Natural Therapies
A natural therapy is usually one that is designed to increase health, wellness, and healing, is slow acting, simple and inexpensive, and does not depend on a patented pharmaceutical.
Examples of natural therapies can include:
- Lifestyle Changes – taking walks and stopping smoking.
- Eating natural whole foods – eating more fruits and vegetables and less processed foods.
- Nutritional supplements – some studies support taking a daily multivitamin.
- Physical exercise - exercise therapy has been proven to reduce the risk of getting many lifestyle diseases.
- Stress management – getting enough sleep.
One example of a natural therapy is dietary therapy. Has diet ever been used by doctors to help cancer patients? The answer is yes. In fact, this happened over a 100 years ago.
Meet Dr. Lucius Duncan Bulkley
Dr. Bulkley was born in 1845 and attended Yale. He became the founder and attending physician of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital. He had a number of accolades including membership of the American Academy of Medicine. Dr. Bulkley treated hundreds of cancer patients. He recognized that cancer is a metabolic disease and that nutrition and diet were important in both causing cancer and helping to manage it. He often prescribed dietary changes to his patients and reportedly had many successes. Dr. Bulkley wrote a number of books about his natural therapy approaches in cancer. A thorough review of his writings does not reveal if he treated mesothelioma.
Gerson therapy
Max Gerson was born in Wongrowitz, German Empire (now Poland) in 1881. He began practicing medicine at age 28 and specialized in internal medicine. After working throughout Europe he settled in the U.S. in 1936. Gerson believed that diseases including cancer were caused by the accumulation of toxins. He treated cancer patients with a vegetarian diet including organic juices and various dietary supplements. Animal proteins were excluded. In 1958, Gerson published a book called “A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases” about his work where he claims his treatment cured 50 terminal cancer patients. The 50 patients he describes in his book do not include mesothelioma. His therapy is still available in Mexico and is considered unproven and is not FDA approved.
Why Natural Therapies Are Unproven
Most people think that natural therapies are not FDA approved because they don’t work. This isn’t true. They may work, but the testing has not been done. The real reason is that they are not approved because they are not tested in controlled clinical trials. Why aren’t they tested? Because clinical trials are very expensive. The average cost of a clinical trial for cancer is $78.6 million. Most of the money is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The problem is that the drug companies will not fund studies to test things that they can’t own and patent. For example, why would a drug company spend $78.6 million to prove garlic helps cancer patients? The drug company would never get any money back because people could go to their local grocery store and buy garlic for a dollar. Drug companies are only interested in funding studies on drugs that they own (patent) because they created it. Once the drug is FDA approved they can charge whatever they want. Today, the only FDA approved treatments for mesothelioma are drugs that have been synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry.
Lifestyle Changes – Even the Mayo Clinic agrees
While nutritional therapies for cancer are considered unproven, life style changes are widely accepted as benefitting health. Even the Mayo Clinic recommends that people:
Don't use tobacco. According to their website, “Using any type of tobacco puts you on a collision course with cancer.”
Eat a healthy diet. The website says, “Although making healthy selections at the grocery store and at mealtime can't guarantee cancer prevention, it might reduce your risk.”
Maintain a healthy weight and be physically active. “Maintaining a healthy weight might lower the risk of various types of cancer...”
