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← Return to Metabolic therapy for cancer
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@mddrm, you've articulated your wife's journey concisely and clearly. I appreciate the backgrounder.
Diet, exercise, and healthy living have been proven to reduce the risk of cancer as well as reduce the risk of it returning elsewhere in the body (metastasis). But lifestyle choices or diet regimens are not a prevention guarantee. I wish they were. It is a gut punch when one does all the "right" things and cancer returns anyway. This gets into a dangerous mindset of blaming oneself or having others accuse the patient that they didn't do enough. It can also give birth to charletans who claim to have the curative diet or supplement, etc, making unfounded promises. Not that you or wife are doing that. Sometimes people do.
It's obvious that your and your wife's approach with low-carb, healthy fat and ketogenic diet along with intermittent fasting helped reverse her diabetes and no doubt improved her health. Perhaps it even delayed the return of cancer. Will we ever know? Like you, I choose to believe her dietary discipline gives her a leg up for the journey ahead.
Like your wife, my father choose not to have chemo when his colorectal cancer returned. Our family supported that choice. We were granted twice as long with him than was predicted. Towards the end, diet consisted of anything he wanted 🙂
I strongly encourage you to look into palliative care as well as integrative oncology. I see that Virginia Oncology has recently added integrative cancer to there practice https://blog.virginiacancer.com/integrative-medicine-coming-to-virginia-oncology-associates
Is your wife currently a Mayo Clinic patient?
Replies to "@mddrm, you've articulated your wife's journey concisely and clearly. I appreciate the backgrounder. Diet, exercise, and..."
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@colleenyoung : Thanks for the response and absolutely, we are charlatan-wary, understanding that any treatment is ultimately palliative. We're not looking for a cure. But, I have to say that charlatantry can be found just as much within the medical-industrial complex as without. While never saying "This treatment will cure you," (for fear of lawsuits!) the pitch is placed in either glossy terms or alternately in subtle scare-tactic fashion, such as, "If you *don't* do the chemo you won't live as long," all the while downplaying the side effects, quality-of-life issues, and the possibility that the treatment itself could be the thing which kills you! It's like all those drug commercials with happy people in soft focus, while the narrator rattles off the fine print.
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I believe your father chose wisely!
No, my wife is not a Mayo patient, and Virginia Oncology has no nearby locations to us. Traveling great distances for treatment is not an option, as I indicated. I also note that the "integrative medicine" there is meant to deal with side effects only while still practicing the standard slash, burn, and poison approach. This seems to me to be wholly different from the research being pursued by folks such as Dr. Seyfried.
And one needs to be careful as well with painting someone as a charlatan if the *only* reason for doing so is because they consider the possibility that the medical-industrial complex might just have it all wrong. No, I am not at all suggesting *you* are doing this! I'm just pointing out that it's oftentimes the outside-the-box thinkers who make the greatest discoveries.
So, all of that to say, yes, we deem the approach we are taking as palliative in nature, and because of my wife's character, discipline, and diet, she may very well be one of those statistical dots down in the far lower right of the survival curve. Or, she may not, but she's good with that.