Essiac Essentials

exactly the same way; no two people die in exactly the same way; no two people are ill in exactly the same way.
     
     
    Seeing the Doctor — Keeping Control of YOU
     
    All prognoses are purely hypothetical. A doctor’s experience is limited entirely to other people’s experience, not yours. You are in charge of you until your very last breath. You are in charge of your illness, whatever it may be, and you are in charge of the treatment. You are entitled to ask direct questions about your condition and the necessity and outcome of all proposed therapies, both in conventional and alternative medicine. As the parents of a dying child you should have unlimited access to all the continually updated medical notes. If you are considered to be sufficiently responsible to be kept fully informed about your child’s illness, are you not equally entitled to be considered sufficiently responsible to be kept fully informed about your own?
    Your illness is not failure. It is your greatest challenge, presenting you with the perfect opportunity to find out what your body needs and doesn’t need. When you are first told that you have cancer, the chemistry of the disease is generally the last thing you have time to think about. All you want to know is how you are going to get rid of it. In that situation ‘free radicals’ don’t mean a lot unless you are already a scientist or a doctor. Most of us are not. We find radiation or chemotherapy or a combination of both being recommended to us and we go along with whatever sounds the best, because that is what is available and we will take anything in the desperate hope that something is going to work.
    The very word ‘cancer’ can conjure fear. Fear induces a state of semi-paralysis, mentally, physically and emotionally. When the doctor has a file with your name and ‘cancer’ written all over it on the desk in front of him, allow yourself time and space for the inevitable shock to register but realise that you do not automatically have to become a victim of that shock. At the end of the day, the disease is your disease. It is affecting your body and it is up to you to do something about it. The doctor can close the file, put it back in the drawer and go home for dinner. He is only affected by what is happening to you while he is reading the notes or talking to you during a consultation. You walk into his office with the cancer and it is still with you when you walk out. You are the one who goes to sleep with the disease and wakes up with it every morning. If you allow the very thought of it to eat you up, you will be eaten.
    A little knowledge can help. Fear runs riot when nothing but passive ignorance is all that confronts it. If you are too sick and tired to want to know, recruit the energy and assistance of someone who cares for you to do the reading and the talking — and the shouting if necessary. Before you visit the doctor, make a list of all the questions you want to ask and take a cassette recorder and a blank tape with you to each consultation. Don’t forget to take a pen and notepad. No doctor, consultant or oncologist should make any statement that they are not willing to have recorded. It is your life and your health they are talking about. If they don’t have an answer to your questions, they must say so.

     
     
    Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy Treatments
     
    Both chemotherapy and radiotherapy kill normal and carcinogenic cells by generating the formation of massive quantities of activated and hugely destructive molecules called free radicals which may be routinely produced in small amounts by normal processes occurring within the life cycle of healthy cells. Produced in excess or insufficiently opposed by antioxidants and the scourging minerals copper, manganese, selenium and zinc, free radicals are believed to be associated with many damaging conditions including cancer, radiation sickness, rheumatoid arthritis and atherosclerosis. They are said to be promoted by radiation, atmospheric pollutants and smoking.
     
    In A Conspiracy of Cells, The Basic Science of Cancer, Dr. R. Grant Steen states:
    “Most cancer patients are treated with anti-cancer therapy that is often both immunosuppressive and carcinogenic.” [This includes both radiation and chemotherapy.]
    No one tells you this when you are sitting dazed in front of the doctor, trying to take in what he is really telling you, only half hearing and then usually agreeing to whatever is being