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Alternative Cancer Treatment

Highlighting Issels Santa Barbara

Cancer Treatment in Santa Barbara
Cancer Treatment in Santa Barbara

“At Issels Medical Center I was empowered by the calm, compassion, love and knowledge — and seeing very sick patients blossom and being able to walk and talk again within short three weeks.” — Issels Medical Center patient Barbara Humphrey

Barbara’s comment is a common sentiment among patients at Issels Medical Center in Santa Barbara, California. The compassionate encouragement of our staff is as integral to the treatment process as our more than six decades of experience with integrative immunotherapy.

Treating More Than Cancer

Issels Integrative Oncology in Tijuana, Mexico is an internationally known alternative cancer treatment center, but we realize that not every patient needs the intensive inpatient care, non-toxic cancer vaccines or advanced targeted cancer therapies available at our Mexico facility.

We have also found that our immunobiologic core treatment program can be beneficial in treating other immune system diseases, not just cancer. We opened our Santa Barbara outpatient center to make Issels’ unique individualized immunotherapy protocols and German homeopathic medicine more accessible.

On the American Riviera

While you are visiting our outpatient clinic, the focus will be on your health and ameliorating the condition that has brought you to Issels. But because we understand that your life is about more than your cancer or disease, we have located our outpatient facility in the beautiful coastal community of Santa Barbara in Southern California. Just north of Los Angeles in an area known as the American Riviera, Santa Barbara enjoys a Mediterranean climate and offers a wealth of outdoor and cultural pleasures.

For our patients’ convenience, Issels Medical Center is located close to major hospitals, fitness centers, health food stores and a variety of restaurants. Out-of-town patients can find comfortable accommodations nearby at special rates.

Click for more information about integrative treatments available at our outpatient clinic in Santa Barbara, California.

Cancer Research, Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy the Cancer Protocol for the Future

Immunotherapy is Being Recognized
Immunotherapy is Being Recognized

It’s not exactly a new procedure – researchers have been working on immunotherapy for decades in the fight against certain types and stages of cancer – but the protocol is getting renewed interest in the light of clinical trials and new treatments that show promise; cancer immunotherapy was even named Science magazine’s 2013 “Breakthrough of the Year.”

In the past, immunotherapy has shown uneven or unremarkable results. “But as the sophistication of our understanding of immunology increased,” Charles Link of New Link Genetics told MIT Technology Review, “new strategies evolved to attack the disease, and those strategies are turning out to work in the clinic.”

Today’s immunotherapy uses the body’s own immune system – the “T-cells” – to target and attack malignant cancer cells. When used in conjunction with chemotherapy, immunotherapy may serve to shorten and lighten the chemo treatment, which can dramatically reduce the unpleasant side effects and toxic complications of the powerful  toxins.

A handful of major pharmaceutical companies have immunotherapy protocols in tests. In one early-stage trial of melanoma patients, half of those receiving high-dose immunotherapy had tumors shrink or disappear, and a year later the majority of those patients were still alive – a notable result, as late-stage melanoma survival rates are typically low.

T-cell protocols are just one of the new wave of cancer treatments that are making headlines. A form of cellular therapy, for example, trains a patient’s own immune cells to better recognize cancer cells, after which these powerful fighters are infused back into the patient. One pharma company is developing virus-based gene therapies that, according to MIT Technology Review, “selectively kill cancer cells while simultaneously making the cells better targets for the immune system.”

Immunotherapy, News

Immunotherapy in the News

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Immunotherapy in the News
Immunotherapy in the News

The longstanding treatment for cancer – which typically involves some combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation – is no longer the only treatment.

Over the past decade, new therapies including hormone therapy, molecularly targeted therapy and now, T-cell therapy, are exciting researchers and catching attention from the public.

In the news recently on April 2014, professor and researcher Dr. Catherine Bollard of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine stated that immunotherapy shows promise in treating the disease. “T-cell therapies are becoming the next wave of the future for cancer therapy,” Dr. Bollard is quoted in AuburnPub.

Immunotherapy involves triggering one’s own immune system to combat malignant cancer cells, and providing support to the system. The immune system’s cells – referred to as “T-cells” – are harvested by doctors who then use man-made proteins to “train” the cells to identify and destroy cancer cells without harming other systems in the body.

Though widely effective, chemotherapy has well-known side effects – from nausea to hair loss, fatigue and pain – which happens because the chemo’s powerful toxins attack healthy cells as well as malignant ones.

When used along with traditional treatment, T-cell therapy can reduce the amount of chemotherapy and radiation needed at early cancer stages. This could help the body recover more quickly and offer patients fewer unpleasant  complications. More importantly, the immunotherapy could aid in preventing relapse later one. “The benefit,” says Dr. Bollard, “is that [the T-cells] can go places where the drug therapy can’t, so it can go to parts of the body that would not normally be reached by drug therapy.”

T-cells are still undergoing clinical trials, but experts like Dr. Bollard believe they have the potential to become a standard therapy.

At Issels we have been using our immunobiologic core treatment to boost the body’s immune system with powerful and positive results for patients. We invite you to find out more about our programs.

Alternative Cancer Treatment

Integrative Approach Pushes Cancer Survival Rates Beyond 10-Year Mark

10 is the Magic Number
10 is the Magic Number

Five years used to be the magical mark cancer survivors hoped to reach. If your cancer didn’t return within five years of completing treatment, you could start to breathe a little easier and feel hopeful about the future. Improvements in cancer treatment, early screening and cancer prevention have pushed the boundary between fear and hope back another five years.

Half of all newly diagnosed cancer patients now survive for at least 10 years, according to Cancer Research UK. With longer survival rates, some researchers are suggesting that many forms of cancer should now be considered and treated as chronic, rather than fatal, diseases.

War on Cancer Reaches Tipping Point

“The reason this 50% figure is an important tipping point is that it’s saying that now half of all patients will survive at least 10 years after a diagnosis and for many it will be very much longer than that,” Dr. Harpal Kumar, CEO of Cancer Research UK told London’s Daily & Sunday Express. I think that does represent a change in the way we should be thinking about cancer.”

Integrative Medicine Changing Treatment

The integrative approach toward treating cancer that has slowly been replacing Western medicine’s traditional reliance on surgery, chemotherapy and radiation may have much to do with the trend toward longer cancer survival rates. That has certainly been our experience at Issels Centers for Integrative Medicine in Tijuana, Mexico and Santa Barbara, California.

A leader in the field of integrative cancer treatments for more than 60 years, Issels’ cancer treatment teams have enjoyed unique success in the treatment of many forms of cancer using individualized immunotherapy. By integrating various alternative cancer treatments into our non-toxic immunobiologic core treatment program, Issels had been able to help many patients achieve complete long-term remission of their cancer.

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Immunotherapy

Integrated Immunotherapy: A Safer Way to Fight Cancer

A Safer Treatment is a Better Treatment
A Safer Treatment is a Better Treatment

“When 14-year-old Nick Wilkins’ leukemia resisted chemotherapy, radiation and a bone marrow transplant, his doctors turned to the real pros: Nick’s own immune cells,” John Bonifield of CNN recently wrote on Click2Houston.com. After two months of targeted immunotherapy, Nick’s cancer “went into complete remission.”

Nick’s experience was not unique. Eighteen of the 21 other young cancer patients participating in a University of Pennsylvania study on the effectiveness of immunotherapy-based advanced targeted therapies also experienced complete remission of their cancer.

“This is absolutely one of the more exciting advances I’ve seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years,” Dr. David Porter, Penn hematologist and oncologist, told CNN. “We’ve entered into a whole new realm of medicine.”

While some of the approaches to targeted cancer therapy are certainly new – recent advances in cellular and genetic medicine have made it possible to target specific genes and cell functions at a level not previously available – employing the body’s immune system to target cancer is a tried and true, rather than a “new,” approach. Issels Integrative Oncology Centers have been using individualized immunotherapy to treat cancer for more than 60 years! (Learn more about Issels’ history.)

Penn cancer researchers are not the only ones belatedly recognizing the advantages the immune system offers in the fight against cancer. In an earlier post on targeted therapy, we quoted immunologist Gordon Freeman of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who presaged the Penn findings when he said:

“The immune system is an evolutionary learning system. If you can engage it and get it to work successfully, it learns how to attack the cancer. And the wonderful thing is that it works.”

Visit our website to find out about integrative immunotherapy, a safe, effective, non-toxic way to treat cancer that is revolutionizing cancer treatment.

Cancer Research

Gut Bacteria Are Critical Factor in Colon Cancer Prevention

Bacteria Connected to Colon Cancer
Bacteria Connected to Colon Cancer

Eating a high-fiber diet is generally recommended to help prevent colon cancer, although there is debate within the cancer community about its effectiveness as a preventive measure.

A new study on mice adds to the debate by suggesting that cancer protection may have as much to do with the type of bacteria that live in your gut as with diet. In experiments with mice, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine found that consumed fiber was fermented into the chemical butyrate when a certain type of bacteria was present in a mouse’s gut. The formation of this chemical appears to be critical to colon cancer prevention – at least in mice.

Mice with the butyrate-producing gut bacteria had a 75% lower incidence of colon cancer tumors than mice whose guts did not contain the bacteria. In control experiments, neither a high fiber diet alone nor the combination of butyrate-producing bacteria with a low-fiber diet had any effect on reducing colon cancer.

“Our study shows that it’s not the high fiber in and of itself that has a protective effect against cancer, but it’s a combination of the fiber plus having the right types of bacteria,” Scott Bultman of the University of North Carolina told Fox News.

Bultman explained that healthy colon cells use butyrate for fuel. Because cancer cells use sugar glucose for fuel, not butyrate; researchers suspect that butyrate collects inside the cancer cells, eventually causing their destruction in some, as yet, unknown way.

Studies on people have explored the effects of a high fiber diet on colon cancer with mixed results. Future studies will need to examine the potential impact of gut bacteria on colon cancer. Visit our website to find out how Issels integrative immunotherapy has successfully helped colon cancer patients achieve long-term remission.