Category Archives: Cancer Care Tips

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips

Valerie Harper Special Puts Spotlight on Cancer

A New Way to Fight Lung Cancer
A New Way to Fight Lung Cancer

Actress Valerie Harper will share her battle with cancer in an NBC prime time documentary to air later this year. Valerie won viewers’ hearts in the 1970s as feisty Rhoda Morgenstern, first on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and then on the spinoff Rhoda. First diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, a recurrence spread to her brain. In March, the 73-year-old actress was diagnosed with leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare and terminal cancer of brain membrane.

Hoping to encourage other cancer victims to keep fighting, Valerie granted documentary camera crews unprecedented access to her daily struggle with cancer. The camera follows Valerie as she discusses traditional and alternative cancer treatments with doctors, undergoes experimental treatments and weathers cancer’s ups and downs with her husband and daughter.

“I can’t say it’s terminal,” Valerie has said. “I’m saying it’s incurable so far, but we’re all terminal. No one is getting out of this alive. The key is, don’t go to the funeral until the day of the funeral.”

Cancer research has made tremendous leaps just in the past decade. New genetic research is expanding our understanding of cancer and how it attacks the body, holding promise for the development of new and more efficient cancer treatment and delivery systems. However, it is our body’s own immune system that most cancer experts believe holds the ultimate key to developing a cure for cancer. A proven treatment protocol, immunotherapy is believed to offer the most promising path to a cancer cure.

For more than 60 years, Issels Integrative Oncology has been a leader in the use of immunotherapy to treat cancer. Click here to review our cancer case studies.

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips

Take Steps to Prevent Skin Cancer

Melanoma Prevention
Melanoma Prevention

While common and sometimes deadly when untreated, skin cancer is largely preventable. Wearing broad-spectrum sunscreen outdoors provides significant protection from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays; yet an American Cancer Society survey found that 31% of people never wear sunscreen.

Unprotected exposure to ultraviolet radiation, either from the sun or tanning beds, can significantly increase melanoma risk. People with pale skin, multiple moles or a family history of skin cancer are also at increased risk.

Early detection and treatment can usually halt skin cancer. Watch for skin changes, particularly the development of new growths or changes in the size or color of a mole, growth or spot. Warning signs include:

  • Scaling, bleeding or oozing.
  • The spread of color beyond the borders of a mole or spot.
  • Changes in sensation such as tenderness, pain or itching.

You can prevent skin cancer by following these recommendations from Issels’ alternative cancer treatment teams:

  • Stay in the shade and avoid direct sun exposure, especially between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. when the sun’s rays are most intense.
  • Wear wide-brimmed hats and cover skin with protective clothing when outdoors.
  • Protect your eyes with sunglasses that provide UVA/UVB protection.
  • Wear broad-spectrum sunscreen and lip balm that provide both UVA and UVB protection. Choose products with SPF 30 or higher. Apply sunscreen generously (about an ounce per application) 30 minutes before going outdoors to give it time to soak into your skin. Reapply every 2 hours and after swimming, toweling off or sweating. Be aware that water-resistant sunscreen only provides about 40 minutes of protection and should be reapplied frequently.
Cancer Care Tips, Stage Four Cancer Treatment

Helping Children Cope when Mom Has Cancer

Children Coming to Terms With Parents' Cancer
Children Coming to Terms With Parents’ Cancer

To their children, mothers seem to be all-knowing, indestructible, invulnerable, the steadying rock that is always there, providing both rudder and anchor for young lives learning to navigate the world. Children can always count on their moms when they need a snack, a playmate, a bandaid and especially a hug. Moms banish monsters from closets, keep cookie jars well stocked, read bedtime stories, listen to prayers and kiss us goodnight. Unless they have cancer, then everything changes for their children.

Mothers with cancer are vulnerable. They are no longer indestructible and must be treated with care for cancer makes their bodies fragile. As Susan Grubar, a mother struggling with terminal ovarian cancer, shared recently on the New York Times Well blog:

“With varying degrees of fearful awareness, such children intuit that the mother who comforts by murmuring ‘I am here’ will not always be there. Under such circumstances, how to safeguard childhood or adolescence from anxious vigilance and dread? Mothers often stand at the center of their children’s orbit. How do you help children when mom has cancer?”

Grub is grateful that her ovarian cancer diagnosis came after her children were grown, though she mourns the fact that her relationship with her new grandson will be cut too short. Even as adults, she and her daughters are having difficulty with the finality of cancer and the separation anxiety terminal cancer produces. She is grateful that she has had many years to build precious memories with her daughters that will sustain them after she is gone — a gift many mothers with cancer are never given.

Next time: Leaving memories for your children

Cancer Care Tips, Living with Cancer

Helping Children Cope with a Parent’s Cancer

Cancer Support.
Cancer Support.

When a parent is diagnosed with cancer, moms and dads struggle with what, when and how much to tell their children. Immediately after diagnosis, parents are understandably struggling to educate themselves, cope with their own emotions and make cancer treatment decisions. Until they have had a chance to assimilate the diagnosis and all it entails, they may make not feel ready to discuss cancer with their children. Many parents feel a need to have some level of certainty about what will happen before trying to answer their children’s questions.

Unfortunately, there are few certainties when it comes to cancer. Individual response to cancer treatments allows for a range of possible outcomes. While statistics allow oncologists to tell their patients what is most likely to happen, your own cancer experience many not follow the normal pattern. While the desire to wait until your know what is going to happen is understandable, with cancer it is an unachievable goal.

Trying to shield your children by failing to discuss cancer may only make them worry more. Even very young children are surprisingly attuned to the normal rhythms of family life. Cancer disrupts those rhythms and children are quick to notice. Giving children an explanation for the changes cancer brings to family life and a parent’s health prevent children from imaging all kinds of horrible things or feeling guilt that they may have caused the problem.

Bringing cancer into the open allows children to express their fears and talk about their feelings. Even when there are no firm answers to their questions, being able to talk openly about what is happening in the family can be immensely reassuring to children.

You can find information about discussing cancer with your children at the American Cancer Society and Helping Children Cope.

 

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips

Young Adults Have Higher Risk of Oral Cancer

Fight Oral Cancer
Fight Oral Cancer

Once considered an old man’s disease, oral cancer is making a comeback; only this time it’s targeting young adults. Oral cancer is now the sixth most common cancer among young adults in their 20s and 30s. More than 40,000 Americans are diagnosed with oral cancer every year, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation. Oral cancer kills  one person every hour. More than 8,000 Americans will die from oral cancer this year alone. Even more frightening, only 57% of people diagnosed with oral cancer live past 5 years.

Oral cancer has a higher death rate than most cancers because it is difficult to detect, often fails to produce noticeable symptoms and is, therefore, usually not discovered until it has metastasized to a secondary location, typically the lymph nodes. The lag time between infection and discovery allows oral cancer to invade other local structures, resulting in additional forms of cancer. The risk of producing primary tumors at a second site is 20 times higher for oral cancer patients.

Oral cancer causes squamous cell carcinomas in 90% of cases. There are several reasons oral cancer has begun to attack people under 40.

  • The war against smoking has made chewing smokeless tobacco popular with young men and women. Marketed as a safe alternative to smoking, it may reduce lung cancer but is a leading cause of oral and pancreatic cancer.
  • Human papilloma virus No. 16 is the leading cause of oral cancer. Sexually transmitted between partners, it is also a leading cause of cervical cancer.

Alternative cancer treatments developed by Issels Integrative Oncology offer new hope for people with oral cancer.

 

Cancer Care Tips, Living with Cancer

Obese Men More Likely to Die from Prostate Cancer

Avoid Obesity
Avoid Obesity

Nearly a quarter of a million men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society. For 30 million of those men that diagnosis will prove fatal. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the second leading cause of cancer death in American men. But big numbers make it hard to assimilate the risk, so let’s break it down:

If you are an American man, your risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer is 1 in 6 and your risk of dying from prostate cancer is 1 in 36. But if you are obese, your risk of death goes up dramatically.

“It is absolutely clear that obesity increases a man’s risk of dying from prostate cancer,” said Dr. Andrew Rundle, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City in an interview with NBCNews.com.

Obesity increased the risk of prostate cancer diagnosis by 57%; however, Dr. Rundle said further research is needed to determine if prostate cancer causes cancer or makes it more difficult to treat. Obesity is known to have a direct causal relationship to five cancers: post-menopausal breast cancer, colon cancer, kidney cancer, esophageal cancer and endometrial cancer.

In 2005, as part of a best-case review of alternative treatments for cancer, cancer researchers from Columbia’s Mailman School reviewed case studies documenting the successful long-term cancer remission achieved using the Issels method of integrative oncology, concluding that the treatment had merit worthy of further study. Visit our website to hear what our patients have to say about the Issels holistic approach to cancer treatment.