Thursday, January 04, 2007

Unconventional Therapies

To follow-up a post from a couple of days ago regarding our concerns with the current treatment plan. Unfortunately, some people are drawing a false conclusion from our blog that we are only going to use nutrition to treat Kate's cancer. Instead, we are researching unconventional treatments that are gentler and have shown great results. Studies of these treatments have been published in many different medical research journals. We don't accept treatments based on opinions and mere anecdotes, evidence is needed to convince us.

There is plenty of evidence in support of these unconventional treatments, however, they will probably never be accepted or practiced by the mainstream medical community. (No offense to any medical practitioners reading this) The reason is, these treatments do not involve pharmaceuticals. If you've done as much research as I have you would realize that the modern medical community prescribes drugs that have successfully made it through all three phases of clinical trials and are approved by the FDA. Clinical trials are very expensive and require a lot of patients to sign up. The majority of clinical trials are funded by pharmaceutical companies, in the hopes that they eventually can patent the drug and make a profit. Unconventional approaches, like those using natural compounds, can not be patented. Therefore, what company is going to spend millions of dollars funding clinical trials for a product they can't patent and wouldn't be able to recoup the cost? You see my point.

Just so you know, Kate and I have nothing against pharmaceutical companies, we are frequent users of their products and will continue to be. However, we also believe that not all diseases can be solved by pharmaceuticals. Kate's brain cancer is a perfect example.

Kate said that she will try and post sometime tomorrow about her interaction with fellow patients and continued treatment at Siteman.

Please continue to pray for wisdom for us.

Dave & Kate

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dave,

Amen! You are doing a great job researching as well as understanding the bottom line! It will be an emoitional battle no matter what treatments you follow.

I do know there is a hospital in Chicago with Zion as part of the name. I have a friend who had breast cancer. She went there, was given nutritional as well as chemo directions there. She came back to Barnes where they carried out what the doc in Chicago prescribed! She is fine today and believs she had a much better time in treatment because she only consumed things that are good for her.

Cynthia