However I was not prepared just to watch & wait. Due to my wife’s experience with doctors I had long since come to realize that they are mostly educated guessers. I read the other day that even in a top medical facility in the USA they get the diagnoses right only 50% of the time. Doctors also act as drug pushers for the big pharmaceutical companies (commonly known as “Big Pharma”) and it seems that if there is no pill available for a disease the medical fraternity regards it as incurable. On top of all this doctors are supposed to be healers where as in reality they tend to be symptom suppressors. Don’t believe me? Just think about your own medical history. How many times when you went to a doctor did she/he try to find out the root cause of your problem? Most likely they gave you a pill to suppress the symptoms.
I need to temper the above a bit because it sounds like I am anti doctors. That is not the case, they have a role to play, but one needs to consider carefully what role you give them because there are limitations in what they can and will do for you. Doctor Bernie S. Siegel in his most interesting book ‘Love, Medicine & Miracles’ shares his extensive experiences with cancer patients. He reckons that about 15 to 20 percent of all patients unconsciously, or even consciously, wish to die. He says “On some level they welcome cancer or another serious illness as a way to escape their problems through death or disease”. Then there is the group in the middle, about 60 to 70 percent. Of this group he says “They act the way they think their doctor wants them to act, hoping that the doctor will do all the work and the medicine won’t taste bad”.
At the other end of the spectrum is a group of about 15 to 20 percent who he calls “Exceptional Cancer Patients”. These people refuse to be victims. They educate themselves and become specialists in their own care. Bernie says that the people in this group do best of all, they live longer and are more likely to have a ‘miraculous’ healing. I like to think that I am in that group. His statements match our own experience as we have found that one needs to research the particular disease that is being fought and take an active interest in the process. It is better if you stay in control of your own healing and don’t just leave it to the doctors.
Anyway, because of what I said in the first paragraph on this page, I was not prepared to rely on what the doctors would tell me, or in my case the total absence of any advice, so I started to do a lot of research on the internet.
It soon became obvious that there are a number of well attested natural treatments available for the tumour type cancers but despite extensive research I was unable to find any healing stories of people with CLL. This did not deter me from trying a number of things. The first was apricot kernels, they seem effective in dealing with cancer tumours, but they did not improve things for me.
Next I heard about a GP in the Adelaide Hills who was known to use natural supplements but I was his first CLL patient and he was unable to bring improvement. I must say though that this GP did suggest a few things that at the time I did not take up because they seemed too far out, but later turned out to be the right direction. When he ran out of ideas he referred me to a homeopathy practitioner.
Homeopathy likewise was unable to improve my blood counts which kept deteriorating so next came a couple of diets, the first of which was the macrobiotic diet. There are many stories of people whom this diet had brought healing from various cancers but it did not help me. I can recommend it as an excellent weight loss diet though. Macrobiotic was followed by the Hallelujah diet; again well attested but unable to fix my problem. It was only later that I came to realize that none of the things I had tried dealt with the root causes and therefore were unable to bring the desired outcome. I will come back later on root causes.
 Graph of the lymphocyte count from February 2002 to February 2004 |
By September 2003 the lymphocyte count had increased to 40 and I was referred to an oncologist at the IMVS (Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science) in Adelaide in order to start working out a treatment. I asked this oncologist the same questions about diet and lifestyle and the result was the same, zilch. However he decided that treatment was still not necessary at that stage, so back into the ‘watch & wait’ mode.