I was very sorry to hear about Sen. Kennedy’s brain tumor. I am the widow of 15-year survivor of a cancerous brain tumor, so I know how difficult the road ahead will be for him and his family – despite their brave words.

The prognosis written about in the press seems grim. And it is. But there ARE long-term survivors, many of whom attribute their long-term survival to the combined use of conventional and alternative treatments – an integrative approach. Both my husband and I attributed his 15-year survival to this kind of approach. I hope that this option will be offered to Sen. Kennedy. But, unfortunately, I sincerely doubt that it will be.

Had we listened only to my husband Tim’s doctors, we never would have chosen this more integrative approach, since all they told us about were the standard treatments: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

We did follow their advice, to a point: Tim underwent the three standard treatments. But we also did lots of research on our own and—with the help of a nutritionist, whose area of interest and expertise is nutritional approaches to cancer—came up with a combined approach, which seems to have worked.

Unfortunately, most oncologists and neuro-oncologists remain unaware of the ways in which the two modalities—conventional and alternative—can work well together. But, what bothers me even more than the fact that they are unaware, is that most conventional doctors do not seem at all interested in learning about these “alternative” treatments—or about any treatments they did not learn about in medical school, or read about in medical journals.

When Sen. Kennedy was first diagnosed, neuro-oncologist Dr. Andrew Norden was asked in an interview with Boston.com, whether there were any alternative therapies that might be recommended by Mr. Kennedy’s doctors. His answer: “. . . I am not aware of any alternative therapies that help to treat the tumors, but these treatments (e.g. acupuncture, massage, others) are very useful for management of symptoms such as nausea, fatigue, and headaches that some glioma patients experience.”

The sad truth is that most conventional doctors are still unaware of many very promising complementary treatments, other than the palliative ones that Dr. Norden mentioned. For instance, it’s obvious that Dr. Norden hasn’t read the article by nutritionist Dr. Jeanne Wallace, published in 2002 in the journal, “Integrative Cancer Therapies.” The article: “Nutritional and botanical modulation of the inflammatory cascade--eicosanoids, cyclooxygenases, and lipoxygenases--as an adjunct in cancer therapy.” The abstract is online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14664746. (Abstracts with information about many other nutritional therapies may be found online, too.) For those who are more ambitious—which really SHOULD include most oncologists—Dr. Wallace’s complete 31-page article (containing 364 footnotes/citations), may be found at http://nutritional-solutions.net/Articles/ICTarticlein flamJeanne.pdf. It provides an excellent first step for conventional physicians interested in learning about integrative approaches to the treatment of cancer.

Patients who are open to the integrative treatment of cancer—including patients with aggressive, cancerous brain tumors, like my husband’s and Ted Kennedy’s—may be able to survive much longer than the norm, with a combination of conventional and alternative treatments. It is therefore unfortunate that more doctors don’t know about these promising “alternative” treatments—especially in cases, such as gliomas, which normally have such poor outcomes.

It’s simply not enough for doctors—and especially those who take care of cancer patients—to say that they are “not aware” of these integrative treatments. I wish they would at least try to start educating themselves.

Julia Schopick
http://www.HonestMedicine.com