Why Should Dealing With Cancer Be So Controversial?
Today, many people seek an alternative or complementary route to medicine. This may happen for various reasons. Conventional medicine may not be providing the answers they seek, or it may be too expensive and out of reach of the patient's finances to explore (i.e., many cytotoxic chemotherapies).

The general medical belief that all cancer cells have to be killed may not be a good one. This notion of killing comes in part from thinking about cancer as a foreign invader that gets into the body and grows continuously until it takes over. In fact, cancer starts in your own cells, which develop mutations, allowing them to replicate without limit and invade outside their own territory. These cancer cells are not in isolation. The cells around them, and the general state of the body influence their capacity to thrive. Cancer cells may be able to be reversed or controlled if the environment of cells, hormones, and the immune system around them is changed.

All of this becomes important in the way we approach cancer therapy. Conventional medicine therapies of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy, albeit the best we have, are quite crude ways of dealing with the disease. They have certainly been shown to make some difference in survival from some cancers, but these treatments are focused on killing cancer cells rather than changing their environment. The conventional focus is on disease treatment. Very simply, by excluding factors critical to public health - such as preventive strategies, including lifestyle changes, behaviour modification, diet, supplementation, exercise and stress management – society will continue to see more disease. Perhaps the most significant issue is that we publicly continue to spend vast amounts of money on drug therapies, as if treating a disease after it has manifested is more important than using resources to prevent the conditions that cause the disease in the first place. This paradigm is illogical and contrary to good health. (see “Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer, Leaf, Fortune, 2004)

CCRG does not treat cancer or other diseases. CCRG advocates for a focus on strengthening the body’s metabolism and altering the immune system to make important changes in the internal environment.

Many medical doctors are wary of complementary therapies, probably because they don't know much about them:

• Although they often cite an absence of scientific studies of complementary therapies, they themselves will often suggest drugs that have yet to be proved effective by the "gold standard" of randomized controlled clinical trials. It is little understood that powerful drugs used to treat disease have potential side effects that may, in some cases, be life threatening themselves. For example, the recent experience when thirty thousand women underwent high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell rescue before studies demonstrated that it was not better than standard chemotherapy illustrates how modern medicine is not always based on science. It is estimated that prescription drugs kill 100,000+ North Americans each year (Lazarou, 1998).
   
• Some doctors complain that complementary therapy is not standardized; yet, these same physicians will argue that modern medicine cannot be dictated by insurance companies because it is not standardized.
   
• There is a general skepticism in medical schools for the use of complementary or alternative treatments. The fact that pharmaceutical companies are usually the largest contributors to such schools and drug research may be part of the cause of this attitude. Regardless of why this has occurred, this attitude is often carried into the profession. So instead of investigating alternative treatments, many doctors immediately ridicule them or downplay their effectiveness.
   
• Finally, they suggest that complementary therapy is too personality driven, but at the same time, we often search for the "best" surgeon or oncologist with the understanding that the person delivering the care is as important as the care.
  In reality, physicians are uncomfortable because they have not been trained in the complementary tradition and do not feel knowledgeable about its use.

Top of Page