The Fresh Network Blog: The truth about cancer: its causes, prevention and treatment

Today we bring you another great extended excerpt from the current issue of Get Fresh! magazine. Thomas Lodi, M.D. has a cancer clinic in Arizona where he combines the best alternative therapies with the best conventional ones. Here he talks about his methods and shares health information that is essential reading – whether you have a cancer diagnosis or want to prevent one. Introduction and interview by Sarah Best.

It is estimated that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women in the Western world will get cancer during their lifetimes. Nearly four decades after U.S. president Richard Nixon declared "war on cancer" in 1971, and despite the billions spent since then researching potential “cures”, more people are getting cancer than ever before, and more people are dying from it than ever before. Why? More people are getting it because of the way we now live and more people are dying from it because despite all that money and medical research, mortality rates remain unchanged.

Against this grim backdrop, for those who know where to look, numerous raw and living foods centres are busy educating patients about cancer prevention and recovery. It’s all anecdotal, of course, but cancer patients who are lucky enough to find themselves at one of these places seem to fare much better than those who go the conventional route. One such centre is unique in that it is also a fully-equipped cancer clinic, staffed by a team of doctors and nurses: the “An Oasis Of Healing” clinic, in Mesa, Arizona. Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix and the clinic, located in a quiet residential district, is the inspiration of Thomas Lodi, M.D.

Lodi practises under a homeopathic licence at the clinic, but he is also a medical doctor of 24 years’ experience, and a member of many professional bodies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology. He is a passionate advocate for natural living and holistic healing whose email signature reads, “Health is our greatest treasure. It must be guarded more preciously than gold.”

He both looks and comes across as someone much younger than his 57 years. He is a raw vegan and a teacher of the power of raw foods and raw juices, colonics and other complementary therapies. It is not unusual for late-stage cancer patients with seemingly hopeless prognoses to arrive at his clinic horizontal and to leave not long after, healthy and full of hope. Here, he shares his views on cancer – its causes, its treatment and its prevention – and also on health and human potential.

Let’s consider conventional cancer treatment first. Obviously, it’s not working in the majority of cases. Why not?
The three aspects of healing cancer are: stop making cancer, selectively target and destroy cancer without harming the patient, and stimulate and rebalance the immune system. Conventional medicine does none of those things. It is based solely on aggressive, non-specific or non-targeted methods to kill cancer cells which often end up killing the patient first. At the clinic, we take very seriously our Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm”.

How, specifically, do the standard treatments of radiation and chemotherapy harm the body?
Radiation, no matter how “thinly sliced” (for example, Cyberknife), results in collateral damage to adjacent tissues and can result in severe complications depending on the organ system affected. Very often these are mortal wounds, albeit later on. High-dose chemotherapy not only adversely affects cancer cells but every cell in the body, not the least of which are the immune cells. If we significantly harm the immune system in our efforts to destroy the cancer, we will have done a great, and perhaps fatal, disservice.

If a person survives chemotherapy, their hair will grow back and they will often be restored to normal appearance but they will also often get either recurrences or new primary cancers due to the fact that their immune system has been devastated. What most people don’t know is that the average person of 60 has had five or six bouts of cancer during their lifetime but it was effectively resolved by the immune system without the person even realizing that there was a problem. The cancer is usually in a very early stage and is not diagnosable by our primitive means, and good that is! Had they been diagnosed, they may not have made it to 60 years of age; they may have undergone conventional treatment which carries a greater than 50% mortality rate.

Given that statistic, it seems especially wrong that people diagnosed with cancer are often told by their doctors that they have to start treatment right away – in other words, they are scared into allowing something that is inevitably going to be very harmful to their health, instead of being given the time to consider their options.
Yes. As patients, we need the time to do our own research. If you were going to buy a new car you’d do some research first, wouldn’t you? Think about this: when a doctor says to a patient, “If you don’t do what I say, you’ll be dead in six months,” what is he basing that on? Say he tells 100 people that, and 80 come back and 20 don’t. The 20 that don’t – he has no idea what happened with them, but we do because some of them present themselves at our centre a few years later, albeit with advanced disease. It is also interesting to note that these people have fewer metastases [incidences of the cancer spreading to another part of the body] than we see with those who underwent chemotherapy and radiation prior to coming to us – and in some cases no metastases.

You mentioned earlier on that the average person of 60 has had several episodes of cancer that the immune system resolved. What is the difference between cancer that the immune system can take care of, and cancer that has become life-threatening?
The difference is that the toxic load has overwhelmed the immune system’s defensive capabilities to such a degree that the cancer cells, which do not die, will keep multiplying until organ disruption and death occur. For this reason [the “immortality” of cancer cells] it is imperative to stop producing more cancer cells, to stop the lateral and distant spread through non-toxic interventions, and to destroy the cancer cells that are causing biochemical and physiological dysfunction.

At your clinic you practise “integrative oncology”, which combines both alternative and conventional healing modalities. Could you outline what this involves, specifically?
We are the only cancer clinic in the United States that integrates raw foods, juices, detoxification and other alternative therapies with different medical treatments. What we do here is remove the impediments to healing and provide the raw materials necessary for producing new, optimally functioning cells.

Our most important role is to teach people how to stop making cancer, and to provide a loving and supportive environment for healing. But, when necessary, we also administer very targeted yet modified conventional therapies that target and destroy cancer, while other therapies enhance immune function. Everything we do here is founded in science and direct, clinical experience. We can’t just begin using some modality we “heard” is getting “good results”. It must be scientifically sound. That’s my allopathic background.

We use ozone, hydrogen peroxide and other oxidative therapies as well as intravenous vitamin C, at doses designed to achieve plasma levels known to specifically destroy cancer cells while enriching normal cells. In some cancers, on the edge of the tumour there are cells getting “recruited” to the cancer side. We use a technique that opens those cells, and then we flood them with essential nutrients to allow them to be restored to normal.

Many studies in respected peer-reviewed journals show that if you give high doses of antioxidants 48-72 hours prior to chemotherapy, the result is increased killing of cancer cells and protection of healthy cells. Yet despite this, many doctors still tell their cancer patients not to take antioxidants because of the disproven fear that they will protect the cancer cells.

We put most of our patients on a three-week green juice feast when they arrive, meaning that they drink three or more quarts [litres] of fresh green juice a day. Colonics are an essential part of the programme. We do full colonics three times a week. Enemas clean the sigmoid and descending colon but not the caecum, which is a pouch in the ascending colon on the right of the body. If that’s not cleansed through colonics or prolonged fasting, it may not empty for decades.

People often report foods coming out during colonics that they haven’t consumed for many years – for example, the female patient who hadn’t eaten corn for 20 years and was amazed when it came out of her during a colonic. Furthermore, lymphatic massage, structural reintegration and yoga are other essential aspects of the programme.

When you say you put patients on a green juice feast, do you mean that they consume only juice for a period?
Fasting is “nature’s cure” and although this is not a fast, it does allow most of the bowel to rest, or fast, so that the immune system can be redirected to fighting cancer. So yes, only juices, unless they are cachectic – meaning late stage and losing muscle mass daily, in which case they’ll also have some healthy oils and plant protein. Most everyone else enjoys a juice feast during their first three weeks. During this period, colon hydrotherapy is provided two to three times per week since the fibre, which stimulates bowel motility, has been removed from the plants during the production of the juice.

Why are the green juices so important?
A quart of green juice contains an armful of kale, dandelion, spinach and other dark greens. We add low-glycaemic fruits – lemon plus pears or green apples – to enhance taste. By drinking three quarts of this a day, you are flooding the body with vast amounts of phytonutrients and minerals; more than the average person consumes in two years.

The pigment in dark greens is chlorophyll and at the centre of every chlorophyll molecule is a magnesium ion. Magnesium is an extremely alkalinizing mineral, and cancer is an acidic condition. So if you’re drinking several quarts of this green magic every day, which still has its bioelectric charge, your body is being restored to a condition in which it can heal. Even if someone has chosen to go the conventional route, as long as they drink green juices they’ll suffer less collateral damage from chemotherapy and/or radiation.

More than 40% of people with cancer die from malnutrition, rather than from cancer, so nutritional therapy is an essential component in any comprehensive approach to cancer treatment. A moderately healthy nutritional programme can increase life expectancy as well as increase the potential for complete remission. An optimally healthy nutritional programme has even more spectacular results and rewards and, when combined with active detoxification, not only is cancer no longer produced but the immune system becomes available for defence, as nature intended.

Buy the issue to get the remaining two-thirds of the interview feature and read Dr Lodi's answers to these questions, and more:

How important is it that cancer patients follow a raw diet?
It is established that sugar feeds cancer cells. Do cancer patients need to avoid fruit?
Have you compiled statistics regarding your success rates at the clinic?
So mental attitude is very important?
The “selective targeting of cancer cells” part of your approach includes chemotherapy. This is very unusual for a clinic that offers such a comprehensive programme of raw foods and holistic healing. Could you explain why you use it?
How does it work?
How is it that a modality like this exists yet only a handful of alternative clinics are using it? Why aren’t there more doctors using this modality, and are you surprised there aren’t?
Let’s talk about your work in treating people with late-stage cancer; people with seemingly hopeless diagnoses, who have been told they have only a few months or weeks or even days to live. I understand they make up a large proportion of your patients?
Is there a big difference between those who have and haven’t gone the conventional route before they come to you in terms of how likely they are to get better?
In conventional medicine, it is considered acceptable for a doctor to tell a patient that there is nothing further that can be done, and that they have X number of weeks or months to live. Do you ever do that with your patients?
Are there cases where you look at a patient and privately think that it’s a hopeless case?
Could you share a little about what you eat and how you manage to stay healthy with what must be a very busy schedule?
Plus - special section: "Preventing cancer" - Dr Lodi's top 12 "Dos" and top 12 "Don'ts" for staying healthy and cancer free.

To find out what else is in our Spring issue, and/or to order it, go here. To susbcribe, go here.

OR get a free copy of our Spring issue (worth £3.95) by purchasing the DVD Healing Cancer from Inside Out, which features Dr Lodi and an impressive line-up of other cancer experts including Charlotte Gerson, Dr Brian Clement, T. Colin Campbell and John McDougall, M.D. Go here to find out more about this ground-breaking DVD and to take advantage of this special offer.