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INTRODUCTION

At the age of 70, my father retired from his profession as an attorney and began taking flying lessons.  He had flown as a young man, in his twenties, and had not had time to resume the hobby until retirement, so he was very excited to be doing so.  With his first lesson he began feeling nauseous, which he had never experienced before when flying.  After three or four episodes of stomach discomfort, he went to a doctor and in 1985,  was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had metastasized (spread basically) up to his shoulders, on his skeleton.  He called me from the hospital in North Carolina and said something like . . .

"Honey, its cancer.  You know my brother Henry died of the same kind of cancer and he had radiation, chemotherapy and castration and still died within six months.  If I have to leave here, I'm going with all my parts.  So as the executrix of my will, I want you to carry it out with fairness, and be nice to your sisters . . . no matter what happens between you.  It has been a nice life, and I love you and I don't know how long I have, so if this is Sayonara, then its alright."  

Now granted, he has been known to gravitate toward the melodramatic in my lifetime but I suggested that we wait a minute before he signed off for good, and see if there were some other alternatives.  I had been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for several assorted periods of my life, and understood basic principles of holistic health care.  I had been off of pork for about fifteen years then and although I was eating meat at the time (mostly because I had become lazy and had married a man who ate everything but the kitchen sink), I still tried to confine it to fish, with occasional chicken.

About two years before my father's diagnosis, my friend and fellow co-worker had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.  I assisted her in developing a program - dietary and lifestyle changes - that helped her get out of a wheelchair (which she had been confined to temporarily), get back to work and have two more children.  Because of that experience, I knew the power of holistic care and the inherent healing processes. I bought a Champion Juicer, stopped by the farmer's market and bought a bushel of broccoli, a bushel of cabbage, twenty-five pounds of carrots and ten pounds of onions.  I threw them all in the back of my van and drove to North Carolina to my father's house.  

We went to the health food store and bought every book on the shelf that remotely looked like it might have a portion of an answer.  Fifty books and two weeks later, my stepmother and I had a basic plan for his recovery.  I did most of the reading and plan formulation and she did most of the cooking.  Basically, it was partial Macrobiotics, with high amounts of carrot juice, a lot of cleansing, and a mixture of herbs.  Armed with greater knowledge and my father's determination, it was war.

Within eight days, the pain he had experienced in his lower back was gone.  He became far less difficult executing the rigidity of the program because he could feel the positive results.  I searched for a more qualified holistic practitioner in the area, but the only one we found made all of us uncomfortable.  It became evident that my father's alternate treatment was our basic responsibility, with me as the research person.  We refined and refined over the next few weeks until his daily routine was well suited to his particular needs.

In the seventh month of his holistic treatment, my father went to the medical doctor for a bone scan and blood work.   When the tests came back, the doctor called him in and said that it appeared that he had no sign of cancer at all . . . not just remission, but no sign of any cancer cells whatsoever.  Despite the fact that three different sources had confirmed the existence of cancer seven months before, and let alone the monthly blood work, etc., this doctor concluded that there must have been a mistake in the original diagnosis and that my father never had cancer in the first place.  A closed mind is a very scary thing.

Because of the incredible experience we went through, I enrolled in a state university in the pre-medical program in order to try and figure out what we might have accomplished from a clinical standpoint.  While we had been going about the daily activities of fighting the cancer, I understood what we were doing in several, disjointed ways, but when I started taking biology classes in the there, I finally got a clearer understanding of the difference between allopathic training and holistic thinking.  I remember sitting in a class, trying to comprehend the mechanisms of cellular respiration and the production of adenosine trisphophate when the light bulb went off in my head and it all made sense.

In my opinion, most allopaths, M.D.s or medical doctors as we know them in the United States, reduce all body functions to the smallest possible mechanisms and attempt to approach and control functions and disorders.  They do so to the point of ignoring the "big picture" and to the exclusion of logic and sensibility in some cases.  Often, they no longer look at the whole body, but only the one condition in isolation that they are attempting to treat.    In contrast, holistic practitioners look at the overall state of the entire body and the joint efforts all bodily functions must put forth as they attempt to correct the problem at hand.  I finally really understood what we were trying to do, and the positive results we got and furthermore, why allopathic training was an inappropriate school of thought for the concepts I knew to be true.  This understanding and trying to learn physics to little avail, made my decision to quit school easy.  Such training was virtually adverse to my comprehension of the treatment of degenerative disease.

Since that experience during the mid 1980's, over the next few years I was approached by many people,  seventeen of whom had cancer, and was asked to work with them.  The fourteen people who actually did some form of what I suggested all went into remission.  Two people did not believe it would work and therefore did not do the things defined and, who were also not having success with the allopathic methods died.

One person who came out of a medical background called and asked about the program that my father had followed.  In an hour long telephone conversation, I told her the basics of what we had done, and informed her that if she did actually decide to pursue this course of action, she should call me before starting and I would guide her through it.  Unfortunately, she did not call me before actually starting on the program, and began doing what she thought she heard me say.  Because she did not really understand what she was trying to accomplish, she only did half of the things necessary and did no cleansing as will be described in later chapters.  She did not call me until she had been half doing the program for nearly two weeks, and was in severe pain.  I figured out what she had been doing wrong and told her what to do, and that I would be there in four days.

After our conversation, probably because of her medical background and because she did not understand how surgery at that point would be detrimental to her health, she allowed herself to be cut open for exploratory surgery.  This process can make advanced cancer growth grow out of control because of the oxidation process.  In her case, and due to the advanced nature of her condition surgery was not a good idea.  She nor her family members called and told me anything until the third day after her surgery when on her death bed, literally, she asked them to call me to see what to do.  She died within hours, and only three days after our last conversation.  

I was thoroughly and completely devastated.  She was a friend of my family's and I felt total guilt and fear, certain that I had acted irresponsibly somehow.  I refused to talk with anyone else about my father's positive experience and felt I was so thoroughly unqualified to advise anyone about such a major illness.  This went on for two years, but people continued to call.  I sent them on to an array of holistic practitioners and offered absolutely none of the information I had accumulated over the years.  I shut down.

Finally, after about a year and a half, I began to figure out that the problem was not in what I knew but in the manner in which I had attempted to impart the information.  For the most part, I had been able to monitor folks closer, or they did so much of their own research that they understood.  Otherwise, obviously, I had not made my warnings strong enough.  I had not made the three points of treatment clear enough.  Foolishly, I assumed that people would follow what had been said, not interpret and alter according to their own experiences, thoughts, desires, fears, value systems and suspicions.  People who have no real understanding of what they are attempting to accomplish pull out the portions of my father's treatment that they like or can identify with and do only those parts.  They neglect those principles and concepts that are unfamiliar, unclear or distasteful to them. My failing had been in the lack of clarity and detail I had used while imparting the information. 

I decided that since it had become apparent that folks were going to call, I had better figure out how to set forth the information in a way that all laypeople could understand, despite their backgrounds.  In some ways, another layperson might be better qualified to explain some of the concepts to others who are also "unencumbered by expertise". This book is an attempt at such clarity.  I hope you find the information helpful in your quest for improved health.  If you follow ALL of the program, you will certainly achieve improved health.  However, you must open your mind and exercise a great deal of common sense.  If you are too strongly puppeted by the ideals of allopathic medicine and expect someone else to make your recovery happen, you will have a difficult time utilizing this information to the fullest.  If you take full responsibility for your own recovery and work very hard at executing the principles and practices that will allow for your improved health, you will garner positive results.  You are also very likely to learn more than I know as well.  This is a primer.

PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT TO DO ANYTHING.  Maybe read it two or three times.  Be certain that you are familiar with all the concepts and activities and that you are committed to doing all three portions of the "fight" process.  Please, please do not think that you can do one portion and not the others.  You will only cause yourself more problems, but if you do all of it, you will see amazing results.  Remember; when you achieve remission through holistic means, you will be accomplishing something that most highly trained physicians generally don't have a handle on.  Consider the weightiness of that process and take this seriously.  Study!  Read!  Nobody can do this for you.  Understand as best possible what you are doing.  It will change and preserve your life.

ADDENDUM

Most of the information above was written in 2003.  My father died, Nov. 2004,  six weeks shy of his 89th birthday.  Over the four years prior to that, he began to have problems again, but they are easily traced back to negative changes in his exercise and eating habits.   This is a matter of choice, and that should always be remembered.  Until his last four years, he never had any chemotherapy, radiation therapy nor was he castrated. He got tired I suppose, of the very different lifestyle from the one he knew for 70 years, but that does not make the process less important.  In fact it makes it more important.  Until he allowed his eating habits to revert, he was very well.  There has been a direct and tangible correlation between his eating habits and his health, both positive and negative. 

Good fighting and please use reason and caution when utilizing these principles.  

To WAR!  Fight cancer now!