Natural Approaches to Cancer: An Ancient Point of View

Cancer is obviously a very scary illness in this era in history where it seems like every other person gets cancer by the time they're 60. Now I thought I would share some interesting aspects of cancer treatment from a Chinese medicine perspective because there's something fundamentally missing from conventional cancer care that is considered essential in the way that Chinese medicine practitioners may approach cancer and I thought it would be a very interesting and a very useful video here. What's up you guys, Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master Today, Doctor of Chinese Medicine. Now before we jump into this video, if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine in California, there's a link below to contact my private practice right down there. And in addition, there's a free download for you for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine and that's right below this video as well. So in Chinese medicine, there's a very important saying that's fuzheng quxie, which just means supporting the terrain, if I can translate it like that, and removing the pathogenic. And this is very different from conventional medicine's approach really to treating most illnesses but also especially to cancer where we're not just talking about strep throat, right, where you can take antibiotics for a week and hopefully you're good after. We're talking about cancer which number one is very chronic for most of them still in the way that they form and the post-cancer care when the person survives and now they have to worry about recurrence, right. If they're in remission then they have this looming fear of is it going to come back. But in Chinese medicine, and to me from my perspective, logically it is a fact. Why does cancer develop in the first place and why does it come back? Obviously the underlying etiological factors that predispose the person to development of cancer did not go away if the cancer came back. Can we agree on this as a logical statement, right? In Chinese medicine, the saying of support the terrain and get rid of the pathogenic or the toxic whatever word you want to use is very important because the first part is to support the terrain, right, support the body, support the term is zheng qi which is upright qi and I just like to think of that as your resources and you don't see this in conventional medicine because the approach is a warfare we need to kill the tumor, we need to kill the cancer and there's a lot of collateral damage a lot like war where it's hard to watch conventional cancer care, it's hard to watch people go through it because of the residual damage that is often permanent associated with the therapy. Now it's good that people survived but the side effects are often so catastrophic and damaging to the patient. The problem is this is a worldview because in modern China, Chinese medicine is used in the same way that conventional biomedicine is used where the doctors will give humongous doses of anti-cancer herbs and the patient begins to experience the exact same side effects as chemotherapy so they utilize Chinese herbs biomedically in the way that it is used allopathically, huge doses of these herbs that then affect the digestion and nausea and vomiting and side effects that are pretty similar to medications just like antibiotics. This is missing the fundamental approach of support the patient, get rid of the garbage. So when we talk about supporting the patient's body to terrain, we need to think why did cancer develop in the first place? That's a very important question just as much as how do we prevent its recurrence. Now we know biomedicine's approach to preventing recurrence. For example in breast cancer, the estrogen sensitive ones, they'll give tamoxifen which is a drug that basically is anti-estrogenic to effectively shut that off and that's the way that the thinking goes, right? If estrogen is a predisposing factor, we don't want no estrogen, right? We don't want any estrogen going on there and so let's just shut it off. But not everyone who has high estrogen gets breast cancer, right? Not all women get breast cancer. Not everyone who has high amount of estrogens get breast cancer. So that's only a piece of the equation. That's only one piece of the equation and with conventional care, you often only see the treatment of pathology and not a lot of clinical approaches towards helping the patient become stronger. Now Chinese medicine, in the way that we approach cancer or the way we approach the common cold, the way that Chinese formulas are written are written in a way that we support the body's constitution. So if this person has been losing lots of weight and they're cold and they're six foot two and 130 pounds now, we need to figure out how to help them to gain weight. So we include a formula that would support the patient's terrain, the appetite, some of the side effects of chemotherapy or conventional care in addition to having herbs that can actively attack whatever's been going on. And so this kind of approach of we support the body and then we also work on treating attacking the pathology is really what is essential especially in cancer because the development is often very long for most of the chronic and slower growing cancers and the recurrence is always looming, right? So those predisposing factors that underlying physiological depletion, whatever's been changing in the body from a Chinese medicine perspective, whatever organs have not been functioning properly, whether it is the person has had, you know, their hair has been falling out, they've been having hormonal problems and they've had fibrocystic breasts and now suddenly they have breast cancer or there's something else going on and the person has prostate cancer or colon cancer, whatever the predisposing factors are by treating or even removing the tumor surgically which can be curative on its own. From our perspective in Chinese medicine, we never addressed the problem, right? We never addressed the predisposition towards cancer and therefore the predisposition is still there after the cancer. So this is not about anti-conventional care or anything like that but regardless of how you treat it, you need to treat the person and the constitution and the terrain and the underlying ideological factors that allowed that to happen, right? Not everyone that smokes cigarettes develops lung cancer. It's actually a fairly low percentage. Of course there are other cardiovascular events, strokes, there are other cancers linked to smoking, I think bladder cancer, but not everyone develops lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. So there are other factors that lead to the development of cancer and we want to understand what those are. So the point of this impassioned rant here is purely about Chinese medicine's approach to supporting the upright, the person, the terrain as well as treating the active pathology is high-level medicine in my opinion because if you do not treat those predisposing factors then those predisposing factors exist on the other side of cancer. Let's say you have a lumpectomy and you have radiation, you have chemotherapy, now you're breast cancer-free. Well, free for how long and what percentage of women stay breast cancer-free, right? Stay cancer-free. We need to address those underlying factors there and cancer is just you could replace that with low immunity, you could replace that with anxiety, depression, whatever physiological disruption has happened that has allowed that person to have this susceptibility to this illness pattern or this pathology is often not addressed through just symptomatic treatment and in my experience the forte of Chinese medicine is not only addressing the symptomatic pattern but the constitutional or core underlying pattern that predisposes that pattern or that illness to keep happening and in my experience you keep treating the underlying pattern, you work on the constitution and the symptoms and then that pattern can become very inconsistent, irregular, 25 migraines a month to just one, IBS, anxiety, depression to something that's constant to something that's just once or twice a year and many other illnesses can follow suit in this way but only if you support the upright qi that Chinese medicine calls it, the constitution, the immunity, the terrain, the person, that is where true healing actually comes from and that is where you put someone in a space that is really safe because they don't have to worry about recurrence of many things in that case. So very very important topic, it's not really talked about at all in conventional medicine, frankly even not a lot of natural medicine practitioners think like this and this is something that I wish that people told me when I was a patient in probably your seat, I wish people told me about this concept in Chinese medicine because it is so quintessential to proper healing to the point where the person does not need medication or can dramatically reduce it. Alright guys that is all I have for today, if you want to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles, virtually via telemedicine throughout California, the link below is to contact my private practice and my office and there's also a free guide for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine below this video and I have two related videos for you right there.