OMG! Cancer and antioxidants. At last!

So, I just finished the 6^th plant I’ve researched and updated and it was the 3^rd plant out of the 6  that I’ve seen clinical studies where researchers or pharmaceutical companies are combining either the plant or chemicals extracted from the plant with standard chemotherapy drugs.

 Oh. My. God!  What are they thinking!!! 

It appears what mainstream medicine has finally learned (that I’ve been telling them since 1996 when I first launched cat’s claw) is that great antioxidants from plants offer remarkable cellular protective actions to healthy cells under the onslaught of indiscriminate chemo drugs that kill everything in their path. It's the good ole “burn the barn down to kill the rat in the barn” approach they’ve done for so many years. Mainstream doctors once thought that a cellular protective antioxidant like cat’s claw would protect a cancer cell from being killed by their chemo drug and warned all their cancer patients NOT to take any kind of antioxidant.  Doctors have warned cancer patients for many years now that all antioxidants would reduce the effectiveness of their chemo/radiation/treatment/results.  This made my eyes roll back in my head and put me in an untenable position of trying to tell a cancer patient that they should listen to me and not their oncologist.  

They were wrong.  I told them so, but most didn’t listen.  Cat’s Claw was a strong antioxidant and an immune stimulant proven in Germany and Austria to enhance the effect of chemo, protect healthy cells from damage, and keep the immune system intact in cancer patients undergoing chemo so doctors could administer even more chemo.  A cat’s claw extract was actually sold as an herbal drug in Germany by prescription only as an adjunctive cancer therapy for those exact reasons. American doctors didn’t want to hear it and they didn’t believe it. They started writing papers, articles, pamphlets, and clinical studies with questionable methods saying antioxidants are contraindicated in cancer.  But they certainly didn't tell their cancer patients to avoid eating fresh fruits and vegetables which are the main source of natural plant antioxidants in our diet.

I need to figure out what changed, because it’s obvious they see the truth now.  I’m assuming they just decided to “go with the flow” since so many Americans were using natural products and remedies without their doctor’s permission or advice and the doctors’ couldn’t ignore the results their patients were getting with them. Maybe it was the oncologists in Europe who had the ability to prescribe herbal drugs with antioxidant actions continually reporting the benefits in reducing toxicity for almost seven years now? What about all the product-sponsored research that now says that coffee and dark chocolate are good for you?  Both are good sources of plant-based antioxidant chemicals and these are the reasons they are now good for you instead of bad for you!

For about 5 years now, it looks like doctors, researchers and pharmaceutical companies worldwide, including in the U.S., are studying and clinically confirming now that plant antioxidants can prevent their toxic chemo drugs from killing liver, renal, brain, heart, blood, gastric, and immune cells. Antioxidants can also clean up all the mess left behind when the chemo drugs are killing cancer cells (scavenging free radicals created in the cellular dying process which damage other healthy cells in the vicinity). They are reporting some antioxidants in these published studies are making their chemo drugs more effective, not protecting cancer cells. Has mainstream medicine finally turned a corner? Not one of the many studies I've read thus far reported that antioxidants were protecting cancerous cells and they've been studying and looking for that effect as well.  I anticipate reading many more of these studies as I continue to update the research on all the rainforest plants - there are lots of strong antioxidants in rainforest plants!  Wow, huh?  

I hate people who take such glee in saying “I told you so.”  So, I’m just going to say. . .  “Neener. Neener. Neener. Dammit!”

But it’s of little wonder, and about time. My personal experience with cancer, and working with some of the cancer patients I’ve helped in the last 20 years, demonstrated to me that oftentimes the chemo will kill you faster than the cancer will. I almost died of renal failure caused by the chemo drugs used to treat my AML leukemia way before the leukemia was actually life threatening. A friend (and sort of family member) died a little over a year ago from ovarian cancer.  Let me restate that; she died of the toxicity to her heart that was caused by the doxorubicin chemo drug they gave her to treat her ovarian cancer.  This chemo drug is well known to cause heart damage.  It’s well known to cause death from the heart damage causing acute heart failure (which you have to sign a medical release for saying they told you that). But my friend's death was recorded as death from ovarian cancer, not death by chemo drug.  Sadly, this heart-toxic chemo drug has never once cured ovarian cancer.    It almost broke my heart when I was reading the clinical research showing a chemical in one of my beloved rainforest plants (a chemical called vitexin that comes from amor seco) completely protected the heart from this exact same chemo drug.  Also knowing that there was enough of this particular chemical in the plant to be effective to avoid this toxic effect to her heart. . .  I wish I would have started updating sooner.

So, are we seeing a paradigm shift in oncology?  First the relatively new (mostly non-toxic) immune therapies for cancer and now the antioxidants.  Have they burned enough barns down to make the shift?  Or maybe it's more and more cancer patients saying; "Now wait just a minute. . . you want to burn the barn down to kill a rat; you're kidding me, right?"  We’ll see.  Maybe I’ve just been away from all this too long playing on my farm and am unaware of a bunch of new antioxidant drugs in development?  I’m just so cynical when it comes to the very profit-driven drug industry. Well, I’m back, so we’ll see about that too!  

So keep an eye out on the updates I’m writing concerning cancer drugs combined with rainforest plants and/or their chemicals.  The number is 3 out of 6 so far. I think you’ll also see me reporting repeatedly that great plant antioxidants are providing very beneficial actions in many other diseases as well.  Diabetes for sure, heart diseases probably, skin and cellular aging absolutely, autoimmune diseases -  we’ll see!