Patients and their care-givers should be aware that many newly diagnosed cancer patients die from heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and suicide within a month of the cancer “despair” diagnosis.
Among a plethora of other pieces of published evidence, a New England Journal of Medicine study showed that the risk of premature death is present before treatment begins. Furthermore, the preponderance of the evidence established a causal relationship between “terminal” diagnoses and many more cancer patient deaths. In other words, the worse the patient’s prognosis, the worse the patients got and the more deaths ensued.
Furthermore, most of these co-morbidilities were not the result of the cancer process itself. They were the end-results of the fear-based medical system, both in terms of “nocebo” self-destruction and because of the deleterious effects of the invasive and misguided cancer procedures.
“As compared with cancer-free persons, the relative risk of suicide among patients receiving a cancer diagnosis was 12.6 (95% confidence interval [CI], 8.6 to 17.8) during the first week (29 patients; incidence rate, 2.50 per 1000 person-years) and 3.1 (95% CI, 2.7 to 3.5) during the first year (260 patients; incidence rate, 0.60 per 1000 person-years). The relative risk of cardiovascular death after diagnosis was 5.6 (95% CI, 5.2 to 5.9) during the first week (1318 patients; incidence rate, 116.80 per 1000 person-years) and 3.3 (95% CI, 3.1 to 3.4) during the first 4 weeks (2641 patients; incidence rate, 65.81 per 1000 person-years). The risk elevations decreased rapidly during the first year after diagnosis. Increased risk was particularly prominent for cancers with a poor prognosis. The case-crossover analysis largely confirmed results from the main analysis. CONCLUSIONS: In this large cohort study, patients who had recently received a cancer diagnosis had increased risks of both suicide and death from cardiovascular causes, as compared with cancer-free persons. (Funded by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and others.) (Source)
Was this Study well designed ?
From the looks of this study, the evidence appears all the more robust that this study involved a huge population of 6 millions adult residents of Sweden age 30 or older who were enrolled in a nationwide health registry from 1991 to 2006. During this time, about 534,000 people in the registry received a first diagnosis of cancer. Slightly more than 26,300 people were diagnosed with cancers considered to be highly fatal, including those of the esophagus, pancreas, and liver. Compared to people without a diagnosis of cancer, the following were the published results.
People with cancer were 12 times more likely to commit suicide within a week of diagnosis and three times more likely to commit suicide within a year.
Cancer patients had a fivefold increase in deaths due to heart attack, stroke, or blood clots in the week following their diagnosis. In the first month following their diagnosis they had a threefold increase in risk, compared to people without cancer.
People with the most deadly cancers had a 16-fold greater suicide risk within a week of diagnosis and a 15-fold greater risk of having a fatal heart attack or stroke.
Within a year of diagnosis, the suicide, heart attack, stroke, and blood clot-related death risk had returned to normal levels for people with all types of cancer.
Analogy with the Broken-Heart Syndrome
Most heart attacks are due to coronary arteries being blocked by blood clots that form when plaques of cholesterol, white blood cells, dental bacteria, calcium and debris rupture. But over the past few years, physicians have come to recognize and better understand another form of heart attack. This unusual type of heart attack does not involve rupturing plaques or blocked blood vessels. Technically speaking, this condition is called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or stress cardiomyopathy. Japanese doctors, who were the first to describe this condition, named it “takotsubo” because during this disorder, the heart takes on a distinctive shape that resembles a Japanese pot used to trap an octopus. (Source). The disorder was commonly believed to be caused by sudden emotional stress, such as the death of a child or spouse and to be far less harmful than a typical heart attack. For that reason, some had also labeled this condition “broken-heart syndrome.”
A study in the September 3, 2015 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reports on the work of an international collaboration of physicians from the United States and Europe that studied 1,750 patients with takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Surprisingly, 90% of these cases occurred in women, and the women in this study were an average of 67 years old. The most common triggers of stress cardiomyopathy were physical (such as lung problems or infections), and the next most common cause was an emotional “shock.” But in a substantial proportion of patients, there was no trigger that could be identified.
Compared with people who had experienced a “typical” heart attack, patients with takotsubo cardiomyopathy were almost twice as likely to have a neurological or psychiatric disorder. And in contrast to the commonly held belief among doctors that takotsubo cardiomyopathy is less serious than other forms of heart attack, the rates of death in the hospital between takotsubo cardiomyopathy and more “traditional” heart attacks were similar.
“Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which derives its name from the Japanese word takotsubo (“octopus pot”) to describe the characteristic ballooning of the left ventricular apex, is generally recognized as a benign disorder. However, patients are at risk for recurrence even years after the first event, and data on in-hospital and long-term outcomes are limited.7-10 The potential role of catecholamine excess in the pathogenesis of takotsubo cardiomyopathy has been long debated,11 and as such beta-blockers have been proposed as a therapeutic strategy.12 “. (Source)
In this quote, consider how conventional cardiologists think, an excess of catecholamine caused by an emotional trauma should be treated more with synthetic molecules (beta-blockers) than with holistic lifestyle that necessarily focuse on the emotional and physiological bio-terrain of the patient.
In the same way that cancer is not caused by a deficiency of chemo, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is not caused by a lack of beta-blockers or any other drug. Medical prescriptions which instructs the use of synthetic drugs to treat these lifestyle conditions more often than not lead to major complications and shortens lifespan. (Source).
Discussion
The Mainstream Debate on holistically-inspired “false hope” diagnoses versus conventionally-determined “terminal” (despair) diagnoses
Contrarily to what most conventionally trained doctors have been educated to think, these cases prove beyond any reasonable doubt that body–mind connection and emotions are relevant.
Both cancer diagnosis and broken-heart syndromes need to address the underlying causes that led to these health challenges, first and foremost the emotional aspects.
In the case of cancer diagnoses, the evidence shows that the formal announcement of the diagnosis immediately kick-starts either the patient’s will to live or decision to go along with the terminal diagnosis and prepare to die.
If the oncologist destroys therapeutic hope, the patient’s emotion are chemically transmuted into serious stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, catecholamine and other endogenous chemicals) and neuropeptides that invite a weakening of the immune system and more cellular havoc.
In contradistinction, if the oncologist opens the door to therapeutic hope, the patient’s emotions are also transmuted, but this time into healing neuropeptides that accompanies an enhanced immune system and microbiota.
It’s only recently that it has been proven that the living entities (bacteria, viruses, fungi and archeas) within the microbiota get nefariously affected when their host gets deeply stressed out. It has also been proven for a long time that the immune cells get demobilized when the host is durably stressed out. See the Institute’s cancer book for the published studies.
I remember my father being the victim of the misguided “say it like it is” conventional medical approach. Once they told him that his cancer was terminal and that he had less than six months to live, but needed to get irradiated with preventive and palliative radiation quasi-immediately, he and his wife just sat in the doctor’s office weeping. They stayed weeping for hours thinking the doctors would come back to explain a little more. But Jack’s medical oncology team had already left the office for the day and never told my parents that they would not come back on that day. And indeed, Jack had died from the cancer treatment and “despair” before the six months diagnosis. (Source) He saw no way out, except to submit his body to radiation science and pharmaceuticals.
In my med-mal actions, i had invoked this issue of “despair diagnosis” in conventional oncology to the attention of different Judges hoping they would grant me a specific “jury instruction” on this topic so that the Jury could better weigh the material (relevant) facts. The Judge denied my requests.
More often than not, most Judges are clueless as to the devastating impact that these “despair” terminal diagnoses have on patients. And we have known about the science of iatrogenic despair and nocebo effects for decades, at least since the 1950s.
Regarding the “terminal” characterization of certain cancer diagnoses, this can be misleading because people are not statistics. Furthermore, those patients who end up dieing from metastastic cancer are usually not compliant to holistic interventions. We also have an abundance of evidence that all types of advanced cancers like advanced pancreatic and lung malignancies have been reversed, including via “spontaneous regression” (Source)
Hope-based Holistic Oncology is clinically superior to Despair-structured Conventional Oncology
Many of these cancer patients who die from cancer diagnoses did have other health conditions, including psychological ones. In conventional oncology, like in general mainstream medicine, the approach is not holistic, it is piecemeal, hence, conventional oncologists are focused on killing the tumor, they are clueless at the body’s own repair mechanisms, let alone on correctly addressing the patient’s nutritional, psychological and spiritual needs.
On the other hand, holistic oncology’s essence is to nurture the entire mind-body-spiritual needs of the patient and to do this with the best non-invasive, safe, efficient and cost-friendly approaches that will help the body to detoxify with holistic detox tools (another concept conventional medical doctors consider to be a ploy) and heal, including with plant-strong nutritional oncology, a field that is also ignored by conventional oncologists.
Even the Government’s N.I.H. experts consider detoxification to be quakery, without evidence. This is what they say on their website: “There isn’t any convincing evidence that detox or cleansing programs actually remove toxins from your body or improve your health.”. (Source). Given the weight of the evidence to the contrary, just this government-based conclusion is proof that Government experts are either incompetent or complicit with the medical system’s profiteering ideology.
Summary
The Swedish findings above confirm that a cancer diagnosis immediately impacts the cancer patient’s survival. Its effect on physical and emotional health can lead to life or death. Just as war, natural disasters, the broken-heart syndrome and emotional trauma have been linked to deadly cardiovascular events and suicide, a diagnosis of cancer is in itself a major life stressor.
Yet, most (not all, just most of those we have met) conventional oncologists, preferring to cling on their biased and flawed hugely expensive clinical trials, are trained to accuse holistic oncologists they call dangerous quacks of perpetrating upon innocent cancer patients “false hope”. But the hard evidence shows that quackery is usually in the camp of the officially recognized accusers.
For individuals who lack scientific knowledge, integrity and intellectual honesty, it’s convenient and self-serving to accuse other health professionals of quackery and pseudo-science when they are perpetrating this “mind-body” connection “myth”, (Source) especially when these holistic providers are taken away some of their “cash flow” business. It is also in this context that the holistic “mind-body” connection should be understood.
And as we know or should know, “therapeutic hope” spurs the flow “vital energy”, what the Chinese call “Chi” or Life force, another millennia-old concept conventional oncologists scoff at. French scientists have proven decades ago that when a mammal feels stuck, without options, inhibited, in a “terminal” situation, the immune system breaks down. (Source)
The only “terminal” element about anything in today’s cancer-care is the dangerous and crippled conventional oncology system. Predominantly based on surgery, chemotherapy and cytotoxic radiation, and secondarily on target therapies, monoclonal antibodies, hormonotherapy, combinational drugs and engineered immunotherapeutics, this medical approach lacks holistic intelligence and happy life-lasting results, for the most part.
While conventional cancer immunotherapy is an improvement, this technique still sidesteps natural immunotherapy and holistic medicine, it is laden with autoimmunity side effects, it is most times combined with radiation and chemo and its benefits are seen in only a small percentage of cancer patients. (See the Institute’s book for the facts).
Based on multiple false premises and on an abundance of hyped data, conventional “evidence-based” oncology spreads the pseudo-science that cancer is supposed to be predominantly a genetic disease, because of which its tumors need to be wiped out asap with weapons of massive cellular destruction that kill everything in their passage, including the patient’s immune system and microbiota that can recognize cancer cells and clear them.
As mentioned, I’m not denying that there have been some recent and more intelligent options with regard to immunotherapeutics, viral therapy, cancer stem cell targeting, targeted therapies, some dietary recommendations and epigenetics that involve the upregulation of molecular switches. But even with these conventional options, most of which are still accompanied with chemo and radiation, most malignancies are still not definitely cured, these cancers eventually come back either before or after the Five-years cut-off “remission” date, including with a plethora of side (toxic) effects.
While Conventional oncologists criticize holistic and integrative oncologists’ “false hope” approach, the devastating damage that results from Despair and terminal diagnosis is strongly established. Having looked at the quasi-totality of the evidence, I can assert that of the 1600 American cancer deaths and the 5000 American new cancer diagnoses each day, the majority of these patients die from conventional iatrogenic (medical) causes, a significant element of which come from this “despair” diagnosis ritual.
Despair and “terminal” diagnoses should be all the more malpractice that today Cancer Scientists recognize that each patient is unique and needs a personalized treatment plan. Because of this, terminal diagnoses have no place in any medical system. An oncologist should nonetheless continue to inform the patient of statistical probabilities in terms of outcome, that’s OK and even legally necessary.
But telling a patient that no other medical approach could cure or really help him or her and that he will die within so many months is all the more damaging that more often than not, the modern oncologist will provide cash-flow-promoting palliative treatments and cookies on the way out of the clinic.
Hope should therefore be encouraged as a therapeutic placebo-inspired tool. Hope is not hype. Hope is an attitude. Hype is a marketing technique. Hope can’t be “false”, this would be an oxymoron characterization. It would be like calling water wet or the fire hot. By definition, Hope is therapeutic, just like faith is elevating.
A good way to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts and hype claims is through sincere and proactive “question & answer” discussions and informed scientific debates, much of which can also benefit the patient. For more, see the Institute’s proposed Q & A and guidelines.
