To achieve optimal care, we:
Provide information and support for skillful decision making. A person faced with cancer concerns often faces a bewildering number of choices in terms of prevention, treatment, and post-treatment monitoring. Up-to-date information and coaching can help guide optimal choices in all of these areas.
Address the patient’s overall well-being– physical, emotional and spiritual health. We investigate and treat nutritional, metabolic (anabolism/catabolism) digestive, energetic, endocrine, and immune balance. Our goals are to strengthen the patient’s constitution and immune system, and boost vital energy. For patients undergoing treatment, we work to minimize side effects and the negative impact of necessary medical treatments, improve quality of life and overall health and extend the life span. For patients who have completed treatment, we work to speed the healing of and protect from the future negative effects of treatment, and help prevent recurrence. Botanicals (herbs), nutrition and exercise are essential parts of this work
Assess the patient’s “terrain” and the tumor micro-environment- for patients with active cancer, this is what the tumor is altering in order to facilitate growth and spread. For patients who are aiming to prevent cancer or a recurrence, this means minimizing the multitude of factors that are conducive to a particular type of cancer’s initiation, growth, and spread. We aim for the nutritional and biochemical environment that is the least hospitable to cancer and most conducive for the patient’s well being. We address blood sugar control, copper and zinc status, inflammation, genetics, hormones, detoxification pathways, etc. We use botanicals (herbs), which “multi-task” to support overall health, optimize the “terrain,” and suppress multiple cancer pathways.
Explore the characteristics of the tumor, when appropriate, with tools such as tumor molecular profiling to identify and target cellular mutations in the tumor. It may be possible to test for drug sensitivity and resistance. This cutting edge approach can be used as a guide to select specific medication– to pick the most favorable drug and timing of administration, as well as herbal and nutritional therapies that are most likely to be effective.
We start each patient with a foundational protocol that makes extensive use of botanical and nutritional therapies to enhance immune response, protect vital organs, potentiate drug therapies, and target specific pathways altered by cancer. Elements of this protocol, customized to each patient, can include:
- extensive nutritional and botanical supplements
- an appropriately tailored diet
- vegetable smoothies or juicing
- a medicinal smoothie
- exercise
- stress reduction
- referrals to other complementary and alternative modalities as appropriate (massage, acupuncture, yoga, Tai Chi/Qigong, etc.)
We receive our primary consultative support from practitioners associated with the Mederi Foundation and the ETMS model with which we have been working since 2010.