Treatment of colon cancer with Chinese medicine

Hey Stephen,

Thanks a lot for your reply. Very meaningful.

I am in China now, going to a Chinese medicine hospital that has an adjunct
building for western medicine. Your comments make this arrangement seem
inappropriate. And it does seem as if in the case of serious illness, the
Chinese doctors would immediately defer to the Western doctors.

I was having some success with the CHinese medicine, but then with a
possible cancer diagnosis, at least one of the TCM doctors (not my favorite
one, though…he is out of town for some reason) immediately deferred to
surgery and started writing prescriptions for Western medicine. Who
knows…maybe they are right.

One thing that made me deeply question the Western diagnosis, however, was
that the biopsy came back negative for cancer. They want to do another.
Well…uh…how many of these are you guys going to do? Until you find
what you are looking for? And if you don’t find it? I clearly saw them take
samples from two separate locations.

So your reply suggests the problem might be better solved by addressing
symptoms, which is what the Chinese doctor was doing before. But then I
presented him with some worrisome symptoms and he sent me to the Western
medicine building…even when his herbal formulas were having some success.

And I say some success. I still had problems. And these are complicated
issues. Not saying that western medicine is inappropriate in my case. Just
wanting to see the other side of the coin.

Paul

I worked with a Chinese master in Boston, Tom Tam, for nearly a decade in his clinic where we treated nearly exclusively cancer and auto-immune conditions and I still see a fair amount of both in my clinic in Chattanooga as do many Chinese Medicine practitioners. An aspect of our overall approach is tong ren therapy (an energy healing technique, but the areas we focus on are the same whether we are doing tong ren, acupuncture, massage, etc.). I only mention that to say I’ve had many patients and treated nearly every type of cancer in most possible combinations and stages of severity. At the end of the day there are no straightforward answers. Some western options, like surgery in many cases, are very helpful and reasonably risk free and successful. But even with successful surgery the recurrence rates are high ( 1 ), so you still need all the available options - dietary change, lifestyle change, Chinese Medicine, etc, which in clinical reality increase your long term outcomes. There are a host of variables, however, that make analysis of individual outcomes impossible to really guarantee.

So to start with your first array of statements about people on this site telling you that you are crazy to consider Chinese Medicine for colon cancer treatment exclusively - given the context of this site no one is going to tell you that. That said, having no reference points as far as diagnostic testing, blood tests, etc. with western medicine would be a very bad idea - even if you treat the cancer initially at least entirely with Chinese Medicine. Why not use science? and why is it an either/or option? It just isn’t.

Now your experience with Chinese practitioners is not unique. There are a range of styles and training worldwide with acupuncture and certainly in China. And in China you have many practitioners tightly interwoven with western medicine and some completely outside of that system as it is somewhat more commonly practiced in the west. There is no right and wrong, but there are great differences in experience and opinion when you get to complicated conditions such as cancer - there are, however, no right and wrong answers/opinions.

When you look critically at long-term outcomes of patients who have western treatments for cancer they are improving, for many cancers, but they are by far not universally great. There are many people who with dietary change alone have healed their cancers, many with Chinese Medicine, herbs and acupuncture, herbs alone, acupuncture alone and many with medical qi gong (energy healing) and every other variant. Enough to say they have a place in treatment, but not enough to give exclusive responsibility to any one system or course of change. Ultimately, I feel a combination is best for most cancers, but with Chinese Medicine leading it and being the critical part and western medicine being secondary but that is just my opinion based on my clinical experience, my understanding of modern research and my own observation of the clinical experience of my peers. I can say Master Tom Tam, my primary teacher, has excellent outcomes across the board with cancer. But that doesn’t mean that patients didn’t do a combination of treatments (west and east) and do other lifestyle and dietary change - they often are doing all of the above with only a fraction doing only Chinese Medicine and most of those due to failures after exhausting all western options.

So that’s a long winded way to say I don’t think your experience with certain Chinese Medicine practitioners, particularly those within an “integrative” facility, is unique. Just like your family practice physician is not the person to treat your colon cancer, you need to see a Chinese Medicine doctor who has deep and broad experience with cancer to get proper treatment. But even they will likely want at least blood work and scans from the western side to monitor treatment and may recommend a combination approach either at the beginning or after watching your initial response to treatment. This in many ways is no different than the western model that starts with standards of care and then essentially gets more aggressive if you don’t respond well with the initial course of treatments.

The following articles I’ve written and research studies at least give some guideposts to how certain Chinese Medicine formulas work, how acupuncture can create internal changes and how some adjunctive Chinese Medicine techniques may work - but they are only guideposts - some are not exclusively for cancer but you can make those links as cancer and other GI diseases have similar backgrounds.

• Western Chemo Actions Aided by Shi Quan Da Bu Wan Herbal Formula for Gastrointestinal Cancers
• Acupuncture for Colitis
• Moxibustion suppresses Colon Inflammation in Ulcerative Colitis
• Understanding the anticancer effects of Xiao Chai Hu Tang - xiao chai hu tang is commonly used for many cancers, but in the right patients it is most often for liver, lung and/or colon.
• Significance of Kampo in Cancer Support - kampo is Japanese herbal medicine, but many of the formulas are identical to the Chinese herbal medicine formulas from which they ultimately were derived.
• Hochuekkito,TJ-41, a Kampo Formula, Ameliorates Cachexia Induced by Colon 26 Adenocarcinoma in Mice

The basis of our particular system for cancer is in the text Healing Cancer with the Nervous System - not that I suggest per se you buy and read the book, just if you really wanted to learn more it’s hard to put all of it in a forum post, particularly to try to keep it at a non Chinese Medicine specialist level.

I wish you the best of health and hope you can navigate the health care labyrinth to your benefit!