Article from "Alternative Medicine" Magazine

[Hebbie]

Commentary from the founder of Alternative Medicine

Marshalling the Forces

What it means to pull out all the stops to fight cancer.

By Burton Goldberg

Over the years I've known her, Myrna Brind has been a passionate advocate for alternative medicine. Elegant, cultured, well-read, and tireless in her work for various cultural and civic organizations, Myrna, now 59, reached out to those who were ill, giving spiritual inspiration as well as practical aid. World traveler, art collector, mother, and grandmother, Myrna and her husband, Ira, chairman of the board of trustees at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, worked with a committee of doctors to found the Center for Integrative Medicine there.

Then suddenly, shockingly, in September of 2002, Myrna was diagnosed with a rare and virulent form of ovarian cancer. What doctors initially thought was a cyst turned out to be a malignant mixed M?llerian tumor, which combines deadly elements of both carcinoma and sarcoma. "I'm the one who tells everyone what to eat, what to do--I've worked with everybody from Bernie Siegel to Deepak Chopra," Myrna told me when she found out. "And now I'm the one who's sick."

The Brinds pulled out all the stops to find help. They hired a cancer consultant in New York, who put them in touch with five oncologists. After interviewing them, the Brinds chose to go with an alternative physician instead and moved to Tucson, Arizona, for the cleaner air and to be closer to Myrna's doctor. For six months, she tried the practitioner's homeopathic and alternative remedies. Then she began losing weight and developed a horrible skin condition called dermatomyositis. When she finally went for a PET scan in March, the cancer had metastasized to her chest, bones, neck, thigh, and liver and throughout her pelvis.

Her doctor told Myrna that her best chance for survival was to fly to Germany to see physician Friedrich Douwes at Klinik St Georg in Bad Aibling, Germany. Douwes's method of treating cancer has attracted notice for its high success rates. It involves a temperature-elevating process called hyperthermia along with low-dose chemotherapy, plus a regimen of detoxifying the body and boosting the immune system. Coincidentally, Douwes was attending an alternative medicine cancer conference in April in nearby Phoenix, so Myrna and Ira met him there and made plans to visit his hospital. At this point, I became involved. I, too, was attending the conference and had just returned from visiting the Kessler Clinic in northern Germany. The amazing results I witnessed there in the case of a friend of mine, Hildegarde (described in my June column, "Mending a Broken Life"), suggested to me that Myrna could survive only if she also underwent physician Wolf-Dieter Kessler's powerful combination of treatments.

Most conventional doctors--and alternative ones as well--pay no attention to the cause of a cancer they're treating, whereas Kessler's methods have been designed to target the underlying factors so that he can restore the immune system to its proper function. I also knew that the feverish state induced by hyperthermia could be highly debilitating and might even kill Myrna if her body was not strengthened beforehand. Only the combination of the two approaches of these doctors, I believed, could save her.

After much discussion, I was able to convince Ira and Myrna of the merits of this idea. Myrna arrived at the Kessler Clinic in Victorbur in a wheelchair, too weak to walk. "Her face was grotesquely swollen," Kessler recalls, "and she showed muscle wasting and had skin lesions all over her body. We were not sure we could save her."

With his staff of highly trained technicians, Kessler immediately began the intensive diagnostic process he employs to determine the root causes of a patient's disease. He uses electrodermal screening methods to arrive at a diagnosis--the Vega, the Quint, and the Ondamed. All three measure disturbances in the body's organs and systems. Kessler's method involves applying results from two or more of these mechanisms to arrive at coordinates in a system he calls vectoring. "When you use only one system, usually you don't see the forest for the trees," says Kessler. "When several systems come up with the same thing, it's so dead-on it's like somebody takes a baseball bat and hits you on the head with the answer."

Head-to-toe screening with the three methods revealed a multitude of problems, including a hormonal imbalance. Myrna had been treated with estrogen replacement therapy for nine years. This had failed to correct an underlying progesterone deficiency, but may well have contributed to her cancer. She also had chronic lung disease, the result of three bouts of pneumonia, and an intolerance to gluten. Kessler believes these problems produced the disturbances that led to Myrna's cancer. "It was like a fire that had been extinguished, but was still smoldering under branches and leaves," he says. Kessler encouraged Myrna to give up wheat and eat more meat. He put her on high doses of progesterone. He used the Ondamed to correct the electromagnetic field disturbances that produce blockages in the body and interfere with immune system function. And he assembled a test kit of 200 different homeopathic substances to find the ones that might help.

After a week of treatment, Myrna and Ira traveled to the Douwes clinic, in southernmost Germany at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. Douwes and Kessler had agreed to work together, and the Ondamed, accompanied by one of Kessler's technicians, Maria Jakobs, went with them. Myrna spent two more weeks detoxifying, taking coenzyme Q10 for nutritional support, and working every day with Jakobs and the Ondamed.

Then it was time for the hyperthermia treatment. Hyperthermia treats cancer by exposing body tissues to high temperatures, which is thought to help shrink tumors by damaging cells or depriving them of the substances they need to live. Since cancer had spread throughout Myrna's body, she needed to have full-body hyperthermia, an arduous and debilitating procedure.

Myrna's body temperature was raised to 104 degrees, the level of a high fever, for a period of several hours. "When I came out of it, I was really a very sick woman," she recalls. She couldn't move any part of her body or even swallow. "She became a complete invalid," Ira told me. "Her proteins and albumin were so low I was planning her funeral."

But even then Myrna remained hopeful. When she and Ira moved to Arizona, she had begun writing letters to a circle of friends asking to be kept in their prayers. Throughout her ordeal, she kept up a correspondence with 250 people, and prayer circles in her name were formed all over the world.

The support helped give her the strength to undergo four courses of low-dose chemotherapy in two months at Klinik St Georg, and, since hyperthermia had been so debilitating, a gentler round of fever therapy (in which her body temperature was raised by hot water bottles and injections of Coley's toxin, a vaccine that raises temperature chemically). To Ira's relief, she finally began to feel better and gain weight.

Back in Philadelphia, Myrna slowly continued to improve. Her skin cleared and she gained 20 pounds. Ultrasound showed that her tumors had shrunk, with the largest going from 9 to 4 centimeters. In July, she returned to Germany for another round of healing. Kessler screened homeopathic substances until he came up with the one acid he felt would be effective against the 4-centimeter tumor. The tumor melted away in days.

Douwes had a hard time recognizing Myrna the next time he saw her. "Here was a woman with beautiful skin, and a beautiful head of gray hair," he says. "I did a checkup and found nothing." A PET scan confirmed the results, and when Douwes checked her blood, her tumor cell count was zero. In a demonstration of the combined power of alternative medicine and low-dose chemotherapy and hyperthermia, her end-stage cancer was in complete remission after only five months of treatment. I remain convinced that all medical practitioners should learn and use the bioenergetic techniques that Kessler uses so successfully. These techniques have powers even beyond the astounding curative ones displayed in Myrna Brind's case. In fact, all degenerative processes can be seen early before they manifest themselves as cancer or heart disease or stroke. If Myrna had seen Kessler a year before her diagnosis, I believe she would never have come to the brink of death.

Was her cure a miracle? No. This is the way alternative medicine is successfully practiced.

[Lisa O]

That is amazing. I wonder if they are going to get any clinical trials going? Thanks for posting this Hebbie!