The Dog Cancer Survival Guide (34 page)

I have great respect for cancer’s ability to wage war on the body. As you’ve seen, cancer is a sneaky foe and a formidable enemy. Like any smart warrior, cancer attacks on more than one front. Here are the five ways cancer attacks your dog’s body:

1. Cancer tumors grow larger and spread wider, crowding and even injuring neighboring body tissues. They metastasize, creating new tumors in new places, sometimes far from the original tumor.
   
2. Cancer suppresses your dog’s immune system, which lessens her natural ability to fight cancer, leaves her vulnerable to outside infections, and slows wound healing.
   
3. Cancer robs your dog of nutrition, causing weight loss (cachexia) and muscle weakness; even when your dog is eating adequate calories.
   
4. Cancer steals resources meant for normal body functions causing otherwise healthy body systems to falter even fail.
   
5. As cancer wreaks this havoc, life quality and happiness can take a nosedive. This leaves the body even more defenseless and increases the chances that the brain chemistry will change to “fight or flight.” This, in turn, creates more stress, and the cycle continues.
   

“Don’t just accept the conventional thinking that most vets and vet oncologists will give you. It will be the same as human oncologists — cut it out, burn it out with radiation, poison it with expensive chemo drugs. As Dr. Andrew Weil said in Spontaneous Healing – ten or twenty years from now conventional cancer treatments will be considered barbaric. Unless it is a tumor that hasn’t metastasized, it’s likely to be an expensive and unsuccessful route. Instead, help bolster your dog’s immune system so his immune system can cure his cancer or extend his life. Improve his diet with whole and unadulterated foods. Only give him purified water to drink. Start him on K-9 Immunity and Apocaps right away until you can figure out a supplement protocol. If you can’t afford the Apocaps and K-9 Immunity, you can get herbs and supplements such as turmeric, green tea, fish oil capsules, milk thistle, quercetin and astralagus from many reputable online vendors (subscribe to Consumer Labs to make sure you’re buying from a good vendor). Do your best to find a vet who gives credence to alternative therapies. Even if you want to utilize conventional chemotherapy, alternative therapies can be used in a complementary fashion. Read Andrew Weil. Subscribe to Dr. Russell Blaylock’s newsletter and read all the back issues on cancer. Read the
Dog Cancer Survivor Guide
...and when you’re finished read it again. Don’t accept the line that alternative therapies are not “evidence-based” because gold-standard double-blind clinical trials have not been done. This does not mean that there is no evidence that alternative work; it just means that FDA-style clinical trials are simply too expensive to run on natural substances that cannot be patented. Love you dog every day. Give him a reason for living. And then maybe you’ll actually see him in Heaven.”

-
Al Marzetti, Raleigh, North Carolina

Typical conventional vet care defends the first front by removing tumors and/or reducing their size. This makes sense, of course, and is also the first step in Full Spectrum cancer care. We don’t stop there; we defend on all five fronts.

Imagine that your house is under attack by a gang of five men. There’s one who’s climbing in the garage window, another is sneaking in the back, another one is taking a crowbar to your cellar door, another is shimmying up a drainpipe, and a fifth is throwing a rock through a plate glass window. You wake up, aware that someone is entering your home, but not sure who it is or what he wants with you.

To defend yourself, you have an alarm system, a cell phone that speed dials the police, a knife in your kitchen, and a gun under the bed. If you had to pick just one of these defenses, which one of them would you use?

That’s kind of a silly question, isn’t it? If you were really in this situation, you would at least
consider
using all of your defenses. And no one in her right mind would tell you not to be ready to use any and all means – the Full Spectrum – to stop the intruders from harming you or your family.

The same could be said of cancer treatments. When we face cancer we are often insufficiently armed, so if a treatment has been shown to help dogs get an edge on cancer, the Full Spectrum mindset demands it be considered for use. In Full Spectrum cancer care, therapies with a solid rationale for being safe and effective are always considered, regardless of their origin.

Not every Full Spectrum treatment we discuss is supported by multi-center, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. So, why am I recommending them? Because I have carefully researched them, evaluated them, and concluded that they are safe and may help. There is no doubt that today we have an increased need for managing dog cancer and an increased urgency in treating it effectively. Just as human cancer patients are more likely than ever to be open to outside-the-box therapies, guardians are both more willing to treat their dog’s cancer and more inclined to explore all of the options. I’m not willing, and neither are many guardians, to wait, when it comes to cancer.

If the treatment is safe and may help, it should be adopted, without waiting many years for the gold standard studies to be completed. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, even some of the conventional therapies used by oncologists today don’t have this “gold standard” support.

Dogs do not have much time; we should move with sense of urgency and be assertive. When fighting to stay alive, we cannot always do things perfectly or follow all of the conventional rules. We vets and oncologists should allow increased leeway for treatments which may help – and if it feels right to the guardian, we should go for it.

Few people used omega-3 supplements for their dogs when I was in school. Now, vets regularly prescribe them for dry skin, kidney disease, arthritis, allergies, and cancer. The same is true for glucosamine and chondroitin supplements, which are now used for arthritis, and for SAM-e, which is now used for liver and joint disease.

Even the Food and Drug Administration recognizes the need for speed, when it comes to new cancer therapies. It has instituted a “fast track” drug approval process, which allows therapeutics that may help advanced cancer cases to enter clinical trials much earlier than usual. Oncologists also recognize this need for speed when they use chemotherapy drugs off label. As long as it is safe and may help, let’s apply this same method of thinking to every available tool.

Treatments from conventional medicine, alternative medicine, holistic medicine, and any other medical system – no matter how esoteric – can be used in a Full Spectrum cancer care plan, as long as the treatment has:

scientific studies supporting its effectiveness, and/or ...

... a strong history of common clinical use supporting its effectiveness, and ...

... minimal and/or tolerable side effects given the potential benefits.

The treatments outlined in this part of the book meet these criteria and, therefore, should be considered for your dog’s cancer care. In the next chapters, you will find out how each treatment works and why I think it might help your dog. Many of them are universal treatments, which can help
any
cancer case.

It may be tempting to read this and think “This is great! If I do everything here, my dog will beat cancer!”

While I have certainly seen dogs go into remission, or experience extended longevity and life quality, I cannot in any way guarantee that these recommendations will definitely help your dog with his particular cancer.

I’m sure you can understand why I must point out that it is impossible for me, or Dr. Ettinger, to diagnose or treat your dog through the pages of this book.
Our recommendations are for your information only, and do not constitute veterinary advice for your dog.

As always, you are the one in charge of your dog’s cancer. If any Full Spectrum cancer care treatment resonates with you, I hope that you will check it out with your vet. Her expertise and ability to evaluate it, in the context of your dog’s cancer diagnosis, other health conditions, age, and other factors, is invaluable. All decisions about your dog’s care should be made with veterinary supervision and guidance.