Chemotherapy is one of the most well known ways to treat cancer.
Unfortunately, chemotherapy drugs by nature are extremely toxic and
usually work against your body's natural mechanisms to fight cancer. It
destroys your host immunity instead of supporting it. Along with
inhibiting your immunity, it destroys healthy cells in your body as well
and can lead to more severe health problems going forward. The other
side effect chemotherapy has is the fact that it can actually support
the growth of more cancer cells by destroying the immune system.
An
alternative to chemotherapy can be found in natural compounds that can
kill cancer cells without destroying the healthy cells that are
essential for recovery. It is an effect called "selective cytotoxicity."
The result is a targeted, intelligent cancer treatment that doesn't
hinder the body's ability to fight cancer.
One particular compound is found in pineapple stems, called bromelain. A study published in the Journal Planta Medica
discovered that bromelain treated cancer in an animal study better than
the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorauracil. The effect of bromelian was
superior to that of 5-fluorouracil by approximately 263 percent,
compared to the untreated control.
The impressive part of this
study was that the bromelain worked in a way that didn't cause
additional harm to the animals, whereas the drug 5-fluorauracil was
relatively unsuccessful.
Written by GreenMedInfo:
"As a
highly toxic, fluoride-bound form of the nucleic acid uracil, a normal
component of RNA, the drug is supposed to work by tricking more rapidly
dividing cells -- which include both cancer
and healthy intestinal, hair follicle, and immune cells -- into taking
it up, thereby inhibiting (read: poisoning) RNA replication enzymes and
RNA synthesis..."
"When a person dies following conventional
cancer treatment it is all too easy to "blame the victim" and simply
write that patient's cancer off as "chemo-resistant," or "exceptionally
aggressive," when in fact the non-selective nature of the chemotoxic
agent is what ultimately lead to their death."
There is no chemotherapy drug that has been proven to produce effects like selective cytotoxicity. Apart from bromelain, there are a number of other natural compounds that have been known to produce the same results:
Vitamin C - A study done by Dr. Ronald Hunninghake found Vitamin C to be selectively cytotoxic against cancer cells over the course of a 15-year research project.
Eggplant Extract - Dr. Bill E. Cham is a leading researcher in the area of treating skin cancer and says:
"The
mode of action of SRGs [glycoalkaloids solasodine rhamnosy glycosides
(BEC)] is unlike any current antineoplastic [anti-tumor] agent. Specific
receptors for the SRGs present only on cancer cells but not normal
cells are the first step of events that lead to apoptosis in cancer
cells only, and this may explain why, during treatment, the cancer cells
were being eliminated and normal cells were replacing the killed cancer
cells with no scar tissue being formed."
In particular, the
extracts from plants in the Solanaceae family such as eggplant, tomato,
potato, bell peppers and tobacco are the compounds that have the ability
of killing cancer cells without harming the healthy tissue.
Turmeric (Curcumin Extract) - In the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry,
a study conducted discovered that rats who were administered curcumin
noted a decrease in experimentally-induced brain tumors in 9 out of 11
treated. This spice has been intensely researched and is suggested that
it targets transformed cells.
There are a number of resources to
find alternative treatments to chemotherapy, including the methods
mentioned above, found in the below sources for this article.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.foodconsumer.org
http://www.dr-gonzalez.com/index.htm
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4924076_bromelain-work.html