Have you ever had an epiphany moment? The kind that makes you want to kick yourself? I had one those last year when I attended a lecture titled “Hyperthermia: From laboratory to clinical research and practice” (part of the Jerusalem International Conference on Integrative Medicine) by Dr. Joseph Brenner, MD.
Dr. Brenner is the managing director of the Oncology Clinic at Wolfson Hospital in Holon, Israel. He is also the founder and medical director of New-Hope, The Center for Biologic and Metabolic Non-Toxic Medicine in Oncology located in Tel-Aviv, Israel. What made me sit in up my seat was the fact that Dr. Brenner, who has been using a method called Hyperthermia to treat cancer tumors in patients at New Hope, presented a number of cases in which treatment with Hyperthermia was able to significantly shrink the cancer tumors – enabling the patients to then continue with standard cancer treatment.
So why did I want to kick myself? For two reasons:
Some of the successful cases Dr. Brenner presented were patients with pancreatic cancer. This type of cancer remains one of the more deadly cancers, with low cure/remission rates and poor prognoses for most patients (such as the well-publicized cases of Luciano Pavarotti and Patrick Swayze).
The fact that my husband lasted nearly a year after being diagnosed – with Stage 4 cancer, surgery to bypass the pancreas, emergency surgery to fix a leaking blood vessel, and a short (and thankfully temporary) systems failure – was considered remarkable. In fact, I remember one doctor telling him he had no more that 18 weeks to live – but then, I always said my husband was too stubborn to listen to his doctors.
The second reason is that this treatment has been around for some time. This was not a ground-breaking lecture – back in 1997(!), Dr. Brenner organized a large medical conference in Tel Aviv called”Hope 2000”. One of the lecturers who attended the conference was Prof. Frederick Douwes, director of St. George Hospital in Bad Aibling, Germany, himself a world-renowned Hyperthermia expert, who has been using this treatment even longer.
Now let me be clear – there is no magic bullet – and there is no promise for every cancer patient, pancreas or otherwise. All I am saying is that I wish I had known about Dr. Brenner’s clinic and treatment method back in 1997, because I know my husband would have wanted to try this treatment. [He did try many different treatments besides radiation and chemotherapy, including shark cartilage treatment in Mexico, Juniper extractions in Germany, and more.]
You should know that not everyone believes in Hyperthermia; practitioners who use this treatment continue to face an uphill battle with their colleagues and with the health services (less so in Germany, where CAM has become more mainstream and accepted).
May your epiphany be much less painful than mine – and wishing you all good health.