I strategically use humor. I have romance party plan business. I ask ladies to get their friends together so that I can sell them “romance items.” Many women are intrigued by the idea but extremely nervous at being embarrassed too. To make them comfortable, I liberally sprinkle my presentation with humor. The idea is to make them laugh so much they forget to be embarrassed. I want them to have fun and forget to be nervous. And let’s face it. So many of those “romance items” are just begging for a joke. The best part of these parties is that so many of the guests are incredibly witty ladies that crack me up, too. I tend to get my best jokes from party goers and bless them for it.

Janet attended one of my parties several months ago. I was holding up one of my newest products called “Tasty Pastease,” showing that they come in black or white flower shapes or a cherry, heart shaped version. They have candies on dangling strings (think candy necklace type candies) and are worn, well, where a topless dancer who doesn’t want to be completely topless would wear them. At a presentation, I usually just hold up the package and indicate that really there is no need for explanation here (since there is a picture and everything). Janet started giggling. Of course, so was everyone else, but Janet continued to giggle as though she was enjoying a private joke. I watched her throughout the rest of the presentation a little intrigued and decided I would have to figure this out.

Once my presentation concludes, I invite the ladies individually into a separate room to do their shopping. This offers them a little privacy and the opportunity to ask embarassing questions without an audience. When Janet came into the shopping room, I asked her if she had especially liked any of the items I showed her. (I do try to be subtle.) Janet immediately volunteered that she had to have a couple sets of the Tasty Pastease. She is a nurse just like many of the other guests that evening. She had also recently had a mastectomy, but she had not yet had the reconstructive surgery that follows. It was scheduled with a surgeon she knows pretty well. And, giggling, she told me that she had decided that a set of Tastee Pastees would be the perfect thing to wear into the OR. The more she thought about the look on her surgeon’s face, the harder she laughed.

I was shocked since her situation was not one I usually heard about in my shopping room, but I couldn’t help but laugh with her. What a wonderful way to approach a difficult situation. I bet she really brightened up the day of that OR staff.

(You can find Tasty Pastease at www.DeannaMayer.SurpriseParties.com under “For Tasting.”)

Deanna Mayer is a Surprise Parties Representative in Colorado. When she isn’t chasing her two boys around, she is teaching ladies how to Celebrate Romance in their lives with lingerie, lotions, and fun love stuff. She can be emailed at mailto:SurpriseLady1819@hotmail.com SurpriseLady1819@hotmail.com. And you can see her catalog at DeannaMayer.SurpriseParties.com DeannaMayer.SurpriseParties.com

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Tags: mastectomy

After mastectomy, women are sent to see the oncologists, and they are often told to go for chemotherapy. This treatment is like an “insurance” against future problems. Chemotherapy can kill all the remaining cancer cells in the body. In this way the cancer can be cured. Chemotherapy can also stop cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. Or at the very least it slows the cancer growth. To the oncologists, chemotherapy is the proven way to go, other ways are hocus pocus!

These points are often well taken by women in general. The fear of recurrence is sufficient enough to make women go through chemotherapy. To them, the sufferings of the treatment are worth enduring for the promise of cure at the end of the adventure. What some oncologists don’t tell their patients is that not all the cancer cells are killed by the treatment. There is no way that a hundred percent of the cancer cells can be wiped by chemotherapy. Add to that, even the good healthy cells are killed and the immune system destroyed.

Patients, on the other hand don’t ask these questions: Will there truly be a cure? If indeed the promise of cure is real, can we put it in terms of real numbers or percentage? To put it bluntly, how effective is chemotherapy for breast cancer? I wonder how many women ask their oncologists these questions, and if they do, what would the answers be like?

a) Without chemotherapy what percentage of people died or would die from breast cancer?

b) With chemotherapy what percentage of people are cured or would be cured?

c) What is meant by cure?

Try and search the answers from the internet and see if you can get anything. There is a great chance that you will go on a merry go round trip! I experienced exactly just that and was terribly disappointed. Thousands of articles are written about breast cancer but I fail to find the clear-cut answers to the above questions. Perhaps they are not important? Or something that women do not need to know before they embark on their treatment? Women just need to have full faith and trust in the experts and everything would turn out fine. Few women realize that such attitude may just be the beginning of more problems to come.

Let me try to share what I have gathered from the medical literature.

Karin Stabiner in her book (To dance with the devil) wrote: “Breast cancer takes the life of an American woman every twelve minutes. There is no sure cure for the disease, no known way to prevent it and no means of predicting.” With all the advances in science and technology, may I ask, how could this be? Why such high degree of uncertainty?

Chantal Bernard-Marty, Fatima Cardoso, Martine J. Piccart of Jules Bordet Institute, Brussels, Belgium (The Oncologist 9: 617-632, Nov. 2004) wrote: “20%–85% of patients … who are diagnosed with early breast cancer will later develop recurrent and/or metastatic disease. Despite more than 3 decades of research, metastatic breast cancer remains essentially incurable.” Women are told that “catching” breast cancer early is a sure way of saving life. But how is it that even after early detection, twenty to eighty-five percent of patients still go on to develop more serious cancer that is incurable? Has the treatment protocols got anything to do with such failures?

How effective is chemotherapy?

Writing in Clinical Oncology (2004. 16: 549-560), three Australian doctors: Graeme Morgan, Robyn Ward & Michael Baton noted that in Australia, of the 10,661 people who had breast cancer only 164 people survived five years due to chemotherapy. This works out to 1.5% contribution of chemotherapy to survival. In their paper, they concluded that “overall contribution of curative and adjuvant chemotherapy to five-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.”

Professor Michael Boyer, head of Medical Oncology of the Sydney Cancer Centre, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital disputed this 2% figure. He said: “It’s not correct for a number of reasons. The 2% figure is achieved by including a whole series of diseases in which chemotherapy would never be used.” To the professor the more “correct” figures should be 5% or 6%. Okay, let us accept that new figures — how do women feel about it — going for chemotherapy to achieve a five to six percent success?

In the editorial of the Australian Prescriber (2006. 29:2-3), Eva Segelov wrote: “Chemotherapy has been oversold. Chemotherapy has improved survival by less than 3% in adults with cancer.”

Veroort et al. from the Netherlands (British J. Cancer. 2004. 91: 242-247) in their study on the role of tamoxifen and chemotherapy for breast cancer concluded that “breast cancer mortality reduction caused by present-day practice of adjuvant tamoxifen and chemotherapy is 7%. Tamoxifen contributes most to the mortality reduction. The overall effect of chemotherapy on mortality is very small.” Take note that the contribution of chemotherapy to breast cancer survival is very small – what is very small? To be sure it has to be much, much less than 7%.

Guy Faguet, after spending numerous years of research on cancer, came to this startling conclusion (The War on Cancer: An anatomy of failure, a blueprint for the future. Springer, 2005): “An objective analysis of cancer chemotherapy outcomes over the last three decades reveals that, despite vast human and financial expenditures, the cell-killing paradigm had failed to achieve its objective … the conquest of cancer remains a distant and elusive goal.” Chemotherapy for cancer is based on “flawed premises with an unattainable goal, cytotoxic chemotherapy in its present form will neither eradicate cancer not alleviate suffering.”

Cured of Breast Cancer?

In a study of 1,547 breast cancer patients at the University of Chicago Hospital, USA, from 1945 to 1987, Theodore Karrison et al. (J. Nat. Cancer Inst. 1999. 91:80-85) observed that for patients who underwent mastectomy but without chemotherapy or radiotherapy, most recurrences occurred within the first ten years after mastectomy. Recurrences were rare after 20 to 25 years. Patients surviving to this time without evidence of recurrence are probably cured.

Women are often told that if they survive five years after their diagnosis of breast cancer, they are considered cured of breast cancer. Based on the work of Karrison et al. this assumption is presumptuous and is not true at all. Women perhaps need to be reminded of what Guy Faguet wrote: “We must recognize that “cure” is not an absolute term because minimal residual or slowly recurrent disease that causes no symptoms can persist and remain undetected for years.” Take note, the cancer can remain dormant in the body for years not just five years!

For more information about complementary cancer therapy visit: cacare.com cacare.com , NaturalHealingForYou.com NaturalHealingForYou.com , BookOnCancer.com BookOnCancer.com

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Tags: breast cancer, cancer patient, chemotherapy, healing, mastectomy

How does an average woman react to the terrifying diagnosis of breast cancer? Many women go through several psychological steps in learning how to deal with breast cancer.

First, there is shock. Particularly when you’re relatively young and have never had a life-threatening illness before; it’s hard to believe you have something as serious as cancer. It’s all the more difficult to believe because, in most cases, your body hasn’t given you any warning at all. Unlike, for example, appendicitis or a heart attack, there’s no pain or fever or nausea - no symptom that tells you something is going wrong inside. You or your doctor have found this painless little lump, or your routine mammogram shows something peculiar - and the next thing you know, your doctor is telling you you’ve got breast cancer. Many women say this is the worst part of the journey. The initial shock can leave you feeling confused and not sure how to proceed. Along with the shock, there’s a feeling of anger at your body, which has betrayed you in such an underhanded fashion. In spite of the horror that you feel at the thought of losing your breast, often your first reaction is a desire to get rid of it.

While this is a perfectly understandable emotional response, it’s not one you should act on. Getting your breast cut off will not make things go back to normal; your life has been changed and it will never be the same again. You need time to let this sink in, to face the implications cancer has for you and to make a rational, informed decision about what treatment will be best for you both physically and emotionally.

Today there’s much more emphasis on doctor and patient sharing the decision making process and there are more options to choose from. There’s also a lot more knowledge available - there are manuscripts about breast cancer and its survival rates in both the medical and the popular press and on the internet.

So if the first stage is shock, the second is investigating your options. It is very important to reflect seriously on what the possibility of losing a breast would mean to you. Its importance varies from woman to woman, but there is no woman for whom it doesn’t have some significance. Although many women will say, “I don’t care about my breast”, deep down this is probably not true for most of us. A mastectomy may be the best choice for you, but it will still have a powerful effect on how you feel about yourself. For many women, the loss of a breast can mean feelings of inadequacy.

Several studies have been done comparing conservative surgery and mastectomy with or without immediate breast reconstruction, looking for differences in psychological adjustment. Interesting enough, the important factor often appears to be the match between the woman and her treatment. That is, the way she feels about her body, about surgery, about radiotherapy, about having a part in the decision making process of her treatment and about a multitude of factors affects how she reacts to this new and enormous stress.

Along with the fears and stages of recovery, there are also a number of related issues that come up for people with cancer. One of these is the tendency to feel quilt for having cancer - a sense that you’ve somehow done something wrong. People have a tendency to blame themselves for being ill anyway and a woman will often feel she’s betrayed her function as a caregiver by getting breast cancer.

For many women breast cancer never returns and they begin gradually to rebuild their lives. But sometimes, cancer does return. The emotional issues of breast cancer recurrence are so profound and complex that, if you do have a reappearance of the cancer, you may need the help of a mental health professional.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to breast-cancer.treatment-and-guides.com/ Breast Cancer

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Tags: breast cancer, mastectomy

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.2 million people were diagnosed with breast cancer worldwide in 2005. In the United States, it is said that every two minutes one woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2005, it was estimated that there were 212,0000 new cases of breast cancer and out of which 40,000 or about 19%, died from the disease. In the city-state of Singapore, it is said that every day three women are being diagnosed with breast cancer. In Malaysia 3,738 breast cancer cases were reported in 2003. This means that one in twenty women in Malaysia will get breast cancer.

Despite extensive research, the exact cause of breast cancer is not known. Medicine has all along been about treating breast cancer, not about preventing it. Most often, women with breast cancer are subjected to a “package” of standard treatments – surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormonal therapy. The most important question that patients ask after undergoing all these treatments is: “Am I cured? Or, is there truly a cure for breast cancer?”

According to Silvia Dellapasqua et al. (in: J. Clinical Oncol. 23:1736-1749) the “prognosis of breast cancer in young women is generally considered to be unfavourable. Young pre-menopausal breast cancer patients treated with adjuvant CMF chemotherapy had higher risk of relapse and death than older pre-menopausal patients.” Martin Piccart-Gebhart (in J. Clinical Oncol. 23:1611-1613) wrote: “Chemotherapy has long been considered our most efficient weapon in the fight against breast cancer … where this dream, unfortunately, did not materialize.”

One sad example of such crashed dream was a case of Mei (not real name), a 34-year old female nurse. Mei was diagnosed with carcinoma of the right breast. She underwent a right mastectomy and axillary clearance in August 2003. This was followed by six cycles of chemotherapy using FAC (5-FU, andriamycin and cyclophosphamide). From 1 March to 19 March 2004, Mei received radiotherapy on her right chest wall. When the treatments were completed,she was started on tamoxifen.

Barely eight months after the completion of her treatments, in November 2004, Mei had a 3 x 3 cm soft tissue mass associated with bony destruction in her sternum. In addition, there were multiple nodules scattered in both her lungs. Sadly, the cancer recurred and spread within this short period of time.

Mei underwent chemotherapy again, using Taxol. After five cycles, the use of Taxol was terminated because it was not effective resulting in disease progression. The lymph nodes in her right collarbone seemed to have been infected. Mei was given another round of chemotherapy using Navelbine. But unfortunately after the first treatment, this chemotherapy was abandoned due to severe side effects.

In April 2005, Mei was given an oral drug Arimidex (anastrozole). From 25 May to 31 May 2005, she was on radiotherapy again, as the sternal mass was increasing in size. In spite of this treatment, the swelling of the right collarbone grew bigger. The use of Arimidex was discontinued and was replaced with Xeloda.

Mei decided to stop further chemotherapy. On 23 June 2005, she developed right pleural effusion (fluid in the lung). The doctor tapped out 5.5 liters of fluid from her lung and she felt better. On 23 July 2005, I received a fax asking for help. Unfortunately, Mei died a month later — much too late to help her in any way.

According to Mei’s sister, upon diagnosis of breast cancer, Mei’s boss, who is a doctor, handed her my book (Cancer Yet They Live) and said: “Read this, and if you believe in what the author said, go and see him. But don’t tell people that I give you this book.” Mei was a nurse. Her training had placed her in a “box” with a fixed mindset that only modern medicine has all the answers to cancer. To her the only right way is surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and follow-up drugs. Other ways are hocus pocus.

Dr. Alan Levin, professor of immunology at the University of California Medical School, was quoted to have said: “Most cancer patients … die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon or lung cancers. Women with breast cancer are likely to die faster with chemotherapy than without it.”

Dr. Hardin Jones, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, analysed cancer survival statistics for twenty-five years. In 1969 at the American Cancer Society meeting, he was quoted to have said: “Untreated patients … in many cases live longer (they) do not die sooner than patients receiving orthodox treatment.”

Dr. Lai Gi-ming, Taiwan Cooperative Oncology Group, National Research Institute wrote: “The thing that most frustrates modern doctors is that, after surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, all they can do is keep chasing and chasing the cancer!”

How much of what were said by these experts apply to Mei’s case?

For more information about complementary cancer therapy visit:
cacare.com cacare.com
NaturalHealingForYou.com NaturalHealingForYou.com
BookOnCancer.com BookOnCancer.com

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Tags: breast cancer, cancer patient, chemotherapy, healing, lung cancer, mastectomy

Myth: If you detect a painful lump in your breast, there is no need for concern, as it is not cancerous.

Pain is very rarely the only indication of breast cancer. However only 10 percent of breast cancers are linked with pain. If an individual complains of pain in the breast and a self-examination test and a mammogram do not show any abnormality the likelihood of breast cancer is minimal.

Myth: Radiation therapy is a painful process.

A few patients experience a slight tingling or warming sensation in the particular area that is being treated but there is no pain. Prolonged radiation therapy may cause the breast to have a burning sensation, to become dry, to become sore and itchy.

Myth: One in every eight women will get breast cancer.

These statistics are based over an individual’s lifetime up to an age of eighty five or ninety five and not on a per year estimate. If you take into account at any given point one woman in every eight women, it does not mean that she will have breast cancer. What it means is that if all women were to live up to an age of 85 years, one woman out of eight would get the disease during her life. Studies have shown that this rate is quickly rising, as thirty years ago it was one woman in every twenty women.

Myth: Women with small breasts will not get cancer.

Breast size is not a significant risk factor for breast cancer. A woman having smaller breasts will have smaller amount of breast tissue, but this does not mean that she will not be able to develop the disease.

Myth: If you are diagnosed with breast cancer and you have a positive outlook on life it will prolong your life.

There is no such evidence to prove that having a positive outlook on life will increase your chances of survival if you are having breast cancer. Of course thinking positive will help you and your family members to cope better with the situation, but then again feeling sad or depressed from time to time is only natural in the light of things.

Myth: Mastectomy or removal of the breast that is affected ensures the elimination of breast cancer forever.

Mastectomy does not in any way ensure that the cancer will not recur. Sometimes even though mastectomy has been performed, the chances are there that the cancer may have spread to other parts of the body and to the lymph nodes. Some individuals who have undergone mastectomy also undergo removal of the lymph nodes in the underarm as a precautionary method.

Myth: The chances are you will not get breast cancer if it doesn’t run in your family.

This is not the case, every woman is at risk. Studies have shown that 80 percent of women who end up with breast cancer have never had a family history of it. The ageing process is the single biggest risk factor of breast cancer. Women with a family history of breast cancer, the chances that you might get the disease may be a little elevated or may be a lot elevated or sometimes not at all.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to breast-cancer.treatment-and-guides.com/ Breast Cancer

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Tags: breast cancer, mastectomy