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Page 329
| In men: raising of the voice, decreased libido, impotence, enlarged breasts. |
| These changes are temporary for some and permanent for others. One of the major problems with the use of hormone therapies is that cancer can become not only resistant to the hormone antagonist, it can actually become more aggressive and feed on the drug itself. |
| My View |
| Chemotherapy and hormone therapy use drugs that circulate throughout the bloodstream and are, theoretically, systemic therapies. Eventually, however, the cancer cells mutate with both of these treatments and can become more aggressive. Refractive hormonal cancers rend to be more aggressive and harder to treat in both conventional and nonconventional methods. When a cancer is very aggressive to begin with, chemotherapy makes more sense as long as the drugs being used are sensitive to an individual's particular cancer-cell line. If that is not the case, it may do more harm than good. |
| Personally, I do not recommend prophylactic tamoxifen, that is, prescribing it as a preventive medicine for inhibiting breast cancer following other therapies. Currently, in my practice I see approximately three hundred women with breast cancer. Of this number, two hundred have been instructed to take tamoxifen as a five-year posttreatment cancer-prevention therapy. I would say that about 50 percent of that group take the drug as directed, 25 percent begin to rake it but stop because they are uncomfortable with the side effects, and the remaining 25 percent never start. Recently, tamoxifen is also being recommended by some doctors as preventive treatment for all disease-free women at high risk for breast cancer. |
| While I maintain my commitment to work with each patient's own treatment choices, my personal opinion is that tamoxifen should be used only as a treatment for active breast cancer and not as preventive therapy. I believe that if a patient rakes tamoxifen prophylactically to prevent recurrence, she will never know whether she is truly in remission or if the tamoxifen is acting as a hormone to suppress cancer growth temporarily. I prefer to see multiple natural modalities used to inhibit the cancer from returning, saving tamoxifen as a possible treatment if it is ever needed in the future. There are so many natural ways to inhibit cancer growth by hormonal modulation, for example, with |
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