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| improvement in survival rate. If the treatment is not a cure but may extend your life, understand that it can also reduce the quality of your life. |
| What are the short-term and long-term side effects of this treatment? Will I lose my hair? Can I still work? Will I lose weight? Many people who undergo certain chemotherapy protocols, particularly ones that include steroids, gain weight. Will I be able to have children in the future? |
| What can be done about the side effects? Hopefully, after reading this book, you will have many answers to this question, but you should still ask your doctor. |
| Do you know anyone I can talk to who has undergone this treatment? Many times physicians will be happy to put you in touch with someone who has undergone the therapy or therapies you are about to experience. |
| Is this the best place to be treated? If you have a rare cancer or are thinking about an experimental therapy, you may want to go to a hospital that specializes in that therapy. |
| Always rememberthis is your decision. No one person has all the definitive answers. A surgeon will most likely recommend surgery; a radiologist will recommend radiation treatments; and an oncologist will more often than not recommend chemotherapy. Many men with prostate cancer who consult me have been told that surgery is the only way to assure a cure. Anyone who is up-to-date on prostate cancer knows that removing the prostate gland does not guarantee anything other than the fact that the prostate gland is no longer there. I personally believe that this can increase one's chances of the cancer becoming invasive. |
| Conventional Therapies and Natural Medicine |
| Can conventional cancer therapies, including chemotherapy and radiation, work with natural medicine? |
| If we could come to a place of harmony and use the best of conventional medicine and the best of complementary medicine, I believe we could make an enormous difference in the lives of many people. I believe natural medicine, in particular herbal medicine, has the potential to cure most cancers, as well as many other diseases that plague our world today; still, I am willing to work with any other discipline or therapy that might be useful to someone who is ill. Most oncologists will agree that even chemotherapy has |
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