Studying the CT scan, Russ Burns could count the tumors in his liver.
There were 24 of them — some the size of peas, the largest the size of an egg.
By the time it was discovered, the cancer, which originated in his colon, had spread. His doctor gave him little hope.
Thanks to an experimental drug, he beat the cancer. But 18 months later, it was back.
That’s
when Burns decided to try something else — alternative treatments like
immune-system boosting supplements and mind-body therapies like qigong.
“That
was 14 years ago and I’m feeling great,” the 75-year-old Laurens man
says. “I live day to day and give thanks for every day.”
Massage,
biofeedback, tai chi, hypnosis, herbal supplements, reiki — call it
alternative, complementary or the latest moniker — integrative —
medicine, it’s growing in popularity. More and more conventional
practitioners are even offering some integrative techniques.
About
one in four Americans had used some kind of non-conventional therapy,
ranging from acupuncture to yoga, in 2007, according to the National
Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine, which is collecting new data this year.
Natural
products were used most, the center reports, with more than half of
adults using dietary supplements. Deep breathing, meditation, massage
therapy and yoga all were on the rise.
And according to a survey
by Consumer Reports, people — including conventional health care
practitioners — use these therapies to treat a host of conditions from
headaches and other pain to insomnia, anxiety, colds, flu and digestive
problems.
A different world
“There are things in the world of healing that medicine is still
trying to figure out — things you just see when you actually open your
eyes to this world of integrative medicine that you can’t put your
fingers on,” says Dr. Nick Ulmer, family physician and vice president of
clinical services at Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System.
“But you can see people do get better.”
At
Regional’s three-year-old Center for Health and Healing, clients attend
an eight-week mind-body program to learn proper breathing, meditation,
guided imagery, biofeedback, self-hypnosis and more to reduce stress,
fatigue and pain and improve sleep and mood, says manager Hunter Mahon.
And three-quarters of those who have attended reported a benefit, she
says.
Nearly 100 Michelin employees have gone through the program,
said Jim West, manager of employee life services for the company, which
contracts with Regional to provide the service. And as reported by the
employees, anger and hostility were down 54 percent, depression and
anxiety were reduced by 45 percent, and fatigue had declined by 33
percent, he says.
“We’re addressing health from many different
angles and processes,” West says, “some traditional and some in the
integrative health arena.”
Greenville psychiatrist Dr. Patrick
Mullen says he’s a believer after seeing many of his patients improve
using non-traditional therapies.
One who was suffering from
depression, for example, turned out to have a zinc deficiency and
improved after taking a multivitamin containing the mineral, he says.
Another researched supplements on his own and got better after taking
them.
“He’d been on numerous drugs and even a course of
electroshock therapy,” Mullen says. “But he put together a treatment
protocol (of supplements) for himself that has worked better than
anything he had taken before.”
Integrative medicine is definitely
on the rise, said Terry Hall-Hines. But when she opened Creative Health
two decades ago, she says she was one of the few purveyors of natural
products and health services in Greenville and was considered by many as
kind of a kook.
But times have changed. Her business has grown 15
percent a year since she started offering supplements and other natural
products along with yoga, acupuncture, massage, stress management and
more to promote healing, she says. And her services are booked three
months out.
“People are getting more proactive. They’re eating
more organic, taking more supplements, and exercising. And yoga places
are popping up everywhere, along with tai chi and qigong, which balance
the body ... so it heals itself,” she says. “Everything in the body is
connected. And now, people are ready to change.”
Dr. Arthur
Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at New York University
Langone Medical Center, says there’s little hard evidence these
therapies work and that taking mega-doses of certain vitamins can even
be harmful.
The herb St. John’s Wort was touted as improving
depression, for example, but when tested there was no evidence it did,
he says. Most of these therapies have more of a placebo effect, he says,
adding that practitioners rely more on personal testimonials than solid
science.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “if you had the cure for cancer by eating tree roots, I think that would get out.”
And,
he adds, though some therapies may relieve pain and stress, they should
not be construed as treatments for life-threatening illnesses.
But
Caplan adds that many conventional medicines don’t always work either
and that integrative medicine does a better job of listening to and
spending time with patients, which is something conventional medicine
should emulate.
Mind over matter
Burns says he has no doubts about the effectiveness of his alternative therapies.
After
diagnosing him with metastatic cancer, his doctor told him he had six
months to live. So he jumped at the chance of joining a clinical trial.
Though the drug fought back the cancer, its side effects were brutal and
destroyed his colon, which had to be removed, he says.
While
recovering from surgery, he and his wife made plans for a Caribbean
vacation. And it was there, he says, by the sea in the sun that he had
an epiphany.
“You’ve got to get out of the moment and think about
the future, tell your subconscious you’re going to be around,” he says.
“That’s the key to ... make this a reality.”
When he felt the cancer was growing again, he went to his doctor and had another scan.
But he also went to a reiki practitioner.
Reiki
is a technique whose practitioners place their hands lightly on or
above the body to facilitate a healing response, according to NCCAM.
“There’s
a concept ... that there is a universal energy that ... can be
channeled for healing purposes,” Burns explains. “Qigong is a version of
that and reiki is the Japanese version.”
As he lay on a massage
table, the practitioner held her hands about six inches above his body,
channeling the energy, he says. He felt better immediately.
“It was just phenomenal,” he says. “It was for me mind-blowing.”
It
was so moving he decided to study reiki himself. He even learned qigong
from a Chinese master and was the subject of a healing ritual by a
group of 150 practitioners, he says.
Healing properties
At the same time, Burns, a retired educator, researched supplements
and their chemical properties. He began taking products designed to
stimulate the immune system to destroy cancer cells, like L-carnitine,
alpha lipoic acid, CoQ10 and noxylane 4, he says. And he began eating a
healthy diet, getting plenty of exercise, undergoing hypnosis and guided
visualization, deep meditation and taking vitamins — up to 33
supplements a day.
He kept his doctor in the loop, but never had a
conventional treatment again. And since then, he says, scan after scan
has showed the spots shrinking until there was only one diffuse spot the
size of a fingernail.
“Do miracles still happen? Yes, every day.
But sometimes the right combination of things come to bear,” Burns says.
“You tell your subconscious, this is what I want to be. And it’s the
emotion and imagery that drives the healing process. I know these things
can help. And there’s a difference between saying I know and I
believe.”
Dr. Mark O’Rourke, Burns’ current oncologist, confirms his account of the events.
“We
can say it went into remission (after chemotherapy) and again ... after
the relapse,” he says. “It rarely happens that someone has spontaneous
remission, but it happens. In my 30 years, I’ve encountered three or
four people for whom this happened. I attribute that to their immune
system being able to control the cancer.”
Why their immune systems couldn’t control the cancer to begin with, he can’t explain.
“That’s
the challenge and mystery of this whole field of oncology,” he says.
“With Mr. Burns, either there was something about the tumor or something
about his immune system.”
Up to two-thirds of people with cancer
use some sort of alternative therapy, says O’Rourke, who agrees with
Caplan that there isn’t a lot of research behind much of it.
“Mr.
Burns’ experience is wonderful, but it remains for me a single person’s
experience,” he says. “He may be getting some benefit, although medical
science has been disappointed in how few of the supplements have proven
to be beneficial.”
Nonetheless, O’Rourke, who considers himself
“quite receptive to integrative medicine,” says that science has
determined that people who eat plenty of fruits and vegetables have a
lower risk of cancer.
And, he adds, mind-body treatments in
general reduce stress, and there’s evidence that stress causes
inflammation that can lead to cancer, as well as heart disease and other
conditions. So it’s plausible that stress-reducing therapies can be
beneficial, he says, adding that it’s clear people feel better after
reiki, acupuncture and massage.
“We don’t know everything,” says
O’Rourke, who is also director of the integrative oncology and
survivorship program at Greenville Hospital System.
“In general,
allopathic medicine has failed to address the full range of human
experience,” he adds. “We don’t pay enough attention to diet, exercise,
sleep and how people feel in general. We need to be addressing the full
range of human experience. Medicine needs to connect with that.”
Mullen agrees.
“Why
didn’t I ever get a course in nutrition (in medical school)?” he asks.
“They still think of the body as a human machine. No soul, no spirit, no
the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts.”
Holistic approach
Integrative medicine tries to use whatever may be helpful, Mullen
says. What it has in common, he says, is individualization — an
awareness that everybody is different.
And it’s getting easier to
find a doctor who uses some of these techniques today, he says, though
some are closeted for fear of push-back from the establishment.
“There
are so many different therapies in the world that are helpful to one,
or two, or 10, or 100 people,” he says. “If you can find a doctor
willing to consider lots of different things, you may find help.”
About 10 percent of Mullen’s patients are aware of alternative therapies when they come to see him. He gives the others options.
“I had patients like this before, but I didn’t know how to help them,” he says. “I took the time to learn about it.”
And now he even uses some of these approaches himself.
Though
not yet covered by insurance, alternative therapies can be as helpful
as conventional treatments, Ulmer says, pointing to a client with a back
injury who was pain-free after four weeks of massage therapy.
“Do
they work? Yes. Do they work well enough so commercial payers will pay?
I guess not,” he says. “The outcomes are very objective. More research
needs to be done and measuring outcomes will be extremely important.”
Yet
some emerging research suggests that integrative therapies are
effective. NIH reports that studies show massage may indeed improve
health by relaxing the nervous system and reducing stress and pain
hormones, thus enhancing immune function and healing.
Other
studies suggest massage turns off genes that cause inflammation and is
effective in reducing chronic back pain, according to NIH.
Ulmer
says it’s accepted that people can lower their blood pressure, control
their heart rate and manage pain using biofeedback, visual imagery and
meditation. There are simply elements of medicine that still aren’t
understood, he says.
“There is more to medicine than what I was taught in medical school,” he says. “Sometimes, medicine is more than a pill.”
Burns believes it was a combination of all of the treatments, including the chemotherapy, that pulled him through.
“I’m not poo-pooing (conventional) medicine,” he says. “But that’s not all there is.”
Sarah Riley from Hypnoteyes bringing
Hypnosis in Orlando and surrounding areas.
Hypnosis
produces an altered state of consciousness, awareness, or perception.
The hypnotic state is a highly relaxed state in which the patient’s mind
(conscious and subconscious) is focused and receptive to therapeutic
suggestion. It involves learning to use one’s mind and thoughts to
manage emotional distress, (eg, anxiety, stress), unpleasant physical
symptoms (eg, pain, nausea), or to help change certain habits or
behaviors (eg, smoking). While hypnosis sessions may vary depending on a
patient’s needs, a clinical hypnosis session typically comprises two
basic phases
