My Great Breast Cancer Adventure

How I Became a Bone Broth Convert

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I've radically changed how I eat since my bc diagnosis. Since I'm not and have never been much of a cook, this change did not come easy. I floundered madly for several months, knowing that I needed to make big eating changes, but feeling utterly overwhelmed when I attempted to become Little Miss Healthy Organic Super-Nutritious Betty Crocker Cooking-for-Breast-Cancer-Prevention and Immune-Strengthening Kitchen Goddess Extraordinaire.

I fumbled along, trying to find my new food groove (reading this or that supposedly healthy-but-mainstream "cancer prevention cookbook" and/or trying to follow the vegetarian diet guidelines and recipes from the Block Cancer Center in Chicago - where I went for treatment consultations when I was still unsure whether or not I'd do chemo or hormone blockers).

It was a chaotic and confusing time (like I said, I'm NOT a kitchen person), until finally I stumbled upon an internet site for the Weston A. Price foundation, and VOILA, it resonated for me, I started researching their diet, and right around this time I learned, through sheer dumb luck, that a group of Bay Area people were embarking upon a new business endeavor called Three Stone Hearth community kitchen.  And what do you think they were planning to do? Make and sell exactly the kinds of Weston A. Price foods that I wanted to start eating. As in: readymade. As in: You place a weekly order and either pick it up at their Berkeley kitchen or have it delivered to your front door.

I HAD learned how to do a SMIDGEN of the things that eating this way requires. For example, I sorta learned how to make bone broths and sauerkraut and crispy nuts -- the key word being "sorta." But I had a long long way to go. The key word being loooooooooooooooong.

So. Three Stone Hearth was a godsend. A miracle. I signed up to be a "member," and have been ordering from them every week for the last two years.

Here are but two examples, taken from their website, of why I LOVE Three Stone Hearth:

Broth-based  Soups and Stews
Each week we offer at least one soup or stew made from a based of slow- simmered bone broth.  Bone broths have been made and eaten for millennia because they are so rich in minerals and gelatin, which makes them nutrient-dense and soothing to the digestion and  nervous system.

To learn more about why “Broth is Beautiful”, click HERE.

Cultured Vegetables            

Each week we offer at least one cultured vegetable such as sauerkraut, kimchee, pickles, cortido, chutney, or salsa. These traditional condiments are lacto-fermented so that they are full of active enzymes  and other important nutrients. To learn more about why these old-fashioned foods are so health supportive, click HERE. 

 

Indulge Me?

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Okay, I have to admit I'm depressed about my recent Healthnet insurance payment HIKE. Since my bc diagnosis in Sept. 2005, my monthly rate has gone from $326 to . . . as of yesterday . . . $671. That's with a $1500 non-prescription stuff deductible, plus an additional $250 deductible for prescriptions, which still require an average co-pay of around $35.

$671.00 a freaking month!!!

Now get this. In 2007 my medical expenses were around $20,000 including the insurance payments. This was for occasional doctor visits, lab tests, and mostly a wide variety of expensive supplements or Chinese herbs. Guess how much HealthNet paid for, for the ENTIRE YEAR?

$573.00. Yup.

They don't pay for my Iscador injections or for acupuncture or herbs or Vitamin D or iodine or ...the list goes on forever. And I'm not even asking them to pay for chemo or radiation or Arimidex or Tamoxifen, because I'm not DOING any of those conventional treatments. Even if they paid for all my supplements, it would still be way cheaper for them than paying for chemo and radiation.

ANYWAY, it would cheer me up immeasurably if you'd indulge me by going to this website, where I'm having one of those fun "five minutes of fame" episodes:

ImageKind

So far I am the only person on earth who has bought any of my photos. I have several of them, now framed, sitting on my dining room table. Last week I showed them to five members of my writing group, who all said nice things like, "Oh, these are great, Jane!" or "I like this one," or " "Great colors."

I don't require standing ovations or even money. Just occasional words of encouragement or praise. Especially when I need to get my mind off of the woeful unfairness of our health insurance system.

Three Very Important People

Jack scanned this photo for me, so I don't know how to make the  rest of the white page go away. You should double click on it if you want to see my neck wrinkles better or, oh yeah, if you want to get a bigger gander at our close friend, Carlos. I've got to remember to send a copy to him, because I know he will want to have a picture of himself standing beside Jane Underwood and Jack Carroll.

Ann Fonfa, for Starters!

Here's the last line in "Blogmaid's" comment from the day before yesterday, which I'd also like to respond to:

How can we make you an authority so that others (ie the mainstream medical establishment) will be more willing to listen?

I have no idea. My first thought is "forget ME!"....there are women out there who have been working tirelessly, for YEARS, chipping away at the mainstream medical establishment. Take Ann Fonfa, for example, who created the website annieappleseed.org (the link to which has been in my sidebar every since I began this blog).

Ann used alternative treatments to heal her own breast cancer and is still here to talk about it more than a decade later (and her cancer was NOT mild; she has diligently dealt with numerous recurrences, and she never had chemo or radiation).

Ann changed her whole life around after her breast cancer experience, and has put all her energies, for all these years, into trying to get the word out about alternative breast cancer treatments. In addition to her amazing nonprofit organization/website, she goes to conferences and symposiums all the country. She does interviews. She writes articles. She is all over the place, as much as she can possibly be considering how little money she has to do ANY of this. I mean, compare Ann's resources to the resources of our pharmaceutical industry!

Ann is a valient warrioress (real word? not sure...) who has taken on a 'project' - a mission, really - so huge it is mind-boggling. I, in comparison, can barely make time to write a few paragraphs on my blog, which is probably read by a grand total of two dozen people, most of whom don't have cancer.

I just typed Ann's name into a Google search. Here's the page that came up:

Click here

I hope somebody out there who stumbles across my occasional stabs at helping to "educate" others will take the time to read about Ann Fonfa and all that she does... and has done. I'll mention a couple more women in future posts who, like Ann, have devoted themselves to this herculean and daunting endeavor of advocating for education about alternative healing options. These women ARE out there, but they're fighting an uphill battle that is so steep and so high, I don't know how they find the strength to keep at it. Yet they do, bless them bless them bless them.

On a Non-Chemo Non-Cancer Note

Yesterday on the Sundance Channel I watched "Chapters 1, 2 and 3" out of six chapters, each 45 min. to an hour or so long, of the documentary Fear of NOT Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.

Loved it and would have watched all six chapters at once, but they were only showing the first three. The last three will be on next Saturday at 3 p.m. I can't remember if 1,2 and 3 will air again before that. You should check the Sundance channel to find out. Just Google around 'til you find it.

Doctors Versus "Lay People" (that would be you and me)

Here's a comment I received on yesterday's blog post. I appreciate it and want to reply:

I like your comment that criticizing chemo as a treatment for breast cancer is analogous to criticizing the war -- you're not criticizing the troops, just the way they are being led. My guess it that most women are so scared of this disease, that if they are diagnosed with it they want to do something ASAP, and are more apt to follow the advice of doctors who have gone to medical school than they are of lay people who have done copious amounts of research, particularly if that advice differs so radically. There is probably also a sense of being more able to leave it behind once the treatment is finished, and a feeling that they did all they could to fight the disease. All that being said, I admire the way you have been speaking out and taking control of your treatment on your own terms. How can we make you an authority so that others (ie the mainstream medical establishment) will be more willing to listen?

Re: "...are more apt to follow the advice of doctors who have gone to medical school than they are of lay people who have done copious amounts of research..."

We "lay people" are merely researching THE RESEARCH that has already been done by DOCTORS (albeit, by doctors who are still in the minority).

The problem is that most doctors don't have the time, energy or in many cases, the desire...to keep up with the latest research. They are fallible human beings with mortgages and domestic problems, just like the rest of us. And most of them are followers, not leaders. Only a very few are willing to even attempt to upset the status quo.  We assume they are as powerful and all-knowing as Gods.  They are not. In fact, many of the doctors who DO begin to see the light become so frustrated by the system that they don't have the strength to fight it -- so they drop out...maybe they become "alternative" doctors (who can't accept major insurance, of course, but that's another post).

Another problem is the media, which has such great power when it comes to getting the lastest and most cutting edge information OUT. Journalists, even the ones who are trained as medical writers, can and do write terribly inaccurate stories about anything to do with medicine. A classic example was the study about female hormones that got plastered all over the media a few years ago, and which scared thousands of women into stopping hormone replacement therapy. As it turned out, the study was deeply flawed as well as incorrectly interpreted on several levels. But the media hasn't bothered to broadcast THIS news.

Oh dear, I'm having a hard time keeping this short and sweet and succinct. Darn.

Re: "...a sense of being more able to leave it behind once the treatment is finished, and a feeling that they did all they could to fight the disease."

Absolutely. Totally understandable. But that doesn't make it smart or right. Breast cancer isn't being 'cured' by the prevailing treatments. That's wishful thinking. That's a deep denial of the factual reality. Yes, of course the desire is to leave it all behind. I, personally, would love nothing more! Who wouldn't?

There's also a belief, which I find profoundly sad, in the "no pain no gain" theory. Many people with cancer believe (have been taught to believe!) that the more severe the treatment, the more effective it'll be. It's like: If I make this horrendous sacrifice (get my breasts cut off, accept damaging radiation, fill my body with poisonous toxic chemicals until I'm at the brink of death), then surely I will have done all that is possible, and surely I will deserve a reward; surely I will deserve to live.

Well, no, sorry but that's not necessarily so.

Oops, I'm out of time. This is a work weekend for me.

To be continued....

Saturday Soapbox

I like making analogies. Always have. It never occurred to me that there might be people in the world who DIDN'T like analogies, who perhaps even ardently disliked them...until I acquired a boyfriend (years ago, water under the bridge) who despised them. That was an odd time (decade), of me trying to figure out how to communicate with a guy who couldn't stand the way I communicated. I mean, using analogies is CORE to my way of articulating myself. Anyway....I'm heading off in a direction that's leading me away from the point of this post.

The point is that a new analogy came to me this morning as I was thinking about an exchange I recently had with a friend about breast cancer and chemotherapy. Nutshell: I said that chemo is useless in most cases of breast cancer. I don't remember the exact percentage, but of all breast cancer cases, the huge majority DO NOT respond to chemo. It's more than 80 percent. I think maybe even 90 percent. This is documented. This is factual. But because doctors do not know which women have one of the minority types of breast cancer that will respond to chemo, they go ahead and prescribe chemo to ALL the women who have the types of breast cancer that don't respond. Slowly, slowly, some tests are being developed so that they can learn how to identify which women's cancers will respond to chemo. But these tests have been too slow in coming, and they are still not OUT THERE yet.

Most women are still subjected to a horrendous and harmful treatment protocol FOR NO GOOD REASON. The women are not helped by it; they are harmed. Their immune systems are severely compromised. Their hormones get messed up. Sometimes they go into early menopause. Their hearts are damaged. Their bones are damaged. Their nerves are damaged. Their brains are damaged (chemo brain, it's called -- and in many women, the damage is permanent, not just temporary, though the doctors won't say that.)

When I started spouting off about this (not for the first time, I admit)  to my friend (and a few other friends who were standing around), I became, as I sometimes do when I get going on this subject, passionate in my expression of my frustration, anger and despair over the situation. This topic is not fun party conversation. Puts a damper on things. Anyway. Okay....

Granted, there was a small breakthrough about two years ago when it was announced at a major annual cancer conference that doctors were over-prescribing chemo to women with breast cancer. So they have cut back A LITTLE. But not nearly enough. Change within the mainstream medical world is slow, slow, slow. And as long as this dependence on such an inadequate and horrific treatment continues, no new and better treatments will be developed. Keep in mind that the drug companies make bijillions of dollars from the chemo industry. Keep in mind that oncologists make the bulk of their income from prescribing and administering chemo. It's all they know.

At one point in my mini-diatribe, my friend spoke up, as she has in the past, to say that she has some dear friends who have gone through chemo and who feel that it saved them. They're proud and glad that they made the right decision for themselves. This was THEIR choice, even though it might not have been mine. She felt, I think, a need to defend them.

I think she was trying to say to me, in essence, "When you denigrate chemo (note from me: for breast cancer, not every kind of cancer) you are also, albeit indirectly, denigrating the women who chose to do it. You are, in a way, insulting them, their intelligence, and their right to opt to follow the advice of their trusted doctors."

I understand how I could be coming across this way. It's as if I'm not supporting other women who have breast cancer. It's as if I'm criticizing them, saying, "You did the wrong thing. It's as if I'm saying, "My way is the only way, and you blew it."

Well, here's my analogy, finally. It's like when you criticize the war, and the war-supporters get upset with you because you're not supporting the troops. But you're not really criticizing the troops per se; you're criticizing the war and the leaders who got us into the damn thing.

By the same token, when I criticize chemo as a breast cancer treatment, I am not criticizing the women who have chosen to do it. I don't mean to disrespect or dismiss them when I'm up railing away, advocating for change. But I can't, in all good conscience, not speak up. Loudly. Insistently. I think that many very intelligent, courageous women have been bamboozled by a system that doesn't respect their right to be given ALL options for treatment -- a system that has patronized and misled too many of us, with too much misinformation.

While I'm at it, I may as well add that I am also critical of our mainstream breast cancer fundraising organizations (ie. the Komen Foundation) because unfortunately their money goes mainly to "research" that I do not support, and their information is totally conventional. They've got thousands of women out there walking and marching "for breast cancer," but I can't get behind the pink ribbons and uninformed party line jargon. These organizations support an ongoing lack of good solid information and education. Women have a right to so much more than these heartfelt but misleading "rallies."

And on that unpopular note, I shall move on to breakfast.
 

A Way In

Tonight at my biweekly writing group meeting, one member read another installment in his ongoing, memoir'ish travelogue about his yearly cross-country trip to spend a long four-month summer in Provincetown. I forget how many years he has been writing about this back and forth adventure. He never seems to run out of things to say about it, because he has one of the most active, interesting, meandering minds that I've ever had the pleasure to be privy to.

As he recounts the here and now "reports" of this or that restaurant meal or stretch of freeway or roadside rest area, he also makes associations that lead to a plethora of memories, thoughts, speculations, reveries, questions, anecdotes, and philosophical obversations about just about everything under the sun. People. Relationships. Culture. Animals. Plants. Music. History. Fantasies. Whatever! I am fascinated by the places that his nimble mind goes. As his body travels from San Francisco to Provinctown  and then back again, along with his wife and their two dogs, his mind travels too, and man it goes freaking everywhere.

Even when his well of ideas for "what to write about, what to write about" seems to be drying up, he admits that he can always fall back on this one, increasingly primary "writing vehicle." His travelogue has become his way in. His way into EVERYTHING.

Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly apparent that another  of our writing group members has a talent for writing about her life as a retail bookstore manager in downtown San Francisco. Her various tales of oddball customers and irritating clerical chores are mounting into rather a quirkyly entertaining collection. She too, it seems, has found a wry and sarcastic way in. A way into saying quite a bit of what she has to say about, well, if not everything, a LOT.

This has got me thinking. What is my own way in? I suspect it is right under my nose, so close it's hard to focus on it. But let me digress for a moment.

Last night I went to a Santana concert. At one point Santana said something like (I'm paraphrasing here), "My music isn't a job. It isn't a career or a vocation or a mission or a vision or a profession. It's a WAY OF LIFE."

I was mesmerized by that one simple statement. Wow. A way of life. That's what I want to have. A way of life. A connecting of all my own idiosyncratic dots.

So I'm thinking maybe I need to work harder at this "breast cancer" blog by trying to better express how what started out to be a quest to "beat" breast cancer turned into a desire to "heal" breast cancer, which then began to turn into a desire to heal more than just breast cancer.

The whole concept of healing has taken on a new and bigger and greater meaning for me. What am I REALLY attempting to heal…and why? How far will I travel? Where will I go? What will the trip be like?

It really IS a journey, corny and cliched as that may sound. I'd venture to say that it's about on the same par as the journey of motherhood. It goes that deep. It feels that earthshaking, that far-reaching.

Let's see if I can get better at talking about it, because I do now see it as, well, as a way in. . . and also as a way of life. A perfectly good way of life.

In My Back Yard

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Rule of Thumb: When you feel like a zombie on a Thursday because you didn't sleep enough because you went to a Santana concert on a Wednesday, post an old photo that you took a few weeks ago in your back yard, while Olivia was racing in crazy circles round and round through the bushes (who knows why), and the next door neighbor's maniacal little dog was yapping nonstop.

There were leaves and Calla lilies waiting to be seen in a new light, so you stepped carefully around the dog poop that hadn't yet been scooped up, leaned in close, and pressed the magic button.

Benefits of Hormone Replacement on Breast Cancer Survival

Benefits of Hormone Replacement on Breast Cancer Survival Are Durable: Presented at ASBS

"Benefits of Hormone Replacement on Breast Cancer Survival Are Durable: Presented at ASBS"

By Carole Bullock NEW YORK -- May 9, 2008 -- Breast cancer survival rates for users of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) continue to be significantly better after at least 5 years compared with nonusers of HRT for at least 5 years, researchers reported here at the 9th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBS). In a previous study that evaluated the 2.5-year results in women who used HRT and in nonusers, the researchers observed that women who used HRT lived longer and that tumours detected in these women were significantly smaller, lower grade, and more often node negative. Now, the study's 5-year results show that survival is maintained over the long term, with survival rates of 92% for HRT users versus 84% for never-users ([P = .02), reported Rodney F. Pommier, MD, Professor of Surgery, Division of Surgical Oncology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon. Long-term use of HRT was associated with a significantly higher probability of having a tumour detection by mammography (P = .02), even though the frequency of screening mammography between HRT users and never-users was similar.

Among patients with mammographically detected tumours, HRT users had 100% survival compared with 90% for never-users (P =.03). And no differences in survival were seen between HRT regimens, Dr. Pommier said in an oral presentation on May 3.

This significant survival difference between HRT users and never-users with mammographically detected tumours indicates that this is not due to better screening among HRT users; rather, it is consistent with a favourable biological effect of hormones on the tumours, he noted in an interview.

"Patients with greater than 9 years of HRT also had 100% survival regardless of mode of tumour detection," he added.

In complementary basic-science experiments, the authors measured the effects of oestrogen and medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) on breast cancer cells in vitro.

For the in vitro studies, oestrogen-receptor-positive and progesterone-receptor-positive breast cancer cell lines and those with oestrogen-receptor-positive and progesterone-receptor-negative cell lines were treated for 5 days with oestrogen (1-10 nM) and/or MPA (0.1-250 nM).

"The addition of MPA did not change the effects seen with oestrogen alone," he said. "Many of the concentrations and combinations were growth inhibitory for breast cancer cells. Our in vitro results support our clinical findings that [oestrogen] or [oestrogen] plus MPA do not worsen clinical outcomes."

[Presentation title: Improved Breast Cancer Survival of HRT Patients, Regardless of Regimen or Length of Therapy, Is Durable After an Additional 5 Years of Follow-Up. Oral Presentation]

What Have Our Doctors Done with Their Thinking Caps???

I'm reprinting today's article on "Evidence-Based Medicine," from the Ralph Moss newsletter, Cancer Decisions:

One of our newsletter readers wrote to us this week about the term 'evidence-based medicine.' "I am hearing this phrase more and more often," he wrote, "and typically I'm seeing it used as a means of putting down alternative medicine, as though only conventional medicine has the right to a place at the table, and anything else lacks legitimacy."

Certainly 'evidence-based medicine' (EBM) is an interesting and somewhat loaded phrase, the unambiguous implication of which is that medicine comes in two varieties - the kind that is based on a solid foundation of objective evidence, and the kind that is not. Because of the apparently stark good-versus-bad division it suggests, the phrase lends itself well to being used as a pejorative by those who are outspokenly opposed to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). To such people, anything other than standard conventional medicine is by definition unproven, speculative, founded on dubious premises and inherently inferior. As our perceptive reader pointed out, the term 'evidence-based medicine' is often used by such people as a rhetorical weapon, a means of devaluing anything that cannot be clearly identified as mainstream conventional medicine.                   

Yet this was not at all the intended meaning of the term as it was originally conceived. The Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group (EBMWG), a research collaborative of clinicians and epidemiologists from Ontario's McMaster University, who first coined the phrase in 1992, were not attempting to draw a contrast between orthodox and unconventional medicine; far from it. They were in fact trying to change the medical profession's entrenched tendency to cling, mainly out of habit, to procedures and treatments for which there was little if any solid evidence of effectiveness (EBMWG 1992).               

According to David L. Sackett, MD, one of the original McMaster group, and author of numerous subsequent papers on the concept of evidence-based medicine, EBM is intended to be "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical experience with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research" (Sackett, 1996).               

These are laudable aims, to be sure. We all want medical care that is based on the best available evidence rather than on unyielding habit or diehard medical tradition. But exactly how far has medicine come towards that goal in the decade and a half since the McMaster University team first advocated the adoption of EBM? Are most current medical treatments backed by solid evidence of effectiveness?

Very Few Treatments Are Effective                                      

The venerable British Medical Journal has an offshoot publication, BM Clinical Evidence, whose mission is to provide physicians and patients with the best available evidence, garnered wherever possible from randomized, controlled clinical trials (RCTs), which are considered to be the most reliable and rigorous standard for measuring treatment effectiveness. The journal describes itself as "the international source of the best available evidence for effective health care."             

"What proportion of commonly used treatments are supported by good evidence, what proportion should not be used or used only with caution, and how big are the gaps in our knowledge?" asks the publication's Web site (BMJ 2007).             

Of around 2500 treatments so far reviewed by the journal's distinguished team of advisors, peer reviewers, experts, information specialists and statisticians, only 13 percent have been found definitely beneficial. A further 23 percent are rated as likely to be beneficial; 8 percent can be classified as a trade off between benefits and harms; 6 percent as clearly unlikely to be beneficial; 4 percent are likely to be ineffective or harmful, and a whopping 46 percent - almost half of all treatments reviewed - are rated as being of unknown effectiveness.                

                                         
                   

Reproduced by kind permission  of BMJ Clinical Evidence If you cannot view the above file, please click or go to:                           http://www.cancerdecisions.com/images/bmjclinicalevid.gif

As the journal acknowledges, these figures suggest that most treatment decisions rest not on solid evidence obtained through properly conducted clinical trials, but on the individual preferences of clinicians, unsupported in the majority of cases by any concrete evidence of benefit.                   

So, given that very few of conventional medicine's standard treatments have been demonstrated to have any clear benefit whatever - and conversely, that a substantial proportion have been shown to be potentially harmful - it is somewhat ironic to see the term 'evidence-based medicine' used as a war cry by those who are virulently opposed to CAM.

Is EBM Compatible with Individualized Patient Care?                                      

Another aspect of the EBM debate that bears close scrutiny is the question of whether it is always in the patient's best interests to be treated according to standardized EBM protocols. On the surface, it seems obvious that patients will benefit when physicians prescribe only those treatments that have been proven through clinical trials to be effective. However, there are those, like Erich Loewy, MD, a bioethicist and professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, who argue very persuasively that things are not nearly as black and white as they seem, and that EBM, as it is currently practiced, may actually not serve patients well.

In a thought-provoking article for the online medical forum Medscape, Dr. Loewy cites the danger of using EBM as a standard protocol into which any patient with a given disease can simply be plugged. He writes: "To me, as a bioethicist and…a physician who has observed the evolution of EBM, I am impressed with the danger to physicians, patients, the educative process, and, ultimately, to the behavior it encourages. Mindless reliance on EBM does exactly what we do not want our students to do: convert what is a suffering human being, with a unique personal life-history, into a specimen of pathophysiology or a heart murmur" (Loewy, 2007).                   

Dr. Loewy lists a number of ways in which EBM may ultimately result in decisions that are not in the best interests of patients. For example, he writes, "EBM protocols start out being considered as guideposts and end up being considered as straightjackets - and straightjackets that are welcomed by many physicians." One physician actually went so far as to tell Dr. Loewy that he was enthusiastic about EBM guidelines precisely because they saved time and did not require him to think.Dr. Loewy points out that EBM, as practiced in large institutions, can have the highly undesirable effect of stifling thought and constraining good diagnostic and clinical judgment. Doctors who 'think outside the box' and who feel that a particular patient is uniquely suited for a treatment option that is currently not listed as standard EBM, risk being disciplined by their institution. "EBM is basically anti-intellectual," Loewy writes. Thinking, he reminds us, is among the physician's most important tasks, and EBM protocols, which often consist of nothing more than standard check sheets, actively discourage thinking. Worse, because of the potential for EBM to result in mechanistic treatment decisions that take no account of individual variation, this method "threatens to separate the patient's uniqueness further from the physician and would support looking at the disease instead of at the patient who happens to have that disease."              

The essence of CAM is its focus on the individual and its insistence on the rationality and centrality of individualized treatment. Of course it is extremely important to establish treatment guidelines, and to conduct rigorous research into the effectiveness of currently accepted standards of treatment. Teaching physicians to evaluate available treatment options according to whether or not such therapies actually result in measurable benefit to patients might go a long way towards improving care (and reducing costs). But when evidence-based medicine becomes a means of strangling diagnostic skill and reducing patients to algorithms or numbers on a checklist, medicine can no longer call itself the art of healing.

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Four Birds, One Stone

Originally uploaded by my.third.eye

Actually, I'm not fond of the "killing birds with a stone" metaphor, but don't have time to make up a new, equivalent one. So we'll have to go with killin 'em, for now.

One stone, four accomplishments. Four satisfactions. That was yesterday when I went for a walk and: 1) Exercised Olivia, 2) Distributed WS postcards and flyers, 3) Took photos, 4) Exercised myself.

This one-hour multi-tasking episode made me feel supremely capable.

Could the essential oils be helping my productivity? Who knows? But I've begun to use them every day. I have six, and I rotate them: 1. Fragrant chi, 2. Fragrant mountain air, 3. ImmuneEssence, 4. Master chakra blend, 5. Aura cleanse, and 6. Clear thought.

Today will be aura cleanse (five drops under the tongue) and Fragrant mountain air (three drops mixed into a tablespoon of aloe vera gel and rubbed on neck, chest, and underarms).

I'll say more about my oils later, but my cell phone alarm just went off, which means the sauna is ready. Yep, I'm trying to get into a new morning routine that includes stretching exercises, the oils, and 30 minutes in the FIR sauna. Crazy, huh?

Today's photo...just a leaf on our back stairs, seen as we were returning from...yes, another walking excursion with little Miss Doted-Upon Princess Tomboy Doggy Livvy B. I was feeling sort of disappointed that I hadn't taken any good photos on that walk, but then this pretty dead leaf appeared.