Sugars That Heal by Emil I. Mondoa

Author:Emil I. Mondoa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49146-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Inhibiting Cancer

Glyconutrients can improve both the odds of recovery and the quality of life in cancer patients. Glyconutrients also enhance standard chemotherapy and radiation and ease their debilitating side effects.

In April, 1978, I was in my second year of medical school at Ibadan University, in Nigeria. Having completed a year and a half of intensive schooling in the basic sciences that underlie medicine, I had just started seeing my first real patients. Word came to us about a rare phenomenon occurring in the wards of our teaching hospital. The effects of the experience have remained with me ever since; indeed, I remember it as if it were yesterday.

An elderly woman had been admitted to our hospital with a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. But within a few days, and with no treatment, one of the residents noted that the patient’s tumor had begun to shrink. Without chemotherapy, without radiation, without medical intervention of any kind, it continued to get smaller. Within a few weeks there was no trace of the malignancy that had brought her to the hospital.

What was most gratifying was that the patient experienced no vomiting, no weight loss, no hair loss, no opportunistic infections—none of the unpleasant complications associated with the treatment of cancer. Although the woman was not my patient, I was among the steady stream of young medical students and doctors who shuffled up to the fourth floor to catch a glimpse of the miraculous lady. The mother of one of our internal medicine professors, she—and her son—were overjoyed at the outcome and as intrigued as everyone else by this unexpected event. Hers was a case of spontaneous remission of cancer, one of many medical terms for, “We don’t know why this has happened, but we’re glad that it did.”

Fast-forward eight years to October 1986. It is 2 A.M., and I am with my own mother, who is dying of breast cancer. I try to ease her pain, placing my hands on her swollen belly and hugging her as best as I can. She had been treated two years before with surgery and radiation, but now the cancer has spread everywhere; her doctors have told me that there is nothing more they can do. Deep down, I know it is hopeless, but I keep trying to find hope. Tears pour down my face in the semidarkness of the hospital room. I feel helpless like a child by my mother’s side. I don’t know how to help her except in the most basic, human way—by showing her that I love her.

Doctors come face to face with death and often develop a defensive professional attitude to it. Other physicians had warned me that it feels different when your own family is affected. The most painful emotion for doctors is helplessness. That helplessness becomes a constant companion when we are unable to do anything of lasting value for many of the patients we encounter. When we help relieve someone’s symptoms without addressing primary causes, the nagging feeling of having not done enough always remains.

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