Great Visit to Schacter Center

I'm just back from an excellent visit to the Schacter Center in New York.

I met Dr. Michael Schacter at the Complementary and Alternative Medicine conference this January, and I was impressed with his approach and his enthusiastic, ecumenical research into different alternative cancer treatments. I also had a chance to speak with him personally, and he not only knew about the kind of treatments I was getting in Germany, but offered some great additional suggestions that were specific to my situation.

So I went back for the whole enchilada. His staff interviewed me extensively, put me through a battery of tests, and gave me some nutritional counseling (it turns out I'm already pretty much on track with the diet I'm following for the enzyme therapy.)

The Bad News

On the second day, I had a private consultation with Dr. Schacter, and we reviewed some of the results from the tests I'd taken the previous day. My PSA was 11.4 -- yow! That's almost double the 5.8 figure that it was 3 weeks ago - and the 5.8 was more than double the 2.6 reading of the previous month. Doubling my PSA two months in a row is *not* a good situation, so I definitely need to keep on the ball with my treatments.

The Good News

That's it for the bad news -- the rest of the visit was a really wonderful education about treatments that I can fit into my own regimen. I received all of the following:

• supplement review

Fortunately it looks like I'm already taking most of what Dr. Schacter would recommend. Both he and Pamela highly recommend the ProstaSol and Avemar. I'm also going to start on Pao V FM (one of the Beljanski remedies that helped keep President Mitterand of France alive for years when he was secretly battling metastatic prostate cancer.) Also I'll be starting to take iodine and iodides -- the Japanese diet has an average dose of iodine that is 12,000 times our recommended daily dose…and they have almost no breast cancer!

I'm also going to be taking amygdalin tablets (laetrile), and I'll be checking out the supplements in Dr. Chi's Cancer Program -- Dr. Schacter is very enthusiastic about the effect of both of these supplement regimens on prostate cancer.

• treatment review

The big question for me this week was: how should I modify my treatment -- if at all?? I've been having awful depression and energy problems with Pamela's version of the enzyme therapy, and put this to Dr. Schacter for his opinion. He was marvelously impartial, and really put the decision back to me, with the assurance that everything I've already been doing is right on track. (I'll write more about the treatment choice in a later post.)

• Vitamin C infusions

This is a mainstay at the Schacter Center -- and Dr. Thaller in Germany used them too. The basic principle is that you lure in the cancer cells with glucose (they love it!), and then explode them from the inside out with megadoses of Vitamin C (they hate it!) I got infusions for four days here, and I'll be continuing them in Austin.

• Colorpuncture

This treatment uses a series of colored penlights (as well as traditional needles) on acupuncture points relevant to my condition. It piggybacks on recent developments that show how direct application of light to tumors has a healing effect. Instead of routing fiber optic tubes directly to the tumors as in those experiments, colorpuncture achieves similar results by treating the acupuncture points that correspond to the tumor area.

I also got a Heart Rate Variability test, which measures how quickly and effectively my system responds to stress. The doctor liked the result I got -- he said it shows that there's a lot of "oomph" left in my system to combat the disease. According to this test, at this point the cancer isn't anything more than an annoyance to my system -- it isn't like it's lumbering along underneath an impossible weight.

• Mind-Body Therapy

Serendipity sent me to the most interesting part of visit to the Center. While I was getting a Vitamin C infusion, I was talking about my treatment history with one of the nurses. "Oh my God," she gasped, " you haven't seen Dr. Reznik? Our mind-body guy?? Hang on, I'll see if he has any time available this afternoon!"

Dr. Reznik uses a combination of guided imagery, dreamwork, and other mental trainings to help visualize a positive outcome. I ended up taking an all-day seminar with him on Sunday, and came home with an extensive set of tools to work with -- I am noticing a marked change in my attitude already! I'll be meeting with Dr. Reznik via Skype next week and am looking forward to it!