Suzanne Somers, Cancer & Controversy
Musicians Dave Grohl, left, and LL Cool J take part in a panel discussion following the premiere of the documentary film "A Death In The Family: The Show Must Go On," at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre on Monday June 11, 2012 in Los Angeles. The film features rare behind-the-scenes footage from this year's 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) / Chris Pizzello
Actress Suzanne Somers is known for her roles on "Three's Company" and "Step By Step," as well as her exercise and diet plans. But for cancer research?
In her new book, "Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who are Curing Cancer and How to Prevent Getting It," Somers shares what she describes as "groundbreaking and successful cancer prevention and care protocols incorporating chemo-free options that are available now."
Read an excerpt of Suzanne Somers' "Knockout."
Somers herself has stared cancer in the face -- including a shattering scare last November of "full-body cancer."
"For six days, six doctors confirmed I had inoperable cancer. I went into that valley of fear. I saw my death, it was horrible," Somers said.
Somers later learned she had been misdiagnosed. But, during the time Somers thought she had cancer, she spoke with several doctors and patients about their various treatments. She turned her research turned into a book about their responses, particularly the alternative treatments available for cancer patients.
The book has proven highly controversial, and she said she's been attacked by doctors for promoting treatments that avoid chemotherapy.
Click on the video below to see Somers address attacks on her book, in an interview with "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith.
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Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. In her new book, "Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who are Curing Cancer and How to Prevent Getting It," Somers shares what she describes as "groundbreaking and successful cancer prevention and care protocols incorporating chemo-free options that are available now."
Read an excerpt of Suzanne Somers' "Knockout."
Somers herself has stared cancer in the face -- including a shattering scare last November of "full-body cancer."
"For six days, six doctors confirmed I had inoperable cancer. I went into that valley of fear. I saw my death, it was horrible," Somers said.
Somers later learned she had been misdiagnosed. But, during the time Somers thought she had cancer, she spoke with several doctors and patients about their various treatments. She turned her research turned into a book about their responses, particularly the alternative treatments available for cancer patients.
The book has proven highly controversial, and she said she's been attacked by doctors for promoting treatments that avoid chemotherapy.
Click on the video below to see Somers address attacks on her book, in an interview with "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith.
Watch CBS News Videos Online
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When I was young, it was flowing smooth,my pee came easily.
Now that I'm old it stops and starts, a degree of difficulty.
I went to see my doctor, and he ordered me a test.
They drew my blood to know my score and plan for what is best
.
The lab report said said my score was high,
they needed to know much more.
I asked my doc what did it mean when 16 was my score?
He said another test was needed, he called it d.r.e.
So he called a doctor of urology to examine me
.
I went to see the doctor new, and he explained to me,
these fingers up your anus to probe for a hard anomoly.
If it proves out true then we must do some surgery,radiation,
chemotherapy to make you cancer free
.
Their is no guarantee of cure of that he is quite sure.
He ordered me some drugs to take each day to make me poor.
I said I need a rest and decide what's best for me.
So I began a search for a kinder gentler remedy
.
Along came Suzanne somers with her anti-cancer book.
Each page I read and had a very thorough good look.
My biological marker was dangerous at 16.
I needed to bring it down to less than all those teens
.
The cure to make you healthy, is more than excercise.
A lot of fruit and veggies,with anti-oxidant ties.
Like the juice of mangosteen and acai berry too,
along with acid reduction and alkalinity true
.
Its been a year since I've known the truth about the mystery.
To extend my life and free myself from much anxiety.
My prostate score declined and now stands less than 9.
I give thanks to Suz Somers and her excellent remedy
.
To those of you who are under stress,
and overwhelmed with fear.
Empower yourself with knowledge,
then you need not shed a tear.
You truly can be healthy,if you know what you must do.
Use orthomolecular medicine, benefits to you.
Yipee yai yay yipee yai yo, learn Suz Somers cancer remedy
"Depending on the cancer's severity, some doctors have stated that they know chemo and rad. therapy will not work, but they suggest it anyhow, believing that the patient would at least feel better that SOMETHING is being done by their doctor (even though it will kill them faster and worsten their pain in the mean time."
is so ridiculous. It is a copmletely uneducated statement. Do you have any idea of why surgery vs radiation vs chemo therapy are used? And what cancers each is used for any why it differs? I am serious that I would like your next post to have an answer.
I am jusr curious because your statement basically implies that doctors are so immoral as to actually suggest harmful treatment when they know it is a bad idea. That is pretty shameful to say.
We have been told since we were little kids that we are what we eat. That still holds true throughout our entire adult life. Unfortunately the processed foods we consume because we want "healthy quick meals" are actually not that healthy and pound for pound more expensive than if we prepared a simple organic meal for ourselves and our families.
With so many families are on very tight food budgets, my suggestion is to buy whole fresh foods and organic products when you can. I believe that if you can wean yourselves off of canned and processed "quick meals", you and your families will be healthier in the long run.
Also check out the different forms of MSG that are out there (Google "MSG" and look for the Truth In labeling website, as well as other sources). You will be surprised how the food processing manufacturers will hide MSG under different names such as "hydrolyzed [anything]", "yeast extract", and "natural flavors", among others. And if you're still not convinced about how MSG affects health, I was surprised to find out that MSG is used to make rats obese for diabetes research since rats genetically are not overweight. To me, it is no wonder that our population is terribly overweight, especially the younger generation.
"During many years medicine was based on proven treatments, not on tests done with sophisticated and expensive machinery nor studies, so why do the common person have to rely just on that in order to choose how they want their own bodies to be treated??"
This is such a funny statement. You say things were based on "proven" treatments....but then you follow it up with saying but NOT on tests done with sophisticated and expensive machinery nor studies. So what do you mean by the word "proven" then? Then you go on and say so why do the common person have to rely just on that in order to choose how they want their own bodies to be treated?? I don't know Naturalistic, I would only hope that the common person would want their treatments to be based on tests done with sophisticated and expensive machinery and studies instead of these "proven" treatments that are based on whatever that means.
And lastly, in your statement to teb when you say "If female hormones caused cancer NO woman on earth would be safe from breas t and other cancers, as we produce quite a bit of them throughout our lives"...is this for real? Are you really making this point as a serious one? The natural way is that estrogen is necessary and involved in feedback mechanisms with gonadotropins and crucial to ovulation which allows people to conceive, etc. Naturally women are made with a certain number of eggs and as ovulation occurs, they get less and less until you reach menopause as the natural way females exist. There no longer is this feedback anymore and estrogen levels then drop, naturally. The female body which has naturally survived since the beginning of existence without these high levels of estrogen after menopause have done fine. This is the natural way. The natural way is not to continue to give yourself estrogen in "bioidentical" hormones. And thus it is therefore potential harmful to do something so unnatural and is have been shown that it can lead to certain cancers as they are not "naturally" used to still be exposed to such high levels of estrogen. Thank you very much Naturalistic for your statements. This still does not explain why Suzanne Somers is seemingly manipulating the media and public to help her book sales at the expense of viewer's health.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/gonzalez/Patient/page2
"Nicholas Gonzalez, a New York physician, first studied his regimen in 11 patients who had advanced pancreatic cancer. In 1993, he reported selected results of the study to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Patients treated with the Gonzalez regimen lived an average of 17 months, which is longer than usual for patients with this disease. Most patients with advanced pancreatic cancer live less than a year.
Because of the small number of patients in the study, and for other reasons, the NCI and the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) decided that the results were not clear and prospective studies were encouraged. In prospective studies, patients are followed forward in time. The NCI and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) sponsored a second study with a much larger number of patients. This was a 7-year clinical study that included patients who had stage II, stage III, or stage IV pancreatic cancer that could not be removed by surgery.
In this study, one group of patients followed the Gonzalez regimen while another group was given standard treatment (chemotherapy). Results in the two groups were compared to see if the Gonzalez regimen works better than the standard treatment and if it has bad side effects. Results of the study were reported in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Oncology in August 2009. Patients treated with standard chemotherapy survived an average of 14 months and patients treated with the Gonzalez regimen survived an average of 4.3 months. Patients treated with chemotherapy reported a better quality of life than those treated with the Gonzalez regimen"
The original study did NOT have very many patints and of course as these quacks tend to do quite often, they only published "selected" results so that they get to pick the ones that look better on paper and don't report all of the 11 patients so you can't see how everyone else did. So the NCI then has them do another study and the results speak for themselves. I am glad NCI sponsored some of the studies so that they could actually reveal the fraud that is going on out there.
"Proven", in the context of what I said (talking of a far gone past), meant what had given good results on ill people since the "sophisticated" tools of today didn't yet exist. Take for example Chinese medicine, which is still widely used today and, in fact, its wisdom has been spreading around the world. It became what it is through tradition, not "studies". Also, in many cultures lots of people still rely on traditional remedies to treat simple to moderately serious conditions, it's a choice that people should be free to have but here in the USA it's considered by many (like you, I suppose) an "outrage" and always and indiscriminately labelled as "quackery".
I guess your reasoning of why the "common" person would/should ideally rely on studies, etc. to choose their treatments is based on faith that today we're really advanced and that studies are the "be all and end all". While I'm not saying that all studies are valueless, I do believe many are biased and made with the full intention of proving or disproving whatever the sponsor wants, therefore, unlike you, I DON'T put all my trust in them.
I know the natural feedback regarding hormones may not be there anymore, but I believe that if bio-identical hormones (as opposed to stuff like Premarin, Provera, Prempro, etc.) are given in proportion to the woman's needs (and there are tests which will show where her levels are) and not in a standardized dosage or type, the risks are WAY smaller.
The "natural" way in an IDEAL WORLD may be for women to not take hormones at the onset and/or after menopause, but the fact is that most of us live under so much stress all our hormones very often get out of balance long before we reach that point. For example, insufficient sleep and/or sleeping at the wrong times, will throw several vital hormones off kilter and I know you know they're all interdependent. And something most doctors selectively ignore is that tired adrenals make the difference between an easy menopausal transition (which some women in other cultures still experience) and a difficult one and unless you're a woman you have no idea the hell it can be when that happens. I speak of personal experience because my life as a single mother of two was anything but easy so neither was my transition. I stopped taking estrogen/progesterone 5 years ago due to the cancer fear but twice already have chosen to take them to get some relief of the symptoms that have robbed me of a good quality of life, for me it's choosing the "lesser of two evils" as I'd rather not have to take any drugs at all but I've also have gotten myself thoroughly informed so I'm really not afraid now. I am convinced there is much more to getting the types of cancer you refer to than just the exposure to estrogen, but I also do not want to go into that here.
Say what? Doctors are constantly misdiagnosing people - have you ever watched the show "Wrong Diagnosis" on TLC by any chance??? And that's not just TV, it's happened to me and members of my family; for crying out loud, even wrong organs and/or limbs have been removed during operations, it's called "human error", yet, the ego of many doctors, fed by the fact that they spent a lot of years in school, makes them believe that their knowledge should never be questioned as if the M.D. following their names actually meant Medical Divinity! Kudos to those that have the humility to sometimes say "we just don't know".
To teb2104:
You should try to get your facts straight, the studies that showed the link with female hormones and cancer were NOT done with bio-identical hormones but with "estrogen" (probably ethinyl estradiol) and a progestin which is far from "identical". It had to be so because drugs like Premarin, Provera and Prempro were what all or most doctors were prescribing at the time.
If female hormones caused cancer NO woman on earth would be safe from breast and other cancers, as we produce quite a bit of them throughout our lives. Also, the key word here would be "balance", something lacking in the usual "ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL" type of approach.
Oh, and I LOVED Patrick Swayze but he was a smoker, a strong indication that his lifestyles was NOT a really healthy one. While I feel very sorry that one of my "idols" had to suffer in that way, his choices had a lot to do with that and I find absolutely nothing "heroic" in submitting oneself to a poisonous therapy like chemo.
To ozo0919:
During many years medicine was based on proven treatments, not on tests done with sophisticated and expensive machinery nor studies, so why do the common person have to rely just on that in order to choose how they want their own bodies to be treated?? It's true many of those old treatments were actually bad for people but that has still been happening in recent decades; personally, I find some practices of "modern" medicine quite barbaric and I'm sure in the future they will be abolished too.
Doctors may read "lots of articles" but out of the ton of journals published most only subscribe to a few since it would be impossible to get/read them all. And some doctors are more diligent than others in this area than others too, some after being disillusioned by allopathic medicine take a step "beyond" but, of course, then they're called "quacks" but to their very grateful patients they are actually the REAL good ones.
You know, your nickname reminds me of Dr. Oz, who has good intentions and recommends a lot of good natural things to prevent illness, but who IMO is still quite a bit behind on some things and very often gives people pat answers to their problems when real solutions DO exist for many of them. But, of course, what am I thinking, he could be sued if he recommended something not sanctioned by "the powers that be" didn't work, for that reason I still watch him most of the time.