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03/13/2007: "Graviola"

You have heard the phrase, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” While on one of my walks through an old town in Europe, I realized that if I was not spending my time trying to find a way to kill my cancer and save my life, then I was wasting that time. My time on the Internet needs to be spent looking for cures. Everything I eat has to contribute to beating cancer. My thoughts, prayers and physical exercise need to be dedicated to breaking through. It requires a total focus on health 24/7.

As intense as that seems, it is becoming easier. I have a constant reminder in the form of chronic pain in my arms and neck. Overall, I am highly motivated to beat this thing but that ache motivates me on an hourly basis.

So recently I set out again scouring the web and reading a couple new books on alternative therapies. I now have read several and they all have a few common threads. The first is that there is a conspiracy driven by big money to make sure that cancer patients in the US only adhere to the big three – surgery, chemo and radiation. What the books refer to as, "cut, poison and burn." You can read case after case of doctors, clinics and vendors of successful alternative treatments being shutdown by the FDA. Soon I will have spent over $50K in alternative treatments that will never be reimbursed by insurance. Yet over that same time period, they were ready to pay four times that in chemo and radiation treatments.

The other thing I am reading is that there a over 150 different alternative treatments that have been successful in one way or another. They only work for about 40% of the people who try them so you need to keep searching for the right ones or the right combinations that produce results. Thus in my renewed effort, I have started taking Graviola. Like Acai, it comes from the South American Rainforests. The fruit and the leaves of graviola tree are used in traditional medicine for their tranquillizing and sedative properties. The supplement uses leaves and twigs of the tree. Technically it is a lipophilic inhibitor of mitochondrial complex I. What that means is that it depresses a cells energy use or ATP. The unique thing about cancer cells is that, unlike all other cells, they are considered anaerobic. This means that they stop breathing oxygen and start fermenting glucose (sugar) to make their energy. Anaerobic respiration is extremely inefficient requiring a cancer cell to burn 18 times more glucose molecules to produce one ATP molecule. That is kind of how a PET scan works, they inject you with sugar and then do a metabolic scan to see which cells are dancing a jig. So Graviola works at the cellular level to cut ATP production. Regular cells produce enough to handle this throttle down while cancer cells will eventually die from the effect.

In the 1970’s Dr. Jerry McLaughlin at Purdue University was funded by the National Cancer Institute to find a botanical substance that could kill cancer cells. He looked at over 3,500 species of plants and found Graviola and Paw Paw to have the most potential.