Infrared
Saunas
Prostate Cancer
Another one of Dr. Douwes'
many success stories is Les M., an engineer from California who had prostate
cancer. From his professional education he brings a skeptical, inquiring, scientific
perspective to viewing various situations. Before Les came to Klinik St. George
for transurethal prostate hyperthermia treatment, he carefully reviewed the
literature on different treatments. He chose the clinic after learning that
local-region radio-wave hyperthermia has produced "fabulous results" (whereas
the U.S. study of hyperthermia using microwaves cause patients agonizing urethral
pain and made U.S. doctors thereafter shun the procedure). Les was also impressed
to learn how sophisticated the clinic's method of determining efficacy of treatment
is. The traditional Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test gives a high rate of
false negatives (about 30%). Les had a particular from of aggressive form of
aggressive prostate cancer that is not revealed by elevated PSA's. Klinik St.
George also uses the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique to determine
whether cancer cells are still circulating in the blood stream. Just Les before
he was to go in for his first treatment. He sat in a comfortable upholstered
chair with flexible radio-receiving plates affixed to each buttock. With local
anesthesia he had a probe containing a tiny radio transmitter introduced through
a transurethral catheter into his enlarged prostate. Unlike the American protocol,
which used high-energy microwaves that burned both cancerous and non-cancerous
tissue alike, the Klinik St. Georg treatment employs short-wave radio transmissions.
These heat the prostate area to between 113 and 158 degrees Fahrenheit and adversely
affect only malignant cells. At times Les felt some discomfort during the treatment,
as if he had to urinate, but otherwise the three-hour process was not traumatic,
and he was asleep for much of the time. I interviewed Les fifteen minutes post-therapy,
after his catheter was removed and he had urinated without pain or any burning
sensation. He was positively joyful and downright playful. I received a call
from Les Two months later, just as I was finishing writing this article. He
had to tell me that he had just visited his previous two conventional oncologists.
They performed the ultrasound imaging and digital rectal palpation that had
revealed his cancer in the first place (later confirmed by biopsy). They found
nothing: there was no evidence of cancer left. They could not perform a follow-up
biopsy because there was no mass left to target.
A Trailblazer in Oncology
Dr. Douwes is a large, muscular bear of a man. He reminds me
of a middle linebacker from the National Football League, or one of those undeniably
self-confident athletes who says to his opponent, "You think you're tough. So
bring it on. Show me what you've got." That's the doctor's attitude toward cancer,
and his upbeat optimism sets the tone for the entire clinic. For the most part,
clinic staff and patients alike are happy and at times ebullient. The setting
probably helps, the clinic rivals any five-star hotel for comfort and accommodations,
quality of food, service and majestic view. The only morose patients I saw were
those who had just recently begun treatment. I assumed that they, too, would
be soon infected by the good cheer freely shared among patients in the dining
room and group therapy rooms. A patient with prostate cancer said to me that
Klinik St. Georg "is the only cancer clinic I've ever been to where people laugh
".Dr. Douwes was not always so upbeat. Following his training in oncology at
medical schools in both the U.S. and Germany, he served as head physician of
the oncology department at the University of Gottengen, where he got severely
discouraged. "I decided after 10 years," he said "to either quit medicine or
to become a landscape gardener, because I was so disappointed about the results
in clinical oncology". "I had my first fight with the faculty after I was supposed
to publish a paper about patients with non-small cell cancer of the lung. We
had a double-blind study, one placebo group and one that received Adriamycin,
Cytoxan and Oncovin. The results were that from the placebo group, the median
survival rate was 9.6 months and in the treated group it was 13.4 months, and
this was statistically significant. I was supposed to publish it because the
pharmaceutical companies gave us a grant. "I told them that this may be statistically
significant, but is was baloney. What does it mean? Three or four months. If
you take into account that these people in treatment survived this experience
only four months longer, then I was not going to publish it. They had a lousy
life quality; they had to be hospitalized most of the time; they had more chemotherapy,
more blood transfusions, and we actually stole several months of their lives
from them." They told me that if I wasn't going to publish the paper because
it's insignificant, then they would cut our grants. This was the minute when
I quit and said, " This is it. I cannot do it anymore because this is not the
way to treat these people." So I slowly adopted complementary methods into my
medicine besides conventional and still stay with conventional medicine because
St. Georg is a fully licensed hospital. All major insurance's pay and I somehow
had to balance it and, therefore, we call it integrative medicine. We have practiced
this now for 15 years." As soon as I adopted these methods, I became more and
more successful, especially when I had the opportunity to introduce hyperthermia
into our treatment and protocol. This was in 1983 and 1984, and my mentor was
an American surgeon, the late Dr. Harry Levine. Also, there was Dr. Rudi Falk
from Toronto, also deceased. They were the first I met with experience in hyperthermia.
Later we made our own machines, and at the moment I think we are now the leading
such hospital in the world because we have all varieties of hyperthermia." author. Dr. Harvey Kaltsas, Past President, American Association of Acupuncture and
Oriental Medicine
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