What we expect to hear from mainstream medicine: “Despite the minimal risks and ongoing studies about cancer seeding during biopsy, collecting tissue samples has been one of the most useful tools in battling cancer. These samples give medical teams a lot of information that helps tailor treatments to give patients the best chance of recovery. “You glean from a biopsy the type of tumor it is, whether it is malignant or benign, and how aggressive it is,” said Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Professor of Pathology, Urology and Oncology and Director of Surgical Pathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “You can also do special studies sometimes for certain markers, which can help determine therapy and which types of tumors would respond to different types of therapy.”
Given how many people die from cancer each year it seems that oncologists are exaggerating both the usefulness and safety of biopsies and just about everything else they do. Dr. Vincent Gammill, Center for the Study of Natural Oncology in Solana Beach, California, presented a case of a woman who had successfully treated her breast cancer naturally since 1994. Last year, her conventional oncologist convinced her that she was a fool to refuse a needle biopsy. She now has new tumors at each of the puncture sites. “I rarely see distant metastasis until after a biopsy – and then it grows rapidly everywhere, especially in the bones,” Gammill said.
In 2011, researchers for Mayo Clinic College of Medicine reported that transperitoneal biopsy of cancer of the bile duct is associated with a higher rate of peritoneal metastasis and they recommend the procedure not be performed if a curative method exists.
Most hospitals and oncologists require biopsies. One small private clinic in Baja, Mexico, like most alternative centers that treat cancer do not. “Many patients come to us because they don’t want to have a biopsy. Especially breast and prostate patients. We respect their wishes, and offer tumor marker testing, color Doppler sonograms, ultrasounds and whole body thermography instead,” says Dr. Antonio Jimenez of Hope4Cancer Institute.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried warns against doing biopsies because of its dangers. The problem is that when you stab into the cancer microenvironment to remove a part of the tissue, it creates a wound in that microenvironment that in turn elicits the invasion by macrophages and other immune cells.
If you already have an acidic microenvironment, you run the risk of causing a fusion hybridization event in that microenvironment between your macrophages and cancer stem cells. This could turn a potentially benign situation into a malignant one, and if the tumor is malignant, stabbing into it could make a bad situation worse.
The question is, what is the value of doing a biopsy in the first place? We take biopsies of breast tissue to get a genomic readout of the different kinds of mutations that might be in the cells. Now, if cancer is not a genetic disease and the mutations are largely irrelevant, then it makes no sense to do that in the first place. If the tumor is benign, why would you want to stab it? If the tumor is malignant, why would you ever want to stab it? I came to this view by reading so many articles in the literature based on brain cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer showing how needle biopsies have led to the dissemination of these tumor cells, putting these people at risk for metastatic cancer and death, Seyfried says.
“In metabolic therapy, you would not touch the tumor; you would not disturb the microenvironment. By leaving it alone, you allow the tumor to shrink and go away. When you start to look at this as a biological problem, many of the things that we do in cancer make no sense. We have, in brain cancer, people say, ‘You have a very low-grade tumor. Let’s go in and get it out.’ What happens is you go in and get it out, and then the following year it turns into a glioblastoma.How did that happen? Well, you disturbed the microenvironment. You allowed these cells that are marginally aggressive to become highly aggressive. Then you lead to the demise of the patient, Seyfried says.
"Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts." Charles Dickens
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