My mother died of cancer at the beginning of last year at the age of fifty-four. No one in my family had ever had cancer and we were all totally oblivious to what to do about it, except what her doctors told her. It was malignant melanoma that had effected her liver. We found out a few things as her health declined. The misconseption is that the United States is the end all be all as far as medical care goes. That's as far from the truth as you can get. There are so many restrictions on health care procedures here in the United States that even if other options are definitively known to help more than the standard Chemo-Radiation procedures would, you can't get them here because they haven't been approved for use, even on people that will die without and would be willing to sign waivers just to have another option available.
Also, for people that haven't ever had cancer, there are stages from 1 through 4. If you are diagnosed with liver cancer of any kind, you automatically have stage 4. With stages 1 through 3 of cancer you have a chance of remission with treatment, but stage 4, that's the stage that the doctors give up on you. Stage 4 is where the doctor gives you a sad look and skirts the subject and says on average you have this many months to live. My mother's doctors told her she had a few options. She could take chemotherapy, which the doctors could almost gaurantee would not help at all with liver cancer. She could go to a hospice and live out her last days being taken care of there, or she could go home and take care of her affairs and die there.
My mom was a JW and she had a friend in the congregation that had had cancer 5 years before. This woman's cancer had effected her ovaries and had spread to several of her organs including her stomach and liver. She told my mom that when she had been diagnosed, the doctors here in the US told her that she was stage 4 and could go the chemo route, but that she would die and on average she had less than six months to live. This lady told my mom that when the doctors here had told her she was going to die, she went to the hospital Santa Monica in Mexico. It's considered an alternative hospital, mostly dealing in treatment of cancer. There were certain treatments that were customized to the type of cancer that the person had and the successfull remission rate is much higher than the remission rate in the US with conventional treatments.
This lady that told my mom about this hospital in Mexico went into remission while being treated there and when she came back to the US, her cancer was all but gone. Today, five years later, she has no signs of cancer in her body at all. My mom decided to take her chances and go there, she was very weak at the time because she had opted for one treatment of chemo here before she knew about this other option. For two weeks she progressively got better as evidenced by her blood work that they would check every day. But unbeknownst to her, the chemo and the pain pills that she had been perscribed by her doctors here in the US for her cancer had caused ulcers in her stomach and two weeks after she'd been at this hospital in Mexico her ulcers ruptured in her stomach and she started to bleed internally. It was found out too late what had happened and the doctors wanted to give her blood, but she said, "no blood" as she passed in and out of conciousness. It was too late anyway and she died.
But I sometimes wonder, if she'd known about the option of the hospital in Mexico when she was first diagnosed with cancer, before the chemo, and before the pain meds, would she have stood a much better chance. I personally think, yes.