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."
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