My 95-year-old aunt was also diagnosed with a different kind of cancer following the death of my father from bladder cancer. I come from a good lineage on both sides. Many members of my family have survived to be older than 100 years. Everyone knew that unhealthy living was not the cause of my father's cancer. While serving in the Second World War and working for a company that the government had hired to produce high-tech weapons years later, he had been exposed to toxins. We were also aware of the depressing fact that nobody can foresee the future. Everybody would live forever if psychics actually existed on Earth.
When I learned my 95-year-old aunt had chosen chemo and radiation I begged my newly widowed mother to knock some common sense into our aunt. “Do you know that chemo kills more than just cancer?” I asked my mother. My mother sighed. “I’ll try,” she said.
My aunt died. If people assumed cancer won they were wrong. I have not had much faith in Western medicine since. I knew it was my aunt’s choice to proceed with this but it was also her doctor’s choice to agree to do it and to pocket the money he received from her insurance plan. We see women marching in cities across the USA wearing pink ribbons every year begging Western medicine for a cure. Yet studies have already shown that a readily available Chinese herb can stop cancer.
Dr. H Lai announced years ago that Wormwood, a common flowering plant, will rapidly kill breast cancer cells. This was announced in an article by Richard Hill and published by Oregonian Publishing Company in 2001. In 2006, Lai and his colleagues at the University of Washington demonstrated that the main active agent in Wormwood, called artemisinin, can stop the growth of cancer cells by binding with something called transferrin. They explained that cancer cells contain more iron than healthy cells.
In a laboratory setting, cancer cells were artificially induced in rats. Then, the artemisinin-transferrin conjugate was injected into half the rats. The researchers found that following treatment, rats showed significantly less cancer. The control group’s cancer spread. The cancer-stopping results were rapid and about half the treated rats improved remarkably well. This research was also reported in journals such as Women’s Health.
There are several varieties of Wormwood. The one used in Chinese medicine is called Artemisia annua, or Qing Hao in Pinyin. The flowering portion is commonly used. This weed will grow to be the height of a rather short woman, as my late aunt was.
In 2008, in the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, researchers noted that while Wormwood certainly is now fully recognized by Western researchers as having multiple medicinal benefits, it cannot be regulated by the FDA. It is readily available without a prescription nor medical appointment. It can be purchased by anyone who makes the decision to take charge of their own health. The pharmaceutical industry depends on our belief that we are dependent on its technology to survive such threats as scary as cancer. However, the industry is threatened right now knowing that the public could find out that cheap and readily available cures such as Wormwood could overturn their power and big money.
Cancer does not run in my family. However, if I were to find a lump tomorrow I’d consider Western medicine’s chemo and radiation only one of the many options available to me. I’d consider Wormwood as an option, too. As for precise dosage, I’d ask a doctor well trained in ancient Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine has been around thousands of years longer than Western medicine, which only began with the Greeks and Egyptians. I wish my late aunt had known this. She very well may have lived to be over 100.