TL;DR ... give it to me without the fluff

The Cancer Healing Compendium (CHC) was born from a personal need to;

• Manage knowledge concerning cancer, cancer treatment, and the likely effectiveness
• Understand and challenge what I was being told by my doctor
• Understand what Conventional Treatment was offering and not offering, and what it was likely to do to me
• Understand integrative / complementary / adjunctive / naturopathic / holistic whatever they wanted to call it treatment options and the associated jargon
• Connect the dots between often contradictory information from a wide variety of sources and medical practitioners
• Advocate for myself and decide on an integrated treatment approach combining conventional and complementary treatment approaches
• Create & monitor progress of my healing plan
• Stay up to date with the science, update the Knowledge base and adapt my plan when necessary

The CHC provides a structured, evidence based Knowledge Base from verified sources including;

• The mainstream medical domain such as cancer treatment centres, government and international agencies
• Cancer related non-profit organizations
• Scientific journals
• Books by well regarded practitioners of integrative / complementary therapies
  ... and tools to navigate and make use of this information to create and execute your personal healing plan.

The CHC does not replace a competent medical team, and your treatment should be conducted with adequate medical consultation and support.

My Journey

• Diagnosis ...
• Journey ...
• The problem to be solved;
  • Dealing with the emotional shock: For me, this meant doing something about it, feeling as though I had some control over the situation and that there was therefore some light at the end of the tunnel
  • Finding reliable information in a understandable and usable form
  • Dealing with a fragmented medical system: Having to cobble together a multidisciplinary team
  • Making a plan: Deciding what to allow to happen in the short term, and then figure out what to do next

The thought process along the way

What's my prognosis? How long do I have?

• What my doctor said;
  • "You've got 6 months to live"
  • "Treatment is only palliative" ... meaning you will die of this sooner rather than later, and there is no cure
• WTF ... There's gotta be some way of beating this thing
  • How did I get cancer? I have my suspicions, but its not going to solve the problem right now
  • What can I do about it?

This is serious. I gotta act now. Yes & No

• Yes: But what action to take? Think slowly, Act quickly
• No: Chances are cancer has been brewing for years. Unless you are an emergency case with immediately life-threatening consequences, taking a week or two to assess your situation and learn enough to make an informed decision will be beneficial
• The learning journey doesn't end: New information becomes available
• How you respond to treatment will become evident as you go along & possibly prompt a change in plan. Adapt
• Appropriate action has to be taken at the right time in accordance with the stage of cancer and phase of treatment

Deciding to be my own Advocate

• Owning my own health
• Taking responsibility for decision making and not relying totally on the Standard of Care (SOC) medical system and paid consultants peddling their own brand and their own biases
• Challenging the SOC providers to integrate complementary therapies

The learning curve: It's steep

What I did in the past ...

• Buying & reading books;
  • Time consuming
  • Books are often padded with a lot of fluff instead of just giving the facts in a nice distilled easy to apply format
  • Can't remember everything I read so the books end up looking like christmas trees festooned with coloured paper tabs and a lot of paper notes
• YouTube university;
  • Really time consuming, but comforting to feel like you are doing something
  • Too many 'influencers' who have a large follower base but no expertise, jumping on the latest bandwagon & regurgitating the same stuff
  • Highly questionable information: Need to distill the wheat from the chaff. How to verify? Who to trust?
• Internet search;
  • AI didn't exist in consumer form in 2020. Reviewing and extracting information from loads of websites & documents is time consuming
• PubMed & other authoritative sources search;
  • Time consuming
  • Have to learn a whole new vocabulary to understand scientific papers
• Chat groups on Facebook;
  • Some of them restrict posts to "positive feedback & success stories" only! Hmm ... very biased
  • Get info in byte sized chunks: Difficult to assemble a coherent big picture & plan
• Talking to conventional medical doctors & hospital patient advisors or advocates;
  • Only ever got the same 'Standard of Care' story line & warnings against anything else which might interfere with treatment
  • The official pamphlets contained what I believed to be outdated & in some cases just plain wrong information
• Consulting with a number of complementary medicine providers. This included various flavours of;
  • Naturopath
  • Wellness clinics
  • Integrative Oncologist

What I do now;

• Use a number of research tools and AI to support getting a verified & distilled grasp on what I need to know to help myself: Going down all the necessary rabbit holes
• Build my own knowledge management system to collect and organize that knowledge, and a tool for planning and executing my healing plan

The Standard of Care: the Gold Standard?

• My oncologists always responded with 'we use the gold standard of proven treatments' and warned against alternative therapies on the grounds they could interfere with conventional treatment, or worse, cause harm
• Doctors are constrained by;
  • Their training, and consequently their thinking
  • The medical system, which obliges them to stick to approved treatments & processes, with consequences for not doing so. This is reasonable in terms of protecting the public from mal-practice
• For a reality check on efficacy and safety of SOC treatments, see;
  • Effectiveness of SOC Treatments
  • Understanding the Statistics
• The upshot of this is that we often can't expect to be healed from cancer by SOC treatments alone

Why are non-SOC alternatives not SOC?

• SOC treatments are approved after rigorous clinical trials to demonstrate efficacy (at least to some degree!) and safety (they at least do more good than harm within a narrow field of application). Such trials are time consuming and costly to undertake
• The most widely held opinion is that there is no money in it for the organizations that would otherwise benefit from research grants or the development of patented drugs, therapies, or equipment. Big pharma / medical won't spend money on research that doesn't result in bringing new patentable treatments to market

Access to a well rounded treatment team

• Ideally, the treatment plan should be decided on in consultation with a Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) of qualified practitioners who assess the current state, options, and the appropriate treatment
• If there is a team, it is typically comprised of SOC specialists or practitioners of complementary therapies, rarely both
• In practice, many patients don't have access to such an integrated team and are forced to work with doctors in different locations and deal with any differences of opinion or advice. In the worst case, a patient may elect to not disclose complementary treatments to the SOC team due their lack of openness to integrative approaches

My why

• I have a family, and lots to do in life
• Helping others is it's own reward
• In 2025 I have survived cancer for nearly 5 years. According to the statistics that's near the 'expiry date' for a large proportion of patients with my condition. I am not a statistic. I'm doing pretty well, and aim to get into and stay in remission
• The CHC is my knowledge garden about cancer. It is an integral part of my toolkit to heal from cancer