Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more about what you can start doing today.
“Multiple myeloma is a serious condition on its own, but both the cancer and the resulting bone damage can lead to several serious long-term effects. The most obvious of these long-term effects is chronic bone weakness and pain.”
Myeloma bone disease (MBD) is not only a main cause of disability and morbidity in MM patients but also increases the cost of management. Bone damage is the third leading cause of death among MM survivors. Most importantly, bone damage is both a multiple myeloma symptom and multiple myeloma side effect.
Multiple myeloma is a complicated, incurable blood cancer. Complicating this is the fact that conventional, standard-of-care therapies prescribed to manage a person’s MM such as
chemotherapy
radiation
steroids (dexamethasone, prednisone)
all cause bones to weaken increasing the risk of bone fracture.
My point above, is that multiple myeloma patients may struggle to manage their incurable blood cancer at the expense of their bone health.To put this another way, aggressive MM therapy such as chemo, radiation and dexamethasone can manage a patient’s MM while damaging his/her bone health at the same time.
I am not putting the onus of maintaining bone health exclusively on conventional oncology. I’m saying that MM, by itself, causes bone damage, year in, year out. Adding man-made therapies that also cause bone damage may be the reason why bone damage is the third leading cause of death among MM patients and survivors.
Throughout PeopleBeatingCancer is the phrase “if I knew then what I know now.” I never questioned the short, long-term and late stage side effects of my conventional, standard-of-care MM therapies. Few MM patients do.
I put total trust in my oncologist. Most of us MM patients do. Unfortunately, conventional oncology is only as good as the information it is given. If the drug approval process misinterprets the adverse events aka side effects caused by chemotherapy regimens then oncology can’t really be held accountable.
The top two articles linked and excerpted below discusses research that questions the findings of conventional cancer research.
Suffice to say that it is in the best long-term interests of MM patients and survivors to take a “less is more” approach to conventional MM therapies. By this, I mean that patients must undergo just enough toxic therapy to manage their MM.
At the same time, consider the many evidence-based, non-toxic therapies shown to enhance bone health and therefore minimizing bone damage.
Encompassing:
frequent, moderate exercise, to
bone building nutrition,
to bone strengthening supplementation,
there are many evidence-based therapies to manage one’s bone health and minimizing bone damage. Amazingly enough, many of these nutritional therapies have also been shown to be cytotoxic (kill) to multiple myeloma while also enhancing kidney health.
Bone health is an important issue discussed widely on PeopleBeatingCancer-
The point is that newly diagnosed MM patients must balance conventional, standard-of-care therapies with evidence-based, non-toxic therapies. I believe that you will live a longer, happier life.
To learn more about the full spectrum of evidence-based MM therapies, symptoms and side effects, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
“An important goal of early-phase clinical trials is to discover a drug’s possible side effects. But despite FDA guidelines seeking to standardize this reporting, a University of Colorado Cancer Center study finds significant variation in how drug side effects are reported, potentially making some drugs seem safer or less safe than they really are…
“Sometimes you only report an adverse event that happens in, say, 10 percent or more of patients on a trial. However, if you split related side-effects into lots of little sub-groups, perhaps no one event reaches this 10 percent threshold and nothing gets reported…”
What the group found was wide-ranging variation in the ways trial investigators report drug side effects…
Additionally, patients are supposed to report all symptoms when they are on a clinical trial andthen it’s up to trial investigators to decide, in their opinion, whether a symptom is likely due to the drug or just happens to be another symptom the patient is experiencing at the time.
“Determining if a side effect is treatment-related or not is subjective. If you rely on this, you get rid of some of the background noise of coincidental symptoms. However, you can also miss more subtle side effects,” Simons says…
“Given the increased speed of drug licensing, early phase trial data is essential in helping us form accurate impressions of a new drug. Recognizing and addressing the variation in how side effects are reported would improve the accuracy of these impressions in the future,”Simons says.”
“Out of the 54 supporting pivotal studies for 32 cancer drugs approved in that time period, 41 were randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Researchers determined 49% of those RCTs were at high risk of bias, including studies of some prominent therapies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo, AbbVie’s Imbruvica and Pfizer’s Ibrance…”
“Osteolytic bone disease is the hallmark of multiple myeloma, which deteriorates the quality of life of myeloma patients, and it affects dramatically their morbidity and mortality…
The myeloma-induced crosstalk among the molecular pathways establishes a positive feedback that sustains myeloma cell survival and continuous bone destruction, even when a plateau phase of the disease has been achieved…
“Multiple myeloma is a serious condition on its own, but both the cancer and the resulting bone damage can lead to several serious long-term effects. The most obvious of these long-term effects is chronic bone weakness and pain.
The lesions and soft spots in the bone that occur due to the myeloma are difficult to treat and may cause continued fractures even if the myeloma itself has gone into remission…”
“Cancer patients experience osteoporosis resulting from accelerated loss of bone mineral density (BMD) caused by their treatment. Such bone loss greatly increases the risk for fracture and can have other serious effects on quality of life…
A variety of cancer therapies, including hormonal therapy, chemotherapy, and glucocorticoids, affect gonadal hormone production, which increases bone resorption and decreases BMD.
Such bone loss occurs more rapidly and to a greater degree than normal age-related osteoporosis, increases the risk for fracture and other morbidities, and decreases survival…
“Chemotherapy is important for cancer treatment, however, toxicities limit its use.
Chemotherapy-driven estrogen loss is postulated to drive bone loss, but significant data suggests the existence of an estrogen-independent mechanism of bone loss. Using clinically relevant mouse models, we showed that senescence and its senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) contribute to chemotherapy-induced bone loss that can be rescued by depleting senescent cells.
SIGNIFICANCE: Senescence drives chemotherapy-induced bone loss that is rescued by p38MAPK or MK2 inhibitors. These findings may lead to treatments for therapy-induced bone loss, significantly increasing quality of life for cancer survivors.”
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2 comments
Vinita Menon says
3 years ago
Hi David,
Very keen on understanding bone health how do I connect with you.I have just gone into a 2nd relapse with bone damage and need to address the situation immediately. I am based in Mumbai ,India
