Q: My brother has appendiceal cancer and is starting chemotherapy including a drug called 5-FU or Fluorouracil. What are the side effects and what can do to prevent them?
A: great question and yet hard to answer only because your brother is as special, unique and individual as a snowflake or a fingerprint so what we do depends on who he is as a WHOLE person and not just on the drug itself.
That being said, when we are getting chemotherapy, the doctor will often give us a huge packet that lists every terrible thing known to man. These things don’t happen but the government mandates that the doctor let you know everything that has happened in human history with the drug regardless of how rare.
We do not recommend reading this packet. Staying positive and in a place of love and hope is actually a more powerful therapeutic than most medicines. In fact the most powerful evidenced based tool you have to begin to reduce side effects in response to all chemotherapy drugs is guided visualization. We like Healthjourneys.com “Fight Cancer”
Start with having your brother listen to this guided meditation every night, 6 nights a week.
Secondly, the most common side effects that do happen with a 5 FU are mouth sores and diarrhea. Unless your brother is seeing these. We prevent mouth sores by using an alkaline mouthwash that we design and tailor for our pts. This simple solution with baking soda as a base, if used every day, completely prevents mouth sores in our population.
If a patient has poor dental hygiene, a risk of herpes simplex I, or taste issues, that may change what we do and we may add essential oils, zinc and lysine.
Regardless, our patients receiving 5FU do not experience mouth sores. This is a gift because mouth sores can prevent a person from eating and result in weight loss. Weight loss is never good with cancer treatment as it makes a person tolerate the drugs less.
For gut support, which we are also wholly successful in, it’s much more individualized. We use things like nutrition, OTC anti diarrheals and laxatives, GI supportive care like therapeutic grade probiotics, slippery elm, glutamine (in low doses), aloe, enzymes, calendula, other botanicals and magnesium…it really depends as most of the immune system lives in the gut and we are supporting as well as treating.
Either way, it's important that your brother see someone like us, with the initials FABNO after their name to be sure that they are not taking natural therapies that can CONFLICT with their current meds.
5-FU is in a class of drugs that was originally discovered by a young enterprising woman, Lucy Wills, who defied custom and wanted an education in science. She travelled to India in the early 1900s and did her dissertation on an observation that women who ate green leafy vegetables had children with less birth defects.
Sydney Farber, a young scientist working in pediatric leukemia here in the States saw her paper and thought, if there is a powerful vitamin in green leafy veggies that causes cells to grow, what if we could develop an ANTI vitamin that would stop cancer cells from growing.
He called this vitamin "Folate" for foliage, and so the Folate Antagonists were developed.
It's very important therefore, if we are taking a drug like 5-FU, to give it the best chance to work by avoiding certain vitamins while preserving our immune system and normal organ health. Any board certified integrative oncologist can do this in a skilled and individualized way. Call us at 248 798 2942 to find out more.
