Your Life In Your Hands: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Breast Cancer

by Jane A. Plant PhD

Overview

One out of nine women in the United States will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. In fact, it is the second leading cause of cancer death for women (after lung cancer) and the leading overall cause of death in women between the ages of forty and fifty-five. For too long women have erroneously believed that there is little or nothing they can do to prevent this dread illness. Our major medical efforts are directed toward detecting and treating, rather than preventing, breast cancer.

Professor Jane Plant, one of Britain's most eminent scientists, contracted breast cancer in 1987. She had five recurrences, and, by 1993, the cancer had spread to her lymph system. When orthodox medicine gave up and she was told that she only had three months to live, she determined to use her extensive scientific training and her knowledge of other cultures to find a way to survive. In her research, she was startled to find that in China breast cancer affects far fewer women than in Western countries. Plant considered that there could be a dietary trigger for the illness. As she continued her scientific investigations, she became convinced that there was a causal link between consumption of dairy products and breast cancer.

Jane Plant finally defeated her breast cancer, in part because she used her training and knowledge as a natural scientist to understand it-- and then overcome it. Combining the diet her research had led to with traditional medical treatment, Professor Plant was not only able to triumph over her own disease but also to pass on what she had discovered to help more than sixty other women successfully fight their breast cancer.

In this book, women will be presented for the first time with a compelling body of evidence strongly suggesting that consumption of dairy products may cause breast cancer. It will demonstrate the specific changes that women can make in their day-to-day lives to help prevent and treat breast cancer. With a clear statement of the scientific principles behind her discovery, Professor Plant includes detailed suggestions for ways to alter your diet by eliminating or reducing consumption of many suspected cancer-causing agents, especially dairy products, and replacing them with healthful alternatives. She offers as well detailed menus and recipes to help you make the transition and enjoy it.

Your Life in Your Hands is a revolutionary book that will change the lives of millions of women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466874169
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/24/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	722,818
File size:	852 KB

About the Author

Jane A. Plant, Ph.D., C.B.E., is one of Britain's most distinguished female scientists. She is chief scientist of the British Geological Survey and continues to sit on many influential government and international committees. In 1999, she was awarded Britain's most prestigious science honor, the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Prize (previous recipients include the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, and the scientist who cloned "Dolly," the sheep). Professor Plant lives in Nottingham with her husband and children.

Jane A. Plant, Ph.D., C.B.E., is one of Britain's most distinguished scientists. She is chief scientist of the British Geological Survey and continues to sit on many influential government and international committees. In 1999, she was awarded Britain's most prestigious honor, the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Prize. Professor Plant lives in Nottingham with her husband and children. She is the author of Your Life in Your Hands: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Breast Cancer.

Read an Excerpt

Your Life in Your Hands

Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Breast Cancer

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By Jane A. Plant

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2001 Jane A. Plant
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7416-9

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CHAPTER 1

The Hat, The Boa Constrictor, and The Scientist

In this chapter I explain to you why, as a natural scientist, I approach the problem of breast cancer differently than doctors and orthodox medical researchers. I then go on to explain how I used my training and experience to cope with all the orthodox types of treatment a breast cancer patient is likely to undergo, including surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. I explain the treatments clearly and simply and give lots of practical tips to help you cope: for example, how to avoid or minimize hair loss during chemotherapy. In this chapter I have tried to make you feel as if you have a good and caring friend guiding you toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

Scientists can often seem to be rather strange people.

The truth is, scientists are different — we're trained to be. Let me explain what I mean by using the story I tell when I first lecture to new students at one of the universities I visit. It comes from a wonderful children's story you may already be familiar with: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In this magical book the little prince draws a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But when he shows his masterpiece to grown-ups and asks them whether they are frightened by the picture, they ask why they should be frightened by a picture of a hat. It is the ability to see that the hat is a boa constrictor digesting an elephant that distinguishes the best scientists.

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a coloured pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My drawing Number One. It looked like this:

Let me give you a well-known example to show you what I mean. What sort of person sees an apple fall from a tree, wonders what force is drawing it down toward the earth — and then goes on to develop the whole concept of gravity?

Here's another example. What sort of person leaves a plate of glass coated with photographic emulsion next to a piece of granite in a drawer and, when he notices that the emulsion appears to have been damaged by "emanations" coming from the granite, does not simply curse and throw it away but instead deduces that previously unknown particles and rays have been emitted from the rock — and discovers radioactivity?

And one more. What sort of person attempts to culture bacteria in a petri dish, finds the experiment has gone "moldy," yet does not simply throw it away but instead looks carefully, observes that something in the fungus has killed the bacteria, and discovers penicillin — thereby establishing the basis for the development of modern antibiotics?

All three people — Sir Isaac Newton, Henri Bequerel, and Sir Alexander Fleming — saw things a little bit differently. It is this ability to see a familiar situation from a different viewpoint or angle that probably makes scientists seem rather odd to other people. But sometimes it results in a major leap forward in our understanding of the natural world.

Thinking like a creative scientist is more a state of mind than anything to do with training or education (although increasingly, we need to know and understand more and more facts before we can contribute new ideas).

This book sees things a little bit differently. For many decades, women have lived in the shadow of a devastating disease that continues to kill a high proportion of sufferers and that is associated in many women's minds with treatments involving invasive surgery, irradiation, or chemicals with frightening side effects. The disease is, of course, breast cancer. The only hope we are given is that with enough expenditure on research, we might one day find a truly effective treatment. Sadly, that day has been a very long time coming.

In these pages I want to take you on a journey. Partly it is the story of my own learning experiences with breast cancer, which I have suffered from five times and eventually conquered. But mainly it is the story of a new and rather different way of seeing, understanding, and treating this disease.

It is my hope that this book will serve two purposes. First, I want it to be directly useful to you, the reader. The straightforward advice and simple lifestyle suggestions it contains will be of practical benefit to every woman in significantly reducing the risk of developing breast cancer. If you happen to be that one woman in ten who has developed breast cancer, then you will also find much additional information here, which will give you a better chance of survival overall and help you to cope with rigorous treatment methods.

Second, it is vitally important that this book ignite a debate within the scientific and medical communities. Science is, at heart, an adversarial process. Progress is made by vigorous cross-questioning of your own and others' work. This book puts forward a new perspective on breast and prostate cancer and backs it up with compelling evidence from the scientific literature. The inescapable conclusion is that relatively small augmentations to the orthodox medical therapies currently being used in clinics and hospitals would result in major improvements in patient survival. For example, providing breast cancer patients with sound dietary advice, as is common in the case of heart disease or diabetes, could greatly increase survival rates. So much suffering could be prevented, and so many lives could be saved, that the evidence must be heard — and acted upon — with the very greatest urgency.

HOW MY STORY BEGAN

I didn't choose to study breast cancer — it chose me.

I first stumbled into science because I was an instinctive feminist. The boys at my local grammar school could choose among Latin, art, and physics as options, while at the girls' school we could choose from only Latin, art, and cookery. Although Latin was my best subject, I did not like it and resented the time spent on something that, as a teenager, I could see little point in. So I led a campaign for the girls to be offered the same choices as the boys and, for my efforts, became hoist with my own petard when I was obliged to study physics just as the boys did. Without quite realizing it, I had started on the road to becoming a scientist.

At school I occasionally regretted what I had done, but at university I literally fell in love with the scientific subject I had chosen to do — geochemistry. I was the only woman to pursue the subject in the final year; however, I was so dedicated and such a perfectionist that I had some problems. For example, after my final year examinations I ran away because I believed I had failed my exams. In fact, when my professor finally tracked me down it was to tell me that I had gained a first class honors degree.

After leaving university I married a young doctor who subsequently trained as an army psychiatrist, and had a son, named Mark. Our marriage failed and, in a protracted and painful custody battle, I lost my son to my ex-husband and his new wife, a psychologist. This has been a source of intense and chronic stress for the last thirty years of my life. Four years after we separated, I married my present husband, Peter, who, like me, is an earth scientist. We have two children, Emma, now twenty-five, and Tom, now eighteen. You will read about them later.

I was lucky to be employed by the British Geological Survey (BGS) as only the second woman scientist in its history. (Women had previously been employed only in a technical capacity.) I am now the Chief Scientist of the organization, and I hope my position is helping to encourage other women to progress in what in the past has been a very male-dominated subject.

Geochemistry is about the chemistry of the earth. My specialty is in understanding the chemistry of the surface of the earth, especially concentrations of chemicals where these occur either as natural concentrations in ore deposits or as a result of man's activity; for example, where there are landfill sites or contaminated land. I have frequently worked with biochemists, veterinarians, epidemiologists, and medical geographers looking at the impact of chemicals in the environment on the health of humans, animals, and crops. Early in my career, between 1975 and 1977, I served on a Royal Society committee concerned with geochemistry and health. Since that time, my team of scientists at the British Geological Survey has been concerned with a wide range of human health problems related to the environment. Some of the methods we have developed allow us to make highly reproducible high-resolution maps showing the distribution of chemicals over the surface of the earth. We are able to look on our computer screens at the distribution of, say, arsenic and uranium (as potentially toxic elements) or zinc or iron (trace elements essential to animal and human health) in the same way people can look at Earth's physiography — using remotely sensed photographs from space. Almost from the beginning, these images, although intended for geologists, created a lot of interest among veterinarians, who found them helpful in diagnosing environmental and nutritional animal diseases in Britain. It was by working with them that I first began to learn of some of the amazing connections between geochemistry and biochemistry. I also learned, when I was ill, that veterinary rather than medical literature provided the most fundamental answers based on biochemistry. Eventually I established a team that is regarded as the best in the world in tackling health problems related to anomalous levels of trace elements in the environment — for example, diseases caused by high levels of arsenic or fluoride or by deficiencies in iodine, selenium, cobalt, or zinc in soils and/or water supplies. This is a particular problem in many developing countries.

Very recent work that the BGS team has conducted, which has received wide publicity, deals with the problem of arsenic contamination in water from wells in Bangladesh. There the levels of arsenic in water can be so high that many people develop skin lesions — their skin becomes black and thickened — that in a significant proportion of sufferers become cancerous.

What I had learned as a result of this type of environmental detective work time and time again was that until you identified the fundamental cause of such problems, there was little or nothing that could be done to help the affected individuals. And until you've found the cause (whether it's of breast cancer or any other disease) and effectively neutralized it, you can never, ever claim to have "solved" the problem.

Until 1987 I had no interest in cancer because, like most people, I never imagined that it could happen to me. I had never smoked or sunbathed, rarely drank alcohol, and ate what most experts would consider to be a healthy diet. I even checked to make sure that the cosmetics I used contained no harmful chemicals. My lifestyle was hectic, certainly (it still is!), but no more stressful than many other women's.

Then, one Friday evening in September of that year, my life changed forever.

I was in northern Canada examining gold deposits before attending a major scientific conference in Toronto. I was working on a project aimed at understanding how gold, which is the rarest element on earth, could become concentrated by factors of up to about 10,000 times by natural geologic processes to form minable gold deposits. I was feeling pleased because I had begun to see clues that would lead to new theories and models, which subsequently I published in peer-reviewed papers (see here) and in a textbook I wrote over the next few years. It had been a grueling day working down in the gold mine. It was hot, sweaty, dirty work, not to mention noisy and dusty, and I couldn't wait to get back to my hotel and the luxury of soap, hot water, and fresh towels.

Finally back in my room, I dried myself and returned to my bedroom to search for a bra. As I was walking around topless hunting for my underwear, I suddenly saw in the low-angle, late-afternoon sunlight a lump about the size of a large pea just under the skin of my left breast. I felt it and was immediately overwhelmed with fear and panic; my mouth went dry and I felt sick. I knew without a doubt that I had breast cancer. Over the next week or so, I was to become very familiar with the feel of the cancer. I was surprised by how hard it felt — like a compressed rubber ball surrounding one of the ducts in my left breast. I was angry with myself for not having examined my breasts before, but somehow I had never thought the advice applied to me. I was only 42 — surely too young to get cancer? My family and loved ones, my developing career, the many happy and productive years I had always imagined to be ahead of me ... In one heart-stopping moment, everything came crashing to a very full stop.

After the initial shock had subsided somewhat, I tried to think what to do. My husband was working in Jamaica and I had no contact telephone number (this is common among geologists), and my children were both staying with their grandmother. In any case, I saw no point in upsetting them. The first thing I did was to telephone one of my oldest and dearest friends. Dr. John Camac had been my doctor throughout my childhood and was still my mother's doctor. Despite the fact that it must have been about midnight in Britain, he was wonderful to me. He guided me through a careful self-examination. He knew me well enough not to give me false reassurances and we agreed that the lump that I had found probably was cancer but that it appeared to be very localized and could probably be treated by lumpectomy on my return to Britain. With his advice and the help of a friend in Canada, I decided to stay for the conference until I had honored my commitments, but also to go to the famous Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto for an examination and diagnosis.

I thus spent the next week alternately being a professional scientist chairing sessions or giving lectures in front of an audience of about 800 people; attending a specialist breast clinic for examinations and biopsies, finally to be given the diagnosis of cancer; and sitting alone or with friends feeling like a terrified 5-year-old worrying about what the future held. Most people have some attractive feature — for example, long legs, beautiful hair or eyes, and so on. In my case, it had been my boobs. I had a small waist and shapely breasts. Before I was married, my surname was Lunn and this led to two of my teenage nicknames — busty Lunn or lusty bun! The thought of losing one of my breasts terrified me. Would it mean that people would treat me as an object of pity? Would my colleagues joke about me?

By the time I returned to London, my local doctor had already managed to get me an appointment with the breast cancer clinic in a leading London teaching hospital, the Charing Cross Hospital. I shall never forget the scene that greeted me on my first visit. The waiting room was full to bursting with strained-looking women and their supporters; the atmosphere was thick with fear and anxiety; there was no conversation, and mostly we avoided even making eye contact with each other. Even then, I noted that most of the women appeared well groomed but were of different ages, different shapes and builds, and with different breast sizes. There were two black women, one woman of Indian appearance, one woman of Middle Eastern appearance, but no Eastern women. Looking back I realize that I was already searching for clues about the cause of breast cancer by looking for common factors among the women affected. Of course, if it were that easy someone would have identified the factors long ago, but it was impossible for me to suppress my instincts as a scientist. Seeing those scared faces — and knowing how scared I felt, too — was the first time I fully understood what a common disease breast cancer is, and how dreadful and widespread is the damage it causes to women and their families and friends.

Over the months and years that followed my first visit to that clinic, I made it my business to learn as much as I could about this devastating disease. In times of great personal crisis, people usually fall back on the fundamental things they know best and trust most. For some, it may be their religious faith. For others, it could be close friends and loved ones. In my case, when disaster struck, I fell back on what I trusted most: my scientific training.

And that's what saved my life.

HOW SCIENCE SERVES US — AND WHY IT SOMETIMES DOESN'T

A good scientist will see things a little bit differently from most people. As a science "insider," I'd like to tell you something about the way science works, which will help you make sense of the differing approaches that scientists have adopted toward breast cancer.

When I lecture to my students, I like to ask them to visualize science as a mighty oak tree — a tree of knowledge, if you like. Start deep down under the earth, at the very tips of the ever-probing roots. This is where lots of discoveries are constantly being made and new facts found. Then some of these are brought together to form larger roots, and finally, the whole knowledge can be assembled to give a total or holistic trunk to the tree. This last function — the assembling of disparate bits of information to give a new insight or theory or sometimes a major breakthrough — has often been achieved by one individual with a grasp of many or all of the different aspects of a problem, who has the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to make all the necessary connections. Finally, this newly acquired knowledge flows to the branches and leaves, as the information is communicated to the world at large — where it may be used for good or ill.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Your Life in Your Hands by Jane A. Plant. Copyright © 2001 Jane A. Plant. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgments,
Welcome,
1. The Hat, The Boa Constrictor, and The Scientist,
2. Cells Behaving Badly,
3. The Third Strawberry,
4. Rich Woman's Disease,
5. The Plant Program — The Food Factors,
6. The Plant Program — The Lifestyle Factors,
7. Reflections from West to East,
Further Reading,
Index,
Copyright,