Patient Report
Carole Conquers
Cancer - One Woman's Odyssey
by Carole Bradford
On March 25, 1993, Carole Bradford faced two key events
in her life: she was turning a young-looking 53 - and she was to undergo
a lumpectomy to remove what she hoped (indeed, prayed) was a benign
cyst.
What else could it be? Certainly not the feared "C"
word.
"I remember thinking what kind of cosmic joke it
would be if I, Carole Bradford, would come down with breast cancer.
No way, Jose!" she recalled.
Why should she not think this way? After all, she was
the hard-driving CEO of California-based American Biologics, an international
bio-tech and nutritional supplement company whose origins dated back
to the laetrile wars of the 1970s.
She "ate right," took up to 30 vitamin/mineral/enzyme
tablets a day, and was fully aware of the nature of cancer.
Of equal or greater importance, she was the globe-trotting
wife of Dr. Robert W. Bradford, the founder of American Biologics, the
scientific director and co-founder of American Biologics-Mexico SA Medical
Center in Tijuana, the co-founder of the Committee for Freedom of Choice
in Cancer Therapy, (the reason for the nationwide "decriminalization''
moves for laetrile in the 1970s/1980s), the author or co-author of numerous
books and scores of research monographs on the metabolic management
of cancer and degenerative diseases, the primary author of the "Primordial
Thesis of Cancer." the reason behind the textbook delineating Oxidology
as a medical subspecialty, and, of more recent vintage, the pioneer/developer
and worldwide patent holder of the Bradford Variable Projection Microscopy
system (BVPM¨) and the two revolutionary peripheral blood tests HLB
and HRBM (LBA) he developed that assess morphological changes in the
blood as a means of evaluation of balanced body chemistry (homeostasis).
Carole Bradford had circumnavigated the globe more than
once as the good right arm of Robert Bradford, and had sat in on as
many or more scientific sessions on cancer, degenerative disease and
microscopy lectures as any licensed professional. She knew cancer intimately:
it was in her family, among her friends. She knew what it was, what
it could do.
"I had had cysts for several years, so had my mother,
and my grandmother had died of breast cancer. But there was something
different about this lump," she recalled. "I could feel this
one easily, since it was growing fast - and it was associated with a
lot of heat."
She remembered some "orthodox" miscues along
the way:
Three years before, in 1990, she had been at the American
Biologics (AB) hospital for her annual three-day trip for rejuvenation
treatment: some live cells, chelation, blood work, Dioxychlor "drips."
She had a breast cyst at the time and she recalled that a staff surgeon
had encouraged her to have a needle biopsy, "just to make sure."
"Of course I can't be sure, but I think that is
what they would call 'the initial insult.' I don't feel right about
biopsies and I'll never do one again," she said.
Carole Bradford now believes that she was incubating
a malignant process in a minimally active state at least since that
time (1990) but was keeping it under control with her disciplined diet
and supplements.
By January 1993, this fast-growing cyst had her worried.
She did another "orthodox" procedure - an ultrasound assay
of the right breast. The ultrasound spotted an area of inflammation
but the official analysis was that it was just another cyst.
Because she was so busy at the office she did not feel
she could take the time away from her duties to have the cyst removed
then. So she waited three months until her birthday, March 25, 1993,
to have the lumpectomy, which she undertook while wide awake and following
the procedure with keen interest. "When I saw the tumor in the
operating room I exclaimed "God - that's big!" The tumor was
4cm x 4-1/2 cm x 3.8 cm plus extra tissue taken - it looked like a golfball.
After five days, Carole Bradford went back to her routine:
long hours (up to 12 deskside) at her American Biologics office in Chula
Vista, California, with endless telephone calls, constant involvement
in the routine operation of a thriving business and all that went with
it, with scant time available to enjoy her beautiful sprawling ranch
in east San Diego County.
Two weeks later, on April 9, she was sitting at her
desk when Robert Bradford entered her office. He had just been on the
phone with Rodrigo Rodriguez, MD, the veteran medical director of the
AB-Mexico hospital. He in turn had already heard from the University
of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic Department of Surgical Pathology, where
the lumpectomy sections had been sent.
Carole Bradford, remembered it well:
"Bob came in and sat down in front of my desk.
His behavior was very calm. He just said it all at once: it was confirmed
that I had breast cancer. It was a 'high-grade infiltrating ductal cell
carcinoma of the right breast, Bloom-Richardson grade 3.' So I'm just
sitting there trying to take it all in. Not an easy moment.
"But within two minutes I was asking Bob to check
my blood on the microscope. I wanted to see what my blood looked like.
And I needed to see it for myself."
"But I never had this feeling of, 'Why me - 'Why
not me?' I'd been through this with enough patients to know not to be
too negative, even if the information was tough to take. I do remember
one thought, looking back, that really sank in: being who I was, and
what we were involved in, how could I not pull through? I didn't sleep
very well that first night, though. It was really a rude awakening."
Working side-by-side for years with medical maverick
Robert Bradford, she had come to have enormous admiration for him and
all that he had done, particularly in helping to get the "AB"
hospital functioning in Tijuana. He and the old nucleus group of the
activist Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy Inc., had
formed the first Bradford-oriented medical center in 1975 (Cydel Clinic
later called Manner Clinic).
"I thought, 'Of course I'll pull through this.
My God, haven't we all been working for this? Don't we have the best
therapies and techniques available? Does anyone know more about cancer
than we do?' I decided then and there I was going to do everything to
beat this thing. I was lucky. I had access to every conceivable cancer
therapy. I was well backgrounded in the subject matter, and I had a
brilliant husband who would be directing my treatment in every way."
The Bradfords' general belief is that the earlier signs
of a possible malignant process were masked because Carole was nutritionally
doing all the right things. But between her rejuvenation visits and
blood analyses several things had happened:
Both were travelling extensively to Europe and China,
where there has been a major effort to use the Bradford microscopy system
and blood tests as therapeutic modalities. Too, Carole was taking very
personally some personnel upheavals at work.
"I'm not trying to make excuses here," she
said. "But I am saying that I was extremely stressed by these problems.
Aside from that, until the diagnosis came like a proverbial knock on
the head, my favorite place was my desk and I spent a great deal of
time there. In retrospect, I can only think now that the needle biopsy
of 1990 and this personnel problem in late 1992 were what it took to
knock over the dominoes and bring my malignancy to the fore."
The "coagulation" blood test (HLB) did in
fact pick up areas of suspicious inflammation, adrenal stress and bowel
flora imbalances.
The AB hospital had become a major center for the use
of another test - AMAS, or the test for antimalignin antibody, preformed
in Boston; and the five-parameter Augusti test, pioneered in France
by Dr. Yves Augusti, a collaborator of the Bradford Research Institute
(BRI). Neither has received the full blessings of the US medical establishment,
but the AB hospital and BRI incorporate both as useful monitors.
Admitted to the AB hospital the day before the scheduled
lumpectomy, Carole Bradford's Augusti test had shown a suspicious rise
in the "allergic" parameter, frequent in cancer cases. The
AMAS test was slightly "positive." Later, from medical orthodoxy,
a breast cancer "marker," CA 15-3, turned out to be very high.
"Okay, the results were in. It was cancer, no doubt
about that, and it was happening to me, Carole Bradford," she recalled.
"So I decided to take charge of my illness and
created with Bob my own injectable program, what we later came to call
the 'Bradford cocktail.' I had a hospital at my disposition, and a collaborating
medical staff. I could have anything done I wanted to."
AB-Mexico's primary claim to fame, by 1993, was already
in the cancer department. Since creation of the original AB medical
group in 1975 and the opening of American Biologics-Mexico in 1980,
the AB team had seen upwards of 18,000 cancer cases. It was securing
some kind of positive responses in 95% and reaching what American orthodox
oncology described as a "cure" - meaning five years free of
symptoms - in at least 20%, a remarkable feat at a time when metastatic,
or "spread" cancer, was "curable" in the US about
9% of the time.
Carole Bradford then began her incredible treatment
odyssey. But it began with an attitude change:
"I knew I was going to have to spend a long time
away from my desk, resting in one of our recliner treatment chairs at
AB-Mexico. I was going to have to learn to relax, read books, watch
television, whatever. After the first week of this, I told myself, 'Hey,
this isn't too bad now.' Several weeks later I began to play tennis
on a more regular basis, to swim, took Spanish language classes, and
really began working on getting de-stressed.
"This was the beginning of healing and I have to
add that, thank God, I was never in pain. I did not have to go through
the horrors of awful pain that I have seen and heard about from so many
patients."
Carole Bradford was an "outpatient" at the
AB Medical Center at least four times a week, returning to her desk
at Chula Vista for only a few hours in the afternoons. "Suddenly,
I found I didn't really need to spend all those hours at the desk. All
that paperwork was somehow getting done by able staff members and it
became less all-consuming to me," she remembered.
"I kept a record of my visits to the clinic for
my injections, like a score card and after 100 injection days I stopped
counting. Now that is a lot of injections." Her daily program consisted
of:
In the first "drip bag" she received: 9 grams
Laetrile, 25 grams of vitamin C, 10 cc of GE-OXY 132 (germanium sesquioxide),
10 cc of reduced glutathione, 5 cc of pangamic acid, 16 mg of superoxide
dismutase (SOD), 10 cc of NAC (N-acetyl-cysteine), 2 cc of thymus extract,
5 cc of licorice extract (Biorizin), 10 cc of taurine, 3 grams of sodium
butyrate, and 20 cc of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide).
In her second "drip bag" she received 100
cc saline with 10 cc of Dioxychlor, the oxidative agent pioneered by
the BRI.
Her oral program, which reached up to 100 tablets or
capsules daily during 1993, consisted of around 30 items: liquid Vitamin
A in the form of A-E emulsion (200,000 units), between 15 to 20 grams
of Vitamin C, proteolytic enzymes in the form of the AB product Inflazyme
Forte, antioxidant enzymes and other substances in the form of the AB
product Oxy-5000, acidophilus/lactobacillus combinations as Bio-Dophilus
Complex, co-enzyme Q10, three different combinations of "omega"
fatty acids, spleen glandular, adrenal glandular, a combination of vitamins/minerals/nutrients
as AB's Multiplex, shark cartilage, selenium, licorice extract (Glycyron),
Basic 9 minerals complex, thymus glandular, GE-132 oral (germanium sesquioxide),
laetrile (amygdalin tablets), benzaldehyde, mammary glandular, beta-carotene,
herbal specialty products called Coleus forskohlu, Ascorfutaruplex,
Lapachoplex (from the South American pau d'arco therapy), homeopathic
burdock root, chitin (crab extract) and apricot kernels (a natural high
source of laetrile and other useful nutrients.)
She also took a combination of homeopathic injectable
extracts from the pioneering Heel Company of Europe which consisted
of 12 separate products including mistletoe extract (Iscador, from Viscum
album).
And that was not all:
For 90 days daily, and then once or twice a week for
many more months, she utilized treatments by another Bradford-pioneered
breakthrough:
ACN (Accelerated-Charge Normalization), which alters
the negative tissue potential usually found in breast cancer to the
normal or positive potential characteristic of breast tissue without
cancer.
By establishing a positive tissue potential, immune
cells, being negatively charged, are attracted to the malignant site
and greatly enhance the body's immune response against cancer.
In addition to the obvious therapeutic advantage there
is also a diagnostic or assessment advantage in measuring the tissue
potential which can be related to tumor activity. In Carole's case,
the tumor's negative charge exceeded 200 millivolts. This is over 100
thousand times the potential required to repel the immune system's macrophages
from the breast tumor. In other words, her body did not recognize there
was an ongoing malignancy. Amazingly, it took over nine months of integrative
therapy for the potential in her breast to normalize.
Also "working" was Carole Bradford's adherence
to the anti-cancer diet long followed at AB-Mexico and also detailed
in the recipe book she co-authored with Beverly Novak: Cookbook for
Healthful Living.
"Another reason we dared not fail," she said.
"It would be bad press! If we couldn't save me, then who could?"
Within a six-month period, most all her blood tests
were turning back to normal. "The only orthodox things I ever did
in my cancer program were the lumpectomy and yes, tamoxifen. It was
suggested that I needed this, particularly against breast cancer. But
I took this only for about 60 days.
"I just knew that it was doing something abnormal
when I began having daily cervical discharges. So after two months,
I said, 'No more.' I would never do it again. Some things are just intuitive
in nature and you have to listen to your body! Once again, I was taking
charge of my health, not the doctors."
(It would subsequently be learned that, however useful
tamoxifen might be in the short term against breast cancer, it increases
a woman's risk of both endometriosis and cervical cancer. It still remains
an optional treatment within an integrative program.)
In May of 1993 she allowed a follow-up mammogram of
her left breast since AB doctors had noticed abnormal tissue and feared
that the cancer had spread.
"I have my doubts about mammograms too. I wouldn't
do them again, either. Squeezing the breast into a vise can't be any
good. And it seems barbaric," she assessed.
(Some research, particularly in Canada, has sustained
her fears: clamping breasts into a vise for a mammogram can indeed have
the effect of damaging tissues and enhancing an existing malignant process,
at least in some cases.)
"Doctors, including some of our own, kept pestering
me about using chemotherapy, because of a suspicious lesion in the left
breast showing up in the mammography. One doctor insisted I have a needle
biopsy of the left breast. Re-thinking what happened with the initial
needle biopsy in 1990, I refused.
"Weeks later, the surgeon came to me as I sat in
the treatment room and waved his finger in my face, telling me, 'You
have a fast-growing tumor and you're not taking it seriously. You could
die.' He had suggested a double mastectomy or at least a 'quad.' I rejected
all of this.
"I remember saying, 'We're a holistic hospital,
we've been in this business for 20 years now and that's what we're all
about. I believe that's what is best for me and we must prove that we're
right.' Maybe the big thing is that I never accepted the fact that I
might die of cancer. I said in essence, "We're into holistic/integrative
therapy. This is what we're all about."
But she was also aware of the developing doctrine of
the true nature of cancer: it is not a tumor, but a malignant process;
it is not "curable" in the sense that all aspects of it vanish
forever; it is susceptible to long-term control, even for the whole
of a lifetime. But you don't "get over" cancer and follow
the same lifestyle as before. The key word is "control" -
not "cure."
"I am a very disciplined person. I said on more
than one occasion to my husband when he would forget to take his 'few'
vitamins; 'It's a good thing I'm the one who has cancer - because of
the discipline necessary to stay on the program.' I was able to stick
with the program," she recalled.
Carole Bradford did stick with the program. Year in
and year out, one blood test after another, reducing her oral program
back to 30 tablets or more, occasionally taking "drips," even
cramming 12,000-gauss magnets into her brassiere as a daily kind of
localized magnetic therapy, in conjunction with ACN.
Now the magic date was looming; March of 1998 - if she
had five years free of symptoms, she would be "cured" by the
definition of standard Western oncology.
"Even though we in holistic medicine perhaps laugh
at the premise that after exactly the fifth year you're instantly 'cured,'
the mind still plays games with you and for me, even though I had been
completely healthy for the past perhaps 3 years, I still celebrated
the fact," She remembered.
Carole had another birthday - March 25, 1998 - with
a series of health assessments and blood tests. Her birthday gift this
year was the best of all:
She was certifiably free of cancer!
(The complete Carole Bradford program is available by
contacting American Biologics, 1180 Walnut St., Chula Vista, California
91911 USA; 619-429-8200 or fax 619-429-8004.)