There’s no one cancer cure. There are dozens. But choose wisely.

If medical science hasn’t found the cure for cancer, neither can we.

And yet, we try. There must be something out there, something miraculous, proven, perhaps ancient and overlooked.

Alternative cures run from the essential to the dubious to the absurd. C’mon—coffee enemas? If squirting cold espresso up my bodunkus four times a day is the cure, then I surrender.

When I was diagnosed with AML leukemia, my beloved Sadie Mae was naturally desperate to find a definitive cure for me—a nonconventional one, to supplement chemotherapy. She researched ceaselessly, and found several. I considered them all, seriously, and two (which I’ll describe below) have saved me.

Among those I rejected was a $4,500 “Rife Machine” that uses harmonic vibration to kill cancer cells. It works—in a Petri dish (remember those from high school biology lab?)—but has never worked, credibly, in a person.

We tried cannabis oil, because “Cannabis Kills Cancer!”, its proponents enthuse. We abandoned it after a few months with no change in my blood counts, but a plummet in my energy and motivation and a perpetual, fuzzy-edged “stoner bliss.” The final straw was the morning I spent laughing at the whimsical shape of dog biscuits, while I missed a work deadline.

First thing’s first: Conventional medicine. It’s proven.

I will take the proven cure with a 10% chance over a dubious one claiming 100%.

After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer—the one very treatable form of it—Apple’s Steve Jobs famously delayed medical intervention for nine months in favor of alternative treatments. Only when he continued to deteriorate did he seek medical intervention. “Jobs’s faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life…He essentially committed suicide,” said the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s integrative medicine department.

An aggressive cancer is like HIV: you have no time to futz around with the unproven.

Jobs appeared to distrust the bugbear “Western Medicine,” supposedly pirated by its evil twin Big Pharma, who don’t want you to know about the healing power of cannabis, coffee enemas, Rife machines, ad nauseum. Why not? Because Big Pharma can’t patent or profit from those. Besides, Western Medicine doesn’t want to cure you; it wants a lifelong dependent with health insurance.

Nonsense. Western Medicine saved my mother, my mother-in-law, Lance Armstrong, Melissa Etheridge, Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America,” and millions more. It has cured hepatitis C—that was decades in coming, but Western Medicine persisted. It enables HIV patients to live normally, versus the practically 100% fatality of the 1980s.

An aggressive cancer is like HIV: you have no time to futz around with the unproven.

Yeah, but you’re not cured!

Not yet.

Still, my healers at Dana Farber Cancer Institute succeed wonderfully.

Never once have they discussed with Sadie Mae and me “running out of options” or “turning our attention now to the quality of your (brief) life.” Instead, they finesse my treatment like chess masters, to stabilize and sustain me, while they diligently search for a promising trial. True, four such trials have come to naught; but people strike gold on their sixth, seventh, eighth trials. With their intervention, I live with acute leukemia as if it were the far-more-survivable chronic form.

Plus, my healers succeed with others, and I meet those survivors every week, while awaiting blood draws or infusions. My favorite was the Italian grandmother, cured for months, who on Christmas Eve Day was in for a routine blood check. She demanded “How long dis gonna take? I gotta get de Hell oudda heah.” It wouldn’t be a Buon Natale for her giant family without her frutti di mare feast.

My turn will come.

Think integrative, not alternative treatments.

Living within an hour’s drive of Dana Farber, I’d be a fool to smirk at it.

Still, as an aphorism goes, “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.” Trust in medicine; but don’t expect it to succeed on its own.

“Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.”

The practice of integrative medicine combines conventional treatment with diet, exercise, herbal treatments, meditation, what have you. It ain’t quackery: The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine is a collaboration between Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (partnered with Dana Farber). It’s worth noting that Steve Jobs lived for eight years, post-diagnosis, with integrative treatments; but it appears he lost too much ground in those early months.

Two integrated therapies sustain me.

First is an anticancer diet. In her search for my salvation, Sadie Mae bought the book Anticancer: A New Way of Life (see sidebar of “Essential Knowledge”). It detailed how cancer spreads (metastasis); how it thrives; and how specific foods combat those mechanisms.

For example, garlic, green tea and turmeric are clinically, credibly proven to cause apoptosis, a sort-of suicide by cancer cells. Carrots inhibit cancer cell growth, as do beets. (Gross. Beets smell like freshly-turned grave dirt.)

The results? An anticancer, largely organic diet took 30 dumpy pounds off me and gave me energy when I should be losing it, and raised my neutrophils—healthy white blood cells—from being dangerously low (putting me at risk from death by a head cold) to near normal levels, in perhaps three weeks.

If diet proved the second most-powerful alternative treatment for me, faith is the first.

Serenity is, perhaps, the most powerful alternative treatment.

I count every day that I spend above ground as a miracle; and post-diagnosis, I’ve had 1,007 such miracles, as of this morning. My vigor is a miracle—with my red blood count, I should be riding a Hoveround with an oxygen tank in the basket.

God did all of that, and can cure me of AML as well.

(Here too, Sadie Mae guided me. For years, she told me of God’s promises, and one day I listened.)

Serenity is, perhaps, the most powerful alternative treatment.

The book Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds (linked in the Essential Knowledge sidebar) tells wonderful stories of people who were “sent home to die,” but survived.

One commonality is serenity—however you achieve it.

Shin Terayama, a Japanese physicist, was sent home in 1984 to die from inoperable, metastasized kidney cancer. His doctors halted treatment. Shin accepted death, but after decades of a panicked, fearful work life, he wished to achieve serenity in his final weeks. He watched the sunrise atop his apartment building every morning. He meditated through breathing exercises and aligning his chakras (a Hindu and Buddhist practice). He took up again the cello that he loved in his youth, and switched to a macrobiotic diet. He refused to hate his cancer; rather, he loved it like a child he had created.

To both his astonishment and that of his healers, he lived, and lives today. Shin didn’t battle cancer. He swam it like a river, neither resisting nor panicking.

Shin inspired me to look into chakra work, much of which is clearing “blockages,” letting go of miseries, injuries, pride. But the Christian faith with which I was familiar had similar answers.

I had much of which to let go. Between ADHD (clinically diagnosed) and chronic, lifelong depression, I hadn’t enjoyed a peaceful day since the crib. No self-help book or antidepressant cracked my code; but Christ did, guiding me to peaceful ways to think, to act, to be. If I am to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:36-40), anger and wrath are impossible. Knowing that “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7), I came to believe that fear is faith in Satan, not in God. And, fear can be chased off with Jesus’ words, “Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” Fear—even of cancer—is simply against my faith.

Imagine what such serenity can do, integrated with chemotherapy? Or, to prevent cancer in the first place?

Remember David’s sling.

I pray to God, “Anoint my healers and their medicines as you anointed David and blessed his shepherd’s sling.” Clearly, he does.

And, He created the foods He knew would sustain the very creatures of his design—foods like legumes, garlic, papaya, and beets, all with anticancer properties. Pringles and cream soda (once my favorite snack) are Man’s doing, and did me no good.

So, chemo means survival. For some, it is all we need. But can we take that chance? I am certain that integrating chemo with diet and faith allow me to thrive. An even deeper faith, plus a new clinical trial, will cure me.

Godspeed. 9.