ja_mageia

2009-09-18 Peter Starr Prostate Cancer Alternative

September 18, 2009, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
© copyright 2009, Prescription 2000, Inc.
www.prescription2000.com

Download as PDF | Return To Audio Interview

KIRK HAMILTON: Welcome to Staying Healthy Today, a health-oriented radio show committed to bringing you key experts in the fields of nutrition, prevention and integrative medicine.

Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, our mission is simple: To provide you credible and usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "Learn About Effective Alternatives To Treating Prostate Cancer - The Best Of Traditional Approaches And One Man's Passion To Educate Others." Peter Starr is a producer, director and writer. He has been honored with 14 international awards for filmmaking. He has produced more than 40 televisions specials, two documentaries and numerous television commercials. He has produced records for major companies such as MGM and United Artists. He has produced and hosted national radio programs and interviewed major celebrities such as Paul McCartney, Tommy Smothers, and Peter Fonda among others. He has won international radio programming awards, numerous Telly awards and writes featured articles for national magazines and has a regular column in Healthcare Weekly Review. Now he is producing a documentary on prostate cancer.

My journey with Peter is that I was at a medical conference about a month ago - an integrative medicine conference and I was talking to a lab director friend of mine and Peter was introduced to me and he allowed me to kind of ‘hang out' with him. He started telling me his story about prostate cancer and his journey to interview people from all over the world and do a documentary because he felt very strongly about certain things.

So Peter I want to welcome you to the show and thank you so much for taking time out to talk us.

PETER STARR: Kirk it's my pleasure. And one correction there. You weren't hanging out with me. I was begging Jay to introduce me to you, you see!

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I'll take that! That sounds good to me! So how does a motorcycle enthusiast, disc jockey, producer, director and writer eventually come to do a documentary on prostate cancer?

PETER STARR: It started really with the day that I was diagnosed with prostate cancer on June 30, 2004. And it was such a shock. I had gone for a normal physical exam, like we do basically once a year and I hadn't been for two years and the doctor did a - by the way my PSA was a very low 1.2 and had been that way for several years. The doctor did a digital rectal (DRE) exam and he said to me, "I don't like the feel of that so I want you to go see this urologist." So the urologist did a DRE as well. That's a digital rectal exam and he said, "I don't like the feel of that, either. We're going to do a biopsy." Well at that point in time I had absolutely no idea what a biopsy was and so of course I went along with it. Nor did they educate me as to what was going to happen. And what did happen is pretty shocking. And after that, and after the general attitude that was shown to me by the urologist and the way that they send you for second opinions, a little light went on and I said, "You know there's got to be a better way."

KIRK HAMILTON: When you were interviewed by the urologist, did they immediately say after you got the biopsy and the prostate cancer "Here's what we're gonna do" or did you - they say "Think about it or you have some time?"

PETER STARR: No. None of that. The day after the biopsy, the afternoon after the biopsy I got a phone call saying, and it was literally about eight seconds, and I can't say this verbatim but it's pretty close and he said, "Yup, you've got cancer. I want you to read this book by Patrick Walsh and then give me a call and come in to see me." Click.

KIRK HAMILTON: What was the book about by Patrick Walsh? What was that going to tell you?

PETER STARR: Well, Patrick Walsh is has a reputation of calling prostate cancer surgery, the radical prostatectomy, the gold standard and he wrote a book to that effect. And by urologists, Patrick Walsh is ‘God'.

KIRK HAMILTON: Before we get into the rest of your story, I want to backtrack a little bit. Talk about the PSA. You had actually a PSA level that is in the "normal" range is 0 to 4. And I'm going to put a quote around "normal." And 1.2 isn't an astronomically high PSA level. So can you talk about what you learned about PSA levels?

PETER STARR: Basically a PSA is no indicator of cancer. And Thomas Stamey who invented the PSA test before he retired actually came out and said that. The PSA is merely an indicator of inflammation in the prostate. That's all it is. You can have people with high PSAs and no cancer. You can have people with low PSA and I was one of those.

KIRK HAMILTON: If you were going to do this over again, knowing what you know now, so let's say you go in and you get your DRE and they say they feel something abnormal and your PSA was exactly what it was and they would have said okay I would like you to get a biopsy now. What would you have said and done with all your knowledge?

PETER STARR: Absolutely no biopsy! None! I would have gone initially to get a 3D Doppler ultrasound, and I would have gone to the best reader of that scan and worked with him and said, "What it is? And the bottom line is that if you do a biopsy - I mean there's a negative side of biopsies which we can get into if you like as well. But they can tell you you've got cancer. They can tell you based on their opinion - based on the Gleason's scale of how aggressive they think that cancer is. And even that test isn't accurate. But they can give you an idea of how aggressive they think it is. But it doesn't mean anything if you're going to treat your cancer holistically or alternatively.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's stop for a second and talk about the biopsy again. I actually asked Dr. Bach (Bahn) and Dr. Scholz, and Dr. Scholz is the physician I know you see and I asked them, well actually the whole group asked them on their question and answer period at this conference we were just at, "Do biopsies spread prostate cancer?" And both of them said they could find nothing in the literature. What is your opinion?

PETER STARR: Well, they need to look further in the literature because there's two things that I believe and I've seen a lot. I can't quote it to you right this minute. But I found references that 10,000 cells escape the prostate with each of the biopsy cores that they take. But there's two things. Even if that isn't the issue in terms of potentially cancers getting out into the blood stream, look at it the other way. They go in through the rectum and that is not exactly the cleanest place in the body to be puncturing before you put the needle into the prostate.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let's talk about the differences between the standard ultrasound and the 3D ultrasounds because that became very clear to me and after seeing many slides by Dr. Bach. It is Dr. Bach correct? Am I saying it right?

PETER STARR: Bahn. B-A-H-N.

KIRK HAMILTON: Bahn, excuse me. It was very clear that number one if you weren't skilled at doing this you could miss prostate cancers even with a biopsy not having it guided by the 3D Doppler ultrasound. That was number one. And number two the whole art of doing this is so important to see if it is contained and where it is in the prostate compared to just a regular ultrasound. Now you weren't aware of this at all obviously until you got somehow educated.

PETER STARR: Well the first thing is that if you go to a conventional urologist. Not talking about Mark Scholz, who is an oncologist or Dr. Bahn who is a radiologist. Their protocol (conventional urologists) is to give you a biopsy and when they do that they still cannot tell whether the cancer is contained within the prostate or whether it's got actually out of the prostate. What they then do is they will send you for a second opinion and then that second urologist will probably recommend a complete body PET scan and a CAT scan to find out whether are any cancer shows up on it. And only then do they decide, "Well it's okay it's within the cell, you know, and there's nothing else there." And they will recommend a treatment based on that. Their treatments are always generally surgery because that's what urologists do.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's say that you do what you've done. You have your knowledge. You don't get a biopsy and you don't get surgery right away. Tell us what your journey would be. You have the cancer. It's contained within the prostate. You're seeing a physician similar to Dr. Scholz. What would you start doing in your life to treat this chronically?

PETER STARR: First, I came to this conclusion not in the first year or so studying, but about three years into studying this. And all along I was learning new things and putting diets into practice and learning what the body needs in terms of diet or detoxifying heavy metals and that kind of thing. But there's three core issues in my opinion that are involved here. One is what we call "What your body is deficient in?" And that generally is contained within a diet or supplementation of things like vitamin D3. The second thing is, "What your body is toxic with?" And that can be anything from the mercury in the amalgam fillings in your mouth, particularly if you've got root canals as well, right down to arsenic, cadmium, lead, and nickel poisoning, which we pick up from our basic environment. All of which have been found in great numbers in diseased prostates . In fact there was a study at the university in Austria where they showed 30,000 times more mercury in diseased cancerous prostate tissue than in healthy prostate tissue. And there's only two places to get mercury from, and that's the amalgams in your mouth and through the environment in which you work or live. That to me was pretty conclusive when I read that . So that's the second thing...is to detoxify heavy metals from your system. And the third thing is what I call the "emotional component." And now even the Center for Disease Control has said that 85% of chronic diseases have an emotional component. I believe it with cancer to be even higher, and I believe if you don't deal with stress and with the emotional component of the disease you cannot truly cure the disease. And I think if you look at the recidivism rate of cancer within people who have had conventional treatment you know that bears up the scrutiny.

KIRK HAMILTON: I think it was very interesting that one of the participants asked Dr. Scholz, "If you could only do three things. You were diagnosed with prostate cancer, what would you do?" And he said eat a vegetarian diet, do weight training and do spiritual, psychosocial mind-body stuff. And I thought that was very interesting when he pinned down what three things to do....Talk about your journey. So what have you done for yourself? You don't have to get too personal. I'd love you to share just a guideline of what you've done, and then we will get into your documentary and what you're trying to do.

PETER STARR: Well initially I did go looking for that book by Patrick Walsh. It was almost serendipitous when I couldn't find it. And I found a book on the bookshelf by Dr. Larry Clapp called "Prostate Health in 90 Days" and it sort of jumped off the shelf at me so I bought it and read it and I thought, "You know this makes a lot of sense." This was actually written quite a long time ago like in the early 90s and yet I read it and it seemed so much like common sense, but you know I would much prefer to do this than to do what I've read about in terms of conventional surgery or radiation or androgen deprivation. And so I started reading that book and I started doing the fasting, the cleansing fast and I started eating a vegetarian diet and I started cutting things out of my life that I'd become accustomed to like single malt scotch and, you know, coffee. The stuff that wasn't doing my body any good at all because I needed to get my body healthy. I needed to excrete the things in my body that were causing it some trauma and I needed to put in my body foods that would make my body healthy. And that was sort of the first big step and that took about a year to really get into in it in a convincing way. All along I was studying this and I then started to talk to people like in Australia and learned about their treatments they do there. Certainly the exercise thing that Dr. Scholz speaks about. I got involved in a gym. I'd never belonged to a gym before. I started doing yoga. I started doing weight training. All of the things that quite honestly I'd never done before because being a film maker you spent an awful lot of your life sitting in front of an editing machine. I had put on some weight. I was probably 30 pounds heavier than I am today. And I wasn't living a healthy life. I was lazy. I'd watch a lot of television. I'd sit in front of my editing machine and all of that had to change. And I got into exercise and I lost the 30 pounds. I fasted and started to cleanse my body out and I started to feel very healthy. I mean just by doing those small things. My energy level raised. But I was doing 3D Doppler ultrasound scans. I started doing them with a Dr. Bard in New York to start with. I'd fly to New York and get them done, and then I went to Dr. Bard - Bahn, rather, in Ventura who we talked about, and finally with Dr. Scholz who is much more local to me and to be quite honest is someone I feel incredibly comfortable with.

KIRK HAMILTON: Many people, in my experience with cancer, is they feel pressure to do something and it's usually traditional and they have family pressure saying, "You've gotta do something." I've actually had patients who were seeing an alternative urologist across the country and their primary care doctor got rid of the patient, their family said you know you're gonna hurt yourself and just this intense pressure. How did you, as you chose to do the treatments you did? Was there ever pressure from the outside to do something traditional?

PETER STARR: Yes, quite a bit actually. But it's all borne out of fear and what I found was that conventional medicine people would - basically I was told this, "You're gonna die if you don't do this. If you don't let me operate on you you're gonna die." That's not a way to deal with patients you know, in my book anyway. And instead of sort of making me have surgery it made me look somewhere else and what I will tell people today is very, very, very few prostate cancer patients have any urgency whatsoever and so it behooves you to take the time to do the research as to what conventional medicine offers. What they call side effects, which I call direct effects. When you call something a side effect it's like, "Oh that's never going to happen to me!" But you call it a direct effect and people start to take notice of what that effect really is. And I've interviewed a lot of people now with pretty awful side effects, and as I said that's why I call them direct effects. And nobody ever told them or their spouses what to expect.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let's say someone has a newly diagnosed cancer and we're coming from the point of view, you know that they have time. I know that they have some time. How would you direct them to start getting information that's going to help them feel confident enough to step back a moment and say, "I need to really think about what I am going to do to myself?" Where do they get that?

PETER STARR: Well eventually they'll be able to get it in my documentary. That will be the cheapest way and the best way they'll get it because I've spent almost two years on this project and traveled to seven countries around the world seeking out the best doctors and I've traveled and interviewed a lot of patients and talked to them about what would they do if they could live their lives over again. And almost without exception they all said they would not do conventional treatment. And they also told me that nobody ever told them the effects they got from their conventional treatment and that they wished they would have known. And I've had other people I've interviewed that said, "You know, I really like what you're saying about alternative treatment, but I think I prefer what my doctor did," because they were of the percentage that came out unscathed and they haven't lived long enough yet to know whether the cancer's going to return.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I do know that what I share with people now is that I think that the institute that Dr. Scholz helps - he's either director or on the board or directors for the Prostate Cancer Research Institute (PCRI). I think that they do a very good job, and in fact I would like to put a plug and I will have their website (http://www.prostate-cancer.org/) is that you can get a copy of the whole symposium on DVD each year and I think that that would be very instructive for people, and you have in my opinion, you have months to step back and think about things. I mean if you're gonna die in two weeks you're gonna die in two weeks anyway if you've got that severe a cancer.

So let's get into some of the doctors you've talked with all over the world. I'm very intrigued.

PETER STARR: Well some of the people you know very well like Dr. Dean Ornish. Dean Ornish has done the only major study in the United States on diet and prostate cancer. And his results were quite conclusive. You change your diet and become vegetarian and you'll live longer. They took two sets of prostate cancer patients. None of which, by the way, had conventional treatment or treatment of any kind, and one group went on to a vegetarian diet and the other didn't. In the vegetarian diet people their prostate cancer had not progressed, or, got better, whereas the ones that hadn't, either the prostate cancer just stayed the same or got worse. And that's a pretty good study that he has done. I also interviewed Dr. John McDougall who I know you know on diet, and Dr. Gabriel Cousens who is a raw food vegan doctor in Arizona, and then on the other side of that I interviewed Dr. Thomas Cowan from the Weston Price Foundation who has a different perspective on diet because I don't believe there is one concrete silver bullet to curing prostate cancer or cancer of any kind. I think you've got to look at what other people have done from all walks of life and then you make an educated decision. So I interviewed Dr. Thomas Cowan who is in San Francisco. I went to Europe and interviewed Dr. Wolf-Dieter Kessler in northern Germany, Dr Friedrich Douwes in southern Germany about how they do it in Germany. Dr. Thomas Rau in Switzerland, Dr. Tullio Simoncini in Rome who has had some pretty amazing success with very simple treatments there.

KIRK HAMILTON: We've got diet, and it's a whole food diet, and maybe a majority of the practitioners would do it plant based and the Weston Price (follower) would add obviously animal food in there, but what about therapies per se like Dr. Douwes and others.

PETER STARR: Personally I think what they offer - if for instance you did hypothermia as an example which Douwes provides. That to me is a stop-gap. You get some immediate results but it doesn't cure the problem, and it's more conventional in it outlook that they treat the symptom and not the cause. Now if you stay with Douwes long enough and you stay with the system and don't only do the hypothermia they will get into getting your body healthy. Thomas Rau on the other hand, who is in Switzerland, is very much involved in getting a healthy mouth. He certainly believes that if you don't have a healthy mouth you're never going to get rid of prostate cancer. And his point of view is getting the cause rather than the symptom.

KIRK HAMILTON: Is the mouth then the amalgams or is that root canals or everything?

PETER STARR: Root canals and amalgams primarily but any gum disease. If you look at the energy lines, energy meridians that pass through the mouth and then pass through the various organs you can see in a lot of people that there is inflammation or bacteria or a virus that's set up home in that tooth that's relevant to the particular organ. As an example I had a bad very bad root canal in my front tooth and that's right on the central meridian that goes right through the reproductive system. And so when they found that out, when I read about that I'm going, "Oh my God!" First thing I did is went to the dentist and got that removed and they put an implant in. They cleaned the whole thing out because it was a mess in there.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about mind/body people? What did you - did you learn any techniques or just a lot of introspective work on your own?

PETER STARR: No not at all. I think EFT is very good for stress management and I would suggest to anybody that's under any stress to take a look at EFT.

KIRK HAMILTON: Explain EFT for a moment.

PETER STARR: EFT is like a tapping. You tap on various acupressure points on your body and you do it in a particular way and it allows you to remove stress and it's something you can do very quickly. And there are some good schools on it and there's a lot on the internet about it. There happens to be a good practitioner in West Los Angeles here, Aileen Nobles that I would recommend highly. But to teach and to treat with EFT, it's something you can do yourself and that is something to stop you getting into a stressful situation when there's nobody else around to help you and I find that very helpful. There's a - you're familiar I think with Bruce Lipton?

KIRK HAMILTON: Yes.

PETER STARR: Well Bruce Lipton teamed up with a gentleman called Rob Williams and Rob developed a system called Psych-K. And Psych-K is a way of addressing the subconscious so that you can change the subconscious beliefs in your body because as Bruce Lipton pointed out you really are what you believe. The "Biology of Belief" is a great handbook to that.

KIRK HAMILTON: How do you put this together? Is there a couple of books? I mean I can see the diet part being relatively clear. I can see the exercise portion. I can see - well the detoxification is still a minefield of the way different people do things. But how about the mind-body? Or is there a good book that puts it all together or a couple of them that you like?

PETER STARR: Well there isn't a book singularly that I've read that puts that all together unfortunately and I am hoping my documentary will go a long way to that and I will be writing a book after the documentary is finished so that people who prefer to have books can have a book. But there are so many ways that you can look at. One of the other methods of dealing with the emotional side or the emotional trauma of cancer which I am still learning about, but which so far has impressed me more than anything is what they call "German New Medicine." It's something that I am studying very hard right now to fully understand because I believe it deserves a place in my documentary. So, before I actually agree to put this in the documentary I am studying it with a practitioner, and I reckon I am about two or three weeks away from understanding it enough where I can say okay we'll do this in the documentary. But on the surface it's a pretty amazing way to connect emotional trauma with cancer and how to get rid of that emotional trauma and relieve that from the stress system in the body so that part of the body can then concentrate more on getting rid of the cancer.

KIRK HAMILTON: What's the name of your documentary going to be? And I know your website the last time I looked was under reconstruction. Is it available now?

PETER STARR: The website is back up. There's a new trailer on the website. The trailer features some of the doctors that you know and I think it's quite grabbing in what it says.

KIRK HAMILTON: Is this Starr.com or is this...

PETER STARR: No it's HealingArtsMedia.net. That's HealingArtsMedia.net. My foundation is called Healing Arts Education Foundation and that's - we look at ourselves as being an educational facility. We don't practice medicine. We're not a clinic. I'm here to educate people and go out and find out what to do and educate them in it because everything rests on your own personal decision.

KIRK HAMILTON: When do you think this will be ready?

PETER STARR: Oh I wish I could tell you that. I think I mentioned when I met you. The economy has hit us very hard in the production business and we don't have the resources we have when we began this. Investors decided they needed to keep their money in-house. So I'm out there right now trying to raise the rest of the money to complete the documentary but if you were to give me a time date I'd probably say three months.

KIRK HAMILTON: I want to tie this together and kind of close and review a little bit. If I asked you to give me three of your recommendations about the diagnosis of prostate cancer, how you get it diagnosed, what would you say?

PETER STARR: There's only one legal way to diagnose prostate cancer and that is through a biopsy. That's the only legal diagnosis the AMA and conventional medicine will accept. In fact, you cannot in their terms declare being cured of prostate cancer without having a second biopsy. That's how they tell. I would go for 3D Doppler ultrasound and let the person who does that, if he is as good as Mark Scholz is, to take a look at it and they can determine there whether you've got something that is deserving of attention that might be cancerous.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about three lifestyle changes? What would you recommend?

PETER STARR: Stress, number one. Emotional side and stress number one. Followed by diet which includes fasting and the kind of cleansing and really trying to not be afraid. I think fear is a very destructive emotion. The other thing which we haven't touched on is of course hormones. Men that get prostate cancer tend to be estrogen dominant and deficient in testosterone. And conventional medicine will tell you that testosterone feeds prostate cancer. Although there's a lot of documentation now, particularly out of Harvard Medical School that will tell you that's not the case. And there are doctors all over the world including Chris Astill-Smith in England that graphically describes the fact that it's the E2 pathway of methylation that is really the issue. It's estradiol-2 not testosterone.

KIRK HAMILTON: I asked Dr. Scholz that same question. I go, "How many of your patients that you are chronically seeing with prostate cancer are on hormone therapy?" He said he had about 100 or so that were actually on testosterone therapy. So it's something that you can reintroduce. Most people would stop it once they get the diagnosis though.

PETER STARR: The jury's out on that to be quite honest. I mean if, I've got doctors that - I've talked to back East that will tell you that taking testosterone supplements does not aggravate prostate cancer. You go to your local urologist and they'll freak out and they'll want to give you Lupron. Personally young men don't get prostate cancer and young men have more testosterone than anybody else you can think of. Remember your prostate is both a muscle and a gland. A healthy sex life makes sure that the muscle stays toned.

KIRK HAMILTON: I think we'll leave it at that with that young man's thought. Peter, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. And I'm looking forward to - I've seen the trailer, so I'm looking forward to seeing your documentary and that's at HealingArtsMedia.net.

PETER STARR: That's correct.

KIRK HAMILTON: So I want to thank you Peter for your great work and I also want to thank all you for listening today on this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And remember until next time Stay and Be Well.

© copyright 2009, Prescription 2000, Inc.
www.prescription2000.com

No part of this interview may be copied or reprinted in any form, electronic or print, without written permission from Prescription 2000, Inc.