I have recently seen two documentaries that are important.
The first was begun by Ruth Sackman, who served as my first mentor in holistic health shortly after I moved to New York. In 1971, Ruth founded The Foundation for Advancement of Cancer Therapies, the first non-profit organization whose sole purpose was to dissiminate information about non-toxic, biological therapies for cancer (and all other abnormal bodily conditions). Ruth’s guidance saved my mother’s life as she struggled with the metastatic cancer (from breast to bone) that had afflicted her – and she was, thus, able to move from a wheel-chair to playing tennis again. Ruth died two years ago, at the age of 93, while the film was still in process.
Her staff, Consuelo Reyes and Jim Oakar, finished the film, and it is now available on the FACT website, RethinkingCancer.org. I highly recommend watching it, as it is informative as well as moving – as it interviews five patients who Ruth advised, who cured themselves of cancer (and Lyme Disease). The film includes some rare footage of Ruth herself, at the end of her life, still giving out her pearls of wisdom about health and longevity (topics she knew as well as lived – her own life was a testament to that).
Ruth believed, more than anything, in the body’s ability to heal itself. I remember a spell that Ruth went through – she was throwing up. It lasted days, then weeks, then a month. Her ever-faithful husband, Leon, begged her to go see a doctor. Everyone who knew and loved Ruth was concerned. She lost a lot of weight. Yet, Ruth embraced the notion that her body was detoxing – and that it would finish when it was done with its process. 40 days later – longer than most human beings would tolerate – her throwing up finally stopped – she ejected what needed to be out of her body – and, as she always said, as she always taught me, she was in better health after the detox completed itself than before that ordeal her body needed to go through.
Ruth inspired me when she was alive, and my memories of her still inspire me as well as inform me about what the human body is capable of when we trust its process, and provide it with the right environments — physical, nutritional, cleansing, environmental, emotional, spiritual — for healing.
The other documentary came into my email box today from Joe Mercola. It is an easy, accessible way of understanding the revolutionary work of Dr. Burzynski, who has been curing cancer for a couple of decades.
This is the email Mercola sent out:
Visit the Mercola Video Library
Burzynski, the Movie is the story of a medical doctor and Ph.D biochemist named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski who won the largest, and possibly the most convoluted and intriguing legal battle against the Food and Drug Administration in American history.
In the late 1970′s, Dr. Burzynski made a remarkable discovery that threatened to change the face of cancer treatment forever. His non-toxic gene-targeted cancer medicine could have helped save millions of lives over the last two decades had his discovery not been criminally suppressed by the US government, as his therapy, called “antineoplastons,” have been shown to effectively help cure some of the most “incurable” forms of terminal cancer.
This documentary takes you through the treacherous 14-year journey Dr. Burzynski and his patients have had to endure in order to finally obtain FDA-approved clinical trials of antineoplastons.
His story is yet another testament that fact can be far stranger than fiction, as the film exposes the powerful, unscrupulous forces that work to maintain the status quo of the medical- and pharmaceutical industry at any cost-including the lives of millions of people.
Preview link for documentary: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/06/11/burzynski-the-movie.aspx