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Alternative Treatment

Last August, Jody, 39, was diagnosed with cancer and was told there is no effective treatment for her. Since then she has had multiple surgeries.

“They keep cutting and pasting me back together,” she said. “I was feeling like the walking dead or a sitting duck.”

Nicole James. Photo by Len Villano.

Nicole James. Photo by Len Villano.

In November she was at a dinner party where she met an employee of the Center for Optimal Health who told her about the center’s Cancer Thriver program.

She met with center founder/director Nicole James in late November and decided to enter the program.

About six weeks into the program, Jody said, “They really treat the big picture, the health of both the mind and the body. Each team member brings a different skill. For the first time I feel there is hope. I’m doing something.”

Her regimen includes working with a food coach, following a strict diet, getting high dosages of vitamin C via IV, taking other supplements and enzymes, meeting with an energy coach and taking infrared saunas at the center in downtown Sturgeon Bay.

“I have had two more surgeries I thought were the end of the road,” Jody said. “Both biopsies were benign. Was it luck, or what I’m doing? I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.”

“There’s a cancer epidemic in Door County,” James said. “It’s not something a lot of people talk about, and there’s definitely not a lot of talk about what’s going on and how can we prevent it. We give people an option to the traditional approaches. We’re not against traditional approaches by any means. We need it. We’re thankful for it. But sometimes it doesn’t always work for people. They don’t really have anywhere else to go. We wanted to provide a support for people, whether they choose to do the Western route or if they say, I’m going to go completely alternative.”

Dr. David Groteluschen, a medical oncologist who practices with Green Bay Oncology and sees patients at Door County Cancer Center, is a supporter of alternative medicine.

“I think the best outcomes are when patients do both traditional and alternative medicine,” he said. “One of the things traditional or Western medicine has done poorly, we haven’t looked at alternative treatments. There are studies looking into diet and the carcinogens in what we eat and what we do. In the last two to five years, we’re starting to say, what other things can we do to improve this? I always tell people, most of our chemotherapies were alternative medicines until they were studied and became medicines. There are a lot of answers out there in the world that we have no idea about. The alternative medicines our patients bring in, I support it. Just let us know what you’re doing. If you feel well doing something, you should do it.”

James was inspired to enter the medical field by seeing the effects of cancer firsthand.

“When I was a teenager, I watched my grandma go through cancer,” she said. “She went through radiation and chemotherapy. At the time, they actually would do it at the same time, and it almost killed her. It was awful for me as a teenager to watch my grandmother go through this and eventually die from it. That inspired me to go into the medical field.”

She was pursuing a traditional medicine route as an undergraduate at the University of California, but then veered into traditional Chinese medicine.

“When I was in grad school for traditional Chinese medicine, I started working for doctors in an integrated clinic,” she said. “They were getting people off medications, reversing diabetes by looking at nutrition, which I thought was impossible, looking at the function of the body, giving the body what it’s missing, what it needs.”

James has since earned certification as a nutritional consultant, a functional medicine practitioner and a doctor of pastoral medicine.

“So when I moved here about five years ago, I saw there was a huge need for this type of medicine. I started from my home and have grown,” she said.

While alternative medicine has a large following on the West Coast, James quickly found that little is known about it in the Midwest.

“There is a lot of judgment on alternative and holistic medicine. I try to bridge that gap because what we do here is very science-based,” she said. “I try to be clear in how I present myself. I don’t treat cancer here. We treat patients with cancer, which is a big difference.”

Another of her patients, Denise, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2013.

“I went through chemo and surgery and radiation. They thought everything looked good, but a couple cells got away,” she said.

They found a tumor in the wall of her stomach and scheduled another round of chemotherapy.

“It was too much for me. It wears you down. I was getting weaker and weaker, and decided chemo wasn’t the way to go,” Denise said.

She met with James “and jumped aboard. I like everything they do. They are very supportive. They built me back up and I’m probably even stronger than I was when I started,” she said.

She is back doing chemotherapy again for the tumor in her stomach wall, “but I feel like my body can help now. I’m very happy. They can’t promise anybody that they can cure cancer, but they are able to improve your quality of life.”

The first thing James does with a new patient is go through their medical records to see everything they have been through. Then come blood, stool and urine tests conducted at the center’s own lab.

“We peer inside their body to take a look at what’s going on with various tests,” she said. “Then I give the body what it’s missing and take away what shouldn’t be there. And then we really support what we call the terrain. We support the immune system, which is a lot of where current research in cancer is going. Our immune system is capable of killing cancer cells, so we want to utilize what is already there.

“We work with a very specific diet, called a ketogenic diet [a high-fat, low-carb diet that has been used to treat epilepsy] that basically starves the cancer cells. It’s very effective. Unfortunately, we don’t hear a lot about it because you can’t patent it and put it in a pill.

“I’ve got a great team of women surrounding me,” James continued. “We have men and women who come in who have been recently diagnosed or maybe have been through the gamut of treatments and it just hasn’t worked or the cancer has come back and they don’t want to do it anymore. We start giving them nutrients based on what their reports are telling me. The body functions really well. Everything tends to improve. They sleep better, their pain levels go down, their stress levels, which is a huge part of cancer, that’s a main thing we work with. We have an amazing energy worker, Katherine McCabe, who does energy treatments with patients and Qi Gong, a kind of moving meditation class, for patients or anybody in the community. That’s so much a part of it, the mind-body connection. It’s a very personalized approach. Everybody’s on a different protocol based on what we see or what they need.”

The Center for Optimal Health is located at 242 Michigan St., Suite 202, Sturgeon Bay. Or visit them online at dcoptimalhealth.net.