When a Florida mom was told she had a super-aggressive brain tumor, she felt she’d been handed a death sentence. Without removal or treatment, she’d only have a few months to live, and even adding treatment would only prolong her life another year or so if she didn’t have the tumor removed.
After reading about a mom’s inoperable brain tumor, surgeon offers new hope by Meghan Holohan / / Source: TODAY
“I would lay there and cry,” Stephanie, 27, who lives in northern Florida, told TODAY. She asked that her last name not be used for privacy reasons. “I called the doctor and they had no idea what was going on.”
Stephanie visited a neurologist, who ordered a MRI of her brain and spotted something concerning. There was a mass nestled against her brain stem. The doctor referred to it as a lesion, so Stephanie didn’t grasp what was going on until she saw a piece of paper from the doctor and read the words “brain tumor.”
“It felt so surreal. When you have a headache, you don’t think you are going to go to the doctor and find out you have a brain tumor. I cried a lot,” she said.
She underwent a biopsy to determine the seriousness of the tumor.
“We were still holding on to hope that it was maybe less severe,” Stephanie said.
were still holding on to hope that it was maybe less severe,” Stephanie said.
Stephanie had a grade 4 glioblastoma, a cancer of the supportive tissues of the brain. Often, these tumors involve many types of cells, including blood vessels, and include many different types of cancer cells. Doctors often eschew surgery because the cancer cells infiltrate the brain and it’s difficult to remove them all. Even with treatments, most people with glioblastoma have a median survival rate of 15 months, according to the American Brain Tumor Association.
After Dr. Michael Sughrue removed most of Stephanie’s brain tumor, she has been focusing on enjoying her time with her daughter and husband. Courtesy Ben Keeling Photography
She had to be strong for her 2-year-old daughter Sarah. A friend who survived cancer suggested Stephanie start a blog to make it easier for her to update people and help her process her feelings. She started writing about her inoperable brain tumor and the frustration she felt.
Then, Stephanie received an unbelievable message. A neurosurgeon in Oklahoma, Dr. Michael Sughrue, posted that he would like to see her MRI scan. He noted in his message to her that sometimes “inoperable is not inoperable.”
Stephanie emailed her MRI scans within 5 minutes. When Sughrue saw the images, he knew why others balked at performing surgery: the tumor rested against the brain stem and damaging the brain stem could be fatal. But Sughrue’s philosophy is that he wants to give patients the best chance.
“It is not easy,” he told TODAY. “It is not terrible. It is doable.”
“I always look at it and say, ‘Is there a realistic way I can do something positive?,’” he said.
Without surgery, Stephanie might only live about six months. The cancer is so aggressive and complex that chemotherapy and radiation wouldn’t work without removing some of the tumor.
“Surgery can’t get all of the cancer, but it can at least get it to a level where a drug might work,” he said.
He told Stephanie if she came to Oklahoma that week, he could perform the surgery and remove much of the tumor that Friday.
“Honestly, I thought it was going to be much worse,” she remembers him replying.
While Stephanie felt thrilled, she also worried.
“Initially, I was a little skeptical because we had three neurosurgeons who said no one would touch this. So why would this surgeon in Oklahoma say, ‘It is not as bad as I thought it would be,’” she said.
But she went and felt relieved after meeting him.
“This man is amazing,” she said.
Within 24 hours of posting her initial entry, she was contacted by A neurosurgeon in Oklahoma, Dr. Michael Sughrue After Dr. Michael Sughrue read about Stephanie’s inoperable brain tumor on her blog, he asked to see her MRI scan.
He thought he could remove it and he was right. She underwent surgery and Sughrue removed most of the mass. “It is really a remarkable story. She has a really bad tumor and we did take it out,” he said.
Doctors normally recommend waiting four to six weeks after surgery to start chemotherapy or radiation, but because her cancer was so aggressive, Stephanie started radiation right away. After a month of treatment, she’s home and taking a chemotherapy drug while looking for local doctors for treatment. She needs more scans to determine the status of her health, so this is not a happy ending yet.
Still, she feels grateful for Sughrue.
This Remarkable Cancer Treatment Helped Jimmy Carter Combat Brain Tumor.
Dr. Andrew Sloan, director of the Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, said scientist have only recently understood how “tumors recruit the immune system.”
“Tumors have figured out how to turn off the immune system,” Sloan said in an interview with ABC News when Carter first announced his diagnosis. “They recruit cells that surround them. … These are not cells that kill the tumor. They protect cells from part of the immune system.”
Drugs like pembrolizumab work by keeping the immune system from turning off. Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, said such therapies, first presented in 2010, were the first new drugs for melanoma since the 1970s.
The drug works as a “checkpoint inhibitor,” altering certain pathways in the immune system so that the antibodies can identify and fight any tumors in the body the way they might fight a virus or cold, experts said. With the medication is much less toxic than chemotherapy, it can react in colon, liver or lung inflammation, according to published studies. Researchers are still trying to determine how long the medication can prompt the immune system to keep fighting. This drug is mainly given to melanoma patients.
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Dr. Van Merkle has been in practice for over thirty years, with a concentration on nutrition. His studies include diplomates through the American Board of Chiropractic Internists, the American Clinical Board of Nutrition, the Chiropractic Board of Clinical Nutrition.
Dr. Merkle has been a guest speaker for the United States Air Force, CDID Annual Symposiums, Wright State Medical University, and CBCN Diplomate Lectures at Northwestern Health Sciences University. He has hosted a top-rated radio show in Dayton, OH, for 16 years.
Since 2001, Dr. Merkle has been providing continuing education lectures with a focus on laboratory diagnosis and analysis. His mission is to provide education, methods, and resources to doctors who want to add nutrition to their practice. His double-patented, automated laboratory analysis program, Science Based Nutrition™, bringing him closer to his goal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Dr. Brimhall has educated thousands of practitioners through his Six Steps to Wellness seminars and his Puzzle Piece newsletter. He has invented over 130 nutritional products, holds two patents, and consults for nutritional and laser companies.
Dr. Brimhall received his Doctorate of Chiropractic from Palmer College of Chiropractic, is a Fellow of the International Academy of Medical Acupuncture, and a Diplomat of the International College of Applied Kinesiology. The Brimhall Wellness Center is located in Mesa, AZ.
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Treating a Brain Tumor With a Gamma Knife
Gamma knife surgery delivers high doses of radiation to a brain tumor to shrink the tumor and destroy cancer cells.
It’s called a gamma knife, but there’s not a blade on it. This medical device, which involves no cutting at all, delivers radiation to a spinal cord or brain tumor with the intent of destroying the tumor cells.
Gamma Knife Surgery: What It Is and How It’s Done
Gamma knife surgery is a type of stereotactic radiosurgery, which is a form of radiation therapy that aims low-dose radiation beams, coming from all sides of the head, directly at the brain tumor. This results in a high dose of radiation at the center of the tumor, where the many radiation beams meet.
Gamma knife surgery uses three-dimensional imaging techniques to accurately target the tumor before the radiation is given. After taking MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging scans) and CT (computed tomography) scans, your treatment team will plan your treatment with gamma knife surgery.
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Tumor freezing, or cryosurgery, is a procedure that kills cancer cells by freezing them with liquid nitrogen or argon gas. Patients may find tumor freezing as a less invasive surgical option to remove external and/or internal cancerous and noncancerous tumors.
Jeremy Plumb has been called Bill Nye of pot science. His enthusiasm bubbles over when he talks about the plant’s medical and therapeutic properties. The Willamette Weekly even called him Portland’s mad scientist of cannabis. Jeremy Plumb has been called the “Wizard of Weed” and was voted best “budtender” in Portland, Oregon, last year. It’s no wonder: Plumb is a virtual encyclopedia of information about marijuana’s therapeutic effects, history and chemical complexity.
Plumb is on a mission to use science, medicine and marketing to redefine marijuana. “This is the first moment where we have all of the resources of science and modern insight to meet this amazing task, which is not just about understanding phytochemistry, but the reflecting of our own physiology,” Plumb told the Vanguard.
His state-of-the-art cannabis farm, Newcleus Nurseries, is practicing sophisticated ag-tech and regenerative farming practices.
But you’ll hardly ever hear the 39-year-old co-founder of the Portland pot dispensary Farma use the word “marijuana,” which he says was “invented with racist intent and broadcast by yellow journalism.” He’s referring to the use of the word by racists and others who wanted to outlaw the plant in the 1930s.
“Cannabis” is the word preferred by Plumb, who is also CEO of Portland pot farm Newcleus Nurseries. “We must update our language in order to pursue a new, more meaningful relationship with this remarkable plant,” he says. “We are passionately committed to reframing every facet of the Prohibition era views on cannabis, also including the language.”
That commitment is easy to see at Farma, where Plumb and his partners take a scientific approach to selling cannabis to customers taking advantage of Oregon’s 2015 law that made it legal for adults to possess pot for recreational use. Medical marijuana has been legal in Oregon since 1998.
“Farma was the first dispensary in the world to begin to curate with the consistent lab results approach that we’ve taken and measuring terpenes and putting the overall terpene value on the shelf,” Plumb explains. “Terpenes are the aromatic compounds in cannabis that we also know have therapeutic effects and affect the altered states.”
And Farma makes it relatively easy for customers without a scientific background to understand how the chemicals in a particular pot plant might affect them. “We put on the shelf a color spectrum, and we indicated three positions for red and three positions for blue. These are meant to correlate to either a relaxing and calming state in the blue or a focusing and euphoriant effect with the red.”
Helping Plumb delve into the various chemical components in cannabis is Rodger Voelker, lab director at OG Analytical, which screens pot plants for pesticides and other chemicals.
He says Farma and other marijuana businesses he works with are interested in “what we refer to as chemotyping, which is basically a measure of the primary chemical constituents of the cannabis product.” https://www.farmapdx.com/menu/
“This would be very similar to what we do with wine right now,” Voelker says. “We have Malbecs, and we have Cabernets, and we have Pinots. As consumers, we can taste them and we know there are different types of wines, and we will select a given wine to match whatever our mood is for that particular time. And I think there’s a lot of reason to believe we can do the same thing with cannabis.”
Plumb expands on the wine metaphor, dividing the cannabis world into premium and low-end brands. “One of the big changes that’s coming down the pike is the distinction between artisanally produced cannabis and commodity cannabis,” he says.
“ In Oregon, you have a devotion to craft and artisanal production, and I believe that distinction. . . will start to become more and more clear in the market. I think that cannabis will really change forms and not be relegated to a small subculture in a kind of Prohibition era. And that’s the transition happening over the next five years that I’m most excited about.”
Note: Through out my research I have seen success cannabis and brain tumors and also believe Oregon is the Happening State. Because it’s the only state that takes out of staters as long as you gain a release from your doctor and go through the State Department 0f Health and gain your medical card!!!
