Treatment in the UK

Cancer is a time consuming and expensive hobby, especially when travelling. I have inflicted part of the problem on myself, with my decision to undertake some medical experimentation of my own. Given the positive response of my CEA following a three week course of intravenous vitamin C coupled with traditional Chinese herbal medicine, I was condemned to find a way to continue this "treatment" now that I am in the UK.

In my first few days here I had to find a GP who would provide me with intravenous vitamin C, and a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner who could provide me with a continuation of the herbal magic previously obtained from the Ngee Ann clinic in Singapore. After much web searching and persistent telephoning, I finally found a clinic in London which could provide the former. Dr Rodney Adeniyi-Jones is indeed probably the only such GP in London, and one of just a handful in the UK. Wellington by contrast has two such GPs. Dr Adeniyi-Jones is a thoughtful and intelligent man who persuaded me, after some discussion, to stay with 75 g doses once per week, rather than the 100 g maximum I had taken in Wellington (the latter, I have to say, with some spectacular side effects, in non-linear excess of that expected for a 1/3 increase in dose), and I have travelled to London twice for this treatment, the second being on Monday, at which time I had a blood sample taken for CEA measurement. The result was 17.2 ng/ml, a small increase, but clearly showing that the three-week doubling of May and early June has been arrested.

And so I hover on a plateau. Will the cancer recede or rage? Why has the CEA gone slightly up rather than consolidating a downward trend? For the last three weeks I have not had access to the TCM herbal formula, since I was able to obtain only a two week supply from Ngee Ann. On Monday morning I travelled to Cheam in southwest London to consult with Professor Bo-Ying Ma, one of the leading TCM practitioners in the UK. He informed me that many of the ingredients from my Ngee Ann recipe were not available in the UK because of import restrictions. He prescribed instead a herbal extract capsule treatment obtained from China before the restriction came into effect. I have started that as of yesterday.

In fact I feel remarkably well. In three weeks time I will take another test. Let's see what that says. I must say, I greatly prefer it when experiments show definitive answers. These latest can best be described as "possibly interesting."

PS: I am grateful to my good friend Yang Xia and his London-based cousin Ze Xia, for putting me in touch with Professor Ma. Bo-Ying Ma is a delightful man with a fascinating background, trained in scientific medicine, and then sent, during the cultural revolution, to a remote village where medical resources were non-existent, and where he learned how to treat using TCM. Later, Ma worked with the legendary Joseph Needham the "Man who loved China", a great British scientist, historian and sinologist based at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where an Institute is named after him. Professor Ma proudly displayed a photo of him and Needham on his surgery wall. I was suitably impressed.