Fighting Cat Cancer in Smarter Ways

http://www.naturalcatcareblog.com/landing/fighting-cat-cancer/

Fighting Cat Cancer in Smarter Ways
"If your life has been touched by feline cancer, my heart goes out to you—more than you know.

One of my biggest motivations for getting more serious about natural cat care and eventually creating this blog was that I had a feline soul mate diagnosed with high-grade intestinal lymphoma–and I was knocked flat with despair and shock.

How did it happen? Where did I go wrong, and…“what do we do now?”  Should we try chemotherapy, which only promised to extend her life several months, or should we try an alternative?

I was not prepared. And it didn’t go that well. I spent endless hours researching options and trying to save her, but it was all too little, too late.

That’s why a dream for this blog is to give you a place to go if you’ve lost a cat to cancer and want to know how to prevent that from happening again. Or if you have a cat cancer diagnosis and want to get some helpful information.

If you want to make sure your cat never gets cancer

I’m always looking into how prevent cat cancer. Here’s a great starting place:

• Go grain-free, like the foods here, if you want to prevent intestinal cat cancer (it’s a common one). Cats eating grains appear much more likely to quietly develop IBD, which many experts believe is a precursor to the deadly intestinal lymphoma.  (You may be interested in another vet’s post about this on ConsciousCat.net too.)
• See 3 other things I discovered that appear to likely to prevent cancer in cats.

See also Jean Hofve, DVM’s extensive article on preventing cancer in cats.

If your cat has been diagnosed with cancer

Here’s what I have for you so far…

One of the most important things I learned

I want to tell you this right away because I believe it was a factor in our cat not beating cancer.

Most cancer-killing methods, even many alternative ones, will essentially breed stronger cancer cells. That’s because the tiny little cells that survived start growing and breeding, given half a chance. These are the cells that were strong and smart enough to be resistant to the stuff you were using to kill them.

Think of how over-use of antibiotics has spawned stronger, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It’s the same kind of problem.

This means you must keep up the fight and not ease off until an expert you really trust confirms that every single cancer cell has been totally wiped out. (That’s different from just saying a tumor is gone, by the way.)

So if you are using chemotherapy and your cat isn’t doing well with it, you may need to ease off the chemo but you’ve got to keep going strong then with an alternative that she does tolerate well. One way or another, you need to make sure the cancer is getting constant, even treatment—no letting up too early.

One cat’s success story

See Incurable to Cancer-Free in One Year: How Nate-the-Cat Survived High Grade Lymphoma. This interview made me very happy! My only regret is I didn’t hear about this approach when I needed it."

more at this link