It sounds as though your real need is for someone to be a support to you
through this thing, with whom you could discuss the various options.  Your
beliefs do not accord with mine or Tim's; we both think that taking the
accepted medical route will give you your best chance although there is no
guarantee.  And your view of the horrors of chemo are, I think, from a
bygone age, although of course it does affect people differently.  My wife
had two years of chemo, her nausea was well controlled by medicine and she
lost no weight.  And at the end of the day, whatever the outcome, I think it
is very desirable to be able to say that you gave it your best.  Anyway,
good luck.

If alternative medicines worked, doctors would use them for themselves and
their loved ones.
I'm sorry you have such old-fashioned ideas. Those ideas may well be the
cause of your death.

My sister-in-law lives in Quebec. Conventional medicine saved her
husband's life (heart problem).
Conventional medicine (surgery and radiation therapy) cured her best
friend of cancer of the cervix?(col de l'utérus) 8 years ago .
Conventional (surgery and radiation therapy) medicine cured the same best
friend of non-invasive breast cancer .
Conventional medicine (surgery and radiation therapy) prolonged the life
of another of her friends who had pancreatic cancer - a non curable
type/stage of cancer.
Your breast cancer may be curable if you follow the oncologist's
recommendations.
Work with them; they'll help you with side effects.

If you look to alternative/natural medicine, you will almost certainly
die, unfortunately for you and your loved ones.
J

Hi Monique,

I didn't like having chemo, but  did not vomit at all.  There are
wonderful drugs that help with nausea and ginger will help also. Any
nausea you might have only lasts a day or two.

I didn't lose any weight during chemo, au contraire, in fact.  I did
feel as if there was poison in my body for one or two days each time,
but that feeling didn't last.  I slept a great deal, but many people
continue working all through their treatments and carry on a normal
life.

Each person is different, but many of us did not have any problems at
all with radiation.

I'll be thinking of you.

Marilyn

The point is that unlike an infectious disease, cancer cells are an
awful lot like your own body cells, and the immune system ignores them.
 So unfortunately any treatment which can damage cancer cells also
damages some normal cells, make you ill and make your hair fall out.

Conventional chemotherapy uses chemicals which are mainly harmful to
cells in the process of division.  Cells which divide rapidly spend a
bigger proportion of their time in the division phase when they are
vulnerable, so tissues composed of such cells suffer the most damage.
Non-cancer cells which divide rapidly include blood and hair, and these
suffer damage too.  The dosage of chemotherapy is basically decided by
estimating how much of it your blood can stand.

As others have said, for most people the vomiting issue is not major, in
the last 20 years or so a new class of drugs has been developed which
control this well, so it's not like cancer treatment was in our parents'
day.

Getting radiation is a necessary part of the choice of having
conservative surgery.  The only way you can safely avoid radiation if
the tumour is small enough and localised enough is to have a complete
mastectomy.  Anyway, if nodes are involved they would probably recommend
radiation anyway.

Yes radiation is damaging to normal tissues, and slightly increases the
risk of other cancers.  But the cancer you have/had is a much bigger
issue, and its recurrence a bigger risk.

Radiation damages the DNA in your cells.  The damaged cells will mostly
use their DNA repair mechanisms to recover, some will die, and
occasionally one may undergo cancerous changes.  Cancer cells have no
DNA repair mechanism, and so always die.  It is an essential part of a
cell becoming cancerous that the DNA repair mechanism is first disabled
so that the 'rogue' DNA of cancer is allowed to proliferate.  You may
read about abnormal "P53" proteins, this is a major part of this mechanism.

The medical mainstream spends a lot of time and effort in doing
extensive trials of treatments to determine how effective and safe they
are. Working out the harm/good balance is what it is all about.  Before
making a personal judgement on this I think it is a good idea to look at
the evidence - research and statistics - that have been collected by
others.  If you are not able or willing to do the research yourself,
then you really have to take the experts' (whoever you trust) word for it.

I don't deny that economics comes into it too, and that not all
researchers are entirely honest and open about their results, but that
mostly applies to new drugs within their patent lifetime.  I think you
can be fairly confident that old established drugs' behaviour and risk
is well known.

"Natural" doesn't mean harmless.  Curare is natural!  A herbal extract
is no more natural than many mainstream drugs: both are produced by
taking plant material and purifying essences from it.  What is different
is that the dosage of active ingredient in approved drugs is carefully
controlled.  With herbals you are taking a much more vaguely known
quantity.  In the context of cancer, where we are necessarily working
close to the edge between good and harm, control is everything.