Dr. David Servan-Schreiber (April 21, 1961–July 24, 2011) was a French physician, neuroscientist and author. He was a clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was also a lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine of Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.
Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, a French-born neuroscientist, becoming an advocate harnessing the body’s own defenses fighting cancer after learning he had a brain tumor twenty years ago. He turned his personal journey into books that changed how the disease is viewed and treated.
Reporting from Paris — When he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor 20 years ago, David Servan-Schreiber, the French-born doctor, neuroscientist and later bestselling author, took the phrase “physician, heal thyself” to heart.
Submitting to the punishing traditional treatments of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, he still felt there was something more he could do to enhance his chances of survival.
Armed with his will to live and a belief that the human body had little-known cancer-combating capacities of its own, he set about looking into a better understanding and way in which we battle the disease. From his own research came the successful book “Anticancer: A New Way of Life,” published in 2007, tha t sold 1 million copies and led to a sea change in how cancer was viewed and treated.
Servan-Schreiber’s near two-decade exploration of the science of cancer was a personal and professional journey that took him from the verge of death to good health and back again twice before ending in his death Sunday at a hospital near his family’s home in Normandy, France. He was 50.
Even when told last year that the brain cancer had returned and would almost certainly kill him this time, Servan-Schreiber refused to give in, continuing to promote the idea that, parallel to traditional medicine, healthy eating along with meditation, yoga and ” a new way of life” could extend the lives of cancer sufferers.David Servan-Schreiber was born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on April 21, 1961, the son of a celebrated French family with Prussian Jewish roots. David was the eldest son of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a respected journalist, essayist and politician, who died in 2006.
He studied medicine at a children’s hospital in Paris, finishing his medical degree at Laval University in Quebec in 1984 before specializing in psychiatry in Montreal and moving to a research post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he earned his doctorate.
In 1991 he went to Iraq as a volunteer medic with the French-based Doctors Without Borders, the nongovernmental organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, and later co-founded the U.S. branch of the charity.
The story goes that he discovered he had a brain tumor only when in 1991 a research patient failed to turn up for an MRI scan and Servan-Schreiber took his place.
He underwent treatment but had a relapse a few years later and began to seriously turn his mind and his work to the effects of diet and lifestyle on the incidences of cancer and depression.
His first book, “Healing Without Freud or Prozac,” titled “The Instinct to Heal” in the United States, was published in France in 2003, translated into 29 languages and sold 1.3 million copies. “Anticancer” followed four years later.
Certain critics dismissed Servan-Schreiber as a “new age guru” who proposed quack theories that more vegetables, more exercise and less stress were a cure for cancer. On the contrary, he was quick to admit that traditional methods such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy were the first and most important salvos in the battle against the disease. However, he believed the body harbored a number of natural defenses that could create a terrain in which cancer would find it hard to thrive.
Said Ursula Gauthier, journalist and coauthor of his last book, “We Can Say Goodbye Several Times”: “He wasn’t a great thinker, a philosopher or a mandarin of science or medicine. He described himself as a scientist and a human. He was a mixture of heart and head, intellect and emotion.”
Servan-Schreiber was told his cancer had returned when a brain tumor, which he called the Big One, was diagnosed in May 2010.
At the time he said: “Death is part of life. It happens to everyone. Profit from now, do the important things.
“I am convinced that ‘Anticancer’ has played an important role in the fact that I survived cancer for 19 years when the first diagnosis gave me only six at the most.”
Survivors include his wife, Gwenaëlle, and three children.
When I read this article
How A Doctor Healed His Own Cancer With Food
He set out to find a cure for his malignant tumors—and came back with dinner
http://www.prevention.com/food/food-remedies/one-doctors-personal-food-cures-cancer
Five years later, Servan-Schreiber’s tumor recurred. This time around, he underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, during which time he became a convert to “alternative” therapies. Ultimately, he wrote his book and became a leading promoter of “integrative” medicine. To his credit, he always told people with cancer that they should seek out scientific medical treatment. Unfortunately, in the process, he also promoted the idea that diet could protect you from almost all cancers, also that cell phones cause brain cancer, and that a number of other dubious health modalities could produces a “terrain” that was hostile to cancer, even though evidence supporting such claims was equivocal at best. Even so, his book Anti-cancer became phenomenally successful, being translated into 36 languages and spending several weeks high on the New York Times bestseller list in 2010, while Servan-Schreiber gave interviews in which he said things like this in describing his conversion to “natural” therapies after his cancer relapse:
Servan-Schreiber refused to simply accept his fate. He embarked on his own research and developed a method for helping his body protect itself from the disease. It drew heavily on natural defense mechanisms and a new lifestyle based on a changed diet and plenty of exercise and optimism. But it did not offer total protection, as he told Ode in an interview. “I’m not saying we can prevent cancer, because we may get cancer for reasons that are beyond our control. Even if you do all of the things I talk about in my book, there’s not a guarantee that you’ll prevent cancer. It’s about 80 to 85 percent protection, which is still enormous.”
Does Servan-Schreiber’s death mean his method didn’t work? Or did it mean that it did work and held his disease at bay longer than anyone would have thought possible. Or was Servan-Schreiber a man who was fortunate enough to have a less aggressive form of brain tumor that responded very well to conventional therapy and was very slow to relapse, taking this latest time 15 years before recurring and then leading to his death? Most likely, it was the latter, because there just isn’t any strong evidence that Servan-Schreiber’s methods are anywhere near as effective as he claimed they are.
One thing that needs to be understood is that glioblastoma is indeed a nasty cancer. Untreated, the median survival is on the order of three months. Even treated maximally, fewer than one in four patients with the disease survive longer than 2 years and fewer than 10% survive five years or more. However, it is known that there are types of glioblastoma with a prognosis that is not quite as grim, although it is grim enough. For instance, younger patients tend to survive longer, as do patients with methylation of the promoter of O-6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase. In the end, however, little is known that can accurately predict who is likely to survive long term after the treatment of glioblastoma and why, much as little is known that allows us to predict accurately which women with advanced breast cancer will survive for long periods of time and why, other than very crudely and unreliably.
What this all means is that Servan-Schreiber, for all his scientific prowess, nonetheless ended up behaving like Suzanne Sommers, Lorraine Day, Hollie Quinn, and any number of other cancer patients who were successfully treated with conventional scientific medical therapy and also chose pseudoscience, after which they attributed their good outcome more to the pseudoscience than to the real medicine. Fortunately for him, he did very well and lived a lot longer than the average brain tumor patient. Unfortunately, during that time he promoted a profoundly misleading view of cancer therapy.
Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine and member of the board of the Society for Integrative Oncology.
The book ‘Anticancer’ is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than thirty languages.
These are the simple rules the of diet and lifestyle that must be followed according to Dr. Servan in order to avoid becoming ill from cancer or successfully fight with it:
Dietary rules
1) Go back to retro meals. Your main meals should consist of 80% vegetables and 20% animal protein. Meat should be used as a supplement in small quantities for adding flavor and not as a main course.
2) Eat a variety of vegetables: Eat different vegetables from meal to meal or within each meal. Broccoli is effective anticancer food but is even more effective in combination with tomato sauce or white, or red onions. Bring in the habit of adding white and/or red onions in your meals or cooking.
3) Eat organic: Choose organic foods whenever possible. However, remember that it is better to eat broccoli that have been exposed to pesticides than not eating broccoli at all. (This rule applies to all anticancer vegetable)
4) Spice up your food: add turmeric (curcumine) and pepper in salads and cooked food. This yellow spice is the most powerful natural anti-inflammatory ingredient. When you can and mediterranean herbs in your food: thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary, mint and so on. These herbs besides giving flavor, helps in reducing the cancer cells.
6) Eat fish: Eat fish two or three times a week. Sardines, mackerel, sardines contain much less mercury in their bodies than larger fish such as tuna. Avoid swordfish and shark, which contain high concentrations of harmful substances.
7) Remember not all eggs are created equal: Eat only eggs that are formed predominantly of omega-3 ingredients or otherwise avoid the yolk. Chickens are often fed with corn and soybeans that contains 20 times more omega 6 fats which cause inflammation unlike than omega 3 fats.
8) Change the type of edible oils: Use oils that do not contain a lot of omega 6 fats. So use olive oil instead of sunflower, corn and soybean oils.
9) At all costs, avoid white flour and its products (pastries, donuts, baguettes, white bread, etc.). When cooking pasta use the al dante way of shorter cooking so that you do not overcook the pasta because it raises the glycemic values of the food.
10) Reduce sugar intake to a minimum and avoid the use of soda drinks, fruit juices and candies and cakes. Replace them with fresh fruit and variety. Read the content of the product carefully and if the first three ingredients are any type of sugar, glucose syrup and similar do not use them. If you have a burning desire for sweets you can use a couple of squares of dark chocolate containing 70% or more cocoa.
11) Go for green: Instead of coffee or fruit teas, use 3 cups of green tea per day. The regular use of green tea is associated with a significant reduction in the risk of cancer.
12) Make exceptions: It is what you consume every day and not what you sometimes eat or drink.
OTHER TIPS
1) Be active: Make time for exercise, walking, running, dancing; Define yourself at least 30 minutes of any activity five times a week. This can be the most ordinary walking to work or to the store. Choose an activity you enjoy and there is greater chance that you will be practice it.
2) Accept the sun’s rays: Try to be at least 20 minutes in the sun without protection or glass between you and the sun. This will boost your natural production of vitamin D. Otherwise, take vitamin D3 as an addition after consulting a physician.
3) Get rid of chemicals: Well ventilate your clothing if you take it to the dry cleaners often. Don’t heat up food in plastic bottles and containers. Avoid cosmetics that contain parabens or patal. Do not use chemical pesticides on houseplants or in the garden. Throw out your damaged-teflon cookware. Do not keep your cell phone near or against the body when not in use.
4) Contact your friends: Call and hang out with friends especially when you need support or when you are stressed even if it is over the internet. Hug people that are dear to you.
5) Remember to breathe: Learn some basic techniques of relaxation through breathing and use them whenever you are stressed
6) Learn how you can help your community and the people in it and do it. Because of that, you will feel good.
7) Make sure you do at least one thing for yourself that you love whenever you can.
Preview YouTube video Dr. David Servan-Schreiber’s Remarkable Story
Preview YouTube video Anticancer_a new way of life
Preview YouTube video Nutrition and Cancer
