Organic diet for melanoma

Woman relies on organic diet to beat melanoma
By NANCY PASTERNACK
Sentinel staff writer
SANTA CRUZ — Anne Dinnell eats as though her life depends on it.

Diagnosed with advanced skin cancer at age 25, last summer Dinnell faced what doctors told her would be a brief life filled with radiation, chemotherapy, and the associated nausea and frailty.

She told the doctors she’d rather eat chard.

Early in the fall, the Santa Cruz native and self-proclaimed skeptic opted for an alternative treatment that aims to cleanse, rather than pollute, her body.

By consuming 50 pounds of carrots, 20 bunches of romaine lettuce, 25 pounds of potatoes, and loads of other vegetables and fruits each week — including chard — Dinnell is trying to beat the odds and get beyond the five years doctors estimated she’ll live.

Her time is measured in PET scan appointments and glasses of thick green vegetable juice.

"Sometimes I want to gag it back up," she says of the organic concoctions she must make and drink fresh, every hour, on the hour, according to the Gerson Institute diet therapy.


The food therapy, which Dinnell discovered through research and a PBS documentary she happened on about physician Max Gerson’s experiments in the 1950s and ’60s, has become the nexus of her life.

Dinnell carries 25-pound bags of organic carrots — donated and delivered to her house by a Soquel organics produce company — to an extra refrigerator she now keeps in her garage.

She downs the last of some green goo and prepares to go through the whole routine again.

An industrial juicer in the kitchen of her Westside townhouse, cleaned just minutes ago, will be whirring again before long.

Rare case
Had it not been for Dinnell’s well-connected friend, Jason Book, she would not have been able to proceed with her treatment. In fact, she says, it’s likely she would not have learned about her condition at all.

At a recent fund-raising event organized by Book on her behalf, Dinnell explained how she was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma.

Book, a business lawyer down the hall from Dinnell’s job as an office manager, had urged her to see a dermatologist about the dark spot of pigment beneath her fingernail, which one doctor already had dismissed.

After a quick look, dermatologist Jim Beckett "had a really serious look on his face and was dead calm," says Dinnell. A colleague seconded his suspicion, Dinnell’s finger was biopsied and Beckett explained the diagnosis.

"He said it can be a very aggressive type of cancer," says Dinnell. "That’s when I lost it."

Despite the radical approach, Beckett says he supports Dinnell in her decision to opt out of the traditional chemotherapy treatment. The occurrence of advanced skin cancer in a person Dinnell’s age is very rare, he says, and he sympathizes with her desire to live like the young person she is, in whatever time she has to do so.

"Most people I diagnose with that are in their fourth or fifth or sixth decade," Beckett says.

The place on Dinnell’s body where the melanoma appeared is even more unusual than her youth.

In women, Beckett says, "on the legs is where it’s most commonly seen."

The number of new skin-cancer cases is increasing at a faster rate than any other cancer, according to the American Cancer Society,

This year, more than 1 million new melanoma cases are expected to be diagnosed.

"We’re seeing it in younger and younger people," says Beckett. "That’s the frightening part."

Finding the means
Surgeons spent six hours removing cancerous tissue from Dinnell’s finger, neck, underarm, and hip. When she recovered enough to decide she did not want chemotherapy, Book jumped into action.

In two fund-raising efforts, Book has raised $17,000 to help pay Dinnell’s living expenses while she’s unable to work. Most of the primary donors have been his friends and business acquaintances.

Following the food program advocated by the Gerson Institute of San Diego is not cheap.

No health insurance policy covers it and the costs are well beyond Dinnell’s means. She is single and lives with her brother and a roommate. Her parents can provide only minimal financial help.

And the program is labor intensive. Preparing and downing the food takes eight hours each day.

Food bills alone for the organic fruits and vegetables Dinnell has been consuming now for eight months, come to about $1,200 a month.

Among those who have pitched in to help are local produce growers and distributors that Book has known through his father’s law practice. Watsonville’s Coast Produce, for instance, provides occasional organic food donations.

The diet, Dinnell says, leaves her craving pasta and bread and ice cream.

But she has not had to fight discomforts associated with chemotherapy and radiation, and for that, she says, she is grateful.

Traditional cancer therapies, she says, "did not come with a lot of positive reinforcement," from her doctors. "They said that hardly any melanoma patients respond to it, but that was all they could offer me."

In late January, Dinnell was encouraged by her most recent PET scan, which showed her body to be cancer-free.

Her scan in June will be crucial.

"It’s a nerve-racking time," she says. "Just doing this food and hoping they don’t find anything (in the next scan)."

If the June tests show Dinnell to be cancer free, she hopes to find work and begin paying for her own food.

And she will wean herself slowly off the strict diet.

"I have cabin fever," she says, standing beside her juicer with a cabbage and an apple. "I hate relying on people, I hate not being self-sufficient. I want to work. I’m antsy."

But, she says, she is strong in her resolve.

"I don’t want to put my body through any more stress," she says. "I want to have a healthy baby in the future."

Dinnell laughs at her optimism.

"This is just not my time to go."

 

That diet sounds almost as bad as the chemo. I wonder if it really has helped her?

 

No, she died four months later

Anne died four months later, on September 29, 2005. Her death got a small article, buried in the middle of the section instead of on the front page, in the Santa Cruz Sentinel at the beginning of October 2005 which I'll paste below.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2005/October/09/robit/stories/01robit.htm has the obit the family wrote.

Honestly, her original oncologist gave her only a 5% chance of living even if she did everything he suggested. Odds are good that nothing she did had even the smallest impact on anything except her attitude.




Anne Dinnell
Skin-cancer patient who used alternative therapy dies at 26

By NANCY PASTERNACK
Sentinel staff writer
Fourteen months after being diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma, Anne Dinnell, 26, died Thursday evening at Dominican Hospital.

Tests earlier in the year had shown that Dinnell, who had pursued an alternative, diet-based treatment in lieu of standard radiation and chemotherapy, appeared to be free of cancer.

Her death, said her friend and co-worker Jason Book, "was as quick, and painless as possible."

Until being hospitalized early in September for what she thought was pneumonia, "Anne felt well, and she thought she was well," Book said.

During that two-week hospital stay, surgeons repaired a collapsed lung, and Dinnell was discharged from Dominican on Sept. 22. While recuperating at her parents’ home in Santa Cruz five days later, she fell ill again and returned to the hospital.

The occurrence of advanced skin cancer in a person so young, her dermatologist had said at a Dinnell fundraiser in May, is very rare.

Friends, family members and anonymous donors had helped support Dinnell financially during the course of her treatment, which was not covered by insurance.

The Gerson Therapy dictates a strictly scheduled regimen of specially prepared organic foods.

Dinnell said in May that she chose the food-based treatment after being told by doctors she was unlikely to live long, regardless of the treatment strategy she followed.

Rather than suffer nausea, weakness and other discomforts associated with chemotherapy, Dinnell took what she said was a calculated risk.

She was convinced she’d made the right choice after a second PET scan came up clear in June.

Dinnell changed her treatment schedule somewhat late in June, so she could begin part-time work as a legal assistant.

Book said she had received dozens of visits from friends and family members before she fell unconscious Wednesday night. "She was joking with them and was even able to laugh," Book said.

 

it sounds like the "hallelujah diet". A bunch of organic carrot juice and salad.