Your Advice/Recommendations For Treatment

Ari was diagnosed in December with a cerebellar medulloblastoma, which despite having been treated with surgery,radiation and several doses of chemotherapy, has recently recurred in two places in the brain.

We have an incredible group of doctors and other members of the medical field that are helping with Ari’s care. Between the personnel at Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington Medical Center as well as our many friends that are in the medical field, we are clearly getting the best care in the world.

Despite this, conventional medical opinion currently is not overly optimistic. Thus, we continue to look at additional non-traditional therapies as well (which we would consider using in conjunction with any treatment he receives from our doctors).

To date, we have uncovered two natural products that have been shown to have very promising healing properties on tumors.

These herbs are artemesia/wormwood (an herb from China) and pau d’arco bark, from trees in the Amazon region. Although there has not been a lot of chemical testing on these herbs, the research done on them so far have been most promising. Ari is currently taking artemesia with the permission of his doctor.

Because we have such a loving community, and such an incredibly competent and knowledgeable group of friends, we are inundated with wonderful and diverse advice. Our unfortunate reality, however, is that we do not feel fully qualified to glean through all this information ourselves. Therefore, we have asked our dear friend Rick Eskenazi, a pediatric PA to review all your suggestions and contact you when necessary to get more information. His email address is eskenazi.r@ghc.org.  Once the information has been gathered, we will review it along with our doctors and other health care advisers.

What we ask of you is to:

(a) please accept our thanks for thinking of Ari and trying to help us find a cure and/or beneficial treatment,
(b) write down your specific ideas for treatment in as much detail as necessary/possible,
(c) inform us of any research you are aware of (if any) supporting the use of such treatment, and
(d) forward to us a case summary of those patients that have been treated with such protocols (e.g. type of cancer treated, type of treatment, benefits received from treatment, etc.).

Centralizing all the information in one location as detailed above provides for the most comprehensive review by qualified medical personnel.

Again, thank you in advance for caring enough about Ari to take the time to share your information and other responses.