Believe Big is an organization founded by Ivelisse and Jimmy Page after her fight with colon cancer. The organization serves to educate, connect, and support cancer patients and families as they walk through the cancer journey. The organization was invaluable to our family and serves hundreds of families each year through online resources, classes, grants, and more. A positive outlook filled with hope along with an integrative approach to healing can help patients through this process of fighting cancer.
Additionally, Believe Big is partnered with Johns Hopkins university to fund the first clinical trial of mistletoe as a treatment and adjuvent therapy for cancer. Widely used in Europe, Mistletoe comes in many preparations and extracts. Though there have been many studies on the substance, weaknesses in those studies have raised questions as to the accuracy of their results. Believe Big and Johns Hopkins plan to provide the first well-designed studies to finally answer the questions of mistletoe efficacy and safety.
Ivelisse used an integrative approach to fighting her stage IV colon cancer, having surgery but using mistletoe as a follow up to surgery because in her case chemo would have adjusted her chances very little while reducing her quality of life greatly. Read more about her story on their web site.
Finally, here is an NIH quick sheet on Mistletoe. In short, it seems to be generally safe, does appear to reduce the side effects of chemo, but needs further study to identify whether it does help to directly treat cancer, and if so what preparations might treat what specific cancers. There are naturopaths in the US who do have access to mistletoe, and Believe Big maintains a list.
