Susan Silberstein was happily married 14 years ago and the mother of two
infants. She had earned her doctorate in linguistics. Then her young husband was given less than a year to live, and she had to learn a new language: the language of cancer.
The lesson had a cruel twist: It was not the cancer that killed him, she said.
"My husband was a cure statistic, then he died of a heart attack brought on by adriamycin," she said, referring to chemotherapy medication.
His death in 1977 meant a new career for her.
That same year, Silberstein organized the Wynnewood-based Delaware Valley Foundation for Advancement in Cancer Therapy (FACT), the only chapter in the country outside the organization's headquarters in New York.
The purpose of FACT is to provide information about alternatives to traditional cancer treatments.
"The average patient with a diagnosis of cancer is in a total state of panic. They have no time, energy, money or emotional fortitude to plow through the information available to them," she said.
Unlike most businesses and organizations, Silberstein's goal is to close her doors - as soon as patients can get what she believes is optimum care from their own physicians, in their own home towns.
But, she added, her devotion to the pursuit of alternative cancer treatments is not a grudge match with the world of traditional oncology.
"I had an intellectual need to be the resource that wasn't there when I needed it. It was too late to help my husband, but I had information that I didn't want to bury with him," she said.
According to Silberstein, 46, the FACT archives include a database of more than 40,000 articles on nutrition. Diet is a strong, individually tailored part of the FACT programs, which are designed to enhance what Silberstein called biological repair - the body's ability to heal itself. But nutrition should not be viewed as a cure, she said.
"If a patient asks me, 'Can you treat my cancer nutritionally?,' I tell them no! I eat bean sprouts every day, but it is not going to cure cancer," she said.
The FACT team, including nurses, psychiatrists and a dietitian, also emphasizes nontoxic, non-invasive treatments.
"If you have a tumor that is threatening a life function, then of course you reduce that tumor, but too often surgery, chemotheraphy and radiation are used when they are not necessary because there are other ways that don't violate the body," she said.
