The founder of the Annie Appleseed cancer conferences -- Ann Fonfa -- is like the folk hero Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman). Whereas Johnny Appleseed planted apple seeds wherever he went, Ann plants informational seeds about the best way to get rid of cancer.

One of the informational seeds at this year’s conference in Palm Beach, Florida, is perhaps the biggest new cancer breakthrough we’ve seen in a while. Keep reading. . .

Anne Fonfa endured surgery for her own breast cancer but avoided toxic radiation and chemotherapy. Instead, she overcame her cancer with a variety of natural, alternative, and holistic methods. The same way Anne used to be, many people who attend the Annie Appleseed conferences are seriously ill with cancer. What they learn at the conference gives them a bright ray of hope.

One of the world’s leading holistic cancer doctors, Tony Jimenez, M.D., was a featured speaker at the 2014 conference. He revealed a breakthrough in virotherapy, telling the audience: “You are the first people in the United States who are hearing this! This will blow your mind. I’ve never seen anything that produces results like this!”

The breakthrough is a “virotherapy” called Rigvir. It’s was developed in Latvia, where it has passed all phases of clinical trials on almost 2,000 patients. The results of the clinical trials are convincing and impressive. For example, stomach cancer patients in the control group had a 24 percent survival rate. The patients treated with Rigvir survived at double that rate –48 percent.

Rigvir was registered in Latvia in 2004 as an anti-cancer drug. A prominent Latvian oncologist disparaged Rigvir until he got cancer. After he used it to get rid of his cancer, he became one of Rigvir’s biggest cheerleaders.

Rigvir works on a wide variety of cancers including melanoma, colorectal, pancreatic, bladder, kidney, prostate, lung, uterine, lymphosarcoma, etc. It triggers an immune response and seeks and destroys cancer cells.

Viruses are harmful, right? Not always! Surprisingly, the Rigvir virus is found in the gut of healthy children. Rigvir is short for “Riga virus” -- Riga being the capital of Latvia. Rigvir is a microscopic living organism with unique properties that kill tumors without hurting healthy cells.

After Rigvir invades the tumor cell, the virus replicates, causing the tumor cell to rupture and die. Rigvir breaks down cancer cells, stimulates the immune system to reject the tumor, and promotes apoptosis (programmed cell death, i.e., cancer cell suicide).

This is the polar opposite of chemotherapy drugs. Chemo impairs or destroys the immune system, while Rigvir boosts it.

Dr. Jimenez remarked, “I’ve been to 70 countries, and I’ve never seen a medicine that’s not a chemo drug that has so much research behind it. You can tell I’m pretty excited about Rigvir.”

Rigvir has none of the side effects of chemo. The only side effect that some people feel is a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit that might last for three days. Concerning that side effect, Dr. Jimenez said, “Big deal.”

Dr. Jimenez decided to take Rigvir therapy for himself because it’s not harmful and because he thought it could benefit his health. He was already the picture of health and vitality before taking Rigvir. He said, “Within three days, tests showed a significant improvement in my immune system, which I thought was pretty good [in the first place]. This shows that we all have room for improvement in our immune system.” He didn’t get the mild, temporary fever side-effect.

Dr. Jimenez said, “Rigvir is a cancer medicine -- a medication approved for cancer. It’s bionanotechnology -- not an alternative, complementary medicine. It’s the most potent immune modulator I’ve ever seen.”

At this writing, Rigvir is unavailable anywhere in the United States. You can get it in Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, the United Arab Ermirates, and a few other places in that part of the world. There’s only one place you can get it in the Western Hemisphere: at Dr. Jimenez’s Hope 4 Cancer clinic in Tijuana (www.Hope4Cancer.com).

Rigvir is only one treatment among many that Dr. Jimenez offers at Hope 4 Cancer. He has used laetrile since 1988 without seeing a single case of the cyanide toxicity that critics claim is a hazard of ths remedy. He says it’s “very, very difficult to have cyanide toxicity with laetrile.”

He also uses an intravenous form of artemisinin (see Issue #382 for more), intravenous curcumin, nutritional therapies, and detoxification -- especially cleansing the gut, which he calls “Job One.” Some patients come to Dr. Jimenez in such a toxic condition that it’s first necessary to open up the channels of elimination before attacking the cancer cells.

Dr. Jimenez talked about one case in which a woman with metastasized liver cancer came to him for help. Her doctor at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles had given her just two months to live. After she got rid of her cancer in Tijuana, she returned to Los Angeles, where doctors declared her “cancer free.”

She asked them, “Would you like to know what I’m doing?”

They replied, “No, but whatever you’re doing is working. Keep on doing it.”

Concerning the reaction of those Los Angeles doctors, conference organizer Ann Fonfa remarked, “That’s good, and it’s also stupid.” It is indeed good that the Los Angeles doctors urged a patient to keep on doing whatever was working, but it’s stupid to remain deliberately ignorant of holistic therapies that obviously work.

Another speaker, Chris Wark, told the story of his recovery from cancer. He began his speech by saying, “I have nothing to sell you. I paid my own way to be here. I’m here to share my story with you in person and to share the information that saved my life.” Chris is the author of a blog called “Chris Beat Cancer” (www.ChrisBeatCancer.com).

At the age of 26, newlywed Chris got the bad news that he had Stage Three colon cancer. He’d felt low energy and got strange abdominal aches that would come and go, but it was hard for him to tell exactly where the pain was coming from.

Doctors found a tumor the size of a golf ball in his intestine. They rushed him onto the operating table and took out a third of his large intestine, after which they told him, “We took out everything we could see, but you need months of chemo.”

Right after surgery the first meal the hospital fed Chris was a sloppy joe. He didn’t know much about nutrition at the time, but he thought to himself: “This doesn’t seem like the best meal for me right now. Maybe some applesauce or soup or something.” Nevertheless, he ate the sloppy joe because he hadn’t eaten for a couple days and was hungry.

Chris said he has heard many cancer patients tell him about their regrets after undergoing conventional treatment. They tell him, “I knew I shouldn’t have done it.” He believes it’s crucial for cancer patients to listen to their inner voice and to have the courage to follow it.

Chris prayed, “God, show me what to do. If there’s another way, show me.” Two days later he received a book in the mail out of the blue. The title of the book was God’s Ultimate Way to Health. It tells the story of a man who beat colon cancer without any conventional therapy whatsoever -- natural methods only.

Chris knew the book was an answer to his prayer. He radically changed his diet, threw out all of his junk food, juiced, and went raw vegan. He said, “When you do alternatives, you’re swimming against the current. Cancer isn’t a physical battle. It’s a mental battle. I stayed the course. I found a naturopath and took every supplement I could afford.” He also did high dose vitamin C by IV.

After working with the naturopath for 90 days, Chris added some cooked food to his diet, including three servings of animal protein per week. The food and supplement regimen changed his bioterrain so that it became inhospitable to cancer cells. He also dealt with a hidden cause of cancer: stress. Chris told the audience, “You have to create a peaceful, quiet life, and forgive everyone who has ever hurt you. Grudges give you a sick heart, which will give you a sick body. You have to heal your heart!”

Another speaker, psychotherapist Daniel Weber, Ph.D., also addressed the issue of stress. The title of his talk was “Stress, Inflammation, and Cancer.” There’s a link between cancer and unmanaged stress, which can rip the immune system to shreds. To make matters worse, a cancer diagnosis adds to a patient’s stress.

Dr. Weber said that stress is only pressure. It’s how we react to that pressure that determines whether good or bad things will happen. Stress tells us that something needs to change -- that what we’ve been doing may not be in line with what we should be doing.

Dr. Weber firmly believes that cancer patients and others should learn from stress because “cancer is an opportunity to change. That’s all it is. It’s another stressor that gives us an opportunity to change our lives.”

That’s a profound insight! If the cancer patient changes nothing or chooses the wrong kind of change, a successful outcome is doubtful. Dr. Weber strongly urges stressed out people to resolve the stress. Don’t self-medicate. Change!

Stress often goes together with depression, which Dr. Weber said “isn’t a single disease but many. It’s a physiological problem. What goes on in your gut affects your psyche 100 percent. Do emotions cause cancer? No. A failure to learn from emotions can cause cancer. Malice is destructive. But standing up for yourself and arguing can be healthy.”

Bringing stress under management is essential for any cancer patient trying to recover from the disease. Granted, that’s easier said than done. He suggested several ways, including exercise, yoga, tai chi, and qigong.

Stress is a two-edged sword. Dr. Weber asserted: “When stress is too much, we break. When there’s not enough stress, we wither.” He explained it this way: “If your challenge is greater than your skill, that causes stress. If your skill is greater than your challenge, that also causes stress. (For example, brilliant people staring at a TV in a retirement home.) Bring your skill and challenge into balance.”

Dr. Weber concluded his remarks with this meditation: “Be like water: empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. When you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Water flows, dissolves, dances, falls, rises, is one with everything. In the river it’s never the same. Water can flow or it can surge. Water can be still or can pour from the heavens. Water is benign or passionate. Be water, my friends.”

Another speaker, Dr. Ashwin Mehta, M.D., addressed the topic of stress indirectly in his talk about “Optimum Sleep During Cancer Treatment and Beyond.” His subspecialty is sleep medicine. Stress can ruin the quality of sleep -- and good quality sleep is essential for recovery from disease. Deep sleep is a time when the immune system rebuilds itself.

Here’s another way to look at it. Dr. Mehta said that the deep state of sleep known as REM (for Rapid Eye Movement -- the eyes move rapidly beneath the closed eyelids) is like “defragging the hard drive.” If you’ve ever watched a computer screen when a hard drive is defragged, you’ve seen the chaotic jumble of file fragments on the hard-drive as they’re put into good order. Something like that apparently happens during REM sleep.

Dr. Mehta remarked that chronic pain and poor sleep are linked. People who suffer from chronic pain and negative moods generally aren’t satisfied with the quality of their sleep, which can lead to a downward spiral. That being the case, pain management and a change of attitude are crucial.

He offered many tips to improve the quality of sleep and warned, “Don’t watch TV just before you go to sleep.” Instead, he suggested a bedtime ritual that might include breathing exercises, muscle relaxation, guided imagery, and chamomile or passion flower tea. For general stress relief, he recommends such things as meditation, yoga (but not “hot yoga”), acupuncture, massage, and tai chi.

Dr. Mehta’s grandmother once gave him a piece of homespun advice: “After lunch, rest a while. After dinner, walk a mile.” He explained that afternoon naps are important and helpful unless you’re having poor quality sleep at night. He added that mild exercise in the evening can be part of a winding-down ritual that leads to a good night’s sleep.

What if you wake up in the middle of the night? Dr. Mehta says not to worry about that because it’s normal. Just as it’s o.k. to have a nap in the afternoon, it’s also o.k. to be awake during part of the night. He said, “Don’t try willfully to fall asleep. Sleep is a surrender, a letting go. What’s needed is serenity, contentment, gratitude, and tranquility to get you in the mood for the surrender that leads you to drift into sleep.”

What if you just plain can’t get to sleep or wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep? In that case, Dr. Mehta said it’s not good to spend too much time in bed when you’re not sleeping. It’s better to get up for a while and go back to bed when you’re calm, relaxed, and serene.

Dr. Mehta said that wearable tech devices like FitBit are making older techniques like a sleep log obsolete. As for melatonin, the popular sleep remedy, he said he uses it only for jet lag.

Next week, we’ll give you Part II of our report on this important meeting.