Julie Atkins


SALEM, Va. (February 4, 2017) -- Elsewhere on this web site is Bogumila (Bogusia) Barton's story of successfully recovering from breast cancer using Dr. Burzynski's antineoplastons. I met Bogusia when she was an undergraduate at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. The year was 1971. I was a graduate student specializing in Slavic languages and literatures. Bogusia and I were roommates.

Fast forward to the 1980s. Bogusia was living in Chicago. I was back home in California. Bogusia didn't tell her friends about her cancer diagnosis until she was no longer in danger. I was astounded by her story. At the Clinic's 25th anniversary celebration, in the mid 1990s, I flew from California to Houston to celebrate with Bogusia and the other patients their recoveries from serious cancers. I visited the Clinic. Back in California, I told friends and acquaintances about Dr. Burzynski's work and success with inoperable tumors.

My story now shifts to Petersfield, England, an up-and-coming bedroom village about an hour's ride south of the London by train. My sister, Roberta, married an Englishman and lived with her husband and two daughters in an English row house behind the village church. In 2000, at age 50, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but did not tell her California family about her diagnosis. Apparently, she received the standard-of-care: lumpectomy, chemo, and radiation. A year after treatment, cancer returned to her liver and bones. We only learned about her condition when she was in hospice where she died on Mother's Day, 2001.

Informed by these two strikingly different outcomes, I decided that, if ever I was diagnosed with cancer, I would go first to the Burzynski Clinic in Houston and seek a non-toxic treatment that would help my own body take care of the cancer.

In 2004, my husband and I left overcrowded Southern California for a modern cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia. My mother, who spent 80 years of her life in California, agreed to move with us (a long and wonderful story!). A year after she died in 2014 I was diagnosed with stage three, infiltrating lobular carcinoma in my right breast.

As planned, a week after my diagnosis, I found myself, with my GPS in my lap, navigating a rental car through Houston traffic as if I knew where I was going! In all, I spent five weeks of 2015 in Houston staying at Habitat House, which is not far from the Clinic. About a week before I arrived at the Clinic the FDA had relented and allowed Dr. Burzynski to again treat patients with antineoplastons--but only terminal patients!

I was not a terminal patient! The only way Dr. Burzynski could treat me was for me to have a mastectomy, which I did at Woman's Hospital of Texas. Genetic testing later revealed that my cancer manifested 14 genetic mutations. My understanding is that most people's cancer manifests four to five mutations. Following the mastectomy, I started PB (sodium phenylbutyrate).

My surgeon here in Virginia did everything he could to persuade me to at least listen to an oncologist tell me about the "benefits" of the standard-of-care (chemo and radiation). I refused.

I asked him, "Why is it that, when someone is diagnosed with cancer, their first referral is to a surgeon? Why isn't the initial referral made to an immune specialist?"

After flippantly responding that "surgeons are the center of the universe," he explained, "The reason is that the body cannot take care of the cancer."

This is obviously false. Bodies take care of cancer all the time. Dr. Burzynski's healthy patients are testimonies to what the body can do when given a chance. As I write in February 2017, it is more than a year and a half since my cancer diagnosis, and I am cancer free! No chemo, no radiation, and no return of cancer! Instead, I have been able to continue my work and my life uninterrupted--except for those five weeks in Houston. This is astounding!

I hope my story encourages you to resist the pressure of the standard-of-care, and not even try chemo and radiation. Seek instead only non-toxic treatments, like Dr. Burzynski's antineoplastons, that can restore the immune system to its God-given function.