The demand for integrative oncology is on
the upswing as both patients and doctors grow impatient with the failed
war on cancer. Best Answer for Cancer Foundation's 2011 conference
this past May had quadruple the attendance of the previous year, and 17
new doctors were trained in the protocols of insulin potentiation
therapy (IPT). The group is an international leader in the move away
from a one-size-fits-all kind of treatment to an integrated,
patient-centered approach.
"Cancer is a multibillion dollar market and growing
fast," says Tomas Hode, PhD, who is working on an autologous vaccine.
"Companies make a lot of money on something that doesn't work that
well. Metastases are the major cause of death in cancer. Yet from 1972
to 2004, only 0.5% of the NCI-sponsored studies focused primarily on
metastasis."
Metastases (the spread of cancer from one spot to another)
are a manifestation of treatment failure. The survival rate today for a
metastatic cancer is about what it was in the 1970s.
Integrative oncology does not mean standard doses of chemo
and radiation plus a sprinkling of vitamins and an acupuncture
treatment. "Cancer is an entire system fallen ill," says Dr. William
Njuguna of Kenya. "That is why chemical attacks like chemotherapy
cannot heal it. Therapy needs to reverse the body milieu."
The Fragile Milieu
The cancer establishment tells us to fight cancer. We
march out the familiar three-pronged attack of surgery, chemo, and
radiation – weapons of mass destruction to be hurled at an already
debilitated immune system. The majority of the drugs are not taken up
by the cancer cells; the massive dosage wreaks havoc on healthy cells
and blood components. Good cells die along with the bad. We know that
surgeries can cause metastases down the road, once chemo and radiation
have killed the P53 tumor-suppressor gene. Indeed, cancer usually
returns between 6 and 11 years, which is why the statistics measure
5-year survival rates.
When the initial treatment produces clear cancer
markers, the patient is sent home and told to hope for the best. The
cancer is declared "gone," yet a very fragile immune system is left to
fend for itself. Too often the body flounders and the cancer returns –
harder to kill than before, and easier to metastasize.
It is becoming clear that we've been losing "the war
on cancer" in great part because the current paradigm is too focused on
bombarding cancer cells rather than healing a depleted body. Doctors
of every stripe can agree that cancer is a failure of the immune
system.
Tumors are wounds that do not heal.
Every cancer medication should improve wound healing.
—Rudolph Virchow, 1865
Cancer is a wily beast. It
mutates so much, it is tough to keep pace with it. "That is why we
really need to stimulate the immune system," said Martha M. Grout, MD,
MD(H), of Arizona. "The immune system kills many cancerous cells every
day. A tumor is partly 'me,' but not completely 'me,' so you need to
include the body's own immune system in the treatment. It is the only
thing in our body that recognizes what is 'me' and what is not."
Conference participants were universally of the opinion
that if you kill off every single tumor cell but you don't have a
support system for the immune system, then the cancer is very likely
coming back. The immune system must be nourished, made stronger than
when the cancer took hold. As Hode puts it, "The immune system is
potentially the best guard against metastases." Yet conventional
therapy dispenses precious little information about the toxic world
that assaults our immune system daily, information especially important
for cancer patients.
Our Toxic World
At least two recent reports have concluded that cancer is, in large part, an environmental disease.1,2
The most recent, the 2010 President's Cancer Panel, said that it was
"particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally
induced cancer has been grossly underestimated," and that "grievous
harm from carcinogens" has not been addressed adequately by the
National Cancer Program." Among the pollutants the panel identified as
causing cancer:
- medical imagingradiation exposure
- pharmaceuticals
- pesticides
- the military's 900 Superfund sites
- chlorine byproductsin public water supplies
- manufacturing
- lifestyle – modern conveniences such as dry-cleaning fluid, cell phones, and tanning booths
"For
the first time in 100 years, newborns have a shorter life expectancy
than their parents," Doris J. Rapp, MD, points out. "Pesticides may be
the worst thing in our environment. The government admits that 30 to
90% of fungicides, herbicides and pesticides cause cancer. We eat
approximately 25 pesticides a day. And with genetically engineered
crops, we are using more than ever – and it's still not working well.
Forty years ago, insect crop damage was about 7% of the harvest; now it
is about 13%. No wonder cancer is still a leading killer. How sick and
malnourished do people have to get before those in power do something?"
Dan Clark, MD, of Florida agrees with putting
pesticides on the top of the list. "Alzheimer's and cancer are both
mitochondrial diseases. The thing that does the most the damage to the
mitochondria (where cells convert fuel to energy) is pesticides." And
California's Juergen Winkler, MD, concurs: "Pesticides and heavy metals –
we find them in all our cancer patients."
We have more than 80,000 chemicals in our environment,
but only about 15% have been tested for safety. Chemicals damage the
body's systems, including the immune system. Over time, the damage can
alter people's DNA and destiny such that they become a cancer
statistic.
3,4 This is the argument for making prevention an
integral part of any cancer strategy. Integrative oncologists take that
to heart. Most say they don't consider the job done when the cancer
cells are killed; they pay attention to the inner terrain during
treatment and, most importantly in terms of preventing cancer's return,
they teach their patients how to boost the inner terrain long after
treatment is over.
The list of such efforts often includes teaching
patients how to make permanent changes in diet; teaching how to make
ongoing use of chelation, colonics and other detoxifying tools;
getting the hormones balanced; getting heavy metals and root canals out
of the mouth; switching out common household and beauty care products
for nontoxic brands; and coming to grips with whatever emotional
baggage may be contributing to a depressed immune system.
"Cancer does not appear out of nowhere; there is more
to this than cells that suddenly go abnormal," says Pieter DeWet, MD,
of Texas and founder of the Center for Nutrition Preventative Medicine
at the University of Texas Health Center. "To treat the symptoms is
like shooting the messenger. The current paradigm does not trust the
body's ability to heal itself. It is conceivable that cancer is a
biological solution to internal imbalances created by unresolved inner
conflicts in conjunction with other factors such as lifestyle, diet,
environmental toxins, and infectious agents."
Targeted Delivery of Chemo
What
if we trusted the body's own hormone, insulin, to allow us to target
the chemotherapy drugs directly to the cancer cells, largely bypassing
the healthy cells? This approach, IPT, was first used for cancer in
1946; the patient in that case lived disease-free for another 30 years.
IPT has been a successful cancer treatment used around the world ever
since. Studies at George Washington University, the National Cancer
Institute, and M. D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute demonstrated
that insulin potentiates (makes more effective) chemotherapy drugs.
IPT stands on the shoulders of Nobel Prize-winning
achievements. In 1921, insulin was discovered. About a decade later,
Otto Warburg taught us that cancer cells differ from other cells in
that their main fuel is glucose (sugar). This is a vulnerability that
can be used to our advantage in therapy. When you administer insulin to
drop a patient's blood sugar level, cancer cells become ravenous for
any sugar (fuel) that they can find left in the bloodstream. At the
therapeutic moment – that is usually when the blood sugar level dips
into the 40s – the cancer cells are screaming for sugar. Now administer
the chemo drugs, and the cancer cells take in the drugs in their
effort to get at the sugar. Think of it as the Trojan horse concept. It
doesn't take long for the drugs to find their way into the cells; a
few minutes later the patient's blood sugar level can be brought back
up to normal.
A 1981 George Washington University study found that
using insulin increased the killing effect of one of the key chemo
drugs, methotrexate, by a factor of 10,000.
5 There was a
small study done in Uruguay with multi-drug-resistant metastatic breast
cancer which found that the combination of methotrexate and insulin
stabilized or shrank the tumor far better than methotrexate alone.
6
The use of insulin to target chemo works so well,
patients need to receive only about 10% of the usual dose. Best Answer
for Cancer Foundation wanted to underscore the ability to target the
chemo and initiated the term IPTLD (insulin potentiation targeted low
dose). The smaller dosage saves a lot of wear and tear on the immune
system and vital organs. IPTLD patients typically do not have severe
bouts of nausea, intestinal ulcers, or hair loss as commonly happens in
conventional therapy. IPTLD patients feel better during treatment and
report a better quality of life than their friends who undergo
conventional treatment.
Insulin brings other assets to the table as well.
"In
conventional treatment, only about 20% of the cells are being attacked
at any one time," explained Dr. Richard Linchitz of New York.
"Insulin, however, sends cells into a growth phase so it sensitizes the
cancer to treatment – makes the drugs more likely to kill the cells
because more are dividing. Insulin increases S-phase activity."
A third way that insulin helps is with detoxification.
Insulin increases cellular permeability, meaning that glucose goes in
more easily, and the low-dose chemo goes in more easily. The door
swings both ways – toxins and debris from dying tumor cells also pass
out much more easily. Insulin facilitates the detoxification so
necessary with cancer.
Chemo Isn't the Only Game In Town
Cancer
cells tend to become drug resistant. It's helpful if the toolbox
contains something other than just chemo. This is where vitamin C
shines. It is commonly used by integrative oncologists as an adjunct
cytotoxic agent to kill cancer cells.7 The National
Institutes of Health (NIH) confirmed in 2005 that high doses of vitamin
C given intravenously are able to kill a high proportion of cancer
cells.8 The mechanism of cellular death is high levels of
intracellular hydrogen peroxide which are produced in response to the
vitamin C. High doses of intravenous vitamin C also help the immune
system because they can ward off bacterial and fungal infections.
PolyMVA is another popular adjunct agent with an
enviable safety record. It is a bound lipoic acid palladium complex
that is highly selective for malignant tissue. Board-certified
oncologist Dr. James Forsythe conducted clinical trials with PolyMVA
and terminally ill (stage IV) cancer patients. He reported that the
overall survival rate was 71% in the PolyMVA group; less than 10% of
those patients would have been expected to survive two years if they
had continued to receive conventional therapy alone. His work was
compelling enough to persuade the FDA in 2008 to approve the first
cancer-related Investigational New Drug study utilizing a dietary
supplement.
Whereas conventional therapy frowns on the use of
antioxidants because they can neutralize chemo drugs, integrative
oncologists use a number of antioxidants. Conventional therapy sees the
need for the chemo agents to hang around for days to catch as many
cells dividing as possible; IPTLD's targeted delivery system negates
the need for that because insulin already encouraged cell division when
the drugs were administered. It's better for the immune system to get
the chemo out quickly.
"If you have maximum oxygen utilization, you don't get
cancer, period," Frank Shallenberger, MD, HMD, of Nevada explained at
the conference. "I have never tested one cancer patient who had normal
oxygen utilization; we can quantitatively measure that. When you put
ozone into a bag of blood, the ozone disappears in seconds. There is no
ozone in the blood when it enters the patient because it has already
formed into peroxides. So you are infusing peroxides (German literature
calls them ozonides) that hang around for several weeks. And there are
great byproducts to ozone therapy: it bumps up ATP (cellular energy)
production as much as 40%, and is antibacterial/-fungal/-viral. One
reason it works so well for my patients is because I am killing all
kinds of bugs. Combining oxygen with antioxidants markedly increases
the synthesis of TNF-alpha, which the body produces to interfere with
growth of tumors."
Integrative oncologists also often use proteolytic
enzymes to dismantle biofilms that cancers can use to cloak themselves
and evade detection from the immune system.
"IPTLD is a very effective approach to killing cancer
cells, but it is not a magic bullet," cautions Linchitz. "It is a
logical approach and is best when combined with changes in nutrition
(reduce sugar and high glycemic foods, choose organic to avoid
increased need to detox), plus a biological dentistry assessment,
supplements, lifestyle assessment, and the use of other therapies like
ozone and hyperthermia."
Emotional Baggage
The
role of chronic stress in degenerative disease is well documented.
Viktor Frankl, a 20th-century Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist,
demonstrated decades ago that those who survived the concentration
camps in World War II were largely the people with a positive outlook.
Research since then has gotten much more sophisticated.
Brenda Stockdale, author of You Can Beat the Odds: Surprising Factors Behind Chronic Illness & Cancer,
told the conference attendees that the mind–body link is basic
biology. "People will say, 'Cancer runs in my family; I have bad
genes.' But whether disease is expressed is not cut in stone. The
coding on our DNA acts like an antenna scanning what it finds, and then
coding the proteins. Your environment, diet – and your feelings, the
way you respond to stress – can change how your body deals with
weaknesses in your DNA."
Patients literally can hear the doctor differently when
the stress hormones are out of their system, Stockdale says. Also,
people can learn how to stop the flood of stress hormones so that they
are not fighting their own biochemistry.
Most of the IPT conference participants listed
emotional baggage as an issue to be dealt with. Many integrative
oncologists notice that the connection between the type of cancer and
emotions can be so specific that some will say, for example, that a
breast cancer is about a "nest conflict," an emotional trauma related
to a loved one living in the home. One prevailing theory is that
cancers are triggered by a traumatic emotional conflict shock, usually
within two years prior to the cancer's showing up. But not all patients
are willing to dig deep into their psyches.
"Cancer patients typically cannot talk about the
traumatic event," explained DeWet. "They may not even remember the
event; it has been downloaded to the subconscious. The most critical
part of healing is becoming fully aware of our unresolved inner
programming and triggering conflicts. Awareness is responsible for
50–60% of healing."
The biology of belief – the stories that we tell ourselves about
who we are and what our experiences are – are all-important immune
system regulators.
However, conventional medicine, with its Newtonian focus on finding
one drug/one cure, has been slow to embrace the concept of emotional
stress.
Patients Demand Change
"The
NIH is focused toward one magic bullet, but we are not going to defeat
cancer looking for the magic bullet," says Ann Fonfa of Florida, a
cancer survivor of 19 years. "Most everybody now knows someone who has
undergone conventional cancer treatment and they know how difficult it
is. The majority of people who die of cancer die after taking
mainstream cancer treatments. So many people get pushed into
conventional treatment with the sales tactic of fear. That isn't right.
You really do have time to educate yourself. What you don't have is the
opportunity for buyer's remorse later when you learn more and know
better."
Fonfa and other patients fed up with conventional
treatment are looking to push changes through the system from the
bottom up. "Patient advocates should have a voice in how the trials are
designed, conducted, and outcomes presented so they are meaningful to
people with cancer," Fonfa says, and she often gets a seat at the table
of various organizations. "Are the powers that be asking the right
questions? There is so little research on metastatic disease and yet
that is what most people die from. I don't feel the funds are being
used in ways that that benefit patients. Researchers are not seeing
nutrition, for example, as an integrated component of any study. Yet
there are a few studies that have show a definite link. Just curcumin
blocks nine cancer pathways all by itself."
Annie
Brandt is teaching patients how to take charge of their therapy. She
used IPTLD and adjunct therapies when diagnosed with advanced stage
metastatic breast cancer in 2001; eight months after utilizing IPTLD,
she was cancer free and still is.
"Our thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of
life's events are as much a part of the cancer etiology as are our
genetics, our circulating tumor cells, and our white blood cell count,"
Brandt says. "When conventional medicine's standard of care includes
treating the whole being, I believe we will see a dramatic turnaround
in cancer survival rates, particularly for later stage cancers."
Brandt says that until then, those who want to be
survivors need to create a personalized "healing platform." Think of it
as a toolbox for life that patients can assemble, including:
- practices that change our
susceptibility to cancer (e.g., serious diet changes, physical
exercise, coffee enemas, digging into our emotional baggage and getting
in touch with the spiritual side);
- products that lessen the
chemicals in our bodies and in our environments (e.g., nontoxic
household supplies, air purifiers, water filters, supplements for detox
and nourishment, reducing exposure to electromagnetic fields);
- procedures and medical
therapies that work together to heal holistically (e.g., IPTLD, vitamin
C, PolyMVA, hyperbaric oxygen, ozone, the use of photon and electron
generators).
"To understand that cancers
are usually many years in the making is to understand how to begin to
take control and change your life," Brandt says. "Most doctors don't
have time to educate us about these things, so we must take the
initiative."
Doctors Are Changing
Guy
DaSilva, MD, of Florida is trained in internal medicine, pathology,
hematology, hematopathology, and molecular oncology. He was a long-time
board-certified oncologist who, by his own admission, "spent many
years as a staunch protector of academic and conventional medicine" and
"made buckets of money" practicing conventional cancer treatment. He
was one of the 2011 Best Answer for Cancer Foundation trainees. Why did
he want to learn IPTLD? "I have too much compassion not to."
Dr. "Billy" Njuguna practiced conventional oncology for
four years before seeking his certification in IPTLD. "The
pharmaceutical industry is making decisions of how things should be
done, but they are far removed from patients and do not see the
individual needs," he says. "I would estimate that 80% of the patients
treated with standard oncology were not responding, they did not have
much life expectancy, and we saw a lot of metastases. Then I attended a
conference and a German doctor presented a protocol where he used
amino acids and trace elements, lysine, 1000 mg vitamin C, and extract
of green tea. I went for training at the Cochrane Institute. I had a
very open mind by the time I heard about IPTLD and got my certification
in 2008. I could not go back to standard oncology."
Gus Kotsanis, MD, of Texas and Sean Devlin, DO, MD(H),
of Nevada cleared their calendars and made time to provide the first 12
hours of training at the conference. The IPTLD program is a minimum of
40 hours, ending in a full credentialing process. It is open to MDs
and DOs in good standing, and NDs in good standing who practice with an
oncologist.
Shifting the Paradigm
No
one appears to contest the efficacy of this treatment; patients much
prefer it. The problem is that the powers that be have nothing to gain.
"If this is so great, why hasn't this been studied more?" proposed
Linchitz. "Drug companies fund the vast majority of cancer studies and
it doesn't make sense to fund a study that would promote the use of
only 10% of your product."
Isaac Newton (1624–1727) defined physics as a system
for measuring gross quantities and forces on a physical plane. Some
would say that Newton contributed more to the development of science
than any other individual in history. But Newton's physics also
produced answers that were often too rigid. He did not embrace the
concept of a soul, for example, because it cannot be straightforwardly
measured or dissected.
Today's language of discovery and the scientific
definition of reality have expanded dramatically. However, in many
ways, the field of medicine has yet to come out of the Newtonian era.
"If you are a scientist trained in the Newtonian
paradigm, you're not seeing the complicated picture that is cancer,"
Grout explains. "The Newtonian way says there is one cause for one
effect, and it gets very complicated to look at multiple causes, and
then it gets too expensive or complicated to research multiple
approaches to healing. Cancer is complicated – it is a multifactorial
disease. The simplistic one-size-fits-all approach is obsolete."
Mary Budinger is an Emmy
Award-winning journalist who specializes in marketing services for
complementary and alternative medicine. She may be contacted at
602-494-1999.
Notes
1. Brody JG, Moysich KP, et al. Environmental Pollutants and Breast Cancer. Silent Spring Institute. Cancer. May 14, 2007;109(S12): 2667–2712.
2. President's Cancer Panel. Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk – What We Can Do Now. 2008–2009 Annual Report. April 2010.
3. Colborn T, Dumanoski D, Myers JP. Our Stolen Future. Dutton; 1996
4. Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility. In Harm's Way. 2002.
5 .Alabaster A, Vonderhaar B, Shafie S. Metabolic modification by
insulin enhances methotrexate cytotoxicity in MCF-7 human breast cancer
cells. Eur J Cancer Clin Oncol. 17:1223–1228.
6. Lasalvia-Prisco E, Cucchi S, et al. Insulin-induced enhancement of
antitumoral response to methotrexate in breast cancer patients. Cancer Chemother Pharmacol. 2004;53(3):220–224.
7. Padayatty SJ, Riordan HD, et al. Intravenously administered vitamin C as cancer therapy: three cases. CMAJ. 2006 March 28;174(7):937–942.
8. Chen Q, Espey MG, et al. Pharmacologic ascorbic acid concentrations
selectively kill cancer cells: Action as a pro-drug to deliver hydrogen
peroxide to tissues. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Sep 20;102(38):13604–13609. Epub 2005 Sep 12.