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A conference coming up in April reminds us that there is a lot going on in integrative cancer treatments.

• Esophageal: 3% for esophageal cancers that metastasize, which is common in this aggressive cancer; the average for all forms of esophageal cancer is 15–20%
• Lung: 4% for lung cancers that metastasize; the average for all forms of lung cancer is 16%
• Pancreatic: 2% for pancreatic cancers that metastasize; the average for all forms of pancreatic cancer is 6%

Despite these dismal statistics, the conventional cancer industry resists change. Patients with little chance of being cured with chemo get chemo anyway, even though it eliminates any chance the body will recover on its own and makes the end of their life much more miserable than it would have been.
Even worse, scientists have found that healthy cells damaged by chemo can secrete a protein which makes cancer worse by triggering more tumor growth. Moreover the cancer cells that survive chemo tend to be the more aggressive ones, which can also lead to faster tumor growth.
It’s not as if the conventional cancer industry does not have any new ideas. But even when it does have one, it seems to take forever to get it approved and used. A striking example is the use of focused ultrasound as an alternative to surgery and radiation treatment. This major innovation has been used very successfully for prostate and even brain surgery, but is still not used very often or in many areas where it should be, such as esophageal cancer. Why should Americans have to fly to Japan to get this exciting new treatment?
Meanwhile, integrative cancer treatments are forging ahead, despite being ignored and denigrated by the medical establishment and the government.
One of the most exciting integrative cancer treatments is Insulin Potentiation Therapy, or IPT, also called Insulin Potentiation Targeted Low Dose (IPTLD). It’s a procedure for targeting chemo drugs directly to cancer cells, making the drugs tougher on the disease and easier on the rest of the body.
Each of our trillions of cells has a membrane, an outer skin, that protects it from toxins. Standard chemotherapy must be given in large enough quantities to force penetration through that membrane, with the result that the body is flooded with incredibly toxic drugs. IPTLD, however, penetrates easily through the cell membrane because it goes in hand-in-hand with sugar (glucose).
Cancer cells, unlike healthy cells, need lots of glucose for fuel. Without it, they die. The membrane of a cancer cell is designed to take in a lot more glucose than healthy cells—they are equipped with many more insulin receptors. So if one pairs a small dose of chemo drugs with the glucose, the cancer cell takes in the chemo in its effort to get at the sugar. This means the rest of the body doesn’t have to be assaulted in order to kill the cancer cells. The therapy uses only one-tenth the usual amount of chemotherapy drugs.
The eleventh annual IPT/IPTLD Integrative Cancer Care Conference, to be held April 18–20 in Dallas, will feature presentations by experts in their fields on different aspects of integrative cancer care, with an emphasis on therapies that are kinder and gentler but still powerfully effective. Besides the latest in IPTLD treatments, they’ll look at comprehensive healing techniques and tools like diet and nutrition, as well as toxins/detox as they relate to cancer and chronic diseases, with an emphasis on individualizing non-invasive cancer care, rather than promoting an invasive one-size-fits-all approach.
Besides IPT, among some of the other well known integrative treatments are:

• Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez’s enzymatic therapy for cancer, which we described in a recent article.
• Dr. Jeanne Drisko’s research on the use of intravenous vitamin C at the University of Kansas.
• Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s pioneering research on a nontoxic gene-targeted cancer therapy called antineoplastons, which has successfully survived attack after attack from conventional medicine and the Texas state medical board.

In addition, there is the important integrative research on diet.  As Dr. Frank Shallenberger points out in his RealCures newsletter, diet is an extremely important part of cancer prevention and treatment. Cancers can only live off sugars, whether they are in the form of simple sugars or are broken down from more complex carbohydrates. Drastically lowering one’s carbohydrate intake, especially carbs that turn to sugar quickly, can slow cancer growth by 50%.
Dr. David Williams also points out (in his January 2013 newsletter article “The Argument Against Being ‘Normal’,”) some of the studies showing a connection between sugars and cancer: elevated blood sugar levels are linked with colorectal cancer in postmenopausal women; high carb intake is linked to an increased risk of recurrence and mortality in stage III colon cancer patients; and the higher your fasting blood glucose is, the higher your risk for several major cancers.
Most people don’t die of cancer; they die of cachexia, whose symptoms are progressive weight loss, anorexia, and erosion of host body cell mass in response to cancerous growth. The connection to cancer isn’t fully understood, but one possibility is that the body is trying to starve the cancer and in the end overdoes it, like the too-strong inflammatory reaction in the lungs that actually kills most people who die of flu or pneumonia. This underscores the likelihood that cachexia is best treated by a radical change in diet.
Yet many conventional doctors still tell their cancer patients that it doesn’t matter what they eat! Cancer patients in hospitals not only get the poor food supervised by registered dieticians; they even get sweets! It is past time for conventional medicine to acknowledge its failures, open itself to new ideas, consider factors such as diet, and stop attacking and persecuting innovators.
It is not just that conventional approaches are failing on some cancers. A recent Australian study shows the five-year survival rate for cancer patients who do not receive chemotherapy to be over 60%. The survival rate for patients who received chemotherapy was only 62.3%—which is virtually the same and doesn’t consider the other costs such as brain damage. Are the results any better in the US? No, the statistics are similar, only 2.1% gain from chemo, really no difference. And as noted above, chemo may actually make the cancer more aggressive and deadly.
Why is medicine so committed to conventional chemo treatments? Unfortunately cancer is big business. According to the National Cancer Institute at NIH, $124.57 billion was spent on cancer treatments and cancer care in 2010 alone.
As we reported in 2010, oncologists are allowed to buy chemo drugs and then dispense them from their offices at higher rates. Being able to run what amounts to a side pharmacy business (which other doctors are not allowed to do) incentivizes oncologists to prescribe expensive drugs.
Another barrier to change in the cancer industry is flawed or corrupted research. Last week’s Journal of Oncology reported that most double-blind random placebo-controlled trials (RCTs) for cancer, supposedly the gold standard of scientific and medical research, are compromised by poor or biased reporting of both the benefits and the dangers. They studied 164 double-blind RCTs of mainstream breast cancer treatments (radiation, surgery, and chemo) and found that almost one-third of the trials reported a positive result that was not based on the primary goal of the study, but rather on a secondary one more likely to be due to chance. And two-thirds of the trials failed to accurately report the toxicity of the therapy.
By underreporting the toxicity, researchers are hiding the fact that many mainstream cancer treatments do more harm than good. And by mischaracterizing the positive results, they are proving that the double-blind RCT isn’t the gold standard it’s cracked up to be.
Let’s hope that change and reform finally comes to the cancer “industry.” In the meantime, anyone with cancer or a family member with cancer should not rely on what they are told at the nearest cancer center but should do independent research on their own. A good place to start is with the Moss Reports, published by medical writer Ralph W. Moss, PhD, who has written or edited twelve books and three film documentaries on questions relating to cancer research and treatment.

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• The question of randomization. Conventional medicine believes that randomization is essential when selecting study participants. However, this doesn’t work for alternative medicine—“such a design most likely would create rather than prevent bias,” says Dr. Gonzalez in his book. With a strict nutritional regimen, compliance on the part of the patient is essential. It requires discipline and usually a preexisting interest in alternative medicine. Therefore selecting study participants requires some sort of screening—the opposite of randomization. In general, patients with an interest in following a strict nutritional regimen to treat their cancer are likely to quit the study once they realize that they have a 50% chance of being in the chemotherapy group rather than the alternative treatment group. By the same token, patients who prefer chemo are likely to quit when they realize that there is a 50% likelihood that they will be placed in the nutritional treatment group instead.
• The lack of a “lead-in.” A two-week lead-in (at minimum) is necessary to fully vet the patients in the nutritional regimen study group to make sure they follow the program. The chief investigators refused to allow for a lead-in period.
• Improper screening of study candidates. Contrary to the initial agreement, Drs. Gonzales and Isaacs were excluded from participating in the selection of study subjects. As a result, as many as 39 patients followed the nutritional regimen only for brief periods or did so inconsistently—with some not following the protocols at all—making the data meaningless.
• Sabotage attempts. Because of the controversial nature of nutritional therapy for cancer, many members of the oncology community were vocal in their opposition to the project and deliberately tried to undermine it.
• Delays. “Over the years, since my fellowship days…I have observed that when the NCI want to get a study done, it gets done….Our study proceeded along a completely different pathway….In our case, the [process] hardly ran expeditiously….Not a single delay involved some deficiency or non-compliance on our part.”

Without Dr. Gonzalez’s knowledge, a misleading article was published about the findings from the clinical trial. Despite his best efforts in dealing with NCI, NCAAM, the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), and the Office of Research Integrity, none of the parties responsible for mismanaging the clinical trail or disseminating the misleading information were held accountable. Even an FDA investigation and pressure from Congress was not enough to correct the situation.
Dr. Gonzalez’s experience is a testament to the failure of mainstream medicine. As noted in the foreword of his book, the “war on cancer” has been a failure due to a combination of politics, money, greed, and corruption—largely the result of an unholy alliance between the American Cancer Society, NCI, Sloan-Kettering, and the drug companies.
With such a powerful—and powerfully biased—medical system, all clinical trials of unconventional treatments are destined to fail. “This particular model of medicine—and it is just that, a model—lauds synthetic and high-tech creations as it relegates diet, food and nutrition to a very minor rule in any consideration of human health and disease,” says Dr. Gonzalez. “This cosmology dominates academic medical thinking, and certainly dominates all teaching in medical schools.”
Dr. Gonzalez’s book, What Went Wrong: The Truth Behind the Clinical Trial of the Enzyme Treatment of Cancer, is available from New Spring Press.

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FDA finds higher levels of arsenic in chicken than previously thought; latest report says supplements are safe; and NIH abandons niacin study.

Over half of the U.S. population takes daily nutritional supplements. Even if each of those people took only one single tablet daily, that makes 155,000,000 individual doses per day, for a total of nearly 57 billion doses annually. Since many persons take more than just one vitamin or mineral tablet, actual consumption is considerably higher, and the safety of nutritional supplements is all the more remarkable.

If nutritional supplements are allegedly so “dangerous,” as the FDA and news media so often claim, then where are the bodies?

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. 2009 is just the latest of a long string of Poison Center reports showing the general safety of supplements, especially compared to drugs.

NIH Abandons Niacin Study

The National Institutes of Health has stopped a clinical trial on an extended-release form of niacin for cholesterol treatment eighteen months earlier than planned, claiming that niacin did not reduce the risk of cardiovascular events (that is, heart attacks) in patients taking statin drugs, though it did increase levels of HDL, the “good” cholesterol, and drop the levels of risky triglycerides.

Some might interpret the axing of the NIH’s niacin trial as an indication that niacin doesn’t work. Far from it. In fact, there isn’t a drug on the market that comes so close to offering the “Holy Grail” of simultaneously reducing both LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and triglycerides, while also raising HDL.

The problem with this trial is that cholesterol levels were already low because patients were taking a statin drug (Zocor) made by Merck. So the only real finding in the study was that the extended-release niacin drug Niaspan from Abbott Laboratories, while shown to increase HDL and lower triglycerides, didn’t have any effect on reducing heart attack rates. How different the results might have been if the patients hadn’t been on orthodox medicine’s standard offering of statins, the default choice for anyone with moderate to high cholesterol!

There are likely to be some drug companies that are worried about giving a simple, non-patentable vitamin (in this case niacin, or vitamin B3) too much positive publicity when they can’t make any money from it.

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