My brother and I have been gathering information to help our father (colorrectal cancer) since 2017, and this is (by far) the best website we've seen.
At this point, our father has a recurrent metastatic cancer in his pelvis (near the sacrum) and, after months of chemo (oxaliplatin + 5FU + avastin), we're trying a radio-surgery (in the second week of october).
Right now, he is off chemo. Until radio, his mainly treatment is IV Vitamin C 2X a week. We've been supplementing with lots of stuff, and we've just started the "pro-oxidant" strategy (and combining it with the cellular building block and shut down the power house, as described in this website).
We're thinking of ways to enhance radiotherapy effect, and we've came along with some doubts:
(1) somewhere in this website, we've read that "in combo with radio, use mitochondria inhibitors, such as atovaquone". But we've also seen references about using DCA (a supplement that affects mitochondria) in combo with radio. Are these two approaches compatible? If not (as it seems), which one we should focus on?
(2) as a way to enhance the immune system, there is a recommendation of stopping the usage of doxycycline one week prior to radio (as the gut bacteria will be needed); but we've read in a different post an opposite recommendation: using antiparasites/antibacterial prior to chemo and other major therapies (as this is the case), since they're respiration inhibitors (and there is a good chance of enhancing chemo that way). Again, which approach should we seek?
Thank you so much.
Best regards,
Rudy
Dear @rtr ,
Thank you for your kind feedback.
Both of your questions are related to the fact that every drug and drug combinations can be seen from different perspectives (as they have multiple targets):
1. DCA, even if it activates mito which would be against the concept of mito inhibition to support the increase of ROS, it can help improving the activity of the immune system (via lowering the export of protons/acidity around the tumor). So it's a choice about what is the fight we want to take.
2. Tumors are populated by bacteria that can also induce resistance to therapies (maybe not so much to radio but more to drugs). In that context, using antibiotics prior to chemo would help a lot. Doxy would help with that and with mito inhibition. I now think that discontinuing Doxy one week prior to radio to address the immune system, doesn't make sense since the impact of antibiotics on gut bacteria is longer term.
Therefore, if I would go for Radio and would want to support that, I would need to think what is more important for me: the immune activity or the ROS generation. Specifically around Radio, I would say that supporting the radio from ROS point of view would have higher priority. Of-course I would give attention as much as possible to the immune system but when having to chose between therapies to support ROS or support immune system, the choice would be clear.
(I like the idea of increasing the chance for abscopal effects but the chance of that to happen is much small compared to ROS winch we know it happens and it is detrimental to the tumor.)
I hope this helps a little.
Kind regards,
Daniel
Dear Daniel,
thank you so much for your attention and your kindness.
Be sure you really helped us.
Best regards,
Rudy
@rtr, there is so much information to research about cancer I realize how daunting a challenge it can be. Yet, I will make one small comment: Perhaps you should rethink your vitamin C treatment. The twice a week 2 hour infusion approach has been used probably by tens of thousands of cancer patients; it makes people feel better and might have perhaps at least a minimal anti-cancer effect.
My comment April 13, 2017 at 6:41 pm in this thread https://www.cancertreatmentsresearch.com/high-dose-vitamin-c-cancer/?highlight=vitamin%20C initiated a conversation about how vitamin C infusions could be made much more effective against cancer. The basic idea is that what is important is not so much dose as duration. An analogy is that dieting for 2 hours a day probably will not result in any weight loss: however, dieting for 18 hours a day probably would help.
Stressing cancer cells with glucose/NAD deprivation and adding in ROS for a few hours two times a week likely is not going to help very much. Tens of thousands of cancer patients have definitively proven this point.
What happens when you treat with prolonged IV dosing of vitamin C? The results were fairly remarkable. Pauling in Scotland in the 1970s used a 10 gram per day all day vitamin C infusion. 4 of 50 patients in the first patient series had fatal tumor necrosis lysis responses. This happens when there is an enormously overwhelming metabolic collapse in the tumor's metabolism. Many of the other patients had large (though not fatal) tumor responses. Another patient was done and it reported similar results. This was also replicated in a patient series from Japan.
Patient reports with metastatic cancer have also been published that had successful responses to a so called metronomic dosing schedule.
This same idea was suggested on the vitamin C forum. https://vitamincfoundation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=13005&start=15 in the thread "Are we doing IVC for Cancer wrong? Study might suggest so" . To gain access to read this thread it is necessary to register on the forum.
High dose metronomic vitamin C treatment is one flavor of the therapy; there are many others. The vitamin C forum is offering a liposomal product of vitamin C combined with Mushroom
https://inteligentvitaminc.com//cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=67
https://vitamincfoundation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=15010
Apparently the FDA (as per comments on the above post) forbid any further marketing efforts for this product. The above testimonial is though quite startling.
There are various other approaches to vitamin C treatment that you might also consider. recently I noted an article that formulated vitamin C and even low doses (I think it was ~250 mg) had stunning results.
Best Wishes, J
Whoa! After commenting on vitamin C I wanted to catch up on the research. What is exciting is that after all these decades continuous vitamin C therapy results are finally being published. The one below looked at colorectal cancer patients dosed continuously at ~10 -50 g/day for 6-8 weeks! This is moving back to replicate the results from the 1970s.
One disappointment here is that they only reached ~1 mM. 50 mM is reached with high dose short term treatment. The patient results were also somewhat less than expected. Of the 17 late stage CRC patients only 2 survived more than a year. The Scottish results from the 1970s seem to have been stronger. Yet, there was ongoing treatment for these patients. With the present study patients were discharged after ~8 weeks of continuous treatment (though I am unsure whether they were actually in-patients). A set of biomarkers are provided and how they are interelated. So, for example, there is a strong negative correlation of survival with LDH and a strong positive correlation between survival and creatinine (also albumin). I wonder whether simply dosing the patients with these would increase survival. This study is a good start; hopefully others will extend this result and obtain even better results.
Hi J,
Very interesting! I remember that I was thinking about using 10 g a day of vitamin c. I remember using 20 g in an elastomeric pump with the idea of using it metronomically for 48 hours, but my mother was ill at 24 hours.
I can try 10 g / day for 5 days for example. I don't know if it's safe and monitoring without medical support is challenging. Vitamin C may cause fluid retention...
Kind regards
Manuone, there is so much exciting metabolic research! It is quite startling. Kimster posted a treatment with phenylalanine (Nano-pPAAM); appears to have all GRAS ingredients and large anti-cancer effects. It looks like a good one.
With vitamin C, I find it discouraging that here we are 50 years later and the treatment protocol is back to replicating the result from the 1970s. It is not overly difficult to see how vitamin C could have very powerful anti-cancer effects yet each step ahead takes so many years. It is reassuring that this recent research confirmed that metronomic dosing is feasible, though we might need several more iterations before we start to see large reproducible responses. Also disappointing that the patients were not better characterized genetically etc.. Having the genetic biomarkers that can prospectively guide patients to the treatments that will be effective for them will be such an overwhelming step forward in cancer care. Few of the studies that I have read have taken this step forward.
