This is a story about one of the top, proven alternative cancer treatments – one I’ve done myself and strongly recommend to anyone diagnosed with cancer.
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Allan Smith was suffering from a severe case of swine flu.
The dairy farmer's lungs couldn't be seen by x-ray because they were so full of infected fluid, a condition called whiteout pneumonia.
His medical team at Auckland Hospital, New Zealand said he also had hairy cell leukemia — a rare, slow-growing blood cancer. After three weeks in which he saw no improvement, his doctors believed there was nothing more they could do for him.
His hospital notes said, "Mr. Smith should be removed from ECMO [life support] and be allowed to die." To continue treatment was pointless as it was "only prolonging his inevitable death."
But this patient’s three burly adult sons told his medical team that there was an option they hadn't yet tried — intravenous vitamin C (IVC).
The results were so extraordinary, Allan Smith’s story became the subject of a 60 Minutes television documentary aired in New Zealand in 2009.
Battling with conventional doctors to save a life
With great reluctance, but to placate the family, the doctors agreed to their request, even though they "knew" it could not work.
After two days of high-dose treatment (100 grams a day) Mr. Smith’s lungs dramatically improved. After several more days he was taken off life support.
But then he deteriorated — the vitamin C had been withdrawn. Mr. Smith now had a new consultant who was adamantly against using it. But after a heated meeting with the family, vitamin C therapy was resumed, albeit at a low dose of two grams a day.
Again he started to recover, but much more slowly.
Still in an induced coma, he was transferred to a new hospital closer to his home. The new consultant refused to administer the vitamin. This time the family hired lawyers. The low dose was started up again.
After nine weeks in a coma, he was woken. Now the family could give him six grams a day of lypo-spheric C — an oral, highly absorbable form of the vitamin. He recovered quickly.
Allan was told he would need three months of rehabilitation. He walked out of the hospital 13 days later, to the astonishment of the rehab team.
As for the leukemia, all signs of it had gone.
The last words of the documentary were Allan saying, "I beat the system."
Needless to say, no doctor from either hospital was willing to take part in the documentary, and they deny that IVC had anything to do with Allan Smith's recovery.
Fighting the medical establishment as an outsider, pressuring them to administer life-saving treatment, is one way to proceed.
A better approach is when doctors working within the system are prepared to travel down unorthodox routes themselves.
The $60 Cure for Sepsis
One such person is Dr. Paul Marik, Professor of Medicine and Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.
Dr. Marik was trying to help Valerie, a 53-year-old patient with sepsis, a life-threatening complication of an infection. He wasn't willing to witness another death without trying something different.
Reading the medical literature, he came across studies conducted in intensive care units (ICUs) which showed reduced death rates and time on ventilators for septic and critically ill patients who took vitamin C and other antioxidants.
So in the evening he administered intravenous C together with hydrocortisone to reduce Valerie’s inflammation. By the next morning her health had improved so much she was able to go off four medications. Three days later she left the ICU. She went on to make a full recovery.
A second patient with sepsis experienced the same results. Then a third.
This convinced him to change the protocol for those with sepsis. He also added vitamin B1.
The results are summed up by critical care nurse Kathi Hodgins:
"We started having patient after patient have these remarkable results. They’d be at death’s door and 24 to 48 hours later, they had turned around. We have seen patients walk out of here we didn’t think would leave. To see them turn around so quickly was nothing short of amazing."
Dr. Marik went on to publish his findings in December 2016, comparing 47 sepsis and septic shock patients treated in the standard way the previous year with 47 under the new protocol.
In the former, the death rate was 40.4% compared to 8.5% under the new regimen – meaning almost five times as many people died among those who were not given IVC.
Dr. Marik has been traveling around the US talking to critical care doctors, but he typically meets with resistance and demands for larger studies. But who will fund these studies? As Dr. Marik remarks, "We are curing it for $60. No one will make any money off it."
First trial of IV vitamin C was way back in 1976
Fortunately, at least in the field of orthodox cancer treatment, there's growing interest in IVC. In fact, we are witnessing something of a revival.
The first major human trial of both oral and IVC for terminally ill patients was carried out by double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and his colleague Ewen Cameron in 1976. Their study demonstrated an increased survival of 300 days – nearly a year. However, when the study was repeated by the Mayo Clinic, their findings could not be replicated.
The Mayo Clinic did not follow the Linus Pauling protocol in several ways. This included only giving the vitamin orally. Whether they deliberately set out to discredit the treatment is a matter of controversy, but whatever the truth, the Mayo results finished all interest in vitamin C within the orthodox cancer community.
But in the 1990s, Dr. Mark Levine, a scientist working at the National Institutes of Health, teamed up with Garry Buettner and other experts in vitamin C chemistry at the University of Iowa to reassess the vitamin's role in cancer.
Because there is an imbalance between excessive reactive oxygen species (free radicals) that tumor cells create and the antioxidant enzymes that keep them under control, it was theorized that increasing the volume of free radicals even more -- increasing oxidative stress -- could render cancer cells more vulnerable to conventional treatments.
While vitamin C is an antioxidant at low doses, it can act as a pro-oxidant at high doses. Taken orally the body maintains plasma levels within a narrow range even when large amounts of C are taken, but giving the vitamin intravenously bypasses this tight regulation.
Drs. Levine and Buettner conducted studies in cultured human cancer cells and animal models demonstrating that at high doses vitamin C acts as a pro-oxidant.
The vitamin reacts with abnormally high levels of iron produced in the mitochondria of cancer cells to form hydrogen peroxide and the free radicals derived from it. These damage the cancer cell’s DNA and make it more vulnerable to chemotherapy and radiation. Normal cells are unharmed.
Positive results in human trials
Joe Cullen, professor of surgery at the University of Iowa, tried the idea in lab experiments on pancreatic cancer cells. He found that vitamin C "worked better than anything we ever tried." It also inhibited tumor growth in a mouse model but wasn't powerful enough to entirely destroy the tumor.
A phase 1 clinical trial in nine pancreatic patients followed in 2013 to assess whether intravenous vitamin C is safe and well-tolerated when used in conjunction with a chemotherapy drug. It passed both these tests. Although the patients only received twice-weekly infusions for two months, they lived for 13 months compared to an average of six months for this cohort of patients.
In a similar glioblastoma (highly aggressive brain tumor) trial, patients lived four to six months longer than expected.
The world finally begins to take note
With a lung cancer trial and others showing improved quality of life, there has been growing interest among clinicians at the University of Iowa and elsewhere. Further human trials for pancreatic and brain cancer have already begun and trials for other cancer types are set to follow.
Research is also taking place at other centers in the US as well as Canada, China, Denmark and New Zealand.
A very positive article was also published in the Japanese edition of Newsweek magazine in September, 2016. The piece featured Atsuo Yanagisawa, MD, PhD, President of the Japanese College of Intravenous Therapy. He describes IVC as "very effective against just about all forms of cancer."
He says it should be used as soon as cancer is discovered.
"...it is an extremely effective therapy when used as quickly as possible at the pre-op treatment stage."
Forty years after the Pauling/Cameron trial, vitamin C therapy is now taken seriously by the orthodox community in the treatment of cancer.
I wonder how many years we will have to wait before its value is recognized across the medical community and it is used routinely in the treatment of influenza, sepsis, and many other life-threatening diseases. It’s tragic that patients have been denied an effective treatment that’s been known for decades.
One thing to realize is that the doses of vitamin C used in this therapy are extremely high. You can’t take a large enough amount by mouth because it upsets the digestion and causes diarrhea (the limit for oral intake is around ten grams (10,000 mg) for most people, I’m told – not nearly enough to knock out cancer).
In addition, as mentioned earlier, the digestive system attempts to regulate the amount of vitamin C that makes it into the blood when you take it orally. The IV route is a must.
It’s pretty obvious this means you need a doctor to administer the treatment – yet another reason to seek out the top alternative cancer doctors we recommend in this newsletter and our books.
Our last issue reported on an important annual cancer conference held in Florida – we’re running the article again below just in case you missed it.
Best regards,
Lee Euler,
Publisher
