yoshiesque
Member
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2014
- Messages
- 367
I would consider this:
- intravenous administration of alpha lipoic acid at 300 mg to 600 mg two days a week
- 4.5 mg of low-dose naltrexone, which is the standard low dose of naltrexone.
- 600mg/day of Oral Alpha Lipoic Acid
- 400mcg/day selenium
- 1200mg/day Milk Thistle Extract
Why? Because long story short its been shown to put 4 people (the study only involved 4) with pancreatic cancer into some form of remission, and they survived for years later even though the doctors (not doctors doing the study) said that they had like several months to live.
Want to read more? Ill insert that part of the podcast from Chris Kressers site in quotes below:
Obtained from Chris Kressers podcast which is available at the link pasted below:
http://chriskresser.com/rhr-chronic-stress-cortisol-resistance-and-modern-disease/
Also the official study for this is available here:
http://www.magicwater.org/storage/Case study Pancreatic cancer ALA-LDN.pdf
Seriously guys, its about a page or so long but its worth reading. Just want to put this out there in case someone here comes across a loved one with cancer - god forbid.
- intravenous administration of alpha lipoic acid at 300 mg to 600 mg two days a week
- 4.5 mg of low-dose naltrexone, which is the standard low dose of naltrexone.
- 600mg/day of Oral Alpha Lipoic Acid
- 400mcg/day selenium
- 1200mg/day Milk Thistle Extract
Why? Because long story short its been shown to put 4 people (the study only involved 4) with pancreatic cancer into some form of remission, and they survived for years later even though the doctors (not doctors doing the study) said that they had like several months to live.
Want to read more? Ill insert that part of the podcast from Chris Kressers site in quotes below:
A non-toxic treatment protocol put 4 cancer patients into remission
Chris Kresser: I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that! So, let’s move on. I could say a lot more about that, but I’ll save some of it for the series. The next study I want to talk about, really interesting. I’ve talked about low-dose naltrexone before, and that’s partly what this study is about. It’s about a natural treatment for cancer that is being used at the Integrative Medical Center of New Mexico. So, the study basically reports four cases of people with aggressive forms of pancreatic cancer, and most of you probably know that pancreatic cancer is very serious. The prognosis is not good. The usual length of survival is something like three to six months, and patients with advanced disease rarely live more than a few weeks. I’m sure most people who are listening to this are aware that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer. So, anything that can potentially successfully treat pancreatic cancer is pretty exciting because it’s one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and one of the worst prognoses that you can have.
So, these folks at this Integrative Medical Center in New Mexico have been using a protocol that involves a few different components. The main two components are intravenous administration of alpha lipoic acid at 300 mg to 600 mg two days a week and 4.5 mg of low-dose naltrexone, which is the standard low dose of naltrexone. They also were giving 600 mg per day, which is a pretty high dose, of oral alpha lipoic acid; 400 mcg per day of selenium — I wish they would’ve said which form they’re using. I imagine they’re using the methylselenocysteine form, which is the one that’s been shown to have more anticancer effects than other forms, and then they’re using 1200 mg per day of milk thistle extract, which is another potent antioxidant. So, I’m sure they’ve done this with more than four patients, but they reported on four patients in particular with pancreatic cancer. The first patient, J.A., had pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver, so this isn’t just pancreatic cancer; it’s metastatic pancreatic cancer. The doctor basically told J.A.: Get your life in order. There’s nothing we can do. You probably have a few weeks to live. And he went to the center in New Mexico, and he did the protocol. Seventy-eight months later, he is in complete remission with no signs of cancer at all and feels like a totally normal person.
Steve Wright: Did you say seven or eight?
Chris Kresser: Seventy-eight!
Steve Wright: Woo!
Chris Kresser: Seventy-eight months later. So I mean, considering that the usual length of survival for pancreatic cancer is three to six months and the usual length of survival for metastatic advanced pancreatic cancer is a few weeks, seventy-eight months is pretty impressive.
Steve Wright: Yeah.
Chris Kresser: The next patient, G.B., was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and refused chemo because of religious reasons, and she did the protocol and is now alive and symptom-free 39 months after diagnosis at the time the paper was published. So, another really impressive result. J.K. was diagnosed with pancreatic carcinoma with metastasis to the liver, and she was jaundiced, exhausted, in constant abdominal pain and nausea when she first came to the center. And after a few weeks of the protocol she improved significantly, and after six months her PET scan showed absolutely no sign of cancer, and she felt normal, without any pain or nausea. And unfortunately — and this is very sad — she returned to her home state because she had traveled to New Mexico specifically for this treatment. So, she goes back home, and her doctors refused to continue the protocol even though she had basically no signs of cancer, and then she died within a couple of months after going home.
Steve Wright: That’s sad.
Chris Kresser: Yeah. I’m gonna have to resist going off on a tangent here about —
Steve Wright: You didn’t say. So, once they started that treatment, the intravenous drip as well as the supplements, they were on that for life basically then?
Chris Kresser: Yeah, it seems to be that this is not curative. It doesn’t look like you do this for a period of time and then you stop and you’re fine. I think you have to continue with the protocol, but when you compare this to, like, chemotherapy, you’re doing a supplement regime plus low-dose naltrexone, which is an extremely well-tolerated, very low dose of a medication that has no documented complications or risks, and then an IV of alpha lipoic acid a couple times a week. I think that’s a pretty small price to pay to survive pancreatic cancer.
Steve Wright: Totally.
Chris Kresser: But the sad thing is that this poor woman goes home and even though she has proof that she’s free of cancer and feeling great, the doctors wouldn’t do it. It just blows my mind, and nothing makes me more upset than that. It’s just crazy. Anyhow, the next patient, R.C., had three malignancies. Three. Prostate adenocarcinoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and pancreatic adenocarcinoma. You know, two of those, in particular, are very lethal. So, he improved significantly on the protocol, and he felt so much better that he decided to have surgery to internalize his percutaneous biliary drain, which is something that people use when they have serious gallbladder issues, and unfortunately he died from complications of the surgery. So, the protocol worked in his case, but he got septicemia from the surgery and he passed away.
So, in all of these cases, the protocol worked extremely well. In two cases, the people are still alive with no signs of cancer and are continuing the protocol. In another case, the protocol worked well, but she wasn’t able to continue it and she passed away. And then in the fourth case, the protocol worked very well, but the person died of unrelated surgical complications. So, pretty impressive. This is certainly something, like, if myself or a family member or a friend or anybody I knew was diagnosed with not only pancreatic cancer, but just about any cancer, because there’s nothing in these results that suggest that they’re unique to pancreatic cancer, I would definitely consider this protocol, either going to New Mexico or trying to convince your doctor to do it, because it’s not that exotic. I mean, the supplements are readily available. You could order them from just about any online source. And then the IV alpha lipoic acid, you’d just have to find someone who’s willing to do a drip. Alpha lipoic acid is cheap and readily available, and low-dose naltrexone is off patent, very affordable, and fairly easy to obtain if you find a doctor who’s familiar with the oncology literature.
Steve Wright: Chris, so the milk thistle, the alpha lipoic acid, the selenium — those all make sense to me. So, what role do you think LDN is playing here?
Chris Kresser: Yeah, well, let me tell you a little bit more about alpha lipoic acid, because some people might not be familiar with it, and I think it’s really interesting in the context of cancer. Alpha lipoic acid is a cofactor that’s active in a number of different enzyme complexes that control metabolism, including the conversion of pyruvate to energy in the mitochondria. So, it helps us to transform the food that we eat into usable energy. But it’s also really effective as a free radical scavenger, which means it reduces oxidative stress. That’s very important in any inflammatory disease, and it’s definitely important in cancer. Alpha lipoic acid also induces hyperacetylation of histones, and histones are proteins that are active in the proliferation of a lot of different cancer cell types, and anything that inhibits histones will drive the cancer cells to apoptosis, which is cell death, programmed cell death. And indeed, human cancer lines have been shown to become apoptotic after exposure to alpha lipoic acid, so alpha lipoic acid helps kill cancer cells. Another mechanism that it might work by is that ALA, which is the shortened name of alpha lipoic acid, stabilizes nuclear factor kappa beta or NF-KB, for short. And when NF-KB is activated, it launches the induction of more than 200 genes that suppress apoptosis, and that will, in turn, increase cellular proliferation, invasion, metastasis, chemo resistance, and inflammation, which are all characteristics of cancer. And so, studies have shown that high doses of ALA have been shown to inhibit the activation of nuclear factor kappa beta. Another mechanism is that ALA selectively stimulates apoptosis in cancer cells. So, in other words, it promotes the death of cancer cells without harming normal cells, and that’s, I mean, that’s amazing. That’s kind of the holy grail in cancer treatment, right? The ability to shut down cancer cells without harming the normal cells, because that means the side effects of the treatment are not gonna be extremely harmful, as is the case with chemotherapy.
Steve Wright: Quick follow-up question here on ALA: So, just for everyone listening, there’s no known upper limit for ALA? No side effects?
Chris Kresser: Actually, that’s a good question. I wouldn’t recommend that anybody do this without supervision. And I hope that goes without saying when we’re talking about cancer. I don’t prescribe more than 200 mg or 300 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid unless the circumstances are pretty extreme. And that’s one of the things. When you’re dealing with terminal cancer, you’re a little bit less concerned about any potential short-term side effects from a treatment like this because, you know, what’s the alternative? For example, selenium has been shown to be potentially toxic at doses of 400 mcg a day, but in this case, the antioxidant benefit of selenium over this period of time and because there’s so much oxidative damage, those effects are less likely to be a concern. So, yeah, thanks for pointing that out.
Steve Wright: Well, yeah, because I’m sure I’m not the only listener of this podcast who has read The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, and in that, actually his weight loss, his non-stimulant weight loss stack that he recommends includes about 300 mg of alpha lipoic acid per meal, so I think that’s somewhere between 900 mg to 1200 mg a day. So, I was just curious if there was, because being familiar with that knowledge and hearing the study, milligram doses, I was like: Wow, it’s not quite as high as what I would’ve thought it would’ve been.
Chris Kresser: No, because it doesn’t really need to be much higher.
Steve Wright: OK.
Chris Kresser: I think a lot of times supplements, there’s a kind of more-is-better mentality, you know, with supplements, and that’s definitely not always true, because as in the case of selenium, like I was just saying, there’s a sweet spot where too little is not good and too much is not good because selenium in excess can be toxic. So, I don’t know what the toxic dose of ALA would be, but I would be hesitant to recommend that somebody take almost 2 grams a day of it for any significant length of time.
Steve Wright: OK.
Chris Kresser: I’ll have to look into that more, and we can talk about it on another episode.
Steve Wright: Yeah, well, I think you pointed out the most important thing, which is most supplements operate on a U-curve, which means that there’s a sweet spot in the middle and if you’re underdosing you’re not really gonna get the effect, and if you’re overdosing you’re probably gonna cause something else to happen that you don’t want to.
Chris Kresser: Right. And as is the case as we’ll see with low-dose naltrexone, in some cases if you increase the dose, it doesn’t work the way that you want it to. So, low-dose naltrexone is, as the name implies, a low dose of a drug called naltrexone. And the full dose of naltrexone at 50 mg used to be used a while back, I think, in the ‘70s and ‘80s for opiate withdrawal, like with people who were addicted to heroin and also, I think, in some cases with alcoholics, because what it does at the full dose is it completely blocks the opiate receptors in the brain, and the opiate receptors are what mediate our experience of pleasure, so if you block those receptors, somebody like a heroin addict who took 50 mg of naltrexone could shoot up and feel pretty much nothing. Unfortunately, they felt pretty much nothing at all from anything else in their life, so naltrexone turned out to have severe depression, suicidal ideation, things like that as a side effect because people who took it, sure, they didn’t get the stimulation from heroin and it was effective in that sense, but they didn’t experience much of any pleasure in their life at all.
But this pretty brilliant doctor named Dr. Bihari back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he was treating HIV and AIDS when hardly anybody else was, and he was also starting to treat cancer, and he discovered that if you used a low dose of naltrexone, 4.5 mg, what it does is it blocks the opiate receptors in the brain just like the full dose does, but only for a short time. So, for example, the typical way of taking LDN is to take it at about 9 o’clock at night and then that creates a 2-to-3-hour blockade of the opiate receptors from, like, 3 to 5 in the morning. And that has the effect of tricking the body into producing large amounts of opiates in response to the blockade. So, the blockade happens, the body senses that opiate receptors aren’t being activated, it thinks that that must mean there are not enough opiates in the body, so then it produces a whole bunch. The reason this is significant is that we now know that white blood cells have receptors for endorphins and opiates, which suggests they play an immunoregulatory role. Specifically, they balance and regulate the various sides of the immune system. They stimulate T regulatory cells, the Th3 cells, which turn off the inflammatory response, or they have an overall regulatory effect on the immune system. So, in the ‘90s, Dr. Bihari gave LDN to about 450 patients with cancer, and these are folks who had failed the standard treatments. You know, they tried all the other, the chemo and the standard stuff, and they ended up with him. And of 354 patients that he followed up regularly, 86% showed at least a three-quarters reduction, 75% reduction, in tumor bulk, and 125 of the patients, which is I guess about 33%, were reported to have achieved remission or close to remission.
Steve Wright: Wow.
Chris Kresser: So, that’s pretty impressive. There’s other research that has shown that LDN has slowed the growth of neuroblastoma cells in culture, so that’s just an in vitro study, but promising. And then another study showed that LDN plus radiotherapy was more effective than radiotherapy alone for malignant astrocytomas, and malignant astrocytomas are thought to be incurable, also a pretty nasty form of cancer. And in this study, the survival rates at one year were higher for people who did the LDN plus radiotherapy than people who just did the radiotherapy alone. So, I think it’s a really promising area of research. Like I said, if I had a friend or a relative or a patient that was diagnosed with a cancer like this, it’s definitely something that I would advise them to look into.
Steve Wright: One last question on this, because this treatment is so heavy on the antioxidant side: There are a lot of papers coming out lately that are saying — I mean, I think they’re mostly epidemiological, but they’re saying that supplementing with antioxidants could actually be a bad thing. And obviously we talking about very specific compounds in this study versus what you could classify as antioxidant is, I don’t know, thousands of different things, and I was just curious if you had any thoughts on that.
Chris Kresser: It’s another good question, and I’m glad you brought it up because it allows me to remind everybody again that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and something that works for people who are sick may actually cause harm in people who are well. That’s fairly easy to forget, but it should also be fairly obvious. Chemotherapy can help people to survive cancer, but you would never give chemotherapy to somebody who doesn’t have cancer, right? And I think that’s a more extreme example than this, but if someone’s just under extreme amounts of oxidative stress, as you find with cancer, something like high doses of all of these antioxidants might be beneficial, but in someone who’s otherwise healthy, it may have undesirable effects. In the same way, you know, we get questions about diet. If somebody has no gallbladder and a lot of difficulty digesting fat, they may have trouble with a really high-fat diet, but that doesn’t mean someone who has an intact gallbladder and good digestion is gonna have trouble with a high-fat diet. So, we always have to consider who we’re talking about, what the goal is, and even what the length of time is that we’re talking about, you know, short-term versus long-term supplementation, or supplementation for therapeutic uses versus supplementation for longer-term, just kind of indiscriminate, indefinite use. I use supplements a lot in my practice, but I tend to use them more for a specific goal for a specific period of time than I do just, you know, hey, take this forever. I mean, there are certain exceptions like vitamin D and magnesium, which I’ve talked about on my blog, I think that are good, just smart to take indefinitely because they’re hard to get from the diet, but otherwise it’s always tailored for who the person is, what condition they’re dealing with, and what length of time we need to use them to achieve the effect that we want to achieve.
Steve Wright: OK.
Chris Kresser: Here again, I’ve just talked the whole entire episode, and we don’t have any time for questions! But we’ll do a Q&A episode soon here.
Steve Wright: I won’t let him talk about any studies next time! I’m sorry guys. It’s my fault.
Obtained from Chris Kressers podcast which is available at the link pasted below:
http://chriskresser.com/rhr-chronic-stress-cortisol-resistance-and-modern-disease/
Also the official study for this is available here:
http://www.magicwater.org/storage/Case study Pancreatic cancer ALA-LDN.pdf
Seriously guys, its about a page or so long but its worth reading. Just want to put this out there in case someone here comes across a loved one with cancer - god forbid.
