posted
Hello all. It has come to my unfortunate attention that a patient is about to pass due to cancer. He has survived more than a decade longer than he was supposed to. Years ago, he was diagnosed with renal (kidney) CA, and had said kidney removed but not before small metastasis to the lungs and liver. He dropped out of radiation and instead treated himself with marijuana and hot fudge sundaes! Surprisingly, the mets stayed stable for ages, over 10 years later. There were some small changes in his regimen, including reduction of marijuana use to coinside with reduction of opioid pain relievers.
Things started going downhill 6 months ago when it was discovered that a brain tumor had stealthily grown large enough to cause issues with higher brain functions, which quickly lead to a resection with clean margins. Sadly, it appears that brain tumor was secreting tumor growth factor as there has been huge, aggressive and explosive tumor growth in the abdominal and kidney cavity, to the point it is eating through part of the duodenum and the liver and lung mets have multiplied in size. The intestinal tumor caused an infection that he is recovering from with IV antibiotics, but it really sapped his strength and reserves.
At this point, the oncologists are basically feeling there's nothing else they can do and that hospice is the way to go. I understand that it may already be too late, but there are several treatments, conventional, experimental, and alternative that have not been tried as of yet. For instance, he is certainly not going to get a better quality of life with simple radiation or "regular" chemo, but there are a number of new oral chemotherapy agents that have remarkable success in reducing tumor blood supply with comparatively few side effects.
I've also been wondering about a number of experimental and alternative therapies - I can only think of a handful that may be of use at this late a stage - IV Vitamin C megadoses with hydrogen peroxide, IV hydralazine, MSM and that sort of thing. Is there anyone who can recommend any other therapies worth looking into that have the ability to act fast and on such a serious and late stage condition, especially with minimal side effects considering the patient is in a weakened state? I've purposefully ignored oncology - that's one field of medicine I knew wasn't for me from the start, but I thought I'd ask the forum if anyone had any insight.
Thanks.
[ 01-07-2010, 05:19 PM: Message edited by: Blackstone ]
Posts: 690 | From East coast, USA | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
Tincup
Honored Contributor (10K+ posts)
Member # 5829
posted
Hey Blackstone..
So nice to see you but not under these circumstances.. for sure. So sorry to hear this news. I will share below some of the info I have found. Hopefully it will be of some help. It is long.. but it is good.
Take care of you!
Scientists find way to 'turn off' cancer Antibiotic halts aggressive tumours in mice
Tim Radford, Science Editor,
Monday October 11, 2004, The Guardian
Scientists in California have found a way to "turn off" a gene that makes cancerous cells lethal.
They eliminated aggressive, incurable liver tumours in laboratory mice in four weeks, they report in an advance paper in Nature today. The study, based on a gene called Myc, could lead to new ways of treating cancer.
Cancer Research UK scientists in Glasgow, working with colleagues in Seattle, last year worked out the details of how Myc cranks up the rate of growth of dividing cancer cells by sending one of the cell's factories into overdrive. In cancer, cells divide uncontrollably.
The California team based their studies on mice with genetically modified liver cells. The type of cell that becomes cancerous is called an epithelial cell, and these form cancers in breast, colon and prostate.
So the same approach might work in all of them. Liver cancer is common and difficult to treat.
"This is a terrible cancer. Anything that is encouraging in liver cancer may be important," said Dean Felsher of Stanford University, who led the research. "The exciting thing is that you can turn cancer cells into something that appears to be normal."
The mice under study had a mutated Myc gene that was constantly on. It produced a Myc protein that served as a kind of conductor, sending a signal to cells to divide. Cancer cells produce too much Myc protein all the time, and are constantly dividing.
Dr Felsher and his colleagues fed the mice an antibiotic called doxycycline, which turned the gene off, and stopped the protein flow.
As long as the mice had the antibiotic diet, they remained healthy. Once the antibiotic was withheld, they developed aggressive liver cancer in 12 weeks.
When they were put back on the diet, all of them showed rapid regression: the liver cancer was eliminated, and liver cells seemed to behave normally.
In effect, the scientists turned the Myc gene on and off like a tap, and turned cancer on and off at the same time.
They also found that some of the apparently normal cells retained the ability to become cancerous, which could explain why cancers often recur after chemotherapy.
Cancer hits one person in three, and kills one in five. In recent years, researchers have concentrated on a number of new approaches. They have tried to cut off the blood supply to tumours, to halt their growth.
They have tested search-and-destroy toxins, designed to make for and eliminate only cancerous cells. They have experimented with scalpels made of ultrasound, and they have tried to "burn" cancerous cells with infrared radiation.
But cancer is, above all, a disease of the DNA, and British researchers have launched a cancer genome project to collect all the genetic mutations involved in the making of a cancer. There are more than 100.
But the Myc protein seems to play a role in many cases of the disease.
The Glasgow study immediately suggested that it would be a good target. If researchers could find a drug that blocked the action of Myc, they could study its effect on cancer cases. The Stanford study shows that they were right. But what works in mice may not work so well in humans.
The next step is to hunt for a drug that would be safe for human patients, and yet have the same impact.
Int J Cancer. 2004 Jun 20;110(3):336-42.
Reversible lymphomagenesis in conditionally c-MYC expressing mice.
Marinkovic D, Marinkovic T, Mahr B, Hess J, Wirth T.
Department of Physiological Chemistry, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany.
It is well documented that deregulation of MYC leads to tumor development, yet many aspects of this process are only partially understood. We have established a transgenic mouse model in which c-MYC is conditionally expressed in lymphoid cells using the tetracycline-regulated system of gene regulation.
Mice with continuously expressed transgenic c-MYC died of invasive T- or B-cell lymphomas within 4 months. Lymphomas developing in transgenic mice were c-MYC dependent since doxycycline treatment led to tumor regression. Using transplantation of established tumor cell lines labeled with GFP, we followed the fate of neoplastic cells in recipients upon MYC inactivation.
This approach allowed us to elucidate both apoptosis and differentiation as mechanisms of tumor elimination. Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and FISH analyses were performed in order to analyze possible chromosomal aberrations induced by c-MYC. We observed that overexpression of c-MYC is sufficient to induce recurrent patterns of genomic instability.
The main observation was a gain of genomic material that corresponded to chromosome 15 in several T-cell tumors, which could be identified as trisomy. Copyright 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
PMID: 15095297 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Virology. 1999 Jan 20;253(2):193-207.
Conditional cell transformation by doxycycline-controlled expression of the MC29 v-myc allele.
Oberst C, Hartl M, Weiskirchen R, Bister K.
Institute of Biochemistry, University of Innsbruck, Peter-Mayr-Str. 1a, Innsbruck, A-6020, Austria.
To investigate the molecular basis of oncogenesis induced by the v-myc oncogene of avian myelocytomatosis virus MC29, we developed a conditional cell transformation system in which expression of the MC29 v-myc allele is dependent on a doxycycline-sensitive transactivator (tTA).
Clonal lines of quail embryo fibroblasts transformed by doxycycline-controlled v-myc revert to the normal phenotype and lose their ability to grow in soft agar after the addition of doxycycline.
Repression of v-myc causes the cells to withdraw from the cell cycle, and long-term survival in culture requires reexpression of v-myc. Although complete repression of v-myc mRNA and v-Myc protein in these cells occurs within 14 h after the addition of doxycycline, the first morphological alterations are observed after 24 h, and after 3 days, the morphology changed entirely from small rounded cells showing a typical myc-transformed phenotype to large flat cells resembling normal fibroblasts.
Cells exposed to doxycycline for 3 days reexpressed v-myc within 24 h after withdrawal of the drug from the culture medium, partial retransformation occurred after 2 days, and complete morphological transformation was reestablished after 6 days.
Analogous results were obtained with a cell line in which expression of the v-myc allele is dependent on a reverse transactivator (rtTA) that is activated by doxycycline. The striking differential expression of known transformation-sensitive genes and of new candidate v-myc target genes revealed the tightness of the doxycycline-controlled v-myc expression system.
The data also indicate that expression of v-myc in these cells is indispensable for enhanced proliferation, transformation, and immortalization. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.
I am a Dreamer, Believer, and Conquer; I will overcome this disease !!! Posts: 382 | From Alabama Via PA | Registered: Jun 2008
| IP: Logged |
Keebler
Honored Contributor (25K+ posts)
Member # 12673
posted
- Curcumin has a lot going for it. Lots of medical abstracts about its use in cancer.
And RIFE, I think at any stage, can be a possible help.
He should keep up the cocoa but, perhaps is a form with less or no sugar (but also with nothing artificial). Cocoa, itself, is excellent adjunct medicine - as an antioxidant.
Corydalis may be safer pain reliever for him than MJ if he is smoking it. Hot smoke is never good. But MJ in butter has been helpful to many cancer patients. -
Posts: 48021 | From Tree House | Registered: Jul 2007
| IP: Logged |
Keebler
Honored Contributor (25K+ posts)
Member # 12673
posted
I have read about poly mva. I don't know if that would help. He could ask his doctor.
Posts: 140 | From Illinois | Registered: Jul 2009
| IP: Logged |
Also, Dr. Francisco Contreras claims that Vitamin C is MUCH more effective as a cancer treatment when PerfTec (a oxygen-transporting blood substitute) is administered before hand.
The Lyme Disease Network is a non-profit organization funded by individual donations. If you would like to support the Network and the LymeNet system of Web services, please send your donations to:
The
Lyme Disease Network of New Jersey 907 Pebble Creek Court,
Pennington,
NJ08534USA http://www.lymenet.org/
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[group hug]](graemlins/grouphug.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic