Cancer is the fastest growing and the most dreaded disease of modern times. Despite the millions of dollars and man hours spent on intensive research, neither the cause nor the cure of malignant growths, nor even means of preventing it, have yet been found.
The three types of orthodox treatment, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy with a possible fourth — immunotherapy, though they may halt the progress of the disease in its many forms, have proved inadequate in eradicating it.
There are many types of cancer, differing according to the kind of tissue in which it occurs. All cancerous growths, however, are closely related in that they are essentially an uncontrolled growth and expansion of tissue cells, which lose their normal restraints of cell division and continue to divide in a wild uncontrolled manner at the expense of normal tissues around them. Moreover, wherever cancer cells lodge in other parts of the body they tend to contine their unrestrained growth at the expense of the surrounding tissues.
Thousands of ‘cancer cures’ have been brought forward, some totally ineffective, some destructive, others claiming, with some justification, to prevent and control the growth of cancerous tissue.
Ever since the discovery and isolation of ascorbic acid as Vitamin C in the early 1930s, a great deal of animal research has been conducted on the relation of ascorbic acid to cancer. The evidence has been conflicting, largely because widely varying doses were used, mostly too small to be effective.
Reports on its value in controlling human cancer have been made, but have been ignored. Because of this confusion of results and the simple non-toxic nature of Vitamin C cancer research workers have tended to shy away from ascorbic acid as a possible means of controlling cancer.
Recently, however, irrefutable evidence of the role of Vitamin C in controlling human cancer has been produced.
One of the first cases of the dramatic effects of Vitamin C in producing complete remission of the disease was in an old gentlemen with myeloid leukaemia. When the patient was given 24,000 to 42,000 mg of ascorbic acid a day he felt well and the cancerous growth ceased. Twice the doctor in charge of the case stopped the ascorbic acid as an experiment. Each time the patient’s temperature rose, he felt ill and the leukaemia symptoms returned. When the ascorbic acid was resumed, the temperature returned to normal; within six hours, his malaise disappeared, and the remission recurred; thus proving that it was the Vitamin C alone that was controlling the disease.
This was published by Dr Greer in Medical Times in 1954. No one took any notice of it!
Irwin Stone quoting it in his book Vitamin C. The Healing Factor has searched the literature since and has failed to reveal anyone publishing a check on these exciting clinical results.
Fifteen years later in 1969 Dr Dean Burk and his group at the National Cancer Institute in U.S.A. published a paper in Oncology describing their findings that Vitamin C (ascorbate) would kill cancer cells, but was harmless to normal cells.
They write ‘The present study shows that ascorbate (Vitamin C) is highly toxic or lethal to Erlich Ascites Carcinoma Cells in Vitro (that is in a test tube)…. The great advantage that ascorbates possess as potential anti-cancer agents is that they are, like penicillin, remarkably non-toxic to normal body tissues, and they may be administered to animals in extremely large doses (up to 5 or more grams per kilogram body weight) without harmful pharmacological effects’.
This would come out at the colossal dose of 350,000 mg or 350 grams for a 68 kg adult man.
‘In our view’, they continue, ‘the future of effective cancer chemotherapy will not rest on the use of host-toxic compounds now so widely employed, but upon virtually host-non-toxic compounds that are lethal to cancer cells, of which ascorbate represents an excellent prototype’.
Strangely enough ascorbate was never tested for its anti-cancer effects by the cancer Chemotherapy National Service Centre in U.S.A. because it was too non-toxic to fit into their programme!
Meanwhile, however, a Scottish doctor, Ewen Cameron, working on the effect of Vitamin C on cancer cells, published his results in 1966 in the Pergamon Press , New York, on the probable way Vitamin C inhibits the growth of cancer cells.
Vitamin C controls the collagen in the body, that thick semi-solid ground substance in which all the cells are embedded. This actually restrains the growth and proliferation of the cells. To divide and grow, cells produce an enzyme, hyaluronidase, which liquifies the firm substance around them so that they can expand. Cancer cells apparently over-produce this enzyme so that they can proliferate, expand and migrate endlessly.
Vitamin C inhibits the production of hyalurinidase in cancer cells and so slows down and stops their excessive growth and invasion.
Dr Cameron writes in his paper, ‘Most important of all, we are led to the conclusion that the administration of this harmless substance, ascorbic acid, might provide us with an effective means of permanently suppressing neoplastic (cancerous) cellular proliferation and invasiveness; in other words an effective means of controlling cancer . . .
‘We conclude that ascorbic acid may have much greater therapeutic value than has been generally assigned to it’.
Another theory that may throw some light on the reason why Vitamin C may be effective in control of cancer. At least one research team has traced radio-active ascorbic acid in cancer cases and found that all available C was mobilised at the site of the malignancy. Another group also found that malignant tissue had a special affinity for Vitamin C and that it was concentrated in these damaged areas.
Dr Ewen Cameron with Linus Pauling and Dr Campbell then proceeded to test these theories in actual practice.
They have produced a series of papers in 1973, 1974,
1975 and 1976 — describing the series of trials with ‘terminal’ (untreatable) cancer patients at the Vale of Leven District General Hospital, Loch Lomondside, Scotland where Drs Cameron and Campbell work.
In their clinical study these doctors compared the survival time of 100 terminal cancer patients, with 1000 similar patients who did not receive the vitamin.
Each patient receiving vitamin C was matched with 10 ‘control’ patients of the same sex, close to the same age, and suffering from the same type of cancer, who did not get any Vitamin C. These control cases were taken from the hospital records over the last 10 years and their survival time noted.
Each patient in the trial was examined and assessed independently by at least two physicians or surgeons who all agreed that their situation was ‘totally hopeless’ inoperable and quite untreatable before the vitamin treatment was started. All had been first treated with all conventional forms of cancer therapy — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or hormones, and death was imminent within a matter of days.
The survival rate in days for each patient was counted from the start of the Vitamin C treatment. The treatment was started with 10 grams (10,000 mg) ascorbate a day given intravenously for about 10 days, after which the same dose was given by mouth and was continued with new patients over the ‘next five years.
Their published findings reveal that in every type of cancer treated the sufferer lived longer than the untreated cases.
For example, lung cancer patients survived 3.53 times longer than their counterparts. Those with stomach cancer 2.61 times longer. Those with kidney cancer survived 5.75 times longer, while victims of cancer of the colon survived on an average of 7.61 times longer on the Vitamin C treatment.
The survival of some individual cases, counted in days, gives great hope to present cancer patients.
A 74 year old man with untreatable lung cancer lived 427 days — more than a year — longer than the 10 controls who lived on an average only 17 more days (3 to 31 days).
A 69 year old man with inoperable cancer of the colon lived 1269 days — almost 3 V2 years — whereas the expected time of survival of cases untreated with Vitamin C was only 37.3 days.
A 67 year old woman with cancer of the ovary responded so well to the Vitamin therapy that she was still alive when the paper went to press — already 6 times as long as her expected survival.
A man of 62 with bladder cancer was still going strong at the time the report was published. In fact, 18 of the 100 people were still alive 970 days after treatment began. In fact, 20 times the average for the untreated patients.’
Campbell and Pauling found that there were two distinct groups of patients, 90 per cent whose life was prolonged for about 3 times the normal expectancy, but who eventually succumbed; and 10 per cent whose response and remission of disease was spectacular.
One case — a woman of 30 with so called untreatable breast cancer — was still alive 4M> years after her diagnosis as terminal, the cancer apparently under control.
One of the most dramatic success stories was in a 42 year old long-distance truck driver suffering from malignant lymph gland disease. His initial recovery was so remarkable that it was the subject of a separate paper in 1975.
For some reason the man’s orthodox treatment was delayed and he was going downhill so rapidly that ascorbate treatment was started at once. He was given the usual dose of 10,000 mg intravenously for 10 days and 10,000 mg by mouth thereafter.
His response was so dramatic that he ‘claimed to feel quite fit and well’ and ‘had been transformed from a “dying” to a “recovering” situation. Appetite had returned, night sweats had ceased with a general sense of well being’. The enlarged liver and spleen had returned to normal and other symptoms of the disease rapidly subsided.
For five months on 10,000 mg of ascorbate a day he remained well. So well that the vitamin was ceased. At his next monthly check up he was sick and the cancer had returned. It now took 20,000 mg a day of ascorbate intravenously for two weeks to control the disease and 12,500 mg by mouth thereafter to keep him well. He remained well as long as he took this dosage.
12,500 mg is indeed a minimal dose to control such a malignant and stressful disease as cancer. Irwin Stone writes that 50,000 mg a day will give more effective response, as indicated in several cases reported by Dr Virginia Livingstone and Dr William J. Saccoman of San Diego in 1975.
All the doctors working with Vitamin C to control cancer and other diseases have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that huge doses of the vitamin, both as the acid and as ascorbates, are non-toxic, have no side effects, but invariable improve the patients’ general health and sense of well being.
Perhaps the most important effect of Vitamin C therapy from the patients’ point of view is that it alleviates and sometimes stops the pain altogether; and they begin to feel better and have hope.
The final months or days of a terminal cancer patient’s life are so often filled with pain and misery that to prolong the agony for so many days merely for the purpose of living longer would be cruelty indeed.
One of the first effects of the treatment is less pain and less need for pain-killing drugs.
Cameron and Pauling found that the patients not only lived longer but they found life more worthwhile.
Considering the excellent results from both sides of the world of megadoses of Vitamin C therapy for cancer, it is hoped that research along these lines will continue by the well funded Cancer Foundations round the world and by individual cancer specialists in their own practice.
Yet, for some reason, they are loath to do so and Linus Pauling’s own Institute for Cancer Research in California is being denigrated by orthodox research organizations and the media and money withheld so that he has to appeal for voluntary donations to carry on his work.
In time I believe that it will be considered negligent for a doctor treating a cancer case to withhold such a non-toxic valuable aid as full doses of Vitamin C (ascorbate) from his patients in the early stages as soon as malignancy is diagnosed. Orthodox cancer therapy should, of course, be undertaken but he should not wait until orthodox treatments have failed and the case is ‘terminal’!
It does not interfere with, but rather enhances, the effectiveness of any other cancer therapy that is instituted, and increases the patients natural resistance to the disease.
Vitamin C is not only valuable in controlling cancer already present but can act as a preventative as well.
Recent studies on substances that can induce human cancer, carcinogens, reveal that the sodium nitrite, which is extensively used in meat processing and preserving, can react with the acid gastric juice in the stomach to form nitrosamines.
These nitrosamines, of which there are many, are known to cause cancer in a whole range of laboratory animals. So far nitrosamines are accused, but not yet definitely convicted, of causing cancer in man. It would certainly upset the whole meat processing industry if it were. However, the risk is there.
Again Vitamin C comes to the rescue. In 1976 Dr Sidney Mievish and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre U.S.A. showed that Vitamin C can block the formation of the carcinogenous nitrosamines being manufactured in the stomach. These results have been confirmed by Hoffman-La-Roche Research Division in U.S. A. Indeed, quite ordinary doses of Vitamin C — say a fresh whole orange — taken in the same meal with the pink processed meat could be effective against nitrosamine production in the human stomach.
Those in the forefront of nutritional and vitamin research believe that as long as the body is maintained in a positive Vitamin C balance, cancer cells cannot grow and spread, that good daily doses in fresh fruits and vegetables as well as in synthetic Vitamin C are the best preventive measure against malignancy.
At the time of writing (1978) further results of treatment with megadoses of ascorbic acid for cancer administered along the lines reported by Drs Cameron and Pauling have not been published — at least in Australian Medical Journals — but I have received — verbally and in writing — the .results of one Queensland doctor with the courage to follow the dramatic help given to patients by the ascorbate treatment in sufficient doses to be effective.
At first the only ampoules available contained 500 mg or 54 gram sodium ascorbate; 20 ampoules would be required to give only 10 grams intravenously — which is the least dose required for an adult. The cost of even 10 grams for 10 consecutive days becomes prohibitive to many people.
The Oakleigh Laboratories, 9 Regan Place, Mentone, Melbourne, are now supplying ampoules of 15 and 30 grams of dry sterilised sodium ascorbate to be dissolved in normal saline or distilled water — 200 ml to 500 ml. This solution is made up at the time of injection and given very slowly with an intravenous needle strapped to the arm. The gauge of the needle depending on the size of the patient and his veins.
Dr Klenner (U.S.A.) usually uses 20 gauge needle, the Brisbane doctor 23 to 25. She says that children need a fine needle and more dilute solution as the ascorbate tends to sting in contact with the vein at the point of entrance.
The injection is continued until the patient’s pain or discomfort ceases. It may take 10, 15 or even 30 grams, and this the doctor considers the suitable daily dose for this patient.
Acsorbate powder 10 to 15 grams taken by mouth is started simultaneously and continued after the usual 10 daily intravenous injections are finished. The patients are then followed up and report regularly for assessment of their condition.
Results so far followed up after nine months are universally good, in some cases dramatic. Invariably the patient looses the pain which is the most intolerable feature of advanced cancer — and it is only advanced cases who finally seek this new untried treatment after all orthodox methods of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy have failed to control the malignancy.
The patients feel better in themselves, regain their appetite, gain weight and their general health improves. Side effects are mild — a slight headache, mild nausea or slight fever the day after the injection — but these soon pass.
They are prescribed a fully nutritous diet containing as much fresh unprocessed food as possible, while smoking and alcohol are forbidden. The ascorbate treatment taken by mouth must, of course, continue indefinitely.
It is too early to assess the final results of ascorbate treatment to control cancer, but if life can be prolonged even in advanced cases with no pain and an increased sense of well being — as in the Scottish cases — then this form of treatment is well worth while.
Research into the place of ascorbic acid in the prevention and treatment of cancer as a first line of defence in early cases is going ahead in both animals and humans on both sides of the world.
Further results of Cameron and Campbell’s work in Scotland and Linus Pauling’s Institute in U.S.A., as well as our own clinical trials in Australia, are keenly awaited by the medical profession and even more eagerly by the victims of cancer themselves.
Here are some notes of the Brisbane doctor’s practical experience that may be useful for those medical practitioners undertaking sodium ascorbate treatment for cancer and offer hope and relief of pain to many patients.
To relieve pain in advanced, cancer this doctor has found that up to 90 g may be needed at one sitting.
Average time for an injection of 15 to 20 g is 15 to 20 minutes. Dramatic pain relief occurs almost invariably within a short time.
Repeat this for 10 days. Meanwhile, start on the oral Vitamin C, trying to build up to a dose equivalent to the intravenous dose required for complete relief of pain.
In the Australasian Nurses Journal, Dr Anne Glew, M.B. B.S. of Brisbane has published the results of some cases of cancer which she has treated with intravenous sodium ascorbate, starting with dosage recommended by Linus Pauling and Ewan Cameron in their trials in Scotland, but increasing the amount given to suit each individual case.
With her permission I now summarise her article and add a few more recent cases from her verbal communications
Between June 1976 and March 1977, 43 cancer patients were given high dose intravenous Vitamin C. Eight of these patients had only one injection. Only fifteen had more than one injection. Twenty completed the course of 10 injections, one injection per day. Most patients gained great relief symptomatically. In fact, in general the relief of pain was dramatic.
Each patient was given intravenous Vitamin C on the first visit until pain relief was achieved. The dose varied from 10 grams to 90 grams. The Vitamin C was obtained in powder form and dissolved down in normal saline. This was carried out in a general practice on an out-patient basis. Some patients could come down for 10 continuous days, others broke the course for a few days. It is believed this is the first time such a programme has been carried out and presented for publication in Australia.
*34/21/7*
Cialis, Viagra from Canada