Potent cancer treatment

Background:

The phrase, “diversity is our strength,” certainly applies to cancer. To help ensure their survival, cancer cells are highly diverse (variable). Cells in one part of the tumor can have different biological characteristics (phenotypes) and genetic makeups (heterogenicity) than cells within another part of the same tumor. Unfortunately, this diversity limits the therapeutic effectiveness of single-target therapy and the reductionist approaches taken by most physicians. Our approach is different. It is multi-targeted and designed to change the course of the disease by attacking cancer from numerous angles, each of which exploits a known vulnerability of cancer, regardless of the biological and genetic diversity. This approach can often help those with cancer that has become resistant to treatment.

Overview:

Our protocol focuses on the critical areas below to eradicate proliferating cancer cells as well as two overlooked adversaries in the battle against cancer: senescent (non-proliferating) cancer cells and cancer stem cells:

Energy metabolism: Deprives (“starves”) cancer of the nutrients it needs to grow and spread. This disrupts the bioenergetics of cancer by inhibiting glycolysis (glucose metabolism), thereby reducing cancer’s pool of energy-providing adenosine triphosphate (ATP). It also disrupts mitochondrial respiration (amino acid and fatty acid metabolism), thereby reducing the biosynthesis of the cellular building blocks required for tumor growth.
Oxidative stress: Induces excessive (cytotoxic) oxidative stress in cancer cells while inhibiting their ability to neutralize it.
Autophagy: Blocks cancer’s ability to use protective autophagy to repair damage caused by nutrient deprivation and excessive oxidative stress.
Tumor microenvironment: Targets conditions that drive cancer progression, promote treatment resistance, and enable immune escape, namely intracellular alkalosis and extracellular acidosis, hypoxia, inflammation, and elevated interstitial fluid pressure.
Apoptosis: Promotes mitochondria-mediated death pathways of cancer cells by upregulating pro-apoptotic BH3, caspase, and P53 proteins and downregulating anti-apoptotic BCL-2 proteins.
Immune function: Stimulates immune destruction of cancer by reversing T-cell exhaustion and promoting the proliferation, infiltration, and sustained cytotoxic activity of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment.
Tumor debris: Hastens the removal of dead cancer cells by promoting macrophage phagocytosis. This is very important because lingering tumor debris can cause more cancer.

Weekly bloodwork (complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel, phosphorus, and uric acid) and daily blood pressure are monitored, and medication and/or supplement dosage adjustments are made when necessary. The protocol can enhance the therapeutic efficacy of conventional cancer therapy or may serve as a stand-alone treatment if necessary. Even some with “incurable” or “terminal” cancer who have failed previous treatment, including drug trials, have had their disease stabilized or brought into remission.

Anti-cancer diet:

Plant-based (low-methionine/alkaline-promoting) and ketogenic (low-carbohydrate), 7 days per week. Make your meals using recipes from these cookbooks:

Vegan Keto: Click here
Vegan Ketogenic Diet: Click here
The Keto Vegan: Click here
The Essential Vegan Keto: Click here

Eat 3 meals per day but limit your eating to an 8-hour window period so that you are fasting 16 hours a day. For example, eat breakfast around 8:00 or 9:00 am, lunch around 1:00 pm, and dinner by 4:00 or 5:00 pm. Eat during daylight hours only as eating after sunset has been found to increase cancer risk. Make breakfast or lunch your largest meal of the day and dinner your smallest meal of the day.

If you are losing weight and are too skinny (cachectic), to help put on weight, take 1-2 tablespoons of organic MCT oil every 1-2 hours along with 1-2 capsules of conjugated bile acids to help digest the oil.

Medications:

Amiloride 5mg: One-half or one tablet with breakfast, 7 days a week. While taking this medication, you need to measure your blood pressure twice daily at home using this device and report to Dr. Thomas if it goes below 90/60.
Auranofin 3 mg: One-half or one tablet with breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week. Note: The cost of auranofin is included in our monthly cost of treatment. This medication is not covered by insurance or Medicare. The cost of auranofin would be over $1400 per month if you were to pay out of pocket using a discount coupon from GoodRx.com (click here). Again, the cost of auranofin is included in our monthly cost of treatment.
Benzethonium chloride 10mg: One tablet 4 times daily with food, Monday-Thursday only.
Dichloroacetate 333 mg: Click here. One capsule immediately after breakfast and dinner, Monday-Friday. Take it with a tall glass of water. Take one capsule of accompanying thiamine with breakfast and dinner, Monday-Friday. Thiamine is needed to reduce the risk of neuropathy while taking dichloroacetate.
Diclofenac sodium 50 mg: One-half or one tablet immediately after breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week. Take it with a tall glass of water and do not lie down for at least 10 minutes after taking this medication. Do not take aspirin or ibuprofen while on diclofenac.
Disulfiram 250 mg: One-half or one tablet with lunch, 7 days per week. Must take with 2 mg of copper gluconate: Click here. Do not drink any alcohol while taking disulfiram.
Lithium carbonate 150 mg: One capsule daily with lunch, 7 days a week.
Metformin ER 500 mg: One tablet with breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week. If oral metformin causes undue nausea, we can switch to compounded transdermal (topical) metformin.
Omeprazole with sodium bicarbonate: Click here. One capsule one hour before breakfast, 7 days a week. The aim is to achieve a mid-morning urine pH of 7.5 to 8 (click here). If additional alkalinization is needed, pH Adjust (click here) is used.
Pyrvinium pamoate oral liposomal solution 25 mg/5 mL: One teaspoon with breakfast and dinner mixed in a glass of water, 7 days a week. The cost of pyrvinium pamoate is included in our monthly cost of treatment. This FDA-approved medication has not been manufactured by pharmaceutical companies since 2005. To make this essential drug available to our patients, we pay medicinal chemists to custom synthesize it for us. If you try to purchase pyrvinium pamoate online, at 50 mg per day (1500 mg per month), it would cost you over $15,000 per month (click here), and that would be for laboratory-grade (low-purity) product, not medicinal-grade (high-purity) product. Further, it would come as a powder and not as an oral liposomal solution to ensure absorption and receive the anti-tumor benefits of the drug. Again, the cost of pyrvinium pamoate oral liposomal solution is included in our monthly cost of treatment.
Sodium selenite 2 mg: One or two tablets 4 times daily, 7 days per week.

If your insurance or Medicare plan does not cover the cost of the above medications, by using cash-discount coupons from GoodRx.com, the total monthly cost is around $200.

Supplements:

Copper gluconate: Accompanies disulfiram (see above).
Magnesium gluconate: Click here. One capsule with breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week.
Pro-resolving mediators: Click here. One capsule with breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week.
Reishi spore oil: Click here. One capsule with breakfast and dinner, 7 days a week.
Thiamine: Accompanies dichloroacetate (see above).

The cost of the above supplements is around $180 per month.

Treatment cost:

The above treatment protocol requires close and ongoing medical monitoring and management by Dr. Thomas. This can be done remotely via GoToMeeting videoconferencing. The cost for this is $3750 per month. This includes the cost of auranofin and pyrvinium pamoate. Treatment is maintained until remission or disease stabilization is achieved. This generally takes 6-12 months and sometimes a bit longer depending on the type and stage of cancer. Our fees are substantially lower than what people pay in Mexico or Europe for alternative cancer treatment. Clinics there typically charge $28,000 to $80,000 for the first month of treatment (click here and scroll down to FAQs and click “What are the costs of stage 4 cancer treatments at a clinic?”). At that price range, patients can receive an entire year of treatment with us. Because many of those Mexican and European clinics lack a deeper understanding of the complex biology of cancer, they can put patients at risk by failing to target key survival mechanisms of cancer.

Monitoring treatment progress:

To verify the protocol is working as quickly as possible, we get a baseline PET/CT scan and follow-up scans every 1-3 months. If your insurance or Medicare plan does not cover the cost of the PET/CT scan, by going through RadiologyAssist.com, the discounted out-of-pocket cost ranges from $1300 to $2500, depending on where you live.

Additional steps available:

Advanced intravenous therapy with radiofrequency hyperthermia:

If additional steps are needed to fight cancer, we administer intravenous artesunate immediately followed by intravenous high-dose vitamin C and low-dose azithromycin and doxycycline, along with radiofrequency hyperthermia. Oral genipin (click here) and liposomal quercetin (click here) are taken three days prior to treatment. This combination induces cytotoxic oxidative stress by causing reactive oxygen species to accumulate to unbearable levels in proliferating cancer cells, non-proliferating (senescent) cancer cells, and cancer stem cells, causing irreparable damage and triggering cell death, along with inducing antitumor immunity. Treatment is done every 1-2 weeks and the cost is $1750 per treatment.

Note: Regarding vitamin C, we use sodium ascorbate instead of ascorbic acid. Unlike ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbate has a neutral pH and takes advantage of the cell’s intrinsic sodium-dependent vitamin C transporters (SVCT1 and SVCT2) to improve intracellular ascorbate concentration.

Targeting cancer’s addiction to methionine:

In 1974, a landmark paper was published showing for the first time that cancer possesses what is called an “absolute methionine dependency,” meaning that if we try to grow cells in a Petri dish without giving them the amino acid methionine, normal cells thrive, but without methionine, cancer cells die. Methionine and iron dependence are the only known general metabolic defects in cancer. Normal cells grow with or without methionine, but cancer cells must have methionine to grow. It turns out that cancer stem cells also need methionine and die without it. Methionine deprivation interferes with cancer epigenetics, nucleotide and protective antioxidant synthesis, membrane lipid homeostasis, and multiple signaling pathways that are methionine-dependent transmethylation events.

Thirty-seven years later, a study showed that a diet low in methionine can be helpful in the fight against cancer. That is why we put all our patients on a plant-based (vegan) diet because plant protein contains less methionine than animal protein. The question is, can we lower methionine levels in the body enough by dietary means alone to eradicate advanced-stage cancer? The answer is no, but it’s an important start.

Our office works with a world-renowned scientist who is a leading authority on methionine’s central role in human malignancies. Our close working relationship with this scientist allows us to have access to patented methioninase created by recombinant-DNA technology in his laboratory. Methioninase is an oral digestive enzyme that breaks down methionine in the gut before it can be absorbed from our food. Methioninase makes it possible to lower methionine levels in the body far beyond what is possible with diet alone. With methioninase, we can come closer to creating a “Petri-dish-like effect” within our body and begin to mimic the conditions in the 1974 landmark study. The cost for methioninase is $750 per month.

For more information:

To understand the science behind our protocol, please study the references below:

Abaza M, Luqmani YA. The influence of pH and hypoxia on tumor metastasis. Expert Rev Anticancer Ther. 2013 Oct;13(10):1229-42.

Abdalbari FH, Telleria CM. The gold complex auranofin: new perspectives for cancer therapy. Discov Oncol. 2021 Oct 20;12(1):42.

Ahn CS, Metallo CM. Mitochondria as biosynthetic factories for cancer proliferation. Cancer Metab. 2015 Jan 25;3(1):1.

Alfarouk KO, Verduzco D, Rauch C, Muddathir AK, Adil HH, Elhassan GO, Ibrahim ME, David Polo Orozco J, Cardone RA, Reshkin SJ, Harguindey S. Glycolysis, tumor metabolism, cancer growth and dissemination. A new pH-based etiopathogenic perspective and therapeutic approach to an old cancer question. Oncoscience. 2014 Dec 18;1(12):777-802.

Balamurugan K. HIF-1 at the crossroads of hypoxia, inflammation, and cancer. Int J Cancer. 2016 Mar 1;138(5):1058-66.

Bénéteau M, Zunino B, Jacquin MA, Meynet O, Chiche J, Pradelli LA, Marchetti S, Cornille A, Carles M, Ricci JE. Combination of glycolysis inhibition with chemotherapy results in an antitumor immune response. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20071-6.

Böttger F, Vallés-Martí A, Cahn L, Jimenez CR. High-dose intravenous vitamin C, a promising multi-targeting agent in the treatment of cancer. J Exp Clin Cancer Res. 2021 Oct 30;40(1):343.

Brüning A, Kast RE. Oxidizing to death: disulfiram for cancer cell killing. Cell Cycle. 2014;13(10):1513-4.

Cairns R, Papandreou I, Denko N. Overcoming physiologic barriers to cancer treatment by molecularly targeting the tumor microenvironment. Mol Cancer Res. 2006 Feb;4(2):61-70.

Cao Y, Xu X, Liu S, Huang L, Gu J. Ganoderma: A Cancer Immunotherapy Review. Front Pharmacol. 2018 Oct 25;9:1217.