Aletho News

Integrative Approaches For Cancer

An Interview With Pierre Kory

A Midwestern Doctor and Pierre Kory, MD, MPA | The Forgotten Side of Medicine | August 29, 2024

One of the most common requests I receive from readers is to discuss treatments for cancer. This in turn speaks to a broader issue—despite there being an immense interest in holistic cancer treatments, very few resources exist for patients looking for these options. That’s because it’s been well known for decades within the integrative medical field that the fastest way to lose your medical license is to practice unapproved cancer therapies and over the decades, countless examples have been made of doctors who did so (which sadly go far beyond even what we saw throughout COVID-19).

Note: I’ve also come across numerous cases where a distant relative learned of an alternative or complementary cancer treatment provided to their relative by a doctor, was triggered by it (due to their pre-existing political viewpoints) and then was able to get sanctions directed against the doctor. Most integrative doctors are aware of this and hence often decline to treat patients they are very close to that they know would wholeheartedly support what the doctor is doing because the doctor cannot take the risk of a hostile relative.

In turn, most of the doctors I know who utilize integrative cancer therapies (and have success in treating cancer) only offer this service to longtime patients they have a very close relationship with and explicitly request for me to not send patients to them. This is a shame, because beyond integrative cancer care being almost completely inaccessible to patients, this underground atmosphere both prevents most physicians from being able to have large enough patient volumes to clearly understand which alternative therapies actually work.

Conversely, countless alternative cancer treatments exist outside of America (e.g., in Mexico) which many American patients flock to since they have no alternative, and since these facilities have zero regulatory oversight or accountability, I frequently hear of very reckless approaches being implemented at these sites that none of my more experienced colleagues would ever consider doing (and likewise we often come across numerous critical oversights in those cases).

Note: most of the doctors I know who took up treating cancer with integrative medicine didn’t want to do it because of the risks involved and primarily started because they really cared about some of their patients and felt if they did nothing the patient would likely die. As a result, most of them are “self-taught” and frequently adopt very different approaches to treating cancer.

Since I’ve been quite young (long before I went to medical school) I’ve been fascinated by the alternative cancer therapies (especially those that were buried) and I’ve helped numerous people I knew through the process. From doing so, I gained a deep appreciation for the following:

• Many of the conventional cancer therapies have terrible outcomes that make them very hard to justify using—especially given how costly they are. Sadly, the actual risks and benefits of the conventional cancer treatments are rarely clearly presented to patients.
• Conversely, some of the conventional cancer treatments are helpful, and in certain cases, necessary. I’ve had patients who died because they understandably refused chemo, and likewise I’ve had certain cases where I had to do everything I could to convince a naturally-minded patient or friend to do chemo, and it ultimately saved their life (as they had aggressive cancers which were chemo-sensitive).
• Much in the same way much of the population was fanatically committed to the COVID vaccines and the boosters despite all evidence showing each vaccination only made things worse, there is also a sizable contingent of people who will do whatever their oncologist tells them to do regardless of how clear it is that the therapy is harming them, bankrupting them and not prolonging their lifespan. Initially it was very depressing for me when I was called in to speak to someone’s friend about reconsidering their disastrous chemotherapy plan, but eventually I realized that all throughout human history people have been willing to die for their beliefs so I didn’t need to take their decision to stick to a treatment plan that ultimately gave them an agonizing death personally.
• It is possible to dramatically reduce the adverse effects of conventional cancer therapies (e.g., with ultraviolet blood irradiation) but despite many of these approaches existing, there is no interest within the conventional field towards using them.
• Some of the suppressed treatments for cancer are phenomenal, while others provide, at best, a marginal benefit.
• While there are certain therapeutic principles that are relatively universal with cancer, in most cases, what each patient will respond to greatly differs. Because of this, if you use a safe but unapproved therapy that has a 50% success rate, you can easily find yourself in the position where the patient who received it still dies—at which point whoever provided the therapy can be found liable by a medical board (which does happen). Conversely, if you use an approved therapy that has a 10% success rate and a high rate of harm, there is no liability for the oncologist who prescribed it.
• The most clinically successful integrative oncologists I know all hold the opinion that cancer is a very complex disease and anyone who claims to have a single magic bullet is either hopelessly naive or a charlatan.
• There is often a significant emotional component to cancers. When this is managed correctly, it dramatically improves outcomes, but it is often a very difficult situation to navigate, especially because people emotionally destabilize when confronted with the fear of a slow but inevitable death.
• In most cases, a cancer is the result of an underlying imbalance within the body (i.e., “an unhealthy terrain”). In turn, success in treating a cancer requires recognizing what is creating the unhealthy terrain and utilizing a treatment approach that also treats that. Unfortunately, quite a few different things can create an unhealthy terrain, so you again run into a situation where a one-sized fits all model for cancer simply doesn’t exist.
• The COVID-19 turbo cancers are often quite challenging to treat.

Repurposed Drugs and Cancer

The aggressive suppression of unorthodox therapies during COVID-19, while initially successful at protecting the market for the pharmaceutical industry, eventually created a climate where enough pressure built for American doctors to find ways to provide non-standard COVID-19 therapies and organizations were established to support doctors wishing to go down this path (which were ultimately successful thanks to the incredible support of the internet).

One of the prominent COVID physician dissidents is my colleague Pierre Kory who gradually transitioned to building a telemedicine practice (Leading Edge Clinic) that focuses on treating individuals with long-COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries (two of the largest unmet medical needs in the country). Much of his treatment approach relies upon utilizing off-patent drugs that were previously approved for another use (e.g., ivermectin), which allows him to take advantage of the drugs being easily accessible, affordable and already generally regarded as safe.

Note: Pierre Kory considers repurposed drugs to be the achilles heel of the pharmaceutical industry since the entire business depends upon selling incredibly expensive proprietary medicines under the justification it is immensely expensive to prove they are safe and effective—whereas in contrast no money can be made off the repurposed drugs (since their patents expired) which nonetheless must stay legal since they were previously proven to be safe and approved by the FDA.

As they worked with studying and treating spike protein injuries, Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory gradually realized that there was also a significant need to provide non-standard approaches for treating cancer and over the last year they’ve put together a model which has been quite beneficial for many patients and are now offering that treatment to a larger group of patients through this research study. Since it is quite rare to find a US based group publicly offering integrative cancer options to their patients, I reached out to Dr. Kory and asked him if I could interview him about his approach.

Before we go further, I want to emphasize that the approach he utilizes is different than my own, something which again speaks to both how many different paths exist to treating cancer.

Note: what follows is a slightly edited version of the conversation I (AMD) and Dr. Kory (PK) had.

AMD: Thank you for agreeing to do this, I know many of my readers will appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule for this discussion.

PK: Thanks. Since I left the system, my eyes have been opened to how many of the things we do in medicine need to be seriously examined. Medicine has provided us with an incredible set of tools for addressing many problems which have plagued humanity, but the politics and corruption in medicine have caused us to use those tools in a way that benefits Wall Street rather than our patients and this has to change. When I started this journey, my focus was on COVID-19 and the vaccine injuries, but as time has moved forward, I’ve come to see that I have an obligation to make a safer, more affordable and hopefully more effective form of cancer care available to the public.

AMD: Before we go further, I want to show you a chart I just pulled up.

PK: Wow. I had an idea of this, but I didn’t realize it was that extreme.

AMD: Since cancer (oncology) drugs are one of the primary profit centers for the medical industry, I’ve always thought that explains why so much money is spent in protecting this monopoly.

PK: Just like COVID-19…

AMD: Anyhow, could you share with everyone what brought you to be interested in treating cancer with repurposed drugs?

PK: Well as you know, becoming a COVID dissident made me much more open to questioning medical orthodoxies, and becoming very committed to using repurposed drugs. The full story is a bit longer though.

AMD: Let’s hear it!

PK: I first started learning about cancer a little over a year ago when my friend, colleague, and mentor, Professor Paul Marik, started to talk to me about a book he had just read. For those who know me and Paul, this should be a familiar story – Paul developing a scientific insight and then I become really passionate about it in his wake.

AMD: For those who don’t know, Paul Marik MD is an incredible researcher who pioneered many approaches with transformed the practice of critical care medicine and was highly respected in his field, being one of the most published and cited critical care researchers in the world. Nonetheless, that did not protect him from being excommunicated by the medical orthodoxy once he chose to utilize alternatives to the COVID-19 treatment guidelines (which actually saved his patient’s lives). Anyways, please continue Pierre.

PK: A lot of what we’re doing now revolves around the Metabolic Theory of Cancer (MTOC), which argues that cancer is a result of disrupted metabolism within the body, and hence that much of the focus in treating cancer should be on first starving the cancer cell of glucose through a ketogenic diet and then using medicines with mechanisms of actions which interfere or block numerous processes which allow the cell to become “cancerous,” i.e. normalizing cellular metabolism throughout the body rather than trying to just kill the cancerous cells.

Although Paul did not construct the MTOC, his recognition and appreciation of both the validity and the importance of the theory may eventually have more impact than all of his prior contributions. There are several reasons for this:

•The first is that cancer rates have been increasing for a while and more recently have exploded (particularly among young people) in the wake of the mRNA campaign.

•The second is that the available therapies used to treat cancer are often toxic, largely (but not completely) ineffective at improving survival (especially in solid tumors), and immensely costly.

•The third is that cancer mortality has barely budged in decades (in fact it has increased).

AMD: It’s always incredible that medical outcomes have no effect on medical spending.

PK: True that. Anyway, Paul was immensely excited about what he was learning about cancer and it became a frequent topic of conversation. That book inspired him to begin working on a project where he reviewed almost 2,000 studies on the metabolic mechanisms of hundreds of repurposed medicines and nutraceuticals as well as other metabolic interventions to treat cancer (i.e. diet).

AMD: 2000 studies? Paul is something else.

PK: You have to have that type of dedication and information retention capability to become the top researcher in your field.

AMD: What did you think of the concept when Paul first shared it with you?

PK: At the time I already knew a little about the topic of repurposed drugs in cancer because early in Covid I had become friendly with the amazing physician and journalist Justus R. Hope (a pen name) based on his writings on ivermectin for the Desert Review and his book called “Ivermectin For The World.” More importantly, I had also read his book called Surviving Cancer, Covid-19, & Disease: The Repurposed Drug Revolution. It was Justus (check out his Substack) who first “schooled me” on the threat that repurposed (i.e. off patent) drugs present to Pharma, and how Pharma has systematically suppressed and attacked both off-patent drugs and inexpensive, unprofitable interventions whenever they show efficacy in treating “profitable” diseases.

AMD: Oh, I always thought you came up with that. It’s great that you’re open to admitting where you got it from rather than claiming it as your own. People often don’t do that…

PK: I cite what you’ve taught me all the time as well! Anyhow, Justus’s book on cancer was inspired by the case of a close friend of his who developed glioblastoma multiforme (a nasty brain cancer). This terrible diagnosis motivated him to search and study for therapeutic interventions and/or repurposed drugs which might help his friend. He found solid evidence for a four-drug protocol which he recommended to him. His friend then proceeded to far outlive his predicted prognosis, and although he died eventually, it was from the radiation injury to his brain that he had received initially and not from the effects of his cancer.

AMD: Three quick points I wanted to share on your anecdote.

First, there’s quite a bit of evidence linking the chickenpox vaccine to a significantly increased risk of that brain cancer (which further undermines the extremely tenuous justification for that vaccine). Additionally, a few other dangerous cancers have also been linked to specific viral vaccinations.

Second, every now and then I hear a story of someone who was injured by radiation therapy that was accidentally dosed at too high of a setting.

Third, if DMSO is administered prior to radiation therapy, it dramatically reduces its complications (while simultaneously having anticancer properties and zero toxicity). In my eyes it’s unconscionable this has not entered the standard of care for oncology and I’ve spent the last month working on a series about that substance.

PK: Wow. I’ll need to look into these—a lot of the other cancer treatment ideas you’ve given have been really helpful. Also, you sadly remind me of an older dear friend and roommate that I lived with in my 20’s who developed metastatic cervical cancer who, even then, I knew had been badly injured from radiation – essentially her bowels were fried and she lived out her days on intravenous nutrition and opiates. Sad stuff.

AMD: Until they experience it, patients really don’t appreciate the side effects of radiation therapy. One of the most common problems is that it changes the tissue in the area (e.g., creating adhesions) and those can create a lot of chronic issues for people (which are often too subtle for the doctor to recognize or believe was linked to the radiation).

PK: If we circle back to Justus’s story, after I heard about it (this was still very early in Covid), I took a close relative of mine who had recently been diagnosed with melanoma for an additional consultation with an integrative oncologist I knew. Although my friend’s melanoma was completely resected and she showed no evidence of disease (NED) on imaging, the pathologists who looked at the tumor tissue (including my friend Ryan Cole, a dermatopathologist) found it suggested a high risk of recurrence and/or metastasis.

Her “system” (standard) oncologist thus proposed she use a cancer drug (an immune checkpoint inhibitor) to prevent recurrence. This was a novel use of the drug, given that she was cancer free at the time so she wasn’t sure she wanted to use it. The reason for her hesitation was that her oncologist had rightly explained that the drug had risks of adverse effects which worried her. It also didn’t help that I was a pulmonologist who had been sent numerous patients over the years with pulmonary toxicity from this same drug (i.e. I’d seen cases of organizing pneumonia).

My relative was thus greatly concerned about the potential side effects and chose to forego her system oncologist’s recommendation. The more integrative oncologist instead started her on 11 different repurposed medicines and nutraceuticals (which I was a little shocked by at the time). Although the integrative oncologist explained the conceptual scientific framework behind the regimen quite well, I wasn’t personally familiar with the evidence base or scientific rationale for the treatment protocol my relative was placed on. That would come much later. I should note that my relative is doing well and cancer free three years later, and unlike many traditional cancer patients, has had no problems tolerating her medication regimen.

AMD: One of the things I’ve always found noteworthy in medicine is that while doctors will typically recommend patients follow their oncologists recommendations, once they or someone close to them gets cancer, physicians immediately start desperately researching the subject and reaching out to anyone they know personally who intensely studies the cancer literature.

PK: I agree. My knowledge about what could have happened to my relative definitely motivated me to go outside the box for her.

PK: Anyway, Paul started becoming obsessed with studying cancer as a metabolic disease in the winter/spring of 2023 but it was not until 6 months later that that I finally read the book that inspired Paul so much, a book titled “Tripping over the Truth: How The Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicines Most Entrenched Paradigms” by Travis Christofferson. That book would prove to be as scientifically transformative to me as “Turtles All The Way Down” was in regards to my understanding of the (non) importance and (non) safety of childhood vaccines.

I was inspired to read the book, and after meeting with Travis and Paul to design an observational trial of using repurposed medicines and dietary interventions in cancer. We designed the study together and successfully obtained IRB approval from a rigorous IRB (we have over 200 patients enrolled already). For any interested, info on the study and enrolling into it can be found here.

AMD: It’s incredible you pulled that off. Options like that are almost never available to cancer patients.

PK: A lot of this came about because I was deeply intrigued by Travis’s knowledge base and the results of one protocol of repurposed medicines that had been studied in patients with one of the nastiest cancers, glioblastoma (which is also the one that killed Senator McCain a year after diagnosis). To put it bluntly, glioblastoma, when treated with current “standard of care” (SOC) consisting of surgery, radiation, and oral temozolomide, has a horrific but well defined and reproducible median overall survival of about 15 months and a 2 year survival between 26-28%. Furthermore, those are all very aggressive therapies which can be incredibly traumatic and harmful to the patient.

In the study that blew my mind, named METRICS, a four drug repurposed medicine protocol was used (mebendazole, metformin, doxycycline, and atorvastatin) alongside the standard of care (SOC) for that cancer. They found that the treated patients lived an average of 27 months from diagnosis and had a 2 year survival of 64% compared to the well established 28% observed with SOC (despite the patients not starting the repurposed drug protocol until a median of 6 months after diagnosis). Such a sudden improvement in one cancer’s survival rate is truly remarkable if not somewhat unprecedented.

AMD: In a recent article, I made it very clear I do not support the general use of statins as there is not evidence they meaningfully decrease one’s chance of dying and conversely they have a high rate of side effects (affecting roughly 20% of users), with many of them being severe and incapacitating. At the same time however, I try to be open minded about everything, and one of the things I’ve always been surprised is that a case can be made for using them in certain cancers.

PK: Fully agree on the statin thing.

PK: Ultimately, what I learned from Seyfried and Christofferson’s papers and books (as well as lectures and interviews by Seyfried) essentially upended the conventional understanding, I like many doctors had been trained to believe causes a cell to become cancerous.

AMD: An unhealthy terrain of the body?

PK: In a way I suppose. Seyfried is the one who ultimately and nearly singlehandedly compiled all the scientific underpinnings into a coherent MTOC (metabolic theory of cancer). He found that cancer has a “metabolic” origin (i.e. problem with energy production) and not a “genetic” one (i.e. arising from mutations in genes). This might sound boring and geeky, but I cannot overemphasize the importance and applicability of Seyfried’s work (which is the culmination of the work of a smallish group of other incredible scientists and researchers over the last 100 years).

AMD: I just want to jump in and mention that one of the diseases a dysfunctional Cell Danger Response (a metabolic state mitochondria enter where the energy production of a cell is shunted to protecting it and hence its normal functions cease—which underlies many inexplicable chronic illnesses) has been linked to, is cancer.

PK: That’s really interesting. What you introduced me to the Cell Danger Response it completely changed how we looked at vaccine injured patients because we realized the mitochondrial shut down we were observing was a normal physiologic response we had to slowly coax back to normal. I only realized recently mitochondrial dysfunction was also linked to cancer.

PK: Jumping back to Seyfried’s book, more importantly, it rightly concludes from a vast body of evidence that nearly the entire scientific and oncologic community has misunderstood the true origin of cancer (they believe it is due to cells mutating by chance and then rapidly dividing and taking over the body). The implications of the erroneous somatic mutation theory (SMT) has been devastating in that it has led to the development of a range of therapies that are indiscriminately cytotoxic (kills both cancer cells and normal, healthy cells) and minimally effective if not outright harmful in terms of quality of live vs. extension of life (the stats on chemo for most cancers are deplorable, I have an upcoming article on this in my Substack series about cancer).

AMD: Another great example of this process was the Alzheimer’s field getting hijacked by the dogma amyloid production in the brain causes the disease and that treatment of Alzheimer’s thus requires destroying that amyloid. This theory has received billions in research dollars, but failed to produce a single viable therapy (even with the FDA doing everything they could to push the newest ones onto the market), and was largely a result of a study that was proven to have fabricated its data but everyone keeps on citing. In contrast, when Alzheimer’s disease is treated as a metabolic disorder, it can be treated (and data exists clearly demonstrating this) but despite the billions we spend each year searching for a cure for the disease, that proven treatment is not acknowledged by the medical field and few doctors even know it exists.

PK: It’s literally the same exact story!

PK: On the cancer front, Seyfried’s book on the MTOC was transformative to me professionally because it now dwarfs the impact of the several other practice innovations that I have been instrumental in propagating in my career (i.e., induced hypothermia in cardiac arrest patients, point-of care ultrasound at the bedside of crashing patients in the ICU, the use of IV vitamin C in septic shock, and the utility and safety of ivermectin or other repurposed drugs in Covid).

AMD: I really wish IV vitamin C for sepsis had caught on. In my experience when it’s utilized correctly, sepsis deaths rarely occur, and the hospitals I know of that use it as a standard protocol have an extraordinary low sepsis death rate. Nonetheless, most ICU doctors, despite acknowledging it’s safe will refuse to use it (regardless of what you do) even though sespsis remains the number one cause of hospital deaths (with roughly 270,000 patients dying each year).

PK: The way vitamin C for sepsis has been treated by my profession is a punch in the gut for me and it still makes me and Paul sad whenever we think about it. To your point and experience, in the first year that Paul started employing his IV vitamin C protocol for sepsis at his hospital, independent Medicare data showed the mortality rate there dropped from a stable and consistent 22% over the years down to 6% and that was in the setting of only his ICU doing it (the hospital had other ICU’s which did not). On the subject of Paul, I’d like to quote a few things from the cancer monograph (basically a book) he created after reviewing those 1800+ studies.

In putting this document together, I have invested thousands of hours, read more than 1800 peer-reviewed papers, and consulted with dozens of doctors and experts. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting I have found a cure for cancer, nor am I the first to propose using repurposed drugs for cancer. What I hope to provide is a well-researched clearinghouse of information that picks up where traditional cancer therapies leave off. I aim to inspire providers caring for cancer patients to broaden their horizons and think creatively about readily available interventions, with science to back up their efficacy, and that could improve their patients’ outcomes. 

PK: What I value so much about Paul’s monograph is that he essentially reviewed the scientific and clinical evidence for approximately 256 repurposed medicines and over 2,000 nutraceuticals. He then ranked and ordered them according to the strength of the totality of the available evidence to support their use in terms of efficacy and safety. What he found was, that although there are claims of efficacy and safety for hundreds if not thousands of treatments, only seventeen had sufficient data which met his criteria for a “strong recommendation.” Another eight he gave a “weak” recommendation. He also categorized another twenty as having “insufficient data” to recommend, despite many claims and use by various practitioners around the globe.

At this point in my life and career, learning that the current consensus theory as to the cause of cancer is built on an inaccurate scientific understanding is unsurprising to me. I add cancer to the list of “scientific dogmas” that have been exposed as being based on faulty or corrupt science (likely due to inaccuracies and medical ignorance that became self-perpetuating). Conversely, I don’t believe poor scientific underpinnings of widespread beliefs is exclusive to any one field, so I found it very helpful that Paul was able to sort through the existing data to establish which integrative cancer therapies actually have evidence supporting them.

The fact that so many cancer patients use integrative therapies despite the evidence behind them being unclear was a key reason why Paul took on this research endeavor. To quote his monograph:

We strongly endorse an Integrative approach to the management of patients with cancer. There is much confusion amongst patients (and many health care providers) as to the characteristics of integrative oncology. The use of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) is frequently seen in the oncology setting, with nearly half of cancer patients reporting CAM use following diagnosis and as many as 91% during active chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

Fortunately, having dug into the literature, we’ve realized that, much in the same way there was real data supporting the use of repurposed drugs and nutraceuticals for Covid, there is a lot of data for supporting the use of repurposed drugs and nutraceuticals for cancer so we are able to practice approaches supported by scientific evidence, and in some cases, extensive evidence. In many cases (because the money isn’t there) those trials aren’t as robust as is typically required for widespread recommendation (ie. the costly large placebo controlled trials) but, in Paul’s list of seventeen strongly recommended treatments, the totality of in vitro, in vivo, mechanistic, safety and clinical efficacy data are beyond convincing to make informed and evidence-based decisions in practice. However, again, because the money isn’t there for these off-patent approaches, this data haven’t been promoted and the oncology field is simply unaware most of it exists (e.g., the committees who make their guidelines never take any of it into consideration).

AMD: A continually recurring theme I find when researching the Forgotten Side of Medicine is that as more money is spent on medical care (e.g., the United States is the largest spender), a stronger and stronger institutional bias exists to dismiss competing therapies which can’t be monetized. In contrast, in less affluent nations that still have advanced medical systems, many remarkable therapies with lower profit margins are regularly utilized within their medical systems—for example, after Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation was invented, it took America’s hospital system by storm in the 1940s (as it dramatically improved the success rate in treating a variety of otherwise fatal or untreatable conditions) but then was buried by the American Medical Association to protect the medical monopoly. Russia and Germany however continued to use it and in the decades since, remarkable research has emerged from these countries (particularly Russia) which would completely transform the standard of care in America, but, like many things it’s almost unknown here. How does this compare to the situation with the cancer therapies you are using?

PK: In many countries — including Israel, Germany, Switzerland, India, and other
countries in Asia — by default most oncologists are dually trained and function as integrative oncologists. This is distinct from the United States, Australia, and some European countries, where most oncologists follow the traditional orthodox approaches of what some derisively call “slash, burn, and poison,” (i.e. surgery, radiation, and chemo).

AMD: Twenty years ago, there was a great book written called “German Cancer Therapies” which illustrated how many relatively benign but highly effective natural therapies are frequently utilized within Germany’s medical system—whereas in contrast most American doctors would label those approaches as quackery and scold any patient considering utilizing them.

PK: Most doctors here don’t know that in countries where integrative oncology is utilized, rather than it being “a unfocused hodgepodge of unproven therapies” it actually involves a multidisciplinary team with caregivers committed to an integrative care model. Specifically, their major focus of care is the patient’s quality of life with an emphasis on:

•Relief of symptoms, anxiety, and pain
•Quality of sleep
•Nutrition
•Nutraceutical/herbs and repurposed drugs
•Lifestyle changes.

AMD: Before you go further, I want to point out how frustrating it is that these basic common sense approaches are not utilized within our medical system. For example, as I showed in a recent article on the critical importance of sleep, there is a lot of evidence showing poor sleep (e.g., due to night shift work) dramatically increases ones risk of cancer and doubles the rate tumors grow at.

PK: Yeah, the thing I think that’s critical to understand is that integrative oncology isn’t actually that radical. It complements conventional medicine while keeping within the boundaries of scientific rigor. Integrative medicine strives to be based on rigorous research, conducted in accordance with scientific methodologies. Integrative oncology focuses on pragmatic research; pragmatic trials test interventions in the full spectrum of everyday clinical settings, in order to maximize applicability and generalizability. Such pragmatic trials allow for a multimodal integrative approach, are individualized and with patient-centered outcomes.

AMD: I feel one of the major issues with standardized medicine is that it makes it impossible to cater care to each patient’s individual circumstances—which is a huge issue because every patient, contrary to the guidelines, is different.

AMD: On that subject, what is your advice to patients who are interested in utilizing these simple approaches to increase their chances of survival if they are stuck in a medical system that’s not open to it?

PK: The best advice I can give for patients in countries where care is being managed by “orthodox” oncologists is to consult with integrative primary care physicians and have at least one of them become part of the treatment team. However, that’s often not an option for many, which touches upon why the we felt the need to prioritize the study we are now conducting (and recruiting participants for). On one hand, we want a telemedicine service to be available to cancer patients who do not have local access to either an integrative oncologist or an integrative primary care provider. More importantly however, we believe it is critical to gather the data which shows these simple approaches work, because it’s only with that data that traditional oncologists will start to incorporate such approaches into their management of cancer. I sincerely believe almost all oncologists in practice want the best for their patients, so the trick to having them adopt integrative approaches is simply to provide them with clear-cut evidence they can understand supporting a more integrative approach to cancer, and that is what we are striving to do here.

AMD: All the background you’ve provided has been very helpful. Let’s now get into the nut and bolts of what you are doing. Since one of the major legal issues in this area is appropriately informing the patient of what you will be doing, could you share the informed consent documentation the patients receive?

PK: Below is the current consent we use in my practice. A lot of work and discussion has gone into making sure it can best support each patient in making the decision that is best for them. If anyone who reads this is considering an integrative approach to cancer (regardless of who they work with) I would highly advise taking what we put together here under consideration because it applies to many of the settings where patients receive these therapies.

Cancer presents in a complex variety of forms, and therapeutic approaches can include both conventional chemotherapy, radiation and/or surgery as well as immunotherapies, herbal, nutraceutical or other natural products as well as repurposed FDA approved drugs that may enhance one’s own response to cancer, directly cause cancer cell death or at least enhance the quality of life as a patient addresses their disease. Your provider can assist you in planning proper treatment for your unique circumstance. Our objective is to provide recommendations that are in keeping with your personal healthcare goals, desires and choices.

Notice of Specialty Status: your provider is neither an oncologist (a physician specializing in the treatment of cancer) or a primary care physician. Patients should have a primary care physician and a treating oncologist who is responsible for treating their cancer. Your provider’s care should be considered adjunctive to such care. Patients should inform their primary care physician and oncologist about the supportive care and protocols they undertake with their provider. Patients should also inform their provider of any and all treatments received elsewhere on an ongoing basis. While your provider is available for counseling regarding decisions about the use of conventional treatments for malignancy as well as these complementary approaches, any decision about the alteration or discontinuation of conventional treatment is the patient’s decision made solely at their own risk and should be done with careful consideration of the advice of the oncologist and any other treating physician(s).

Notice as to Complementary/Alternative Nature of Supportive Care: While research is continually emerging in new directions in cancer care and management, the therapies offered may not be widely accepted and perhaps controversial. There may be considerable basic science, anecdotal and clinical evidence regarding these approaches, but a therapy that has not been tested within randomized controlled clinical trials is not considered by mainstream medicine to be scientifically proven. These treatments are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in treating cancer. The treatments provided by your provider in support of health and a patient’s ability to heal but may not at this time be supported by a body of evidence considered sufficiently rigorous by mainstream medical institutions to support the practice for these care approaches to patients with malignancy by academic or institutional medicine. While integrative physicians have found that many patients respond well to these therapies, and, for example, improve quality of life, individual responses vary widely. Such therapies include a variety of herbal and other products derived from nature, nutritional IVs, biologics such as peptides or cell therapies, off-label use of drugs approved for purposes other than cancer or for the patient’s specific cancer and could include other emerging therapies.

Potential Adverse Reactions: While many of these are repurposed drugs and natural products which generally have a good safety profile, they can present risks of adverse reactions, particularly in patients dealing with toxicity related to cancer or interactions with drugs used in treatment. Some of these interactions are controversial and depend on the specific disease and treatment, for example, whether antioxidants can interfere with chemotherapies. The potential for adverse events will be discussed during treatment planning.

No Guarantees: As is true of any cancer therapy but particularly the case with integrative/emerging therapies, your provider makes no claims about the effectiveness of these therapies to assist patients with any form of cancer in either achieving remission or cure, or even in the successful management of pain, quality of life or any other aspect of treating or managing malignancy. Many therapies are used to assist healing capacity by enhancing your nutritional status, immune function, sense of well-being to increase your ability to function and live in comfort.

Other Treatment Options: There could be a wide variety of potential treatments for my condition that should be discussed with all treating physicians. Depending on the type of cancer and location treatment could include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, immunotherapy, certain targeted therapies, hormone therapy, stem cell transplants, precision medicine and there could be clinical trials for which you might be eligible. Some of these treatments might be provided as part of an overall plan of care while others may be alternatives to the proposed plan that should be considered.

Insurance Non-Coverage Notice: With some narrow exceptions, these therapies are considered not medically necessary and/or considered non-covered services by private insurance companies or Medicare. It is likely that no reimbursement will be available. This may also be true of coverage for related labs The patient acknowledges and agree to be financially responsible for these therapies and laboratory tests even if a denial is issued because it is considered medically unnecessary, experimental or investigational or for any other reason.

Notice to Pregnant Women: All female patients must alert their physician if they know or suspect that they are pregnant, could become pregnant during the course of treatment or are nursing.

AMD: That’s very helpful, thank you Pierre. I’d now like to jump to the question everyone’s been asking. What results are you seeing in your patients from your approach to cancer?

PK: Well, we are certainly seeing results in some of our patients! I have to admit though, at this point, it is often difficult to parse out the relative contributions to improvement between our protocol and the standard of care they are simultaneously receiving (however that knowledge will eventually come from the data compiled in our study). That said, we do have some patients showing impressive responses that are even surprising to their “system oncologists.” However, I want to be transparent and state that we also have many patients who are not showing such responses and I don’t know why as the treatments and their mechanisms should be effective independent of cancer type. It is becoming clear to me that there are some patients whose responses leave a lot to be desired and we have not closely analyzed the data enough yet to try to understand why there are such differences in response. Certainly one reason is how advanced some patients cancer is when they present as it is always easier to treat any disease the earlier you start, but even there, we have had some surprising turn arounds in advanced cases. It’s clear we still have an immense degree to learn here—which is incredible given that the modern medical field has already been given over a century to figure cancer out.

AMD: I believe your response speaks to two very important points.

First, there are numerous completely valid models for restoring the terrain of the body so that an existing cancer disappears. The great issue is that different ones apply to different ones. In turn, the most skilled integrative oncologists I know have the perceptual capacity to recognize which one is the most likely to be applicable to their patient and to switch their treatment paradigm once it’s clear it won’t work. My central difference of opinion from you is that I believe in the MOTC, but I think it’s only the underlying cause of cancer in a subset of cancers rather than all of them.

2: One of the things that’s extremely unfair about integrative oncology is that patients typically only seek it out once conventional therapies have completely failed them and they are expected to die in the immediate future. At this point, any therapy, including integrative therapies are much less likely to work (especially if chemotherapy has destroyed their immune system), and once they fail, the death is often blamed on the integrative therapy (which again makes things so challenging for doctors wishing to help these patients). Nonetheless, you still will see dramatic recoveries from those approaches (e.g., this is how many of the buried cancer treatments of the past initially proved themselves and rose to notoriety).

PK: I fully agree with you, and it’s remarkable to me how similar this dynamic is to what saw throughout COVID-19 (e.g., the repurposed drugs could save people on the verge of death, but they were dramatically more effective if instituted at the start of the illness—often having close to a 100% success rate).

AMD: Do you have any cases you could share that are representative of the typical experiences patients have under this (ever-evolving) protocol?

PK: As I just mentioned, in some cases we are seeing really dramatic results while in others we have not, which speaks to your point about the complexity of cancer. For instance, in the 6 months since we started treating we have had a number of deaths but also surprising successes. For instance:

1. One of our patients was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer with bone metastasis. This was her fourth diagnosis since 2009. This time around she was not interested in doing chemo or radiation. Within a month of starting our treatment, she had a repeat PET scan [a way to detecting cancer throughout the body], which was completely clear of lesions.
2. A fairly old male patient has been diagnosed with renal cell cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and bones. He was concurrently receiving immunotherapy and about a month after beginning of our therapy, he was hospitalized for arm swelling. The hospital did the repeat whole body PET scan while he was there, which was previously scheduled for a week later. The pulmonary NP was jumping out of her seat with excitement as she compared the previous, CT images of his chest with the current images, noting multiple tumors, which were completely gone and other tumors which were significantly decreased in size. Clearly this was unusual and inspiring.
3. A patient of my partner Scott had a significant cancer and was concurrently receiving an insanely expensive and fairly dangerous conventional treatment for it. They had a remarkable response to the combined treatment, but (likely due to their oncologist convincing them we were quacks), insisted the improvement they saw was solely due to the conventional therapy they were receiving and stopped seeing us. Given this patient’s situation, I am grateful they recovered, but this again speaks to the incredible prejudices which exist within American oncology to anything that is “different.”
4. One of the other study sites, headed by retired breast cancer surgeon Dr. Kathleen Ruddy, treated a terminal prostate cancer patient which led to a full recovery – he even told his story at a recent FLCCC conference here (starts at 7:45), it is pretty dramatic and I wish this was the rule rather than somewhat of an exception. However, I believe the most important element to this story is that Dr. Ruddy’s successes show that the success of our (very preliminary) protocol can be replicated.

AMD: Thank you so much for all of this. Do you have any final parting words for the readers here?

PK: At this stage in my career, my main goal is leave something behind that helps the generations who will follow me. That’s a major reason why I transitioned out of the high paying intensive care jobs I previously worked and switched to a more modest lifestyle where I started the (incredibly controversial) push for creating off-patent treatment protocols for individuals with Long COVID and COVID vaccine injuries. My greatest wish at this point is that I can contribute something similar to oncology because there’s so much need there.

Ultimately, the impacts of our complementary treatment approaches can only be accurately measured or estimated via collection of immense amounts of data. We already have hundreds enrolled in our study across the multiple clinic sites, the majority of whom are also receiving “standard of care,” however there are also a minority who have exhausted standard of care and were receiving nothing when they came to us. Either way, the prognosis and survival of patients with cancer is one of the most deeply studied aspects of the disease, so we think the most impactful data we can gather will be that of 1, 2, and 5 year survival of our patients when compared to traditional estimates. I really believe we will better the historical outcomes with our approach but time (and data) will tell for sure. For that reason, if you know anyone who would be interested in participating in this study, please have them reach out to us here.

AMD: Lastly, I wanted to alert my readers to your Substack (which, despite being quite busy, I frequently read).

https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/

PK: Thanks for the shout-out! I would also encourage my readers to subscribe to yours (which I’ve been a longtime supporter of since I believe it’s the top newsletter on Substack).

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/

AMD: That’s very kind of you Pierre. However, to circle back to your work, I know that you’ve already published a few articles about integrative approaches to cancer on your Substack (e.g., this one and this one). Do you have any more you plan to publish, and if so roughly when?

PK: Yes, I do. I plan on writing about the history and overall efficacy of chemotherapy in cancer as well as the overall incidence and survival of different cancers over time (especially since the mRNA vaccine campaign created a cancer catastrophe), and finally to produce a summary of our approach to treating cancer using dietary interventions and repurposed medicines (from which I will borrowing heavily from Paul’s monograph).

AMD: Thanks you again for taking the time to talk here, and more importantly for doing this entire project. I know how incredibly challenging it can to be at the forefront of a contrarian movement in medicine and how much pushback the medical system directs at prominent dissidents. I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor and I sincerely hope your study (which again can be signed up for here) is able to collect the data which can move us towards a better cancer treatment paradigm that works in harmony with the body rather than trying to fight and dominate it.

PK: My pleasure, thank you for hearing me out. As I hope your readers know, this interview only scratched the surface of the cancer story, and it is my hope in the years to come we can share many of the incredible discoveries each of us have come across in this field.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this interview, please let me know your thoughts on this format in the comments. It is incredible to me how much I have been able to reach out and positive affect others with this platform (e.g., I never imagined I could put something like this together and have it be seen by hundreds of thousands of people). That is in a large part thanks to you, and I sincerely appreciate all the help you have given me to help bring the world’s attention to the Forgotten Side of Medicine—the support you are giving this publication is starting to make a lot of incredible things become possible behind the scenes.

September 3, 2024 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | United States | Leave a comment