I wanted to thank Dr. Roberts for his letter “Physician urges caution.” This topic certainly needs intelligent discussion regarding the ramifications of personal medical treatment.
Like Dr. Roberts, I am not an oncologist, my background is in engineering, where I have over 20 patents in different stages of approval in my field. I’m an active member of Central Indiana Mensa, am a moderately accomplished artist, writer and am on leave from law school. In the field of engineering, my career has been based upon isolating variables and solving problems of complex nature which I utilized in analyzing the data I’ve recorded over a year long period from pre-diagnosis to post-treatment phase. This data documents each and all my diet intact (food, hydration and supplements), prescriptions, treatments, blood analysis, diagnostic, clinical reports and how each impacted the outcome of my recovery. This is not anecdotal information, but grounded upon existing medical studies, personal documentation, and medically driven data.
When I was first diagnosed with this cancer, I knew nothing about it. I was shaken, as I believe all cancer patients are upon learning of their diagnosis. When I started treatment, I was expecting my world to fall apart based upon what I had read and from speaking to friends and family that had endured similar diagnosis and treatment. I was also warned in advance about the effects of my treatment on the body from my doctors and other care providers. When I did not have adverse effects from the treatment and my tumor was resolving at a rapid rate, I started asking questions of my oncologists. Their answers were always the same, “sometimes we see this and sometimes we don’t, and we don’t know why.” After the fourth time or so of hearing this from both of my oncologists, I thought to myself, “why don’t you know?” I didn’t like their answers and it was at this point that I took it upon myself to solve my case and figure out why I was responding so well, in hopes that it would help others in the future.
I have documented in painstaking detail a case study titled “Stage 4A squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) metastatic to cervical lymph nodes from unknown etiology, treated as stage 2: the impact of zincum gluconicum, cyanocobalamin, ascorbate calcium, hyper-hydration, Alprazolam, Dopamine, Prochlorperazine, cool atmospheric air treatment and stress mitigation as integrative methods with 3-week chemoradiotherapy treatment plan on a single patient clinical case study.”
This document is being prepared for peer review on PubMed at the suggestion of a distinguished professor from Purdue University’s Oncology department after they had reviewed my preliminary findings. PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
I shared my preliminary findings with the Chief Surgeon of ENT at Ascension St. Vincents as he had performed my exploratory surgery prior to treatment. He and I had a very good and lengthy email exchange over several weeks regarding the preliminary findings I had sent him, in one email he described my data as “ground-breaking,” in the following email, this was his response.
“You have provided me with a lot of info — actually, too much info for me to digest after hours thus far. Looks like you have something team of experts to work with you and appears as though you have enough ideas to keep them busy. I hope you are onto something. Some of the best ideas can come from outside of the big research institutions and all it takes is for someone to start thinking outside the box. I wish you luck. Good luck with the audiogram tomorrow. Have a great Christmas and New Year’s. Let your brain take some relaxation time. See you at your next follow-up visit.”
My radiation oncologists reviewed my preliminary case study as well and couldn’t refute any of my findings. He did make a good point and that was I haven’t proven anything yet and he is correct. We did just complete my first post-treatment CT scan and blood work along with multiple physical examinations which show I am tumor and cancer-free. There is a follow up PET scan in late March that should confirm the same. At this point, I will have proven, at least in my case, that the treatment plan that has been devised is effective for one individual and should be studied in greater detail for the greater population.
Before my last CT scan, I reached out to Mayo clinics ENT department and had multiple discussions regarding my findings. They asked me to port all my clinical and diagnostic data to them for review. They said they couldn’t take me as a patient because I don’t have cancer now, but they want me to send the case study to them after I have the results back from the PET scan so they can study its implications in greater detail. At that point, I am hoping to have an even greater dialogue with their department to ascertain whether there are specifics to my diet, hydration, supplements, prescriptions, and treatment or whether the recovery is based more upon certain DNA structures that I possess and how those may be utilized to advance certain cancer treatments in the future.
For each of the supplements, diet, hydration, prescriptions and chemoradiotherapy, I cross-referenced their effects on the type of cancer I had and how they effected the key cellular components involved with this cancer. The clinical and research data I referenced for all these components were drawn from the NIH. I’m not a big fan of getting my medical information from Facebook. I cross-referenced all this data with my blood work and diagnostics to create a true cause and effect timeline for how each component worked when treating my cancer.
I realize that this is not the normal approach of a cancer patient, but I’m just built differently and am driven to solve problems and that is what I did in this case. Dr. Roberts is correct in his assessment of only counting on supplements or fad remedies to cure many ailments. I am in no way espousing that philosophy. His reference to Steve Jobs and his battle with pancreatic cancer is a good point, but that is a totally different type of cancer than I what I endured and each have their own specific chemical and biological make-up, different type of treatment and so on, so it’s more along the lines of comparing an apple to an orange when comparing the two cases, their both a fruit, but are wildly different.
$25,200,000,000, that’s 25.2 trillion dollars is spent annually on cancer globally, that number is larger than the entire gross domestic product of the United States by a few trillion dollars. So, the statement that if a drug company came up with a cure for a certain type of cancer, they could name their own price, while probably being true, may not be a motivating factor for these companies based upon global revenues already in place regarding cancer.
Regarding research on supplements like B12, vitamin C and zinc, there are a significant amount of clinical research studies already available on NIH and how they work with SCC and on the cellular structure of key components in cancer stroma, many of which have been referenced in the case study.
When anyone asks me about how they can help themselves make it through cancer, my first response is to learn as much as possible about your cancer. Learn what each of your blood work markers mean and the information they provide in reference to your stage in treatment. By learning as much as you can, you can make more educated choices and have much better dialogue with your care providers. At some point, hopefully the information I have documented will be proven effective for a much larger audience and implemented into standard protocol, but nothing that I have referred to in this study is radical by any means and it certainly isn’t radical for patients to take more responsibility for their health by learning more about their conditions. Doctors are human like the rest of us and at times, they do make mistakes and the only true advocate for one’s health is the patient themselves.
Robb Owen of Crawfordsville contributed this response.
