Further strategies in treating advanced cancer - Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  July, 2003  

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Editor:

Readers of the Townsend Letter may have an interest in what got me involved in medicine.

When I was age 15 in 1926, my mother at age 40 was suffering from pernicious anemia. She was bedfast and white as a sheet and not expected to live for long. A young Baptist minister was looking after her salvation in light of her expected early death. One day he came running up our front steps saying that everything was going to be "alright."

Two doctors at Harvard, Murphy and Minot, had taken 46 patients with late-stage pernicious anemia and fed them one pound of liver a day. All 46 of them had completely recovered in three weeks' time, showing no sign of anemia. They had published the results in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1926 and the Baptist magazine had picked up the story.

I was doing most of the cooking and we all began to eat liver three times a day and my mother was fully restored in three weeks' time. Her doctor, when told of eating liver for pernicious anemia, said 'ridiculous, doctors do not learn medicine from the Baptist magazine.' My mother lived to 94.

It was of interest to me that doctors took almost no note of the discovery of Murphy and Minot and very few patients with pernicious anemia were told by their doctors to eat liver.

In 1926 we had 10,000 deaths in the USA from pernicious anemia. In 1934 we still were having 10,000 deaths from pernicious anemia. In 1934 Murphy and Minot won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of 1926. Did that get doctors to tell patients to eat liver for pernicious anemia?

What happened was that drug firms came out with a liver extract to be injected in the buttock five cc at a time. The cost was $5.00 an injection and was most painful. My mother was told by her doctor that at last something could be done for her anemia. One injection was enough for my mother. She continued to eat liver.

The injections of liver extract did some good and by 1938 we were having only 4,000 deaths a year from pernicious anemia where there could have been none, had all pernicious anemia patients been eating liver each day.

Then in 1948, young Karl Folkers, PhD working for Merck discovered vitamin B12. Injections of one cc a week would completely prevent pernicious anemia. Merck sold it to doctors, putting an end to over 10,000 deaths a year from pernicious anemia worldwide.

In 1926 doctors were not reading medical journals and that seems to have changed but little today. Doctors today learn medicine from the sales people of the major drug firms and from little else. I will give a few examples:

See my letter in the TLfDP in the April 2000 issue on the anticancer effect of cimetidine. Cimetidine is a wonderful drug for cancer treatment. Smith Klein had done most of the work to find the anticancer effect of cimetidine but when the patent on it ran out, Smith Klein shut up like a clam and will do nothing to foster cimetidine for cancer treatment. There is absolutely no use for this wonderful drug in cancer treatment. There are now about 20,000,000 patients, worldwide taking cimetidine for stomach distress and this may be having the effect of reducing cancer among them.

I will not review all that I have in my letter in that issue in 2000. I will review a bit of it: The first indication of the anticancer effect of cimetidine was from the University of Nebraska and reported in The Lancet in 1979 (i p 822-3). It reported on two patients with lung cancer. Both were given cimetidine for stomach distress. Both had dramatic complete remissions from cancer. In one patient, the lung cancer was a metastasis from a squamous cell carcinoma on the neck. The lung metastasis was most aggressive. The patient was given cimetidine, 1,200mg a day. Almost at once there was, a regression of the lung metastasis. The patient was maintained on cimetidine, 600mg a day and one year later, the tumor could no longer be detected.

A second patient had a brain metastasis from a non-small cell carcinoma primary of the lung. The patient was given steroids for the brain tumor and cimetidine 600mg a day. Very soon after she was given cimetidine, the lung tumor decreased in size. The brain tumor was removed by surgery and one year later the lung tumor no longer could be detected. The patient was continued on cimetidine at 600 mg a day.

The authors said that there was no indication in the medical literature that cimetidine is an anticancer drug but there was no doubt in their minds that cimetidine was responsible for these two remarkable remissions of lung cancer.

By 1982 it was understood that cimetidine inhibits T-suppressor cells and helps to liberate our cancer-killing lymphocytes. A report from Ireland was in The Lancet, 1982 (11, p 328), of the treatment of four melanoma patients: All were far advanced with metastases in the internal organs, in the lungs and liver. One young man had severe stomach distress, with many tumors. He was given cimetidine, 1,000 mg a day and almost at once he had regressions of his many tumors. In two weeks' time, he was able to return to work.