ABRAM HOFFER - The Use of Bacterial Toxins in the Treatment of Cancer

Abram Hoffer (November 11, 1917 – May 27, 2009) was a Canadian psychiatrist known for his claims that nutrition and megadoses of vitamins are effective treatments for schizophrenia. This general approach, called orthomolecular medicine by its proponents and questioned by most of the mainstream medical community, includes the use of megavitamins and is commonly called megavitamin therapy.

Hoffer received a degree in agriculture from the University of Saskatchewan in 1938, followed by a Masters degree in agricultural chemistry in 1940. He received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1944 with research into vitamin content of cereals. Hoffer graduated with an MD from the University of Toronto in 1949 and completed psychiatric training in 1954.[1]

Hoffer was a faculty member of the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan from 1955–67 and served as the Director of Psychiatric Research for the Saskatchewan Department of Public Health in Regina from 1950–67.[1] He stated that half the patients housed in the mental hospital were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and that the conditions in the mental hospital and the treatment of these patients were poor, and looked for better answers to treat the mentally ill.[2] Critical of psychiatry for its emphasis on psychosomatic psychoanalysis and for what he considered a lack of adequate definition and measurement, Hoffer felt that biochemistry and human physiology should be used instead. He hypothesised that schizophrenics lack the ability to remove a hallucinogenic metabolite adrenochrome from their brains. He speculated that he could decrease the concentration of adrenochrome in the brain by using vitamin C to reduce adrenochrome to adrenaline and using niacin as a methyl acceptor to prevent the conversion of noradrenaline into adrenaline. Hoffer called his theory the "adrenochrome hypothesis".[3]

By the mid-1960s, according to Hoffer, psychiatry was emphasising the use of neuroleptic drugs. Hoffer claims that he and like-minded researchers, calling themselves "orthomolecularists", were snubbed and became the victims of a conspiracy, with their reports rejected by scientific journals.[4] In 1967, Hoffer resigned his academic and administrative positions, entered into private psychiatric practice in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and created the Journal of Schizophrenia as a means of publishing articles rejected by mainstream journals. After several name changes, the journal was called the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1986.[4] In 1976, Hoffer relocated to Victoria, British Columbia and continued with his private psychiatric practice until his retirement in 2005. Hoffer continued to provide nutritional consultations and served as editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.[2] He was also President of the Orthomolecular Vitamin Information Centre in Victoria, BC.[5]

Hoffer died May 27, 2009 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.[6]

Working with counterculture icon Humphry Osmond (who coined the term "psychedelic"), Hoffer sought to find medicinal uses for hallucinogenic drugs.[7] Theorizing that alcoholics needed to "hit bottom" before they were willing to stop drinking, Hoffer and Osmond treated alcoholics with LSD. Their stated goal was to simulate delirium tremens (i.e. hitting bottom). Osmond reported a fifty percent success rate in one study, although Hoffer speculated that it was more likely the psychedelic experience of LSD, rather than simulated delirium tremens, that convinced the alcoholics to stop drinking.[8]

Incidental to Hoffer's psychiatric work with niacin, he was part of a team that reported an effect of niacin on cholesterol levels.[9]

Observing biochemical abnormalities and serendipitous cancer recoveries among his psychiatric patients, Hoffer worked for several years on the potential anticancer effects of nutrients, particularly the B vitamins, selenium, and ascorbate. He says this included treating hundreds of cancer patients with nutrients, with reported success.[10] Hoffer collaborated with Linus Pauling on several aspects of orthomolecular medicine,[11] co-authoring several books with Pauling.[12][13] These claims are rejected by the medical community, with large-scale trials showing little or no effect of vitamins on cancer; large doses of some vitamins are correlated with an increase in the cancers they are claimed to prevent.[14]

Hoffer's claims regarding schizophrenia and his theories of orthomolecular medicine have been rejected by the medical community.[15] In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reported methodological flaws in Hoffer's work on niacin as a schizophrenia treatment and referred to follow-up studies that did not confirm any benefits of the treatment.[16] Later studies similarly failed to find benefits in the use of megavitamin therapy to treat schizophrenia.[17] The term "orthomolecular medicine" was labeled a misnomer as early as 1973[16] and its practices are currently considered inadequate as a treatment for schizophrenia.[18]

Hoffer predicted in the 1950s that it would take at least forty years for his methods to become accepted. In a 2006 interview, Hoffer stated that while he felt that current mainstream psychiatric care was "terrible", his theories and treatments were starting to become more accepted. "[W]e’re at a transition point. If I live another four or five years, I’ll see it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Hoffer


Clinical Procedures in Treating Terminally Ill Cancer Patients with Vitamin C
(further below)

The Use of Bacterial Toxins in the Treatment of Cancer

A. Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.

1

Introduction

For over two hundred years spontaneous cancer
cures or regressions have been observed and
recorded. They have been discussed in standard
textbooks of surgery and medicine with the
omission of a very important observation, i.e. that
they were not spontaneous. Many of them, if not
most, were preceded by a bacterial infection such
as erysipelas. Many early physicians were aware
that there was a relationship, but because there
was no scientific explanation the connection did
not become generally known. It had also been
observed that the bacterial infection was even
more beneficial if it was accompanied by fever.
Helen Coley Nauts (1986) collected this imposing
clinical data in the files of the Cancer Research
Institute Records (1953-1982), and in her
publications (1990).
Thus Vautier in 1813 discussed the cure of
cancer by natural means after he had found
several patients who were cured after they had
developed gangrene. Nauts collected 22 such
cases. The mixture of bacteria probably induced
the formation of tumor necrosis factor. She
published 449 cases found in 1032 worldwide
references in the medical literature. Modern
medical scientists ignore this material because it
is considered anecdotal, not double blind.
Physicians in the 18th and 19th century induced
"laudable pus, selons or issues" in their inoperable
cancer cases. Two case histories are given by
Nauts (1989). Prior to 1744 Schwenke described
a woman whose breast cancer progressed in spite
of all treatment. After she had lost hope and
stopped trying she developed an abscess on her
leg. As this became worse the cancer began to
regress and vanished. Against advice she allowed
the ulcer to heal whereupon the cancer recurred.
The ulcer was restarted and once more the cancer
disappeared. This is an interesting example
1. 3A - 2727 Quadra Street, Victoria, British Columbia,
Canada V8T 4E5.
of the first immunotherapy and would be classed
as a spontaneous cure the first time, but there was
nothing spontaneous about it the second time
since the ulcer was induced mechanically. The
second case was described by a French physician
who applied gauze dressings soaked in
gangrenous discharges on an ulcerated breast
cancer. The ulceration destroyed the tumor in 19
days and she was healed. The gangrene replaced
the live cautery, caustics and the scalpel. Other
physicians recorded some remarkable cases of an-
tagonism between bacterial infection and cancers.
Busch (1866) reported the cure of a sarcoma of
the face by recurrent episodes of erysipelas. Bruns
(1887) saw a terminally ill patient with malignant
melanoma with metastases recover after repeated
attacks of erysipelas associated with fever.
Rhodenburg (1918) reviewed 166 cases of
spontaneous regressions of human tumor. Of
these 72 had intercurrent high fevers, heat
applications or infection. Everson and Cole
(1956) found that out of 1000 cases worldwide,
130 were cured by fever or infection. But Dr.
Coley was the first physician to follow up this
new treatment approach systematically. The
clinical data was assembled by his daughter Helen
Coley Nauts in a series of very useful reports.
Just over 100 years ago William B. Coley
operated on a 19 year old woman for a breast
sarcoma. She died. This event, which would be
accepted by most surgeons as an unfortunate
natural event, changed his life. He concluded that
surgery was at best a partial answer and he began
to search for a better one. He studied about 100
charts of sarcoma patients treated at his hospital
the previous ten years, and discovered one case of
a patient with recurrent round cell sarcoma who
developed erysipelas following surgery and was
cured. Here was another partial answer which Dr.
Coley pursued with undiminished vigor the rest of
his life. He induced erysipelas in ten terminal
patients but concluded this could not be ac-
ceptable treatment, since this might hasten
163 Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 7, No. 3, 1992
death or not induce an infection. I doubt modern
physicians would be tempted to try such a
treatment, but today with the use of antibiotics this
would be a much safer treatment than it was in
1900. It might be much more acceptable today
since antibiotics could be used to terminate the
infection after enough fever had been generated.
Realizing that infection could not be used Dr.
Coley turned to bacterial vaccines. About 100
years ago bacteriology and the use of vaccines was
being investigated with great enthusiasm. Dr.
Coley prepared a vaccine from heat killed
streptococci mixed with the toxin of bacterium
Serratia Marcescen. This was the first use of a
mixed vaccine in medicine.
He treated a 19 year old male with inoperable
sarcoma of the abdominal wall and pelvis
involving the bladder. The mass measured 16 by
13 cm. The vaccine was injected directly into the
mass daily for four months. Fever to 40 degrees C
was induced. The patient recovered and died 26
years later from a coronary occlusion. Dr. Helen
Coley Nauts assembled 896 cases treated by this
mixed bacterial vaccine (MBV). She found that of
523 inoperable patients, 238 recovered (46%),
while from 373 operable cases 190, or 51%,
recovered.
Considering how little was known about the
optimum use of the vaccine, these results are
remarkable and surpass the results obtained by any
modern treatment using only surgery,
chemotherapy or radiation. The quality of the
vaccine was not standardized, the best site of
injection not yet determined, and the optimum
frequency of injection unknown.
With this astonishing record, why did this
treatment not become the standard treatment of the
day and even today when so much more is known
about vaccines and their use? After his death in
1933 his son continued to use the Coley toxins,
but the treatment was destroyed by the declaration
of the American Cancer Society that this was
quack medicine, and the decision of the FDA to
classify the vaccine as a new drug even though it
had been in use over 60 years. Only in the past
few years, due to the heroic efforts of his daughter,
Dr. Helen Coley Nauts, and due to increasing
understanding of the role of the immune system,
have vaccines become more respectable and are
being used more and more. Thus B.C.G. has
become an acceptable additional treatment for
cancer.
Dr. Coley lost his first cancer patient. Luckily,
double blind methods for examining treatments
were far into the future and did not deter him from
pursuing his investigations. Next he infected a
patient with erysipelas who had repeated
inoperable myosarcoma of the neck. The patient
recovered. In 1893 Coley reported this case and 9
others, together with 28 who had accidentally
developed the infection. In 12 the tumors
vanished, and in 19 there was some improvement.
But he realized that inducing infection was not a
reliable way and was potentially dangerous. He
therefore turned to vaccines using streptococci
and later combining this with the toxin from
Serratia Marcescans. His first case recovered. This
recovery must have impressed Fr. Coley as much
as had his first surgical failure, because from that
moment on he did not waver in his research nor in
his use of the Coley toxins for the treatment of a
large variety of cancers. But he also used other
treatment including surgery. He was the first to
demonstrate that using the Coley toxins before
surgery could prevent recurrences. Of 128 cases
where amputation was avoided, 51 percent
remained well, compared to 32 percent out of 166
cases after amputation only.
There were many problems with these early
vaccines which were unavoidable, considering
this was major pioneer work. The early
preparations were variable in potency. Nor was
the best injection site known. Surgical colleagues
in England urged Dr. Coley to restrict the toxins
to sarcomas, because the weaker preparations they
had used seemed to be most effective for sarcoma,
and had not worked with advanced cancers and
melanomas. But many of these cases were treated
successfully by the vaccines by other surgeons,
and Coley continued to use it for all the tumors.
Animal studies confirmed these clinical
observations. The results were better when the
vaccines were used.
Dr. Coley also used radiation. Patients given
the toxins before radiation responded better and
had fewer side effects. But too much radiation
nullified the therapeutic effect of the vaccine. In
this report I will disucss: (a) the reasons for the
near demise of a very successful therapy; (b) the
historical development of the use of mixed
vaccines; (c) Dr. Coley the surgeon; (d) what is
known about the vaccine; (e) what I would
consider an ideal
164 The Use of Bacterial Toxins in the Treatment of Cancer
treatment for cancer, combining Orthomolecular
treatment, the vaccines and, as a last resort,
surgery, radiation and/or chemotherapy.
Why New Treatments May Require Forty or
More Years to be Accepted
(a) Resistance to New Treatment Ideas
The introduction of new treatments into
medicine appears to be the result of a series of
random events which determine whether a
treatment will be rejected, or accepted sluggishly
or swiftly. The scientific merits of the treatment
seems to play a minor role at the onset of what
usually becomes a great debate before it is
eventually accepted. Whether or not serious
examination is given to a treatment depends upon
such factors as the location and prestige of the
investigator. Thus, a discovery coming out of
Harvard Medical School will be given more
attention than a discovery from the University of
Manitoba, for example. It depends upon the
journal in which the findings are reported, upon
the urgency of the disease being treated and, most
of all, on the current fashion surrounding the
disease and whether the new treatment violates the
current dogma. A recent example is the treatment
of AIDS which, in spite of its rather sudden onset
and brief history, already has a dogma which
prevents a proper examination of the use of
vitamin C. It also depends upon chance events
which are unpredictable, such as Queen Victoria's
use of ether for childbirth, which helped introduce
this useful treatment into medicine. More recently
it depends upon public pressure such as that pro-
vided by the gay lobby, which is seeking to
bypass the rigid rules of the FDA in order to get
access to newer drugs more rapidly. A major
factor is whether the drug can be patented.
Nutrients can not be patented and therefore there
is no financial incentive to develop and promote
the treatment. Patented drugs have their parent
companies behind them and can be promoted by
huge expenditures of money for advertising and
development. Thus niacin, which is one of the
most effective compounds for lowering
cholesterol, cannot be patented, even though it
was discovered to be a hypocholesterolemic
substance in 1955. Only in the past five years has
it received a good deal of attention. Atromid, a
patented drug, introduced just a few years after
niacin's effect on cholesterol was discovered,
came into use very quickly, and for many years
was the favorite compound for lowering choles-
terol. It is ironic that niacin saves and extends
lives whereas Atromid has been withdrawn from
the market in some countries because of its
toxicity.
Bad theory which becomes established also
prevents newer treatments. The Howell theory of
heparin's role in the body kept back serious
examination of its clinical potential for many
years. Another example is the use of vitamin B3
for the treatment of schizophrenia which Dr. H.
Osmond and I introduced about 35 years ago. It
was instantly rejected because it was then known
that schizophrenia was not a biochemical disease,
and perhaps because we were the first
psychiatrists to use the double blind technique for
testing treatments and the method was too new to
be examined seriously. Tranquilizers came in very
quickly because they were promoted by many
drug companies hungry for the fat profits which
they yielded.
Another major factor is the innate conservatism
of the medical profession. Almost every new
discovery which eventually became a formal part
of medicine was first rejected out of hand for
many years. The history of medicine is a history
of conflict of treatment ideas, from Harvey who
was ridiculed because he thought blood circulated,
to Sydenham who was nearly expelled from the
medical association because he thought that it was
better to lower fever in his smallpox patients, to
the use of tranquilizers bitterly opposed by the
psychoanalysts, and so on. There has always been
a medical establishment, now more powerful than
ever, which has fought against new ideas in
medicine. They have used every technique to
discredit and destroy the innovators, such as
criticizing the research methods used, denying the
diagnosis and questioning the person's competence
and the conclusions.
(b) Belief that Medicine is a Science
There is a wide spread belief that medicine is a
science. In fact, many scientific principles are
involved and utilized, but unfortunately many
physicians believe that being scientific means that
we know why something works, in other words
there has to be an acceptable explanation.
Historically, medicine won over
165 Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 7, No. 3, 1992
some of the other healing arts because it covered
itself under the cloak of science and thus defeated
chiropractors, homeopaths and others. These
professions were, and to many still are,
considered quack medicine, because they do not
provide explanations of why they work which are
acceptable to the medical profession. The
acceptable explanations do not have to be correct,
but they do have to be acceptable. As a result,
over the ages one explanation has replaced
another as more information is obtained, and as
theories of biochemistry and physiology are
developed. Clinical descriptions of diseases are
hard data for they do not change, whereas
explanations are evanescent. The clinical
description of epilepsy recorded two thousand
years ago remains valid today, but the explanation
of the disease two thousand years ago is totally
inappropriate.
Because of this need to be scientific, i.e. to
have an acceptable explanation, treatments which
can not be understood are rejected. This has been
one of the main problems in accepting
Orthomolecular medicine, which emphasizes the
use of large doses of some nutrients when these
optimum doses are indicated. According to all the
common theories in nutrition to which physicians
adhere, there is no scientific explanation for the
use of these doses. Linus Pauling in his basic
report (1968), provided such an explanation, but
no one seems to have read his paper in Science.
Medicine is a science because diseases treated
by a given treatment ought more or less to
respond in a predictable way, i.e. it is based upon
the observations of many physicians whether
these observations were made in the usual clinical
sense, or by single blind controlled studies, or by
double blind controlled studies. The use of the
word anecdotal to denigrate observations has no
place in the science of medicine. It is a practical
science where observations take precedence over
theory, even though these observations might
have originated on the basis of theory. There
should be no demand that no treatment is valid
until it has been explained satisfactorily. I doubt
that most treatments today have a valid scientific
explanation except that they appear to work. For
many years we used aspirin for the relief of pain,
but only recently is there some understanding
developing of how it might work, but aspirin has
not thereby become more effective.
Other healers are not as impressed with the
need to understand. For example, herbalists freely
use herbs which have curative properties even
though we do not know why, nor what is the main
therapeutic factor. Herbs comprise the original
pharmacopeia. This does not mean we should not
search for the correct explanations, which in time
surely will be found. It does mean that we should
not resist using newer treatment simply because
there are no acceptable theories today.
Medicine is a pragmatic art which slowly
incorporates scientific principles. But if we forget
our pragmatic roots we have the situation we have
today, where a lot of medical theory has become
dogma and where practitioners can say, thinking
they are scientific, "I do not believe in vitamins,"
for example. This dogma prevents serious
examination of ideas developed which are outside
the mainstream of medicine, and thus inhibits
progress in medicine.
In an attempt to make medicine more scientific
a new dogma has developed dealing with the way
clinical trials should be run. I am partially
responsible since, with Dr. H. Osmond, I
conducted the first double blind controlled
experiments in psychiatry when we began our
trials in Saskatchewan in 1952. Modern medicine
has adopted this technique as the ideal method for
doing clinical trials, even though it has been
severely criticized by Dr. Osmond and myself,
and a large number of other theorists. Many of the
early proponents have realized the errors inherent
in this methodology. Today, double blind methods
are used as a weapon against work which is not
acceptable to the profession. If the new treatment
tested by this method appears to work, it is
criticized for not having been done well enough or
by the right people. The originator is always
suspect because he is bound to be biased. If it is
not done double blind, it is rejected out of hand as
being anecdotal. Thus, the New England Journal
of Medicine rejected a paper which showed that 8
patients with idiopathic thrombocytopenic
purpura (ITP) responded to vitamin C because it
was not double blind. For ITP there is no useful
treatment, apart from vitamin C. Double blind
methods are being used primarily to promote
treatments which have already been accepted, and
to satisfy the dogma of research personnel
166 The Use of Bacterial Toxins in the Treatment of Cancer
and editors of journals.
Along with the need to be scientific is the need
to be certain. This is another reason double blind
experiments are considered so essential. The
magic 0.05 point indicating the difference is due
to chance in only 1 in 20 experiments, is accepted
as one of the elements of this certainty. But
according to Foster (1992), "... the necessity of
certainty is an inconvenient myth. Attempts to
achieve this goal in medicine involves enormous
suffering and unnecessary expenditure of time,
effort and resources." He adds, "This does not
mean progress is impossible, merely that society
has to be willing to make decisions and take
action on less than totally convincing evidence.
To do this, it must accept lateral and other types
of thinking as having a valid role to play in the
search for solutions to its most pressing problems.
To illustrate, despite enormous expenditure on
cancer research which, in the United States alone,
is approximately one billion dollars annually,
cancer mortality generally continues to climb. The
only significant exception to this generalization,
of which this author is aware, has occurred in
those regions of the Peoples Republic of China,
where jiang-shi concretions have been added to
drinking water. The decision to modify potable
water in this way was not based upon irrefutable
scientific evidence, conclusively linking
esophageal cancer to deficiencies of one or more
of the many bulk and trace elements found in
jiang-shi, but rather was a lateral one, designed to
test the efficacy of a traditional Chinese method of
treating the disease."
(c) Cancer is a surgical specialty
Until the development of chemotherapy, the
treatment of cancer was a surgical specialty. A
few patients were cured, many more were not but
there was no alternative treatment, and it made
sense to remove the offending growth and stop its
invasion of the body. Medical treatment would be
counter to the prevailing ideas about treatment
and take away the surgical monopoly. After he
had developed the Coley vaccines, called Coley
toxins, he found great difficulty in persuading
other surgeons to use his treatment. Between 1891
and 1896 he published 16 papers describing his
treatment. There was one critical report in 1894.
In 1895 Dr. Coley read a paper to the New York
State Medical Association and published it the
following year. After several adverse editorials
Coley responded with,"... that a few physicians in
a very limited number of cases with indifferent
preparations of the toxins have failed to obtain
good results will not... have great weight in the
minds of the scientific portion of the profession in
determining failure or success of this method of
treatment of sarcoma."
Brief History
X-ray and radium treatments were introduced
and were quickly accepted by surgeons, including
Dr. Coley. As I see it, this was merely surgery by
other means and so did not violate their basic
beliefs. These treatments came into direct conflict
with the use of vaccines, especially since it was
impossible to explain how infections or vaccines
could possibly have any influence on the tumors.
Dr. Ewing, of Ewing's sarcoma fame, became
medical chief of Memorial Hospital in 1915. He
was an enthusiastic supporter of radium treatment
and had no interest in Coley's vaccine. Coley, who
was chief of the Bone Tumor Service, had to
follow Ewing's rule that all patients on the service
must receive radiation before surgery. Coley
believed this to be very dangerous and in 1927
proved this. He published the results of 169 cases
of whom none survived, while from his private
patients given the toxin followed by surgery 50
percent survived. The Mayo clinic using his
method also achieved a 50 percent five year cure
rate, compared to the 10 to 15 percent reported by
other surgeons not using the vaccine.
By 1909 Coley had published 66 papers, but the
majority of surgeons ignored or criticized his
work. January 1931 Dr. Coley retired after 40
years service. A testimonial dinner was held at the
Waldorf Astoria Hotel on his 69th birthday. In
1935 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal
College of Surgeons in England. Following his
death, his son, Bradley L. Coley, became Chief of
the Bone Tumor Service and continued to use the
Coley vaccine. But after serving in the army from
1942 to 1946 he found on his return that the
Medical Director, Dr. Rhoads, had advised Parke-
Davis not to make any more vaccine, and in 1963
the FDA finally destroyed the use of the vaccine
by declaring it to be a new drug, under the new
powers given to the FDA. This effectively killed
167 Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 7, No. 3, 1992
the treatment with vaccine for a long time. At one
time Coley vaccine was declared by the American
Cancer Society to be quack treatment.
Dr. Coley, the Surgeon
Dr. Coley was impressed by his observations
but used them only to direct his further research.
He was wide in his approach, using radiation and
surgery as well as his vaccine, and he had enough
faith in his own observations that he was not
deterred from continuing his investigations. He
made many contributions to his hospital and to
medicine in general. Thus, at Memorial Hospital
many of his patients could not afford to pay for
the treatment, and between 1908 and 1913 60
percent of his operations were free. In 1901 he
helped establish the Huntington Cancer Research
Fund with a $100,000 gift from Mrs. Huntington.
He established the first x-ray department and ran
it without pay for a year. In 1903 he set up a
medical record system at the hospital. In 1902 he
persuaded John D. Rockefeller to donate one
million dollars to Harvard Medical School and he
obtained another $300,000 from Mrs. Huntington.
He developed acromegaly, which he self-
diagnosed in 1913 but he told no one. He was at
the same time under a lot of stress from Dr.
Ewing's growing antagonism and Dr. Codman's
Bone Sarcoma Registry. In 1920 Codman wrote,
"... your treatment has a profound systemic effect
but I am inclined to attribute the successful cases
to errors in diagnosis. Yet I must admit you have
more to your credit than anyone else." Codman
did not want to include in the registry cases who
recovered but died before 1920. He once accused
Coley of not trusting him or of playing too much
golf, because Coley did not send him enough data.
Coley responded angrily but was hurt. He wrote,
in referring to a letter he had written to Dr. Ewing,
"You could at least have omitted your remark that
you would regard the case as having gotten well
in spite of Coley's toxins, instead of with the help
of them." Codman apologized. Coley developed a
very serious duodenal ulcer and hemorrhaged in
February 1922. He never regained his former
strength. The scar from his bleeding ulcer later
stenosed and in 1930 required gastrointestinal
surgery. But he continued to work. By 1926 he
had assembled data on 170 cases of long bone
sarcoma and 69 of giant cell tumors he had
treated from 1906 on, in two reviews. He
published 25 more papers. By 1934 Codman,
chairman of a Bone Sarcoma Symposium,
summarized his paper on Ewing's sarcoma and he
pleaded for further clinical examination of the
Coley toxins.
Review of the Coley Toxins (Vaccines)
The optimum treatment using the vaccines
depends upon the following variables.
(a) Duration of treatment. Up to six months of
injections are needed before it is concluded that it
will not help. There have been cases where the
condition appeared to worsen with treatment and
then finally improved, leading to recovery.
(b) Site and dose. The best place to inject is
into the tumor. Next best is as close as possible to
it, intramuscularly or subcutaneous. When
injected at sites remote from the tumor much
larger doses were needed to reach the required
level of fever. The preferred sites are: intratubar>
vascular tissue> intravenous> intramuscular>
subcutaneous. The initial dose is 0.05 mL and is
increased by 0.05 increments until a mild fever is
obtained. Injections are given daily but may later
be tapered off to less frequent administration.
(c) Fever. The greatest response rate was
found when temperature rose above 39.4 degrees.
(d) Timing. The best results were found when
the vaccine was started before surgery or
radiation.

Other Vaccines

Vaccines prepared from other organisms have
been used, such as the tuberculosis bacteria,
B.C.G. or the SSM vaccine available from Japan.

Epidemiology

There is an inverse relationship between the
incidence of infections and the incidence of
cancer. For example, among the Native Indian
population of North America where the infection
rate is higher, the rate of cancer is lower, and in
other populations where the infection rate is low
the incidence of cancer has been six times as high.
Helen Coley Nauts proposes the hypothesis that
the use of antibiotics has increased the incidence
of cancer, because it has removed from us nature's
168 The Use of Bacterial Toxins in the Treatment of Cancer
way of fine-tuning our immune system by giving
us an infection whenever it is down. This
stimulates the immune system so it can deal with
other invaders such as cancer. This hypothesis
makes good sense to me. It suggests that
antibiotics ought to be given only as a last resort,
when it is pretty clear that allowing the infection
to continue would be hazardous. It would be wise
to allow simple bacterial infections to at least
initiate the immune system activation with a
slight degree of fever before suppressing it.

A Possible Ideal Program

The evidence from these vaccine studies going
back 100 years, and from the Vitamin C studies
going back 10 years, suggests that a combination
of Orthomolecular medicine and vaccine therapy
ought to improve greatly the outcome of cancer
treatment when it is combined with the other
treatments including surgery, radiation and
chemotherapy.

1. Orthomolecular therapy, including opti
mum diets and optimum amounts of nutrients
with a minimum of 12 grams per day of
vitamin C.

2. Mixed Respiratory Vaccine or some similar
vaccine, daily as described preferably into the
tumor or into the abdominal wall subcuta-
neously. It should be started before radiation,
surgery or chemotherapy to decrease the pos-
sibility of metastases. Avoid antibiotics as much
as possible, avoid antipyretics.

3. Surgery, radiation or chemotherapy as
indicated.

4. Other treatments may or will be used. This
program is only a design which can be followed
and which can be coordinated with any other
treatment which has been found to be helpful in
cancer treatment. It is not meant to be the sole
treatment which should be used. Too little is
known about cancer and its treatment to become
too narrow.

Literature Cited
1. Bruns P: Die heilwirkung des erysipelas aus
geschwulste. Beitragezurklinischen Chirurgie
3,443-466, 1887.
2. Busch W: Uber den einflus, welchen heftigere
erysipelen zuweilin auf organisierte neubildun-ger
ausuben. Verhandl Naturh Preuss Rhein
Westphyal 23, 28-30, 1866.
3. EversonTC & ColeRS: Spontaneous regression of
cancer: preliminary report. Annals of Surgery 144,
366-383, 1956.
4. Foster HD: Health, Disease & The Environment.
CRC Press, Boca Raton, 1992.
5. Nauts HC: Immunotherapy of Cancer — The
Pioneer Work of Coley International Symposium
on Endotoxin: Structural Aspects and
Immunobiology of Host Responses, Riva del Sole,
Giovinazzo, Italy, May 29 - June 1,1986.
6. Nauts HC: Bacteria and cancer—antagonisms and
benefits. Cancer Surveys 8,713-723,1989.
7. Nauts HC: Coley Toxins — The First Century.
International Clinical Hyperthermia Society, Rome
Italy, May 1989.
8. Nauts HD: Bibliography of reports concerning the
clinical or experimental use of Coley toxins
(Streptococcus Pyogenes and Serratia Marce-
scens) 396 references, 143 by W.B. Coley 1893-
1990. Available from Cancer Research Institute,
Inc., 1225 Park Ave., New York, N.Y.
9. Pauling L: Orthomolecular Psychiatry. Science
160,265-271, 1968.
10. Rhodenburg GL: Fluctuations in the growth of
malignant tumors in man, with special reference to
spontaneous regression. J. Cancer Research 3,
193-225, 1918.
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Clinical Procedures in Treating Terminally Ill Cancer Patients with Vitamin C

Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D1

1. 3A-2727 Quadra Street, Victoria, B.C., Canada V8T 4E5

Let me tell you what I am not. I am not an oncologist, I’m not a pathologist, I’m not a GP, I am a psychiatrist. Therefore you may want to know what a psychiatrist is doing messing about with cancer. I think that’s a legitimate question so I’d like to tell you briefly how I got into this very interesting field.

In 1951, I was made director of psychiatric research for the Department of Health for the province of Saskatchewan. I didn’t really know what to do. I had one major advantage, I think, over my colleagues. I didn’t know any psychiatry. You may laugh but that’s very important because I didn’t have anyone who could tell me what we could not do. The most important problem at that time was the schizophrenias. (They still take up half the hospital beds, and we still don’t have an effective treatment Dr. Humphry Osmond and I began to research schizophrenia. We developed the hypothesis that those with schizophrenia were producing a toxic chemical made from adrenaline, adrenochrome. Adrenochrome is an hallucinogen which we felt was producing toxemia, in the sense that the adrenochrome worked on the brain in the same way as LSD. That was our hypothesis.

We knew that most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. We didn’t think we were going to be correct but we felt that since we didn’t have much choice we ought to work with it and we also wanted to develop a treatment for our schizophrenic patients. Those were the days before tranquilizers. We didn’t have any effective treatment. We had shock treatment which was only temporarily helpful and insulin coma was going out of style,

Adrenochrome is made from adrenaline, so we thought if we could do something to cut down the production of adrenaline, and if we could also prevent the oxidation of adrenaline to adrenochrome, then we might have a therapy for our patients. And that immediately led us to look at two chemicals. One is called nicotinic acid or vitamin B3. Vitamin B3 is known to be a methyl acceptor, which, by depleting the body of its methyl groups could cut down the conversion of noradrenaline to adrenaline and that would be helpful, we thought. Secondly, we wanted to use vitamin C as an antioxidant. Looking back now it seems that we were 30 or 40 years ahead of antioxidant theories, We wanted to decrease the oxidation of adrenaline to adrenochrome. Vitamin C will do it but not very effectively. And that drew our attention to these two vitamins, vitamin C and vitamin Its. I had an advantage because I had taken my Ph.D, at the University of Minnesota on vitamins, so I knew their background. That’s why we started working with these two compounds.

Why did we start working with cancer? We were very curious about what these compounds would do. I recall that in 1952 when I was working as a resident in psychiatry at the Munroe Wing which was a part of the General Hospital in Regina, a woman who had her breast removed for cancer was admitted to our ward. She was psychotic. This poor lady had developed a huge ulcerated lesion, she wasn’t healing, and she was in a toxic delirium. Her psychiatrist decided that he would give her shock treatment, which was the only treatment available at that time. I decided I would like to give her vitamin C instead. As director of research, I had the option of going to the physicians and asking them if I could do this with their patients, A friend of mine was her doctor and he said, “Yes, you can have her.” He said, “I’ll withhold shock treatment for three days.” I had thought that I would give her three grams per day, which was our usual dose at that time, for a period of weeks, but when he told me I could have three days only, I decided that this would not do. Therefore, I decided to give her one gram every hour. I instructed the nurses that she was to be given a gram per hour except when she was sleeping. When she awakened, she would get the vitamin C that she had missed. We started her on a Saturday morning and when her doctor came back on Monday morning to start shock treatment she was mentally normal. I wanted to know, if vitamin C would have any therapeutic effect. To our amazement her lesion on her breast began to heal. She was discharged, mentally well, still having cancer and she died six months later from her cancer. This was an interesting observation which I had made at that time and which I had never forgotten.

There was another root to this interest. In 1959, we found that the majority of schizophrenic patients excreted in their urine a factor that we call the mauve factor, which we have since identified as kryptopyrrole. I was looking for a good source of this urinary factor. We had thought that the majority of schizophrenics had it. We thought that normal people did not have it but I was interested in determining how many people who were stressed also had the factor. Therefore, Iran a study of patients from the University Hospital who were on the physical wards. They had all sorts of physical conditions including cancer, I found to my amazement that half the people with lung cancer also excreted the same factor. By 1960, a very famous gentleman of Saskatchewan, one of the professors retired and was admitted to the psychiatric department at our hospital. He was psychotic. He had been diagnosed as having a bronchiogenic carcinoma. It had been biopsied and was visualized in the x-ray and it had also been seen in the bronchoscope. While they were deciding what to do, he became psychotic so they concluded that he had secondaries in his brain. Because he became psychotic, he was no longer operable and instead they gave him cobalt radiation. It didn’t help the psychosis any. He was admitted to our ward where he stayed for about two months, completely psychotic. He was placed on the terminal list, I discovered that he was on our ward, so I though he may have some mauve factor in his urine. On analysis he revealed huge quantities. I had discovered by then that if we gave large amounts of B3 along with vitamin C to these patients, regardless of their diagnosis, they tended to do very well. He was started on three grams per day each of nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid on a Friday. On Monday he was found to be normal. A few days later I said to him, “You understand that you have cancer?” He said, “Yes, I know that.” He was friendly with me because I had treated his wife for alcoholism some time before. I said to him, “If you will agree to take these two vitamins as long as you live, I will provide them for you at no charge. In 1960, I was the only doctor in Canada that had access to large quantities of vitamin C and niacin. They were distributed through our hospital dispensary. He agreed. That meant he had to come to my office every month in order to pick up two bottles of vitamins. I didn’t know that it might help his cancer. I was interested only in his psychological state. However, to my amazement he didn’t die. After 12 months, I was having lunch with the director of the cancer clinic, a friend of mine, and I said to him, “What do you think about this man?” And he said, “We can’t understand it, we can’t see the tumor any more.” I thought he’d say, “Well, isn’t that great.” So I asked, “Well, what’s your reaction?” He responded, “We are beginning to think we made the wrong diagnosis.” The patient died, 30 months after I first saw him, of a coronary.

Here’s another case that is very interesting. A couple of years later, a mother I had treated for depression came back to see me. Once more she was depressed. She said she had a daughter 16, who had just been diagnosed as having an osteogenic sarcoma of the arm. Her surgeon had recommended that the arm be amputated. She was very depressed over this and so I asked her, “Do you think you can persuade your surgeon not to amputate the arm right away? ” And I told her the story about the man with the lung cancer. She brought her daughter in and I started her on niacinamide, 3 grams per day, plus vitamin C, three grams per day. She made a complete recovery and is still well, not having had to have surgery. But this time I concluded that maybe B3 was the therapeutic factor. The reason for that, of course, is very simple. I liked B3 and I didn’t have much interest in vitamin C.

When I moved to Victoria, another strange event happened, In 1979, a woman developed jaundice and during surgery a six centimeter in diameter lump in the head of the pancreas was found. They were too frightened to do a biopsy, which apparently is quite standard. They thought that the biopsy might disseminate the tumor. The surgeon closed and told her to write her will. They said she might have three to six months at the most. She was a very tough lady and she had read Norman Cousins’ book Anatomy of an Illness. So she said to her doctor, “To hell with that, I’m not going to die.” And she began to take vitamin C on her own, 12 grams per day. When her doctor discovered what she was doing, he asked her to come and see me, because by that time I was identified as a doctor who liked to work with vitamins. I started her on 40 grams of vitamin C per day, to which I added niacin, zinc and a multi-vitamin, multimineral preparation. I had her change her diet by staying away from high protein and fat. I didn’t hear from her again for about six months. One Sunday, she called me. Normally when I get a call from a patient on a Sunday, it’s bad news. She immediately said, “Dr. Hoffer, good news!” I asked, “What’s happened?” She said, “They have just done a CT scan and they can’t see the tumor,” So then she said, “They couldn’t believe it. They thought the machine had gone wrong; so they did it all over again. And it was also negative the second time.” She had her last CT scan in 1984, no mass, and she is still alive and well today.

By this time, I had learned about Dr. Cameron’s and Dr. Pauling’s work with vitamin C and I began to realize that the main therapeutic factor might be the vitamin C rather than vitamin B3. The reason I want to present four cases is that one might my that I have seen four spontaneous recoveries and the question is, how many spontaneous recoveries would one physician see in his lifetime? I don’t know. Maybe this is not unusual but I think it is.

The last case I’m going to give details of was born in 1908. His mother died of cancer and his father had a coronary at the age of 80. My patient had had a myocardial infarction in 1969, and again in 1977, followed by a coronary bypass. In March of 1978, he suddenly developed pain in his left groin and down the left leg. In February 1979, he developed a bulge in his left groin, and later, severe pain with movement. In surgery, a large mass infiltrating sarcoma was found, part of which was removed, but a mass the size of a grapefruit was left. The tumor was eroding into a ramus of the pubic bone. They concluded that it was not radiosensitive, In March he had palliative radiation to his left half - 4500 rads. The pain was gone at the end of the radiation. On May 28, he developed a severe staph infection, and in June he was very depressed because his wife was dying of cancer and also he was suffering from drainage of chronic infection. In July he still had a purulent discharge in two areas. Now the mass was visible and palpable in the left iliac area above the inguinial ligaments. In January of 1980, he saw me for the first time. I started him on 12 grams of vitamin C per day and I recommended to his referring doctor that he give him IV ascorbic acid, 2.5 grams, twice per week, which he agreed to. I gave him niacin, vitamin B6 and zinc to balance it out. In April, the mass began to regress and the ontologist wrote, “This is interesting, it must be something else.” In other words, the patient said, the vitamin C is helping and the oncologist said, no it isn’t, The oncologist put a note in the file, “He’s probably responding to chemotherapy.” But he had never had chemotherapy. The infection was gone. In May 1980, his x-ray showed reconstruction of the left superior pubic ramus. In July he wrote to me telling how grateful he was to be so well. In February of 1988, he went back to the cancer clinic for some recurrent facial skin carcinoma. He died in the fall of 1989 of coronary disease when he was 81. This man survived 10 years after having been diagnosed with cancer.

My practice began to grow because the first patient felt it was her duty to tell as many people as possible that I had the cure for cancer. Now I should tell you the nature of my practice. In Canada we have a referral service. I do not take walk-ins. Every patient that comes to my office must be referred by their family doctor or by a specialist, During the early years, patients usually went to their doctor and said, “I have had all this treatment, you have told me I’m not going to do any better, will you please refer me to Dr. Hoffer.” So I call these patient-generated referrals, The past four or five years, it has swung around and I am now getting a lot more doctor generated referrals. Doctors, themselves are beginning to refer their patients to me.

I would think that 80% of my patients had failed to respond to any of combination of treatment, including surgery, radiation or chemotherpy. Usually the story was that they were told by either the cancer clinic or their doctor that there was nothing more that they could do. Most of them were terminal, but not all. I see three to five new cases of cancer every week. All of them have been treated by their own doctor, their own ontologist, their own surgeon. What I do is advise them with respect to diet and the kind of nutrients they ought to take. I am seeing them much earlier in the stage of illness, which I think is very good because the earlier I can get to them, the better are the results.

Here are the results. Generally, the patients were a lot more cheerful. They had less discomfort and they lived a lot longer, A few years ago I was at a meeting at Woods Hole with Linus Pauling. This was a Festschrift for Dr. Arthur Sackler. I told Linus that I thought I had something, that I was beginning to see the impact of adding vitamin C to their program. Dr. Pauling encouraged me to work it up, to do a really careful survey and write it up for publication, which I did. I examined every cancer patient referred to me between July 1978 and April 1988 and followed them to January 1990. I did not miss a single case. A total of 134 were seen. And I dated the time that they first saw me as day zero. The only thing I wanted to look at was survival. I wanted hard data, something that couldn’t be argued with. I wasn’t going to say the patients were better or not better because these are subjective terms. These 134 fell into two groups. It wasn’t my fault that this happened because I treated every one of them exactly the same way. I did not plan a double blind prospective study. What I planned and what I did was to advise every patient what I thought they ought to do in terms of their cancer. If they were getting radiation, I suggested they stay with it. If they were getting chemotherapy, I suggested they stay with that. I never advised them about their surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. However, out of these 134, there were 33 who did not or could not follow the program. For example, on chemotherapy, they were so nauseated that they couldn’t hold anything down and if they couldn’t hold the vitamins down they weren’t going to do very much good. There were some who didn’t believe in the program. I remember one woman with breast cancer came to see me and I advised her what to take, sending a consultation letter to the referring doctor outlining what I thought she ought to be taking. When she went back to see her doctor, he laughed at her. He made so much fun of her that she became thoroughly ashamed and she wouldn’t follow the program. She died two or three months later. Another case was a doctor who had cancer and was given 30 days. He had left his wife and was running around with his girl friend. Since he knew he was going to die, he decided that he would spend the next 30 days living as riotously as he could. He would travel all across the United States and have as much fun in 30 days as he could. His girlfriend brought him to see me because she wanted him to live longer than 30 days. He didn’t believe her and he never started the program. He went to the United States and died 30 days later. These are some examples of people who wouldn’t or couldn’t follow the program, Or they weren’t on the vitamin program long enough. I had found that they must be on the program at least two months before it began to work. These were my pseudocontrols. They’re not really a double blind control, it’s kind of pseudocontrol which provides an estimate of the kind of patient that I was seeing.

The other 101 did stay on their program at least two months. Some went off in the third or fourth month but they stayed on it for at least two months. I was encouraged by Linus Pauling. I followed them all. First of all, I contacted their doctors. I contacted the patients that were still alive. I contacted their families. I got all their records from the cancer clinics. I had a complete file on every patient I had seen so that I knew within a matter of months exactly what had happened to them. The results were analyzed by Dr. Linus Pauling using a new technique for analyzing cohorts. The data is as follows: 33 controls - they survived an average of 5.7 months, from the first day that I saw them. There were two treatment cohorts: a cohort of 40 females with cancer of the breast, ovary, uterus or cervix. The second cohort of 61 were other types of cancer. The cohorts were divided into two groups. First were the poor responders, those who didn’t do well; they survived an average of 10 months, nearly twice as long as the control. The others, the good responders, were divided into two groups. The female group survived an average of 122 months and the other group 72 months. I think this is very significant. There was a tremendous difference in the survival rate. Today, all the controls are dead, 50% of the treated group are still alive. Over the past year, I did another survey and of the remainder only three more have died. It can not be all due to cancer because I’m dealing with a population with ages between 60 and 80. They are going to die of other causes as well. This was published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Volume 5, p. 143, 1990.

The Treatment

First of all, as I pointed out, I did not interfere with the treatment done by the oncologists. These patients were treated by their own doctors and I went along with whatever they did. No one can accuse me of depriving these patients of having had the best of chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation. What I tried to do was to improve their general health, to improve their immune system, to the point that they could cope more successfully with their tumors. Many of them were depressed when they came to see me, The first thing I would do would be to create a bit of hope. I don’t think many doctors in cancer clinics realize the absolute importance of hope.

Let me give you another case. A woman came to see me with cancer of the breast. She didn’t want to have any surgery and so she had taken a huge quantity of nutrients, including vitamin A, 500,000 units per day at one of the clinics in the USA, She wasn’t doing well, the mass had opened up, she was ulcerated and in a terrible state. When she came to see me, she said to me, “Dr. Hoffer, (she was very depressed) you are my last hope.” I asked, “What do you mean?” She replied, “A week ago, when I went to see my family doctor, I asked when can I see you again. He said he would not give me another appointment, because I would be dead within a week,” Now, that’s very negative, Hope is very important. She didn’t die a week later, We started her on the program. Eventually, I persuaded her to have surgery and chemotherapy. She survived more than 30 months after that first day,

Hope is extremely important. Attitude is very important. Patients must want to live. You may be surprised to know that many people, when they are told they have cancer, are quite relieved, because they now know they don’t have to live much longer. They are really quite happy to go. So you have to test the attitude of the patient. Those who came to see me, of course, were preselected, they selected themselves. So they did have the right attitude, they did want to live. They have to be optimistic and I do think it helps if they laugh a lot. I agree with Norman Cousins, that if you combine laughter with vitamins, you do get better results.

Then I advise my patients what kind of nutrition they ought to follow. The first thing I try to do is to cut their fat way down. I try to cut it down below 30 percent of calories, down to 20 or 10, if possible. I find that, in our culture, the easiest way to do that is to totally eliminate all dairy products. If you eliminate all dairy pro. ducts and cut out all fatty meats, it’s pretty hard to get too much fat in the diet. So, I put them all on a dairy free program. I reduce, but I don’t eliminate, meat and fish, and I ask them to increase their vegetables, especially raw, as much as they can. I think it’s a good, reasonable diet, which most people can follow without too much difficulty. Having spent some time with them going over what they ought to eat, I begin to talk about the nutrients. The first one, of course, is vitamin C. I am convinced today that vitamin C is the most important single nutrient that one can give to any person with cancer. The dose is variable. I find that most patients can Lake 12 grams per day without much difficulty, that’s the crystalline vitamin C sodium ascorbate or calcium ascorbate. They take one teaspoon three times per day. If they do not develop diarrhea, I ask them to increase it until this occurs and then to cut back below that level. I think in many cases it would be desirable to use intravenous vitamin C and there are doctors now in Canada doing that. The amount that one gives is limited by the skill of the physician, not by the patient.

I also add vitamin B3, either niacin or niacinamide. I prescribe from 500 mg to 1500 mg per day. Before I did that empirically, now there is a lot of evidence that B3 does have pretty interesting anticancer properties. Two years ago, in Texas at one of the osteopathic colleges, there was an international congress, Vitamin B3 and Cancer. There is a lot of work being done in this area today. I also add a B complex preparation 50 or 100. I think vitamin E is an extremely important antioxidant and I use that as well, 800 to 1200 I. U. They also get 25,000 to 75,000 units of beta carotene. I sometimes use vitamin A. I like to use folic acid for lung cancer, and for cancer of the uterus because of work that has been done showing that folic acid might reverse a positive pap smear to negative. I use selenium, 200 mcg, three times per day. I think the toxicity of selenium has been greatly exaggerated. I had a patient from Chile, a refugee, who developed a severe lymphoma. He was operated on but it came back. He had radiation and it recurred. He had been a patient of mine for the treatment of depression when he developed his cancer. He was given three months to live. I had started him on selenium, 600 mcg per day. Like many patients, he thought if 600 is good, more is even better. He came back and said he was taking 2 mg per day, or 2,000 mcg. I became a bit concerned about that and suggested he cut down to 1,000. In any event, he recovered and he has now been alive for seven years. There is no evidence of tumor, and his major problem today is reorienting himself in a foreign culture. So I use selenium and I use a lot of it. I use some zinc, especially for prostatic cancers and I do use calcium-magnesium preparations. So this is the basic nutrient program that they all follow. The cost ranges from $50 to $75 per month. People who are dying from cancer don’t mind paying this.

What are this program’s advantages? Well, first of all, the increase in longevity. We have increased the longevity from 5.7 months to approximately 100 months, which is very substantial, and half of the patients are still alive. There has been a tremendous decrease in pain and anxiety, even amongst those who were dying. We do not have the final answer, but we have at least a partial answer. The use of nutrients, like vitamin C and B3 increase the efficacy of chemotherapy by increasing its killing effect on the tumor and decreasing its toxicity on normal tissues. The same has been shown to be true with radiation therapy.

My conclusion is that vitamin C must be a vital component of every cancer treatment program. I believe the other nutrients help, adding 20% to 30% to longevity.

What do we need? We need a definitive study. When I did the study, when I wrote it up with Dr. Linus Pauling, it wasn’t our belief that we had answered the question. We hoped that this would stimulate enough interest for the institutes that have the finances and the time to do these studies to get going and do them properly. We need a definitive large-scale study to tease out the relative value of all the nutrients. This is extremely important. I am not telling you that I have a treatment for cancer; I say that we have improved the results of treatment. My conclusion is that the best treatment for cancer today is a combination of the best that modem medicine can offer, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, combined with the best of what orthomolecular physicians can offer, which is nutrition, nutrients and hope.

From Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Volume 6, Numbers 3&4, 1991, pp. 155-160