Ares
26th April 2011, 08:04 PM
Alternative cancer treatments are a kind of "forbidden area" in medicine, but Dr. Gonzalez chose to go that route anyway, and has some remarkable success stories to show for his pioneering work.
He didn't set out to treat cancer at first however, let alone treat patients. His originalal plan was to be a basic science researcher at Sloan-Kettering, a teaching hospital for Cornell Medical College. He had a chance meeting with William Kelley, a controversial dentist who was one of the founders of nutritional typing. Dr. Kelley had been practicing alternative- and nutritional approaches for over two decades at the time, led him to begin a student project investigation of Kelley's work, in the summer of 1981.
"I started going through his records and even though I was just a second year medical student, I could see right away there were cases that were extraordinary," he says. "Patients with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer, metastatic breast cancer in the bone, metastatic colorectal cancer… who were alive 5, 10, 15 years later under Kelley's care with a nutritional approach."
This preliminary review led to a formal research study, which Dr. Gonzalez completed while doing his fellowship in cancer, immunology and bone marrow transplantation.
The "Impossible" Recoveries of Dr. Kelley's Cancer Patients
After going through thousands of Kelley's records, Dr. Gonzalez put together a monograph, divided into three sections:
Kelley’s theory
50 cases of appropriately-diagnosed lethal cancer patients still alive five to 15 years after diagnosis, whose long-term survival was attributed to Kelley’s program
Patients Kelley had treated with pancreatic cancer between the years 1974 and 1982
According to Dr. Good, the president of Sloan-Kettering who had become Gonzalez' mentor, if Kelley could produce even one patient with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer who was alive 5-10 years later, it would be remarkable. They ultimately tracked down 22 of Kelley's cases. Ten of them met him once and didn't do the program after being dissuaded by family members or doctors who thought Kelley was a quack.
The average survival for that group was about 60 days.
A second group of seven patients who did the therapy partially and incompletely (again, dissuaded by well-intentioned but misguided family members or doctors), had an average survival of 300 days.
The third group consisting of five patients, who were appropriately diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and who completed the full program, had an average survival of eight and a half years! In Dr. Gonzalez' words, this was "just unheard of in medicine."
One of those patients included a woman diagnosed by the Mayo Clinic with stage four pancreatic cancer who had been given six months to live. She'd learned about Kelley's program through a local health food store. She completed his treatment and is still alive today, 29 years later.
The Truth about Medical Journals: Why Gonzalez's Book Was Never Published
However, despite—or rather because of—the remarkable success of the treatment, Gonzalez couldn't get his findings published.
"We tried to publish case reports in the medical journals; the whole book, parts of the book, individual case reports—with no success," he says.
This is an important point that many fail to realize.
Those of us who practice natural medicine are frequently criticized for not publishing our findings. My justification for that is that it's not going to be published anyway, and Dr. Gonzalez' anecdotal story confirms this view.
His mentor and supporter, Dr. Good, was one of the most published authors in the scientific literature at that point, with over 2,000 scientific articles to his name. He'd been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, and yet he was refused because the findings were "too controversial," and flew in the face of conventional medical doctrine.
If the cream of the crop is refused, how does a general primary care physician get an article published?
He doesn't…
"Robert Good was at the top of his profession: President of Sloan-Kettering, father of modern immunology, and did the first bone marrow transplant in history. Yet, he couldn't get it published," Gonzalez says. "He couldn't even get a single case report published.
In fact, I have a letter from one of the editors, dated 1987, who wrote a blistering letter to Good saying "You've been boondoggled by a crazy quack guy. Don't you see this is all a fraud?"
It was just the most extraordinary, irrational letter... [Because] the patients' names were there, the copies of their pertinent medical records were there… Any of them could have called these patients, like Arlene Van Straten who, 29 years later, will talk to anyone… But no one cared. They wouldn't do it; they didn't believe it.
They couldn't believe it.
It was very disturbing to me because I say, "It is what it is." I come out of a very conventional research orientation, and it was astonishing to me—I had assistance; I had the president of Sloane-Kettering who couldn't get this thing published because it disagreed with the philosophy that was being promoted in medicine; that only chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy can successfully treat cancer, even though the success rate was abysmal.
The idea that medical journals are these objective and unbiased repositories of the truths about science is total nonsense. Most of them are owned by the drug companies. They won't publish anything that disagrees with their philosophy."
By the end of 1987, it was clear that the work would never get published, and since Dr. Good had retired from Sloan-Kettering, they no longer had the power-base to conduct clinical trials.
Dr. Kelley, realizing his work would never be accepted, let alone get published, "went off the deep end," in Dr. Gonzalez' words, and stopped seeing patients altogether.
"When I last spoke to him in the summer of 1987, he accused me of being part of a CIA plot to steal his work, and I knew that I had to move on," Dr. Gonzalez says.
"To this day, of course, I give him credit for his brilliant innovation. It's kind of like Semmelweis, who ended up going crazy during the 19th century after showing doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies and no one accepted that. Semmelweis just went off the deep end, and that's what kind of what happened to Kelley, I say with great sadness."
Starting the Alternative Cancer Treatment Practice
Dr. Gonzalez set up a practice in New York together with his associate, Dr. Linda Isaacs, and started seeing patients using Kelley's three-pronged approach. The results were impressive.
One of his remarkable success stories includes a woman diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, which is the most aggressive form. She'd been given a death sentence.
Today, over 23 years later, she's still alive and well, and cancer free.
"Here's a woman that was given six months to a year to live AND developed metastases while getting aggressive multi-agent chemotherapy, yet 23 and a half years later, she's alive and well, enjoying her life and just doing so well.
We could see that Kelley's approach really worked and when I report these cases I'm giving Kelley the credit because he developed this treatment," Dr. Gonzalez says.
Recognition from the National Cancer Institute
In 1993, as part of a legitimate effort to reach out to alternative practitioners, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invited Dr. Gonzalez to present 25 of his cases in a closed-door, invitation-only session. On the basis of that presentation, the NCI suggested he conduct a pilot study with patients diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, which in conventional medicine is known to be an untreatable, highly lethal form of cancer.
Interestingly, Nestle stepped in to finance this pilot study. It may seem an odd choice, but the business motivation was the same then as it is today—making junk food appear healthier is a good business move, even if it's only in theory.
Supervised directly by Dr. Ernst Wynder, a premier cancer researcher, the study was completed in early 1999 and published in June that year. According to Dr. Gonzalez:
"It showed the best results for the treatment of pancreatic cancer in the history of medicine."
Chemo Therapy vs. the Kelley Treatment
To put his results in perspective, the chemo drug, Gemzar, approved for pancreatic cancer dates back to 1997, and the major study that led to its approval had 126 patients. Of those, 18 percent lived one year. Not a single patient out of the 126 lived beyond 19 months.
Dr. Gonzalez' study had 11 participants, of which:
Five survived for two years
Four survived three years
Two survived five years
Based on these results, the NCI decided to fund a large scale clinical trial, to the tune of $1.4 million, to test his nutritional approach against the best chemo available at the time.
"My friends say "Why did you get involved with something like this? How could you trust the NCI?"
Well, the NCI had been very fair, up to that point, and the then-director, Richard Klausner, in face-to-face meetings with him said he thought I was doing something really interesting and needed to be properly supported," Dr. Gonzalez says.
But that goodwill soon disappeared.
How to Sabotage a Clinical Study 101
About a year after the study was approved, Klausner left the NCI and was replaced by new management with a wholly different attitude.
"[F]rom our first meeting, we knew something has changed significantly," Dr. Gonzalez says, "and all the people that had initially been assigned to the study, who were supportive and believed we were doing something useful, were taken off it. In fact one of them couldn't even talk to me. She said she'd be fired if she talked to me; if she took my phone call.
I was told by another person who had supported me at the NIH that I shouldn't call him at his office; that he was afraid his line was tapped, and I should only call him at home.
That's how insane the politics over this clinical study got. I couldn't believe it! I thought this was just something you'd read about or see on TV, or that some paranoid or crazy person would make up. But here I was living it. Coming out of Robert Good's group, I don't say that to impress people, but my background is so pure and conventional! It was unbelievable to see that the profession I respected and wanted to join could behave like this."
Unfortunately, the study was, in the end, sabotaged.
"Turned out the principal investigator at Columbia, who's supposed to be completely neutral, had helped develop a chemo regimen that was being used against us—a conflict of interest that was never declared," Dr. Gonzalez explains.
"[T]here are specific requirements for entry into a clinical study. Ours is a nutritional program, and when the first protocol version was written, we had a list of specified criteria… They have to be able to eat…Ours is a nutritional program, so patients have to be able to eat. If they can't eat, they can't do the therapy. They have to be able to take care of themselves…
This is a program the patients have to follow at home.
He didn't set out to treat cancer at first however, let alone treat patients. His originalal plan was to be a basic science researcher at Sloan-Kettering, a teaching hospital for Cornell Medical College. He had a chance meeting with William Kelley, a controversial dentist who was one of the founders of nutritional typing. Dr. Kelley had been practicing alternative- and nutritional approaches for over two decades at the time, led him to begin a student project investigation of Kelley's work, in the summer of 1981.
"I started going through his records and even though I was just a second year medical student, I could see right away there were cases that were extraordinary," he says. "Patients with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer, metastatic breast cancer in the bone, metastatic colorectal cancer… who were alive 5, 10, 15 years later under Kelley's care with a nutritional approach."
This preliminary review led to a formal research study, which Dr. Gonzalez completed while doing his fellowship in cancer, immunology and bone marrow transplantation.
The "Impossible" Recoveries of Dr. Kelley's Cancer Patients
After going through thousands of Kelley's records, Dr. Gonzalez put together a monograph, divided into three sections:
Kelley’s theory
50 cases of appropriately-diagnosed lethal cancer patients still alive five to 15 years after diagnosis, whose long-term survival was attributed to Kelley’s program
Patients Kelley had treated with pancreatic cancer between the years 1974 and 1982
According to Dr. Good, the president of Sloan-Kettering who had become Gonzalez' mentor, if Kelley could produce even one patient with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer who was alive 5-10 years later, it would be remarkable. They ultimately tracked down 22 of Kelley's cases. Ten of them met him once and didn't do the program after being dissuaded by family members or doctors who thought Kelley was a quack.
The average survival for that group was about 60 days.
A second group of seven patients who did the therapy partially and incompletely (again, dissuaded by well-intentioned but misguided family members or doctors), had an average survival of 300 days.
The third group consisting of five patients, who were appropriately diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and who completed the full program, had an average survival of eight and a half years! In Dr. Gonzalez' words, this was "just unheard of in medicine."
One of those patients included a woman diagnosed by the Mayo Clinic with stage four pancreatic cancer who had been given six months to live. She'd learned about Kelley's program through a local health food store. She completed his treatment and is still alive today, 29 years later.
The Truth about Medical Journals: Why Gonzalez's Book Was Never Published
However, despite—or rather because of—the remarkable success of the treatment, Gonzalez couldn't get his findings published.
"We tried to publish case reports in the medical journals; the whole book, parts of the book, individual case reports—with no success," he says.
This is an important point that many fail to realize.
Those of us who practice natural medicine are frequently criticized for not publishing our findings. My justification for that is that it's not going to be published anyway, and Dr. Gonzalez' anecdotal story confirms this view.
His mentor and supporter, Dr. Good, was one of the most published authors in the scientific literature at that point, with over 2,000 scientific articles to his name. He'd been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, and yet he was refused because the findings were "too controversial," and flew in the face of conventional medical doctrine.
If the cream of the crop is refused, how does a general primary care physician get an article published?
He doesn't…
"Robert Good was at the top of his profession: President of Sloan-Kettering, father of modern immunology, and did the first bone marrow transplant in history. Yet, he couldn't get it published," Gonzalez says. "He couldn't even get a single case report published.
In fact, I have a letter from one of the editors, dated 1987, who wrote a blistering letter to Good saying "You've been boondoggled by a crazy quack guy. Don't you see this is all a fraud?"
It was just the most extraordinary, irrational letter... [Because] the patients' names were there, the copies of their pertinent medical records were there… Any of them could have called these patients, like Arlene Van Straten who, 29 years later, will talk to anyone… But no one cared. They wouldn't do it; they didn't believe it.
They couldn't believe it.
It was very disturbing to me because I say, "It is what it is." I come out of a very conventional research orientation, and it was astonishing to me—I had assistance; I had the president of Sloane-Kettering who couldn't get this thing published because it disagreed with the philosophy that was being promoted in medicine; that only chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy can successfully treat cancer, even though the success rate was abysmal.
The idea that medical journals are these objective and unbiased repositories of the truths about science is total nonsense. Most of them are owned by the drug companies. They won't publish anything that disagrees with their philosophy."
By the end of 1987, it was clear that the work would never get published, and since Dr. Good had retired from Sloan-Kettering, they no longer had the power-base to conduct clinical trials.
Dr. Kelley, realizing his work would never be accepted, let alone get published, "went off the deep end," in Dr. Gonzalez' words, and stopped seeing patients altogether.
"When I last spoke to him in the summer of 1987, he accused me of being part of a CIA plot to steal his work, and I knew that I had to move on," Dr. Gonzalez says.
"To this day, of course, I give him credit for his brilliant innovation. It's kind of like Semmelweis, who ended up going crazy during the 19th century after showing doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies and no one accepted that. Semmelweis just went off the deep end, and that's what kind of what happened to Kelley, I say with great sadness."
Starting the Alternative Cancer Treatment Practice
Dr. Gonzalez set up a practice in New York together with his associate, Dr. Linda Isaacs, and started seeing patients using Kelley's three-pronged approach. The results were impressive.
One of his remarkable success stories includes a woman diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, which is the most aggressive form. She'd been given a death sentence.
Today, over 23 years later, she's still alive and well, and cancer free.
"Here's a woman that was given six months to a year to live AND developed metastases while getting aggressive multi-agent chemotherapy, yet 23 and a half years later, she's alive and well, enjoying her life and just doing so well.
We could see that Kelley's approach really worked and when I report these cases I'm giving Kelley the credit because he developed this treatment," Dr. Gonzalez says.
Recognition from the National Cancer Institute
In 1993, as part of a legitimate effort to reach out to alternative practitioners, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invited Dr. Gonzalez to present 25 of his cases in a closed-door, invitation-only session. On the basis of that presentation, the NCI suggested he conduct a pilot study with patients diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, which in conventional medicine is known to be an untreatable, highly lethal form of cancer.
Interestingly, Nestle stepped in to finance this pilot study. It may seem an odd choice, but the business motivation was the same then as it is today—making junk food appear healthier is a good business move, even if it's only in theory.
Supervised directly by Dr. Ernst Wynder, a premier cancer researcher, the study was completed in early 1999 and published in June that year. According to Dr. Gonzalez:
"It showed the best results for the treatment of pancreatic cancer in the history of medicine."
Chemo Therapy vs. the Kelley Treatment
To put his results in perspective, the chemo drug, Gemzar, approved for pancreatic cancer dates back to 1997, and the major study that led to its approval had 126 patients. Of those, 18 percent lived one year. Not a single patient out of the 126 lived beyond 19 months.
Dr. Gonzalez' study had 11 participants, of which:
Five survived for two years
Four survived three years
Two survived five years
Based on these results, the NCI decided to fund a large scale clinical trial, to the tune of $1.4 million, to test his nutritional approach against the best chemo available at the time.
"My friends say "Why did you get involved with something like this? How could you trust the NCI?"
Well, the NCI had been very fair, up to that point, and the then-director, Richard Klausner, in face-to-face meetings with him said he thought I was doing something really interesting and needed to be properly supported," Dr. Gonzalez says.
But that goodwill soon disappeared.
How to Sabotage a Clinical Study 101
About a year after the study was approved, Klausner left the NCI and was replaced by new management with a wholly different attitude.
"[F]rom our first meeting, we knew something has changed significantly," Dr. Gonzalez says, "and all the people that had initially been assigned to the study, who were supportive and believed we were doing something useful, were taken off it. In fact one of them couldn't even talk to me. She said she'd be fired if she talked to me; if she took my phone call.
I was told by another person who had supported me at the NIH that I shouldn't call him at his office; that he was afraid his line was tapped, and I should only call him at home.
That's how insane the politics over this clinical study got. I couldn't believe it! I thought this was just something you'd read about or see on TV, or that some paranoid or crazy person would make up. But here I was living it. Coming out of Robert Good's group, I don't say that to impress people, but my background is so pure and conventional! It was unbelievable to see that the profession I respected and wanted to join could behave like this."
Unfortunately, the study was, in the end, sabotaged.
"Turned out the principal investigator at Columbia, who's supposed to be completely neutral, had helped develop a chemo regimen that was being used against us—a conflict of interest that was never declared," Dr. Gonzalez explains.
"[T]here are specific requirements for entry into a clinical study. Ours is a nutritional program, and when the first protocol version was written, we had a list of specified criteria… They have to be able to eat…Ours is a nutritional program, so patients have to be able to eat. If they can't eat, they can't do the therapy. They have to be able to take care of themselves…
This is a program the patients have to follow at home.