Boy this makes me angry when I read such inaccurate reporting. Intravenous vitamin C therapy for cancer has been around for a very long time. If you know how to do research you'd find the science behind the treatment and know it has been tested and approved as effective. The down site is that the money machines behind the FDA want everyone to think this treatment is quackery.
It does a great job for Hepatitis C too.
Too bad for so many people who have been denied this treatment by ignorant medical professionals these past few decades. Too bad also that the brave physicians who have carried on this therapy have risked losing their licenses so they could prescribe the best therapy for their patients.
There is an entire medical association that focuses on these treatments, the Oxidative Medical Association. ACAM member doctors also offer this treatment.
We can even tell you how to do a home version, at about half the strength of the IV therapy.
The PetSmart fellows (see next article) would have been helped early on with IV vitamin C, but no one told them!
FDA OKs trial on vitamin C for cancer Cancer Treatment Centers runs research
Bruce Japsen, Published January 11, 2007
Adding more credibility to its research into alternative methods for oncologic medical care, Cancer Treatment Centers of America said it has won federal approval to begin a clinical trial studying the potential of intravenous vitamin C as a cancer
treatment.
While winning U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to begin clinical trials is a regular occurrence for traditional cancer researchers such as the nation's elite comprehensive cancer centers designated by the National Cancer Institute, Zion-based Cancer Treatment Centers is not known for conducting federally approved research--making the FDA-approved vitamin C trial a bit of a coup for the firm.
"Our vitamin C research protocol is the first investigator-initiated protocol approved by the FDA in the history of CTCA," said Christopher Lis, the firm's vice president of research and development. "We are now taking our research here to the next level."
Lis said there will be a limited number of patients who will actually receive the therapy. "Only patients who have exhausted all other conventional treatment options are eligible to receive the therapy," Lis added.
The first phase of the trial is to examine the "optimal therapeutic dose in a series of 18 patients" and largely see whether the treatment is safe and tolerable to patients. Additional studies will be needed that could take several years to show whether it is effective and could lead to FDA-approved treatment.
The FDA confirmed Cancer Treatment Centers' "investigational" new drug application but would not comment further.
Potential medical uses of vitamin C gained notoriety in the 1970s because of the efforts of researchers such as Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. But such research was not known to reveal successes or was not pursued long enough to result in standardized effective cancer treatments, say researchers such as Jeffrey Blumberg, professor of nutrition at Tufts University in Boston. In older studies the vitamin was taken orally.
Although early studies, conducted with orally dosed supplements, failed to demonstrate clinical benefit to cancer patients, hope still persists that vitamin C
may be useful if administered correctly.
"I am not aware of anybody else now that is doing IV studies in patients with vitamin C to look at cancer effects," Blumberg said.
While cautioning that the research is early, Blumberg said vitamin C therapy could result in reducing side effects of chemotherapy or as a potential booster to
existing treatments. He cautioned that it is too early to know.
"If this works, we would have a useful adjunct to chemotherapy treatment that could lower the dose," Blumberg said.
Cancer Treatment Centers' facilities differ from most cancer care centers in that they provide traditional inpatient and outpatient chemotherapy and surgical care as well as non-traditional services such as acupuncture, massage and nutrition therapies.
The privately held for-profit company has hospitals in Zion, Philadelphia and Tulsa, Okla.
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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
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