Successful Natural Treatments for Breast and Prostate Cancer

by Ben L. Pfeifer, M.D., Ph.D.

[This transcript is of a seminar that Dr. Ben Pfeifer gave at the Complementary & Natural Healthcare Expo at ExCel in London on October 15th 2006. The audience was a mix of the general public, alternative and complementary healthcare practitioners, and medical doctors. Dr. Pfeifer kindly gave us permission to reproduce his copyrighted lecture materials.]

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Good afternoon everyone,

What does Noah's Ark and this very modern space capsule have in common? Not too much, but somehow, for me, they symbolize our present and future struggle to resolve some of the health challenges we have.

One of those is certainly the ever-growing cancer mortality. If you look at the cancer mortality in 2005, you see that 7.5 million died of this disease. That is about 13% toll of the 58 million that year.

Now looking at cancer reality for the individual, in the US in 2004, you had about 700,000 cancer patients dying of the disease. Now that accounts for almost 2000 per day, 80 per hour, or more than one cancer death per minute. Looking at the incidents at the same time, in 1970, 1 in 30 Americans was told by his or her physician, "Sorry Mr. Smith, you have cancer." Now today, that number is 1 in 3, and we are afraid by next year it will be 1 in 2.

The cancer incidence and mortality in Great Britain is not much better. These are numbers from your National Statistics Office. In 1971, there were more than 143,000 cases registered; in 2004, 324,000. Looking at cancer death, estimated because there is no hard figure for that year, 78,000 in 1971 and double the number, almost, in 2004.

When we go away from the overall picture, and now look at two cancers: breast cancer and prostate cancer. The numbers are here, showing that close to 42,600 new cases of breast cancer in your country every year, and almost 12,500 women die of this disease.

Prostate cancer has these numbers: 31,000 new cases and about 10,000 men have to die with that cancer, or because of that cancer.

Clearly, breast and prostate cancer survival rates are depending upon the disease stage. Now here you see four curves: on the left hand side you see the survival in percent; here you see the years after diagnosis; and here these four curves are depending upon the disease stage — Stage I to IV. And you can see that I to III are having pretty good survival rates, in particular, I and II, and these are the cancer stages where our conventional therapy certainly does make a difference for some of the cancer patients, and, despite the fact that most of the therapies do mean sacrifices for the cancer victim and for the families and do mean a lot of side effects, there is clear evidence in the literature that life expectancy can be prolonged with those measures. We should not forget this. But, what happens in Stage IV, you see this curve does not look very nice. More than 50% of those patients are dead within one year after the diagnosis. And for those patients we have palliative chemotherapy, that often does not work at all with regards to life prolongation, and very often it is increasingly making the lives of those patients more difficult.

We have embarked on quite a different route. We have looked at remedies that are not causing hair-loss, that are not causing the blood-building organ in our bone marrow to deteriorate, that are not destroying the immune system. And we have come up with some successful natural treatments for breast and prostate cancers that I want to talk to you about.

[Picture of Aeskulap Klinik in Switzerland - slide missing]

Now, why am I at this very small hospital in Switzerland, coming from larger universities in the States? I think that has more than one reason: without going into that, only so much here in this non-profit environment I am allowed to do many more things that were forbidden by FDA and other ruling authorities in the United States. And therefore, I am feeling very comfortable staying there and working there.

Not only is it located in a beautiful spot in Lake Luzern, where the arrow is, and maybe that is one of the reasons patients have good success rates at this small place. But anyway, I think that the major part of our success with metastatic breast and prostate cancer is our non-toxic regiment.

For breast cancer, we want to talk about three substances here that we combine for these patients. One is called Indol-3-Carbinol, the second is Biobran and the third is Imusan.

Here are some facts regarding Indol-3-Carbinol. It comes from broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, but certainly you cannot eat enough to get Indol-3-Carbinol in your body when you have breast cancer, so you need to rely on a good company that can extract from those cruciferous vegetables the important nutrient — Indol-3-Carbinol. It has been shown that Indol-3-Carbinol and its metabolites possess clearly anti-carcinogenic effects, and that was shown not only in experimental pre-clinical studies in animals but also in humans.

Now there is some more science to it. We know today that Indol-3-Carbinol is reducing blood concentrations of estrogen metabolite, and this is a specific one — it is called 16-alpha-hydroxyestron — which is associated with breast and endometrial cancer. We know also that it increases the change from the more dangerous estradiol to estriol, which is a biologically weaker estrogen, and thereby reduces the growth rate and increases the apoptosis (that means the death rate) of cancer cells. In the pre-clinical lab tests we can clearly state that Indol-3-Carbinaol has almost as good as an effect as Tamoxifen — this is one medicine that breast cancer patients all know as an anti-estrogen compound. Indol-3-Carbinol was effective in MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines, blocking their growth more effectively than Tamoxifen It also inhibits estrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer cells which most of those hormonal treatment compounds like the aromatase inhibitors — Arimidex… Femara… that some women in the audience may know, or Tamoxifen, have no effect on. The recommended daily intake is about 400-600 mg.

Now that Indol-3-Carbinol compound has received quite some attention, this is one of several papers that I found in the PubMed registry of the National Library and here these guys clearly showed an effect of Indol-3-Carbinol in chemo prevention of breast cancer and in treatment.

Now the second compound that we use in this protocol is Biobran. Biobran is very interesting compound: it is extracted out of rice bran. The actual molecule that you see here is a combination of arabinose and xylose — so a complex sugar molecule actually — but this sugar molecule was shown to have dramatic effects on a subset of cells that we know are our front-line soldiers in the immune system that work against cancer. These are the NK cells.

Now here you see them if you compare Biobran to other immune boosters. And up here, the red bar, is the Biobran bar. Then you see here that it compares very well with other substances like beta-glucan, like other arabinoxylans and active hexose compounds. It compares very well with regards to its effect on NK cells.

When you give volunteers up to 2g of Biobran a day then you see a curve like this: the NK cells which are shown here in their activity and here is the time, then you get a curve like this. 60% you can achieve after 2 weeks; when you stop taking it the activity comes down to the previous value before you started. But if you continue, you can achieve up to 100, 200 percent increase of NK cell numbers and their activity.

Why are those NK cells so important? Looking at the picture for various cancer patients and comparing the activity of NK cells with healthy people then you see the healthy column is 100% and all these cancers — breast cancer, colon, prostate, ovarian cancer, lung cancer — have very much diminished NK cell activity.

Now does that really mean anything for patients? Yes, it does. If you look at these numbers: here were 205 cancer patients compared in their 2 year survival. Here you have two groups: one is the Biobran group; and here is the control group. The Biobran group received 2g of Biobran per day; the control group did not receive anything. Now just look at the total numbers. 52 of the 96 patients in this group [Biobran group] survived 2 years — this is 54% — and here [control group] it is 19 out of 63 — 33%. Now if you go deeper into this and you see who of the patients survive in dependence on their initial NK activity then you see that if patients had higher than 40% activity of their NK cells prior to going into the study, they had a very high survival rate compared with the control group. If they were very low, that means very far progressed [with their cancer], that had a lower survival rate in both groups but still, here 42% [Biobran group] and here about one third or one forth [control group]. So that work that was published in Japan really shows that Biobran by itself is doing something for end-stage disease cancer patients.

Now Imusan is the third compound in this complex protocol. And Imusan is a herbal extract mix of 15 medicinal plants; it has shown activity in various cancer cell lines. And so in the laboratory, we can clearly see that cancer cell cultures are being disturbed in their growth by Imusan in the culture medium. Today, Imusan is taken by many cancer patients as a complementary phytotherapy.

Pre-clinical work shows clearly that it inhibits cell division in vitro, in a dose dependent manner. In liver cancer it inhibits an oncogene that is known to be involved in the development of Liver cancer called IGF-II. It also normalizes a gene that is called P53 which has something to do with apoptosis, that means with normal cell death. And it also increases activity of those very cells that you will be reminded of when I introduced Biobran to you — the NK cells.

Here is a picture showing how Imusan inhibits breast cancer cell growth in culture. This is MCF-7 culture of breast cancer, and on the left hand side you see the growth in the control group, so nothing done and you see the cells in the medium are increasing by the hour. On the other side is the Imusan part where 200µg of Imusan were put in the nutrition medium and you see it basically declines instead of growing, as is shown on that slide. Now that is all theory, what can we do in daily clinical practices?

I will show you a couple of patient examples. This is a lady, 57 years, who was diagnosed in '98 with intraductal carcinoma of the left breast. That is a cancer of the milk duct of the breast, a typical situation for breast carcinoma and the typical location. This lady had lymph node metastases to begin with; she was treated with mastectomy and lymphadenectomy — that means that her axillary lymph nodes were also taken out. And she received what is called adjunct chemotherapy — that is, after the surgery she has to complete her wound healing and then three weeks later she starts on a chemotherapy protocol.

Now, unfortunately, already a year and two months later, her CT scan (computer tomography scan) showed that lesions were already in the liver and she was recommended and started on what was then called palliative chemotherapy protocol — a second line chemotherapy — but that was unfortunately not very successful. She not only had a lot of side-effects, but the tumour was growing under this.

She then started in September with the protocol of Imusan, Biobran and Indol-3-Carbinol, and after four months on that protocol — you see it doesn't go fast, chemotherapy can be much faster when it is effective — she is feeling much better. Her tumour marker declined; a repeat CT in Dec '99, about three and a half months later, showed resolution of the liver lesions. And that only under complementary therapy. The patient is alive today and she is doing well, without signs of disease. Now that is from '98 to today — almost eight years.

Here you see the liver lesions of this lady. This is the picture in December [right hand pic] and this was the picture in August [at the beginning - left hand pic].

The second example I show you because it helps understand that I am not propagating an alternative way of medicine. I work very closely with university departments and here we show you an example of how important it can be for patients for both sides to work together. This is a very young lady from Switzerland — a famous TV star in this country — who was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer in April 2005. At the time of diagnosis she already had lymph node metastases. She was treated with mastectomy. She had also adjuvant chemotherapy but not even a year later, she developed two big solid metastases in the liver. She refused a new course of systemic chemotherapy, but she agreed to a regional chemo embolization therapy of the liver lesions, called trans-arterial chemo embolization.

Now why did I choose this for her? Because I know that our phytotherapy regiment, although effective in a great deal of patients, needs time. This lady had no time. Her tumours were huge — I will show them to you in a second — and we needed to do something quickly to suppress further growth of those tumours in the liver.

In February of 2006, she started just prior to this one with our protocol. Her tumour markers decreased slightly and she improved in her overall well-being and she stayed on this complementary therapy while undergoing this local regional chemotherapy protocol, and we did this as a precursor treatment for something that is called Laser Induced Thermo-Therapy (abbreviated LITT) that was done at the university hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. You see, even borders between countries do not matter if we are wishing to help.

Now these pictures are from the same lady that received treatment together with the Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at Goethe University in Frankfurt; the colleague who is doing this there is Professor Vogl — he is well known all over Europe and further away even for this technique. Here you see the large lesion in her liver, the second one in this section. That is her initial MRI [pic on left]. That is a different way of looking at the larger of the lesions, same initial MRI [pic on right].

Now here you see what we do: from the femoral artery we come up with a little catheter so that the leg artery is punctured and the little catheter is come up through the aorta, and we look for the arteria hepatica, that is artery that supplies blood to the liver. And we go in with that little catheter into that artery — here we injected some radiotracer that makes that visible. And here we start injecting a substance that is actually clogging up, for a certain amount of time, the venus outflow of the liver. We are producing an embolite, but that only lasts for about 20 to 30 minutes. Why are we doing this? Because we are sending after that some chemotherapy drugs into that area to make the concentration of the chemotherapy drug very high and have no dilution by blood dissipating. We are achieving a great deal of impact on the cancer.

Here [second scan on right] you see the effect of embolization into the two tumour sites.

The next one even showing you that treatment. That is one tumour, the venus outflow blocked by the emboli, and here is another one. The embolization substance is basically fat, little droplets of fat. But we know after 20 minutes our blood is managing to dissolve it and clear it again. And then chemotherapy was at least sitting there twenty minutes. This is the situation of the big tumour afterwards, the final result after trans-arterial chemo embolization.

And this is another picture which also shows the gall ducts of the liver, but this is what is left of those two big tumours. Now, when we have this, we can come in from the outside here with what is called a Laser Guided Wire and can now actually destroy the rest of this much smaller tumour because this area still contains tumour cells. Chemotherapy is not able to get rid of all tumour cells. Never. Never seen it. But now another technique called Laser Induced Thermo-Therapy can come in from the outside, from here, into the centre and basically coagulate — make hot — all of this with a healthy rim of about 1cm to actually destroy all these remaining cells. And that is the result after the LITT.

Now this one here is a damaged area of the liver, but we are pretty sure that there are no cancer cells left. The practical experience of patients treated that way shows that liver lesions, when they occur again, never come back in this area. And we have patients that are treated this way already six years out with no repeating liver lesions.

There are limitations to it: we cannot treat a liver that is full of small lesions, but one, two or three larger lesions in the liver can actually be treated very successfully.

[Slide with study results missing]

Two of those examples is certainly no proof to anybody that this protocol is working. That is why we did a larger prospective study: the number of patients is not very large — 22 patients with metastatic breast cancer received these protocols. 600mg of Indol-3-Carbinol, 3000mg of Biobran, 600mg of Imusan for six months after palliative chemotherapy. That means, patients who have already been in the metastatic disease. Now this non-toxic phytotherapy protocol was associated with stable tumour markers in 16 of those patients — 16 of 22 were at least stable for one year. And we saw an increase in NK cell activity in those ladies of 160 to 330%.

Now does that increase have something to do with stable tumour markers and feeling better? I am sorely convinced it does. These 16 patients also were followed up better with CT scan and bone scan — for those who had bone metastases. And we could see that stable disease, meaning that the metastases did not grow in the CT or no new metastases came in the bone scan. So overall, these 22 patients with that protocol fared very well. Does that mean it can be generally recommended? Certainly not. More money is needed; more study is needed. Does that convince conventional oncologists? Certainly not. Does it convince me? Yes, and I am here to tell you about it because it is you, and friends and families of patients who have to demand a change.

Coming to prostate cancer: now that is a protocol that we are very proud of because it is a bit older and we have used it a bit longer and it has a rather good success rate in patients that have nowhere else to turn. If you look at prostate cancer patients and their therapy options, these three conventional treatment options all have their problems, but for patients in Stage I and II, and for some even in Stage III, they are certainly very very valid options of treatment. But once the cancer has become hormone-refractory, meaning it does not depend any more on testosterone in the body of the patient then it becomes very difficult to treat, and chemotherapy that we have done in the 35 years for those patients has not improved anything on survival for those patients. It has been improving with regard to symptom control — newer protocols are certainly better than protocols twenty years ago — but we cannot say that chemotherapy has made a dent for those patients with hormone refractory cancer.

We embarked on a different route here too, and used this phytotherapy protocol. These four substances here called Prostasol, Curcumin Complex, Biobran and Imupros will be discussed in the next 10 or 15 minutes.

Prostasol is an extract of nine medicinal herbs with proven efficacy against prostate hyperplasia — that is the benign form of prostate enlargement — and also efficacy against cancer. We have seen in the laboratory that it produces the same process, namely apoptosis, in prostate cancer cell lines and even if patients take it orally, that same apoptosis is seen in cancer cells. It inhibits cancer growth in the laboratory, it reduces PSA, and in some patients with bone lesions in particular it reduces bone pain. What we have seen is that it is having efficacy in hormone-refractory cancer.

Now this is what we saw in experiments with Prostasol. There is a dose-dependent inhibition of cancer growth in the laboratory. There is also a down-regulation of PSA and androgen-receptor. This is something that prostate cancer cells have on their surface, androgen-receptors where testosterone normally docks on and stimulates the prostate cancer cell to grow. We have also seen something very interesting and we use it actually now: Prostasol sensitises somehow prostate cancer cells to heat and to radiation. So almost all of my cancer patients with prostate cancer that contemplate radiation therapy will start on Prostasol because of that synergism of that sensitisation of the prostate cancer cells to radiation.

Curcumin is known from turmeric root; it contains not only turmeric root — ground up material — but also extracts of turmeric root called curcuminoid. Bioperin is added to this product or compound because it improves the absorption of curcumin through the gut and Resveratrol is added for its highly active antioxidative effect. If you look at what is out there in the literature then you will find that curcumin inhibits the development of cancer cells in some animal models, it suppresses cancer growth once it is established, it has also anti-inflammatory effects, and antioxidative effects, and it also disturbs the new development of small blood vessels if the cancer wants to grow. This effect is called anti-angiogenesis.

Looking at the PSA of 24 hormone-refractory patents and of hormone-naive patients — that is those that have not been treated prior to hormone therapy — all of these patients were given 3 grams of curcumin a day and here is the timeline; there is the PSA; only this given, only curcumin and nothing else. You can already see a decrease for some patients in their PSA.

Biobran I already explained a bit about. Here you see what Biobran does given at 2g a day to patients with metastatic prostate cancer. Here is the activity of NK cells and here is the time in weeks. And 15 patients with metastatic disease were monitored and you see that 14 go up nicely and one doesn't. This patient died eight weeks after we started him on the protocol, unfortunately, because of wide-spread disease.

Imupros is the last compound in this protocol, and this shows you the composition… we use these single ingredients combined in Imupros because it is said they are packaged in small envelopes, so they are not reacting in the capsule or tablet with each other. And they are released in the gut at certain times: so Vitamin E comes out first, then this, then the green tea extract, then calcium, and so on and so on. We find this very nice for our patients because, before this product was out on the market developed in Holland, my patients had to take 30 capsules to get all the nutritional supplements that I thought were important for them. That is why we think this Imupros has plenty of advantages.

It provides nutritional factors for prostate health. It is certainly having enough scientific proof in the literature for each of the single ingredients with regard to prostate health. We are recommending it — and I do take it myself for five years, one to two tablets a day to avoid problems with my prostate — and for treatment purposes we recommend 3 to 4 tablets. Less tablets taken at less cost for my patients.

Now here again, for prostate cancer, two examples. This is a colleague of mine who was diagnosed at age 70 with metastatic prostate cancer and that happened in September of 2001. At the time he came to us his PSA was almost 1000, he had multiple lung lesions and bone metastases and pain that forced him into a wheelchair. His quality of life was markedly impaired.

He began the protocol with these substances with excellent results. Already seen after the first three months but then lasting until today. That is why I like to show this situation.

His PSA declined very fast over eight months to this level. Bone lesions then complete vanished, at least we cannot see them in the bone scan any more. Lung metastases vanished after 1 year — 90% — quality of life markedly improved: he is walking and doing his job today. This is his PSA when he stared, coming down to 0.1, today still there.

This is his lung picture before treatment. And you see where those arrows are, there are these multiple lung lesions. And this is in September 2001.

This is July 2002. The radiologist tells us there may be a little lesion still here or a scar, we really do not really know, but no symptoms any more.

That is the bone scan of that same patient. You will see where the arrows are: in particular, this one is the atlas that's our first vertebra, where our head sits on, of course a fracture in this area would be deleterious because not even breathing would be possible. And all these other black spots through the skeleton symbolise metastatic lesions. That was again in September or October 2001…

And there is the 2002 picture: after treatment you don't see any lesions any more. This one here is an old lesion from a knee accident — because technetium, the radioactive tracer used for this diagnostic, of course goes also to non-cancerous lesions if they have, or to non-cancerous areas of the bone, if they have a high metabolism. And an old fracture, for example, will show up in the same way, storing technetium.

The treatment result today: he is really feeling no pain any more, is active, and has still a PSA of 0.1 since July 2002.

The second patient I want to show had metastases to the lung and lymph nodes, he is 59, 2 years after radical prostatectomy, so the surgical removal of the prostate… the cancer came back. His PSA came up to close to 90, despite what is called complete hormonal blockade, that means despite the standard treatment. There was unclear abdominal pain. When a CT scan was done it showed lymphadenopathy meaning his lymph nodes were now involved and the cancer, the lymph nodes, got bigger and bigger. One of those lesions pushed on the urethra that connects the kidney to the bladder and a situation that is called hydronephrosis resulted — that is when the urine cannot flow from the kidney to the bladder and the urine backs up into the kidney, not noticed by the patient by the way because the patient usually has two kidneys, not seen in the laboratory or kidney function tests in the blood, but the kidney dies if it is backing up urine. Hydronephrosis — which causes dilation of the urethra [by the increase in urine pressure], dilating that little tube coming from the kidney to the bladder — can only be diagnosed with ultrasound, which is a good follow up method for prostate cancer patients with lymph node disease.

This patient also had a large pulmonary mass which means a large lesion in his lung. He refuses chemotherapy because his brother had the same cancer, had taken chemotherapy and died because of chemotherapy. That is also something we are not likely to tell patients that there is an inherent risk with each therapy to be causing problems, in particular with chemotherapy protocols, they have an inherent risk of 4 to 8% of mortality rate — that means chemotherapy is the one that kills the patient, not the cancer. Some protocols, so called high-dose chemotherapy, have a risk that goes up to 40%, that means we accept 40% death rate due to the treatment.

So I think we skip that…

Here I show you some CT scans. This is the lymphadenopathy that I am talking about before, and this, after the treatment. Section of lymphadenopathy here.

This is his lung cancer or his lung lesion, before and after… not there any more… February to June.

And of course I am always asked, "Do you only have good cases?" Of course not. We know that this protocol is effective in almost two thirds of the patients and that is something in those patients with hormonal-refractory cancer, but of course there are many patients that do not have benefit from it, and some only have short-lived benefits from it.

We did a trial that evaluates it but I will skip this all here… [lecture time was running out]

We included 194 patients in what is called a prospective study and saw that it really works.

This slide is my last slide and shows you what we know today. I have 5 years experience with this protocol and there is more than 1300 patients in the database now; we have experimental cell-culture data; we have already now two prospective studies.

This is what I can summarize: improvement we will see in about two-thirds of the patients, we will see PSA reduction in two-thirds of the patients — PSA reductions of more than 50% from baseline. We will see pain reduction go down in two-thirds of the patients and the side-effects we have seen are not too worrisome. There is a bit of breast nipple soreness in 5 to 10%, some breast swelling, that is reversible when we stop the protocol, and some dyspepsia, some soft stools at the beginning.

As I showed last year, I want to end my talk with a bit of medical history. And I like to show that slide again…

For some of you who have seen it, please bear with me, but it shows you that too much physician for you and for cancer patients is not beneficial. This shows a situation that is true history: in the past, 1973, physicians in Israel go on strike for one month; the number of funerals goes down by 50%. That same thing repeats in '76; that same thing repeats in your country in '78. And, what can we learn out of all of this? Maybe we physicians should go on permanent strike in the interest of our patients!

Thank you so much for your attention.

 

Copyright © Ben Pfeifer 2006

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