Defeat Cancer (9 page)

Dr. Gonzalez’s research and experiences also led him to write a book based on the therapy, entitled
One Man Alone: An Investigation of Nutrition, Cancer, and William Donald Kelley
. This monograph, completed in 1986 and published in 2010 by New Spring Press, describes his investigation of Dr. William Donald Kelley’s work and has been generating interest in the alternative and conventional medical world for over two decades. He also wrote a book entitled
The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer
, a work which he co-authored with his colleague, Linda Isaacs, MD, which discusses, from the perspective of contemporary molecular biology, the pioneering research of Dr. John Beard. It provides a scientific rationale for the anti-cancer effects of pancreatic enzymes and their efficacy in the treatment of cancer, and includes case reports from Dr. Gonzalez and Dr. Isaacs’ practice. Since 2000, Dr. Gonzalez has also been writing a series of books detailing the history, theory, practice, and success of the therapy in his own practice.

Over the years, Dr. Gonzalez has regularly contributed as a guest on health-related talk radio programs such as Robert Scott Bell, LIME radio, Deborah Ray, Ron Hoffman, and Robert Atkins. His work has been positively featured in many consumer oriented venues, including
Prevention, Total Health, Alternative Medicine, Life Extension, Longevity,
and
New Yorker,
among others.

He has received many awards, including the following:

• Teagle Scholar award from Cornell University Medical School (1982).
  
• Ernst L. Wynder Award from The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. (2000). (Dr. Wynder was the first scientist to confirm the link between cigarette smoking and cancer).
  
• Distinguished Pioneer in Alternative Medicine Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Innovative Medicine (2000).
  
• Integrity in Science Award from the Weston A. Price Foundation (2010).
  

Dr. Gonzalez has been in private practice in New York City since 1987, treating patients diagnosed with cancer and other serious degenerative illnesses.

My approach to cancer; what it is, what causes it, and how to treat it is similar to that of the early 1900s English scientist John Beard, DSc, who developed a ground-breaking theory on cancer over 100 years ago. Conventional medicine believes that cancer develops from mature, healthy cells that go “berserk,” mutate, and turn cancerous. Dr. Beard believed that cancer didn’t come from mature cells, but from residual trophoblast cells that remain in all of us and which are scattered throughout our tissues and organs. Embryonic trophoblast cells are the earliest precursors to the placenta; the scattered trophoblast cells in the mature organism serve as stem cells, regenerating new tissues as replacements are needed. They sit quietly most of the time, but can, at some point, start growing just like the placenta, as the result of a stimulus, such as an infection or inflammation, but unlike the placenta, they grow in the wrong place and at the wrong time. And just as the placenta grows and invades into the uterus, cancer cells grow fast and invade local tissues and organs.

When Dr. Beard’s view that cancer was caused by misplaced trophoblasts (which are the type of cells produced by the placenta) growing in the wrong place at the wrong time was published in a
book nearly 100 years ago, in 1911, people thought that he was crazy, even though he was an eminent university professor who was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work in embryology. Indeed, he was a prominent embryologist, but people thought he had gone off the deep end when it came to cancer.

His theory, however, is similar to what molecular biologists are saying today; that cancer cells resemble misplaced trophoblasts (or placental cells) in many ways. They grow fast like placental cells, produce their blood supply in the same manner as placental cells, and are invasive like placental cells. Much of their molecular biology is identical to placental cells, and they use exactly the same invasive techniques in the body that placental cells use when they invade the uterus. Additionally, their transcription and other factors are similar so biologists are now beginning to study Beard’s early tumor model. (Transcription factors are molecules that are involved in controlling gene expression). So Beard may not have been that far off in his thinking, but it’s sad that 100 years of research have been lost in the meantime. If researchers had listened to Beard back in 1911, knowledge of cancer biology today would be more extensive. At my office, we look at cancer as Beard did.

The second component of Beard’s hypothesis was that while the placenta initially grows, develops, proliferates rapidly, invades tissue, and develops a blood supply like a cancer, at some point, it changes completely and stops doing all of these things. The mature placenta is a very benign tissue, and is a necessary link between the embryo and the mother’s blood supply in mammals. Cancer is different from placental cells in that it never stops growing and invading—and ultimately kills us, whereas placental cells, at a predetermined point, suddenly change completely and stop behaving like a cancer. Beard spent years trying to figure out what the signal was that caused the placental cells to stop acting like invasive cancer cell tissue, and one day realized that that it was when the embryonic pancreas became active. This led him to formulate his thesis that pancreatic enzymes control trophoblastic destiny, and since trophoblasts are like cancer cells, and enzymes control trophoblast activity, pancreatic enzymes are useful for controlling
cancer and can therefore be used in cancer therapy. So these enzymes became the essence of his therapy.

Interestingly, a lot of molecular biologists, such as Max S. Wicha, MD, at the University of Michigan, also now believe that cancer doesn’t develop from mature cells gone “berserk” but from stem cells. Stem cells are used to replace cells that are lost through normal turnover, aging, disease and injury, and their role in cancer development is a hot topic in modern research. We think that these cells are what Beard really identified, because he described the misplaced trophoblasts that he found as being microscopic, primitive, undifferentiated cells that are scattered throughout our tissues, which basically also describes stem cells. So we believe that stem cells were discovered by Dr. Beard in 1902, even though they weren’t officially recognized as such until 1960. In summary, Dr. Beard’s misplaced trophoblasts are what we today call stem cells, and these are the source of cancer.

The incidence of cancer has increased dramatically in recent years. I have been in practice for twenty-three years and I have seen things change a lot. When I was in medical school in the early 1980s, I was taught that cancer was an old person’s disease. When I started out in practice, I didn’t see twenty year-olds with cancer; now I see them almost routinely. Back then, if I saw young adults with cancer, it was usually because they had twenty years of smoking under their belts. But today, I see young adults with breast, metastatic lung, and other types of cancer and these cancers are far more aggressive than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, and I think the reasons are environmental. Just recently, I consulted on a twenty-four year-old patient with metastatic breast cancer, and a twelve year-old with pancreatic cancer. This is happening because the world is more polluted than it used to be, and each year, it gets worse.

Assuming that Dr. Beard’s theory about cancer is correct, why would these toxins affect the development of cancer in a person? He wrote in his book 100 years ago that any type of inflammation,
irritation or toxic exposure could cause these immature trophoblast cells to start dividing. So, whether you believe that cancer is caused by mutations of mature cells or by trophoblasts, there is no question that environmental toxins stimulate cancer growth. And it’s for this reason that younger people are now getting cancer.

There are all kinds of toxins in the environment, both appreciated and unappreciated. Recently, I read that over 75,000 chemicals have been approved for industrial use in the United States. One of my European doctor friends told me that artillery shells are now coated in inactivated uranium. Uranium is among the heaviest of metals and can penetrate walls, tanks, and artillery. It’s also 98% radioactive, so no matter what anyone’s politics are, every time the military utilizes one of these artillery shells, in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the place may be, they are increasing environmental radiation. Over the past ten years, tens of thousands of artillery shells have been discharged in war, which has added a significant load of unappreciated radiation toxicity into our environment.

So there are a lot of toxins in the environment that weren’t even there ten years ago. Many of these toxins are mutagenic and carcinogenic, so whether people believe in Beard’s theory or in a more traditional origin of cancer, there’s no question that chemical toxins in the environment are stimulating cancer development in humans.

Although my treatment protocol is complex, it can basically be simplified into three components: diet, nutrient supplementation (including pancreatic enzymes), and detoxification.

The first component of my protocol involves putting patients on a specific diet, which in our practice, we individualize. We (my colleague Linda Isaacs, MD and I) differ from a lot of other alternative health care practitioners in that we don’t just have one cancer diet for everyone. We have ten basic diets that range from pure, raw
vegetarian nut and seed diets, to red meat Atkins’ diets in which people eat fatty red meat a couple of times per day. We then have ninety different variations on each of the ten basic diets. So we have balanced diets that involve a combination of plant and animal foods, as well as more extreme vegetarian and carnivorous diets, with lots of variations in-between.

Food is fuel for the body, and because our bodies are the most sophisticated engines on earth, they require the most sophisticated types of fuel. Humans aren’t like white rats, that all look the same and have the same nutritional requirements. Our requirements differ, depending upon many factors, including our ancestry. For instance, the Masai in Africa traditionally subsisted on raw milk and blood. The Eskimos lived on red meat while the Polynesians consumed fruits and fish. The Pygmies in the Congo ate plants, and the Indians in the Eastern United States consumed over 1,000 edible plants in the woods where they lived. All of these different groups thrived on different diets which satisfied their nutritional needs. If you give the wrong diet to the wrong person, it’s like putting water into your car’s engine. The proper fuel must be put into the right engine. And humans have variable needs, because their ancestors adapted to a lot of different ecological niches with different available food supplies. The Masai, Eskimos, and other groups were very healthy when they stuck to their traditional diets.

So I must first determine for my patients what diet they need to be on, because food is fuel for the body, and every molecule that comprises us, everything that we are, comes from our food. It doesn’t come from anywhere else. If I put a vegetarian on a meat diet, “all hell is going to break loose” in that person’s body. If I put a meat eater on a vegetarian diet, that person will get sicker. It’s important to give the body the right fuel. It works better when we do. The same is true of nutritional supplements. My patients’ diet protocols are formulated based on their biochemistry.

Biochemistry also determines the type of cancer people will get. Those who, genetically, should be vegetarians and on a plant-based
diet, tend to get solid tumors of the breast, colon, pancreas, lungs, liver, intestine, stomach, uterus, ovaries, and so on. People who, genetically, should be meat eaters tend to get immune cancers: leukemias, myelomas, and lymphomas, as well as connective tissue cancers like sarcomas. Omnivores, or balanced people, fall somewhere in-between, but in general, they don’t tend to get cancer as often as the other two groups. Most cancer develops in those who genetically should be extreme meat eaters or extreme vegetarians. Their biochemistry determines what kind of diet they need to be on, as well as what kind of cancer they are susceptible to.

Along with a specific diet plan, I recommend individualized nutritional supplement plans to my patients. Some require a wide variety of high-dose supplements, but not all, since each patient’s protocol is individualized. I find, for instance, that vegetarians need different supplements than meat eaters. Vegetarians tend to do well with potassium, magnesium, a lot of the B-vitamins, and Vitamin C. They don’t do well with Vitamin E. Meat eaters have great results with calcium, zinc, selenium, and Vitamin E, but don’t do well when they take magnesium and potassium. They also don’t do well with most B-vitamins (except for B-12 and a few others), large doses of Vitamin C and D, manganese and chromium, whereas vegetarians tend to do well with the latter minerals. Balanced people are somewhere in-between and do well with all kinds of vitamins, minerals and trace elements.

The approach that conventional medicine takes to researching nutrients and their effects upon people is nonsensical. The conventional approach yields results that are “all over the map.” For instance, when testing the effects of selenium upon the body, researchers will give the same dose of the same type of selenium to everyone, but a vegetarian needs a different dose of selenium than a meat eater, so the results will be skewed because of this factor. Also, doing tests this way doesn’t take into account a person’s entire system. In my practice, we prescribe different forms of calcium, depending upon the patient’s metabolism. Nutrients facilitate every
reaction in the body, and they are extremely powerful, for good and for bad. The wrong dose of the wrong nutrient to the wrong person will cause chaos in the body, which is also why the “one-size-fits all” studies are crazy. They also don’t make sense because their results are assessed independently of the impact that the particular tested nutrient has upon other nutrients in the body. Thus, the overall effect of a given nutrient upon the body cannot be accurately determined in isolation. Nutrients work together with other nutrients; for example, Vitamin E protects selenium and selenium protects Vitamin E; Vitamin C protects both Vitamin E and selenium, so if I give a patient Vitamin C with selenium and vitamin E, I don’t need to give high doses of any of these nutrients, because they are preserving the effects of each other. There are very complex interactions between all of the nutrients, and vegetarians need different supplements in different doses than meat eaters do, so it’s important to give the right supplements to the right people. When this principle is respected, and patients are prescribed a proper diet, every system in the body works better, from the neurological system, to the endocrine system, to all the others.