Alternative Cancer

Alternative Cancer on
CNN's Larry King Live

© By Peter Barry Chowka

(October 18, 2009) Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., the subject of a two part interview series published in September 2009 in Natural Healthline, has informed me that an hour long program he taped one week ago on Larry King Live is scheduled to run on CNN during the week of October 19, 2009 – most likely on Tuesday 10/20 or Friday 10/23 – at 9 PM EDT with replays at 12 midnight ET and 3 AM ET.

The main subject of the program is actress and best-selling author Suzanne Somers. A long time proponent of alternative medicine, Somers has written a new book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place (Crown), which is being published on October 20, 2009 and, as of this writing, is #188 on Amazon.com.

Also appearing on the program, according to Gonzalez, are Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D.,Ph.D., and two alternative cancer therapy “antagonists.”

On March 28, 2001, Somers, then 54 years old, appeared on Larry King Live to announce that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 but had chosen to use primary alternative instead of conventional treatments.

As I reported on April 1, 2001:

Somers, a high-profile celebrity and author of best-selling diet and fitness books who initially rose to fame on the ABC-TV sitcom Three's Company in the late 1970s, said she was going public after a year-long private battle with cancer in order to counter the National Enquirer's recent reports that she had undergone liposuction because her much-hyped diet program had failed. On the CNN program, Somers confirmed that she had undergone procedures at the Lasky Clinic in Beverly Hills but said that “What I had done [there] had to do with my breast cancer.”

Somers said her cancer was diagnosed in April 2000 after which she had surgery (she implied it was a lumpectomy and not a mastectomy) followed by radiation therapy. She then went against her doctors' wishes, she said, and declined chemotherapy — and she started taking the alternative treatment Iscador, a mistletoe extract. Iscador is popular in parts of Europe but relatively unknown in the U.S. Somers incorrectly described Iscador as “homeopathic.” In fact, it is an herbal therapy that is part of Anthroposophical Medicine, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, PhD (1861-1925), a European philosopher, scientist, educator, and the founder of Anthroposophy.

Back in 2001, Somers’ decision to go the alternative therapy route was immediately challenged by the medical Establishment. A feature article in People magazine on April 20, 2001, “A Matter of Choice,” described Somers’ treatment and the ensuing controversy.

On May 1, 2001, I reported at length on the story and on a new study of Iscador, published May 1, 2001 in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. My article included an interview with the journal’s editor, David  Riley, M.D.  

Regarding Burzynski, I wrote about him at length in an article originally written in 1993 and later published in 1997 in Nutrition Science News. Some excerpts:

Stanislaw Burzynskii, M.D., Ph.D., Houston, TX, 2007 at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of his work

Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D. Burzynski is one of the leading contemporary pioneers in the field of nontoxic cancer therapy. His therapeutic discoveries are interesting, and his personal story is fascinating and instructive. Burzynski's work was reported on positively on the probing network television investigative series 20/20 (ABC-TV, October 22, 1981) and Street Stories (CBS-TV, July 23, 1993), and more recently, ABC-TV's Nightline and CBS This Morning (April and March, 1995, respectively).

One of the youngest and brightest M.D.-Ph.D.s in his native Poland, Burzynski left home in 1970 in search of personal and professional freedom in the non-communist West. What he found instead in the U.S., he has said, was a situation reminiscent of the authoritarian one-party state he had left behind -- a scientific system in America that was run like a Communist politburo, where true innovation and independent discovery were frowned on and where pioneering thinkers were relegated to a “medical gulag.”

Through the mid-1970s, Burzynski was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The research projects he worked on received funding from traditional sources including the federal government. Burzynski's decision in 1977 to leave Baylor and start up his own small research and treatment facility where he and his colleagues could pursue their myriad ideas and discoveries and treat late-stage cancer patients free of bureaucratic rigidity and interference, however, did not sit well with the medical powers that be.

Before he left Baylor but especially after he began working independently, Burzynski and his associates published numerous scientific papers on antineoplastons -- his term for the nontoxic urinary peptides that he discovered and that form the basis of his novel approach to treating cancer. Burzynski followed the accepted practice of publishing scientific papers on his discoveries, which he initially tested in laboratory tissue cultures and later in animals and humans.

Typical of Burzynski's extraordinary results were the outcomes for early groups of advanced cancer patients treated with antineoplastons: 60 percent enjoyed objective remission, 47 percent experienced complete remission, and 20 percent survived for over five years without cancer. These and other results are far superior to anything reported then or now for standard cancer treatments. (For example, in 1985 interleukin-2 was heavily promoted by orthodoxy, supposedly as a highly promising new treatment after a single study showed it to have been associated with a complete remission from cancer in only one patient out of twenty-four treated -- a positive response rate of only four percent!)

By choosing to work indepedently, on his own, outside of a mainstream institutional setting, Burzynski ran up against the closed mindsets and vested interests that dominate orthodox cancer research and treatment. In 1983, the influential American Cancer Society (ACS), without actually testing Burzynski's therapy or even visiting his facility, added Burzynski's antineoplastons to its list of “unproven” or “questionable” methods -- a kind of blacklisting that typically represents the first step in official marginalization. In the view of journalist [Robert] Houston and other independent observers, it is highly unlikely that a scientist whose name appears on this list can ever succeed in gaining official funding or recognition of any kind. “It's like trying to get out of hell,” Houston quips.

The entire article including more about Burzynski can be read here.

In 2007, Burzynski was a honored at a 30th anniversary celebration attended by 600 guests including long term recovered patients marking his three decades of work curing cancer with alternative methods. Julian Whitaker, M.D.’s account of the event was published in 2008 in The Townsend Letter.

Peter Barry Chowka is a writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media.