Supportive Vitamin C Therapy for Cancer Patients: Dr A. Hoffer

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Supportive Vitamin C Therapy for Cancer Patients

 

Cancer: Dr A. Hoffer

 

Clinical Procedures in Treating Terminally Ill Cancer

Patients with Vitamin C

by Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D

 

Let me tell you what I am not. I am not an oncologist,

I'm not a pathologist, I'm not a GP, I am a

psychiatrist. Therefore you may want to know what a

psychiatrist is doing messing about with cancer. I

think that'sa legitimate question so I'd like to tell

you briefly how I got into this very interesting

field.

 

In 1951, I was made director of psychiatric research

for the Department of Health for the province of

Saskatchewan. I didn't really know what to do. I had

one major advantage, I think, over my colleagues. I

didn't know any psychiatry. You may laugh but that's

very important because I didn't have anyone who could

tell me what we could not do. The most important

problem at that time was the schizophrenias. (They

still take up half the hospital beds, and we still

don't have an effective treatment. Dr. Humphry Osmond

and I began to research schizophrenia. We developed

the hypothesis that those with schizophrenia were

producing a toxic chemical made from adrenalin,

adrenochrome. Adrenochrome is an hallucinogen which we

felt was producing toxemia, in the sense that the

adrenochrome worked on the brain in the same way as

LSD. That was our hypothesis.

 

We knew that most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. We

didn't think we were going to be correct but we felt

that since we didn't have much choice we ought to work

with it and we also wanted to develop a treatment for

our schizophrenic patients. Those were the days before

tranquilizers. We didn't have any effective treatment.

We had shock treatment which was only temporarily

helpful and insulin coma was going out of style,

 

Adrenochrome is made from adrenalin, so we thought if

we could do something to cut down the production of

adrenalin, and if we could also prevent the oxidation

of adrenalin to adrenochrome, then we might have a

therapy for our patients. And that immediately led us

to look at two chemicals. One is called nicotinic acid

or vitamin B-3. Vitamin B-3 is known to be a methyl

acceptor, which, by depleting the body of its methyl

groups could cut down the conversion of noradrenaline

to adrenalin and that would be helpful, we thought.

Secondly, we wanted to use vitamin C as an

antioxidant. Looking back now it seems that we were 30

or 40 years ahead of antioxidant theories, We wanted

to decrease the oxidation of adrenaline to

adrenochrome. Vitamin C will do it but not very

effectively. And that drew our attention to these two

vitamins, vitamin C and vitamin Its. I had an

advantage because I had taken my Ph.D, at the

University of Minnesota on vitamins, so I knew their

background. That's why we started working with these

two compounds.

 

Why did we start working with cancer? We were very

curious about what these compounds would do. I recall

that in 1952 when I was working as a resident in

psychiatry at the Munroe Wing which was a part of the

General Hospital in Regina, a woman who had her breast

removed for cancer was admitted to our ward. She was

psychotic. This poor lady had developed a huge

ulcerated lesion, she wasn't healing, and she was in a

toxic delirium. Her psychiatrist decided that he would

give her shock treatment, which was the only treatment

available at that time. I decided I would like to give

her vitamin C instead. As director of research, I had

the option of going to the physicians and asking them

if I could do this with their patients, A friend of

mine was her doctor and he said, " Yes, you can have

her. " He said, " I'll withold shock treatment for three

days. "

 

I had thought that I would give her three grams per

day, which was our usual dose at that time, for a

period of weeks, but when he told me I could have

three days only, I decided that this would not do.

Therefore, I decided to give her one gram every hour.

I instructed the nurses that she was to be given a

gram per hour except when she was sleeping. When she

awakened, she would get the vitamin C that she had

missed. We started her on a Saturday morning and when

her doctor came back on Monday morning to start shock

treatment she was mentally normal. I wanted to know,

if vitamin C would have any therapeutic effect. To our

amazement her lesion on her breast began to heal. She

was discharged, mentally well, still having cancer and

she died six months later from her cancer. This was an

interesting observation which I had made at that time

and which I had never forgotten.

 

There was another root to this interest. In 1959, we

found that the majority of schizophrenic patients

excreted in their urine a factor that we call the

mauve factor, which we have since identified as

kryptopyrrole. I was looking for a good source of this

urinary factor. We had thought that the majority of

schizophrenics had it. We thought that normal people

did not have it but I was interested in determining

how many people who were stressed also had the factor.

Therefore, Iran a study of patients from the

University Hospital who were on the physical wards.

They had all sorts of physical conditions including

cancer, I found to my amazement that half the people

with lung cancer also excreted the same factor. By

1960, a very famous gentleman of Saskatchewan, one of

the professors retired and was admitted to the

psychiatric department at our hospital. He was

psychotic. He had been diagnosed as having a

bronchiogenic carcinoma. It had been biopsied and was

visualized in the x-ray and it had also been seen in

the bronchoscope. While they were deciding what to do,

he became psychotic so they concluded that he had

secondaries in his brain. Because he became psychotic,

he was no longer operable and instead they gave him

cobalt radiation. It didn't help the psychosis any. He

was admitted to our ward where he stayed for about two

months, completely psychotic. He was placed on the

terminal list, I discovered that he was on our ward,

so I though he may have some mauve factor in his

urine. On analysis he revealed huge quantities.

 

I had discovered by then that if we gave large amounts

of B3 along with vitamin C to these patients,

regardless of their diagnosis, they tended to do very

well. He was started on three grams per day each of

nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid on a Friday. On

Monday he was found to be normal. A few days later I

said to him, " You understand that you have cancer? " He

said, " Yes, I know that. " He was friendly with me

because I had treated his wife for alcoholism some

time before. I said to him, " If you will agree to take

these two vitamins as long as you live, I will provide

them for you at no charge. In 1960, I was the only

doctor in Canada that had access to large quantities

of vitamin C and niacin. They were distributed through

our hospital dispensary. He agreed. That meant he had

to come to my office every month in order to pick up

two bottles of vitamins. I didn't know that it might

help his cancer. I was interested only in his

psychological state.

 

However, to my amazement he didn't die. After 12

months, I was having lunch with the director of the

cancer clinic, a friend of mine, and I said to him,

" What do you think about this man? " And he said, " We

can't understand it, we can't see the tumor any more. "

I thought he'd say, " Well, isn't that great. " So I

asked, " Well, what's your reaction? " He responded, " We

are beginning to think we made the wrong diagnosis. "

The patient died, 30 months after I first saw him, of

a coronary.

 

Here's another case that is very interesting. A couple

of years later, a mother I had treated for depression

came back to see me. Once more she was depressed. She

said she had a daughter 16, who had just been

diagnosed as having an osteogenic sarcoma of the arm.

Her surgeon had recommended that the arm be amputated.

She was very depressed over this and so I asked her,

" Do you think you can persuade your surgeon not to

amputate the arm right away? " And I told her the

story about the man with the lung cancer. She brought

her daughter in and I started her on niacinamide, 3

grams per day, plus vitamin C, three grams per day.

She made a complete recovery and is still well, not

having had to have surgery. But this time I concluded

that maybe B-3 was the therapeutic factor. The reason

for that, of course, is very simple. I liked B3 and I

didn't have much interest in vitamin C.

 

When I moved to Victoria, another strange event

happened, In 1979, a woman developed jaundice and

during surgery a six centimeter in diameter lump in

the head of the pancreas was found. They were too

frightened to do a biopsy, which apparently is quite

standard. They thought that the biopsy might

disseminate the tumor. The surgeon closed and told her

to write her will. They said she might have three to

six months at the most. She was a very tough lady and

she had read Norman Cousins' book Anatomy of an

Illness. So she said to her doctor, " To hell with

that, I'm not going to die. " And she began to take

vitamin C on her own, 12 grams per day. When her

doctor discovered what she was doing, he asked her to

come and see me, because by that time I was identified

as a doctor who liked to work with vitamins.

 

I started her on 40 grams of vitamin C per day, to

which I added niacin, zinc and a multi-vitamin,

multimineral preparation. I had her change her diet by

staying away from high protein and fat. I didn't hear

from her again for about six months. One Sunday, she

called me. Normally when I get a call from a patient

on a Sunday, it's bad news. She immediately said, " Dr.

Hoffer, good news! I asked, " What's happened? " She

said, " They have just done a CT scan and they can't

see the tumor, " So then she said, " They couldn't

believe it. They thought the machine had gone wrong;

so they did it all over again. And it was also

negative the second time. " She had her last CT scan in

1984, no mass, and she is still alive and well today.

 

By this time, I had learned about Dr. Cameron's and

Dr. Pauling's work with vitamin C and I began to

realize that the main therapeutic factor might be the

vitamin C rather than vitamin B-3. The reason I want

to present four cases is that one might say that I

have seen four spontaneous recoveries. The question

is, how many spontaneous recoveries would one

physician see in his lifetime? I don't know. Maybe

this is not unusual but I think it is.

 

The last case I'm going to give details of was born in

1908. His mother died of cancer and his father had a

coronary at the age of 80. My patient had had a

myocardial infarction in 1969, and again in 1977,

followed by a coronary bypass. In March of 1978, he

suddenly developed pain in his left groin and down the

left leg. In February 1979, he developed a bulge in

his left groin, and later, severe pain with movement.

In surgery, a large mass infiltrating sarcoma was

found, part of which was removed, but a mass the size

of a grapefruit was left. The tumor was eroding into a

ramus of the pubic bone. They concluded that it was

not radiosensitive, In March he had palliative

radiation to his left half - 4500 rads. The pain was

gone at the end of the radiation. On May 28, he

developed a severe staph infection, and in June he was

very depressed because his wife was dying of cancer

and also he was suffering from drainage of chronic

infection. In July he still had a purulent discharge

in two areas. Now the mass was visible and palpable in

the left iliac area above the inguinial ligaments.

 

In January of 1980, he saw me for the first time. I

started him on 12 grams of vitamin C per day and I

recommended to his referring doctor that he give him

IV ascorbic acid, 2.5 grams, twice per week, which he

agreed to. I gave him niacin, vitamin B6 and zinc to

balance it out. In April, the mass began to regress

and the ontologist wrote, " This is interesting, it

must be something else. " In other words, the patient

said, the vitamin C is helping and the oncologist

said, no it isn't, The oncologist put a note in the

file, " He's probably responding to chemotherapy. " But

he had never had chemotherapy. The infection was gone.

In May 1980, his x-ray showed reconstruction of the

left superior pubic ramus. In July he wrote to me

telling how grateful he was to be so well. In February

of 1988, he went back to the cancer clinic for some

recurrent facial skin carcinoma. He died in the fall

of 1989 of coronary disease when he was 81. This man

survived 10 years after having been diagnosed with

cancer,

 

My practice began to grow because the first patient

felt it was her duty to tell as many people as

possible that I had the cure for cancer. Now I should

tell you the nature of my practice. In Canada we have

a referral service. I do not take walk-ins. Every

patient that comes to my office must be referred by

their family doctor or by a specialist, During the

early years, patients usually went to their doctor and

said, " I have had all this treatment, you have told me

I'm not going to do any better, will you please refer

me to Dr. Hoffer. " So I call these patient-generated

referrals, The past four or five years, it has swung

around and I am now getting a lot more doctor

generated referrals. Doctors, themselves are beginning

to refer their patients to me.

 

I would think that 80% of my patients had failed to

respond to any of combination of treatment, including

surgery, radiation or chemotherpy. Usually the story

was that they were told by either the cancer clinic or

their doctor that there was nothing more that they

could do. Most of them were terminal, but not all. I

see three to five new cases of cancer every week. All

of them have been treated by their own doctor, their

own ontologist, their own surgeon. What I do is advise

them with respect to diet and the kind of nutrients

they ought to take. I am seeing them much earlier in

the stage of illness, which I think is very good

because the earlier I can get to them, the better are

the results.

 

Here are the results. Generally, the patients were a

lot more cheerful. They had less discomfort and they

lived a lot longer, A few years ago I was at a meeting

at Woods Hole with Linus Pauling. This was a

Festschrift for Dr. Arthur Sackler. I told Linus that

I thought I had something, that I was beginning to see

the impact of adding vitamin C to their program. Dr.

Pauling encouraged me to work it up, to do a really

careful survey and write it up for publication, which

I did. I examined every cancer patient referred to me

between July 1978 and April 1988 and followed them to

January 1990. I did not miss a single case. A total of

134 were seen. And I dated the time that they first

saw me as day zero. The only thing I wanted to look at

was survival. I wanted hard data, something that

couldn't be argued with. I wasn't going to say the

patients were better or not better because these are

subjective terms. These 134 fell into two groups. It

wasn't my fault that this happened because I treated

every one of them exactly the same way. I did not plan

a double blind prospective study. What I planned and

what I did was to advise every patient what I thought

they ought to do in terms of their cancer. If they

were getting radiation, I suggested they stay with it.

If they were getting chemotherapy, I suggested they

stay with that. I never advised them about their

surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. However, out of

these 134, there were 33 who did not or could not

follow the program. For example, on chemotherapy, they

were so nauseated that they couldn't hold anything

down and if they couldn't hold the vitamins down they

weren't going to do very much good. There were some

who didn't believe in the program.

 

I remember one woman with breast cancer came to see me

and I advised her what to take, sending a consultation

letter to the referring doctor outlining what I

thought she ought to be taking. When she went back to

see her doctor, he laughed at her. He made so much fun

of her that she became thoroughly ashamed and she

wouldn't follow the program. She died two or three

months later. Another case was a doctor who had cancer

and was given 30 days. He had left his wife and was

running around with his girl friend. Since he knew he

was going to die, he decided that he would spend the

next 30 days living as riotously as he could. He would

travel all across the United States and have as much

fun in 30 days as he could. His girlfriend brought him

to see me because she wanted him to live longer than

30 days. He didn't believe her and he never started

the program. He went to the United States and died 30

days later. These are some examples of people who

wouldn't or couldn't follow the program, Or they

weren't on the vitamin program long enough. I had

found that they must be on the program at least two

months before it began to work. These were my

pseudocontrols. They're not really a double blind

control, it's kind of pseudocontrol which provides an

estimate of the kind of patient that I was seeing.

 

The other 101 did stay on their program at least two

months. Some went off in the third or fourth month but

they stayed on it for at least two months. I was

encouraged by Linus Pauling. I followed them all.

First of all, I contacted their doctors. I contacted

the patients that were still alive. I contacted their

families. I got all their records from the cancer

clinics. I had a complete file on every patient I had

seen so that I knew within a matter of months exactly

what had happened to them. The results were analyzed

by Dr. Linus Pauling using a new technique for

analyzing cohorts. The data is as follows: 33 controls

- they survived an average of 5.7 months, from the

first day that I saw them. There were two treatment

cohorts: a cohort of 40 females with cancer of the

breast, ovary, uterus or cervix. The second cohort of

61 were other types of cancer. The cohorts were

divided into two groups. First were the poor

responders, those who didn't do well; they survived an

average of 10 months, nearly twice as long as the

control. The others, the good responders, were divided

into two groups. The female group survived an average

of 122 months and the other group 72 months. I think

this is very significant. There was a tremendous

difference in the survival rate. Today, all the

controls are dead, 50% of the treated group are still

alive. Over the past year, I did another survey and of

the remainder only three more have died. It can not be

all due to cancer because I'm dealing with a

population with ages between 60 and 80. They are going

to die of other causes as well. This was published in

the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Volume 5, p.

143, 1990.

 

The Treatment

First of all, as I pointed out, I did not interfere

with the treatment done by the oncologists. These

patients were treated by their own doctors and I went

along with whatever they did. No one can accuse me of

depriving these patients of having had the best of

chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation. What I tried to

do was to improve their general health, to improve

their immune system, to the point that they could cope

more successfully with their tumors. Many of them were

depressed when they came to see me, The first thing I

would do would be to create a bit of hope. I don't

think many doctors in cancer clinics realize the

absolute importance of hope.

 

Let me give you another case. A woman came to see me

with cancer of the breast. She didn't want to have any

surgery and so she had taken a huge quantity of

nutrients, including vitamin A, 500,000 units per day

at one of the clinics in the USA, She wasn't doing

well, the mass had opened up, she was ulcerated and in

a terrible state. When she came to see me, she said to

me, " Dr. Hoffer, (she was very depressed) you are my

last hope. " I asked, " What do you mean? " She replied,

" A week ago, when I went to see my family doctor, I

asked when can I see you again. He said he would not

give me another appointment, because I would be dead

within a week, " Now, that's very negative, Hope is

very important. She didn't die a week later, We

started her on the program. Eventually, I persuaded

her to have surgery and chemotherapy. She survived

more than 30 months after that first day,

 

Hope is extremely important. Attitude is very

important. Patients must want to live. You may be

surprised to know that many people, when they are told

they have cancer, are quite relieved, because they now

know they don't have to live much longer. They are

really quite happy to go. So you have to test the

attitude of the patient. Those who came to see me, of

course, were preselected, they selected themselves. So

they did have the right attitude, they did want to

live. They have to be optimistic and I do think it

helps if they laugh a lot. I agree with Norman

Cousins, that if you combine laughter with vitamins,

you do get better results.

 

Then I advise my patients what kind of nutrition they

ought to follow. The first thing I try to do is to cut

their fat way down. I try to cut it down below 30

percent of calories, down to 20 or 10, if possible. I

find that, in our culture, the easiest way to do that

is to totally eliminate all dairy products. If you

eliminate all dairy products and cut out all fatty

meats, it's pretty hard to get too much fat in the

diet. So, I put them all on a dairy free program. I

reduce, but I don't eliminate, meat and fish, and I

ask them to increase their vegetables, especially raw,

as much as they can. I think it's a good, reasonable

diet, which most people can follow without too much

difficulty. Having spent some time with them going

over what they ought to eat, I begin to talk about the

nutrients. The first one, of course, is vitamin C. I

am convinced today that vitamin C is the most

important single nutrient that one can give to any

person with cancer. The dose is variable. I find that

most patients can Lake 12 grams per day without much

difficulty, that's the crystallin vitamin C sodium

ascorbate or calcium ascorbate. They take one teaspoon

three times per day. If they do not develop diarrhea,

I ask them to increase it until this occurs and then

to cut back below that level. I think in many cases it

would be desirable to use intravenous vitamin C and

there are doctors now in Canada doing that. The amount

that one gives is limited by the skill of the

physician, not by the patient.

 

I also add vitamin B-3, either niacin or niacinamide.

I prescribe from 500 mg to 1500 mg per day. Before I

did that empirically, now there is a lot of evidence

that B3 does have pretty interesting anticancer

properties. Two years ago, in Texas at one of the

osteopathic colleges, there was an international

congress, Vitamin B-3 and Cancer. There is a lot of

work being done in this area today. I also add a B

complex preparation 50 or 100. I think vitamin E is

an extremely important antioxidant and I use that as

well, 800 to 1200 I. U. They also get 25,000 to 75,000

units of beta carotene. I sometimes use vitamin A. I

like to use folic acid for lung cancer, and for cancer

of the uterus because of work that hag been done

showing that folic acid might reverse a positive pap

smear to negative. I use selenium, 200 mcg, three

times per day. I think the toxicity of selenium has

been greatly exaggerated. I had a patient from Chile,

a refugee, who developed a severe lymphoma. He was

operated on but it came back. He had radiation and it

recurred. He had been a patient of mine for the

treatment of depression when he developed his cancer.

He was given three months to live. I had started him

on selenium, 600 mcg per day. Like many patients, he

thought if 600 is good, more is even better. He came

back and said he was taking 2 mg per day, or 2,000

mcg. I became a bit concerned about that and suggested

he cut down to 1,000. In any event, he recovered and

he has now been alive for seven years. There is no

evidence of tumor, and his major problem today is

reorienting himself in a foreign culture. So I use

selenium and I use a lot of it. I use some zinc,

especially for prostatic cancers and I do use

calcium-magnesium preparations. So this is the basic

nutrient program that they all follow. The cost ranges

from $50 to $75 per month. People who are dying from

cancer don't mind paying this.

 

What are this program's advantages? Well, first of

all, the increase in longevity. We have increased the

longevity from 5.7 months to approximately 100 months,

which is very substantial, and half of the patients

are still alive. There has been a tremendous decrease

in pain and anxiety, even amongst those who were

dying. We do not have the final answer, but we have at

least a partial answer. The use of nutrients, like

vitamin C and B-3 increase the efficacy of

chemotherapy by increasing its killing effect on the

tumor and decreasing its toxicity on normal tissues.

The same has been shown to be true with radiation

therapy.

 

My conclusion is that vitamin C must be a vital

component of every cancer treatment program. I believe

the other nutrients help, adding 20% to 30% to

longevity.

 

What do we need? We need a definitive study. When I

did the study, when I wrote it up with Dr. Linus

Pauling, it wasn't our belief that we had answered the

question. We hoped that this would stimulate enough

interestfor the institutes that have the finances and

the time to do these studiesto get going and do them

properly. We need a definitive large-scale study to

tease out the relative value of all the nutrients.

This is extremely important. I am not telling you that

I have a treatment for cancer; I say that we have

improved the results of treatment. My conclusion is

that the best treatment for cancer today is a

combination of the best that modem medicine can offer,

surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, combined with the

best of what orthomolecular physicians can offer,

which is nutrition, nutrients and hope.

 

(Reprinted with the permission of the author.)