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For a number of years, he served as the only oncologist in northern Nevada who would treat cancer patients who were also under the care of an alternative medical physician. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (ATHM): How early in life do you remember wanting to become a doctor? When I got to my senior year, they called me into the dean's office and said, "We looked over your file and your financial statement, and we don't think you are going to be able to finish med school because your finances are so bad." Or their platelet count went down to 4000 or 10000 and they are bleeding internally, and you have to keep them in the hospital 2 weeks to stop the bleeding and then give them blood platelets every day.
James Forsythe, md, HMD, was a standard allopathic physician before he also became boarded as a homeopathic physician. He is respected for his treatment of cancer and the legal use of human growth hormone. For a number of years, he served as the only oncologist in northern Nevada who would treat cancer patients who were also under the care of an alternative medical physician. He started the oncology units at all 3 major hospitals in Reno, Nevada, as well as the Veterans Hospital Oncology Clinic. He also was the founding father for Reno's Ronald McDonald House. Most notably he warned of the "Cancer Cluster" in Fallon, Nevada, due to high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. He has addressed practitioners all over the world and is the author of numerous books and book chapters. ( Altern Vier Health Med. 2015;21(2):54-59.)
Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (ATHM): How early in life do you remember wanting to become a doctor?
Dr Forsythe: I think it was somewhere around the eighth or ninth grade, as I recall. My main motivation came from a friend of mine. My family had moved from Michigan to Southern California and the father of one of my friends was a cancer doctor-a surgeon, though. I was always impressed with his presence and bearing and the way he carried himself. I do not know just how to describe it... he had an aura about him that was magical, and I thought he was neat guy.
Before that time, I probably would have been thinking that I wanted to be a movie director, at one time, and an engineer. You know how kids are: They go through all of these things. Being a doctor at that time seemed like it was something I could do. I would have to put my nose to the grindstone, so to speak, and really work hard with my grades. I really thought I could do it. I never lost that motivation and I never wanted to change my majors or deviate from that at all-from the eighth or ninth grade through where I am now.
ATHM: After you decided that you were interested in medicine, were there any experiences you had along the way toward medical school that stuck with you?
Dr Forsythe: I can't say. Our family never really had a lot of chronic medical problems, and I never met my grandparents. On both sides of my family, they had passed away. There were no old-age problems in growing up and, frankly, as far as neighbors and others were concerned, there was not that much going on. I never spent a lot of time in hospitals or anything like that growing up. So, I would have to say no. It was just something that seemed right for me. It was just one of those things that you have a calling to and you don't know why, but it was there.
ATHM: Where did you go to medical school?
Dr Forsythe: I went to Berkeley from 1956 to 1960. I had pretty good grades-an A-minus average. My major was biochemistry and physiology. When I applied to medical school, I applied to just 2: McGill in Canada-we thought it would be fun to live in Canada-then, I applied to the University of California, San Francisco, which was the one that I could actually afford. I really had to do everything on my own. My mother had been married 5 different times, and there was no money coming in. So, I worked side jobs and got scholarships. I knew that UCSF would be best because the tuition was cheap and I could use some of my skills-I was trained as a lab tech and a pharmacy assistant. I had had quite a bit of experience while going through Berkeley, doing different jobs. At UCSF I would be able to do some of those jobs part-time to get through school.
ATHM: As you progressed in your medical school, what influences affected your perspective on medicine the most?
Dr Forsythe: Of course, it was very competitive. Everyone was just trying to get through the first couple of years because we were told that if you made it through your junior year, you were pretty much guaranteed to graduate. In order to keep up my scholarships I had to get above a B-plus average. In my own class, I was able to be a teaching assistant in physiology. I actually helped my classmates get through that mandatory course in our second year and got paid for it at the same time. I also lectured for my classmates because I had a degree in physiology and had a lot more knowledge than they did-just enough to make me the teaching assistant.
When I got to my senior year, they called me into the dean's office and said, "We looked over your file and your financial statement, and we don't think you are going to be able to finish med school because your finances are so bad." At that time I had a wife and a child, and she was unable to work. I said, "I'll see what I can do to make more money to get through." I joined the military as a senior-year student and they made me a second lieutenant. I got paid during my whole senior year as a second lieutenant, and that helped me immensely. I actually came out of medical school without any debt and was fortunate enough to get an internship at the Presidio of San Francisco-which was only a couple of miles from my house-by the bay at a beautiful hospital, Letterman Army Hospital.
I took a rotating internship and I still was not really sure what specialty I wanted. I knew that I was not going to ever be a pediatrician. I did not like that, and I didn't think I was good enough with my hands to be an orthopedist or a neurosurgeon or an eye surgeon. I was thinking of internal medicine or psychiatry. The field of oncology had not yet been established, believe it or not, back in 1964 or 1965.1 did know that the Vietnam War was looming on the horizon and that I was not anxious to go southeast Asia. I felt that by taking a pathology residency in the army I would be less likely to go because they did not need a whole lot of pathologists in Vietnam, so I thought.
I applied for and got a pathology residency at Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu and spent the next 2 years in beautiful Hawaii. Then, I got transferred to the 82nd Airborne in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and became a paratrooper doctor and also ran the laboratory at the hospital at the base. I got orders for Vietnam and moved my family back to Los Angeles where my wife could be with her parents while I was gone. I had 2 children at that time.
As we arrived in Vietnam, our plane was being shot at by the Vietcong. The plane had to circle the runway and we almost had to go and land in the Philippines or somewhere else because of the danger. Finally, the troops on the ground controlled the fighting and the plane was able to land. I kissed the ground as I got off the plane because I was sure that the plane was going to be shot down. I got orders for Chu Lai, which is on the southern part of I Corps, right on the South China Sea-a beautiful setting, actually.
I had to run a laboratory there, one in a jungle hospital-surgical hospital. I had to set up a laboratory and malaria control center and a blood banking center, and I had to do forensic pathology on the deaths. That is where I spent the next year. I did have a couple of close calls. We got hit by rockets one night from the Cong, and they destroyed part of the hospital. I carried the only nurse that was killed on active duty in Vietnam to the operating table. A piece of shrapnel cut her neck and made her bleed to death. They put a memorial to her in Washington; her name was Sharon Lane. There was another instance where I went down on a Chinook helicopter. We were going to an offshore island to provide medical care for refugees, women, and children, on this island off the South China Sea.
On the way back, at dusk, one of the rotor blades went out and the chopper pilot said, "We are turning around. We are going to try and make it back to the island, but we may have a water landing because one blade is out." He said, "Take off your boots and tie them around your neck. I have just radioed the mainland and they do not think they will be able to send a rescue chopper out for you tonight. You are going to have to sleep on the beach and bury yourself in the sand. Hopefully, there won't be any Vietcong on the island, so you may wake up in the morning, instead of being chopped up." Anyway, we did wake up in the morning. I had buried myself in the sand and weeds. They sent a rescue chopper in the morning.
ATHM: Did you have to parachute out of the helicopter?
Dr Forsythe: It made a landing on a coral reef. We had to wade ashore in 3 feet of water. He did a good job landing without any explosion, and the chopper is, for all I know, still on that coral. I do not know if they ever got it off, but they got another chopper to us in the morning. No one was hurt in the whole thing. We were very lucky.
ATHM: You did 1 tour of duty?
Dr Forsythe: Yes. I was there in 1969 and then, when I got back to the mainland, I was again put back at Letterman Army Hospital, on the Presidio. I became assistant chief of pathology there and taught medical students from the university as well. My time was paid back to the army by then. I got out, but because I still needed money to complete an internal medicine residency in San Francisco, I stayed in the army reserves so I would not have to work during my residency that much. I also benefitted from the Gl Bill, so I made enough to live and support my family during that period.
ATHM: How did you make the transition into oncology?
Dr Forsythe: After my internal medicine residency, I knew that I wanted some specialty. I looked at neurology, rheumatology, and there was the new field of oncology. I never even really knew what the word was during med school; they never used that term. Because of my pathology background, it was a natural for me because I enjoyed working with blood, in the laboratory, and also reading biopsies. I knew quite a bit about tumors at that point. I applied for and got a fellowship in oncology at the university and a teaching position there as instructor of medicine for the medical school. I was paid a fairly decent salary at that time during my fellowship. I took 2 years of training and a lot of the people who I was in training with ended up being department heads at various universities like UCLA and University of Arizona and Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York. We had quite a famous class of guys that were really sharp. That was the first year they ever gave the boards in oncology and I probably could have practiced just about anywhere I wanted.
When 2 years wrapped, I decided to stay in San Francisco and practice there, downtown. In my practice, I joined 2 other oncologists. They were called cancer specialists then-they had not even adopted the term oncologist. We were starting to see AIDS cases popping up, but we did not know what to call it or what it was. The hospital was very close to the gay district on Polk in San Francisco. If you know the city, St Francis Memorial Hospital is on Bush Street and Hyde, and it is just a couple of blocks from what was a significant gay gathering place.
We were seeing young men come in with cancers that they should never have had and wasting diseases and bad pneumonias that they should never have had. No one could really figure out what was going on since we did not have an established test in those days to prove that they were immunodeficient. It was very frustrating. Anyway, as you recall, it was not until the early 1980s that HIV was defined as a retrovirus and that the problem was that infected individuals' T cells were depleted and the immune system was dysfunctional. Young men were getting cancers and viruses that, of course, otherwise never showed up in that population.
I practiced for a few years in San Francisco and then decided that it was a pretty tough lifestyle to live in Marin County-doing the bridges and going to 6 or 8 hospitals to practice medicine in a city where you could never find a parking place. So I said, "I am probably going to die when I am 50 if I keep this up." I looked around and thought about Palm Springs, San Luis Obispo, Chico, and I finally decided on Reno because I like to ski and liked the 4 seasons and the small-town atmosphere-plus all the nice things that Reno offered: the entertainment and good restaurants.
I became the first trained oncologist in Reno. I immediately had 30 to 40 patients in the hospital from the day I started. I ended up not getting home at night until 9 or 10 PM. That is very hard on your marriage when you are having that kind of lifestyle. My older partner at that time had a young son who died of leukemia and that is how he got into oncology-just because he became interested in cancer when his son died. But he was not fully trained, so I had to teach him everything I knew about oncology.
I did everything by the book. I was very conscientious about doing protocols. Back in those days, you never got paid anything extra for doing chemo. You had to mix it all up yourself-when you went to the hospital making rounds, you would have to mix up all of your own drugs. You did not even have a chemo nurse. You did not have an area where you could safely draw up the drugs because they were pretty toxic. All of that has changed over the years. They did not have an infusion center, so if you wanted to give a patient a blood transfusion, you had to do it in their home and stay there during the whole time the blood ran in. It was tough going, but it was rewarding. I still enjoyed it.
I started to keep records about my patients-how they were doing and surviving. I found out that not too many of my patients with stage IV disease made it to 5 years. Reading the literature, that was what I was seeing there too, that only 1% or 2% of patients ever made it to 5 years on chemo.
I said, "I don't think I can be in that kind of practice where the results are so dismal." Then I began seeing patients from naturopaths and homeopaths in Reno-Nevada had legal boards for those specialties-that were getting better results than I was getting by just using natural things. I said, "I have got to learn how to do this and then become a boarded in this so I can push the envelope and do them both under one roof." In other words, be a conventional oncologist and yet be a homeopath also at the same time.
In the early 1990s, I became a consultant for the homeopathic clinic here in Reno called the Century Clinic and I started to study for my boards through the British Institute of Homeopathy. It was a correspondence course you could take without actually going to Britain. Then, I was subjected to a 2-day test-oral and written-in homeopathy and I passed in 1995. I ended up buying the clinic from the homeopathic doctors that owned it and running the clinic and seeing patients who were interested in doing alternative therapy with their conventional therapy, or patients who did not want anything to do with conventional chemo but would take alternative therapy.
That continued for 5 years, and then I hooked up with Douglas Brodie, MD, who was the preeminent homeopath in Reno at that time. He and I opened a clinic together. He was in his late 70s at that time and he taught me quite a few things. But then he decided that he wanted to be on his own, so we split the blanket and he left. I bought the building from him and since then I have started doing outcome-based studies.
The first one was for Nature's Sunshine on pawpaw. They asked me to look into this product that was from the pawpaw tree that looked like it was able to stop cancer from growing. I did a 100-patient study for them and proved that it was effective, and they went on to manufacture it. I never took any money from them or had any compensation other than free product they gave me to use on patients.
The second outcome-based study involved poly-MVA, a complex of palladium with lipoic acid. It is manufactured out of New York, from Long Island, by the Garnett McKeen Laboratory, which was affiliated with Stony Brook University. They had a product that had been subjected to animal studies and been effective in causing cancer cells to die off early where otherwise they were unable to die, and instead of building up in the body, they would go to premature death. I got up to 225 patients on that project, but the FDA interfered with completion of the study.
In February of 2005, 3 branches of the federal government, the FDA, the ICE-Immigration and Customs Enforcement-and the FBI all came to my house and office simultaneously on the 16th of February. They held guns to my wife and me and searched my house for 6 straight hours but did not go into the garage or our storage areas. They sent all the patients home in our office, threatened our employees, and told them that I was doing things that were illegal. My wife asked them what I was doing that was illegal, because I had never had a malpractice suit or any trouble with any hospital board. They said I was using human growth hormone off label. She said, "Doctors use drugs off label every day in their practices; what is this all about?"
Anyway, they did not shut me down. They did not actually do anything. They took a lot of things from the office. They took all of our computers and software and hardware. Took all of our medicines at the office, but they let me continue my practice. Then, in May of 2006, they indicted me. A grand jury indicted me on 2 counts. The first count was for using human grown hormone, or HGH from an illegal source, which I was getting from Israel through a local pharmacy in Carson City, NV. The second indictment involved practicing a nonrecognized form of medicine, namely antiaging medicine, which they considered to be an outside-the-norm practice. We had to, of course, get lawyers and see lawyers 5 days a week. I was put in jail and finger printed, told that I was up for 5 years in prison and a $5000 fine, but then I could go on practicing-which was crazy. All of my insurance carriers left me, and all of my directorships with nursing homes and hospital privileges were cancelled out.
It looked like I was about ready to pack up and leave town. But I just persistently practiced and then I got some good lawyers, Mirch and Mirch. They believed in me and we told the feds that we were going to take it all the way to court.
They came up to my lawyers in August of 2007 and said, "We think you know a lot about human growth hormone and we do not have a protocol for using it in older people who may be deficient in it." They asked me to write it, and this is the first time ever that the feds had asked a doctor in private practice to write a protocol about something after he has been indicted for using it in an unrecognized fashion.
I took the ball and ran with it. I went around the country with-sometimes with my lawyers-to find all the latest information and to write a full protocol, which then, before my trial, the feds approved. They said, "We agree with your protocol. We are going to make it the official protocol for human growth hormone deficiency syndrome."
My lawyers said, "It is great having the protocol, and you cannot sell it or anything, but at least you have it and it has your name on it." It was more of a moral reward than anything else. Then, we thought that they would cancel my trial because they had already tacitly admitted that there was nothing there. Instead, they said they wanted to put me on probation for 3 more years and then lower the fees to just $80 000 from $100 000 for all their investigative procedures. We said, "No. We will go to trial." We went to a 10-day trial in federal court, in front of a jury, and we were awarded a completely unanimous not-guilty verdict.
The victim of an indictment usually only wins 1 out of 25 or 30 times when they fight the feds in court. I felt very lucky that I was able to do that with the help of good lawyers. Then I was interviewed on radio and TV and I got a lot of good PR out of the victory. Since the trial, I did another Forsythe Immune Protocol study for 5 years, and then the last study that I am involved in, which began in 2010, has a total of 750 stage IV cancer patients at 54 months. It observed a 64% survival rate, which is about 32 times higher than the published results from conventional medicine of 5-year survival rate in stage IV cancers-that is only 2.1%.
ATHM: Which therapy is being evaluated in that study?
Dr Forsythe: This study involves using circulating tumorcell assays and chemosensitivity testing followed by low-dose insulin potentiated therapy, which according to Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, from Southern California who was interviewed by Sanjay Gupta, MD-which you can still get on the Internet-the best treatments for cancer involved exactly that: doing circulating tumor-cell assays followed by lowdose chemo. He is devoting half of his $11 billion treasure, which he made by developing a cancer drug called Abraxane to hype this protocol that I am using. Of course, I have been doing it for 10 years now and he is just coming out of the box, but he does feel that this is the answer to the best treatment for cancer.
ATHM: Talk about chemosensitivity and insulin potentiation therapy. Where do they come from and how do they work?
Dr Forsythe: Chemosensitivity came out of the human genome project, which was started in the early 1990s. The project completed genome sequencing in 2003 at the cost of $100 billion and still ongoing, of course, in many centers throughout the country. The first chemosensitivity test that was run in the early 2000s cost a $100000 dollars per patient to run. Now, the cost is down around $2500-down by 97.5%. It involves taking circulating cancer cells from the patient-basically, a simple blood draw-and sending it to very high-tech laboratories. The 3 best ones in the world are in Korea, in Germany, and in Greece, and we've used all 3.
The Greek lab, called the RGCC, Research Genetic Cancer Centre-within 10 days you will get a report back. As soon as they get the blood, even if it is in the middle of the night, they start working. They harvest the cancer cells from the blood, grow them in cultures and media, and then tear them apart genetically so they can tell from the genetic defects-overexpression, underexpression, mutation, etcetera-how each gene responds to various chemotherapies. You are getting 3 important things out of the test results: You are getting the best chemicals to use on that specific cancer; you are getting the best supplements-by that I mean vitamins, minerals, and herbs; and you are getting the best hormonal maneuvers for instances where it is a hormonally driven tumor such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, cervical cancer, venereal cancer-or, if it is a male, cancer like prostate cancer or testicular cancer.
You are getting those 3 things that are tailor made to that particular patient. They're not just a Betty Crocker, guess-work approach where you are thinking that the recipe book off the shelf is saying, "This is what this patient is going to get because she has stage II breast cancer or he has stage IV prostate cancer." Often the same things are used on every patient no matter what and, many times, what they are doing to patients is not working, so it is guesswork. As I tell all of my patients, "If I am giving you the wrong drug, I am giving you a poison-as simple as that." The oncologist, even though well meaning, is poisoning his patients because they are not up-to-par on the technology.
Now, insulin potentiated therapy has been around for 70 or 80 years. It was developed in Argentina by ... his name is Donato Pérez García, Sr, MD. He used insulin with low-dose chemo because of the knowledge that cancer cells have many more insulin receptors than normal cells, and that is the whole basis of the PET scan. When you give insulin with the chemo therapy, you cause the cancer cells to take up the chemo instead of the sugar. You are tricking the cancer cells into thinking sugar is coming along. If you can use less chemo, it does not hurt normal cells, so the patients do not get all the adverse side effects that they get from full-dose chemo. By that, I mean they do not get nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, chemo brain, neuropathies, cardiac damage, liver damage, kidney damage, and even death.
ATHM: Does that also affect an outcome like cachexia or is that just a product of the progression of the cancer?
Dr Forsythe: That is usually just a product of stage IV cancers; the cachexia is improved though. Whenever you are shrinking the cancer down and killing cancer cells massively in the body, the cachexia is going to reverse, and they will get their appetite back. They will start to build muscle.
ATHM: Talking, again, about the poly-MVA study, did that get interrupted?
Dr Forsythe: Yes, it did. I did not elaborate on that, but I should tell you that they shut us down with 225 patients. Then, they actually summoned all the charts, which cost over $30 000 to reproduce the charts because we had to bank a separate copy of 225 charts for the attorneys involved. They audited them-they were taken by car to their central office here in Reno and given to the agents to review. When they reviewed them, they could find nothing wrong. There were no superseding indictments placed on my study-which we thought there would be-but there were none. They kept threatening, of course. Basically, they use scare tactics. That became the only alternative study in the United States ever to be subpoenaed by the FDA and then okayed. The whole progression of having me write a national protocol for growth hormone deficiency syndrome, when they had none before, and then approving it, and yet still taking me to trial was an amazing set of events.
ATHM: To say the least. Is there anything more moving forward with poly-MVA at this point?
Dr Forsythe: Well, we still use it in our protocols. This is the way it works: When we get the test results back, I immediately fax or e-mail copies to the patients. Then, I make up a protocol using the 2 best drugs-that means over 80% effective at killing the cancer cells. Say you had prostate cancer and 20 agents came back as being effective against the cancer. We are only going to be looking at those that are over 55% effective, but we want to use-first of all-those that are over 80% effective. We never get above 90% on any patient with any drugs on any cancer. If we get 85%, that is pretty good.
We use those 2 drugs at a 10% dose. We give them on 2 days a week, on Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week, we sandwich the lowdose chemo therapy, which we are giving with insulin incidentally, with high-dose vitamin C, with poly-MVA, with hydrogen peroxide, with the Forsythe immune protocol-which is basically a Myers cocktail-and then an amino-acid drip, which is L-glutathione. They are getting their immune system revved up every other day, between the chemo. That goes on for 3 weeks. If needed, we go to a fourth or fifth week on some very sick patients.
All of our studies are gauged around 3-week treatments, and then we send them home on an oral pill that is effective, also, but in a lesser dose than you would ordinarily use at a conventional clinic. That could be something like Xeloda or Cytoxan, Melphalan, or VP-16-any number of agents that we use orally, but they also have to show a response rate somewhere in the 75% to 85% range.
ATHM: Could you elaborate what a Myer's cocktail is?
Dr Forsythe: A Myer's cocktail has a number of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and DMSO, or dimethyl sulfoxide, in it. It is used in almost all alternative clinics as an immune boosting intravenous therapy. We have modified it and call it the Forsythe immune protocol.
Here is something that I always tell patients that is very important. I hope they listen to this in order to give them hope. I use the American sniper as an example.
I say, "The sniper is up in the tree and there are hundred terrorists coming out of the forest. He is able to shoot 80 out of 100; his kill ratio is 80%." Think of the snipers as being the chemical that we are using and the terrorists as being the cancer cells. Then you are going to get an idea of how they work. So, if you have 2 drugs with 80% kill rates, plus you have 20 agents-like vitamins A, E, C, D, and B^sub 17^-and then you have a number of other herbs that are all 20%, 30%, or 40% effective against the cancer, you are going to move the 80% kill rate 90 somewhere over 90% because the treatments are additive to one another. You are getting a higher percentage of kill by using the east-west type of approach with the natural therapies plus the chemo, and so you are going to be hitting them somewhere in the 90s. We do not know if it is 92% or 98%, but somewhere in the 90s. You do not need to kill every last tumor cell in your body to have a cure. You need to get the volume down to the very minimum that you can. That might be 5% or 3% left, but your body's immune system can then kick in. It will do the work for you if there are only a few tumor cells remaining. It will not kick in with 20% or 30% of the tumor cells around.
ATHM: You said the chemo sensitivity testing not only informs you about the best options for a chemo therapy drug, but also informs you on the best options for supplementation and for hormonal support?
Dr Forsythe: Yes. Let's take the supplements. I mentioned the number of vitamins that often come up, but there may be herbs such as mistletoe, artemisia, quercetin, and turmeric or curcumin. All of those are agents used around the world and have been, for many years, used for cancer, but not a whole lot has known about their effects because no one has done large case studies. Now that we can have a large case study-and 750 patients is a large study-comparing what kind of results we can get at 4 or 5 years in patients with alladult cancer, stage IV.
Think of how much the government would save if they were to use 90% less of a drug. The cost of the drugs is the main cost of oncology. When you have to give an IV of Avastin for $8000 a bag to a patient who has no insurance, how much longer do you think his pocketbook can withstand taking that drug every 2 to 3 weeks?
ATHM: Anything that can help the patient's immune system tolerate the chemical poisoning and still protect the system is a tremendously advantageous. Cycling through pneumonia or low white-cell counts would really disrupt the cancer protocol.
Dr Forsythe: Not only that, but think of how much it costs the insurance companies and the government to put someone in the hospital with pneumonia sepsis or urinary sepsis because they have a low white count. Or their platelet count went down to 4000 or 10000 and they are bleeding internally, and you have to keep them in the hospital 2 weeks to stop the bleeding and then give them blood platelets every day. Think of all the cost of all there-and you save all of that money from the treatment and the secondary illness.
ATHM: On top of that, also to know that your survival rates are coming out so much higher. Once again, you are seeing what kinds of survival rates on your protocol?
Dr Forsythe: At 4.5 years, we are showing a 64% survival rate as compared to the published survival rate in 5 years of 2.1% in the United States and 2.3% in Australia. Some of those are retrospective studies; ours is a prospective study. When you do a retrospective you can look at 500 charts all at once. In a prospective study, you do not have 500 patients lining up at the front door and waiting to be treated. You have to take them as they come in and then follow them for 5 years. That is the difference.
ATHM: To be absolutely clear here, you are talking about straight survival rate; this is 64% of your patients that are still living after 4.5 years, as opposed to a 64% increase in rate of survival?
Dr Forsythe: It is actually better than that because we count all of the deaths in our study-even if they died in a car accident or from a fall off a roof. We count them as a cancer death regardless, and so we are actually adversely affecting our study by counting every single death as a cancer death. These are older folks; they could die of a heart attack or stroke, too.
ATHM: I assume that you have some protégés that are getting ready to pick up the torch and carry it forward.
Dr Forsythe: Yes. I have several in my office that are in training. I am also on the Board of Directors of the IOICP, the International Organization of Integrated Cancer Physicians. We have a yearly meeting, which we will have here in April in Reno, and we train doctors who come to the meeting in using our protocols and procedures so that they can spread the word.
Editor's Note: see page 61 for more information about the IOICP conference.
Copyright InnoVision Health Media, Inc. Mar/Apr 2015