My Findings on Laetrile, Part One
- From: "Laura" <lhann10243@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Jul 2005 14:19:49 -0700
My Findings on Laetrile, Part One
by Laura Landsberg Hanning
----
(I have been gathering my thoughts and research on Laetrile for a
relative who has cancer. I'm hoping this might be helpful to others
also. This is an ongoing process for me as I am still waiting for more
books to arrive. I am not a medical professional and this is not
medical advice. These are my opinions - references are provided.)
10/3/01
Dear C,
I am on an alternative health list where we mainly discuss the
properties of colloidal silver. Silver has been used in medicine since
the time of the Egyptians. I've heard stories that the older
generations would drop silver dollars in a glass of milk to keep it
from spoiling.
The idea of consuming a metal never held much appeal for me until I
understood that we do consume metals, i.e. minerals, every day in our
foods. Vegetables contain minerals, which are various metals in ionic
form. The principle behind colloidal silver is that it is made by
electronically shaving pure silver ions off of silver wire so that they
are suspended in a solution of water. Consuming the water in small
amounts gives a person a powerful antibacterial, anti-fungal, and/or
antiviral weapon against disease or illness.
And why is colloidal silver such a big secret? The theory is that it
cannot be patented, so modern medicine, i.e. pharmaceutical companies,
would not be able to make much profit from it. As a few years have gone
by, and as I've used colloidal silver for various things (cleaning
vegetables, dropping in infected ears, using in pet water, warding off
bronchial infections, killing fungus on plants, etc.) I realized that
theory might be correct. It occurred to me the other day how very many
prescriptions we've been able to avoid around here just by using
colloidal silver.
So on this silver email list, people go off-topic from time to time,
and one of the off-topic subjects was about Laetrile. I was curious
about it and followed the discussion closely. I vaguely remembered
hearing about Laetrile on the news when I was in high school -
something like that. There was a big controversy over it and that's
all I knew. I read what these people had to say and learned that one
can get essentially the same benefit of using Laetrile by eating raw
apricot kernels (the seeds inside the pits.) I looked up a couple of
websites that sold apricot kernels, but never went as far as to buy
any. In the last couple of years, I've gone this route a few times - my
curiosity gets piqued, I search, read, and almost buy kernels but
don't, and then I forget about the whole thing.
When you got your diagnosis, I told you I would look up some things to
see if I could find info on herbs or vitamins that might help you as
you went through treatment. So I did the whole Laetrile thing again,
but this time more carefully. I read site after site after site, mostly
the mainstream medical sites, and came away feeling very discouraged.
It looked like Laetrile was quackery after all, and more than that, it
could be harmful. There was much talk of cyanide toxicity in patients
using Laetrile or eating too many apricot kernels, and that was pretty
scary. The sites that spoke well of Laetrile were mostly full of
personal accounts by ordinary people with little science behind it all.
I generally dislike doctors, not as individuals but as a group, and I
love nutritional therapies, so I was really hoping there was something
to this Laetrile. But it was looking more and more like a dead end. I
was almost ready to give up and start looking for herbs that might help
you rebuild your body after the damage of the chemo and radiation, but
figured I'd give Laetrile one more try. I went to some used-book
websites and looked for books on Laetrile. I went to eBay too. I found
some books cheap, and ordered about six.
The first one to arrive was "Politics, Science and Cancer: The Laetrile
Phenomenon" edited by Gerald E. Markle and James C. Petersen. (An
American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium Volume,
#46, Westview Press Inc, Boulder, CO, 1980).
Excerpt:
About the Book
"At no time in U.S. history has there been a more effective challenge
to medical expertise and authority than that mounted by the
contemporary Laetrile movement. The efficacy of Laetrile has been
debated for over twenty-five years, but despite vigorous opposition
from the medical community, support for the purported cancer treatment
continues to grow and the controversy has in recent years intensified
and become highly politicized. How does one account for the continuing
debate and spectacular political growth of the movement to promote
Laetrile? This and related questions are addressed by an
interdisciplinary group of authors in this first scholarly analysis of
the Laetrile phenomenon."
----
This book is indescribably dull. I slogged through the first two
chapters bored to death. The history, the background, the court cases,
on and on and on. I came to chapter 3, "Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering" by
Richard D. Smith. Smith's brief bio says:
"Richard D. Smith is editor of 'The Sciences,' the Journal of the New
York Academy of Sciences. A former staff writer and associate editor of
the magazine, he has a special interest in and has written numerous
articles on the biomedical and behavioral sciences. He is a member of
the American Medical Writers Association and the National Association
of Science Writers."
----
Because of public pressure and publicity, and generally all the ruckus
being stirred up by Laetrile advocates, Sloan-Kettering took it upon
themselves to test Laetrile. For a little background, there are two
basic types of tumors tested in mice. The first are transplantable
tumors, and the second are spontaneous tumors. All the former National
Cancer Institute tests were performed on transplantable tumors, and the
results for Laetrile were negative. Sloan-Kettering's tests were the
first to be performed on mice with spontaneous tumors. The initial
experiments were carried out by Kanematsu Sugiura, "a veteran
researcher with more than sixty years experience at the institute."
Excerpt, page 63:
"From the point of view of those who had hoped for a quick, negative
judgment on Laetrile, Sugiura came up with resoundingly 'wrong'
results. In three separate experiments he found that Laetrile, though
failing to actually eliminate the primary tumor, did appear to retard
its growth. What's more, he found that the Laetrile-treated animals had
fewer metastases (secondary tumors) in their lungs than did the control
animals, which received an inert saline solution. Since it is often the
metastatic spread of cancer that is responsible for the lethal effects
of the disease, this finding was of great potential clinical
significance. In addition, Sugiura observed that the Laetrile-treated
animals appeared to be livelier and healthier-looking than the control
animals."
----
I almost dropped the book! So there really IS something to this!
It goes on to say:
"Sugiura's unexpected findings were not published in the scientific
literature, nor were they made public by Sloan-Kettering. 'If we had
published those early positive data,' Chester Stock later told a
journalist, 'it would have raised all kind of havoc.'"
----
News of Sugiura's experiments got out anyway, because the results were
used in support of a doctor who was on trial for using Laetrile on his
patients in California. Sloan-Kettering went on to study Laetrile
further, in mice with both transplantable tumors and spontaneous
tumors. In June, 1977, they called a press conference to make public
the five years of Laetrile experiments.
Excerpts about what was revealed:
"In none of the collaborative or independent studies conducted after
Sugiura's initial positive findings were the veteran researcher's
results duplicated. His findings were described as 'seriously
challenged' by the body of subsequent experiments, including those in
which he participated."
"Nonetheless it was noted that Sugiura still believed Laetrile to be a
'palliative' if not a cure for cancer, and when questioned whether he
stood by his positive results in the face of subsequent studies, he
responded, 'I stick.'"
And then it gets really interesting...
"...In November of 1977, about five months after the Sloan-Kettering
press conference, another press conference was held in New York, this
one by a group called Second Opinion, which had just published a
48-page pamphlet on Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering. The group charged that
the work described in the June Sloan-Kettering papers was 'both
incomplete and scientifically invalid.'"
"The Second Opinion organization described itself as a group of
rank-and-file employees of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
including both scientific and non-scientific personnel. An offshoot of
the radical national organization Science for the People, Second
Opinion claimed that its basic aim was to organize the workers are
Sloan-Kettering. In the 'war on cancer,' the group advocated 'putting
prevention first, making research relevant to human diseases,' and
encouraged 'an open-minded policy toward new and unorthodox methods,
making the best treatment available to all people, and taking the
profit out of cancer.'"
"Until the Second Opinion press conference, no employee of
Sloan-Kettering had ever publicly identified himself as a member of the
organization. The only name openly associated with the group had been
that of a City University graduate student. But at this press
conference, Ralph Moss, Sloan-Kettering's Assistant Director for Public
Affairs, identified himself as a member of Second Opinion. He was fired
from that position the next working day."
"According to the Second Opinion report, a fair test of Laetrile had
been impossible at Sloan-Kettering from the start. The group's analysis
of anti-Laetrile sentiment at the institution included the assertion
that Sloan-Kettering had been set up not to produce just any cancer
cure, but a patentable one..."
"...The anonymous authors of Second Opinion asked readers of their
report who did not share their political perspective not to reject
their scientific critique of Sloan-Kettering's Laetrile experiments
because of ideological differences. That critique proved to be a
wide-ranging analysis that included charges that Sloan-Kettering had
failed to report pro-Laetrile findings (other than Sugiura's) from
experiments conducted at the center and that it had willfully
misrepresented the results of those experiments that it did report..."
"...Among the charges of incompleteness made by Second Opinion, the
most serious was that an experiment had been carried out between
December 1973 and January 1974 in the laboratory of Elizabeth Stockert
at Sloan-Kettering. This experiment was conducted with a strain of
laboratory mice that, like the CD8F1 strain with which Sugiura had
worked, develops spontaneous breast cancer. Second Opinion claimed that
Stockert had obtained results similar to those reported by Sugiura and
included in their pamphlet a copy of a memo written by a technician in
Stockert's laboratory and addressed to Sloan-Kettering's vice-president
Lloyd Old. The technician reported a longer life, healthier appearance,
retarded tumor growth and fewer lung metastases among the mice treated
with Laetrile than among control animals."
"Though not challenging the authenticity of the document, Chester Stock
explained that his failure to include a report of the experiment in the
scientific papers of which he is principal author hardly indicates a
will to maliciously 'suppress' pro-Laetrile findings. In the first
place, he said, he was not even aware of the work until it was brought
to his attention by the Second Opinion report. But even had he known
about it he insisted that he would never have published it because the
results as presented were 'uninterpretable.' Elizabeth Stockert, in
whose laboratory the work was done, attributed the fact that she did
not bring the study to Stock's attention to her view of the experiment
as only a preliminary study designed no so much to test Laetrile as to
familiarize herself and her staff with the animals and materials
involved. Furthermore, she pointed out that she had been called away to
Europe in the middle of the study and that it was therefore never, in
her judgment, properly completed."
"Sloan-Kettering thus acknowledged the existence, though not the
validity, of the Stockert experiment..."
"...Sloan-Kettering never picked up the Second Opinion gauntlet and
answered the group's scientific critique on a point by point basis
either in the press conference format in which those results were
originally presented nor in the less public medium of the scientific
literature."
----
I realized that there was more to this issue than met my
internet-searching eye. When the next book arrived, written by a doctor
who was harassed, jailed and repeatedly tried in the courts for using
Laetrile, I was ready to listen to his story with an open mind. More
later.
----
Update 07/23/05:
The 'next book' was "Laetrile Case Histories: The Richardson Cancer
Clinic Experience" by John A. Richardson, M.D. and Patricia Griffin,
R.N. (Bantam Books, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1977, ISBN #0-553-11491-3.)
Excellent book. If you can only order/read one book, this is it, in my
opinion.
----
Laura
http://home.earthlink.net/~lhann10243/index.html
..
..
..
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature
is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. --
Emerson
.
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