Czech therapy - "devitalisation"

http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/czectherdev.html
Czech Hospital Testing Banned Cancer Therapy

By Justin l'Anson Sparks

PRAGUE (Reuters Health) Jun 06

A Czech hospital is undertaking human trials with controversial cancer
treatment known as "devitalisation" in the face of a government ban on the
technique and questions about its efficacy and safety.

Devitalisation, the invention of Czech surgeon Dr. Karel Fortyn, involves
ligature of arteries and veins to and from tumours or parts of affected
organs, without removal of the tumour.

Before his death last year, Dr. Fortyn launched a media campaign to
champion his technique. As a result of numerous television programmes, one
of which claimed that Dr. Fortyn cured a man of advanced stomach cancer in
1957, there is widespread public interest in the affair.

The Czech health ministry last year initiated trials in patients with
stage 4 melanoma and metastatic colorectal cancer but halted them after
only 6 months.

The ministry's trials were primarily designed to test the validity of Dr.
Fortyn's claims that necrotic tissue created in primary tumours through
devitalisation caused an immune reaction that prevented and even
eliminated metastases.

Full details have not yet been published, but the ministry of health has
added devitalisation to its list of "unlicensed" treatments.

Professor Jan Dvoracek of the Ministry's research department recently
informed the country's most respected medical journal, Zdravotnicke
noviny, that 80% of patients who underwent devitalisation operations had
died since the trials were halted last October.

"Provisional results have suggested that leaving decomposing tumours in
the body simply causes infection and allows cancer cells to spread," added
Petr Kubicek, spokesman for the Czech Medical Association. "That is why
human trials have now been banned."

But at least one clinic, the private Horska Krkonoska hospital in the town
of Vrchlabi, is continuing with its own human trials of the technique.

The hospital's director, Dr. Vladimir Dryml, has vowed to continue with
his trials come what may.

"The Ministry's human trials last year were flawed because they were badly
documented, not properly coordinated, and individual cases were not
properly followed up, which is why after all this time they still cannot
provide us with the facts and figures," he told Reuters Health.

Dr. Dryml has not given any detailed information about his patients.
"Devitalisation has the ability to cure metastases, and while I'm not
going to go into the range of cancers I'm currently treating, I can say
that I currently have a female patient who was given days to live and who
is still alive after a month," he said.

The Ministry of Health has acknowledged that it is powerless to enforce
any immediate end to the hospital's unlicensed programme.

A Ministry spokesman, Otakar Cerny, said: "It's true that we haven't taken
any formal measures against the hospital, but that is partly because our
lawyers are still uncertain about what our legal position is."

A central tenet of Dr. Fortyn's theory revolves around his claim that when
left to necrotize in the body, malignant tumours do not cause other
complications.

His findings were based on experiments carried out on healthy sections of
the colon, inguinal node and kidneys of pigs, which after
"devitalisation," atrophied and became fibrous but did not cause
septicaemia.

One of the surgeons who was involved in the ministry-sponsored human
trials, at Bulovka hospital in Prague, Dr. Frantisek Antos, told the
Zdravotnicke noviny journal that his patients did develop infection, and
experienced an acceleration in the spread of the disease.

The Ministry's decision to stop the human trials has also been strongly
supported by Professor Terezie Fucikova, who is responsible for analysing
the immunological data.

"I'm not going to leak any details about the trials, but let's just say
this is a technique I wouldn't want to have myself and which I wouldn't
advise anyone else to undergo," she told Reuters Health.

In spite of such gloomy reports, supporters of the technique are un
perturbed. According to the Czech Patients' Union, a network of surgeons
and hospitals is continuing with the human trials.

"I can confirm that such a network exists and that we are keeping patients
informed about where they can get the treatment," Lubos Olejar, president
of the Union, told Reuters Health.

"All operations and results are being documented for eventual publication
when the time is right, alongside other 'sanitised' paperwork which is
being kept to satisfy insurance companies and keep the Czech Medical
Association happy."

Ann's NOTE:

We actually do not know anything else about this therapy, BUT it just
sounds exactly like the way the U.S. used to handle "unaccepted" or
"unconventional" therapies.



http://www.radio.cz/en/article/11585
De-vitalisation clinical trials cancelled
[19-09-2001] By Nicole Klement
On Tuesday, the Czech Ministry of Health cancelled clinical trials of
what, a couple months ago, was considered a breakthrough in cancer
treatment. The method, called de-vitalisation, is based on the concept of
surgically cutting off the blood supply to malignant tumors, thereby
depriving them of oxygen and nutrients resulting in reduced rate of growth
and finally tumor cell death. From the beginning, medical experts warned
that many problems connected with the treatment remained unresolved and
that the treatment had been shown to work in animal models but that there
was no such proof in humans. Despite the debate, the clinical trial was
initiated and only half a year later abruptly cancelled due to
questionable results in humans. Nicole Klement has the story.

Czech-born cancer researcher Giannoula Klement who presently works as a
clinician-scientist in Canada, says the method, presented in the Czech
Republic as revolutionary, is not actually very new.

"For the past thirty years Dr. Folkman, at Harvard, has been pioneering
the idea of cutting off the blood supply using chemical substances. Ever
since, this field has taken off to really new heights. And, we now have
better much more sophisticated ways of cutting the blood supply to the
tumor. So, Dr. Forthyn's method is really something we have tried thirty
to forty years ago before Dr. Folkman and the field of angiogenesis had
begun."

Some Czech researchers claimed that de-vitalisation works because when the
primary tumor's blood supply is destroyed, the immune system is able to
fight off the metastatic cells. Dr. Klement explained to Radio Prague that
findings in the American cancer research community contradict those of
their Czech colleagues.

"Most of our patients die of metastatic growth, not really because of
these large primary tumors and cutting the blood supply to that single one
is not really going to help the patient. So, it's really against intuition
to try to cut the blood supply to this large tumor. In fact, we have now
found that the metastatic growth increases if you cut this primary blood
supply."


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