Desperate people are good business. Hope sells for big money and with little consequence. If a promise doesn’t hold, there’s hundreds more. Just dig into the internet, and you’ll find miracle cures, life-extending elixirs and serpentine lube. I’m not desperate, but I’m looking around to see what’s there to increase my chances of survival. It would be delinquent not to do so. I’ve already identified exercise, which is cheap (after the initial investment of the trainer) and uncontroversial, but is there anything else? Anything I could buy?
One option I came across in the newspaper is methadone. This synthetic opioid has been used for more than fifty years as a painkiller and to wean people off heroin. Ten years ago, Claudia Friesen, a chemist at the University of Ulm, found indications that chemotherapy is more effective when combined with methadone. She showed this in cells and animal models, but a clinical trial to assess safety and efficacy didn’t follow. No pharmaceutical company would invest resources in a compound that’s long out of patent protection.
As a side note, how would such a clinical trial look like? Normally, the control group gets a placebo. To double as a powerful painkiller, sugar water probably wouldn’t do. It seems to me one could solve all problems by volunteering some of Purdue Pharma’s ill-gotten gains to finance the study and get free fentanyl for the control group. Who wouldn’t want to sign up for this?
Anyway, Friesen has been hyping methadone at conferences, in public lectures and on TV. She advises physicians and recommends dosages, as if methadone were an established cancer drug. While the basic science sounds intriguing (though incomplete; there isn’t even a structure of the drug bound to its receptor), this approach puts the cart before the horse and risks patients’ lives. You can’t ethically treat patients with something that hasn’t gone through clinical trials. Luckily, this gap is now being filled. A German cancer charity has just announced a clinical trial with colon cancer patients that do not respond to chemotherapy. By the time it starts in 2020, I hope to be outside this category, but I’ll keep it on my radar.
Besides methadone, there’s mushrooms. I haven’t dug deep into the dark recesses of the internet where the most obscure supplements become reliable remedies, but I’ve come across turkey tail mushrooms. A friend sent me a link to a talk and a couple of papers.
I started with the video where an entrepreneur in the field of fungal production praises the powers of the turkey tail. Instead of concealing his business interest, he presents it as a gesture of goodwill, sharing the benefits of this almost magic mushroom with the world. I looked on with growing suspicion as a single data point was used to cement the power of the mushroom. The speaker’s mother survived advanced breast cancer with the help of the mushroom, the only one in a cohort of 50. The sensible alternative that her other son prayed harder than all other patients’ kids and thus saved her is completely ignored.
Is it all nonsense? My friend and I went to graduate school together. He’s now working at a cancer research institute. There must be something to this. The first of the two scientific publications he sent reviews the use of polysaccharide K (PSK), a proteoglycan isolated from the mushroom in immunochemotherapy. This has been common practice in Japan for years. The second publication is a metastudy of clinical trials assessing the use of PSK for patients with curatively resected colorectal cancer.
I might not fall into this category. When my tumor and metastases were resected, the curative aspect was not on the surgeon’s mind. But this is too powerful to ignore. I haven’t read the papers carefully yet, but I will ask my oncologist tomorrow what he thinks of this and whether PSK is available in Switzerland. A properly characterized drug produced under controlled conditions inspires more confidence in me than mushroom preparations from someone’s backyard that might contain anything.
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