A cure for cancer?

I’m not over eighty, but I work a lot - every year I write several books, a dozen articles, reports, and now I write a regular column in the newspaper. So whenever I die, I will die prematurely. I don’t have the slightest belief in “life after death”, in heaven, hell and similar fairy tales. The only real life after death is in a person’s works, in his children and students. So I try to have more of me left.

For the last decade I have been living with a clear awareness of imminent death - not because of my age (my ancestors are long-livers), but because I have cancer. The operation took place in 2001, they cut out the prostate, but three years later the cancer returned. There is no prostate, but there is prostate cancer. Like the smile of a Cheshire cat, but a sinister smile. The academician grew up. acad. honey. Sciences N.P. Napalkov said that every person should get cancer, but many do not live to see their cancer. I made it. It's good that at my age cancer develops slowly. I do tests every three months, tumor markers (in my case PSA) have been steadily increasing. This means that prostate cancer is growing, although it is still impossible to say where it has settled: the tumor is still small, there are no clinical manifestations yet.

Four years ago, metastases to the spine were diagnosed by x-ray (osteoscintigraphy). That's what I felt. However, either the doctors were good, or the diagnosis was wrong, but now there are no metastases. There is, of course, the danger of their appearance at any moment in the same place or in any new place.

I am an energetic person. Therefore, he could not come to terms with the prospect of a quiet and relatively quick death. Of course, everyone will have to die, but we need to fight to put off this moment as far as possible and get as much done in life as possible. I didn’t turn to grandmothers and healers (not my element), but I used all means of a scientific nature. For example, I learned about the activities of the St. Petersburg doctor Sevruk, who stimulates the immune system with courses of strong interferon injections - I experienced it myself. There was a lot of torment, there was no special effect. I saw in the press reports about the experiments of the Ussuri biologist Britov on a sharp strengthening of the immune system after suffering a rather dangerous disease - trichinosis (he established this in animals and transferred it to people). I called the doctors from his team and inoculated myself with trichinosis twice (with immediate treatment measures). The first vaccination gave a slight drop in tumor markers, the second passed without consequences.

Then I read about the discovery of Canadian doctors. Evangelos Michelakis from the University of Alberta discovered in 2006 that a very simple chemical reagent - dichloroacetate (sodium salt of dichloroacetic acid) at small dosages reduces cancer tumors of various types and different locations three times in three weeks. He established this by testing in test tubes and on animals and developed a theoretical basis for this phenomenon. Before transferring it to people - obtaining permission for clinical trials, multi-year testing, etc. - the period is usually long, many years. Those who already have cancer, of course, will not live to see the end of these trials.

To complicate matters further, drug companies have been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a new cancer drug. The success of the drug would mean curtailing the production of incredibly expensive current drugs (and there are a lot of them) and replacing them with a very cheap drug, for which it is even impossible to obtain a patent, because it is a long-known chemical reagent sold in ordinary chemical stores. Of course, they sell a version for chemical experiments, and not for medical use, i.e. not so clean. But this reagent was also used as a medicine (in the treatment of children) and was even specially produced for medical purposes. He was admitted to children's hospitals for treatment of metabolic disorders. It proved ineffective for these purposes and is no longer used or produced. Research at the University of Alberta has, if not stalled, then slowed down, although large, detailed articles have been published in reputable medical press.

Based on this, Americans with cancer began to experiment on themselves using dichloroacetate. They communicated with each other over the Internet and organized their own website ( thedcasite.com ), where they began to publish all the medical materials that became available and the results of their experiments, and exchange experience in using them. The Americans were soon joined by patients from other countries, including Russia. Of course, there is no shortage of descriptions of miraculous cases of complete healing from hopeless forms of cancer, but there are no statistics that would be the only reliable evidence of the effectiveness of the drug.

I also decided to get this drug. In America, the production of pure dichloroacetate was established, but the American government immediately banned this initiative, and by the time of my attempts it was no longer on sale. Friends brought me a bottle of a fairly pure drug from Finland (intended for treating animals), I started taking it, but my stomach hurt, and I stopped this experiment. Since I have chronic problems with my stomach in general, it is not clear why my stomach hurt, but the experiment had to be stopped also because from the mentioned site I learned that other patients with prostate cancer did not receive healing from the drug . Later, reports appeared that this drug was especially effective in combination with caffeine: lovers of strong coffee and tea were healed faster. In a word, people are treated, and some find healing.

As for me, my oncologist professor, who was interested in my experiments, convened a council of his teachers, perplexing them with my incident. Three old oncologists, after consulting, rendered a verdict: in this case, nothing needs to be done - there is no radical and reliable remedy, and any experiments can take the body out of the balance in which it resides. You need to take advantage of the opportunities and quality of life that are available. Don't take risks. Well, the decision is wise, but sad.

I just keep the immune system active using more modest means (two courses a year). One ray of hope: over the past year and a half to two years, the increase in my tumor markers (PSA) has stopped, and there is even a decrease. But how long this will continue is unknown.

I wrote this article in order to draw the attention of the leaders of our pharmacology and medicine to existing opportunities that have not yet been used. Perhaps, if there had been initiative people among our doctors and pharmacologists, they had taken the initiative, overcome departmental barriers and obstacles, found funding, organized the use of the drug (already known as a medicine) to hopelessly ill people, then perhaps People’s Artist Yankovsky would not have died so early in front of everyone. It would be a pity if each of them remembers this missed opportunity only when they themselves stand at the last line.

Lev Klein