I added a category on the sidebar “DCA” so you can find the series of articles I’ve written about this cancer killing drug beginning in late January of this year. It’s been a month since the last update.
Still no formal clinical trials have begun for DCA as a cancer therapeutic. This is more than two years after its discovery at the University of Alberta and almost 6 months after the discovery was disclosed in peer reviewed Cancer Cell and hundreds of news outlets and bloggers picked up on it. Even the American Cancer Society has articles about it on their website. The DCA Site remains the focus of where to learn about it and where informal trial methods and results are published. The DCA Site was begun by a person who’d learned about DCA by reading Uncommon Descent. That same person later went on to hire a top-notch cancer drug development chemist at UC Berkeley to come up with an inexpensive high tech method to manufacture very pure Sodium DCA which he has been marketing at little more than break-even cost for the past 60 days – about $50 for a one month supply at high dosage rate here or 60 days at a lower rate. About a dollar a day, more or less. That’s so low compared to FDA approved cancer therapeutics which cost thousands of dollars virtually free of cost in comparison not to mention it appears to work better and have virtually none of the debilitating side effects of other cancer chemotherapies. To avoid problems with the FDA it’s being marketed for treatment of cancer in animals but it’s mostly people who are taking it. In the month since I last posted an update there is much more at the informational site. The accumulation of knowledge is explosively fast compared to clinical trials which span years. Given that DCA has been used in clinical trials for other diseases for decades it should have been fast-tracked straight into phase II cancer trials but for evidently very unsavory reasons it’s being ignored by the powers that be.
Highlights of the past month:
1) Most cancer sufferers report almost immediate recovery of energy, appetite, and mobility upon taking DCA. Best efficaciousness seems to be at the lower end of the recommended dosage range (10mg/kg).
2) Some tumors die so fast that tumor lysis syndrome (poisoning the body from dead tissue cells) is problematic. Dosing schedules are being experimented with to moderate it.
3) Some cancers start shrinking in days while sarcoma and possibly small cell lung cancer exhibit resistance.
4) Reversible peripheral neuropathy (tingling in the extremities that goes away after ceasing DCA) is reported by a few people taking higher dosages (25mg/kg) after several weeks. Managing blood pH so it stays neutral to alkaline seems to be a key for both making DCA more effectacious against cancer and eliminating the reversable neuropathy. DCA is an acid and tends to lower blood pH. The myelin sheath around nerves is compromised by the high acid level. Managing diet by eating high alkaline foods or supplementation with things like milk of magnesia and monitoring blood pH through inexpensive home testing of urine and saliva seems to be working.
5) Temporary dizziness and disorientation from low glucose after some time at higher dosages is reported by a few. DCA alters glucose metabolism. This side effect is successfully managed by snacking between regular meals to keep a constant supply of glucose.
6) Perhaps oddest of all is a few people reporting that slow growing moles they’ve had most of their lives are shrinking and disappearing. No one expected that but it makes sense as DCA use restores mitochondrial activity so that malfunctioning cells are given a suicide order (apoptosis). Moles are typically non-cancerous but are still malfunctioning cells that refuse to die. One person reported that topical application of DCA eliminated an unknown surface skin growth he’d had for years that had become painful.
It’s a sad reflection on the economics of cancer therapy that no drug companies or anyone else is willing to fund real controlled medical studies of DCA as a cancer therapeutic. The people who early on were labeled conspiracy theorists for saying DCA would never see the light of day because it wasn’t patentable or profitable for drug companies seem to be proven right.
It also appears I’ve been banned from Oncology researcher Dr. David “Orac” Gorski’s blog as I tried to post a comment including the above last night and it was refused. He wrote thousands and thousands of words in a series of negative articles about DCA and me in particular for helping spread information about it. I guess he can’t tolerate being wrong so now he’s just not talking about it or allowing talk about it on his blog anymore. Cool. Getting a healthy dose of woo hammered into him with the old DaveScot cluestick (woo and cluestick are a couple of his favorite words) couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. It certainly makes one wonder how many other potential wonder medicines have been ignored or buried because they have no profit potential.
Party on, Garth.