Integrated Genetic Solutions brings “Specific Data” to work for doctors

INTRODUCTION: I'm a clinical immunologist, and as such I treat people with various severe and chronic diseases. There's several different divisions of clinical immunology, such as onco-immunology, which is cancer immunology, immunodeficiency diseases, autoimmune diseases and the like. The type of patients I work with most are patients with severe and chronic diseases, mostly cancer patients. And cancer basically by definition is an immune deficiency disease because if the immune system is functioning normally, it will protect us from getting cancer of any sort, regardless of what the stresses are. What happens for most people is as a result of things such as poor nutrition, infections, toxins, traumas, stresses, et cetera, in other words daily life here on Long Island, their body gets a little bit toxed-out, the immune system starts to dip in terms of its ability to surveil and protect us from abnormal cells.

Abnormal cells get a foothold, they start to grow, and bingo, we have cancer. Long Island is officially classified as a cancer cluster for breast cancer, high degree of prostate cancer on a nationwide scale. And also, interestingly enough, is a cluster for autoimmune diseases, autoimmune thyroid diseases, specifically Hashimoto's thyroiditis. There have been a number of studies that actually look at the relationship between thyroid disease and cancer. And the direct relationship comes from the fact that the thyroid hormone is critical in stimulating the activity of certain cells that protect us from these abnormal cells. Certain cells called 'natural killer cells' and cytotoxic lymphocytes require thyroid hormone in its unadulterated form, in other words, not being attacked by antibodies, and not being too deficient in order to activate and to protect us from these abnormal cells. So there's a direct connection between thyroid problems and cancer problems.

PRIORITY 1: WATER FILTRATION
Why there's such a problem on Long Island with both is not yet known, at least not publicly. They've done a lot of research, spent tens of millions of dollars trying to find that answer, but at this point there's no clear answer, at least none is known publicly. What we do know is that there are things such as we find in Newsday newspaper periodically, such as a recent article about what they call the 'Bethpage plume.' The Bethpage plume is a toxic plume that's underneath the area of Bethpage, which consists of chemicals that were dumped there years ago by the aerospace industry, Grumman and the like, when they were building aircraft here and the space shuttle here and the lunar lander here and all sorts of things, and they just dumped these chemicals into the aquifer. Unfortunately, at Long Island, we only have one aquifer for the entire island. So a news daily showed this plume underneath Bethpage and they showed lines around it like a bullseye showing where the plume would be in five years, in 10 years. And in 15 years from now, it's gonna be all the way out to Montauk Point.

And this contains chemicals known to the State of California and New York to cause cancer. And this is a big problem. So I recommend for all my patients as a starting point that they get a water purifier and that they only drink either good quality bottled water, preferably in a glass bottle, or that they use a good filter. There are several good ones on the market, but you have to make sure to check the filter regularly, to make sure that it's still working adequately for your needs. All the water you drink should be either filtered or bottled. If it comes from the tap it has to be filtered, and you use that for drinking and for cooking purposes. For showering and bathing, that's another story and that's a bigger problem, and for that you're gonna need a whole house filter. The first thing you need to do is to stop putting more toxins into your system. So you wanna have clean water. Clean water is critical from the point of view of detoxification and from the point of view of allowing the enzymes to get from point A to point B in as quickly a manner as they need to do.

Also it's important in terms of the viscosity of the blood and all of our important bodily functions are dependent to a large extent on the quality and the amount of water in our system. So next on our list, once we have the water situation covered, is to look at the kind of food that you're eating. I recommend that you eat organic food as much as possible. Here on Long Island, we have lots of good sources for organic food. If you go out east, there are farms, whole farms, that grow organic produce which in the middle of the winter it's kinda hard to get them and get there but nonetheless, places like Fairway Market has a good organic section and the Stop & Shop, et cetera. And, of course, we have health food stores around. Places like Whole Foods and Wild By Nature, which have good organic produce, tend to be more expensive but they have usually a bigger selection. And then also, if you're going to eat protein in the form of eggs, beef, pork, what have you, they should be organic as well. There's a couple of very good organic butchers around.

GO ORGANIC!
In addition to going to the health food stores, as I mentioned earlier, which also have organic beef and pork and what not, chicken, there's places like Empire Market at College Point which is a great source for organic protein. They have all sorts of organic chicken, they have 10 different kinds of organic chicken sausage, turkey sausage, beef, et cetera, et cetera. All organic, this stuff is very, very fresh and I recommend it highly. So your diet should be as organic as possible, keep things as clean as possible. Then it's a matter of looking at your life and lifestyle and trying to keep stress under control. Stress by itself does not cause cancer. But what it can do because of its ability to suppress the immune system is it can promote the cancer. Every single day, every single one of us produces a certain number of cancer cells, which is why if you do a blood test, called a 'tumor marker test' and there are different ones of these tests like a CEA, CA-99, CA-125, etc.

If you do these tests you'll see that the normal range is not zero to zero. It's zero to some number, a low number, and the reason for that is that we make abnormal cells every day. Our immune system seeks and destroys these cells and releases these abnormal proteins into our blood, which we can measure. So it's only when the immune system is falling behind its job and falling behind the curve of its ability to recognize, respond, and remember what's going on with our health and these abnormal cells, that these abnormal cells can accumulate and form a tumor and then a full-blown cancer. So we have to pay attention to what's going on with these cells. We have to pay attention to what's going on with our immune system.

For those people who actually develop cancer which, at this point, is unfortunately about 50% of us, which to me is a terrible statistic, but nonetheless true, actually a little higher here on Long Island because we are classified as a cancer cluster. From my point of view, the best way to go after it is to rebuild the immune system. What you want to do there is some very sophisticated blood test, looking at the structure and function of the immune system, look to see where the problems are, see what the functional capacity and damage is to the immune system, and then we put together a strategy of how to repair this.

LIFESTYLE UPGRADE & STRESS MANAGEMENT
How do we repair the underlying biochemistry that supports the immune system? Because without an intact biochemistry, you cannot have a functional immune system. That's a very, very important piece. So the biochemical piece is looking at, as I said before, looking at the quality of your diet, looking at toxins in your foods, looking at the stresses in your life, and then controlling these things so that you can support the biochemistry and have your immune system be as functional and robust as is possible.

Once we have corrected the biochemical issues, then we look at the communication within the immune system. There are certain substances called cytokines. Cytokines are special communication molecules within the immune system, allows your cells to send out signals, what the problem is, where the problem is, what kind of troops are needed to deal with the problem, so on and so forth. These cytokines are critical messenger molecules that allow the immune system to report damage from the bottom of our feet to the top of our head in a matter of seconds to the immune system at large. We see a response at the level of the bone marrow, again, within seconds of the problem being identified.

THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

It's a miraculous system; almost as complex, almost as fast as our nervous system. Therein lies many parallels and connections between the two. There are specific receptors on the immune system for all of the brain hormones that we have, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin. They all play a role in immune function, as well as in our central nervous system. Direct parallels, which is another reason why stress is such a big factor in suppressing immune function. It's oppressing immune function. So in any case, once we have looked at the immune system, its structure, the underlying biochemistry, looking at the function, looking at the balance of the cytokines that are there, then we put together a treatment strategy very, very individualized to what those problems are. And the treatment will usually consist of some sort of nutritional IV to help with detoxification and to put back nutrients that are needed to support the immune system, as well as, often, the use of direct cytokines to help stimulate and direct the immune response. There are many different cytokines that can do this, everything from alpha interferon, beta interferon, gamma interferon, Proleukin, et cetera, et cetera. And these things are available, they are very, very powerful, and can be used in a very gentle way to help shift the immune system back into gear. Then it's a matter of letting the body do what the body does best, which is to heal.

So we supply the basic ingredients that allow the body to repair its biochemistry, support the immune system, get the communication back on track, and then we just get out of the way and let the magic happen 'cause the body is brilliant in healing itself. It just needs the right building blocks to do it, enough time to get the job done, and the right ability to get rid of the waste products from that process as well. Time is a big problem when somebody has cancer, for many people 'cause often when I see them, it's already at a very late stage. And in those situations, we don't have the luxury of time to slowly put things back together and go at the usual sort of biochemical speed that we need to get things glued back together. So in those situations, I'll use a low dose form of chemotherapy, and then that situation is called IPT, Insulin Potentiation Therapy. Insulin Potentiation Therapy is a technique of using very small doses of insulin to drop the blood sugar a little bit, followed by low doses of the chemotherapeutic agent that's proven to be effective against that particular form of cancer.

The reason that this works so well is because cancer cells have 20 times more insulin receptors on their surface than normal cells do. So when we have somebody come to our office who's been fasting, they haven't had breakfast in the morning, give them a little bit of insulin, their blood sugar drops, and their cells open up these receptors because they are very hungry. So instead of giving them food, we throw in low doses of chemotherapeutic agents that will preferentially go to the cancer cells because they have 20 times more receptors than the normal cells, and then we give a low dose of glucose, of dextrose IV, which basically snaps these receptors shut, sealing these chemicals inside the cancer cells. This strategy is very good, very elegant, has very little toxicity, and has very, very excellent responses.

There's a big study that's just now coming out on the five-year survival rate of over 500 patients, consecutive patients, who were given IPT, and the results that are just now being published are stellar compared to the conventional way that chemotherapeutic agents are normally used because in the high doses, the way that the chemo is generally used, has a lot of toxicity. It generates a lot of inflammation, but inflammation works against us in a lot of different ways. Number one, it suppresses key immune response factors, and number two, inflammation stimulates the activity of cancer stem cells. So we wind up shooting ourselves in the foot which is why the long-term survival rates and long-term success of full-dose chemotherapy are so poor, because the toxicity of the agents that are used and the fact that they're not coupled with a very powerful program of detoxification becomes a big, big problem. But when one uses IPT, Insulin Potentiation Therapy, you don't have those problems. Yes, we still have to do detox. Yes, there still are some mild side effects, but nothing compared to the full dose use of those drugs and chemicals.

Now, the way that we use those agents is in a very, very particular way. The way that we start is by getting a genetic analysis of the person's cancer. We find out what the genetic structure is of the cancer which will tell us what its weaknesses are, and then we match different chemotherapeutic agents to those weaknesses, so it's a very precise application of these kinds of drugs. So we use the drugs that we know are going to intersect with those genetic alterations and have a maximum impact against the cancer cells. Then we pair the chemotherapeutic agents with ones that have a synergistic effect, depending upon where in the cell cycle they were, so we could have a maximum impact, again, with a minimum amount of toxicity. It's a different way of putting together a chemotherapeutic strategy than is done through, for example, the ASCO protocols. ASCO stands for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. It's the world's biggest clinical oncology organization, huge organization. And they run these trials, and they have been for decades, where they'll take a group of patients with the same, "diagnosis", so they'll take 100 women with breast cancer or 100 guys with prostate cancer, etc. They'll give them a combination of chemotherapeutic agents that, in the laboratory, seem to work well against breast cancer cells or prostate cancer cells or leukemia cells or what have you. Then they'll give it to them as a clinical trial and see what happens, to drive the experiment. And then they'll report those results. And then they'll try a different combination of drugs and see how those results are. And the combinations that have the best results for that group of people, again, this is a very generic sort of treatment, without taking into account the genetics of the cancer, that they'll report those findings into what are called ASCO protocols. And any doctor, anybody actually can go online and go to cancertherapyadvisor.com and look at these ASCO protocols and see what the off-the-shelf treatment is in a generic sort of way with somebody with any kind of cancer that you can pretty much imagine.

Now, that's one way of doing things, and that's the way a lot of cancer institutions still do it, but nowadays, a lot of the facilities have moved over to the genetic analysis approach first and are looking at the genetic structure of the cancer and using targeted agents instead of these generic agents. The studies show that when you use targeted agents, such as in the ways that I just said, that the long term and short term results are far superior than using the generic off-the-shelf strategies that have been used in the past before we had this kind of technology. This technology is still relatively new, it's FDA approved, covered by most insurances, etc, but it's something that a lot of oncologists haven't moved on to yet because of whatever reason that I can't begin to imagine. Because the results are so much better when you do that, I can't imagine why anybody would not do that, but still there's a lot of oncologists out there that don't.

Be that as it may, this technology gives us much better results, even when using chemo in the conventional sort of way, but when you do it in the ways that I suggested, with the IPT approach coupled now with immuno therapy, we now have a treatment strategy that gives far better survival statistics, far better short term responses, far better quality of life than any treatment strategy we ever had before against this awful disease process.
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