The Pancreas and Pancreatic Cancer
An Interview with Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.
With permission from totalhealth Magazine, Volume 28, No. 4. For subscription information, call 1-888-316-6051.
As a medical student at Cornell in 1981, Nick first began investigating the work of the late and very eccentric Dr. William Kelley, the dentist who developed a nutritional enzyme approach to cancer during the 1960’s. His research mentor at the time, Dr. Robert Good – then President of Sloan-Kettering and recently described in his obituary as the “Father of Modern Immunology” – suggested as part of Nick’s project he evaluate all patients with appropriately diagnosed inoperable pancreatic cancer treated by Dr. Kelley within a specific time frame (Nick ultimately chose the years 1974-1982). Dr. Good, wise teacher that he could be, encouraged Nick to focus his efforts on this particular malignancy, since pancreatic cancer was at the time, as it is today, an invidiously aggressive illness that kills most of its victims within 3-6 months. Dr. Good realized Kelley treated other types of cancers as well as non-cancer illnesses. But he felt that if Nick could show Kelley had even a few significant victories against this disease, his work would deserve to be taken more seriously – after all, no one in orthodox oncology anywhere could claim any success with inoperable pancreatic cancer.
In Nick’s searchings through Kelley’s files he did indeed discover a series of remarkable patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer who had done extraordinarily well for years under Kelley’s care. He documented these unusual cases as a part of his lengthy report on Kelley’s methods, completed as fulfillment for his immunology research training under Dr. Good – who by that time had moved to All Children’s Hospital in Florida. Though the original manuscript remains unpublished to this day [note: One Man Alone was later published in 2010 by New Spring Press and also available on Amazon] – due to the usual biases in the medical and publishing world – by the late 1980s, long after Kelley had closed down his office and disappeared from view, word of Nick’s study and his unusual findings with pancreatic cancer spread quickly in the alternative world.
In 1993, Dr. Michael Friedman, then Associate Director of the National Cancer Institute, suggested Nick pursue a small pilot study, evaluating his nutritional approach in patients diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, for reasons similar to those of Dr. Good 12 years earlier. He felt that if Nick had the guts to put his therapy to the test against pancreatic cancer in a formal clinical trial and the treatment showed some benefit even in a few patients, the NCI would have to move to the next level with his work and support large controlled clinical studies. By “benefit” Dr. Friedman meant three out of 10 patients living one year.
Nick far exceeded Dr. Friedman’s definition of success; of the eleven patients in the study, eight with very advanced stage IV disease, nine lived at least a year, five lived two years or more, and two lived beyond four years. Based on these well-documented results, published in a peer-reviewed journal in 1999, the NCI agreed to fund a comprehensive controlled study, originally designed to pit The Gonzalez Protocol® against the best available chemotherapy in patients diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. This closely followed study seems well-known within both the alternative and the orthodox medical world as one of the NCI’s first attempts to study, seriously, an alternative approach to cancer. Unfortunately, despite the earlier optimism that surrounded the project, it remains seven years later uncompleted, for many reasons that for now must be kept confidential.
So though the long story of Nick’s clinical trial was told in his book What went Wrong, that project struggled along its peculiar pathway. Nick did pursue laboratory studies in a mouse pancreatic tumor model developed by the renowned molecular biologist Dr. Parviz Pour at the University of Nebraska. Again, as with the pilot study, the results were positive, impressive, published in the peer-reviewed literature, and presented at an NCI invitation-only conference.
Since so much of his research, both clinical and laboratory, has involved pancreatic cancer in one way or another, it’s understandable that many familiar with our regimen associate it primarily or even exclusively with the disease, even though Nick did treat all forms of cancer as well as non-malignant illness. Nonetheless, after several conversations with his friend Lyle Hurd, the publisher of totalhealth, Nick decided to write about this particular disease once again, concentrating not on the clinical studies, but our success with patients treated in his private practice. In doing so he hoped to demonstrate that with his nutritional therapy, a number of his patients have beaten soundly this normally rapidly terminal condition in a way unmatched anywhere in the orthodox oncology literature. Nick also hoped to make the same point Dr. Good made with him in their first conversations about Kelley 25 years ago, and the point Dr. Friedman repeated years later. If he could document even an occasional success with inoperable pancreatic cancer, The Gonzalez Protocol® deserves to be taken more seriously.
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