Thursday, December 22, 2005
Update on Dr.Roundup...
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:Treated patients support Stockbridge doctor.
Another shoe may be about to fall as well:
(An excellent discussion of "alternative cancer cure" testimonials by Orac may be found here)
The specifics of the charges:
My Pubmed search found this paper:Insulin-induced enhancement of antitumoral response to methotrexate in breast cancer patients
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:Treated patients support Stockbridge doctor.
Federal prosecutors say a Stockbridge doctor injected patients with a chemical commonly used in pesticides or weedkillers and gave desperate people false hope.
But patients like Nancy Hoffman say the hope Dr. Totada R. Shanthaveerappa instilled was real. And she wanted the world to know it. On Wednesday, the 65-year-old Stockbridge woman, dressed in a red and white pantsuit, delivered a tray of Christmas cookies to the man she says saved her life.
"This is ridiculous," she said, scowling at reporters outside his office.
Shanthaveerappa, 70, of Stone Mountain faces an 87-count federal indictment for health care fraud and money laundering involving almost $5 million. He is also known as T.R. Shantha and operates Integrated Medical Specialists, a medical clinic in Stockbridge. Federal prosecutors said he might turn himself in today.
Another shoe may be about to fall as well:
Shanthaveerappa, a native of India licensed in Georgia since 1972, is still licensed to practice medicine, but the Composite State Board of Medical Examiners has scheduled an emergency conference call Friday morning.Dr. Shanthaveerappa doesn't follow the advice of Dr. Parker:"Never be the first, or the last, to perform a procedure, or prescribe a treatment."
Dr. Jim McNatt, the board's medical director, could not say if the meeting dealt with Shanthaveerappa. The board can "issue summary suspensions if a physician is demonstrated a threat to public health and safety," McNatt said.
In a letter to a medical newsletter, Shanthaveerappa wrote that he treated a lady dying with septic shock with peritoneal hyperthermia. "The procedure has never been attempted before anywhere in the world," he wrote. "Sarcasm and indignation was expressed by my colleagues about how I treated this woman." He wrote that he is scorned by some doctors for avoiding "the status quo."Other testimonials:
Yaro Garcia and her mother, Isabell Santos, 53, came to the Stockbridge clinic from Naples, Fla., to get help for Santos' brain and breast cancer.
"Her oncologist group told us to give up, take her home and make her comfortable," Garcia said Wednesday after leaving the clinic. "But Dr. Shantha has shown us that there is no such thing as false hope. He promised to help my mom, to give her a longer life and nothing else."
[snip]
Hoffman and Denise Trinklein, who both suffer from scleroderma, a degenerative disease that affects the esophagus, agree that Shanthaveerappa is a humanitarian.
Hoffman said other doctors wanted to try traditional treatments  like steroids  but she wouldn't hear of it. "It's time people stand up to the pharmaceutical companies that are killing us," she said.
"He was doing good for mankind, more than most doctors," said Trinklein, 55, of Venice, Fla., in a telephone interview.
Trinklein said she was "desperate but informed" when she underwent a three-week intravenous chemotherapy treatment four years ago.
"People should have a choice to gamble. ... In my book of angels, he's one of them."
(An excellent discussion of "alternative cancer cure" testimonials by Orac may be found here)
The specifics of the charges:
The indictment alleges that Shanthaveerappa and medical assistant Dan U. Bartoli, 63, of McDonough defrauded health care benefit programs by falsely claiming to have performed insurance-eligible treatments by administering approved drugs. The men also allegedly used DNP, which is banned for human use in the United States.Dr. Shanthaveerappa's websites; Integrated Medical Specialists, Island of Hope (with soothing waves and music), and the wehealcancer.org site all attest to his prowess:
Think twice before you leave the U.S.A. for treatment of LYME DISEASE and CANCER or any debilitating disease such as MS, ALS, Alzheimer's, AIDS, CFS, Fibromyalgia, Gulf War Syndrome, obesity, Parkinson's, addiction, etc.He is a big fan of chelation, hyperbaric oxygen, Ukrain, and Insulin Potentiated Therapy:
Dr. Shantha has had success treating cancer, advanced cancer, stage 3 cancers, stage 4 cancers, colon cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, brain cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, mouth/throat cancer, tongue cancer, bladder cancer, small cell lung cancer, kideny[sic] cancer, bone cancer, Metastatic Cancer, Lyme Disease, Lupus, SLE, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), ALS (Lou Gherig's Disease), Sarcomas, Leukemia's, (including acute leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myelogenous leukemia - AML, chronic myeloid leukemia) Melanomas, Alzheimers and other incurable illnesses.
What is IPT? IPT stands for Insulin Potentiated Therapy. In a nut-shell, by lowering ones blood sugar, cancer cells become more susceptible to any anti-cancer agents used in chemotherapy or alternative treatments. How does this work?: Cancer cells have six (6) to ten (10) times as many insulin receptor sites as healthy, well differentiated cells. This allows cancer cells to feast on sugar. By lowering your blood sugar, cancer cells open their receptors (doors) at a rate of six (6) to one (1), thereby allowing us to selectively target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells to prosper.
Therefore, lower amounts of anti-cancer agents necessary to destroy abnormal cells can be used. This improves the patients quality of life while providing the sufficient amount of therapy for reducing or ablating cancer. Side effects are significantly reduced, and your immune system doesn't take a beating.
My Pubmed search found this paper:Insulin-induced enhancement of antitumoral response to methotrexate in breast cancer patients
PURPOSE: It has been reported that insulin increases the cytotoxic effect in vitro of methotrexate by as much as 10,000-fold. The purpose of this study was to explore the clinical value of insulin as a potentiator of methotrexate. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Included in this prospective, randomized clinical trial were 30 women with metastatic breast cancer resistant to fluorouracil + Adriamycin + cyclophosphamide and also resistant to hormone therapy with measurable lesions. Three groups each of ten patients received two 21-day courses of the following treatments: insulin + methotrexate, methotrexate, and insulin, respectively. In each patient, the size of the target tumor was measured before and after treatment according to the Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors. The changes in the size of the target tumor in the three groups were compared statistically. RESULTS: Under the trial conditions, the methotrexate-treated group and the insulin-treated group responded most frequently with progressive disease. The group treated with insulin + methotrexate responded most frequently with stable disease. The median increase in tumor size was significantly lower with insulin + methotrexate than with each drug used separately. DISCUSSION: Our results confirmed in vivo the results of previous in vitro studies showing clinical evidence that insulin potentiates methotrexate under conditions where insulin alone does not promote an increase in tumor growth. Therefore, the chemotherapy antitumoral activity must have been enhanced by the biochemical events elicited in tumor cells by insulin. CONCLUSIONS: In multidrug-resistant metastatic breast cancer, methotrexate + insulin produced a significant antitumoral response that was not seen with either methotrexate or insulin used separately.Let us note the variable measured was tumor size not survival. The sites make for interesting reading and certainly prove P.T. Barnum was correct. |
(emphasis mine)
