Mark A. Rosenberg M.D. says he’s “generally disliked by local oncologists.” For one reason, he’s not a conventional board-certified oncologist. For another, he’s not interested in the mainstream standard of cancer care.
Even still, some conventional oncologists will refer patients to his treatment center, the Rosenberg Integrative Cancer Treatment and Research Institute - patients who have advanced cancer that’s not responding to conventional treatment. In other words, hopeless cases. How does Dr. Rosenberg help them? Let’s take a closer look…
As a young teenager Dr. Rosenberg had an interest in the aging process and methods to delay it, including the use of vitamins and herbal supplements.
Even after becoming board certified in emergency medicine in 1994, he retained his interest in aging, attending an anti-aging conference in 1997 and opening his own part-time anti-aging practice.
His transition to becoming a cancer doctor happened following a tragic event in 2004.
A new understanding of cancer
In that year Dr. Rosenberg’s mother came into the emergency room with chest pain. He and a team of other medical doctors diagnosed her with lung cancer and noted that it had spread to four other organs. Dr. Rosenberg took her to the best cancer hospitals only to discover that survival for advanced cancer patients had barely improved in decades. His mother was only expected to live another four months with no treatment or six months with chemotherapy.
Dr. Rosenberg was “amazed” by the lack of progress and threw himself into research. This became a passion and, he says, “eventually an obsession for me.”
After discovering many cancer treatment options not explored in conventional oncology, he suggested potential treatments to his mother who chose to have high-dose intravenous vitamin C and nothing else.
She lived another eleven months.
Dr. Rosenberg’s research led him to realize that our understanding of how cancer grows must be wrong, otherwise killing cancer cells as conventional oncology does would be curative. After all, killing cancer cells is easily done with drugs in a laboratory culture and even aggressive tumors in mice can be eradicated quickly. So why doesn’t this approach work in humans?
Dr. Rosenberg came to believe that uncontrolled cellular growth comes from the interaction and communication between abnormal cells and the environment they live in. In other words, to eliminate cancer, multiple treatments are necessary to address not only the cancer cells, but the body’s cancer-prone environment.
Multifaceted cancer treatment
After his mother died, the first cancer patient Dr. Rosenberg saw was a 47-year-old woman with lung cancer spread to the liver and spine who was unresponsive to chemotherapy. He treated her with many “off-label” FDA-approved drugs not used by conventional oncologists as well as high-dose intravenous vitamin C. After four months, scans revealed she was in remission.
Other patients who, in his opinion, needed non-FDA-approved drugs were treated abroad and he writes, "The results on my patients were nothing short of remarkable, [extending] both quality of life and lifespan."
He added that "there is no greater satisfaction [than] crying” with a patient, given only a few months to live, whose cancer - spread to other organs - can no longer be seen on scans and is in remission.
Because of the complex, multifaceted and constantly evolving nature of cancer, he regards the conventional one-size-fits-all approach as "an ongoing travesty...absurd to any cancer scientist."
His own approach, he explains, is to "use everything that works." And by using multiple modalities in advanced cancer patients he has been able to "cut off many pathways of cancer growth, often converting an acutely progressive disease into a stable chronic disease."
I want to add here that this is an approach used by many of the most successful alternative cancer doctors. Perhaps they don’t use the exact same treatments as Dr. Rosenberg, but their goal is the same-- it isn’t always to cure cancer, it’s to control it. As a result, many cancer patients go on to enjoy months, years and sometimes even decades more life with their loved ones and friends. And I call that a great success.
Dr. Rosenberg’s favorite treatments
Therapies Dr. Rosenberg uses include diet and nutrition, a cornerstone of his protocol; supplements such as melatonin, curcumin, lycopene, Avemar (wheat germ extract), turkey tail mushroom, resveratrol, vitamin D3, and ECGC (green tea extract); off label drugs such as metformin and DCA (dichloroacetate); intravenous vitamin C and intravenous immune boosting cocktails; pH manipulation therapy (see below); local hyperthermia; and a special form of low dose chemotherapy.
Dr. Rosenberg is not only a leading integrative cancer physician and anti-aging specialist but also a developer of new treatment techniques including a promising new cancer drug.
Cancer pH manipulation therapy
In 2011 Dr. Rosenberg announced preliminary findings in two patients using a novel two-pronged technique he calls "Cancer pH Manipulation Therapy."
Without chemotherapy, tumor markers in a patient with cancer of the uterus completely normalized. In a second patient with a rare form of abdominal cancer and tumor markers rapidly rising, his technique lowered tumor markers by 40 percent in just two weeks.
The treatment focuses on cancers that feed on glucose for energy, which many do. This form of metabolism produces lactic acid as a byproduct and acidifies the environment outside the cancer cell, promoting tumor aggressiveness.
His oral protocol blocks three of six mechanisms cancer cells use to pump out the acid, which they need to do to stay alive. Once these are blocked, the second aspect of the technique is to feed high amounts of glucose to the cancer to deliberately create an abundance of lactic acid that the cancer cells can’t dispose of. In Dr. Rosenberg’s words, “the more they feed, the faster they die.”
He is currently at work on another exciting treatment for cancer.
Cancer “dialysis”
It’s estimated that nine out of ten cancer deaths are due to metastasis – the spread of the cancer cells from the primary organ to other parts of the body. Stopping this process, therefore, would be a big step in saving lives and turning cancer from a killer into a chronic, manageable condition.
Metastasis occurs when tumor cells break away from the primary organ and enter the bloodstream, at which time they are called circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Multiple studies reveal that the levels of CTCs correlate with patient survival and measuring their levels is more accurate than both scans and tumor markers.
Interestingly, CTCs can be shed in the early stages of cancer. This is contrary to the prevailing view that metastasis is a late-stage event.
One example of this comes from a study published in the journal Nature Genetics in 2019. It showed that eight out of ten metastatic colorectal cancers are likely to have spread to the liver and brain “while the carcinoma is clinically undetectable.”
In another study published in the journal PLoS One, the researchers examined patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a known risk factor for lung cancer. They reported that “CTCs can be detected in patients with COPD without clinically detectable lung cancer, [and that] annual surveillance of the CTC-positive COPD patients by CT-scan screening detected lung nodules one to four years after CTC detection.”
Since clearing CTCs would be a major advance, Dr. Rosenberg has developed an outside-the-body patent-pending device that filters CTCs from the blood before returning the blood back into the body. It’s not dissimilar to a dialysis unit except that only CTCs are filtered out. He believes it could be a true “gamechanger” in cancer treatment.
A third treatment that Dr. Rosenberg is developing focuses on cancer stem cells.
Targeting cancer stem cells
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) can self-renew and resist chemotherapy. These cells are a prime reason why many cancer treatments fail. Even with no evidence of disease, these cells may lie dormant and become active sometime in the future.
Dr. Rosenberg’s “obsession” for research enabled him to stumble upon a drug called salinomycin, an antibiotic used for decades in chicken and pig feed. He discovered that it targets and kills CSCs. Unfortunately, it’s also highly neurotoxic, so he started a pharmaceutical company and worked with research scientists from Harvard to develop a version of the drug that’s nontoxic and only targets these cancer stem cells.
He describes the results in mouse models of ovarian, breast, pancreatic, lung and brain cancer as “phenomenal.” The first phase-1 human trial is expected to be launched soon. I’ll share results as soon as they become available. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Dr. Rosenberg and his treatments, visit his website at newhopeforcancer.org
Best regards,
Lee Euler,
Publisher
