I just ran across this article...Shock PC to death with testosterone!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/11/30/man-cured-prostate-cancer-doctors-shock-tumour-death-testosterone/

I was just about to post the same thing. Here it is in a clickable link: www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/11/30/man-cured-prostate-cancer-doctors-shock-tumour-death-testosterone/

Bipolar androgen therapy isn't a new idea. This is quite a positive article about its effectiveness for guys that had, from the article, All of the patients had spreading cancer that was resistant to treatment with two of the latest hormone therapy drugs, abiraterone and enzalutamide.

And, to temper the enthusiasm a bit, there's this: "However, this is early stage research and further studies are needed in order to understand exactly how intriguing developments like this work and to test the findings more robustly in large clinical trials."

If you're interested, here are two threads about it from a few months ago. There are links to fuller discussions of it.

www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=35&m=3695979
www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=35&m=3695949

If this is a clinical trial you'd like to participate in, you ought to contact NJJon who is in one of the trials, and is getting excellent results from it.

I have to say that "they will be no worse off than they were before" is precisely why the trials are being done. We don't know that. It is quite possible the opposite is true.

But convincing an oncologist to go off protocol may be more challenging than it sounds. A freelance oncologist maybe easier than one that works for a group or institution. At those places IRB's will have to approve it before allowing an experimental approach. There's a lot of liability that can enter the equation.

For myself, after three years on leuprolide acetate and bicalutamide, my T levels never came back up to normal ranges. After 5 years in remission we decided to try testosterone replacement but this ended up reducing my quality of life as TRT caused nausea and blood pressure fluctuation for me. I stopped it after trying various methods of TRT and decided to just live with T levels around 220-265.

Fairwind said...
As far as I know, NONE of the 47 has suffered a negative outcome..but a few have noticed no improvement..Doctors in England claim that one lucky man was actually cured

Unfortunately, that's not the case. The 47 is based on two separate pilot studies, one for mHSPC (n=29), the other for asymptomatic mCRPC (n=16). Neither of these small pilot studies were among men who "only had a few months to live." It is also unclear whether or not the increased testosterone accelerated progression in many of the men in each trial. In the HSPC trial, 6 of the 29 had detectable metastatic progression after 18 months on BAT. How do we evaluate that without a control group? In the CRPC trial, half had no discernable PSA or radiographic response to BAT. Was that worse than expected? Impossible to know without a control. Their new clinical trials for which they are currently recruiting are still Phase 2 - testing efficacy in various settings.

Pilot tests like this are great for eliminating non-starters and for generating hypotheses. Tony can tell you war stories of all the Phase 2 clinical trials that washed out when expanded to Phase 3. Importantly, can we identify patients in whom it is likely to be beneficial, and those in whom it is likely to be detrimental? And, perhaps most importantly, will the observed PSA/radiographic response in some translate to a survival benefit?

This is definitely not ready for prime time and will not be for several years at least.

BTW - the doctors were at Johns Hopkins rather than England.

Under that reasoning, you would legalese laetrile. Yes, it may kill one, but some people claim it works. There's no medical evidence for either therapy in "terminal cancer patients." As I said, BAT has never been tried in terminally ill patients, and certainly might ruin their quality of remaining life and hasten their demise.

Most guys I know who have become castrate-resistant are still leading full, active lives with a great deal of quality. They would be insulted by your assertion. You ought to keep such judgments to yourself. I suggest you edit your post accordingly.

The reason they restricted the mCRPC trial to asymptomatic men is because ADT is the single most palliative medicine for bone bain, and by giving testosterone to men with advanced (symptomatic) mets, as you propose, it would put them in excruciating pain. There is no doctor other than Mengele who would do that to another human being.

As long as ADT is working to suppress cancer progression, you are not a candidate for BAT..Only when you become hormone refractory and that includes Zytiga and Xtandi, when those drugs stop working, this is the window where BAT seems to work..Does it fuel the growth of tumors putting patients in excruciating pain? Apparently not....It seems to kill the tumors wherever they may be lurking. If any of the men in the trail experienced a rapid increase in their tumor burden that fact would have been reported..Reading all the available data, virtually ALL the men in the trial experienced a decrease in their PSA numbers. There were no reported PSA increases which certainly would have happened if the testosterone caused the cancer to progress and progress rapidly..Again, this effect is only noted in men who are hormone refractory. At this point, the nature of their cancers seems to have changed dramatically, it's no longer the same disease they started with..

Faustmann, we G-9 guys play a whole different ballgame...We play in a different league than most of the other guys. So it should not be surprising when we voice different viewpoints....

The main body of research can be found here..

grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-CA184012-03

about 90 men die from prostate cancer every day..If there is a treatment that's been proven safe (much safer than Chemo anyway) and has shown great promise in preliminary trials, a simple, inexpensive, easy to administer treatment, why should this treatment be withheld from stage 4 advanced prostate cancer patients if they wish to try it?? You want then to wait 2 or 3 years while trials are completed? That's almost 100,000 more victims....Will BAT make any difference in that number? Who knows ? Lets find out !

Using your own numbers, it seems to deliver a worthwhile response in 60% of the trial subjects. If you include the fact that MOST of the subjects again responded to Zytiga, Xtandi, even Casodex, after those drugs had stopped working, it seems to me that BAT is a big advancement in PC treatment..

As far as the "terminal cancer" disagreement, you and I have different viewpoints as to where that line is drawn..Depending on your age, once metastasis is detected, sooner or later, that cancer is going to kill you unless of course you have a heart attack or a stroke first..

So sure, let the researchers work out the details with their trials and their lab work, let them work out the optimum dose and treatment schedule. Let them work out all the angles...Years go by.. But in the meantime, lets let anybody who wants to try this under the supervision of their local oncologist have a shot at it..What's the downside here?

When the time comes, I will ! Good Night TA, great little debate...

The point is moot, since no one, not even Liebowitz, would give testosterone to a symptomatic man (at least I hope not). Laetrile would actually be a safer option. I agree that the danger would be for charlatans to take advantage of desperation to sell "miracle cures" to dying men. I can see from some of these comments that there is a lot of money to be made off of such patients. I also blame the media for not explaining the complexity of these issues. Very tragic.