IPT (Insulin Potentiated Therapy) is not well known among conventional cancer doctors but among alternative cancer doctors it is well known and often used to good effect. When my son brought me from Costa Rica — where I had a small stroke that took my balance and some hearing — to an Arizona cancer clinic, the first thing they did was put me on oxygen 24/7 and the second thing was to give me IPT.
The Slow Beginning
It starts slowly then accelerates until it comes to a sudden and delightful end. You arrive in the morning with an empty stomach. The nurse sets you up with a saline drip that will keep you hydrated during treatment. Then she punctures your ear lobe (doesn’t hurt) and reads the sugar level of that drop of blood using a handheld glucose meter.
You relax in your comfy recliner, feet up, blanket over your legs, cushion for your head, and doze off if you like and enjoy the sunshine filling the room and the mix of conversations. All around the walls are others in their recliners with IV poles, receiving various treatments such as vitamin C, B vitamins, heavy metal chelation, or ultraviolet blood irradiation. Over the days and weeks, you get to know some of them. Some have family members sitting with them and many are quite sociable.
The nurse bustles around bringing syringes and related items that fill the small table by your chair. She gives you a dose of Toradol, an anti-inflammatory drug to protect you during treatment. Then she gives you a dose of insulin. She brings some icy-cold clothing items, chosen to match the specific drugs you’ll receive: a beanie, mittens, and/or booties. For some drugs, you need all three and for others maybe none. You don whichever of these the nurse brings you.
The nursing assistant also cares for you, bringing more blankets or cushions if you ask for them as well as food and drink for later consumption. In my first IPT treatment, it was apple juice and chocolate pudding. This clinic had us all on a raw vegan diet as part of treatment and the kitchen provided three filling meals each day. The chocolate pudding was made from avocados and I’ll post the recipe later on — stay tuned for that!!
The Rapid Middle
Periodically the nurse takes another drop of blood from your ear to see how well the insulin is lowering your blood glucose level even more than it was when you arrived minus any breakfast. When she finds that it has dropped to about 60% of what it was to start with, the IPT accelerates. In quick succession, the nurse injects two or three chemotherapy drugs into your IV line, then a dose of Dexamethadone (an adrenocortical steroid) and one of Diflucan, an antifungal. Like the Toradol, these are to protect you while the chemo drugs are busy decimating your immune system.
The Pleasant Ending
After a very brief pause, she then injects a large syringe full of dextrose, a type of sugar, to start raising your blood glucose level back to normal. The IPT now is suddenly over and you are free (and well-advised) to drink your apple juice and eat your pudding. The low blood sugar makes you feel weak and vague, maybe shaky. It feels good to get it back to normal.
The IPT Rationale
IPT’s slow beginning is the wait for the insulin dose to lower your blood sugar enough and the goal of low blood sugar is to make the cancer cells hungry. They depend on blood glucose to survive and they have many more glucose receptors on their membranes than normal body cells. The IPT beginning makes them open their receptors ready for any glucose that comes their way. Insulin’s main job is to act like a key for glucose, opening the body cell glucose receptors and ushering glucose molecules through the cell membrane. Normally, the body produces insulin in response to the presence of glucose in the blood. In IPT, there’s little glucose in the blood, because of you having had no breakfast, but the insulin does its job anyway, opening cell membrane glucose receptors.
The rapid middle part of IPT takes advantage of this period of cancer cell openness to provide them with toxic chemo drugs instead of glucose. The insulin facilitates chemo entry into the open cancer cell membranes, poisoning those cells and because the cancer cells are open, these drugs are administered in low doses — about ten percent of traditional chemotherapy doses. That means IPT causes no sickness and for most people does not cause hair to fall out. The icy cold beanie, mittens and booties are to protect against peripheral nerve damage.
In the 8 months I was at the AZ cancer clinic, I had IPT 31 times. That’s more than most people need but my leukemia was in its acute stage, final stage, and was very fierce. I was in cachexia, that stage where a cancer patient loses muscle, fat, and appetite, becoming thin, weak and usually depressed or discouraged. My weight dropped from about 136 pounds to 109. IPT, along with many other IV and non-IV treatments calmed the leukemia down and allowed me to spend the following year in Thailand without any treatments. I did stick to an anti-cancer diet though. More on anti-cancer diets in upcoming blogs.