Kim Il Jong: Pancreatic Cancer Poster Dictator?

Unless you are both rich and very lucky (this means you, Real Steve), pancreatic cancer is pretty much a death sentence. By the time you are diagnosed, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of months you have left.

My dad managed about 18 months, due to an experimental "drip system" chemo developed at UCLA. He barely made it to 1994, which was just about when the Web started exploding. He went back in computing to the days of analog computers (for example, modeling the Lockheed Electra wing problems with differential equations), and I know he would have loved the Web.

1994 was some years after Dr Bernard Bihari started exploring the use of Low Dose Naltrexone for the treatment of cancer and other dread diseases like AIDS and Multiple Sclerosis

...almost all cancers have a lot of receptors for endorphins on the cell surface, and that seems to be necessary for it to work. Some of the cancers that respond most dramatically are Multiple Myeloma, Lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, breast cancer, all the cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, like pancreatic cancer, non small-cell cancer of the lung, the kind associated with smoking. I've got several patients with tumors that have stopped growing; they have no symptoms, and then after a year, year and a half, in about half of that group, the tumors start shrinking and disappear.

There have been other results since then, notably from Berkson. Why isn't mainstream medicine pursuing research along these lines? Simple - the patents on Naltrexone ran out long ago, and nobody would make any money on curing cancer with it.

Perhaps LDN isn't The Answer - I wish the FDA and NIH would do their job and get on the case.

Meanwhile, in resource-poor no-health-care North Korea, I'd put even money that Dear Leader will happen along this treatment. It would be ironic indeed if he survived, and the world "discovered" a cheap, effective treatment through its use on a murderous despot.

Other LDN/cancer references:
http://cancerx.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/naltrexone-for-cancer/
http://www.geocities.com/~vera_b/alts/naltrexone.html
http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/gazorpa/interview.html
http://www.libnot.com/2009/05/31/pancreatic-cancer-and-autoimmune-diseases-treated-with-low-dose-naltrexone-and-intravenous-alpha-lipoic-acid-protocol/