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2009-11-20 Nicholas Gonzalez MD Cancer And The Trophoblast

November 20, 2009, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our mission is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "The Trophoblast And The Origins Of Cancer, And Successfully Treating Cancer Cases Using Enzyme Therapy By Doctors Kelly, Gonzalez And Isaacs."

Our guest today is Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a graduate of Cornell University Medical College in 1983. After his internship, he completed a fellowship training in immunology under Robert A. Good, M.D., PhD, considered by many to be the ‘father of modern immunology.' Dr. Gonzalez began researching nutritional approaches to cancer treatment while a medical student, and, completed his investigation of enzyme therapy in cancer while an immunology fellow. Dr. Gonzalez's work on cancer was recently reviewed in Suzanne Sommer's new book "Knockout" and he was on Larry King Live on October 23, 2009 with Suzanne Sommers and other physician panelists. His new book, co-authorized with his colleague Dr. Linda Isaacs, is entitled "The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer."

So welcome Dr. Gonzalez and I am glad you could slow down and not be traveling so much since you got on Larry King Live and all that to be with us.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it's great to be with you again Kirk. I always appreciate your interest in our work

KIRK HAMILTON: So this book. Why did you write this book in particular? What was kind of the draw for you or the push to do it?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well we're doing a series of books and we decided we should get this one out first because it really takes into account the essence of our work. Dr. Beard's work with enzymes. You know the book "The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer" is about Dr. Beard and how a hundred years ago he first proposed that pancreatic enzymes have an anticancer effect, and we show in this book how modern molecular biology one hundred years later has confirmed what Dr. Beard said. We thought it would be a good place to start because enzymes are the essence of our treatment.

KIRK HAMILTON: What is a trophoblast?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: A trophoblast is just the earliest placental cell. In mammals the placenta is the connection between the embryo and the uterus and provides the blood supply from the mother with all the nutrients and oxygen, and provides a conduit where the embryo can get rid of its waste materials and it's essential for in utero life of all mammals. And the trophoblast is the earliest of the placental cells.

KIRK HAMILTON: So what does that have to do with cancer?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well Beard was an embryologist by training, not a researcher interested in cancer at all. It was really embryology that got him into the cancer field. And he was the first scientist one hundred years ago to suggest that the placenta in its earliest incarnation, that is the trophoblast, resembles both in appearance and behavior cancer. The trophoblast, like cancer, is very primitive in its appearance under the microscope. It's invasive like cancer. It tends to proliferate, grow, divide very quickly the way a cancer does. It can migrate the way a cancer does and it produces a rich blood supply to the placenta. If nothing else, it is basically angiogenic organ. And Beard made these observations. And today, and as well as a hundred years ago, pathologists and cancer researchers knew that cancer had these five basic properties. They're primitive, undifferentiated in appearance, they proliferate without restraint, they're invasive, they migrate and they produce a blood supply. They're angiogenic. Beard first suggested that the trophoblast is an ideal model for the study of malignancy. Now one hundred years later cancer researchers have rediscovered that thesis and in many papers are suggesting that the trophoblast, the earliest placental cell, is the model we should use to study cancer.

KIRK HAMILTON: Wow! Now when did he get the idea that an enzyme might affect, I guess the growth of the trophoblast?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well that's a great question. Beard was a great observer, and of course, in its earliest stage the trophoblast does resemble a cancer, but at some point there is a remarkable transformation where suddenly this very primitive, undifferentiated, aggressive angiogenic tissue becomes the mature placenta which stops invading, stops producing blood supply and it's the life supporting organ that allows the embryo in mammals to grow. If it continues to grow it can indeed kill the mother but in, you know, 99.9% of the time at some point and it's predetermined in every species - in humans its day 56 of development - it suddenly changes its character and becomes benign and noninvasive, nonaggressive. And Beard spent years trying to figure out what caused this change in placental behavior and appearance. And it turned out the very day the placenta changed its character from this invasive tumor-like organ into the mature placenta was the very day the embryonic pancreas became active, and he made the suggestion that the pancreatic enzymes actually regulated trophoblastic growth, and since the trophoblast is so much like a tumor in both behavior and appearance, pancreatic enzymes probably would control cancer growth. And he then tested it in both in animal models and in patients at that time, with great success published in all the major medical journals.

KIRK HAMILTON: It sounds like we all started out as ‘cancers' and then somewhere along the line we became less invasive.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: That's exactly true. You know the trophoblast is a very early tissue. I mean it appears just as the fertilized egg enters the uterus when the 100 cell stage, you already have the trophoblast forming like an egg shell around the growing embryo and it's really critical because that allows the embryo to attack and invade into the uterus and serves as the anchor as well as the connection to the maternal blood supply.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let's talk about how you got involved with Dr. Kelly. But could you put a caveat in there because I think your work with Dr. Robert A Good - I mean just plug Robert Good in there and how he influenced you and then lead into Kelly.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Robert Good was a great teacher. In fact it's been said that more of his fellows went on to full professorships in American medical schools than from any other research group in history. He was an M.D. PhD out of the University of Minnesota. He was a Minnesota boy. Had a PhD in neurophysiology and his residency training was actually in pediatrics. But he was a Renaissance scientist. He was the first scientist to propose that the thymus was not some vestigal organ This is back in the 1950s when he was really getting established as a researcher. And Good was the one who first showed that the thymus is actually the main regulator for all immune function. Good also showed that the tonsils are not just a vestigal organ which was believed back in the 1950s, but also important immune modulators for entire head and neck. And it was Good who did that. Good did the first bone marrow transplant in history in 1969. Even though he had no formal pathology training he was such an expert pathologist that he was made head of the Department of Pathology at University of Minnesota. He always used to laugh that he didn't have one hour of formal training in pathology but he was such a world-renown cancer pathologist, self taught, they made him the head of the department and from there he became president of Sloan-Kettering in New York in 1972. And he lasted about 10 years at Sloan-Kettering and then kind of was booted out. I met him when I was a Cornell medical student. He was my research mentor and he really encouraged me, even though he was president of Sloan-Kettering, he's got more to do than talk to some medical student. He always encouraged the students. He used to spend hours with me talking about my interests which was cancer research, particularly nutrition and cancer, and when I met Dr. Kelly as a second year medical student even though Kelly was very controversial, Good encouraged me to start investigating Kelly's cases. He said even if Kelly turned out to be a charlatan I would learn a lot of medicine by doing an independent study such as that. So it began as a second year independent study under the president of Sloan-Kettering, and eventually developed into a major research effort when I completed my fellowship under him.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well that's one of the points that you know I was so saddened when I listened - when I heard the CNN thing is like your background didn't come out and I don't like the words "Alternative Medicine." To me you were doing real medicine and you weren't this alternative doc over here with Burzynski and the other two guys. You're doing real medicine and that's why I wanted you to get it out. You came from studying under Dr. Good and a real scientist. So how did you become - I have this little quote here, from ‘Quack-Buster to believer' of Kelly's work?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well when I first approached Kelly I was skeptical. And I was a very - I appreciate what you just said because I was a very conventional medical student. I expected to spend the rest of my career at Sloan-Kettering in basic science research working under Dr. Good, or someone else just like that, and I started working in Good's group as a second year medical student. He kind of adopted me. The reason I went to Cornell is because I wanted to work at Sloan-Kettering which is one of our teaching hospitals there. I had a very conventional orientation but I had an open mind because Good taught me to have an open mind. He said if you have a closed mind you're going to miss the next new innovation. So when I met Kelly, serendipitously through a friend of mind who Kelly happened to be in New York, I kept an open mind even though he had been attacked in the press, and all that as a cancer quack, etc., etc., the usual stuff. I kept an open mind and Good encouraged me to start looking through his records and I did that. The summer after my second year of medical school I spent down in Dallas, Texas where Kelly had his office at the time going through his records. And even though I was you know just completed second year medical school I had enough pathology to know what was a poor prognosis cancer and unquestionably Kelly was taking the worst cancers, pancreatic, metastatic pancreatic, acute lymphocytic, acute myelocytic leukemia, metastatic breast, metastatic prostate, and turning them around. He had records of patients alive five and ten years later and I piled a lot of these records together after my weeks down in Dallas, brought them back to Dr. Good and we spent hours going through them and he said something's going on here that you need to follow through on a more formal way and that led to this formal study. But it came out of a very orthodox situation. You know I wasn't working in a kind of cage somewhere in a health food store trying to figure out how to cure cancer. I mean -

KIRK HAMILTON: Did you ever have any idea that at that time when you were investigating him as a ‘cancer quack' that you might be turning around and called a ‘cancer quack' what 20 years later?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Once I got involved in investigating Kelly and realized that something was going on in Kelly's office I knew that I was headed for controversy because there were professors at Cornell that really insisted that I give up this controversial work and they actually criticized Dr. Good for this, but Good was so powerful in that medical center people left me alone. He gave me - half my senior year, was devoted to independent research under Dr. Good simply investigating Kelly's work and some of my professors went ballistic that I was being allowed to do this. They even tried to stop the research at one point but again, you know, you can't argue with the president of Sloan-Kettering. Not only was he the president of Sloan-Kettering he was the most published author in the history of medicine so people kind of backed off when he said leave Gonzalez alone. But I could tell you I could see right away that there was controversy which made no sense to me because the purpose of a scientist is to look into the truth whether it's moonbeams or whatever. You look into the - find out what the truth is however odd it may seem. The truth always, you know, when it's new always seems odd. You know people believed the world was flat. It was very odd that it wasn't, but you know you have to accept the truth so I had an open mind because I was trained by a very good scientist who taught me to keep an open mind and I didn't care what they thought. But no, I'm not surprised because I knew I was headed for controversy.

KIRK HAMILTON: Tell me about the monograph on Kelly called "One Man Alone."

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: You know we're finally going to publish that. That's actually the results of my investigation of Kelly which ultimately took five years and I went through over a thousand of Kelly's records. I mean I reviewed thousands of his records, went through a thousand in detail, interviewed about 1300 of his patients. And we put the results together in a monograph, again under Dr. Good's direction. The first third of the book basically discusses this theory behind Kelly's approach including Dr. Beard's work with enzymes. Some of the controversies and the legal problems Kelly had as an alternative practitioner in the 60s and 70s. The second part was 50 cases of patients with appropriately diagnosed advanced or poor prognosis cancer who had done well clearly, only under Kelly's care and with the success that could only be attributed to Kelly, and the third part was our investigation of all of Kelly's pancreatic cancer patients that he treated between 1974 and 1982. And we found that the group that had completely complied with the program, we found five who completely complied - their average survival was eight and a half years with a cancer that normally kills in three to six months. So we put that together in monograph form and we couldn't get it published . This is 1986 and at that time no one could believe that a nutritional approach could have any benefit in the treatment or prevention of cancer. It was considered abject quackery . And even though Good was such an esteemed scientist, and the most published author in medicine, we got two general responses. A lot of his friends who were editors thought that he must have just made it up. The records couldn't be real. No one could get these kinds of results. There was a second group of honest editors who believed that it was real, but thought it was so controversial that their careers would be over if they published it. They'd be the center of a firestorm and they just wouldn't do it. So we couldn't get it published. We put it aside. There's been kind of an underground interest in it for 20 years. We finally decided now that we're kind of well known and people appreciate what we're doing, we are going to get it published so hopefully in the next two months it will be out, with an updated introduction.

KIRK HAMILTON: When did you start actually using The Kelly Method in your practice? How did you transition over to start practicing it?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: I finished my fellowship. By that point Good had moved down to the University of South Florida to set up a bone marrow transplant unit. I finished my fellowship there under him and we set up the bone marrow unit. And I finished my Kelly research and the monograph and he was out of Sloan-Kettering, he was getting elderly and you know he just didn't have the power base he did when he was at Sloan-Kettering. He himself was a controversial man because he supported work like mine. In fact, James Carter in his book "Racketeering in Medicine" in the introduction says one of the reasons Good was probably pushed out of Sloan-Kettering was because of his support of me and it was strong support. I don't know if that's true but Carter, who knew Good well, says that. So we decided that I had to come back to New York and start seeing patients, always with the goal of collecting data so that we could get research funding. So in 1987 I came back to New York and Dr. Isaacs and I, who had been working with me set up a practice and just started seeing patients. It was that simple. We just couldn't get the funding .We couldn't get our monograph published. There was no interest other than from Dr. Good. Even though Dr. Good was do powerful no one would take it seriously so we said to hell with them, we're just going to set up a practice and prove that this works.

KIRK HAMILTON: So you started seeing patients and you started obviously having some success and was this exactly like Kelly's approach then or did you adapt it?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it was pretty much like Kelly's approach yes. I mean it involved the individualized diet, the individualized supplement protocols, large doses of orally ingested enzymes and the detoxification routines like the coffee enemas which Kelly had added to the Beardian approach. It was basically that kind of three part therapy diet, supplements, enzymes and the detox procedures. It was very much like that. Of course we had to get our own supply of supplement and we ended up designing our own enzymes, etc., but it was basically based on the Kelly approach.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you tell me about then when you started - you did this pilot study because that's when I became aware of your work, and then what I want to hear and have you get out is you did the pilot study and then there was going to be this follow-up study and that just ‘blew up!'

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: That's true. The NCI in 1993 reviewed my cases and suggested I do the pilot study with pancreatic cancer which was funded by Nestle and we had a really excellent, superb scientific advisory board so people could not accuse the study of, you know, being manipulated by
me or that patients didn't have pancreatic cancer, whatever. We had a group of scientists that approved each case. We published the results in 1999. The best results ever published in the history of medicine for pancreatic cancer We had people living four and five years with advanced disease. Based on that in 1998, the NCI awarded us this big grant for a large-scale controlled trial to be run at Columbia University and at that point we all thought this would finally be the great breakthrough everyone had been hoping for, you know a generation where the conventional and the alternative doctors come together. I hate the word alternative but for lack of a better term I will use that. Come together for the benefit of patients and scientific truth. And initially, Dr. Claus who was head of the NCI at that time really was supportive of doing a fair and honest study, but unfortunately he left to go to work with Bill Gates, and the new team that came in to us clearly had marching orders that this therapy should not see the light of day. And we battled for 10 years to try and get them to do the study right. Burzynski probably had more sense than I did when he had his NCI grant. He just quit because he saw you couldn't possibly work with them. We refused to quit. We insisted that we keep working together to try and get the study to work but they did everything they could to undermine it. And successfully did undermine it. But what they thought - I guess they thought, because I'm some kind of alternative guy I must be an idiot and I'd be too stupid to see their manipulations. They even changed data to make chemo look better and we - you know we caught them at every step. We filed a complaint with the Office of Human Research Protections which is the NIH supervisory group that looks into all allegations of mismanagement and they, after a two year investigation, they found that the Columbia team had admitted 42 out of 62 patients improperly, which I understand percentage wise is a record. The study was clearly mismanaged, we believe deliberately, and now there's a fraud investigation with the Inspector General to see whether there's criminal activity in the way the NCI, and the NIH, and the Columbia team colluded to try and undermine the study. So that's in progress right now. But it's been a total mess and unfortunately it's ended up with investigations by government authorities. Interestingly enough, not into the alternative guys. We're the ones that filed the complaint, but into the conventional doctors who are supposed to be these esteemed scientists.

KIRK HAMILTON: So now that you've - well you're kind of starting from scratch, but you aren't and now you have this incredible amount of publicity. How do you plan on using it?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it's kind of ironic. I thought because having come out as you said earlier, out of a very orthodox conventional research approach, I mean I was about as conventional a researcher as you could want in my early career. It's ironic that an actress is the one that's going to finally get our work the recognition we believe it deserves and Beard the recognition. When I say the recognition I'm not patting myself on the back. It's Kelly and Beard that went before me that really figured this out. I'm just a very good technician using their approach. It took an actress, not the NCI or the NIH. They were totally corrupt. The NCI and the NIH, NCAM, all those groups I find them totally corrupt. It took an actress to tell the truth about our work and it's gotten enormous publicity. What we hope is that it will create a real dialogue. We realize that the idea that somehow you can work together with the NCI and the NIH and NCAM, which is their national group for complementary and alternative..., you know it's just not going to happen. They're so embedded in their traditional thinking they just can't accept nutritional approaches and that's why so many negative studies are coming out of NCAM about alternative approaches. We are hoping that people just demand it, and popular pressure in America still has, you know, enormous influence.

KIRK HAMILTON: So how does - then, how does the lay person find a credible cancer alternative treatment?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it is tough. There's no question about it and there are "alternative therapies" that I don't trust. You really have to look at the data. You know we've done everything right . We had funding as you know, funding from Nestle, Procter and Gamble as well as the NCI even though the study ended up in chaos, we did have the grant from the NCI. We've had enormous amount of funding from Procter and Gamble that helped us refine our work and from Nestle. We've had legitimate funding from legitimate groups and I think that's one thing to look for. We've always tried to do it the right way scientifically. We believe in clinical studies. Nestle gave us - gave us money for animal studies which were done at the University of Nebraska which has a basic science research group world known for their work with pancreatic cancer in animal modeling and they did animal studies and got extremely good results and they were published in the peer review literature. So you have to look for that kind of thing. Burzynski, whom you mentioned, and was on the show with me. He's published in the peer reviewed literature and I'm impressed with that. I don't know his work that well but I know he's a serious scientist and that's what you have to look for. Sometimes you know some of the clinics in Mexico I question, you know, whether they're really scientifically based or even interested in that. Some of them and I know them seem profit driven. Some of them seem very legitimate like the Gerson treatment. Very legitimate. Gerson was a genius in his day. Charlotte Gerson, his daughter, is keeping the therapy alive. She's like 87 years old. That's a legitimate clinic in Mexico but there are clinics there I wouldn't trust.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's take a couple of your case studies that - some of your favorites. Now pancreatic cancer was the cancer that no one had good results with and you have like one case of a 15 year cancer survivor. Can you give me kind of like an overview of that patient?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well yeah. Actually we have even longer. On our website the longest survivor goes to 1991 and he was a guy that on a routine chest x-ray picked up the tumor in his lung. Then they did a CAT scan and lo-and-behold he had a 5 cm tumor in his pancreas, four tumors in his liver, a tumor on each adrenal and, which is rare for pancreatic cancer, tumors and metastases into his bone. They did a bone scan and confirmed metastases. Then they did a thoracotomy because they thought the lung tumor was the easiest to access, biopsied it and it turned out to be adenocarcinoma consistent with either lung or pancreatic primary and they said this is clearly pancreatic. They didn't even want to treat him. He was about 70 years old at the time and they said you've got about eight weeks to live. His wife, who had a PhD in English literature, knew about my work, ended up in my office, and did the program religiously, had a great attitude, wonderful patient, believed in what we were doing, wasn't suspicious or hostile and this was in 1991 before I was a big famous international ‘whatever' alternative celebrity star or whatever it is with the book. He really believed in it. And a year and a half later repeated the CAT scans and the tumors hadn't changed. He said, "I don't want any more scans because they give me too much radiation" and I said "Okay." Then in 1997, six years later I said "Please let me do scans. I'm a research scientist by heart." He let me do them. All the tumors were gone and he did fine until about 2005... when he shouldn't have been driving because he was about 85 years old, drove his car off the side of the road and ended up in rehab and was really sick and debilitated and has been in rehab on and off since, but basically totally cancer-free. And that's - he was at last contact he was about 15 years out. We have a patient from 1988, one of my first pancreatic cancer patients 21 years out. She came from a small town in Texas. She had inoperable disease and came to me. Within a year her tumors were gone. She was a quick responder but she didn't have liver mets. It was really local but unresectable. They couldn't operate on her because it was wrapped around the arteries. And her tumor went away and she has done well, and I still get Christmas cards from her.

KIRK HAMILTON: Are you're going to - now I know you have eight cases in I believe in "The Trophoblast and Cancer..."

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Right. We've got eight of our own cases, right.

KIRK HAMILTON: Are there other posted elsewhere? Are you going to have a collection? I thought you said you were going to do like a hundred cases or something?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: We are. We're doing a book of one hundred cases. That's the fourth book that's going to be out. We've got about fifty of them done and we know the other fifty so that's going to hopefully in the near year we'll get that finished.

KIRK HAMILTON: Name your books again.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well the first one is "The Trophoblast and The Origins of Cancer" that you mentioned. The second one is the "One Man Alone," the Kelly - my Kelly monograph from twenty years ago that we've updated. The third one is the one on the clinical studies. I've done a major book on the - how they sabotaged the clinical study. It runs about 630 paged type script right now. The fourth one is going to be the book of one hundred cases and we will probably call it "One Hundred Cases." The clinical study book we're going call it "Clinical Study."

KIRK HAMILTON: How long will it take to get the one hundred cases done?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Oh it's easy. I mean it's not easy because you have to get the records and collect the records and probably - you know I'm hoping - we have these other three books. They're all done. The first three are all done. The Kelly book is at the printer now. We're going through the final editing. We actually, we have permission to use the actual medical records and it takes some doing to get them to look really nice. These records, some of them go back thirty years from patients who were treated in the 70s originally. So we want them to look clean and readable and all that. So that's taking some time. And then the clinical trial book just needs a little bit of editing and the conclusion but it's basically done and the one hundred cases is half finished. I think within the next year the four of them will be out.

KIRK HAMILTON: Excellent! Well we're going to wrap this up. I - you know - is there anything you want to say about your books and your work?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: No. Just that if they are interested in getting "The Trophoblast..." you can get it on Amazon or through our website. You can order that and we think it really kind of solidly explains how Beard a hundred years ago really was right about his concept of the trophoblast as the ideal tumor model, and his concept that pancreatic enzymes are the main anticancer substance in the body.

KIRK HAMILTON: Give your website address again please.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: It's www.Dr-Gonzalez.com, so it's www.Dr-Gonzalez with a Z at the end, .com.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well you know I sincerely hope that you get the backing that you need to continue your work and to get it out there because you've been a warrior kind of fighting the good fight and so I hope you get to see it through.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well I appreciate that. Yeah, we'll just keep fighting the battle until we can't do it anymore but we will just keep fighting.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. I want to thank Dr. Gonzalez, and also Dr. Isaacs for doing pioneering work with Dr. Gonzalez on diet, detoxification, enzyme therapy and cancer and keeping Dr. Kelly's and Beard's work alive. And I want to thank you the audience for listening today on this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And remember, until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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