With laboratory mice at Beljanski’s disposal, and because the
Rauwolfia vomitoria
and Pao pereira extracts’ anticancer effects were demonstrated
in vitro
, the research team set out to investigate anticancer activity
in vivo
. Following well-established conventional experimental protocols, the research team grafted dozens of different types of cancers into the mice, including lymphoma, malignant breast tumors, and others.
The guideline used for determining how well these
in vitro
treatments work was comparing the percentage of mice that survived in excellent condition at the end of the three-month trial period to a control group that had not received any treatment.
Depending on the doses of
Rauwolfia vomitoria
and Pao pereira extracts used as therapy, the tumor-ridden mice showed high survival rates in a wide variety of different cancers. In one study, cell lines from a type of lymphoma were transplanted into mice. The mice were given the
R. vomitoria
extract, and at the “highest doses, up to 80 percent of the mice treated [with the compound] survived for ninety days, whereas all of the untreated mice were dead by day forty….All mice that did not survive had developed tumors…Cured mice survived in excellent condition.” No secondary toxic effects appeared. The herbal extracts prolonged the lives of numerous mice and saved the lives of many others, all of which had been victimized in their cages by transplanted cancers. The affected mice also exhibited no side effects, no nausea, no hair loss, no cracks in the mucous membranes, nothing at all destructive to the quality of life.
Columbia University Studies on Prostate Cancer
Dr. Mirko Beljanski passed away in October of 1998, and I will relate the story of his death in a later chapter. But I believe it is important that additional studies that have been done on his anticancer molecules be reported on in this current chapter to give you the full scope of the work being carried out in such prestigious American institutions as Columbia University’s Center for Holistic Urology and the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I do so to honor the late Dr. Mirko Beljanski and also to suggest to those researchers reading this material that there is much work to be done to first recreate the Beljanski team’s experiments and then take such data into further research on the healing properties of these two alkaloid extracts.
Aaron Katz, M.D., director of the Center for Holistic Urology, was introduced to Beljanski’s approach through the same well-respected physician that introduced them to me: Michael B. Schachter, M.D., of Suffern, New York. Dr. Katz became interested in Beljanski’s products after meeting with Dr. Beljanski’s widow, Monique, and his daughter, Sylvie. He told the two women that his patients had continually badgered him with questions about various products, and he had embarked on empirical research to discover what worked and what didn’t. Dr. Katz reports that Sylvie Beljanski gave him a number of her father’s peer-reviewed scientific articles with his research results, which interested him greatly. He told Sylvie that in order for Beljanski’s work to be accepted by American doctors, all the painstaking research would have to be repeated.
The Columbia University team got to work, and they were not disappointed. The first results were published in the November 2006 issue of the
International Journal of Oncology
. Titled “Antiprostate Cancer Activity of a Beta-Carboline Alkaloid Enriched Extract from
Rauwolfia vomitoria
,” the article reported that in both
in vitro
and
in vivo
studies of the
R. vomitoria
extract on the human prostate cancer cell line (technically called LNCaP), tumor volumes were decreased by 58 to 70 percent, depending on the dose of
R. vomitoria
administered to the mice. The extract was showing the same kind of results that Beljanski’s research had shown twenty years earlier. Columbia’s research team then tested the Pao pereira extract both
in vivo
and
in vitro
and, again, formed the same conclusion as Beljanski. The Pao pereira extract, enriched with the active alkaloid Flavopereirine, “significantly suppressed cell growth and induced apoptosis (cell death)
in LNCaP cell cultures as well as in LNCaP tumor xenografts (the transplanting of living cells, tissues, or organs from one species to another).”
The results were again published in the 2009 issue of the
Journal of the Society of Integrative Oncology
that reported the same findings: both the
R. vomitoria
and the Pao pereira extracts Beljanski and his team developed showed “significant anticancer activity in certain preclinical models,” enough to justify a human trial for men suffering from prostate cancer.
The preliminary human trial was completed by Dr. Aaron Katz, M.D., director of the Columbia Center for Holistic Urology sometime in 2009, and the results were written up by Melissa Burchill, Rd, CDN, in
Integrative Medicine
. Ms. Burchill reports that Dr. Katz noted that “We now know that [the two extracts, combined], significantly lowered PSAs (the markers that may indicate prostate cancer) in a twelvemonth period.”
There is also an interesting piece of information in the 2009
Integrative Oncology
article that reported on the trial then in progress that I would be remiss in not reporting. According to that article, “the tumor-suppressing effect of the Pao pereira extract was apparently lost at the highest dose (50 mg/kg/d)…”
While I do not know how that particular dosage in the
in vivo
trials in mice translates to human dosages, it is important to note that the reader is advised to take any treatment under the care of a knowledgeable and caring physician, either traditional or alternative, who can monitor the dosages.
Dosage issues aside, the Columbia studies lend a great deal of scientific credence to the work the Beljanski team performed in France. These studies help us all to better understand the science behind the excellent effect these purified extracts can provide anyone diagnosed with cancer or who show early warning signs, also called markers, for cancer.
Whatever must be done to understand, recreate, and apply Beljanski’s research, it is imperative that we demand it be done. These anticancer results were possible because of the selectivity of Beljanski’s “bolt” molecules for cancer cells alone. He found them to be even more effective when combined with conventional cancer treatments—a subject I will take up in-depth in the next chapter.
French Doctors Prescribe the Botanicals
Dr. Beljanski was aware of his good fortune in uncovering the two alkaloids containing “bolt” molecules, the ideal substances to fight cancer because they only target cancer cells and thus do not have side effects associated with them. From the time that reports began to emerge about the success of some cancer patients with Beljanski’s botanicals, doctors from every corner of France (some of them enlightened oncologists) solicited the Beljanski team members, to get help for themselves, their families, and their patients, including other nature-derived supplements Beljanski had developed.
Unfortunately, the popularity of his discoveries was dangerous both for the Beljanski team members and for the individual medical doctors who tried to help patients with Dr. Beljanski’s supplements. France, even more so than in the U.S., opposes the practice of holistic medicine or even discussions of any therapies using CAIM (Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine). Politicians in France are closely associated with that country’s pharmaceutical industry lobbyists with their big money bribes even more so than in the United States. As with American politicians, the French politicians take very large sums of drug industry lobbyists’ funds. These lobbyists make sure to use their money, power, and persuasion to get European bureaucrats to go so far as to take away a physician’s license to practice medicine when that practice fails to prescribe or dispense copious quantities of drug products.
This untenable situation was created under the Vichy government during World War II. Named “the Order of Doctors” (
l’Ordre de Medecins
), it carries out a witch hunt of sorts on French medical doctors who practice medicine employing a holistic approach. They do so by monitoring what is prescribed. In contrast to common medical procedure in many states in the U.S., doctors in France do not have the right to sell products from their offices or to even give them as gifts to their patients. Samples of drugs to physicians are fewer too. The pharmaceutical industry, directly or indirectly, finances most public officials. Their interests conflict with those of the patient. From this perspective, the political position of doctors in France is quite fragile.
Despite all of these adverse conditions involving restrictions on freedom and civil rights, about 450 medical doctors were sufficiently impressed with Beljanski’s results, along with what they observed in patients, that they risked their careers to recommend them in order to help their patients. In discussions among themselves, these holistic thinking French medical doctors agreed to run the risk of making some serious enemies in their professional organization. It is thanks to such brave physicians that at least twenty thousand sick French people were able to receive their self-administered herbal treatments.
More than bravery, however, the real story behind these anticancer botanicals is the passion that Mirko Beljanski had for his biological research.
Mirko the Man, a Passionate Researcher
I have shown throughout this book that Dr. Beljanski was an indefatigable experimenter in his scientific endeavors. He constantly verified his results, varying experimental conditions along every conceivable parameter, and endlessly starting over. He knew, more so than any of his colleagues, there was no room for error.
In the book
Chronique d’une Fatwa Scientifique
, Beljanski’s wife and staunch assistant states the following:
His whole life, Mirko said and showed that one can and one must do something, must fight, to find a solution. When he would later go up against diseases considered to be incurable, his energy, never lacking, would effectively find a solution. His can-do spirit would break down the barriers of habit, convention, ease, and fatalism. He left nothing to chance. He wanted to anticipate and to control. He always maintained a vision of the future which he projected onto the present moment. Behind each isolated fact, he saw all of its possibilities […] In matters of science Mirko could never rest as long as there was something to be done.
Often, his best qualities would work against him: he would annoy, bother, he would take logic to an extreme and would suffer the consequences. Many years later, he would take science to a higher level, requiring that it serve man so as to diminish suffering, disease, and medical costs.
Better than anyone, Mirko Beljanski knew that, like an artist, the researcher is an adventurer. He must break with old customs, ways of thinking, and inherited ideas. Every person, thing, idea, and fact must be viewed with a fresh eye through a personal lens, separate from the norm. Each judgment—beginning with his own—must be endlessly questioned. The scientist like the artist journeys to new horizons, but it is a lonely road. As their estimations of value are unique, so too, are their criticisms. Solitude is the price of such individualism: it maintains and facilitates doubt, continual questioning, and the search for truth.
To create, one must be uncomfortable, anxious, and driven by an internal imperative. Instead of seeking constant comfort in what is known, a person of vision uses acquired knowledge only as a spring board. The known must also be surpassed and conclusions constantly reevaluated in order to venture into the search for a new form of thought or expression. This almost always requires putting oneself in direct conflict with others, renouncing the assurance of friendships easily born of the shared ideas in vogue. Breaking new ground is almost masochistic in nature, and is an act which very few tolerate and which is not suffered well by those in one’s immediate entourage. A break in one’s thinking quickly leads to a break in certain ties that normally bind men and women together.
Certainly, marginalization occurs when one thinks or works differently than the status quo. But for those who take risks and live life on their own terms, there is no other choice.
Dr. Mirko Beljanski kept himself walled off from pressures, impervious even to threats from the scientific community when he made discoveries that ran contrary to established dogma or conventional wisdom. His fortitude and tenacity will be forever appreciated by all those who avail themselves of his discoveries.
The Uncurable Myth
It is true in science, as in art, that they are laden with conformists who use their talent to make for themselves a socially comfortable situation. These types of people are the biggest enemies of innovation, and there is an army of them. It is they who populate those on the side of the war who claim the only effective treatments for cancer are toxic, and that cancer, ultimately, isn’t curable. For them, to cure cancer means the loss of billions of dollars.
And that is, at heart, what keeps the “war on cancer” firmly entrenched. Money. The producer of the most-read Internet health newsletter in the United States, Joseph Mercola, D.O., states: “They [the drug makers] want you to feel frightened for your health, as that is a very powerful motivating emotion. The goal of the campaign [drug advertising] is to create a picture where relying on them [again, the drug makers] for the solution (to the health issue they made you fearful of) is necessary. This creates a dependency and annuity that enriches their bottom line.”