ANTI-AGING AND INSULIN POTENTIATION STRATEGIES

by Dr. Murray Susser, M.D.

December 2005

I do not consider myself an old dog, even though at this writing I am seventy-one years old. I am still working full time which fact is equally attributable to my robust good health and some almost equally robust foolishness with finances. Suffice it to say that I am happily engaged in serving my fellow humans, particularly in the medical world of anti-aging.

Anti-aging medicine, like so many new age movements, is hard to define, harder to characterize, and impossible to limit. I know a few things with some certainty. I know that we definitely can extend life expectancy with various health and lifestyle strategies. These simple no-brainers like good diet and exercise, while avoiding tobacco, alcohol or drugs, and of course, using seat belts have become virtually uncontestable.  It also pays to avoid petting a hungry polar bear or slapping a Bengal tiger. This would incontestably shorten your life expectancy. Nonetheless, we know certain things to be self-evident. 

What is anti-aging?  I believe there are two main aspects. One is living older and healthier toward our maximum life span. The other would be to extend our maximum life span. If we can reach these goals, then we mainly need to learn to enjoy these gifts. We need a quality maximum life span. We can easily see that living to a healthy 100 years or so means we have done a good job of anti-aging. But alas, that would not mean that we have extended our maximum.  Most aging experts regard 120 years as the maximum human life span. Statistically, only one in a billion people will reach age 116. “So what!” I hear ringing from the rafters. “I don’t want to suffer that long.” Well, if you are suffering miserable health, the anti-aging failed. True life extension precludes existing on life support, or even in a wheel chair. Of course, that opinion is mine. Statistical bean counters judge only whether or not you are breathing.

Is it fair to say that any physiologic maneuver that that extends life, could be included in anti-aging strategy? That would include prevention and detoxification and even genetic engineering. It should also include use of modern medical pharmacology interventions. I definitely at some point want to give my experience of the exciting advances in stem cell research and treatment. Hormone replacement with bio-identical hormones has  carved a niche for itself in the arsenal of anti-aging strategies. We will at some time in the not too distant future, discuss heavy metal detox, high tech nutriceuticals such as RNA, Gene diagnosis, prognosis and best of all therapy may be the most promising of all the anti-aging ideas. With all these possibilities, where do we start?

Of all the many anti-aging strategies, the most unlikely is one that I never thought I would utter in a positive sense:  chemotherapy! But not just any conventional chemotherapy will do. The therapy that may fit into the anti-aging paradigm is IPT (Insulin Potentiation Therapy). This approach to various chemotherapeutic adventures could change the face of medical effectiveness as we look at cancer and many deadly infectious and degenerative diseases. Originally, perhaps 70 years ago, IPT was used to treat syphilis. In recent years, this dramatic and unappreciated treatment has been used to treat cancer with chemotherapy in doses perhaps ten percent of the standard doses and with many times the effectiveness. The low dose virtually eliminates the dreadful side effects while it achieves spectacular results. In addition to cancer, IPT is now being used to treat such stubborn conditions as Lyme Disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Before I explain and define IPT, I need to explain a principle of modern medical philosophy that I espouse. I cannot recall anyone else saying this, so I may have originated it. Simply put — we must fight fire with fire. We must fight civilized diseases with civilized treatments A large percentage of the patients I have seen in my career, do not want modern drugs, especially the likes of chemotherapy. For the most part, I agree with them. I have saved many people from destructive chemotherapy by helping them to learn what really will happen to them with chemotherapy; they then have the knowledge to choose. They often choose "natural therapies."   Purely natural therapies, however, usually fall short of our therapeutic needs. We have not lived in a “natural world” for many millennia. If we lived in caves or jungles, killing animals with clubs, scavenging for roots and insects, I would be a shaman and treat natural diseases with tree barks and herbal concoctions. That would be appropriate for the diseases of those times. Today, however, we live in a civilized, chemicalized, electrophied, and deficient world. We have civilized diseases that must be met with civilized remedies. During the decades of using the most natural approaches I could find, I have managed  health problems with synergizing combinations, adding modern medications to the natural therapies and finding the synergy. Though we still have natural physical bodies that need appropriate attention, we must heed the toxicity and deficiency of our mechanized world. It is not too far of a metaphorical stretch to call anti-biotics modern herbs. It is not just because of legalities that we need to use the pharmaceuticals; it is because it is remiss not to use them when the natural approach fails. To that end, I will explain why I feel that IPT makes great sense in this modern blending of natural and pharmacologic.

Since we are talking about longevity and anti-aging, we should include IPT because it may give long remissions in cancer patients, remissions that sometimes look permanent. It may also give cures in chronic debilitating arthritis and Lyme Disease and many more difficult conditions. I have been looking for a panacea for cancer patients for almost four decades. I have not found one. I have been open to any safe and reasonable possibility, far beyond what a conventional MD would consider. I have conferred and consulted with some of the most prominent alternative cancer doctors in the world. I saw some miraculous remissions that looked good enough to be called a cure. The percentage, however, was small. Overall, I would say less than 5%. . (Remember "cure" is forbidden to mention regarding cancer. We can only have remissions).

Now, a small group (soon to be large) of perhaps two hundred doctors in the World are achieving dramatic remissions in cancer patients using IPT. Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT) is a brilliant concept which gives brilliant results. It works on certain metabolic differences between healthy and cancer cells. Cancer cells have at least six times more insulin receptors than healthy cells. That gives them the ability to absorb much more sugar to feed their voracious appetite for energy. They burn energy much faster than ordinary healthy cells. Since they have immortality and the built-in ability to penetrate the tissue boundaries of healthy cells, their rejuvenation system uses this high metabolic energy to wreak havoc, thereby explaining much of the malignancy of cancer.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (I did not make that up; we must thank Isaac Newton for that Law of Nature.) Because cancer cells have such high demands, they have a consequent vulnerability that we can exploit with ITP. If we lower the blood sugar with insulin, to the hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) moment, we can give a chemotherapy drug in a dose that is about 10% of standard. This decreases the toxicity almost to zero. The cancer cells are, at that point, starving for sugar. They devour anything within reach. They are like baby birds in the nest with their beaks wide open when the mother bird arrives with the food. They grab large amounts of chemotherapy much faster than do the healthy cells. Thereby, the effectiveness of the chemo magnifies while the toxicity approaches zero.

In practice this has resulted in superb therapeutic results. Unfortunately, no one to my knowledge has done good controlled studies on IPT. Nevertheless, cancer patient anecdotes are powerful because of the inexorable nature of cancer. When cancer patients reach advanced stages of the disease, the expected result is obvious to all. When such patients get a treatment that obviously reverses their plight, there can be little doubt that something happened that cannot be explained by conventional wisdom.

I know an IPT doctor who last year treated four patients who had already begun their hospice care. Most of us know that hospice care is almost always the end of the line. The return of even one hospice patient to the land of the living, seems miraculous. For four of them to heal under the hand of one doctor may prove more than a major demographic study. Of course it may just prove that someone used bad judgment in admitting these patients to hospice, but that is not very likely. More important are the many anecdotal reports of terminal cancer patients recovering and going into strong remissions.

This treatment bodes well for some aspects of longevity. Curing or at least attenuating deadly diseases can give us longer stronger lives. What would happen to our life expectancy statistics if we could cure cancer? It might be more dramatic than the anti-biotic revolution. The anti-aging stats are not so important as the quality of life. The quality of life of a person dying of cancer can be worse than a horror movie.

IPT would fit into many health topics. It is not primarily anti-aging. Primarily it would exist in the nature of exciting alternative therapies.  We should recall that anti-aging  emphasizes quality of life, which means that a cancer therapy must achieve new heights of efficacy to meet that demand.