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A Patient's Perspective on PC SpesAn Abridgement of a TalkGiven by Charles A. Reinwald, Esq.At the International Cancer Alliance Prostate Cancer Symposium February 17, 2001 I am a prostate cancer patient and I am a prostate cancer survivor. I am using PC Spes, the supplement that the previous speaker talked about. As he indicated, it has some efficacy.
And I was diagnosed with a Gleason 6 and a T3C stage, with a prostate cancer that was outside the prostate gland. I didn't have an easy problem. I had a cancer that was life threatening. But I knew the side effects and I had to balance in my mind the loss of quality of life against the risk of disease and death. And this is the problem that confronts prostate cancer patients when they are diagnosed. There are many ways to treat the illness; there are many choices: radiation, surgery, castration, hormonal therapy. I have two doctors here in Florida - one a urologist and one an oncologist - and they recommended to me chemical castration. They recommended then that I follow that with external beam radiation. And that two months later I have brachytherapy, seed implantation of radioactive seeds. I decided I would think about it. As one of the doctors earlier mentioned, prostate cancer doesn't require that you rush next week to do something. Surgery was out of the question for me because the T3C diagnosis means that the prostate cancer is outside the gland and the surgical removal of the gland would not cure my cancer. I contacted various agencies that supply information. Cap Cure was one. In their annual report there was a mention of PC Spes as a treatment that was showing effectiveness and had minimal toxicity. That intrigued me. I researched PC Spes on the web; I contacted the manufacturer and got literature. The manufacturers of a supplement of this kind are rather cautious in their claims because of their desire not to run afowl of the FDA and be in trouble with making medical claims that they haven't justified or proven in a clinical trial. However, clinical trials were mentioned and had been done. I reviewed the clinical trial reports. I am a lawyer by training. I've been involved in the medical field in an ancillary way for 50 years. I was a trial lawyer full time for 23 years and I was involved previously to that in evaluating insurance claims involving serious injuries. So I was capable of reading these clinical reports and evaluating them. I found that indeed there was strong evidence for the efficacy of PC Spes. In fact, my present urologist, Dr. Aaron Katz at Columbia Presbyterian, who is one of the outstanding urologists in the United States, did a clinical study on PC Spes with the intention of proving it to be not a valid treatment. What happened? After he concluded his study, and this was done at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in conjunction with six or seven other first-rate physicians, he found that it did have positive effects and that the toxicity level was relatively moderate. I found that Dr. Eric Small on the west coast, who is associated with the University of California … had done a clinical trial … had published a report. The results were good. Dr. Abraham Mittelman, my oncologist, one of the outstanding oncologists in Westchester County and a professor at the New York Medical College, had done a clinical study in conjunction with six or seven other physicians, and again had found that PC Spes had efficacy. I decided I would try PC Spes. I knew that if it was going to work for me, I would know in a matter of two or three months because PC Spes acts relatively fast in reducing your PSA level. I had a PSA level in January of last year of 32. And I had a PSA level when I saw my doctors in New York of 27. I had had a biopsy, MRIs, bone scans … I knew that the prostate cancer was there. I knew it was serious. I knew it was aggressive but it had not yet metastasized to the bones. I thought I had a breathing room of two or three months to see whether PC Spes worked and I thought I would try it. And so I sought out physicians that I knew would be knowledgeable, who had done clinical studies and would know what they were doing. I consulted Dr. Katz at Columbia Presbyterian and Dr. Mittelman in Westchester County at the Sound Shore Medical Center. Dr. Mittelman agreed that we should try it and I did try it. In the brochure I have outside, the handout piece prepared to help move my talk along, you will see that one of the charts shows my PSA reduction on embarking on the treatment with PC Spes. I started on May 4, 2000 and I started with approximately five tablets per day. It reduced my PSA count in one month from 27 to 23. Dr. Mittelman told me that I wasn't using enough, that nine was what he recommended. I tried to use nine but I only succeeded in using eight. Well, I used eight for the next month and it dropped my PSA count to 8.7. I came back in two months after using eight tables a day and my PSA had dropped to .08. After using eight tablets a day for another two months, my PSA went down to .03. I repeated the test here in Florida on January 24, 2001 at the Jupiter Medical Center, and my PSA was zero. You can't go any lower than zero. I knew also that some vitamin and nutritional supplements have a beneficial effect, and I knew what we learned from our speakers earlier today that the Japanese diet is much more effective than the American diet. The Japanese who have come here and adopt the American diet get prostate cancer that's aggressive, that spreads, that causes illness and death. The Japanese who stay in Japan and use the Japanese diet, they get prostate cancer too because all men ultimately will get prostate cancer. But it's small; it's not aggressive; sometimes microscopic and doesn't cause disease and death. Not at least in the numbers that it has caused in this country. So I adopted a nutritional program. I had always had a nutritional program and I fortified it with supplements that are effective against cancer. Some were based on clinical studies, some done at Columbia Presbyterian, some done at the Westchester County Medical Center, some done in Philadelphia and some done in Europe. So, what else did this do for me? What are some of the side effects that I've had? Well, I had a rather surprising side effect. I'm a high-risk heart attack patient and have been all my life. My father died of a heart attack at 64. He'd had his first heart attack at around age 50. I've always had a cholesterol level of around 300. It usually runs anywhere from 270 to 350. After I embarked on this program in May, my cholesterol level came down from 349 to 225, then to 222, 202, 212, 218. Also the last test done at the Jupiter Medical Center found that my CHL/HDL ratio was 3.07, which placed me in the lowest level of heart disease risk reported. I had previously been in the highest level of heart disease risk. Now, to my amazement, I was in the lowest level risk shown. And I didn't take this diet to do that. But it did do it. And what caused it I can't be sure, but something I'm doing that I wasn't doing before has caused me to be a low risk cardiovascular patient. And the highest cause of death in this country is cardiovascular. What are some of the other effects? Well, one, my energy level is up. I found that I was more active. I found that I was working two to three hours longer a day. I know this is anecdotal, and that one person's experience is not a clinical trial. But I can only tell you what happened to me. The diet that I'm taking is shown in the handout piece. There is a component to the diet that I believe to be antiangiogenic, that cuts off the blood supply to cancer. I base that on information from Dr. Charles Myers, who was a speaker here last year. I'm speaking of conjugated linoleic acid, CLA as it's known. In Dr. Myers's spring newsletter for the Year 2000, the Prostate Cancer Forum newsletter, he reported on clinical studies that demonstrated this. They're early studies. Some are on animals. There's also an important one that was done in France on a large number of women which showed the affirmative action of CLA in combating breast cancer. Additional clinical trials are still underway. There is a relative lack of clinical studies for nutritional supplements and one of the reasons for that is that it's expensive to do a full-fledged clinical trial. And since the nutritional manufacturers do not need FDA approval, they don't have to spend $500 million to get nutritional supplements through the FDA. They can promote and sell them without doing that because under our law, nutritional and food products don't have to be proven safe. Dr. Aaron Katz of Columbia Presbyterian recently reported on nutrition in his holistic urology newsletter … I recommend, incidentally, that you get these newsletters that I'm mentioning. They're first-rate newsletters by outstanding physicians. Dr. Katz founded the Holistic Urology Center at Columbia Presbyterian and has a broad-scope approach. When I saw him, he asked that I see his nutritionist, Erica Goliday. I did that. She's a marvelous scientist. She's now on the scientific advisory board for my foundation. It's my belief that not only should you see an oncologist and a urologist, but I strongly recommend to a prostate cancer patient that he see a nutritionist as well. Nutrition can be very effective in supporting a cancer-fighting program regardless of what that program is - whether it's surgery, radiation, seeding, cryolation, PC Spes. Whatever you do, I think you want to keep your body healthy. And appropriate nutrition will help do that. Obesity should be avoided as it is a cause of early death. It does a lot of things - it causes diabetes, it causes heart attacks, it can do a lot of damage to you. There's no question that Americans eat too much. That's one of our problems. We should be eating in moderation. Exercise is important. You should exercise. I also believe marriage increases longevity. I think it's important that you exercise your mind and your body. I think it's important for a cancer patient … or a patient of any illness … to be socially active, to have family, to be out with people and to help people. If you help people, you help yourself. In order to satisfy any skeptics, I've appended to my handout piece the two-page report from the Jupiter Medical Center, which confirms what I've told you - zero PSA and as far as a heart attack, a cardiovascular risk at the lowest level possible. What are the side effects that are adverse? PC Spes does reduce the testosterone level. My testosterone level is down to practically zero from the estrogenic effect of PC Spes. There is no question that there's also an apoptosis effect from PC Spes, that it kills cancer cells. We know from earlier speakers and from information that's well accepted now in the medical profession, that PC Spes can be used on hormone refactory patients and that it shows results even on patients who have prostate cancer that has spread to the bones. So we know that there are other active ingredients in there in addition to estrogenic. Now, there's a mystery about this. PC Spes is a concoction of eight herbs and each herb is a complex of chemical ingredients. So we don't know for sure what's working in there, but it is a complex compound and it does have an estrogenic effect. It will reduce potency, it will reduce libido, it will cause some slight breast enlargement and there is possibly a 2% risk of thrombosis among PC Spes patients. Now we know that prostate cancer patients have a higher risk of thrombosis than the normal population. If they were not taking PC Spes, they would still have an elevated risk of thrombosis. But it's something you should be aware of and that you should take preventative action for. You should exercise, you should walk, you should promote your circulation and you should use a diet that promotes cardiovascular health. |
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I had a diagnosis in March of last year of prostate cancer of an advanced type, an aggressive type. I had the same dilemma that many of you had, and may have now, to decide what to do. You heard the speakers earlier today tell you about the possible adverse side effects of conventional treatment, the impotence, the incontinence, the loss of sexual activity, the effects on the body of the hormonal treatments, the risk of morbidity from surgery, the effect on the bladder and the rectum from the radiation - all of these things were known to me when I was diagnosed.