An American oncologist, Ben Pfeifer MD PhD, gave a 45-minute talk in the ExCel centre in London’s Docklands on October 15. Addressing an audience largely made up of health professionals, he described a radical new cancer treatment that flew in the face of oncological orthodoxy. For anybody suffering from, or trying to treat, incurable forms of prostate or breast cancer – the two most common cancers afflicting men and women in this country – Pfeifer proposed an immediate cessation of standard medication. Instead, regular doses of four nutritional supplements, taken orally – the so-called Pfeifer Protocol – could, he claimed, arrest and even reverse the progress of breast or prostate cancers in their final stages.
This is the point at which, with secondary tumours swarming, normal treatments operate on the “if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working” principle. Conventional medicine resorts to chemotherapy or other heavy drugs, such as steroids, which carry dismal side effects. These can include a complete loss of libido, impotence, swelling of the joints, a sharp increase in weight, listlessness, and a propensity to develop blood clots. After the disease has reached what is known as the hormone-refractory phase – when it can no longer be controlled by the administration of hormone suppressants – patients continue to exist, or subsist, only at a debilitating cost. The battle against breast or prostate cancer has been, in many respects, lost.
But not according to Pfeifer. In a series of PowerPoint slides showing ghostly before-and-after x-rays and bone scans, he demonstrated how three of his male patients with galloping prostate cancer had seen their conditions dramatically improve and then stabilise. From wheelchair-bound invalids with hideous secondary growths in their lungs, lymphs and bone marrows, all three had been returned to pretty well normal health. The blood test by which their levels of cancerous activity were monitored – the prostate-specific antigen marker, or PSA – had in each case dwindled from over 3,000 to almost nothing. One now spent his days flying to and from America visiting his son; another had gone back to work, the third was feeling fairly positive about life.
And here was the point: not only were these guys still alive, they felt well. In the five years Pfeifer had been running his programme, more than 800 of his 1,250 patients had, he said, registered a sustained improvement, not just in terms of tumour shrinkage, but also in quality of life – or QOL, as the PowerPoint panel snappily referred to it. By any reckoning, two out of three is pretty good odds on a reprieve, however temporary, in a terminal illness. That this could be achieved by the ingestion of a few capsules of herbal mixtures strained credulity. Some of his more far-gone cases had revived to an extent even Pfeifer professed to find “unbelievable”.
He gave a detailed rundown of the four components of his protocol, none of which, being herb-based, is defined as a drug – which means that none of them qualifies for the intense scrutiny accorded to all pharmaceutically prepared medicines. Pfeifer’s miracle remedies are available on a non-prescription basis in specialist health-food outlets across Europe.
The main one was Prostasol, a blend of nine herb extracts whose action replicated that of many of the synthetic drugs used to treat prostate cancer. Laboratory tests had, he said, shown Prostasol hugely inhibiting the growth of tumour cells. Referring to another chart detailing the results of 194 of his patients, he claimed a 50% drop “within a few months” in the PSA reading in about 70% of cases. That Prostasol carried no unpleasant side effects Pfeifer put down to the fact that its oestrogens are naturally occurring rather than chemically simulated.
Backing up Prostasol was Circumin Complex, a food supplement based on the turmeric root. (Research published in early 2006 by scientists at Rutgers University confirmed that this Asian spice can shrink prostate tumours in rats.) Pfeifer’s recommended mixture also contained a powerful antioxidant found in grapes that prevented the cancer from forming in the first place, clobbered it if it did occur, and also acted as an anti-inflammatory, easing pain. Biobran is a bran, rice-bran and oriental-mushroom concoction that aimed to boost the body’s natural killer (NK) immune cells. Imupros, a mineral-and-vitamin supplement, was designed to replenish supplies of the substances that keep prostates healthy, such as the cooked-tomato derivative lycopene. Taken together, this quartet of innocuous-sounding compounds could apparently do more for a cancer sufferer than anything in the hospital pharmacy. Pfeifer then delivered another jaw-dropping claim: the amount of Prostasol needed to sustain a low PSA actually went down over time rather than up, as is usually the case with synthetic drugs.
There was a subtext to Pfeifer’s presentation that became explicit in his concluding caveat: don’t trust what the cancer specialists tell you. In particular, don’t believe that heavy drug treatments like chemotherapy will extend your life because, where the final stages of breast and prostate cancer are concerned, they rarely do. Western medicine pays insufficient heed, Pfeifer averred, to Hippocrates’s ancient warning to overzealous doctors: “Above all, do no harm.” He told how clumsy biopsies on men with cancerous prostates had been shown to spread the disease beyond the affected gland – and also related how he was booed by an audience of German urological surgeons when he spoke of this in 2000.
Pfeifer threw in some startling, if unsupported, statistics purporting to show how, in various parts of the world, death rates have plummeted when doctors have gone on strike. In Israel in 1973, funerals declined by 50%. In Colombia in 1976, burials were reduced by 38%, while in the UK in 1978, the death rate dropped by 40%.
“I ask myself, maybe physicians should go on a permanent strike for the interest of our patients!” he said as a parting shot, to laughter and applause.
Given that he made this presentation at Camexpo, a trade fair celebrating complementary and natural health care and featuring any number of unorthodox, medically unproven therapies and fringe practitioners, it would be easy to dismiss Pfeifer as a clever snake-oil salesman, a plausible charlatan. But whatever else he may be, he is not that. He doesn’t disown conventional cancer therapies the way many alternative practitioners do. Applied early on, chemotherapy and the rest
can definitely help, he told the Camexpo crowd. Their limitations, he said, became apparent later on, in that grim phase of diminishing returns that is known as “therapy failure”.
Pfeifer’s CV, as it appears on the web, is uneventful, with no wacky interludes. Around 10 years ago he began investigating plant-based medicines – or phytotherapy – while at the University of Lexington in Kentucky. The Aeskulap Klinik in Brunnen, Switzerland, where he now works as director of research, is a nonprofit subsidiary of an American company that is the world’s largest manufacturer of surgical instruments. He isn’t, in other words, pushing his employer’s product Nor has he sought altogether to dodge the rigorous testing that distinguishes conventional treatments from their alternative equivalents. In January 2005, Pfeifer and a colleague Ulrich Kratzer published a peer-reviewed clinical evaluation of Prostasol, based on a study of 178 patients, in the Swiss Journal of Urology. Two-thirds recorded significant reductions in PSA and tumour size.
So far, these results have been neither disputed nor independently confirmed. The scientific jury is still out. Over here, the Pfeifer Protocol is being followed up by Professor Tim Oliver, an oncologist based at St Bartholomew’s who is currently running a small trial study treating 10 men with advanced prostate cancer. Oliver is due to publish his preliminary findings next spring.
