LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

Turning Down the Volume on Fibromyalgia Pain (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Cases of fibromyalgia are discussed. Using opiates and LDN for fibromyalgia pain.

Cindy - 3rd July 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda: Today, my guest is Cindy from the United States who takes LDN for MS. Thank you for joining us today, Cindy.

Cindy: You're welcome!

Linda: Could you tell me when you first noticed that there was something wrong with you? How long ago was that?

Cindy: Well, back in the 90s I was a letter carrier. I worked for the postal service delivering the mail. I noticed I started to have trouble with my balance. My leg would go numb. I would have days where my vision would change. It turned out it wasn't bad. After a couple of years of having MRIs, they were inconclusive, just not knowing the reasons, not knowing what they were. Then the year 9/11 happened and I was still working for the postal service. It was a very stressful time. From thereafter I had a flu shot because they thought I had anthrax. So I had the flu shot and 10 days later I had the biggest flare-up of anthrax that I ever had, and I didn't know I had MS yet. I noticed that I was numb from the waist down. I couldn't see, and I was in the hospital on steroids for a week. I had two months of physical therapy to recover from that. Then they diagnosed me with DNS and suggested Interferon, all those kinds of drugs. I did go on Copaxone for a while but I couldn't tolerate the side effects. So went on and off for years, and then I retired from there. I don’t do that anymore because I just couldn't do it anymore. My primary doctor showed me a book on its medical background and I read it. I went to my neurologist and asked if I could try this and she let me do it. It's been wonderful. There's a big difference in the way I feel every day. The fatigue is gone, the brain fog is gone. I feel so much better. I've had a recent MRI with no progression, no lesions which clearly confirms that this really does work and work very well.

Linda: So before you started LDN if you had to rate your quality of life on a score of 1-10, what would it have been?

Cindy: Probably about a 5 or so because what would happen is I would get up and I would be awake and able to do some things but then around 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, I would be too tired to do anything after that.

Linda: How easy was it to get a prescription for LDN?

Cindy: Very, very simple. I went to my neurologist and she said that she'd heard of it but she said she would let me try it. So she let me try it, wanting me to stay on my previous medication as well and I decided I wasn't going to stay on and give this a try. I let him do it and I was also taking a couple of antidepressants at the time. I had been on them for years and I found I was able to wean myself off of those as well. So I'm not using those either. Then they wanted me to have another MRI. So I had that and then found that it really did work. I was afraid to almost have it because you want some confirmation. I thought it was a good MRI. There was no further progress.

Linda: What would you say your quality of life is now on a scale of 1-10?

Cindy: I would say it's very good. I mean, you can't do everything, but I think about the hours I spend being able to work all day and being able to be alert enough to get things done. I had that short window of time where I would get things done in the morning but that's not the case anymore. I can do much more than good.

 Linda: What would you say to other people with MS who are contemplating trying LDN?

Cindy: You’ve got nothing to lose. You won't regret it. You really need to try it.

Linda: In your experience, how long did it take before LDN worked for you?

Cindy: It took 2-3 months because I started out at 2 mg and then I worked my way up to 5 mg. My neurologist wants me on 5 mg. I don't know why. It's the switching what she wanted. So I went along with it. She gave it to me, and I think it's fine. I think I could probably sleep better if I take a little less, but after a while, I got over it. I started to feel really good.

Linda: Did you have any introductory side effects at all? 

Cindy: I did have to take it in the morning and now that I have a good MRI that shows that it's working, I don't worry about taking it in the morning. I just can't take it at night. It gives me too much energy.

Linda: There are people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome who do prefer taking it in the morning for exactly that reason. They feel it gives them more energy taking it in the morning than at night because they don’t want to be wide awake in the middle of the night.

Cindy: Exactly and if It does work just as well, there's no reason to put yourself through insomnia.

Linda: What would you say to yourself in the past if you were able to go back and talk about LDN?

Cindy: I wish I knew about it. When I think about all the years I spent taking some of these drugs that actually did some damage to my liver and also had side effects… I wish I'd known about it sooner. I wish I did 20 years ago. I'm going on 18 years now. Two or three years before that, not knowing what I’ve been diagnosed with, but I think about all the years of doing other things, not knowing that there's anything else. I think it's a shame that more people don't know about it.

There are so many choices out there now where there wasn't any before, but I think this was such a good choice that if it's not tied to the mainstream. You’re competing with all these expensive medications out there that claim first and offered first. It's not worth it unless you ask for it. That's what I find to be so frustrating in the US is that you have to ask. If you didn't know to ask for it, you would never be told about it. I think that's something that needs to change.

Linda: I just think it's sad when there are people out there who will inquire about LDN, ask questions and they’ll say “I think it's really good. It's something I'd like to try people with MS”, but they don't want to give it now. They want to wait until they need to take it when things start to go wrong. I always think it's their choice. I don't say this to people, but I would rather take it before I go downhill rather than take it when you are downhill to try and improve yourself. If you can hold the progression, it's got to be a win-win, hasn't it? Rather than try and see what you can get back. What an amazing story, Cindy, and thank you very much for sharing it with us today.

Cindy: You’re welcome! I hope things change in this country where people will know that there's more than they do now.

Linda: We're working hard and we've got you as a volunteer, so that's got to be a win, win too and the best advocates are those people that take LDN. Thank you for joining us and helping us spread the word. Let's make LDN easily accessible for everybody, regardless of where you live in the world.

This show is sponsored by our members who made donations. We'd like to give them a very big thank you. We have to cover the monthly costs of the radio station software, bandwidth, phone lines, and phone calls to be able to continue with the radio show and thank you for listening.

Any questions or comments you may have, email us at contact@ldnresearchtrust.org.  I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.

“The Game Changer” - LDN & Cancer (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

If you were to ask me does low dose naltrexone kill cancer cells, I would say it supports the actions of your classic cancer-killing drugs, such as your platinum; such as your radiation. These drugs and these modalities do work, and they work well in a lot of patients. However, there are a small fraction of patients that don't respond as well, and what low dose naltrexone can do, is that it can open up to these patients that are non-responsive. The whole idea that yes, you can use these treatments in your case, which  I think is fantastic. And if you were to say, do these patients see that as a cure to their cancer, in that situation, you must say it's helped them, and the help it's given them means the world.

I had a patient who I really thought their advanced cancer should be progressing and was delighted and surprised that she hadn't progressed in a certain time. And I asked her if she was taking anything else that I didn't know about because lots of patients do take all sorts of things, and she told me she was taking low dose naltrexone, and this is well over 12 years ago, if not longer. And I asked her where she got it and the whys and the wherefores, and I learned she was getting it from Dr Bihari in New York. And she told me a bit about the background and said that I should go and visit next time I was in New York, which is essentially what I did. And I realized he came from a proper clinical background, that he had been a narcotics expert and was weaning people off morphine heroin, which is how he knew about naltrexone and had been convinced that at low doses and not at high doses, that a lot of chronic conditions seem to improve.

So that's how I got interested, and I became more interested in it the fact that it might have a role in cancer when I noticed that other patients were doing very well on it. And at the end of that, often when there were no therapeutic options, I started prescribing it myself and being impressed that there seemed to be more to it than a placebo or smoke and mirrors, which is what many doctors regard something at a low dose.

Well, what really excited us is that I've taken the clinical observations from this seriously and because some of the results I saw are being really quite remarkable. For instance, I had a patient who had very serious melanoma of the head and neck, and he'd been on a vaccine program for about four years.

And when he started to progress, he wouldn't take any chemotherapy, but I did discuss with him about my suspected properties of low dose naltrexone. And he did agree to take that and rather than be grateful for taking the low dose naltrexone, he came and complained to me two weeks later that he had broken out in vitiligo, which means you get white patches all over.

And often just in the arms sometimes subtly on the face. In fact, about 5 to 8% of people have some form or other of it, except this appeared quite dramatically a few days after taking the low dose naltrexone. He didn't like the cosmetic aspect of it. I basically said I was delighted because it was a sign that the immune system's responding and had targeted the melanoma, and that's exactly what it is. It is due to the killer T cells recognize a major component of melanoma and the normal melanins taken out and bystander a friendly fire as it were. Well, he is still here. I mean, he had a dramatic clinical response to this. And what that showed me was that low dose naltrexone had to be stimulating part of the immune receptor pathway. And that was the start of our research. I said to the guys in the lab, this strike, isn't just working through opiate receptors, it's working through immune receptor pathway, and we sat down and worked out how to do it, did a strategy, and actually hit gold, and we found a very important, immune pathway was indeed heavily interactive with low dose naltrexone, which explained the clinical observation I think. With vitiligo being switched on; there's no defined time period, it can occur at any time, but with an effect of immunotherapy, this usually takes some weeks, months to occur. And we found out with the new checkpoint inhibitors, we basically don't really look to see if you're getting a response for a couple of months, because it is that slow. So, the fact that the vitiligo was induced very quickly suggested it had just flicked that switch which was already programmed, but the vaccine hadn't done it for four years, it just took the LDN, and it flicked it. Well, obviously we're going to be very focused on researching it; doing it properly. I mean, LDN is being used, anecdotally and off-license for a long time. There are fantastic results out there, but it ought to be taken forward; it really wants to be put it into proper clinical trials and getting it to the right niche. And because there are so many possibilities, we would like to do everything properly; get it properly approved by the FDA, EMEA, et cetera, and then go for a condition that we know the chances of working are very high and don't take very long, and of course, two of the conditions it's effective in are Multiple Sclerosis and Crohn’s, which are very difficult studies to get approval for. They're very hard and expensive trials to do. And you mention about taking it with something; this is what we've found with all of immune modulators, that they're much better in combination with other agents than by themselves. One of the things that we have been researching independently and it fits beautifully is that it is great, with what I would call an endemic, epidemic of a low vitamin D in the population. and it's particularly in the winter months and the further North you go. And this is one thing that we are looking at very carefully because we think that there is a positive interaction here, but that's not a big surprise, because if you're low in vitamin D, you don't respond to a whole range of things, like chemotherapy or whatever, so that's one particular thing. Combining it with another immune modulators/vaccines is the next obvious way to go, as is enhancing the anti-inflammatory aspects of it.

So, all of these things we have been looking at in our research, both in the lab and taking it forward into the clinic. Given how non-toxic it is and how relatively cheap it is compared to other interventions could be applied to, I would say the vast majority of people who have incurable cancers where you can't cut them all out because the anti-inflammatory aspect for most cancers is now well established and the need to boost the immune system when you have cancer. In fact, one of the pieces of research that we did early on, that  I’m most proud to have done, was we showed that even patients with very early colorectal cancer have a major suppression of the immune responses. And we proved that this was due to the bowel cancer patient group we use, because we repeated the assays a month after the tumour had been completely removed, and the immune system all bounces back into the normal range. So after that, and the colleagues elsewhere showed that they got the same sort of thing with other solid tumours, lymphomas, gliomas et cetera. So it means that tumours immune suppress, and if you can't cut them out you want to go some way to correct it.

There are some very fancy, toxic, expensive ways of doing that, but low dose naltrexone provides a lot of those properties without any of the toxicities, et cetera. So as a universal supplement, as well to be an anti-inflammatory, immune booster, I can't see why it would be limited to any particular tumour type.

Low dose naltrexone works on a number of processes in cancer cells. So, if a patient has cancer at whatever stage, if that cancer exhibits the same malfunctions, the same profile for one of the better term, then naltrexone prefers or low dose naltrexone likes, then you should see some kind of responses.

Like the first thing is that there is no drug in the world, and that would include LDN, that is active in everybody. But, if you’ve got advanced cancer and basically don't want to take anything else, but you’re happy to try something that might help you feel better, then to my surprise, I have seen the LDN is very effective in that scenario.

It shouldn't be looked upon as a cure again, to work on everybody, but I'm impressed with people who do have their disease stable after finishing chemo, having given up, and they take LDN, and they feel much better on it, and they request for repeat prescriptions that basically provides the evidence that they're doing really well just on this treatment.

One thing we did, first of all, was to explore the effects that low dose naltrexone had on immune cells, as well as on cancer cells. And I suppose one thing that people tend to forget is that drugs that you give to patients will have an effect on immunity as well as on cancer cells.

So, these so-called indirect effects versus the direct effects, and the beauty of naltrexone, especially at low doses, is that it can have an effect both on the cells in your body, as well as on the cancer cells. So it's like a double-edged sword, I suppose, one edge that kills cancer directly, and one effect which modifies the body's own natural ability to kill cancer cells. So, this drug naltrexone being a potential agent, or at least a semi-synthetic, we could then explore that further. And we showed that in addition to the effects on immunity, which made it a fantastic stimulator of immunity, which allows the body's cells to be re-educated to re-engage cancer cells, low dose naltrexone was also capable of targeting cancer cells directly. How does it do that? And that's the exciting thing. There's lots of data to suggest that it binds to certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cell and in doing so can manipulate the cancer cell to make it much more sensitive to the treatments.

There's also other trains of thought that suggest that it might enter the cell independently of these receptors, but nevertheless what we're finding is that the mechanisms that control cancer, the mechanisms, in fact, that makes a cancer cell, a cancer cell, is being turned off. it's been tweaked in such a way to make that cancer cell much more sensitive to cell death.

So, if you were to go along or come along, treating patients with low dose naltrexone, in addition to other drugs, which are focused on killing, then we have a fantastic partnership where one prime the cell and the other does the killing. And that's, what's exciting about low dose naltrexone.

So it was in about 2007, 2008 that I first discovered LDN, and we started using it immediately as a cancer treatment because there was some promising data presented by Dr Bahari. So, when we started using LDN for patients with stage three or stage four cancer with low disease volume, in other words, small tumours, or patients who had had surgery already but were not completely cured, we started seeing better results. One of our earliest patients that we used LDN on was a 65-year-old gentleman with bladder cancer. He had a tumour in the bladder, which was treated by conventional means, which means surgery, so they would go in and removed the tumour; they would burn where they had removed it from with a cautery and inevitably the tumour would return some months later.

So this gentleman had a few surgeries and the doctors had told them it was an aggressive type of cancer, which is called high grade, and that because of the depth of the growth of cancer into the bladder wall, it was growing into the muscle, they felt that he was at risk of cancer spreading in a short time.

So, this fellow was offered an aggressive surgery, which meant the removal of the entire bladder, and he declined that. At that point, he came to us and we started him on LDN. And he did very well on it, he had a little bit of sleep problem, but that was easy, we just gave him a little sleeping pill with that, and he did very well. And at the same time, his conventional doctor gave him a single course of an immune therapy called BCG. It's a bacteria that they instil into the bladder, and it can trigger an immune response. So while he had the one course of BCG, he was on LDN, and he took LDN for about four months, and then he had gone back to see the surgeon; they took a look in the bladder, and the cancer was completely gone. So, this gentleman continued LDN for about a year. He had no further conventional therapies, and cancer remained in full remission, and it's been about seven years now, and this gentleman is still in full remission. So, in his case, he did extremely well, and I believe that the LDN and the immunotherapy worked in unison, and one synergized with the other in order to give him an excellent result, which in this case would be considered a cure.

Another one of our earlier cases that really intrigued me was a 58-year-old gentleman that came to see us for rare cancer that was present in the base of his tongue.

He had about a three-centimetre tumour in the tongue, which was an adenoid cystic carcinoma; that's just the type of cancer, but it's an unusual type of cancer of the mouth. So, this gentleman went to see his specialist and he was told that in order to cure his cancer, the entire tongue would have to be removed surgically, and because of the location, in order to really give them the best chance of cure, they would have to remove his voice box as well. And then there was discussion about possible chemotherapy and radiation after all that surgery. So naturally, this gentleman was upset because of the dramatic change in his quality of life that would follow after cancer treatment.

So, he declined conventional therapy. He came to see us requesting a therapy that had no side effects. So, the first thing I told them was there's no such thing that has no side effects, however, immediately I thought of LDN because it's one of the gentlest therapies I know. So, he ultimately started LDN, and he combined it with vitamin D because that's considered to be a medicine that can potentially enhance other cancer therapies. It can work on the immune system and improve anti-cancer immunity. Vitamin D can also change the behaviour of cancer cells into more harmless behaviour so that they don't grow and aggressively spread. So, this fellow has started taking the treatment with the LDN combined with vitamin D, and within a few months he felt that the tumour was shrinking, and so continued therapy, and we didn't hear from him for a while until about two years after he started treatment., and he sent us a new MRI report, which is a scan of the tongue that showed complete disappearance of cancer. So, he continued on LDN and vitamin D and he has now over five years cancer-free. His specialist is quite surprised and pleased, to the point that he no longer repeats his scans frequently, and he just sees him once a year for a regular checkup.

A couple of years ago, a 53-year-old gentleman came to see me requesting treatment for bowel cancer. It was present in the sigmoid colon, and it was believed that cancer formed as a result of his inflammatory bowel disease called colitis.

So, this fellow was offered surgery by his specialist that would have been the standard treatment and potentially curative. However, he was afraid of surgery. He was afraid of the complications. So, as a result of his concerns, we offered him a few treatments, and he ultimately chose LDN. So, he started LDN, and we were monitoring him with a blood test for colon cancer called CEA, and in addition, we also monitored him with colonoscopies. So, his specialist would have a look within the colon and see what was happening with the tumour. It took about four months to see some improvement. We actually started to see the CEA, the cancer blood test numbers fall, and it was falling progressively over about a period of about three to four months subsequent to that.

And then it was maintained at a steady value of about 30% below the original value. In addition, he did have a follow-up colonoscopy, which confirmed that the cancer was stable or smaller, and his symptoms of bleeding in the bowel actually improved as well. Now this fellow did decline traditional surgery, which was not exactly what I had recommended either because I thought that cancer could potentially be curable.

However, the case does demonstrate that in cases where let's say a patient refuses surgery, or if surgery were to be too risky, then LDN could be an option for patients to try, especially if the cancer is non-aggressive.

In addition to using LDN, we almost always recommend vitamin D. The dosing of vitamin D is very controversial, but there's adequate research now that supports using high doses of the vitamin. So, that's what we're doing: we're using typically in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 units per day of vitamin D3, preferably in a liquid form because it's easier to take, and so patient compliance is high. Sometimes we even need upwards of 15,000 units or 20,000 units of vitamin D per day. As an aside, I personally take 15,000 units of vitamin D myself, and I've been taking that for about a year now. I take it from my allergies, and I find it to be highly effective.

So I became acquainted with Naloxone and Naltrexone, the drugs, in my training over 20 years ago in emergency medicine, and early in my career in general medicine began to explore the use of low dose naltrexone for a variety of illnesses, including auto-immunity, pediatric disease and then cancer. As the years of practice went on, we developed more and more cancer patient care where we were using the low dose naltrexone as an integral part of the patient's therapy.

We began adding low dose naltrexone with a variety of cancers, not knowing for sure which ones would be more or less responsive. And back at that time, the data was very sparse, so we were basically asking patients if they were okay with us trying it, So, many would come in with articles they had read, and we would start the therapy with them.

We have had a number of responses that run the gamut from—stabilizing disease, to being very supportive of other therapies that were being done, both natural and standard chemotherapy and radiation in some cases. And then one of the most beneficial uses we have seen is in the patient who has come back from the oncologist, and there is the report there's no more we can do for you. So, we use it in our program for stabilizing those patients where the standard of care has run out. I think the persistence of our using the low dose naltrexone as therapy is owed to the fact that we see positive results frequently enough, that we keep using it with many therapies that are nonstandard. You'll find that they work in a very narrow margin or for only certain types of cancer or certain types of illnesses, and so we'll reserve those for those certain type things. Low dose naltrexone at this point, as they say, eight or more years has impressed me enough that I keep it at the beginning of treatment when I'm working with patients all across the board with cancer.

So, the results are quite varied. We have had some patients, especially elderly patients, where they're very sensitive to medications. They've been told by their oncologist that they are not a candidate for standard therapy, because they're too elderly or frail. We have had a few of those patients where their disease, their cancer, has stabilized with basically the addition of low dose naltrexone on its own.

We don't expect that in everybody, but it's been curious to me to see one agent do that in cancer, which is very unusual. Most people, what we see is, it is a very good synergist with the rest of the care, and sometimes what will happen is, a patient will stop taking it and not tell us, they'll come back and they'll have some regression or some addition of symptoms from their cancer, we'll find out they've gone off low dose naltrexone. They'll go back on, and often those symptoms will go back away. So, we do see it as an integral part of care. I would say the number of patients with cancer that we have prescribed low dose naltrexone for in the last seven or eight years amongst myself and my colleagues at my clinic would probably reach a number between 250 and 350 patients.

As I said, we've seen a wide spectrum of response all the way from it was the only thing that they could tolerate, due to age or frailty, and we saw a stabilization of their disease, meaning it didn't progress, which is a very positive finding, to the person on multiple therapies where it's being used as part of a team approach, and as I mentioned, it being withdrawal caused a reversal of the positive. So, I would say in at least 30% of people, we have some verification, either based on it being the only drug used or it being taken away from their therapy, and them having regression that we could really point to clinical success. The rest of the patients, it's not that it made or broke their therapy, but we definitely left it in their therapy and never withdrew it to see if that was part of the success or not. But we definitely have seen, and as I say with either on standard oncology or natural therapies, I've seen it to be useful and positive in cancer cases, more than most other therapies I've used.

I would say that of all of the integrative and standard therapies that I have seen both in chronic illness, but especially in cancer in the last 20 years, low dose naltrexone has been one of the top treatments that have impressed me as far as outcomes. Improving the quality of life and stabilizing disease.

For patients, it's largely letting them know that it has a very low incidence of side effects and downside., and the most we can do is share case reports with them that match their cancer, and normally we have some positive ones. Of course, you can't guarantee anything in cancer, but to me, it's a low downside, low cost, and high-value therapy.

 

So low dose naltrexone isn't the cure to cancer, unfortunately, and I suppose there's no such thing as a true cure to cancer, but what low dose naltrexone will do, is it will support the actions of other drugs that are out there, which have been shown to have an effect. For instance, chemotherapies are efficacious in lots of patients, but they could be boosted. Irradiation is also effective in lots of cancers, but again, they can also be improved, and these agents that can support the activities of other drugs, these so-called agents, is a class of agent that low dose naltrexone will sit-in, which makes it an incredibly exciting piece of the compound.

So, what we did with all this genetic data, we went on to see if these cancer cells that we brought into lab could be sensitized or could be affected upon by naltrexone. So, we use in vitro experiments, experiments performed in a lab to see if we could kill these cancer cells.

And the disappointment was, that by using naltrexone at low concentrations continuously, we were having no effect on a number of cancer cells. However, the genetic fingerprint told us that it should work. So, by changing the schedule in the way that we gave this, this treatment to the cancer cells, based upon our understanding from the genetic fingerprint, we could actually cause these cancer cells to undergo cell death.

So, to summarize all that, we have a situation where if you were to use low dose naltrexone continuously you'd have no effects or effects will be minimal. However, if you were to use a schedule that involves slightly different aspects, you would end up killing those cancer cells. And that's something that armed with, we can take forward to the clinic and convince clinicians to start using low dose naltrexone, not on its own, possibly in combination with other therapies such as these chemotherapies, as I alluded to, as well as other newer drugs, such as the immunotherapies. So, the results of our studies that have allowed us to understand the action of low dose naltrexone much, much better than we did a while ago. And armed with this knowledge, we can design new treatment regimens, these new, different strategies that can be used in patients. And in that regard, it’s a game-changer. We now know how best to use naltrexone. In the past, we used to think naltrexone should be used continuously, and that would induce some effects in the number of patients. However, the data that we've generated very recently, suggests that we can actually improve on that. And it's these small step changes that will lead to a situation where these patients with cancer will benefit. We've worked on a number of cancers in our lab-based studies, and these cancers have involved cancers of the colon, of the breast and also of the lungs, and in these cell lines, we've shown that the effects of other drugs can be enhanced by using low dose naltrexone. And we are yet to find cancer that doesn't respond in this positive way, but we've only just started very recently and in the three cancer cell types that we've used, we've had a response that's always been positive.

Our results suggest that doctors who prescribe naltrexone need to be very wary of the way it's given. We've shown that depending on how the drug is given, you may get responses that are not optimal. Indeed, our results specifically showed that by giving this drug continuously over four days, would result in effects, although good on its own, was inferior to if you were to use the naltrexone on a different schedule altogether. What our data suggests, is that low dose naltrexone effects can be improved if you were to modify the schedule to involve breaks in treatment.

 My hope for low dose naltrexone is that it's incorporated in treatment regimens, in treatment strategies in patients with cancer. Naltrexone, especially low dose naltrexone, will enhance the actions of a number of chemotherapies in a number of cancers, and my hope is to see it being included in treatment.

Well, in a word, with the findings that we've captured here, gives a complete scientific justification for taking this forward into the clinic and giving evidence to the commissions, and the regulatory authorities and say look this does this, that, and the other, it should be incredibly useful in these conditions, and here you have this enormous amount of anecdotal evidence that it is. So basically, we want to go forward and capture it so it can actually be used and prescribed in the clinic on the NHS.

Our data gives us a better insight into low dose naltrexone, but better understanding, low dose naltrexone, we can better understand the ways that you can treat patients with cancer. So, I suppose the take-home message would be, we need to know how this drug works to maximize its uses in cancer patients. Patients are not interested in how the drug works, they are more interested in whether or not the drug works or not.

What our data suggests is that we have the best understanding. And by understanding the drug better, we can design better treatments that will benefit patients.

Well, the NHS and the government say, and various people say, that they would basically like drugs which are non-toxic cheap.

The current drugs being used to treat cancer are coming in at an average of about 5,000 pounds a month. And when you finish one, there's another one, so these costs are totally unsustainable. Whereas the advantage for a drug like this, that's a cheap, non-toxic can extend life, possibly, we don't know until we try that, but you can see it's a doctorate. It does improve the quality of life in a lot of people; that's an enormous potential that could save I believe you know, millions and all the treatments that we currently use to try and improve the quality of life and extend, et cetera.

One of the issues with LDN being a generic drug is that if it has been proven to be effective as a treatment for a disease like cancer, it could certainly prove to be challenging for the pharmaceutical industry. The reason is that this very cost-effective medication could potentially compete with branded drugs that are out there already.

So, I think that there is going to be a bit of a challenge moving LDN forward as more of mainstream therapy because it would likely be opposed by the pharmaceutical industry. Well, at the current rate of growth of cancer around the world, and looking at the cost of cancer therapies right now, it’s pretty clear that in a short number of years, the treatment of cancer is going to be unsustainable, so we actually desperately need more cost-effective therapies. Now with the current research model, there's really no motivation to conduct large formal scale clinical trials with LDN, because it is not a profitable drug. So, what we really need is a different model for researching LDN. One in which there should probably input from the government, in order to fund large scale trials to finally put to rest the idea that LDN is in fact, a valuable therapy and potentially from the insurance industry there should be funding because they're probably going to benefit greatly from the reduction in the cost of cancer therapies.

Low dose naltrexone increases what's called the OGF and OGF receptor. These are little peptides, basically proteins, that when connected together inside the cell, they give a signal to the nucleus that inhibits the cancer cell production. The amazing thing that they found is this is present in 90% of the human cancers, over 47 different lines of cancer, they've shown that this mechanism is present, and after reading their papers regarding this, I found the science to be good enough to be legitimate to try for people who have cancers that really have no other choice; stage three, four cancers that really are done with their therapy. It also increases what's called the P16 and P21 pathways, that are the key components to inhibiting the cancer cell division, and what they found interesting enough is in the cancer cells, they don't have a lot of OGF and OGF receptors. So, what it does is it boosts the body's own way of inhibiting cancer cells. We don't know that it really destroys tumours., it just inhibits cancer cells from dividing. So, in doing so, I took it upon myself to do research on it before it would use it.

You know, I'm a scientific type of person. I like the science to be there. Dr Zagon published articles regarding ovarian cancer cells specifically with naltrexone and OGF, and since ovarian cancer’s, the fourth leading cause of cancer mortality with women, and it's the leading cause of gynaecological cancer; this is a tough cancer and it’s critical to understand the cancer mechanism. And they found that the OGF receptor mechanism was present there. They showed it reduced cancer cell proliferation, and he's had a number of other articles showing the same thing.

So, I have a patient who is 2004 had initial ovarian cancer, and as Dr Zagon points out in his articles, 65% of the patients with ovarian cancer recur within two years. Well, she went six or seven years, and then she had stage four metastatic ovarian cancer everywhere. Her spleen, liver, colon, she had the surgery, she had some chemo, and then she heard about me through a friend, and so I started her on low dose naltrexone in 2011. And as a matter of fact, I just talked to her two days ago. She's doing very well. Her liver metastases have stabilized, and she's now in a stable state, and this is four years, four and a half years later, which is significant, because I was anticipating that she wouldn't have lasted more than four or five months with metastasis through her whole abdominal wall cavity, and the other areas I mentioned.

I had another patient who at 38 years old had a discovery that he had stage four squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil. And he was treated with the usual chemotherapy, radiation; he elected not to have a radical neck dissection. He just said I'm not doing that. So about eight months go by, and he's just not doing very well.

He was tired, fatigued, and so I said, well, come to my clinic. I did a bunch of body chemistry tasks; hormone levels and found that the chemo and radiation destroyed all those, which is very common. Once I got those balanced, he was feeling better now, and he's doing great, but I also put him on LDN and Squamous cell carcinoma that tonsil does not do very well when you're stage four. This is four years later now. There are no signs of cancer. His oncologist says we really don't even have to follow the PET scans anymore because there's really no evidence of any recurrence. And he now is doing very well. He's doing worldwide trips, working two jobs, and he takes the 4.5 milligrams every day and hasn't had a problem since. In regards to how well he's done, well, maybe half the people last five years with that diagnosis, he met two other men who had the same diagnosis, same exact diagnosis when he was at MD Anderson, they have now both passed away a couple of years ago, so as long as he lives, it's another telling sign that LDN could be very positive for people, you know, long-term, and maybe preventing the recurrence by inhibiting any other cancer cells that are residing or starting to rise again.

I'm a stickler for facts. I want facts. I want proof. I want black and white. I want to know this is how it works. It increases the endorphins in the body, we know this. We know what endorphins do to the tumour cells; they block those tumour cells, and they block the receptors on the tumour cells. They cut down the inflammation around these tumours because this inflammation around the tumours helps it to grow, helps it to get blood vessels to grow out of those tumours so you can get more metasticies et cetera. So low dose naltrexone plays a role directly there at the tumour surface at the tumour cell.

However, it has another mechanism. This is what's also fascinating. And that was, as I said before, it down-regulates some of the T suppressor cells; the ones that are the most important in suppressing the immune system, it blocks those. So, the immune system can go up, and you can get the immune system up by down-regulating these T suppressor cells it's called foxp3, for those who are in biochemistry or studying this area. The foxp3 cells are blocked by low dose naltrexone, and so you're raising your immune system, you're working directly against the inflammation at the tumour cells, and you're helping the patients to be able to reverse their own tumours,  but not as one drug alone, but in combination with other things. If any of my cancer patients have cancer, they should all be on low dose naltrexone, because of the fact that it is helpful for them in every area of cancer therapy…period. If I had it myself, I would be on low dose naltrexone, and I'm a physician and a pharmacologist and a former FDA official, and I would recommend it to any and every one of my patients. It's imperative, as far as I'm concerned as a support measure, and we need to realize this. We need to realize this is not a cure. We need to realize that this is something that is an agent that will help tremendously, and that when patients are in remission, it will help to keep them in remission. The fact that low dose naltrexone cannot do any harm, and we've been showing efficacies in autoimmune diseases as well as cancer, it's something that I think the FDA is going to have to recognize this as a support measure for many of these illnesses.

A very diligent radiographer went back through all my medical notes and said, perhaps we should look at the pathology of the spots you had removed from your leg seven years ago. And sure enough, it showed that there were some suspicious cells there that hadn't been removed. So, it was then decided that it was probably melanoma, and I had my lymph glands down my right leg removed. And then I was having a few spasms in my right arm and my right hand. My GP, my same GP, suggested that I was just anxious about my golf swing and that I shouldn't be too worried at my age. So, off I went on holiday and while I was walking on holiday, I had the most amazing spasms in my right leg, and I knew something was wrong. Thinking I'd got a trapped nerve, I went straight back to the doctor when I returned home. By the afternoon, I was seeing a neurosurgeon. He sent me for an MRI, and the result came back that yes, I had I think five-centimetre tumour in my left side of my brain. So, I had a pet scan, and it revealed I had a tumour on my adrenal gland and tumours in my lungs.

My name is Annette Manabi, and I'm a physician in Illinois. My background is in osteopathic medicine, and I have two board certifications, family practice, and neuromusculoskeletal medicine. I was diagnosed in December of 2014 with cancer, and at that point, it was a stage one endometrial cancer and the initial treatment plan is always surgery, which I asked to defer in an attempt to hopefully avoid surgery. And so they were willing to work with me. I said, you know, there are a lot of options that they do with women who are still trying to have children, and once you're menopausal, they just want to go straight to surgery. So, I said give me a chance to try some of these things. I, unfortunately, wasn't able to find a practitioner in my area who was versed in using LDN in cancer patients, and so I was having to navigate a lot of that on my own, but I worked up to the four and a half milligram dose, and over the course of six months incorporated a lot of integrative holistic treatments as well into my cancer treatment regimen. During that time, my tumour markers continued to rise. So ultimately, I did have surgery in June of last year. However, at the time of the surgery, what was of note to me, and I feel assigned that the LDN and the supportive treatments I did were helpful is the tumour itself did not invade systemically. So at the time of the surgery, it was still only a half-centimetre into the wall of the uterus. It didn't go into the lymph nodes. It didn't go into the circulation or metastasize anywhere. It did grow into the uterus. So, the tumour itself increased in size, but not into my own tissues, and so I feel had I got it sooner and had I caught cancer when it was much smaller, I may have had success in actually avoiding the surgery, and I'm continuing on the LDN at this point to prevent any recurrence or continue to boost my immune system because we don't really understand all the mechanisms of why cancer occurs and there's still a risk for recurrence or metastasis, and so I'm trying to boost my chances, and there's so much promising research coming out, showing it is effective in fighting cancers of all types and all stages. And so, I have no qualms in continuing to use it to support my own immune function.

So, I went away and I followed a very strict diet, then I was very conscious that I needed to rebuild my immune system and really fight cancer through my immune system. So, I followed that for the whole of that year. In July of that year, there were some more slight spots on my brain. So, the gamma knifed it again, and then I had seven sections of my small intestine removed.

So it wasn't until mid-2007 when I collapsed and was taken into hospital, ended up in Hammersmith Hospital. And I had a ruptured tumour on the outside of my liver, which caused me to bleed internally. And I was very seriously ill. You know they basically resected my the liver at that stage and shut everything down and that was the start.

So, Professor Dalgleish said, well, I wanted you to have LDN anyway because I think it's going to be good to build your immune system. He also advised me at that point to take vitamin D3, 25 UGS, high dosage every day. I was having B12 injections because I had so much that my intestine removed and I was trying to drink a lot of green tea.

So, he put me on green tea extract at that point, which was much easier.

So, it was about that time that I have an old school friend and his wife plays tennis with Professor Angus Dalgleish, and she said, why don't you go and talk to him? He's a top oncologist. And so I did, ‘cause I really didn't know what I should be doing at that stage.

So, I thought, well, I've got nothing to lose. And I went and spoke to him; had a consultancy session, and what he did tell me, he said, look, you know, it's just not quite my field, but he said, I can tell you, he said, I can't recommend it, but I can tell you that I have a dozen or so patients who are self-prescribing low dose naltrexone for malignant melanoma, and remarkably they've been symptom-free for 18 months, and he said, that's very interesting.

So here I am, just over seven years with, I hate to say it, but at the moment…good scans. And that’s really about where I am now. I suppose I love it, that's all I can say. My lungs are completely clear and that's only happened since I took the LDN. Up until that time, it was still growing. So, from my point of view, that's very positive. It's had no impact on my life whatsoever.

When I initially started taking the low dose naltrexone, I started at one and a half milligrams worked up to four and a half. I'm currently still on four and a half milligrams of the low dose naltrexone.

Initially, I did notice an improvement in my energy and an overall sense of feeling better. And aside from the initial disruption of sleep, which took place, my quality of sleep improved dramatically on the low dose naltrexone. And that persist, like if I miss a night or during the surgery, when I had to stop because of the pain medications, I could see a difference when I was off the low dose naltrexone than when it was back on the low dose naltrexone. So, I find overall, it's helping my overall wellness and state of health.

So, following on from that, I got more information from him and I didn't do anything about it immediately. I don't know why. I think it was because I'd been around the alternative market, and I was talking to all sorts of odd people. One of them selling mistletoe therapy.

I consider the impact of low dose naltrexone on myself and potential negative side effects. I did experience initially some of the sleep disruption that is commonly reported, where I was a little bit more awake at night, or I woke up a little more frequently.

And after about two weeks that passed and the quality of my sleep actually improved. Other than that, I've not had any other types of side effects from it that I'm aware of, and in general, I am feeling much better in how I feel my sleep energy and I haven't noticed any other specific side effects.

And so I was a bit sceptical about following Professor Dalgleish’s advice at that time, so I didn't do anything about it for 18 months. Anyway, within that timescale, I had two further recurrences of. HCC, which is hepatocellular carcinoma. It's a tumour in the liver. It doesn't spread in the body, but all the same, it destroys your liver.

When I came out, I did a bit more research, following up on what Angus Dalgleish had told me, and I researched  Dr Buhari in New York, and I thought, well, this is very interesting. And it kind of supported what Professor Dalgleish had said to me. And I also got to know about Dr Berk Berkson’s books and who's in Las Cruces, New Mexico, who was doing very interesting work as well with LDN and also using antioxidants, in particular, alpha-lipoic acid and some other things, and so, based on my research, I thought, well, I mean, I've got nothing to lose so I'll give this a whirl.

I have in terms of ways to take the low dose naltrexone, I am taking the capsule form that I obtain from a local compounding pharmacist. In terms of the future of LDN in the US I think in the ideal world, I would wish that all the major cancer centres would incorporate it into their treatment regimens immediately. Unfortunately, change in medicine is very slow, and it's challenging, and because it's already a patented medicine, there's not a lot of profit to be made. It's inexpensive, and so that becomes a barrier I think, in realistic means, the integrative medicine and holistic medicine community will be embracing it as the word gets out, as conferences are held, they will be the ones to hold the torch and get it available, as the patients also demand access, it'll be, I think, through that population of physicians who offer it to their patients. I would like to see it as a frontline for anyone who's got a suspicious diagnosis that's potential cancer. They should be started immediately.

So, I started without any expectation. I started taking the LDN and hey presto, miraculously I went into remission for three and a half years. Three and a half years. And that in itself was remarkable. And I was being treated then by someone at Hammersmith Hospital who was a bit dismissive about LDN. He'd never had great faith in it. And what he said to me was he said, look, your liver is recovering,

I don't think your recovery and your remission has anything to do with this low dose naltrexone you're taking. So, he was so dismissive I discontinued it, and I rue the day I listened to him basically. So, I discontinued it, and then within nine months, I'd had another recurrence of another tumour in my liver. But after I’d had this news, I decided I'd go to America to see Dr Berk Berkson, because I'd heard about him. And I thought, well, I'll go and talk to the guy. So I went out there and started on the LDN again with him, and I came back to the UK again with no expectations, and when I got back to the UK, I'd only been on the liver register for six weeks I think it was, and I  just sitting at home one day and I had a phone call saying we've got a liver for you. And I almost fell off my chair and we had to make a sort of an instantaneous decision about where to go. So, I said, yes. Interestingly, when they removed my liver and replaced it with a new one when they sectioned the old one, they said, oh, that's interesting, all your liver cancer has disappeared. Your tumour has completely necrosed. So, I don't know how to explain that, but since that day, that was over three years ago now. So well, I shouldn't really judge, but I suppose in my mind, I know that what did LDN do for me? Well, it gave me three and a half years of remission from the time when the doctors were actually saying, he's going to have another recurrence in three months time and it doesn't look very good, to basically getting me through that period. It's gone very well indeed, and I have no recurrence of any sort. So, do I believe in LDN? Yes, I do. I know, I know it worked for me.

So, more commonly we are getting many inquiries from patients who have been diagnosed with various types of cancer for low dose naltrexone. And it's quite important that if you are going to look at using low dose naltrexone for your cancer therapy that you talk to your individual GP and your oncologist first, because you may be on certain types of pain medication, which are contraindicated initially unless they're very carefully handled. A lot of people have come to us because they've gone onto the internet, and they’ve found something that they can buy. A lot of those are not real, or they are fake medications, which are dangerous, and you should not randomly decide to treat yourself for cancer by buying naltrexone tablets on the internet. I know it sounds very simple, but we find out the great number of people who do that.

So, looking at the possible side effects you can have from taking LDN along with cancer chemotherapy, that's extremely individual, dependent upon the type of cancer chemotherapy that you have. So, for example, there is a growth in biologics and vaccines, versus original chemotherapy drugs, like the platinum and things like gemcitabine, which has a slightly different mechanism of action. So, if you are taking, or you’re being prescribed many different types of cancer chemotherapy drugs, and each individual cancer is specific; cancer is not one disease, it uses multiple different types of treatments for different types of cancer, and the guidelines are always changing.

So, there are biological drugs that are chemically drugs called the plantains, and there are also drugs which can change your immune system, like vaccines. So, it's going to be very individual when and where you're able to take LDN in your treatment cycle or your treatment pathway. Now, there has been some information that we are aware of, which has not yet been released.  And I think over the next year we're probably going to hear more about that along with vitamin D. So, I’d certainly say, if you have been diagnosed with cancer and you're looking at using LDN, the first thing you should do is start taking vitamin D, and the dose for that, you can decide with your practitioner, but really it would be aiming for between five and ten thousand units per day, and LDN seems to work much better when it's being used with that, but LDN itself should not be taken when you're on any strong painkillers without direct medical supervision. So to speak to your doctor or pharmacist, and before embarking upon this journey and make sure that you get someone who is very qualified, who is capable of reading the most recent research and keeping you up to date and make sure that your treatment pathway works as well as possible.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you for listening to this presentation. All past conference presentations can be found on our website, https://ldnresearchtrust.org/

The LDN Story low dose naltrexone documentary (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Laura Dankof, MSN, ARNP, FNP-C 26th June 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, my guest is Laura Dankoff, who is a functional medicine nurse practitioner, speaker, and author. She has her own practice, which is a path to health and healing. Thank you for joining us today, 

FNP Laura Dankof: Linda, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to this. 

Linda Elsegood: Now, we interviewed you about three years ago, and as you well know, so much can change in a period of three years. What has been happening in your practice? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Well, I've noticed in my practice over the last three to five years, that the interest and number of people seeking out LDN as a treatment option has increased. And that's certainly been mostly due to word of mouth, but also some people have actually found me through your website as well.

Many have travelled to meet with me to determine if LDN is an option for them, as they are really frustrated with their healthcare. Sometimes they are not getting answers, or perhaps feel that there's another path that they could be exploring, and they're wondering if low dose Naltrexone is an option for them. 

Linda Elsegood: And we didn't say where your practice is did we?

FNP Laura Dankof:   That is correct. My practice is located in a little town called Westcliffe, Colorado. I used to practice in Iowa for several years in internal medicine, and so I still am licensed both in Iowa and in Colorado. And, I offer virtual and in-person appointments. 

Linda Elsegood: Oh, that's very interesting. All right, so then what would you say your patient population consists of?

FNP Laura Dankof: My patient population is a lot of people with autoimmune disease, digestive issues, hormone issues---et ceteria. Quite frankly, they're generally people who have already been through the conventional healthcare system with a traditional workup, and either has been handed a laundry list of medications or been told that there is nothing wrong with them, and there's nothing that can be done.

And they, of course, are looking for answers. They don't want to settle for that conventional diagnosis and treatment. They want to figure out, with functional medicine, what the root cause is that is preventing them from feeling well. And so, this is where we start to look at lifestyle and what's happened along their life timeline.

And in the process of that, particularly people with autoimmune conditions, such as Hashimoto’s, and other conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and even severe depression, people have come to me wondering if LDN would be something that could help them.  And a lot of times I also learn from my patients, and so will look to find what research is available out there and to determine that there is no contraindication, say, for example, them being on narcotics.

Then I would tell them, it's not going to hurt us to try LDN, to see if it helps you. 

That certainly has been true with a couple of cases of severe depression that came to me.  I had never really used it in that way, and so that was one of LDNs use that kind of surprised me, that it did seem to help anecdotally, just from my experience with these patients.

 With one patient Debbie, LDN did seem to help some with her depression.  I used it in one patient with Lyme disease, a lot of cases of Hashimoto's, where we looked at and monitored their antibodies, along with other things, that can certainly contribute to Hashimoto's. You need to look at gut health, hormone balance, detoxification pathways, and a lot of other things.

So it's just not using. Low Dose Naltrexone alone. You certainly want to look at all these other things, and for people that have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, one of the things that I'm looking for is if they've had evidence in the past, of exposure to various viruses. That can be a possible indication of one of many contributing factors to their condition.

 For these patients, I may try anti-virials on them.  If that doesn't work, we move on to Low Dose Naltrexone, and for some, I do a phenomenal type of response to it, and I'm always amazed by this result.

Linda Elsegood: Well, it's interesting because there are so many people with autoimmune diseases that suffer from depression.

I always think if you took a healthy person who never had depression, and gave them all the symptoms and the quality of life that some of these people have, you're going to feel depressed by having to cope day after day with these symptoms. So for the people that are listening at home, who might be feeling hopeful that their depression can be helped, in several different ways, what is the first thing that you do if somebody comes to you suffering from depression? 

FNP Laura Dankof: So there are a few things that I'll do. First, I want to get an extensive history on them. Things like, does depression run in the family? What emotional or physical traumas have they had? What's their nutrition like?

Though many people do not know this, gut health is so important to our mental health. So if we don't have a healthy gut, we're not going to have a healthy brain. I may also do a few genetic tests on them looking for MTHFR, and other gene mutations and deficiencies.  The reason for this type of testing is that those mutations and deficiencies can play a role in how people process their nutrients, particularly like folate.  We need to take a really comprehensive look at things.

We also need to know what things have they previously tried that did not work.  And from that, you really need to take a thorough history from each patient and make sure you've ruled the possible contributing factors to their depression, and then decide the suitable treatment.  We need to know if they are using natural herbal remedies in combination with Low Dose Naltrexone, or in combination with their prescription medicine.

I would never just pull anybody off a prescription antidepressant if they are on one, but I may add Low Dose Naltrexone or other nutrients, and nutrients such as B12 and folate and things like that if needed to, but would cross that bridge at that time, and see if that's an opportunity to work in conjunction with those things.

I may be that they will be able to wean down to a lower dose or even off of these medications? So you basically just have to take an individualized approach in each case. 

Linda Elsegood: And how long would it take if somebody came to you that had been suffering from depression for quite a while, and we're currently not taking any medication, for you to do all the testing and begin implementing a treatment plan, such as herb's and supplements, LDN, whatever, before they could start to feel an improvement?

FNP Laura Dankof:  First, I would do the evaluation and workup, and then I’d certainly look at their hormones, gut health and test for the MTHFR gene.  Then after I get results, I will create a treatment plan based on my experience in the few cases of depression that I've had, and see if they maybe want to try that.  In my experience, patients see a difference within the first month of taking it.   Now, I know in some cases, with other conditions, you need to give them a longer time, but generally speaking, when I'm seeing them back in a month, they're starting to notice a difference. Well, then they're excited about it. 

Linda Elsegood: Yeah, I bet. You know, there are people that think if you start LDN, by the end of the first week, you're going to feel better. But anything takes time, doesn't it? And you have to be patient. What dose do you normally start your patients on?

FNP Laura Dankof: I will start them on anywhere from 1.25 to 2.5 milligrams of compounded LDN.  If a patient tells me that they're very sensitive to things I will adjust the dose.   I had one person one time that was concerned about that, and we started her a little bit lower. The maximum is usually around 4.5 milligrams.  I would say that the average range is 3 milligrams of LDN.  I maybe have a few higher, a few lower, but I'd say the majority seem to have best results in the 3-milligram range.

Linda Elsegood:  Oh Okay. And what age range are your patients? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Previously to starting the path to my health and healing practice, I was working in internal medicine. So I would see people generally age 18, you know, on up to the end of life. But I would say people that were generally seeking LDN and other treatments for their autoimmune would be anywhere from age 20 to the mid-fifties.

Linda Elsegood:  Oh okay. And what about now in your new practice, will you do any consultations for children? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Yes. I am trained as a functional medicine nurse practitioner and family nurse practitioner, so I can see the whole life span. So I do see some children as well.  

Linda Elsegood: And what's your experience with LDN in children?

FNP Laura Dankof: I have not used LDN on children yet. I'd say the youngest patient that I have used LDN on was around 17, and that was prior to starting my current practice. So I have not started any children on it in my practice as of yet, not I wouldn’t consider it.

Linda Elsegood: Exactly, that's what I was going to ask. If there was anybody there with a child, close to you, would you be able to do it for them?  So that's very good. Okay. So what about pain? Have you noticed LDN has been a good source of helping with pain? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Yes, it can be.  I would probably say that my greatest experience using it for pain, would it be in helping people with fibromyalgia and their pain symptoms? But certainly, as we know, we must not use somebody on a narcotic. I've had some people come in and asked me to prescribe it, and they were on a narcotic, and I said, well, you've got to be weaned off that first before we can start that. I don't want him to have any kind of withdrawal symptoms, so you just have to be careful about that.

But otherwise, I'd say my primary experience with chronic pain symptoms, is in patients with fibromyalgia.  

Linda Elsegood: And have you seen any people with skin conditions that you've used LDN on? 

FNP Laura Dankof: No, not that I can recall right now. I think I maybe had one gal that had idiopathic urticaria, which is an itchy skin condition. And what I would say there is that a lot of times when somebody comes in with a skin condition, I'm looking at their gut microbiome, and they may have small intestinal bacteria overgrowth.  I know LDN can potentially help in that way as well to help support the immune system, so I have prescribed it for that. So yes, if we're looking at skin conditions, a lot of times those conditions can relate back to a digestive condition so then we may use LDN in that way.   

Linda Elsegood: Yes, I mean, there were a lot of people who use LDN for psoriasis, with very good results, but that isn't a quick fix either.  I've had people tell me that their skin has stayed just as flaky and patchy for six months, and then they start to have fresh skin appearing, and all the scaly bits go, which is just totally amazing. But it is very hard if you've been taking LDN for months and you haven't seen any benefits. It must be hard to continue having faith that it's going to do something for you when you've been taking it long-term.

FNP Laura Dankof: Yes, and I would say that what I generally tell people is that I recommend they stick with it for six to nine months, to see if they begin to see some benefit if they aren't somebody that responds quickly. And I would say the majority of people; they do want to stick with it because they have kind of come up empty-handed from other directions.

And this is—an avenue of hope for them, to see if this is something that will help them. 

Linda Elsegood: Hmm. And it must be very satisfying to be a nurse practitioner where people have been to so many other doctors, nurses, whoever can prescribe for them and have come up with nothing. You know, to actually be able to help these patients, you must get quite a buzz from it.

FNP Laura Dankof: It's very rewarding and humbling as well. You know, as a functional practitioner; you really care about helping people. And of course, trying to get them the answers that they deserve and that they're looking for, I don't take that mission lightly at all.

And I try to do my best to try to help them in any way that I can, and as naturally as possible, to support their bodies in a healthy way.  Certainly, LDN is just one of the tools in my toolbox to do that, and I will forever be grateful to the first person that brought LDN to my awareness, who is no longer with us.

She was a woman with stage four breast cancer, who came to me asking me if I would prescribe it. At that time, this was many years ago, I didn't know anything about it. And I thought, well, I need to look more into this. And so, had it not been for her, I might not have ever known the benefits of LDN and what it can do, and to see how many people have benefited from it, 

Linda Elsegood:  It's really so rewarding to hear that you are able to listen to one of your patients. It’s “kudos to you” for listening to your patient. You know, there are so many doctors that are so busy. I'm sure patients always recommend different things they would like to try, but doctors don't always listen and act upon what the patient says, so that's really good. 

FNP Laura Dankof: Oh, thanks. I think 90% of figuring out what's going on with the patient is listening. If there's something we don't know about, that doesn't mean it's not true and doesn't have value, and it's up to us to hear them, and for us to look into what they're saying, and see if there is merit and value in what they're bringing.  This day and age, with the internet, people are searching everywhere, so it's up to us to try to figure out and decipher what is relevant or not. 

Linda Elsegood:  Yes. So here in England, the doctors have 10 minutes per patient, and that includes getting up from the waiting room, walking into the doctor's exam room, and coming out.  So if you've got somebody who has an autoimmune disease which has a myriad of different symptoms, what can the doctor actually achieve in 10 minutes?

I mean, 10 minutes is nothing, is it?

FNP Laura Dankof: Very little. That's why quite frankly, many of us that have worked in the conventional medical setting, know that the healthcare system is broken, and you cannot begin to figure out anything and listen to a patient in that amount of time. So it's like, what are your top symptoms, and how are we going to either run a lab or give you a medication in that short amount of time and out the door?

I've never. I've never practiced that way.  I've just kind of bucked the system a little bit, I guess, and kind of flew under the radar. And now, now that I have my own practice, as many functional practitioners do, I don't take insurance because it dictates too much of that. And it allows me to spend a lot more time with patients as well.

You know, my initial visit with a patient is going to be 90 minutes. And follow-ups, depending on the situation, could be 30 to 60 minutes or more. So, that's the beauty of having your own practice and don't take insurance. And that's why a lot of functional practitioners don't, because it dictates those very things about the volume of patients you need to be seen in a day.

Linda Elsegood: Well, that's pretty good. So you really work it out and give the patient the amount of time that you feel they need. 

FNP Laura Dankof: Absolutely, because I always worry if I don't give them the time to tell their story, what am I missing, and are we going to go down the right path with their healthcare if I don't hear their journey there?  You know, like what has happened to bring them to this point that they're sitting in front of me now.  And so it is important that I hear that because there are so many clues that help put the pieces of the puzzle together. 

Linda Elsegood: And how long of a waiting list do you have? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Currently people can get into my practice pretty quickly because I just started my virtual practice in the last six months. I had been working in internal medicine, large corporate healthcare system for many years prior to that. So right now, it’s pretty easy for people to get in to see me for a consultation. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, that's really exciting, isn't it? So, the telephone consultations that you give, if they need lab work done, how do you go about doing that?

FNP Laura Dankof: If they're in Iowa or Colorado where I'm licensed, we can either run it through Lab Corp with their insurance, or I use a discounted lab called Ulta Labs. The discounted lab charges a fraction of what patients would pay running their labs through LabCorp.  So, if you have a high insurance deductible, or it's not covered, you're better off going through a discount lab. And if they are in another state other than Iowa or Colorado, we can use Alto labs where they can do some testing. They can even order it themselves.  If they need a prescription for LDN, I have to see them face to face once a year, if they're in a state other than Iowa or Colorado where I'm currently licensed.   They certainly could come to see me face to face, even if they live in a different state.  Otherwise, I would be talking to them more in a consulting role, I could not diagnose them in another state.

Linda Elsegood: Well, that's really interesting. So would you like to give us all your details? 

FNP Laura Dankof: Yes, of course. If people want more information, they can find me at wwwdotpathtohealthandhealing.com that's “path to health and healing.com” and there you'll find more information. I write a health blog there. You can kind of read my story, and why I'm so passionate about taking a functional or natural medicine approach to healthcare, along with the different kinds of conditions that I treat, and how to schedule an appointment or contact me directly. 

Linda Elsegood: You've got me intrigued. Now tell us why did you go down the path of functional medicine? 

Laura Dankof: Okay. So for many people who go into functional medicine, there was a health crisis in them or a family member, and that was certainly true in my case.  I had a daughter born with a hereditary blood disorder.

And she was very sick when she was young.  She ultimately had her spleen and gallbladder removed, and they put her on antibiotics for an extended period of time, which then led to skin conditions, eczema and so forth. So, I took her off the antibiotics, against medical advice, because of what it was doing to her.

And we healed her gut, and healed her body, through natural medicine, because the answer conventional medicine wise was to give her steroids and immunomodulating agents that would have increased her risk for cancer. And it was just going down a very deep, dark rabbit hole with her at a very young age.

And then on myself, I had thyroid and hormone-related issues when I was in graduate school and did not want to go down that pathway either. And so I started really diving deeper into functional medicine throughout that whole journey with her and with myself.  

Linda Elsegood:  Wow. I’m sure all your patients are really pleased, not that you had those obstacles, but that you chose to become a functional medicine nurse practitioner. It has been absolutely amazing speaking with you today Laura and I hope you continue with your practice and success, and we wish you all the best.

FNP Laura Dankof:  Well, thank you very much, and I've enjoyed talking to you again Linda.

Linda Elsegood: Okay, thank you. 

FNP Laura Dankof: Thank you. 

Linda Elsegood: This show is sponsored by Mark Drugs, who specialize in the custom compounding of medications, assuring that the client gets the proper prescriptions for their unique needs and conditions. They work with practitioners, integrating knowledge and treatment of experts to create comprehensive health plans.

Visit Mark drugs.com or call Roselle (630)-529-3400. Or Deerfield (847)419-9898.

Any questions or comments you may have. Please email me at contact@ldnresearchtrust.org. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.

LDN 2019 Conference Testimonials (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Andra-Maria, MS Patient - 5th June 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today my guest is Andra-Maria, and she's from Romania and she uses LDN for multiple sclerosis. Thank you for joining me today.

Andra Maria: A pleasure.

Linda Elsegood: This is really exciting. Can you tell us in your own words, when you were diagnosed, what you were like at that time and what you are like now?

Andra Maria: When I first was diagnosed in 2012 it was kind of a shock but at the same time, it was a relief because, after two years of going back and forth to all sorts of doctors, I finally got a diagnosis, but thereafter I understood what kind of disease I had. I was kind of depressed for six months, and then because I'm a really optimistic person, I said: “well, these are the cards that I have from life and so with these cards, I will play along”. It all started with urinary incontinence. I was very dizzy. I was not seeing very well. I had all sorts of mixed feelings. I was happy. I was sad. All sorts of feelings and then, in 2013, I joined a national program for multiple sclerosis. The interferon did wonders for me for the first three years, but, after two more years, I started feeling worse, not being able to walk properly. I had a lot of fatigue. I had a lot of balance issues. I couldn't concentrate a lot, and I decided to stop. I talked to my doctor and I said, I think the treatment isn't going very well.

The process between changing from one medicine to another, because now I'm on Tysabri for nine months, but the period from going to one to another was for about one year. I really realized that in this year I had to do something because I couldn't just stand and watch myself going down every day and being sad and not being able to do things like normal. Actually I didn't find out about LDN by myself. My husband did because he was really affected by my illness. So he was searching through the internet and at one point he found a video about LDN, about people in Norway or Sweden who would take it and he showed me that video and she said, “what do you think? Are you going to try this medicine?” and I said, “I'm a very optimistic person and I think that all things that happen in life are for a reason”. So I think there was a reason why my husband discovered LDN. I said, yeah, definitely. I'll give it a try; what can go wrong? I did all the research. My husband found this group as well. He sent an invitation. I read all the information that you have on the Facebook group and I said that I’d go to talk to my neurologist about it. I'm very lucky that my neurologist is a very open person and is open to new… well, she's not very strict. I went to her with all the information sheets and I said to her, “look, I would really like to try this medicine”. She said “Okay. Let me, let me do my homework on it. Just let me read and see and I'll see you back in a couple of days”.

After a couple of days, I went to her. I had a prescription for naltrexone. Actually, this was actually in February. Just in February. It has been a year since I started LDN. My first dose was 0.5mg. I started from there. I took 0. 50 for about three weeks. After three weeks I went to 1mg and the best time for me on LDN was last year in March when I was lucky enough to go to Thailand. I had the time of my life because I was able to go around and visit all sorts of things without fatigue, without worrying about anything. So that's what’s great for me. Then I realized, wow, this medicine is great. Who knew because although I read all of those positive things that people go through, I read about many people who don't get well immediately, who don’t have any improvements in their systems. I crossed my fingers and said, “let's hope that's not me”.

Now I can say that now almost a year from that moment when I was normal for two weeks, I can say I'm not as well as then but for example, I did a lot of tests on myself and I decided to stop LDN for two to three days then I noticed a very significant change in my state. I said, no, this is not a medicine to drop.

So I must stick to it. I want to tell you that I'm very grateful that this medicine exists. I'm very grateful to all the people who shared their stories and their experience. I'm very grateful to those who are the admins of this group. I want to say thank you. You're doing a wonderful job.

From my point of view, whenever I go and I talk to people that have the same disease, I always end up putting on the table at a discussion, the LDN, and I always mention that it's done wonders for me. But as you know, people are people and some of them are sceptical and some of them are not lucky like I was to have a great doctor who trusts, my knowledge and who trusts that I will never go to my doctor to say that I want to use a medicine if I do not read about it before. So people, when I go and tell them about LDN, are really sceptical and they're looking at me funny and they're asking me questions.

What's this medicine for? I start telling them what this medicine is for something else. But it's used in a lot of diseases and a lot of illnesses, and people are really sceptical. So I guess you carry on. I guess you went through that as well. When you tell people, you can give people the information, answer all their questions, but everybody is entitled to make their own mind up what they think is right for them.

I know that there are some times when I want to say to people, please just try. You know? And it's very frustrating. We get a lot of phone calls and people will say, with multiple sclerosis, well, I'm okay right now. I don't need to take anything, but I know that LDN is there, so when I deteriorate, I can take it.

You know? And it's like, if you take it now, you might not deteriorate. Why wait until you know, you start to notice you're not so good, but you can't force your ideas on other people. You have to allow them to make their own mind up. But it is sad when the choice isn't what you would expect or what you would like them to say.

I want to tell you that if I knew sooner about LDN, I probably would take it from the start. So that's definitely a choice I would make. Even though in 2012 I was better. Because in 2012 when I was diagnosed, I didn't have fatigue. I was in DC and all sorts of MS stuff.

But definitely, if I knew about LDN, then I would have taken it so I wouldn't think about it. I wanted to tell you also that I take LDN now; I'm on Tysabri but I also have, let's say a strict diet. I don't eat gluten. I don't eat dairy. I don't eat sugar. Definitely no, for about two years now, I think so for about two years.

I don't eat gluten. I don't eat dairy. I don't eat sugar. Definitely not. So, yes. For me it did. Actually it did for my husband too, because my husband doesn't have any illnesses and for supporting me, he has the same diet. It has done wonders for him because he lost a lot of weight.

His back doesn't hurt anymore and all sorts of these things. So I think from my point of view, I'm trying to, with the knowledge I have now about eating correctly about LDN, pass it on, not only to sick to ill persons. I always try to pass it to another person. Make sure that people are okay and I'm always trying to tell them it will make a change in their life.

Eating just what's right. But again, you cannot force people. You can only give them information. If they are interested to try it, they will try it. If not exactly how you said before, you cannot force people. You have an amazing story and thank you so much for sharing it with us today.

Thank you. Again, thank you to all the people in the group. I want to give a special thank you to my husband who gave me LDN, for finding it and giving it to me. And besides the LDN, because he really makes a difference in my life with all of his support.

Linda Elsegood: Long may your success continue.

Andra Maria: Thank you and I hope to hear about more successes.

Linda Elsegood: This show is sponsored by our members who made donations. We'd like to give them a very big thank you. We have to cover the monthly costs of the radio station software, bandwidth, phone lines, and phone calls to be able to continue with the radio show and thank you for listening.

Any questions or comments you may have. Please email me and Linda, contact@ldnresearchtrust.org. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.

Russell - 29th May 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, my guest is Russell from the United States who takes LDN for hypothyroidism, Graves' disease, a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Thank you for joining us today, Russell.

Russell: Hi, Linda. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you 

Linda Elsegood: So could you tell us, when did you first notice there was something wrong? How long ago was that?

Russell: So first for me, it was with the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The cancer was back in 2016. Um, well that's when I got diagnosed, but I, I had a, uh, a lump on my arm near my elbow and, um, I had seen a lot of, uh, or I saw my primary care physician for it.

And I'm fairly young. I'm 29. Just turned 29. Actually. You know, a couple of weeks ago in February 1st and uh, so, you know, no one thought that it was cancer at the time, as I call it. It's a rare chance that it could be, but you won't know until you get it taken out or get a biopsy or anything like that.

At the time, I was busy working and. Uh, I kind of, you know, drug my feet a little bit to actually get, get it, uh, you know, get the imaging studies that were requested, you know, those types of things done, you know, just being busy with work. So it turned out to be about, uh, it's about 14 months later when I actually got diagnosed and, um, and I, that's when I got the cancer diagnosis and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

It's a. Caught 'em anaplastic large cell lymphoma and it's a T cell lymphoma, and it's highly aggressive, and it's, it's, you know, they diagnose it as systemic cause I had a lymph node and, um, it can end up anywhere and everywhere in the body very quickly. And, uh, you know, by the grace of God, at that time, I was diagnosed with stage one.

So that was surgically removed, and I'm kind of taking a step back. So that was surgically removed. That's how I actually found out what was. And so then they referred me to an oncologist. And, uh, so I saw an oncologist and, um, you know, they recommended to chemotherapy. So I did the chemotherapy first-line therapy, 

And, um, so that, so that, and then in that context, it was an adjuvant therapy. From what I understand. Based on the terminology, because you know, I had pet scans, CT scans done, you know, after that biopsy. And there was no other detectable disease at the time. So it was stage one, and they said, Oh, since this is stage one, and you know, we think we, uh, you know, can, you know, take care of this with the first-line therapy.

And it was like they said, a 90% chance of longterm, durable remission or cure with chemotherapy. Then ten months later. Um, I, uh, started to get skin lesions that were just popping up. And I'm saying that now cause I know what they are now, but at the time they just look like, like little bumps and um, you know, they started on the legs and arms and they'd get on the back and had some on the face and not a whole lot on my face, but mostly on the, you know, the limbs and trunk and stuff like that as a body.

And it's like, what should go in and get this checked out? So I had told my oncologist about it, and he saw some of them, and he's like, Oh, this is kinda, you know, it looks, you know, it doesn't look like anything cancer-related, but then we'll recommend you to the, you know, the lymphoma, dermatology, ontological specialists.

So, and that was kind of a little, what am I seeing? This guy where I'm in? This doesn't look like him, but they just want to make sure. So I saw him. And, um, you know, he's used to seeing these types of things. And you know, it was kind of shocking to me when I saw his face because he was puzzled. He was kind of like, or not puzzled, I should say, but he was concerned that this was cancer.

And so I did some biopsies there, and they started checking lymph nodes, and they found the lymph node and the growing. And I was like, Oh, we need you to go, you know, and get this a lymph node biopsy as well. So those biopsy results came back. So it came back as a recurrence for the primary, uh, lymphoma that large anaplastic cell in the groin.

And then I had metastasis to my skin and with that, of that same primary lymphoma, then there was one of the other skin biopsies that were done. It was suspicious for. Another type of skin lymphoma called mycosis fun goatees. But they were kind of going back and forth cause it kind of looked like the primary, um, anaplastic large cell lymphoma and this other type.

So then the recommendations, you know, back for all those fines reflected and met my primary colleges. Again, I was like, well, we have the second-line therapy. We still believe it is a high chance. To, uh, to cure this. And those were the terms they used. And, um, so I went through that, and I did four rounds of a targeted drug.

It's called an upper and Tufts and bad. So my client will make antibody. And, um, within two cycles, I got another emission. All the skin lesions, you know, went down at the lymph nodes in the groin were gone. And then, um, the oncologist said, well, in order for us to cure you, we need to get you into, um, high dose chemotherapy with the STEM cell transplant.

So this is not just the normal chemo. I mean, this is like, you know, high dose. They give you enough chemo where they wipe out everything that's in your bone marrow, and they rescue you with a STEM cell transplant. So. Uh, so I was like, you know, at the big, you know, kind of against that, because I looked into a lot of, uh, you know, the side effects and longterm stuff is associated with that.

And there's just a lot of risks with me being young. And I, I was never in favour of doing that. And, um, so my plan then was after I got through a mission, you know, which the mission was done about that, maybe the second cycle. And so I did two more additional. Then after that, my plan was to try to, you know, pursue some holistic type treatment and, um, to, to sort of try to keep it away or whatsoever.

But, you know, look, uh, shortly after that, maybe two to three weeks after I was done with that chemo, I started to get skin lesions again. So, I mean, that kind of shocked me as well. That was pretty quick. I was like, Holy cow. Um, you know, I just got off of the chemotherapy, so I went back in and got some more biopsies, and sure enough, it was the same, you know, stuff in my skin again, this with this lymphoma.

I was like, well, now it's insight, you know, it came back so rapidly. They were like, well, you know, if you don't go into this, you know, high dose chemotherapy with the STEM cell trust that we wouldn't expect, you know, Chris, your condition and with relapse and stuff like that to live past six months.

So that was kind of, I was like, Oh, wow. Yeah. So then, you know, this was, that was in January of 2018 so, I mean, I was, I wasn't convinced that that was gonna cure me because the data that they supply for me, um, you know, the bone marrow transplant team and my primary oncologist, I mean, the data was showing a 30% chance of survival for three years.

You know, and they were saying that secure. I mean, I, and, and I was trying to be objective as possible. And I mean, it just didn't pan out to me. I mean, I have a three-year-old, and I'm thinking to myself, it's like, well, how is this going to cure me? You know, there's no data showing ten years, 20 years, or 30 years.

But I don't know. That's what they told me. And that's what the data said. So that's when I decided to, um, you know, not pursue any more conventional therapy, you know. So I stepped outside of the standard of care, and I went to a, uh, a clinic down in Mexico, ships the hospital, and I got some, um, you know, uh, treatment down there and some natural therapies and some immune therapy, um, called Cooley's toxins.

And this is how we're just starting to get him to the point where, um, I started my LDN. So after, you know, all those treatments and stuff I did down there. Actually, I responded pretty well. Um, you know, a lot of the skin lesions, I had probably about 95% of those was gone when I came back home though, right before I left Mexico.

Um, they had tested, uh, just normal thyroid panel testing and my T, um, TSH was like really, really low. It was like, I think it was like 0.05, and so then I got back here, I got the results, and they sent it to me an email, and I saw my functional medicine doctor, and he was like, Whoa, this looks like graves' disease.

So I'm like, Oh my gosh, you're, this is, you know, I've got another condition. You know, trying to deal with cancer and, and, um, so he did some more tests and some thyroid antibody tests and TSI, those tests like that. And, um, my TSI came back. It was elevated positive for graves' disease. So then that's when he had recommended for me to take, um, LDN low dose naltrexone.

So I started taking that, and he started me off at 1.5 milligrams, and the plan was to escalate that dose over a, you know, go up 1.5 milligrams every two weeks. But what I found is that I wasn't able to do that initially. I mean, I somewhat explain that a little bit. I went from, I think it was what, 1.5 to three and in two weeks, and I tried to go.

Oh to 4.5 then the next weekend, I did have some side effects. I was like, Whoa. I had to, I just felt so exhausted the next day, and you know, really, you know, really tired and fatigue, muscle aches and stuff like that. So I, you know, took a step back and I went back to three. And, uh, took that for a little bit longer than asked my doctor, you know, if it would be okay if I just went to force.

I did that for probably a couple of weeks then. Then I finally went to the 4.5, and that's where I'm at now, taking, taking that every night at bedtime. And, um, some of the side effects that I've experienced. Um. I mean, this is very low. And that's one of the things I like about LDN. There are very low side effects, but I did call sleep services for me in the beginning, and every once in awhile I'll have an issue where I'll find myself, you know, awakened and, um, you know, two or three o'clock in the morning or something like that.

But I started, um, taking some magnesium. With that, because that's been shown to help with sleep and stuff like that. So that's, that's actually been helping me quite a bit here, uh, over the last couple of months. And, uh, so I've been taking it, so I, I haven't, I mentioned when I first started it, I started it back in, uh, was in April of 2018?

So I'm coming up to about a year and, uh, on the LDN. But other than that, I think those were all the side effects that I experienced. And one other, uh, interesting. Um, synergy I think I experienced with LDN because I'm, I'm doing this, this holistic protocol, Gerson therapy, those two different types of therapies for just the maintenance and to keep cancer from coming back.

And I'll kind of, um, I'm not jumping over the place here, but I'll kind of come back to the cancer part a little bit too because I believe it's helping there as well. But, um, yeah. So all the therapies I mentioned, I was doing this Coleys talks and this immunotherapy, so mixed bacterial vaccines, non-infectious, and this is a dead bacteria, but I won't go too much into the details or the history behind that, but it's a very old, um, you know, Dr. William Coley was the father considered the father, you know, therapy. And he actually formulates, came up with the formulation for this mixed bacterial vaccine and found out that, uh. What he, what he saw is that a, a patient that, uh, had sarcoma and of the, I think it was a bone sarcoma, and this patient was not supposed to survive this disease.

And he actually, you know, coldly found him alive and well, you know, long after he was supposed to be gone. And he, uh. They looked into the records and found out what actually happened to him. But this man was breaking out into high fevers and chills and, you know, shake. So he had this, uh, uh, air syphilis infection and, and, you know, dr Coley believed that that caused the tumour regression, and he, you know,

A scientist actually tried to reproduce that, and he was able to do that by infecting people with live bacteria. But he killed a lot of people. And this is doc, well documented in the medical literature, you know, would dr Kohli and his results. But, uh, so then he actually, you know, you can't kill people giving them something to treat a condition.

So he actually, uh, you know, thought that, Hey, what if I heat-killed this bacteria and gave it to people? And, you know, he didn't cause any mortality associated with it, but he did have, uh, some tumour regression. And um. But anyway, so that's a little bit of history behind this vaccine, but there's some literature out there that shows that LDN has the potential to, um, help the maturation of dendritic cells and, you know, Coleys this vaccine actually.

Um, it, it works through your dendritic cells. And, and, um, from my experience when I started taking LDN and continuing my, uh. Immunotherapy vaccine, I notice more the reactions from the vaccine were more intensify. And, uh, and it, that didn't happen before. Like, actually I responded better. Like, one of the metrics for this vaccine is it does cause you to have high fevers.

And, you know, I, I, I didn't really get them consistently and, um, but once I started, you know, using LDN and the vaccine, I mean, it actually. You know, I would get getting consistent, you know, high fevers in some record temperatures and stuff like that. But, um, so I thought that was pretty interesting. So my, all my doctors were kind of on board with me using that.

So I was working with my doctor. I just wasn't, you know, doing experiments and stuff like that by myself. But, um, so kind of, uh, I think that's the gist of. With the, with, with the vaccine, but back to, um, with Gray's disease, as I mentioned, I started taking it in April of last year, and about three months after that, um, in July, I had more thyroid testing done and my graves' disease would, it's remission, you know, just in those three months of taking LDN.

So that was pretty, I was pretty sold on using it. And, uh, as I said, I still use it to this day, so, and, and, um, but my, so regarding cancer, um, so like I said, I've been taking it and, um, you know, also for cancer, but in doing all these other things, but. You know, as I mentioned that my doctor mentioned in January of last year that I wasn't expected to live past six months without that high dose chemotherapy and STEM cell transplant.

And so now I'm actually, you know, it's almost a, it would be going on like 13 months since that, um, prognosis and I had a pet scan back in September of last year, and that actually showed that I didn't have any, you know. Evidence of any tumours or anything like that. So was a clear pet scan.

Linda Elsegood: Yeah. That's amazing.

Russell: So, um, so I'm, uh, you know, and I believe that LDN has helped as well. You know, as I said, especially with the vaccine and, you know, and, uh, so I'm, I am, you know, going to continue to take that and. And, um, and another thing that's pretty interesting that from that I came across is, you know, there's a lot of talks now about cancer STEM cells and circulating tumour cells.

And, you know, the literature is saying that this is what causes a person to relapse. And, you know, what I found highly interesting is, um. No. From some of dr his work and, and some of the, uh, the information that's out there regarding some of the people that he gave LDN after they had, you know, successful cancer treatment.

You know, even if it was conventional or whatsoever surgery, and that people tended not to relapse after taking LDN. And the connection here, and this is some of the conclusions that I've been drawing just from some of the research that I've been doing, but I'm coming out of a university of Michigan, dr max, which I mean, they have one of the leading STEM cell cancer STEM cell research laboratories, and they're kind of leading building this.

But one of the. Cytokines and these are just inflammatory cytokines. It's called interleukin six is what causes these cancer STEM cells to go into the proliferation cycle. And that's kind of what they found from their, their research and the connection with LDN is I've seen some of the data that they looked at some of these cytokines that LDN effects.

And, and this is in particular, I believe you probably though the doctor, I think you've, I've heard you interviewed him, he did some clinical trials with fibromyalgia

Linda Elsegood: Jarred Younger

Russell: Yeah. That, yes, that's his name there. And, uh, one of the tops of the, uh, on the top of that list, my memory serves me correctly, I believe it was to where necrosis factor out was, which is another, you know, uh, typical transcription factor or a cytokine.

I forget. Specifically, but interleukin six is like the second one on that list. So LDN, um, inhibits that. So I meant, I know, as I said, these are some of the conclusions I'm drawing from my research. But, so, I mean, maybe that's by one of the mechanisms by which, you know, LDN may keep a person in remission.

And, uh, so, and I, I've heard a couple of testimonials of people. You know, having, you know, in remission from cancer, especially if LDN, you know, bought them, but that person in remission, you know, and they stopped taking it and have a relapse again. And there's a guy, I believe, I think his name is Kevin. I think he had liver cast.

And I believe you interviewed him and he mentioned the head in an interview, uh, with you regarding, uh, the, the, you know, after he stopped taking ODN and liver cancer came back, I believe his name, Kevin, but, um. But anyway, so I just thought that was interesting in some other, you know, functional medicine doctors have kind of reported some of the similar, um, similar, you know, things happen.

Linda Elsegood: well, you know, it's totally amazing, and I'm sure people find you an absolute inspiration. Definitely.

Russell: Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I'm just very, yeah, I've been blessed in it, you know, I thank God for. You know, everything and you know, the success I'm having, and you know, being in good health right now. And so that's a

Linda Elsegood: yes.

Well, long may you continue in the way in which you are and lead a normal, healthy, happy life.

Russell: Yes.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you, Russell.

Russell: Okay, great, great. And uh, you had the great day and thank you for all that you do. And uh, that's great. 

Linda Elsegood: This show is sponsored by our members who made donations. We'd like to give them a very big thank you.

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Any questions or comments you may have, please Contact Us.  I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) in Scotland and beyond (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Samantha Lebsock, PharmD - 22nd May 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Samantha Lebsock, PharmD shares her Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Samantha received her Bachelors in Human Biology and her Doctorate of Pharmacy from The University of Montana. She left the small city behind with her husband Nick and moved to Denver, Colorado. 

Samantha started working at Belmar Pharmacy in 2014. She quickly became involved in the Low Dose Naltrexone family and was amazed at the way it has changed people’s lives. Samantha is also the point person at Belmar for Clinical Trials and assists research coordinators in the dispensing of study medications. 

Samantha attended the LDN 2019 Conference in Portland to represent Belmar Pharmacy.

This is a summary of Samantha Lebsock’s interview. Please listen to the rest of Samantha’s story by clicking on the video above.