Vitamin C in Cancer Treatment: What You Need to Know (2024)
Holistic Oncology
Goodyear started out as a gynecologist and pelvic floor surgeon. Once out of residency, however, he noticed that a lot of what he’d been taught in medical school didn’t work. Then, in 2006, he developed pheochromocytoma, a rare type of tumor that develops in the adrenal gland, causing it to excrete high amounts of norepinephrine, which in turn causes extremely high blood pressure and heart rate.
“When you look at holistic natural therapies, there's this assumption by many, including conventional medicine, that we are just throwing darts up on the wall and hope they stick.
But in actuality, we're following the science of genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and immunomodulomics. This is the future of medicine that's here now, and we're being incredibly specific and targeted for the dysfunction within the cancer, but with natural holistic or integrated therapy.”
Examples of Holistic Therapies for Cancer
Mistletoe is another excellent cancer treatment. I’ve previously interviewed Dr. Nasha Winters about the use of mistletoe in oncology, so for more in-depth information, see that interview.
One key point to be made about holistic oncology is that the earlier you start this kind of treatment, the better. Unfortunately, most patient who seek alternative strategies have already done tremendous damage to their bodies, particularly the immune system, with one, two or even three rounds of chemo, which really impairs your body’s ability to heal naturally.
“If we can get them earlier in the process ... before they get conventional chemo and/or radiation, the impact is huge,” Goodyear says.“Before you destroy the immune system, one can actually heal with the immune system. I can't tell you how many ladies with breast cancer have been able to preserve their breasts with this cancer healing strategy. You can actually heal the body, not destroy it. That is a novel concept because when you destroy the immune system through conventional therapy, you're going to see cancer recur and spread.”
How Cancer Kills
Typically, it’s not the initial cancer that kills you. What kills is when the cancer spreads (metastasizes) to other areas of your body. Also, most cancer patients don’t actually die from the cancer, but from the treatment that conventional oncologists use to treat the cancer.“The literature is very clear — especially in the last five to 10 years — that 90% of morbidity and mortality associated with cancer is when it spreads,” Goodyear says. “Thankfully, research has provide a good understanding of how this chemotherapy and radiation-induced metastasis process occurs.
So, let's look at maximum tolerated chemotherapy. The literature is very clear on this and ... shows the mechanisms in how it [contributes to death]. Maximum tolerated chemotherapy actually induces the mechanisms to spread the cancer. In breast cancer, maximum to tolerated chemotherapy will reduce the primary tumor, yet at the same time, cause it to spread to distant locations in the body.
Thus, that leads to 90% of morbidity and mortality associated with cancer. So, the very treatment being used in conventional oncology to treat the tumor is actually resulting in 90% of morbidity and mortality associated with cancer ... That is in unforced error.
A lot of people that come to us, they're so surprised. They ask, ‘Why didn't I know about this? Why didn't I know that surgery can cause metastasis? Why didn't I know chemotherapy and radiation can cause metastasis?’”
Vitamin C Basics
The story of vitamin C demonstrates that the devil’s in the details. Roughly 50 years ago, Linus Pauling demonstrated that intravenous vitamin C (10 grams a day for 10 days) improved cancer survival. Later, researchers at the Mayo Clinic tried to reproduce the results, but didn’t use IV vitamin C. They instead gave 10 grams orally, and found no benefit.In the academic battle that followed, Mayo won and for the next several decades, the conventional thought was that vitamin C doesn’t work. That began to change around 2000, when Dr. Ping Chen, a conventional oncologist started looking into vitamin C and publishing papers on its pharmacokinetics.
Since then, there’s been a combination of pushback against the idea that vitamin C works on the one hand, and on the other, growing research that points to vitamin C’s effects as powerful as any drug.
Vitamin C Is Natural but Has Drug-Like Effects
Vitamin C does have drug-like effects, and I like to refer to it as a pharmaco-mimetic, but it’s still a natural biological molecule that cannot be patented, and hence cannot be a drug. Also, to be clear, there are distinct differences between whole food vitamin C and ascorbic acid.They really have two very different purposes. Whole food vitamin C is not suitable for the treatment of cancer, but does wonders for general health support, as it interacts favorably with copper and iron in your cells and mitochondria. I only recommend and use high-dose IV vitamin C in cases of acute infection or illness, as it does have very potent “drug-like” effects. Goodyear adds:
A holistic approach is like a pebble thrown into a calm pool in the morning. Its effects ripple throughout the physiology of the body. That is the beauty of natural therapies.
Now in cancer and sepsis ... when we're dealing with the major dysfunction found in cancer, where things have metabolically, genetically, immunologically gone off the rails, we have to come in and really work to turn the tide. That's where the intravenous vitamin C delivery is required. That's where the sodium ascorbate comes in, because that's the only way we're going to be able to change that tide.”
Oral Vitamin C vs IV Vitamin C
When treating cancer, IV needs to be used because you simply cannot take the high dosages required orally. Doses over 10 to 20 grams of ascorbic acid will cause loose stools when taken orally, but IV administration bypasses the limitation of the gut. It also allows the vitamin C to get directly into the blood to the extracellular fluid, into the tumor microenvironment, to penetrate the tumor and saturate the entirety of the tumor.Now, if you feel like you’re coming down with an infection, such as a flu or cold, oral vitamin C is adequate. Oral dosing of vitamin C, using a non-liposomal product, can double your blood level of vitamin C, and using liposomal vitamin C — which is what Dr Joseph Mercola been recommending for years — can increase it three- to fivefold — up to about 300 micromolar. So, liposomal vitamin C can make a big difference.
However, when you’re dealing with cancer, you need a minimum 1,000 micromolar, or 1 millimolar, in the extracellular fluid to kill cancer cells, which is why you really need to use IV. In the case of large tumors, or significant cancer spread, much higher plasma concentrations are required.
While the dosage is highly individual to each patient, as a general benchmark, Goodyear typically starts at 1.5 grams per kilogram, which for the average person would be somewhere between 100 and 200 grams per dose, three times a week.
So, to be clear, Dr Mercola do not advise taking ascorbic acid for daily vitamin C requirements. He strongly suggests you use whole food vitamin C which is far superior as a daily supplement.
There's still no evidence that vitamin C alone can cure cancer, but researchers are studying whether it might boost the effectiveness of other cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, or reduce treatment side effects.
There are still no large, controlled clinical trials that have shown a substantial effect of vitamin C on cancer, but some preliminary studies do suggest there may be a benefit to combining standard treatments with high-dose IV vitamin C."
Actions of Vitamin C
Vitamin C has a wide variety of effects, which can be generally classified into the following: genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and immunomodulatomic.What that means is, it creates an energy crisis. It actually depletes the body of certain intermediates that make it so this cancer, which is addicted to sugar, cannot use [the sugar] efficiently to make energy (ATP), so it ... dies. It also depletes [the cancer] of its ability to detoxify.
So, to be specific, research shows that vitamin C depletes the cancer of reduced glutathione. And getting rid of that glutathione in that cancer eliminates its ability to handle the high oxidative stress that this pro-oxidative vitamin C therapy induces, which kills the cancer cell.
It also disrupts how cancer makes energy. And it's fascinating because everybody looks at this and they ask, ‘Well, how will this affect my healthy cells?’ This is the paradigm changer with vitamin C.
The environment — as much as the dose, as much as the delivery, as much as the tumor saturation — the environment encountered by that vitamin C dictates the result as much as the dose itself. So, you can induce a pro-oxidative effect, a detoxification crisis, an energy crisis, in cancer cells, and healthy cells do just fine.”
Using Pro-Oxidation to Kill Cancer Cells
When you think of vitamin C, you’re probably thinking it’s an antioxidant, which is true, but in high doses only available through IV, it actually becomes a pro-oxidant, and that’s what allows it to kill cancer cells and gives it its antiviral and antibacterial properties. Goodyear explains:And there's plenty benefits of that. That's why it's so helpful in viral and bacterial infections. It's countering that cytotoxic burst found in infection. It's donating an electron and becomes oxidized [which neutralizes oxygen] ... That's why vitamin C ... can help people with sepsis, including COVID sepsis, and the associated COVID cytokine storm that causes most of the lung damage and the associated increase in mortality.
But in the higher doses — again, its different effects are dictated by the different environments — it can become pro-oxidative. It's very different in that it's delivering the oxidative stress to the tumor and creating it through hydroxyl free radicals, hydrogen peroxide, superoxide anions.”
Melatonin for Cancer
Goodyear also uses melatonin for cancer, and monitors patients’ melatonin levels to ensure proper dosage. Typically, patients will start off with IV melatonin at a dose of 10 to 20 milligrams daily for two weeks, to get the level up as quickly as possible, while simultaneously taking oral melatonin at a dose of about 60 mg per day. The oral dose is then titrated upward, based on bodyweight and other parameters.
“Ideally, your blood level is supposed to peak at around midnight. So, with that in mind, if you're going to do the oral dose, you want to take the highest dose right before bed, maybe 45 minutes before, and then right before bed.The other doses, if you're going to do it three times a day, would be maybe 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. You really want to keep it away from solar noon. Otherwise you're going to [impair your] chronobiology.
When patients go home, we do work more toward a more appropriate circadian rhythm of the delivery of melatonin. But when patients come to us, so many of them are in an advanced stage, so, in that acute setting, we have to use these therapies in combination and sequence, together, to really turn the tide against the cancer.”
High-dose vitamin C enhances cancer immunotherapy
Vitamin C Can Help Augment Copper Level
Whole food vitamin C can also boost your copper level, as vitamin C contains an enzyme called tyrosinase, which has 2 atoms of copper in it. Acerola cherry is one excellent source. A single acerola cherry contains about 80 mg of whole food vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is prooxidant, while vitamin C complex is actually an antioxidant. Anything that has copper is going to be antioxidant.
Do not make the mistake of taking ascorbic acid, however, as it is NOT the same as whole food vitamin C. If you were to compare the two to a car, vitamin C would be the whole car, fully functional, and the engine is an enzyme called tyrosinase, while ascorbic acid is the car frame, with no moving parts.
Importantly, ascorbic acid chelates copper out of tyrosinase, which is exactly what proton pump inhibitors do. It's my view that ascorbic acid is a “pharmacomimetic.” While it’s a natural molecule, it has drug-like effects. It acts differently from vitamin C because it’s been taken out of the vitamin C complex. For example, ascorbic acid does not prevent or treat scurvy. Only whole food vitamin C does.
Ascorbic acid was identified by two scientists who also discovered ceruloplasmin, the major copper-carrying protein in your blood, and ascorbic acid can affect the structure and the copper composition of this crucial copper protein too.
The ideal ratio of copper to ceruloplasmin is copper around 100, and ceruloplasmin at 30, giving us a ratio of 3.33. If that ratio starts to rise or fall, then you likely have some kind of pathology going on.
What Kind of Results Can You Expect From Holistic Oncology?
Goodyear and Mercola cover a lot more ground in this interview (below) than the summary here, so we encourage you to listen to the full interview. In closing, what kind of results might you get using a holistic approach to cancer treatment? Goodyear says:
“I'd say probably 90% of our patients are metastatic and [have had] prior treatment. In those patients, in a six-week or maybe eight-week cycle, we can see a significant reduction in tumor burden. What I tell them is, ‘When you come into our clinic, my goal is [for you to have] no evidence of disease when you leave.’They ask, ‘Is that possible?’ Well, as that one case study I mentioned, it was achieved. Now, she ended up being with us for nine weeks, but the point is she came in a wheelchair, she walked out, her PET-CT scan [showed no sign of disease], and her tumor markers [were] normal upon discharge.
Our goal is no evidence of disease, but we're going to typically see — in most of our patients, well over 50% — a significant reduction in that tumor burden while they're here with us. The after-care, is very important to continue that process. What we're talking about here is at least a 50% reduction in the tumor that you can see clinically, through labs and through imaging.
And so, many of our patients will come in where the breast is a whole tumor, [or] their spine lights up like a Christmas tree. So, it's not like we have a patient coming in and they have a small little nodule, OK? These are patients that have failed chemotherapy twice or more, [have had] surgery, radiation [and the cancer] recurred, not just once, but often two or even more times.
It's a tough spot to be in, but if we can set a goal of ‘no evidence of disease’ and see a 50% reduction in these patients, hey, that's something that we can work with, because we're not destroying the body; actually we're working to heal the body.”
As mentioned earlier, most of the patients have destroyed much of their bodies’ innate healing ability through repeated toxic treatments, which makes holistic treatment far less effective. Once chemotherapy damages your immune system it becomes extraordinarily difficult to treat it.
I know how panic-stricken one can get when given a cancer diagnosis, but if you’re in the early to mid-stages, you have virtually nothing to lose by going holistic FIRST. Your chances of total remission will be far greater than waiting until all other treatments fail, and you may be able to save your breasts and other parts of your body that would otherwise be cut out.
A Case History
To make his point, Goodyear offers the case history of a woman with bilateral breast cancer who’d been told she needed a bilateral mastectomy, bilateral radiation with chemo, and lymph node dissection — six to 12 months of brutal and toxic treatments that would have left her disfigured.
“When I was talking to her before she came, I said, ‘Let me tell you my approach. Since you've not had any treatment, if we take this in a healing perspective and through a holistic integrative approach, you may just save your breasts, and you may negate the need for any of those other harmful therapies.’And in fact, now she's over two years out — cancer-free, no breasts removed, no lymph nodes removed. So, here is a person who was headed down that road that would be life changing in a negative way. We hit the pause button.
She took a chance to think, she took a chance to read. And then she said, ‘You know what? I want a different approach.’ We addressed it with a holistic evidence-based, integrative approach ... and now she has both breasts and she's living cancer-free.
She even had COVID and did great ... When the immune system is not destroyed, things work so much better, and full-dose chemo destroys the immune system.”
Vitamin C Improves Effectiveness of Chemo and Radiation
Research has shown vitamin C is selectively cytotoxic to cancer cells when administered intravenously (IV) or in liposomal form in high doses. The mechanism behind vitamin C's ability to selectively target cancer cells has to do with the generation of hydrogen peroxide, which is ultimately what kills the cancer cells.1
Normal tissues remain unharmed by the high levels of hydrogen peroxide generated because healthy cells have several ways to remove it, thereby preventing buildup to toxic levels.2
One of the primary pathways of removal is the enzyme catalase, and cells with reduced catalase activity — such as cancer cells — are more prone to die from excess reactive oxygen species and secondary free radicals when exposed to high amounts of vitamin C.3,4,5
Research6 also shows high-dose vitamin C administration in combination with chemotherapy and radiation significantly improves the effectiveness of these treatments. Cancer cells have unstable iron particles (also known as redox active iron molecules), which makes them more vulnerable to oxidative damage caused by high-dose vitamin C.
When redox active iron reacts with vitamin C, hydrogen peroxide and associated free radicals are generated, which damage the cancer cells' DNA and weaken them, thereby making them more vulnerable to the effects of chemo and radiation. As noted by one of the study's co-authors, Garry Buettner, Ph.D.:7
"This paper reveals a metabolic frailty in cancer cells that is based on their own production of oxidizing agents that allows us to utilize existing redox active compounds, like vitamin C, to sensitize cancer cells to radiation [therapy] and chemotherapy."Vitamin C Doubles Survival Rate of Brain Cancer Patients Treated With Radiation
To evaluate the safety of vitamin C, 11 patients with glioblastoma (a highly malignant and aggressive type of brain cancer) received high-dose vitamin C IV treatments three times a week for two months while undergoing radiation therapy, followed by two weekly infusions for another seven months. As reported by Time Magazine:8
"[S]o far, half of the people in the study were alive nearly two years later. The average survival for the disease is generally around a year.In a separate study designed to get an early sense of the vitamin's effectiveness, the researchers also tested the high-dose vitamin C in a group of 14 people with non-small cell lung cancer.
So far, 93 percent of the people receiving the vitamin C infusions are responding to chemotherapy and radiation, compared to 40 percent who usually do.
In an encouraging finding, more than 30 percent of the people getting the vitamin C also showed signs of their tumors shrinking. Usually, only 15 percent to 19 percent of people receiving chemo and radiation see their tumors get smaller."
In the second phase of the trial, the researchers will investigate vitamin C's effects on patients with stage 4 lung cancer and other aggressive cancers.
Other Ways Vitamin C Benefits Cancer Patients
Aside from the mechanisms already mentioned, vitamin C also benefits cancer by lowering inflammation.9,10
As a general rule, chronic inflammation is a hallmark of cancer, and research shows IV vitamin C treatment lowers pro-inflammatory cytokines and C-reactive protein, and that these improvements correlate with a reduction in tumor size.
It also lowers the risk of metastasis. A study done by scientists at the Riordan Clinic (the successor to Linus Pauling and his work on vitamin C) noted a positive response in 75% of patients.
Other research11,12 done by scientists at the Lewis Cantley of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York found high doses of vitamin C help kill and eliminate colorectal cancer cells with certain genetic mutations. Other studies13 have shown high-dose vitamin C can help slow the growth of prostate, pancreatic, liver and colon cancer cells.
Human studies also show IV vitamin C can help improve symptoms associated with cancer and cancer treatment, such as fatigue, nausea, vomiting, pain, loss of appetite and overall quality of life.
While the above studies and most protocols use IV vitamin C, there is compelling research and anecdotal clinical evidence to support the use of liposomal vitamin C. It may be nearly as effective, or even more effective, than IV vitamin C.
It certainly is far easier and less expensive to administer. I personally think liposomal C should be in everyone's medicine cabinet and travel kit, as high doses (such as 2 to 5 grams every hour) can obliterate most infections.
Vitamin C and Nutritional Ketosis Is a Winning Combination
While the featured research is certainly on the right track, an oncology center in Turkey has taken it a step further, showing that vitamin C in combination with nutritional ketosis improves the effectiveness of chemotherapy to such a degree that a minimal dose can be used to treat even the most aggressive and advanced cancers.
I interviewed Dr. Abdul Kadir Slocum from the ChemoThermia Oncology Center in Turkey about this research. If you missed it, you'd be well advised to watch it now, because this metabolically supported therapy is truly groundbreaking, offering hope where previously there was none.
In summary, metabolically supported chemotherapy involves applying chemotherapy with a variety of interventions to support its effectiveness. This includes the use of high-dose vitamin C, a ketogenic diet, hyperthermia, glycolytic inhibitors and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, just to name a few.
All oncology patients at the center are put on a ketogenic diet, which creates metabolic stress on the cancer cells.
Then, prior to administering the chemo, the patient will do a minimum 14-hour fast (Slocum recommends fasting as long as possible, but a minimum of 14 hours is required), which further increases the metabolic stress on the cancer cells.
At this point, the patients will typically have a blood glucose level around 80 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). They then apply glycolytic inhibitors to inhibit the glycolysis pathway in the cancer cells, which creates a terrific amount of metabolic stress, as the cancer cells are already starved of glucose.
Insulin is then applied to lower the blood glucose levels to around 50 or 60 mg/dL, inducing mild hypoglycemia. At that point, when the cancer cells are maximally stressed and weakened, the chemotherapy drug is applied. An added boon of this metabolic approach is that a far lower dose of chemotherapy can be effectively used, thereby lowering the risk of side effects.
In the days following chemotherapy, hyperthermia and hyperbaric oxygen therapy is applied, plus a daily infusion of glycolytic inhibitor therapies with high-dose vitamin C (50 grams) and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO).
Metabolically Supported Chemotherapy Successfully Treats Aggressive Cancers
Two years ago, Slocum's oncology team published its first paper,14 reporting complete response for stage 3 rectal cancer. The standard of care for rectal cancer and the only curative option has been surgery or chemo-radiotherapy followed by surgery. In this case, they used metabolically supported chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hyperthermia. No surgery was necessary.
Their second paper,15 published in January 2016, was a case series of 33 patients with stage 3 and 4 pancreatic cancer — one of the most aggressive and deadly cancers known. Eighty-one percent of these patients had stage 4 disease when the treatment began, and many of them also had large scale liver metastasis. The typical life expectancy of someone with stage 4 pancreatic cancer is six to 10 months. Most die within weeks or months once they have large-scale liver metastasis.
The center treated them with a standard conventional protocol using chemotherapy applied in a metabolically supported fashion (which included the ketogenic diet, fasting prior to chemo administration, high-dose vitamin C, plus hyperthermia, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, supplements and glycolysis inhibitors).
The expected median survival time for the conventional chemotherapy protocol alone is between six and 11 months, depending on the drug used. But when given in combination with these other metabolic supports, the median survival time shot up to 20 months, and over 50% of the patients are still alive today!
Nutritional Ketosis Appears To Be a Key Component of Successful Cancer Treatment
Maintaining nutritional ketosis and fasting for a minimum of 14 hours before the chemotherapy treatment appears to be key for the overwhelming success rate achieved by ChemoThermia Oncology Center. A number of other researchers have verified the remarkable ability of a ketogenic diet to prevent and suppress cancer, and when you combine that with fasting and high-dose vitamin C, you end up creating a very hostile environment for cancer cells.
Dr Joseph Mercola's book, "Fat for Fuel" — which has been peer-reviewed by over two dozen medical and scientific experts — details how to implement nutritional ketosis for optimal health and disease prevention. Besides the information presented in "Fat for Fuel," you'll also find many collaborative supports, including a nine-hour-long free video series that we hope to launch in early May.
Credentialed nutrition professional Miriam Kalamian is also developing a certification course to go along with it through the American College of Nutrition.
This certification will teach any qualified clinician — primarily certified clinical nutritionists but also physicians — how to practically implement nutritional ketosis. Eventually, I expect there will be a virtual army of clinicians available to assist patients with this kind of protocol. Hopefully, at that point we'll finally start making a dent in cancer statistics.
An important but often overlooked aspect of nutritional ketosis is "feast and famine cycling." Meaning, you don't actually want to stay in ketosis indefinitely. The real magic actually happens during the refeeding phase, so one or two days a week, you'll want to increase your carb and protein intake, and then cycle back into nutritional ketosis again.
ChemoThermia Oncology Center uses this kind of cycling as well, although under far stricter conditions. When you're dealing with late-stage cancer, you cannot break your ketosis that frequently. However, on the days patients receive chemotherapy, which is once every two or three weeks, they're allowed to eat as many carbohydrates as they want.
- 1 University of Iowa January 10, 2017
- 2 Express.co.uk March 23, 2017
- 3 Redox Biology 2016 Dec; 10: 274–284
- 4 Medicine.news February 19, 2017
- 5 Science Daily January 9, 2017
- 6 Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccell.2017.02.018
- 7 Medical News Today March 31, 2017
- 8 Time Magazine April 5, 2017
- 9 Journal of Translational Medicine 2012; 10: 189
- 10 Riordan Clinic Press Release October 2012
- 11 Science November 5, 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa5004
- 12 International Business Times November 9, 2015
- 13 National Cancer Institute High Dose Vitamin C
- 14 International Journal of Cancer Research and Molecular Mechanisms January 18, 2016; 2(1) (PDF)
- 15 Journal of the Pancreas September 1, 2015
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