Ivermectin and Fenbendazole May Just Quell Cancer - Mary Beth Pfeiffer
A retired software programmer, Ridgway took long-established, off-patent drugs that are surely not on a typical oncologist’s radar: ivermectin, fenbendazole (a veterinary drug), and colchicine. They cost $400 for six months of treatment. Standard pharmaceuticals for early lymphoma, by contrast, cost an average $12,396 a year in the United States.
Cancer medications, no surprise, are Pharma’s biggest money-maker, with $160 billion in sales annually, or 20 percent of world drug revenues.
Ridgway, who is sixty-five years old, represents a small share of cancer patients who choose alternative care in part because they mistrust profit-driven oncology and dislike the chemo drawbacks. The drugs they take—under the supervision of a physician and sometimes with traditional therapies—are supported by considerable laboratory and animal studies and some human research.
Early clinical data “increasingly support the use of . . . ‘non-cancer’ drugs in an off-label setting against multiple tumor types,” a mainstream journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology, reported in 2019. “The time has come for large scale clinical studies of off-label drugs in this context.”
The primary impediment to further research—which has been called for time and again in research articles—is the low cost “patent-expired” drugs, the study said. Trials “may not be an economically viable option.”
This is the story of one doctor’s new, small, and thoroughly nontraditional, cancer practice based in his home telemedicine office in Mumbai, India. Dr. Darrell DeMello admits there is a lot to learn, in a field of medicine dominated by a treatment model that disregards drugs with fewer side effects and potential to help.
“I have had well-known senior doctors treated by me for Covid . . . who trusted me with their lives over the past five years. They have stage 4 cancers. Yet, they chose chemotherapy,” DeMello told me. “Treating cancer is a very hard proposition as the public is brainwashed about biopsy, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.”
For such last-ditch patients who come to him, DeMello, a general practitioner for thirty-five years, does not change the ultimate outcome. But he gives them something else: Time.
For cases in which the outcomes are known, he prescribed his ivermectin-fenbendazole cocktail to sixteen patients, who almost all had been given one to four weeks to live. Thirteen survived from six to ten months before dying, he said. One near-death pancreatic patient, who had exhausted the gamut of chemotherapy, lasted more than a year.
“It’s difficult to reverse the (chemotherapy) damage,” DeMello said, who has six other cases in various treatment stages.
In two of his first sixteen cases, however, patients bypassed traditional care and went first to DeMello. Rohini Hughes, a fity-three-year-old advanced colon cancer patient, is alive though suffering, twenty months after her remaining time was measured in days. Mike Ridgway, whose cancer was caught early, was given a clean bill of health nearly a year after the disease emerged.
“I cannot overstate how blessed my wife and I feel,” Ridgway said.
“Dr. DeMello has kept me alive,” said Hughes.
Hype—and hope
In 2020, Dr. DeMello emerged as a leader among doctors worldwide who opted, at risk to their livelihoods, to treat covid-19 patients with drugs that were not sanctioned by the World Health Organization or otherwise anointed by medicine.
DeMello’s limited and new experience suggests cancer can be treated in ways other than—or in addition to—the model that patients have been trained to accept as their only hope.
“Let’s say I have to decide whether to do chemotherapy or radiation,” said Rohini Hughes. “I want to be informed from a neutral source that gives me a third option.”
That “third option” is real.
Ivermectin and fenbendazole have been shown to kill cancer cells in multiple laboratory and animal studies and in a study of three cancer cases that showed “complete response.” A 2024 review of the fenbendazole science concluded the drug was safe and, moreover, “crucial to perform clinical trials to assess its potential anticancer effects.”
Evidence for ivermectin, similarly, supports the “rapid move into clinical trials for cancer patients—a conclusion published in 2018. Just two trials are now testing ivermectin along with traditional cancer drugs.
As science slogs along, clinicians are forging ahead with these and a variety of other drugs like metformin, propranolol, mebendazole, mistletoe, and dimethyl sulfoxide or DMSO, for which there are also supportive published studies.
While they are hopeful, treating doctors reject labels like miracle cure that are touted on social media, especially for ivermectin and fenbendazole.
“I don’t see it alone doing the miraculous things others are talking about,” said Dr. Mollie James, whose James Clinic cancer cases have “exploded” as patients look for more choices. “And it gives patients false hope.”
Dr. Pierre Kory, who runs Leading Edge Clinic, has personally treated about seventy-five cancer cases with repurposed drugs, of a total of 250 in his practice. “We do not see the daily incredible cures and remission,” he said. “However, we are seeing consistent control of disease in terms of non-progression.”
These doctors—both covid early-treatment groundbreakers—agree there is great promise for repurposing old drugs for cancer treatment. They are seeing successes.
James is “loving mistletoe” as a cancer treatment and uses “safe, proven” ivermectin for which she said, “There is no downside.” To these and other therapies, she may add intravenous alpha lipoic acid and Vitamin C.
Kory uses eight to ten drugs including propranolol, a medicine to control anxiety with the “strongest clinical evidence base that I’ve seen in cancer,” including observational trials.
Both physicians also prescribe ivermectin and fenbendazole’s molecularly close but more expensive cousin, mebendazole, because it is approved for human use. Using an over-the-counter drug approved solely for de-worming animals is fraught with risk.
Of note, mebendazole is part of an ongoing and promising study of four repurposed drugs that have shown powerful benefit for glioblastoma, or brain cancer. Another study is testing nine more off-patent drugs for glioblastoma treatment, suggesting the concept is gaining acceptance.
Side effects? Nil
Kory’s learning experience in treating cancer is instructive, as he went from surprise to disappointment to genuine hope.
“There is a small cohort where there is a dramatic response and remission with tumors melting away,” he told me in a telephone interview. But then, reality set in: “A small cohort appear to not respond at all and they have died.”
In the middle, and more typically, Kory said, “I slowly realized, although tumors were not melting away, we were also not seeing more metastases or new or worsening symptoms,” Kory told me.
Such win-loss observations are routinely seen, and accepted as the norm, in traditional cancer therapies. But repurposed drug protocols have one distinct—perhaps huge—advantage over the standard of care that many of his patients have already received.
“The majority of my cancer patients, if they are suffering from symptoms, it is almost always from side effects of conventional treatments like chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy, and not from their cancer,” Kory said.
He continued: “Conversely, the medications I use are almost always well tolerated. We don’t make patients sick.”
Indeed, safety data for ivermectin and fenbendazole/mebendazole is abundant. The drugs are not associated with a long list of side effects that cancer patients have come to expect: debilitating fatigue, hair loss, nausea, infections, anemia, weight loss, neuropathy, and more.
Chemotherapy and radiation almost always inflict such damage.
By one large study, 10 to 20 percent of cancer patients are hospitalized from “treatment-related toxicities” of chemotherapy, which are blithely accepted as part of the oncology model. Ten percent of those patients died, and the cost averaged $19,000 per hospitalization, two studies found.
Whether repurposed drugs are as good or better in terms of cancer control remains to be seen. They are clearly easier on the body.
The worst side effect that Mike Ridgway had was a fenbendazole-related surge in enzymes that threatened his liver—surely not good and something patients and clinicians need to monitor. He took a break from the drug and levels went back to normal, as several science papers attest.
Bobi Fox, Ridgway’s wife, described her husband’s cancer journey like this: “He is the healthiest sick person you would ever want to know.”
Mike’s story
In 2020 and 2021, DeMello, sixty-seven years old, treated 26,000 covid cases; his record was 1,200 calls on a single day in April 2021. He relied on a protocol centered on Nobel Prize-winning ivermectin, which was then newly tapped as a powerful anti-viral; and colchicine, an anti-inflammatory drug that also stopped clotting. Just seventy-five of those patients were hospitalized, and twenty-five died, he said.
That’s a very good record considering the U.S. Food and Drug Administration branded ivermectin as dangerous horse paste, a claim it retracted to settle a lawsuit.
Early on, Ridgway became friends with DeMello through Facebook, where they shared like-minded views of the flaws of official pandemic policies.
Ridgway’s first inkling that he was facing a serious health problem was in February 2024 after suffering abdominal pain and enlarged lymph nodes. “This PET scan will find cancer anywhere in your body,” the technician told a startled Ridgway.
Indeed, the scan showed “two nodes in the left upper abdominal mesentery that are markedly hypermetabolic, and lymphoma is a primary consideration.”
An oncologist ordered a biopsy, telling Ridgway unequivocally, “The tissue is the issue.”
He turned to DeMello, who “was very, very emphatic against it,” Ridgway said.
“I am convinced that there is no useful role of biopsy (and risk of spreading cancer) especially when a non-invasive test like PET scan can confirm the presence of malignancy,” DeMello explained. “Two huge lymphomas” on Ridgway’s scan were diagnostic for him.
“Unless he had a major infection, with symptoms of fever, high WBC counts, high neutrophil counts,” he said, “the only diagnosis for such huge tumors in the abdomen is malignancy’.”
After that, Ridgway opted to follow the advice of a doctor he respected half a world away.
“It’s nothing short of a miracle that the two of us were in communication when I received my diagnosis for cancer,” he told me.
Rohini’s story
Rohini Hughes, fifty-three years old, went to an emergency room in late October 2023 with excruciating abdominal pain that made her scream. She was diagnosed with a tumor in her colon that would need immediate surgery and then chemotherapy.
Hughes had no health insurance and an unstable family life so checked herself out of the hospital. She was told she could be dead within days; her tumor had created a fistula—a connection—between the colon and bladder, putting her at risk of potentially fatal sepsis, DeMello said.
In March 2024—after surviving for five months on Ayurvedic medicine, pain medication and, DeMello says, faith—Hughes started sixty days on the ivermectin-fenbendazole protocol. Dr. DeMello oversaw her treatment without charge, as he does for many patients.
Hughes is now stable. But she still has blood and feces in her urine, ongoing pain, and extreme fatigue. She is not cured or even well.
“Ivermectin and Fenbendazole cannot repair and heal the damage being done in my body due to high cortisol, due to stress and trauma,” she wrote to me. “They have kept me stable and alive when I should have been dead by now. They have been life-saving for me.”
Hughes gave testimony before Congress in 2019 on the alleged circumstances surrounding her marriage and family life. She is homeless and helped now by friends who have supported shelter at an undisclosed location for her and her son, Jay, twenty-one.
If she had a stable home life and living arrangement, and could afford recommended vitamin C infusions, Hughes believes, “my tumor would have been gone by now.”
Not just drugs
Drugs alone—whether repurposed or the latest-and-greatest from Pharma—won’t alone allay cancer, DeMello believes, and Kory and James agree. They embrace the theory that cancer is a metabolic disease which feeds on carbohydrate-driven glucose.
“If one continues to eat a high sugar/high carbohydrate diet, and not make a drastic change to a HIGH PROTEIN, ZERO/Extremely LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIET,” he wrote to me in a text, “the cancer will spread, and patient’s condition will worsen!”
“My ‘sense,’ based on clinical experience, is that patients that are more adherent to the [ketogenic] diet do better,” Kory said in an email.
Ridgway found it relatively easy to adopt a “carnivore diet,” initially just beef, fish, eggs, yogurt, and bacon for six to eight weeks, then adding things like nuts, vegetables, sauerkraut, and chia seeds. He lost weight that has not come back and feels good.
By contrast, a patient of Dr. James’ was told by an oncologist: “Go eat a Big Mac and fries, it doesn’t matter.”
James, a functional medicine specialist, oversees diet, checks hormone and vitamin levels, and tests for chronic infections and toxicities to, for example, metals and mold—measures meant to address the root cause and driver of cancers.
Under the traditional model, on the other hand, she said, “All that patients are told is show up for next chemo appointment.”
“The system is only designed to pay for certain treatments, patented treatments, treatments that feed the system,” she added, explaining why repurposed drugs are outliers of care.
Dr. DeMello, meantime, has adjusted his protocol with time and experience. His approach varies by the patient’s stage, from early to aftermath. “I don’t have hard core protocols fixed in stone,” he said.
Here are two:
Basic protocol:
Ivermectin 1 milligram to 1.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight daily, initially for 60 days.
Fenbendazole 222 milligrams, 2 each morning, 2 each evening for 60 days (expressed below as 2-0-2).
Colchicine 0.5 milligrams daily.
Intravenous Vitamin C as needed.
Stage 4 protocol:
Colchicine/Goutnil or Zycolchin 0.5 milligrams 2-0-1 x 60 days.
Ivermectin 12 milligrams 3-0-3 x 60 days. Ivermectin needs to be taken on an empty stomach in the morning and evening.
Fenbendazole 222 milligrams 2-0-2 x 60 days take tablets after breakfast and after dinner daily.
Famotidine 40 milligrams 1-1-1 x 5 days for any acidity-related problems.
Lymphoma? Gone.
One uncertainty is whether cancers quelled by DeMello’s and other off-label protocols will recur, which is true for traditionally treated cancers as well. Two doctors told me of unverified reports of fenbendazole-treated cancers reemerging aggressively. Doctors are also still working out dosage, duration, and whether to give the medications continuously or pulse them.
As an early treated patient, Ridgway’s change was relatively quick. The scan on which DeMello diagnosed Ridgway’s cancer was February 21, 2024. He began the DeMello protocol soon after.
On June 17, 2024, a second PET scan found: “A single abnormal . . . lymph node is slightly smaller . . . much less metabolically active . . . (but is) still markedly hypermetabolic . . . A previously . . . abnormal lymph node nearby now appears normal. There is no new abnormality elsewhere.”
By January 13, 2025, a PET scan reported: “There is no lymphadenopathy. There is no hypermetabolism.”
“All I can tell you, I had a high number on the 21st of February, a lower number on the 13th of June, then on the 13th of January, zero.”
Ridgway continues maintenance weekly doses of 12 milligrams of ivermectin and 222 milligrams of fenbendazole.
Postscript
Beyond what the scientific literature and these patient experiences suggest, ivermectin and fenbendazole seemed to make a difference in the cancer of a close friend’s mother, Jackie, now ninety-two. In the last year, this spry woman, after repeated emergency room visits for extreme abdominal pain and nausea, was diagnosed with medullary cancer of the colon. The tumor was surgically removed, and Jackie, left too frail for chemotherapy and radiation, instead began Keytruda infusions, an immunotherapy drug for cancer.
A scan several months later revealed that the cancer had spread to her liver. While continuing the Keytruda, she began a protocol with Dr. James that included ivermectin and fenbendazole; melatonin, high-dose Vitamins D and K, and Tudca, among other nutritional supplements; a lower-carb diet; and a short course of Vitamin C infusions.
Her next scan showed the liver tumors shrinking, but Jackie stopped the Keytruda infusions because of excruciating body-wide joint pain.
A subsequent scan showed the tumors still decreasing in size, and Jackie, while finally admitting to her oncologist this month that she has been taking an off-label drug protocol since last summer, asked to schedule another Keytruda infusion.
Her oncologist declined the request. “How will I know what worked?” was the rationale. Time will tell, but Jackie has more energy and a great appetite now that she is off the immunotherapy. Liver enzyme monitoring showed that, so far, she is tolerating the fenbendazole.
And as she awaits the results of her most recent PET/CT scan, she is staying the course on the James protocol.
Source: https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/safe-cheap-drugs-like-ivermectin-and-fenbendazole-may-just-quell-cancer-c3402533
%20in%20a%20visually%20appealing%20way,%20without%20any%20text.%20The%20background%20is%20split_%20one%20side%20has%20a%20sci.webp)
.png)
Comments
Post a Comment