Enzyme Therapies

Some alternative medicine practitioners claim that digestive enzyme supplements not only relieve digestive problems, such as ulcers and food allergies, but also strengthen the immune system, improve circulation, ease sore throat pain, aid weight loss, and relieve hay fever, ulcers, and rheumatoid arthritis. Proponents also claim that certain enzymes remove a protective coating from cancer cells, allowing white blood cells to identify and attack them.

"Enzymes are life", as many like to say. Besides digesting food, the body uses them in creating energy, fighting disease and for thousands of other activities within the body. Human biochemistry is all about converting one chemical substance into another - mostly with the help of enzymes. In fact, Edward Howell in his important book "Enzyme Nutrition" claims we are by mass 80% enzymes. 

Certain proteolytic enzymes (protein digesting enzymes) are used to digest a cancer cell's tough protein coating, or outer cell wall. This is a remarkable technique cancer cells have developed to protect themselves from our immune system. In short - they hide. Protein digesting enzymes eat away at this outer wall which leaves the cell vulnerable to the immune system's so-called NK cells (also called leukocytes or white blood cells). The NK cells will then recognize the cell as dangerous and defective and go to work dissolving it. 

Enzymes are usually abundant in raw foods. But the modern diet for decades has been focused on cooked and processed foods. As critical as they are to all life processes, enzymes are fragile and easily destroyed by .....

- Cooking food over 115 degrees (Approx.)

- Pasteurization
- Commercial food processing 

- Food Irradiation
- Carbonated beverages.

In this era of fast approaching changes in cancer treatment, enzyme therapy is finally gaining serious mainstream recognition. For example, the work of physician Nicholas Gonzalez MD of New York is now being assessed in a large National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health (NCI/NIH) funded clinical trial conducted through New York’s Columbia University.

Much of Dr. Gonzalez's interest in alternative approaches began in his second year of medical school, when he was introduced to the cancer treatment used by William Donald Kelley, DDS, a dentist active in the cancer underground from the 1960’s through the 1980’s. (More about Dr. Kelley to follow.) Kelley had pioneered a method of using enzymes in combination with nutrition to cure himself of pancreatic cancer.

Amazingly, enzyme cancer therapy dates back to the early 1900s and the theories of Scottish biologist, John Beard. A teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Beard proposed that the digestive function and pancreatic enzymes represent the body’s main defense against cancer. To his surprise, Beard found that human infant placenta cells look and behave like cancer cells. However, the placenta stopped growing and acting like an invading tumor-like tissue, when the baby's pancreas became activated about it's 4th month within the mother. He hypothesized that the fetus started producing enzymes to control placenta and that without this production the placenta would continue growing and ultimately kill the mother and baby.

Beard took this work to yet another level, believing that all tumors throughout the body arose from misplaced placenta cells, which had been deprived of proper control. These cells were thought to be left over from early embryonic stages in both males and females and were kept under control by circulating pancreatic enzymes throughout adulthood. However, these cells can quickly grow out of control should the pancreas fail to manufacture or release adequate amounts of proteolytic enzymes.  In 1911, Beard published a monograph of his work, entitled The Enzyme Therapy of Cancer. Although his peers scoffed at him, his work is now recognized as being essentially correct. Today histologists and molecular biologists have identified Beard’s misplaced placental cells in every organ. Today, however, they are called stem cells. 

Unfortunately, after Beard’s death in 1923, his amazing insights were ignored and forgotten. Dr. Gonzalez has found that orally ingested pancreatic enzymes are acid stable, can pass into the small intestine and be absorbed through the intestinal walls and enter into the blood stream. It is now clear that pancreatic proteolytic (protein digesting) enzymes have a profound cancer-fighting effect. If only today's cancer oncologists (MDs) would recognize this and use them - after 90+ years of being ignored!

The pancreas has the responsibility for producing these much-needed enzymes not available from our food anymore, but can become weakened and overwhelmed in the cancer fighting process. Note that proper dietary minerals are essential for the pancreas to manufacture enzymes. Research in developing new forms of cancer-fighting enzyme preparations has been going on for many years. Meanwhile, according to Dr. Hugh Smith of the Life Sources Educational Library, the way to get rid of the "slime coating", as some call it, protecting cancer cells is to use large doses of plant and/or animal enzymes - he cites bromelain and pancreatin. Again, this allows an access point for the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer cells.

More about Dr. William Kelley DDS: A pioneering dentist & scientist, he became a cancer researcher/ therapist after healing himself of terminal cancer with diet and the pancreatic enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin. He successfully treated thousands of cancer patients who sought him out over the years. And along the way was endlessly harassed and persecuted by "medical authorities" for practicing medicine without a license. No matter that he was achieving great success curing cancer. More later on this wonderful medical pioneer.