Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  May, 2001  

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I thought this to be a greatly fortuitous result and made contact with Dr. Stenkvist. The Head at his hospital was unimpressed with the indication that breast cancer could be treated with digitalis and Dr. Stenkvist was not permitted to treat another breast cancer patient with digitalis. He then tried to interest the major pharmaceutical firms in Europe in digitalis as a drug to treat breast cancer. There was no interest in a herbal remedy on which no patent could be had, that sold for a few cents a day. Dr. Stenkvist then went into retirement, greatly depressed that nothing had come from his effort.

About two years ago, I sent all of the above to my friend Johan Haux, MD of the Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Biology and University Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. He was already doing research on the induction of apoptosis, the programmed death of cancer cells. Over the past two years he has done an incredible amount of testing in cultures of the anticancer effect of digitoxin, the natural form of digitalis in the leaf of the foxglove. He has found that it induces apoptosis and hence cancer cell death in a broad spectrum of kinds of cancer including breast cancer and a most hopeless kind of brain tumor, glioblastoma. This marked anticancer effect of digitoxin takes place at harmless concentrations in patients.

Dr. Haux has published widely in medical journals of his results. In Medical Hypotheses 1999, 53 (6) 543-8 he has published a review of his work.

The oleander has a glycoside very much like digitoxin, oleandrin. In the July 2000 issue of Cancer Research Dr. D.J. McConkey et al. of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, published a report showing the same anticancer effect of oleandrin as Dr. Haux has found with digitoxin.

In the December 2000 issue of the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients Dr. Haux had a letter telling of the harmless nature of digitoxin in treating cancer as compared to the harm done to normal cells by the alkylating agents (cytotoxic chemotherapy). He again reviewed his work to date on digitoxin, making mention of the confirmation from the group at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

He closed with "The in vitro data accumulated now show that the properties of the cardiac glycosides may be more or less perfect in treating some types of cancer. Clinical studies will in time reveal if this turns out to be rea1ity."

It is suggested that digitoxin is harmless so why not use it now in treating breast cancer in the hope that the fine indications seen by Dr. Stenkvist almost 20 years ago should prove to be reality.

Digitoxin is available by prescription. Treatment must be done by a doctor as an overdose can be toxic.

Wayne Martin

25 Orchard Court

Fairhope, Alabama 36532 USA

334-928-3975 / Fax 334-928-1050

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