Transcription
In a world where algorithms and financial incentives dictate the information we see, it's easy for important stories to slip through the cracks. This is powerful because it can heavily influence and divide public opinion. Much of what I do on Soft White Underbelly is about digging deeper and trying to see beyond our own biases. This is why Ground News is a perfect fit for my channel.
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When I first appeared on this channel, I told a story of greed and the pharmaceutical industry. That's an easy story to tell because the pharmaceutical company has a very, very simple business model: greed. But like any story that is dark and has human suffering involved, as this one does, there should be a little bit of hope at the end—maybe a flicker of hope. And this story does; it's dim, but it has a flicker of hope.
It reaches back about 50 years ago when I was just out of my teens and I was working on a steamer called The Sovereign, Edith—a Liberian steamer. In the mess hall, I saw, when we were in port in New Orleans, this one seaman there—a sailor and his poor condition. Something was about him; he had this large lesion on his face. I found out his name was Victor; he was from Ecuador and he had skin cancer. As I heard, they cut it away and then it grew back. I could tell that Victor was on that lonely road to death from cancer.
It was my first real confrontation with cancer, and I befriended Victor. His job on the ship was called "donkey man," and that really is self-descriptive because on the ship, in the bowels of the ship where the engines are—this huge turbines that turn the screw—all of this machinery is handled by what they call "wipers." Wipers do exactly what that sounds like: they wipe all this machinery down and they squeeze the grunge and the goo into these two large buckets. When they're full, they're put on a yoke like a donkey, and the donkey man goes up these scaffolding—80 feet up—and this is in the scorching heat of the tropics—and goes to the poop deck, which is the stern of the ship, and dumps them over.
Now, I know that sounds terrible in today's ethos, but this was another epoch. He does this all day long, and he was at the end of his rope. I befriended him, so I started helping Victor. I'd spell him, let him rest, and I would carry his buckets up and dump them into the sea. He was a real nice man; he had a couple of kids and a wife, and he wanted to keep working as long as possible to send money home.
I lost track of Victor; we were in Port Monaco, and I got very sick. I had to be rushed to a clinic there; I never saw Victor again, but he died shortly after that. I'm sure he was on his way to death.
So now we flash back a few years after that, and I'm off the ship. I had taken a new bride, and I was working. My sister—I had two older sisters, Phyllis and Carol—they were nine and eight years older than me, respectively. My sister Phyllis had developed breast cancer. A lot of this is a haze in that time period, but she went to Memorial Sloan Kettering. She had treatment; it recurred, and she was very, very ill. She had two young boys, Mark and David.
One day, my wife and I are in our apartment, and the phone rings. It's my mother and my sister— they're at Phyllis's house in Oyster Bay. They said something's wrong with Phyllis. Of course, something was wrong with her; she had cancer. So my wife and I raced to the house, and my parents and my sister were standing there in shock, just glazed over. She was upstairs.
So my wife and I went upstairs, and my sister Phyllis was propped up against the bed with a glazed-over look. I know she was dying—she was dying right there. My wife brought her to the floor, trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Finally, the EMTs came and took her to the hospital. We followed in a car, and we got to Glen Cove Hospital. The doctor came out shortly after that and said, "I’m sorry; she’s dead."
The grief was so profound to my father that when we got back to the house, I literally had to carry him into the house. He died a month to the day that Phyllis died, but Phyllis was only 35 and she had two kids—Mark and David—they were five and seven at that time. It fell upon my wife and I to go pick them up from Catholic school and tell them that their mother had died.
We drove there; they came out in their uniforms and got in the car. I pulled over, and they called her "Mamina." I said, “Boys, I'm very sorry; Mamina is dead.” With that, like little puppy tears bubbled in their eyes and they started crying. So it was a profound moment for me.
Shortly after that, my other sister Carol developed a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Her type was called "mocosis fungoides"—because mushrooms—and it's an exogenous cancer that manifests on the skin outward. The tumors are on the skin—it's of biblical proportions what it does to the human body and the human soul.
So she was dying, but this took a long time. I'm talking about 20 years of my life were basically filled with cancer—a long string of cancer. When Carol was at the end, I remember I had a restaurant in Scarsdale called Ronald's Café, and we were going out of business. It was a hellhole; I was living on Voda and Marlboro at that time.
Carol asked me to come over during my break; she lived close by, and again she was toward the end. At this point, her suffering was so severe and unremitting that she asked me to kill her—she asked me to help her kill herself.
So I went back to the restaurant and I couldn't shake this pounding sense of guilt that I'm still alive and these people have died. The suffering she was going through weighed on me. I walked up to the bar, and this big Irishman, Steve McCue—6'4" with a handlebar mustache—was there. I went to my bartender like this, and she took a pint glass, put some ice in it, and poured vodka with a little grapefruit juice. I went over to Carol and did it again, and she did it again—just to self-medicate from this.
Several years later, I ended up back in the cancer industry first as an editor—managing editor—then as a freelance writer, which I've done for 35 years, along with research. So I'm still in cancer, and then something interesting happened. I was reading an article about a clinical trial by a guy named Dr. Muny, and in it he was a head and neck cancer specialist, but he was doing research on squamous cutaneous cell carcinomas. It's one of the three major skin cancers.
What he was doing was taking high-concentrate hydrogen peroxide, which is not like what you have at home; it's food-grade and it's between 33% and 35%. He was rubbing it with a Q-tip, pardon me, on these lesions. He was doing that for one reason: just to reduce the surgical margins, okay, for cosmetic reasons because everybody knows that H2O2—hydrogen peroxide—has cytotoxic properties; it kills cells.
He was flabbergasted at the end because I was talking to him, and he said, "Ron, 70% of these cancers, with one application, vanished!" Then I went back a month later for a rebiopsy; all the cancer cells were gone.
Wow, this is very interesting! So I kept this in my head, and I was doing my own research. I went to the dentist, my dentist, Larry Schwarz, and he saw a spot on my tongue. He said, "Ron, you got a spot on your tongue; I don't like the way it looks." He pulled it out.
I went up to Maine with my wife, and I'm looking—I'm brushing my teeth and I said, “Wow, this thing had grown.” It was ugly, and it looked like a squamous cell carcinoma. Now, if there's one cancer you do not want to get, it's head and neck oral cancer because the treatments are worse than the cancer itself.
They'll do, like, for instance, a partial or total glossectomy—take out your tongue, or half part of your tongue—and you don't survive. Anyway, I'm looking at this; my wife is freaking out. I get back home, and she goes, "You gotta go see Larry, you gotta go see Larry." The dentist.
It's growing exponentially, and I know that I can't put this off. I go to Larry, and Dr. Larry says, "Ron, you've got to go see a person right away; I'm really concerned about this." He goes, "I'm going to send you to this oral surgeon, but he's also an MD—he’s the best. He's a medical doctor on topics, I'm very concerned about this."
Okay, now I got some high-concentrate hydrogen peroxide—35% hydrogen peroxide—and the appointment was in about a week. So I start rubbing it until it blanched—did that twice a day for three days, and I'm also making a solution with a little bit of the hydrogen peroxide in it, gargling.
So I went to the oral surgeon about seven or eight days later, and I'll never forget—I sit in the chair and he comes over, very serious, and he's got his tools all there. The nurse is there; he's going to do the resection, he's got his scalpels and all this, and the lesion on my tongue is up on this screen, okay? It’s an ugly lesion.
I'm looking at it, and he looks back at the screen; then he looks at my mouth and says, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm Ron Piana." He said, "Well, where is it? It disappeared!"
I told him what I did, but his eyes glazed over because he just didn’t want to hear it. That's what I call "the look" when you explain something like this—it's out of their comfort zone.
The thing was, "You've got to come back; you've got to come back in a month." I went back in a month and nothing—it had cured this lesion on the tongue, which was a suspect of a squamous cell carcinoma.
So I started doing a lot of research on this, and I said, "Wow, something's really going on here." I realize that it goes back many, many years—okay, this is not a news flash. Hydrogen peroxide is a reactive oxygen species, and it kills cells.
So anyway, I’m doing research on this and I find a person that has a lesion on them. I brush it two or three times—it disappears. My friend, an associate of mine, Bert Vormann, who is a doctor—he’s a retired surgeon, a big-time surgeon.
He worked with the NCI and so forth, published a million papers. He’s an outdoorsman, so he had four lesions on him—two on his face and two on his legs. He went to the doctor; they were medically diagnosed as squamous cell carcinomas.
So Bert, instead of going through the standard of care, does what he calls the Piano Protocol. He gets the high-concentrate hydrogen peroxide, takes a Q-tip, rubs it until it blanched—three times—all four of these things are gone. He goes back to the doctor, and the doctor says, “What the hell happened?” Bert said, “Well, I used the Piano Protocol—this hydrogen peroxide.”
His doctor said—Bert said his eyes glazed over because it’s out of his comfort zone. First of all, skin cancer dermatology is a billion-dollar industry in this country, so put that in your thought process.
So this goes on, and I wrote a paper for this guy, Dr. George Lundberg. Dr. Lundberg was the longest-running medical editor-in-chief of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association—big-time doctor, and he's a supporter of me.
I wrote a piece about what I did with my tongue and Bert Vormann and so forth, and it got a little bit of notice. He’s not well known; I mean, his blog isn’t well known, but I would get people that would email me, and I would explain the protocol.
I'd say, "I'm not a doctor," and explain the protocol to them, and lo and behold, I’d get these emails back: “Ron, thank you so much, it worked. It changed my life. I didn't have to go to the doctor; this medically diagnosed squamous cell carcinoma is cured!”
So I'm going on and on, and there's something here. In cancer, you rarely ever hear the word “cure,” but this was curing squamous cell carcinomas.
Now between basal and squamous cell carcinomas, they kill about 420,000 people a year; squamous cells alone kill 15,000 Americans, okay? So I'm continuing to do this research, and I get to the point where I'm getting some pushback from people.
But let me tell you how this works, and it's okay—it’s a biochemically complex process, but it's really not. If you're looking to defeat something, you look for its weaknesses.
I did a little amateur boxing when I was a young guy at Gleason's Gym—over here on 303rd Street, it's no longer there. In boxing, like anything, you look for a weakness. So if a guy's throwing a left jab and he drops his right hand, he's open for a left hook. You always look for weaknesses in something you want to defeat.
So I was doing research and continuing. Behold, cancer cells—first of all, 90% of all cancers are carcinomas. Carcinomas arise in the epithelial tissue that line the organs and the skin—90% of them.
Almost 90%, the vast majority of carcinomas, have two deficiencies, two weaknesses. Number one, they don't produce enough of an enzyme called catalase. Catalase's main job in the body, in the cell, is to neutralize hydrogen peroxide. That's what it does.
The other weakness is, because of their hyper-replication, the cancer cells have to draw more iron out of the blood than a normal cell. Think about that. They have excess iron and not enough catalase.
Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a small molecule, so it has the ability when it encounters a carcinoma cell to defuse into the cell. It builds up because the cancer cell does not have enough catalase to break it down into harmless oxygen and water.
Okay? So it’s building up, and then the other thing is, because of the excess iron, it initiates what's called the Fenton reaction. The Fenton reaction produces a thing called the hydroxyl radical. Hydroxyl radicals kill the cell; it's called liquid paradoxides. This breaks down the bilipid cell membrane and kills this cancer cell.
This happens every single time. It’s an irrefutable process that always happens when H2O2 encounters carcinomas; it kills them.
Okay, so here we have a situation that—this is known, okay? But it’s not being prosecuted. It’s not being properly looked at, well, for one because of the huge financial situation involved.
I’ll give you an example of how compartmentalized and protective these people are. Years ago, I was given an assignment to profile this doctor named Dr. Bernard Fisher. Bernie Fisher is probably one of the most revolutionary doctors in cancer.
It was Bernie's work; prior to Bernie, if a woman had breast cancer, she would undergo what's called the Halstead radical mastectomy. It was named after William Halstead, who was a New York-based physician who developed this. He was also an IV cocaine addict.
I mean, I don't hold anything against that; it doesn’t make him a bad person, but I don’t know if I’d want somebody whacked out on blow operating on me. He eventually got disbarred, but this was the standard of care for 60 years. It’s a mutilating, disabling procedure in which both breasts are taken off, the muscle tissue along the breasts is taken out, and the axillary lymph nodes are removed.
It’s debilitating and life-altering. Bernie Fisher's groundbreaking clinical trial work proved that lumpectomy—breast-conserving surgery—was just as good, had better outcomes than the total radical mastectomy.
So Bernie Fisher's work revolutionized the treatment of breast cancer. It was a win-win for women; they no longer had to have this mutilating procedure—they could retain their breast, and so forth. Bernie told me that he was at a post-meeting cocktail hour one day, and an elegant woman walked over to Bernie.
He thought she was going to ask him about nothing, but she walked right up to him and said, "I hate your guts." She was the wife of a surgeon who did the Halstead radical.
Think of this: this was proved to be the wrong procedure in favor of the breast-conserving surgery. It violated medicine’s first precept: do no harm, but these surgeons were protecting their franchise, even though it was against the central premise of medicine.
That's how ingrained the financial aspect is that I talked about in the first video. So I'd like to sum this up: first off, when I say hydrogen peroxide, it's not what you have in your home—the 2-3% in that little bottle that you keep for cuts and scratches.
This is between 33% and 35% food-grade hydrogen peroxide. It is very powerful. If you pour a little on your skin, it will abid; it’ll turn white and you’ll feel it. So this is very, very caustic stuff. It’s very reactive.
Okay, number one, the H2O2 molecules, when they interact with the carcinoma, it always happens—this is irrefutable. The chemical biochemical process I described—with the lack of catalase and the Fenton reaction happens—and then it produces a hydroxyl radical that ultimately kills the cell.
It is very rapid cell death. Okay? So this is, as I mentioned, this is known science. It’s science that is irrefutable, and it's been around for a long time.
It’s called oxidative stress therapy because you put oxidative stress on a particular cell, and it breaks it down and kills it. However, any attempt to do this has been made trying to get a pro-drug or an agent to deliver this while always looking for that billion-dollar blockbuster drug when it’s right there in front of you.
Now again, hydrogen peroxide has been sort of co-opted by the alternative community, and they've done a lot of stupid things with it. It’s given it a bad name, so mainstream medicine uses that when anybody brings up hydrogen peroxide. However, the science is there; it’s in the literature, and you heard it right here.
I dare anybody—there’s nobody that can refute this. So I’d like to sort of wrap this up in a bit with a thought experiment, and I’ll use somebody very prominent in the oncology sector: Richard Pazdur.
I've met Dr. Pazdur many times. He's the head of the oncology drug division of the FDA—one of the heads. If there's anybody over the past several decades that has been more prominent in the drug approval process—the cancer drug approval process—it’s Rick Pazdur. He's been nicknamed the oncology czar.
So Dr. Pazdur, here’s a thought experiment: if, unfortunately, you were diagnosed with glioblastoma, the deadliest of brain cancers, you’d have two choices. Okay?
Number one would be the standard of care: the surgeon opens your skull and resects—takes out the tumor as much as much as possible. Then you would undergo concurrent treatments of radiation therapy and temozolomide, a drug that was approved 25 years ago—a very caustic drug.
When it recurs, you’d be given Avastin, which Genentech, the developer of Avastin, in its own data says does nothing to improve survival or symptoms. The data also show you'll be dead within 12 to 18 months. Those four standard of care treatments you have— you’d be essentially tortured to death for 12 to 18 months.
Or you have this other option. This—that was that was made available—a neurosurgeon can open your skull, expose the glioblastoma, and have it injected multiple times with high-dose hydrogen peroxide around the periphery. And it would be image-guided with a sonogram so that needles would go in all the places—so we know we’d have tumor saturation—and then a bit around the periphery.
Which would you take? To me, that’s a no-brainer. Okay? What’s so ironic is that it’s not unusual for neurosurgeons, when they’re doing a glioblastoma resection, to put cotton balls that are soaked in hydrogen peroxide in that cavity as they say to pick up errant cells that they missed—to kill cancer cells that they missed.
It’s absolutely maddening. So right now, we have a cure for squamous and basal cell carcinomas. We have a methodology that we can use—take from that cure that could be used in other cancers.
Unfortunately, this is another—I got an email from a woman in Canada—a lovely woman—and her young son had what I had, a lesion on his tongue. The dentist didn't pick it up; it ended up to be a squamous cell carcinoma, and it metastasized.
They did a partial glossectomy, and she said it was just horrible. They took out most of his tongue; he ended up dying. In the email, she said, "Ron, I wish I had read your article on Dr. Lundberg's cancer comments about the hydrogen peroxide and about your experience with the lesion on your tongue. It probably could have saved my son."
So lives are being lost here. This is a simple and effective, cost-effective way to treat these carcinomas. Dr. Mun, who I first saw the trial of years before, said, “Yes, this merits more clinical studies.”
I called him up: where are they? They’re not there. Would I trust the federal government to conduct clinical trials on squamous cell carcinomas with H2O2? No, they would subvert it. I know they would subvert it because this is a multi-billion dollar industry.
One of the huge problems in cancer right now is that we are operating on recycled ideas—the same ideas we put a little gloss on, but they're being recycled. The cancer society, everything about oncology and cancer is living in a fortress of dogma.
To break that dogma wall down will take a populist revolution, I think, to finally say: enough is enough! Let's get some new ideas in here, like the one I described today.
Okay? Like the one I described today. Let's get some new ideas; let’s get some fresh scientists who are not tied to pharmaceutical companies—scientists like Bernard Fisher, who I described, who was the pure scientist.
When I went to his house and he looked at me and said, "Ron, to know my work is to know me," that’s it—he was the pure scientist; he cared about results.
So we can do this; I’m confident, but it’s going to take things like this to get this out. Lives are being lost unnecessarily, and we have unnecessary suffering.
I'm very confident that we will prevail, and we'll find a cure for cancer. I've elucidated one cure for cancer right here on Soft White Underbelly.
Thanks for listening. Peace. Thank you, Ron.