Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT)
IPT for Cancer
Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT) is an integrative cancer therapy that combines elements of conventional cancer protocols together with alternative methods.
The conventional part of the IPT protocol involves low-dose chemotherapy, and the alternative part utilizes insulin to make the chemo’s targeting skills more effective.
This allows the patient to receive a much lower dose of chemo, making the process significantly more comfortable and safe, while also avoiding any serious side effects that would normally accompany chemotherapy usage.
IPT has been studied in patients with prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer with promising results.
Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT)
How Does IPT Work?
When doctors discovered that sugar was one of the main sources of food for cancer, an idea arose - what would happen to cancer if a patient’s blood sugar levels were lowered? What would that do to the cancer cells?
The insulin aspect of IPT was introduced and is very important for two reasons:
1. When insulin is injected into a patient’s body, it lowers their sugar levels. This makes the cancer cells very hungry, weak and irritated, creating a state called ‘metabolic stress.’ Because the cancer is starving, it is not strong enough to fight the chemotherapy when it enters the body.
2. Cancer cells have more insulin receptors on their surface than any of the other healthy cells in the body. When insulin is injected, it binds onto these receptors - almost as if it’s targeting the cells for the incoming chemotherapy.
When cancer cells are targeted this way, chemotherapy is actually more prone to going after the cancer cells themselves rather than other cells in the body.
The amount of insulin used varies per patient and is calculated based on the patient’s body weight and blood results. The patient is monitored for roughly 30 minutes after receiving the insulin, to ensure that they have entered the state of metabolic stress. At that point, a low dose (between 10-25% of a conventional dose) of chemotherapy is injected into the body.
Because the cancer is in metabolic stress, the chemotherapy gets a bigger bang for its buck out of every dose with very low side effects.
Insulin Potentiation Therapy Explained
What Are the Benefits of IPT?
1. Less side effects: IPT typically uses only 10-25% of the standard chemotherapy dose, which may reduce the severity and number of side effects compared to conventional chemotherapy.
Despite the involvement of chemotherapy, IPT has almost none of the side effects such as nausea, radical hair loss, liver damage, and DNA distortion that one experiences regularly with standard chemotherapy.
Reducing the amount of chemotherapy entering the entire body leads to fewer and much less severe side-effects to the chemotherapy.
2. Enhanced effectiveness: It is believed that IPT increases the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs by making cancer cells more permeable, allowing them to absorb the medication more effectively.
3. Better quality of life: Because of the lower chemotherapy doses, patients undergoing IPT may experience fewer side effects, leading to an improved quality of life during treatment.
4. Targeted cancer treatment: IPT is said to be more targeted because cancer cells are more sensitive to insulin than normal cells, potentially allowing for a more focused attack on the cancer while sparing healthy cells.
5. Treatment for resistant cancers: IPT may offer an option for patients with cancers that have become resistant to other treatments, such as metastatic, colon, and prostate cancers.
6. "IPT may change the blood chemistry for the better" according to Dr. Perez Garcia. The changes that occur in the “biological terrane” of the body after IPT make it less hospitable to future diseases.
Did you know?
Frequently Asked Questions
IPT uses insulin to improve the effectiveness of conventional chemotherapy. When insulin is injected into the cancer patient’s body, it lowers their blood sugar just like it would for a diabetic patient. This puts the cancer cells into metabolic stress, essentially weakening them so that they are unable to fight the chemotherapy when it enters the body. This creates a higher intracellular concentration of chemotherapy medicine, which then leads to increased drug effectiveness.
IPT starts with an initial evaluation to determine the correct dosage of both chemotherapy drugs and insulin for the patient. In its early stages, IPT may be administered as often as twice a week. The schedule and duration are then adjusted based on the individual patient’s results.
Because IPT is administered in conjunction with traditional chemotherapy, patients can still expect to experience some of chemotherapy’s common side effects such as hair loss, fatigue, frequent bruising and bleeding, vomiting, anemia, and appetite and weight changes. Notably, reducing the amount of chemotherapy entering the entire body leads to fewer and much less severe side effects of the chemotherapy.
No, IPT is usually administered in outpatient clinics. Patients do not typically need to stay in the hospital for the treatment.
Most insurance companies do not cover IPT, as it is not considered a standard or scientifically validated treatment by mainstream medical organizations.
