The Woman Who Cured Cancer: The Story of Cancer Pioneer Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, M.D., and the Discovery of the Cancer-Causing Microbe

Preface

First of all, the word cured in the title needs to be explained. I know full well that the word sets off all kinds of warning lights in the medical community. Indeed, the words quack and charlatan and alternative and a host of related terms usually ensue. This book should actually be titled The Woman Who Put Cancer into Permanent Remission to mollify professional critics. But that’s too cumbersome for a title.

Second, I purposely chose to keep the word cured in order to get people’s attention. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, M.D., did, indeed, cure patients of their cancer with the vaccine she developed. As she was wont to say, My patients’ names are in phone books, not on gravestones. In fact, there has been so much good news about new cancer vaccines that the reader deserves to hear it in the first chapter before we go into the history of the Livingston cancer vaccine’s development in San Diego.

In this book, you’ll read about some of the other good news about cancer treatments being published every day. These news updates have been included to familiarize the reader in general about various current cancer treatments, research projects, and nutritional developments that seem to be progressions of Dr. Virginia’s treatments. I am tempted to call them corroborations, because several of these news subjects were once considered outrageous and generated ridicule for her clinic but are accepted medical practice today. The updates are brief because I encourage readers to use the Internet to read the entire story of the scientific development.

But here is the best news of all and one of the chief reasons for writing this book: the cancer vaccine developed by Dr. Virginia forty years ago at her clinic in San Diego is still available today! John Majnarich, Ph.D., the biochemist who made the vaccine for her clinic and who is the co-holder of the patent, is still making it in his laboratory in Redmond, Washington, for hundreds of other physicians and surgeons ever since Dr. Virginia died. (In the Resources section at the end of this book I’ll tell you how to reach his lab.) Also, a new Livingston Foundation has been formed, which is committed to keeping the knowledge and ideas promulgated and practiced by Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler in the public domain for future generations. In this respect, all of her work, published and unpublished, as well as videos and other archival material, is available at www.LivingstonFoundation.com free of charge to anyone who would like to learn of her amazing work and discoveries. Additionally, the website is dynamically updated regarding the latest discoveries in autogenous vaccines and related fields of research and, if appropriate, will give referrals to physicians around the world who administer the Livingston vaccine and Dr. Virginia’s other protocols in the treatment of other autoimmune diseases.

As mentioned, the vaccine is autogenous, which means it isn’t a one-size-fits-all product but instead is made from each patient’s individual tumor cells. Hence, it doesn’t require Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. This is the first question I usually get in my lectures and interviews, especially by medical doctors. When I explain why the vaccine does not need FDA approval, they seem satisfied, albeit still skeptical.

The second question I get is, If it’s so effective, why doesn’t the medical community know about it? And the answer to that is twofold: 1) they do know about it, but they don’t want you to know about it, because 2) if you were making trillions of dollars a year peddling chemotherapy drugs and radiation apparatus, would you want to see a $1,000 vaccine come along?

So, read on. No one needs to die of cancer. Dr. Virginia’s story will tell you why.

1

The Vaccine Works!

Over the years since her death in 1990, physicians around the country who knew about Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler’s work or who heard through old-fashioned word-of-mouth about her autogenous vaccines have been using the vaccines to treat their patients. To me, the remarkable thing about this is that it is practicing mainstream physicians and surgeons who are using the vaccines, not alternative clinics or fringe-credible practitioners. These doctors obviously believe that the vaccines have some beneficial effect and are not hesitant to administer them. The trouble is, they won’t admit it for fear of losing their licenses (of this, more later). I believe their use of the vaccine may go as far back as 1991, when a New England Journal of Medicine article determined that the Livingston protocol for cancer (vaccine, vegetarian diet, high dosages of vitamin A, and other modalities) was no worse than standard treatment, and it probably made a lasting impression on the medical community.

Greg’s Story

In one recent case, Greg H., a fifty-nine-year-old man who had undergone three surgeries for brain cancer (glioblastoma), had been told that any further surgery would be meaningless and that he had only six months to live. Gliobastoma is rare but is one of the deadliest types of brain tumor. He had been going to regular gym workouts when one day he noticed in the mirror that the right side of his face was sagging, as if he’d had a stroke. Later that afternoon his head started flopping as if his neck muscles had given out, and he ran to his doctor.

The doctor immediately sent him to the emergency room where he was examined and sent to a prominent local hospital for a brain scan, which revealed a tumor that was 1.2 centimeters (0.5 inches) long by 0.3 centimeters (0.1 inches) thick. This was in November 2010. He was given six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy, but by February 2011 he had a recurrence of symptoms and a second surgery. Further radiation and chemo only led to a third surgery, until he was finally told further treatment was useless and he had a maximum of six months to live.

Despondent and desperate for alternatives, Greg was told about the Livingston vaccine’s availability by a friend, and began taking it. To make a long story short, when I interviewed him in preparation for this book he told me that a recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan showed that the tumor had completely disappeared. He now has an MRI every two months and a follow-up vaccine shot once a month, and has remained clear of any evidence of cancer.

Rolph’s Story

I have a close friend, a retired oral surgeon, who was diagnosed a few years ago with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a cancer of the blood-forming tissues (bone marrow, lymph system, or spleen). Rolph underwent chemotherapy with a combination of drugs that nearly killed him. He lost weight dramatically, his energy plummeted, his scalp itched continually, and he developed lesions on his back, boils on his legs, nasal discharges, aching bones, a persistent cough, and was always tired but could not sleep.

I had lunch in June 2012 with Rolph and a mutual friend. When Rolph got up to shuffle to the men’s room, I commented to the friend that I thought he would be dead by Thanksgiving. He looked terrible. His face was ash gray, he was thin, and he could hardly walk, steadying himself on the backs of chairs as he went. This was a man who loved golf, skiing, and once climbed Mt. Everest.

That afternoon I took Rolph aside and told him about the Livingston vaccine’s availability from a laboratory in Redmond, Washington. Rolph was skeptical (as so many are!) but I insisted that, as a doctor and scientist himself, he should at least discuss the biochemistry of it with John Majnarich, Ph.D., who, as I said, is the biochemist who made the vaccine for Dr. Virginia’s clinic, and who is the co-holder of the patent. Rolph did, and eventually consented to send in his urine sample. At the end of July Rolph received his vaccines, stopped his chemotherapy, and started on the vaccine protocol.

The vaccines come in three separate bottles, in concentrations of 10 million, 100 million, and 1 billion parts per million. Syringes and needles come with the vaccines. The needles are 28 gauge—no pain whatsoever! Alternatively, the vaccines can be taken sublingually. The patient simply squirts the withdrawn vaccine into a teaspoon, places the liquid under the tongue, and holds it there for 10 minutes. Complete comprehensive instructions are foolproof. The regimen calls for two doses per week; each bottle provides a ten-week regimen.

In early November 2012, Rolph called from a skiing vacation to tell me his latest blood test was absolutely normal! Not only that, but his oncologist actually told him the blood results didn’t indicate he was sick with anything, much less leukemia. (To my great consternation, Rolph still hasn’t told the oncologist about the Livingston vaccine, claiming he doesn’t want her negative vibes to undermine his euphoria.)

Richard’s Story

Another friend of a friend, Richard Lane, now seventy-three, gave me permission to use his real name and I asked him to describe in his own words his battle with an extremely rare cancer. This was his reply.

I was born in 1940 and was raised on a farm in western Minnesota. During summers, heaving 75-pound hay bales around made me fairly strong and muscular. I was a good student and an accomplished athlete. I received advanced degrees in engineering and business from the University of Minnesota. Immediately after graduation I was hired by Honeywell, Inc., as a design engineer, and rose to become general manager of a semiconductor operation in Denver. I retired from Honeywell in 1999, at age fifty-nine, after thirty-seven years of service.

During my life, I remained physically fit, jogging regularly, and doing weight training since my mid-twenties. I never smoked cigarettes, but I did enjoy daily cigars until I was in my mid-fifties. I consumed two or three glasses of wine a day, but otherwise ate a relatively healthy diet.

Late in 2001, I began to feel lethargic and to show signs of jaundice. I consulted with a doctor who immediately referred me to undergo an endoscopy procedure (a fiberoptic camera inserted down your throat to examine the stomach and duodenum areas). A tissue sample was taken of my ampulla of Vater and biopsied. (The ampulla is a nipple-like projection into the duodenum, the first portion of the intestine; it is at the confluence of the bile and pancreatic ducts, with an opening that permits secreted digestive fluids to be injected into the duodenum.) The biopsy-identified cancer had infected the ampulla and this was restricting these digestive fluids from entering the duodenum. Ampullary cancer (technically, adenocarcinoma of the ampulla of Vater) is quite rare—on the order of 3,000 cases worldwide annually. The cause is unknown. I felt I had encountered lottery-type odds: 3,000 cases in a worldwide population of 6,000,000,000—that’s 1 in 2,000,000—only I had lost the lottery. My first reaction was shock, as I truly believed I had led a relatively healthy lifestyle. I immediately thought my life would soon be over.

A surgeon at a hospital in Minneapolis told my wife, Karen, and I that the requisite treatment for ampullary cancer was a Whipple surgery. A procedure in which the ampulla, parts of the bile and pancreatic ducts, part of the pancreas, the gall bladder, the duodenum, and some surrounding lymph nodes are removed. I then expressed an interest in getting a second opinion. Fortunately, we live in a state with first-rate health-care options.

I said I wished to go to Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester, where I had previous experience. The Minneapolis surgeon was sympathetic, and said he had studied under one of the world’s foremost Whipple surgeons at the Mayo Clinic. An appointment was arranged, and within a week I visited him. I discovered he dealt almost exclusively with Whipple procedures, and had an entire hospital floor dedicated to his Whipple patients with teams of pre-op, operation procedures, and rehab specialists.

Within two weeks, I had the Whipple procedure. It’s terribly painful the first few days after the surgery, as your entire abdominal area is exceedingly sore. After all, you’ve been gutted like a fish on your front side, had numerous parts removed, re-plumbed, and closed back up. But the secret to recovery, I was told, was to force myself up from bed and begin walking. I did this on day two— painful to say the least. Since I was in reasonably good physical shape prior to the operation, I recovered quite quickly and was released in seven days. (In the 1970s, 15 percent of patients died during or shortly after surgery. It’s now less than 1 percent. However, the survival rate after five years is still only 20–30 percent.) Also, an ancillary effect of a Whipple is an increased tendency to develop diabetes—a result of removing part of the pancreas.

Post-op, the surgeon felt quite confident he had eliminated all the cancerous cells. He had removed organs, or parts of organs, and ducting in the vicinity of the ampulla, and had biopsied the nearby lymph nodes. Tests were negative for cancerous cells.

Following the Whipple procedure, the Mayo medical staff conferred about any need for additional treatments. The consensus was that chemotherapy was not required, and that radiation would likely do more harm than good. I convalesced at home over the next several months, making sure I did a lot of walking. After six months, I don’t recall any side effects at all.

It was recommended that I see an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic every three months to monitor my post-op progress, and he ordered regular positron emission tomography (PET) scans of my abdominal area, as well as blood chemistry tests. After five years, he concluded that, based on experience in the medical community, no cancer was evidenced and that I could stop his periodic exams. Definitely, an upper for Karen and me.

But in 2008, I began to experience middle back pains. I attempted to counter the pain with ibuprofen-type medications, but to no avail. Suspecting that this was more serious than a simple back pain that would go away with time, I returned to the Mayo Clinic. Tests revealed that indeed, cancerous tumors on my lymph nodes were growing in my abdomen. One of these tumors was exerting pressure on my central nervous system and causing the back pain. According to the oncologist, I now had stage IV (late-stage) metastatic ampullary cancer, indicating the original ampullary cancer had remained dormant for about seven years but now was again active. The recommended treatment was chemotherapy.

Over the next year, I traveled to the Mayo Clinic every three weeks (200 miles round trip) to receive a chemo infusion of the drug gemcitabine (Gemzar). I also took a daily oral pill called capecitabine (Xeloda) for two of the three weeks. (Ampullary cancer is so rare that drug companies and researchers don’t have enough incentive to develop specific drugs for it. Instead chemo drugs used in the treatment of pancreatic cancer are used as a proxy, since oncologists apparently regard the two forms of cancer as first cousins.) The infusion took about two hours to administer. Over time, PET scans showed a reduction in the size of my tumors.

Side effects of this chemo include, among other things, lower white and red blood cell counts, and lower platelet counts. The platelet issue is the oncologist’s major concern, as platelets are required to clot blood after an injury. If the platelet count is too low, chemo treatment cannot be administered. So the routine for me was to drive the two hours to the Mayo Clinic, have a blood draw, wait for 30 minutes for its analysis, and if the platelet count was above a minimum threshold, get the infusion treatment. Occasionally, however, the platelet count was below the minimum threshold, in which case I had to forego chemo and wait for my platelet count to increase (typically, one to two weeks). Whenever I failed the platelet test, the total time consumed was at least half a day, including drive time and blood analysis. I, therefore, decided to transfer my chemo treatment to the University of Minnesota Physicians Group in Minneapolis, close to my home and only a 30-minute trip.

At the university I was fortunate to be assigned to one of their leading oncologists, who continued the Gemzar/Xeloda regimen of treatments prescribed by the Mayo Clinic for two more years, with regular monitoring of my blood chemistry and PET scans every three months. At this time (2010), my oncologist concluded that the Gemzar/Xeloda drugs had stopped being effective, as the PET scans showed growth of the abdominal lymph nodes again. Apparently, the cancerous cells had learned about the Gemzar/ Xeloda