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Coley's Toxins

ysabella

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ysabella
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
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Discussing alt-med somewhere, someone threw Coley's Toxins (also known as Coley's Fluid) at me. I'd never heard of 'em.

Dr.William Coley was a doctor who noticed remission on some cancer patients who had contracted erysipelas infections, so he tested it as a cure, and had some success apparently. His treatment focused on causing fevers in patients by injecting them with certain bacteria.
Chemo and radiation came along and eclipsed his results, but some studies show that his treatment might still be worthwhile, in combination with other therapies. So there may be something of a revival of what he was doing.

Naturally, this was presented to me as fascist allopathic medicine hiding an easy, natural cure in order to sell poisons to the innocent masses. I don't think it's that simple - it wouldn't necessarily be cheap or easy, and of course some of the chemo drugs are quite natural plant extracts anyway.

Still and all, I am not a doctor and I don't feel 100% sure about what I've read. Is this treatment reasonably legitimate? Are cancer doctors interested in this? Is it something that was genuinely overlooked for some decades? Is it some big secret or something fairly well known?

Searching PubMed finds some of Coley's writings, and some other testing from the 1930s. I did come up with this:

http://pmj.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/79/938/672

which is a pretty good read.

If anybody has input, I'd appreciate it.
 
One very common woo technique is the sweeping generalization. Just the abstract alone, in your link, contains not one but two of them.

...This phenomenon inspired the development of numerous rudimentary cancer immunotherapies, with a history spanning thousands of years...

< snip >

...Can it be a coincidence that this method of immunotherapy has been "rediscovered" repeatedly throughout the centuries?
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This does not bode well for the paper itself...
 
There used to be a cure for Syphillis, which was to infect the person with Malaria, and the high fever, etc, would kill the spirochetes. Besides, back then they had a cure for Malaria (quinine) but no real cure for the clap.

basilio
 
It's based on the theory of the danger model of immunity. Bacterial DNA with CPG nucleotide motifs can stimulate the immune system. Several biotech companies have technologies based around it including Onyvax in the UK and the Coley Pharmaceutical Group (named after Coley and with the intials CPG).

The BCG vaccine is administered for the treatment of bladder cancer and works on this premise of immune stimulation.
 
ysabella?

Have you had any further conversations about this?

The principle of inducing danger signals to stimulate the immune system is used with adjuvants. For example, Freund's adjuvant is an oil mixed with Mycobacterium. Others include bacterial endotoxin. It's only recently that the mechanism of action of these adjuvants has been proposed and studied.
 
ysabella said:
Is this treatment reasonably legitimate? Are cancer doctors interested in this? Is it something that was genuinely overlooked for some decades? Is it some big secret or something fairly well known?

If anybody has input, I'd appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Yes.

Yes, but not in some countries.

Yes and no. It is mostly ignored or ridiculed in the AMA world. It is however, still being used to treat cancer in countries that have given legal rights to Doctors, - "therapy freedom", the legal right of a physician to apply whichever therapy she/he believes to be appropriate, considering all his medical knowledge.

The fact that it is still used, might lead us to think it is self evident that it works. But you know how science is. If you haven't spent 30 million getting it approved by the FDA, and you can't make a pile of money off of it, it doesn't work.

:hb:
 
robinson said:
Yes.

Yes, but not in some countries.

Yes and no. It is mostly ignored or ridiculed in the AMA world. It is however, still being used to treat cancer in countries that have given legal rights to Doctors, - "therapy freedom", the legal right of a physician to apply whichever therapy she/he believes to be appropriate, considering all his medical knowledge.

The fact that it is still used, might lead us to think it is self evident that it works. But you know how science is. If you haven't spent 30 million getting it approved by the FDA, and you can't make a pile of money off of it, it doesn't work.

:hb:
Click to expand...

All you have to do is keep good records. An MD says this guy has cancer -- apply magical blipity blip ray -- MD says he has no cancer. How hard is that?
 
Capsid said:
ysabella?

Have you had any further conversations about this?
Click to expand...
No, that discussion died down. I am sure it will come up again, so I'll just be patient. If I get in the mood, I could always
Here's the backstory. I hang out on a forum for low-carb eating, the biggest one out there (so large that there has even been a study done on voluntary responses of members). It's an interesting select group because it is thousands of people who have mostly found that controlling carbs (to varying degrees) quite seriously helps them lose bodyfat and get healthier. Data is rolling in on why it can help, but meanwhile, many of them feel like mavericks bucking the system. And unfortunately, sometimes this attitude leads people further and further out towards woo-isms. I like to jump in and often be the devil's advocate on various topics, and sometimes people get really mad at me for that.

So, one day I started a thread openly asking people what makes them reject medical science. I have rejected some medical advice my own self, because I take Armour thyroid pills instead of Synthroid, a decision with a rational basis and very low risk. So I posited that we all do it, just to differing degrees; after all, even the most dolphin-safe homeopathic-remedy-taking Chopra reader will run to the ER for some things. Answers have been interesting, and attitudes quite illuminating. A lot of people said that doctors are not scientists, which is of course a good point. Many people have had negative experiences with doctors. Many feel that real science is suppressed by the way the system works.

If you are interested in reading that discussion, PM me and promise to be nice, and I'll give you a link - because it is a diet support forum, with a lot of vulnerable feelings exposed, it's got to stay warm and friendly, so I don't want to send a lot of people there if I don't know how nice they'll be. You can read the discussion without being a member.

The principle of inducing danger signals to stimulate the immune system is used with adjuvants. For example, Freund's adjuvant is an oil mixed with Mycobacterium. Others include bacterial endotoxin. It's only recently that the mechanism of action of these adjuvants has been proposed and studied.
Click to expand...
Here is a quote from what the gal posted: "Ever hear of Coley's Toxin? It has a fifty-percent total remission rate of curing all types of cancer, but because of politics and the medical bureaucracy, it was made illegal in the U.S. so no one ever hears about it."
So far as I can tell, not being much of an expert myself, she is quite incorrect in a lot of ways. For one thing, I think Coley himself would not claim that it totally cured cancers all by itself, in that you would still want to remove tumors surgically and so on, and also it worked better on some cancers than others. I think in at least one case it helped an inoperable tumor shrink and become operable, so then obviously they went in and took the tumor out. And apparently, radiation and chemo came in and got better overall results than he did. The question now is, can his treatment be used along with other treatments and be therapeutic?

Plus that, you can gather from what she said that she thinks a Coley-style treatment would be this natural, dolphin-safe walk in the park compared to evil scary chemo and radiation. I don't think it would be, at all! When my father-in-law, who has CML, joined a research study and took chemo along with his Gleevec, they put him in the hospital during the chemo because his immune system would be so weakened (and in fact he did have a go-round with some fungus in his lungs that was really freaky). So if someone was going to give you toxins to make you sick as a part of your treatment, surely it would require you to be in hospital care for quite a while?
 
Incidentally, the same girl (she is maybe college-age) posted that sometimes she thinks about becoming a doctor, and hopefully challenging some of the dogmatic ideas. I told her that I think she should! If she's burning with idealism, maybe she'll make it. Admittedly I'm not sure she could get in, I don't know that much about her.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
All you have to do is keep good records. An MD says this guy has cancer -- apply magical blipity blip ray -- MD says he has no cancer. How hard is that?
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In the USofA that is not allowed. There is no freedom of therapy for Medical Doctors.
 
robinson said:
The fact that it is still used, might lead us to think it is self evident that it works. But you know how science is. If you haven't spent 30 million getting it approved by the FDA, and you can't make a pile of money off of it, it doesn't work.
Click to expand...

Yeah, like homeopathy, dowsing, acupuncture, psychics, numerology, astrology, ...

Just because someone uses it doesn't mean it works. It's also self-evident that the Sun goes around the Earth, but you know how science is, it keeps asking for those pesky facts.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
All you have to do is keep good records. An MD says this guy has cancer -- apply magical blipity blip ray -- MD says he has no cancer. How hard is that?
Click to expand...

It does seem easy, but in the US, that is not allowed. The current buzz over DCA illustrates the problems with the US Medical system. Even if you are going to die in a month, no Doctor can prescribe DCA to you for your terminal cancer, much less help you try it.
 
robinson said:
It does seem easy, but in the US, that is not allowed. The current buzz over DCA illustrates the problems with the US Medical system. Even if you are going to die in a month, no Doctor can prescribe DCA to you for your terminal cancer, much less help you try it.
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Sorry. That's me being too brief. I'm not suggesting that an MD apply the magical blipity blip ray. The woo can do that. All the woo has to do is to tell the patient to bring his diagnosis with him and see an MD afterward. If any Woo were serious, this would not be too hard to do and would constitute a degree of proof never before given!

PS. What's DCA?
 
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