In the 1960's, a team of doctors from the Baylor University Medical Center began serious study of H2O2 in animals, as well as humans. One of their earlier studies1 concerned cancer therapy. Tissues are more sensitive to X-ray treatment if the oxygen supply to those tissues is maximal. Hydrogen peroxide, they reasoned, if given into a blood vessel going to the cancerous area, should make the cancer more sensitive to X-ray. Cancer cells don't like oxygen anyway, so there would be two forces working against the cancer: oxygenation and radiation. The authors reported that there appeared to be a positive effect from this combination, thus allowing effective X-ray therapy at a lower dose.
In 1964, the Baylor group did a sensational study that, again, didn't phase the medical community. Dr. Finney and his colleagues pointed out that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (getting oxygen to the tissues through increased pressure inside a chamber) was being intensely researched. But, they emphasized, the method is costly, cumbersome, and not without some danger. If oxygen could be delivered to the tissue by injecting H2O2 directly into blood vessels, the cost would be inconsequential compared to hyperbaric oxygen therapy. H2O2 therapy had long since been proven safe.
Hydrogen peroxide breaks down very rapidly on entering the bloodstream. Oxygen is released in less than a second. (It takes one-tenth of a second, to be exact.) The blood becomes supersaturated with oxygen. It's called hyperoxia. The magnitude of saturation is far greater than can be obtained with the expensive and cumbersome hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO). With HBO, two atmospheres of oxygen are about as far as they dare to go. Any pressure above that can lead to serious consequences. But with H2O2 therapy into a blood vessel, the oxygen delivery can be four times2 that of HBO, with no side effects whatsoever.
The Baylor researchers investigated the potential of H2O2 to remove the plaque of hardened arteries. Wouldn't it be sensational if they could prove that H2O2 would clear up the arteries like chelation therapy, but do it quicker? Chelation therapy, the dripping of agents into the veins to unplug the blood vessels, works slowly and mostly on the tiny vessels. It is an excellent therapy and will obviate the need for bypass surgery in most cases. But chelation therapy doesn't seem to affect the large vessels very much, like the big heart arteries and the aorta. It works by opening the tiny vessels at the end of the line. Wouldn't it be better if a therapy treated all the vessels from the biggest to the smallest?
Finney and his colleagues have gone a long way toward proving that H2O2 , dripped into the leg arteries of patients known to have severe arteriosclerosis, will clear those arteries of disease. When these patients died, autopsies were done to compare arteries that had been treated with H2O2 with those not treated. They reported: "The elution of lipids from the arterial wall by dilute hydrogen peroxide has been accomplished..." In simple English that means the plaque buildup was removed by injecting H2O2 into the blood vessels. Sensational! (No one paid any attention. That was over 20 years ago.)
The investigators also reported that the improvement was not temporary. Autopsies done a year after the H2O2 treatments showed as much cleaning out of the arteries as in those patients who died just weeks following the procedure. Would you be willing to go in for treatment once a year or so for a simple procedure that is safe, painless, inexpensive, and effective rather than face by-pass surgery that is painful, dangerous, expensive, and at best temporarily effective? (Let me guess.)
I guess if I were a cardiac surgeon I wouldn't be very excited about this mode of therapy either. It would be like telling Chevron and Exxon we've invented a car that will run on saltwater.
In 1966, the same Baylor University group did some more interesting research with H2O2 and cardiac resuscitation. In fact, it was downright mind-boggling:
Victims of heart attacks often die within hours of the onset of the infarction. This is due to ventricular fibrillation, a deadly event in which the heart muscle goes crazy and beats rapidly and chaotically. This is the heart's response to oxygen-lack called hypoxia. If this dangerous "runaway heart" condition can be controlled, then the patient has an excellent opportunity to survive.
Some emergency measures have proven to be partially successful in calming the heart down, and defibrillation, an electrical shocking of the heart, has often been lifesaving. Also lidocaine, a cardiac drug given in the vein, is dramatically effective in some patients.
But remember, the heart is responding to hypoxia, lack of oxygen, so these methods are only of temporary benefit in most cases. If the blood could be supersaturated with oxygen, the problem would be met directly, and the patient should survive.
Hydrogen peroxide has been found to have an energizing effect on the heart muscle, causing it to beat with more vigor and efficiency (called the inotropic effect).3 The heart exhibiting "pump failure," the inability to pump blood efficiently through the circulation, is often helped dramatically with peroxide therapy.4 This "high output heart failure" leads to death due to backing up of fluid in the lungs, with consequent drowning. The heart is often slowed from an unhealthy, rapid rate with H2O2 and the blood pressure will often be appreciably reduced. "Myocardial asemia," lack of oxygen to the heart muscle, is often dramatically improved with peroxide. "Ventricular fibrillation," a totally chaotic rhythm of the heart which rapidly leads to death, has been reported to have been completely relieved with the emergency use of hydrogen peroxide.5
Doctor George Hart, an expert on hyperbaric oxygen at the Memorial Medical Center, Long Beach, California, tells the story of how "an elephant suddenly landed on my chest" while he was driving to the hospital one morning. He knew without a doubt that he was having a heart attack.
Doctor Hart knows what hyperbaric oxygen can do. Upon arriving at the hospital, he immediately had himself checked into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. His chest pain was immediately relieved, and he went on to recover from his heart attack.
Unfortunately, most of us don't have access to one of these chambers. Even if they were readily available, the method would not be practical. The doctor loses access to the patient during a critical period. The treatments are expensive and the patient cannot take more than an hour to an hour and a half of treatment without getting toxic symptoms which would further complicate his condition. But oxygen delivered directly into the circulation would be another matter. This would get to the heart of the problem, pardon the expression, and immediately reoxygenate the starving heart muscle.
In their first experiment, the Baylor doctors crossclamped the trachea of some New Zealand rabbits. In other words, they strangled them. If you can't breathe, you can't get oxygen into your blood and, thus, to the heart muscle. Within 12 minutes the rabbit will develop cardiac arrest or ventricular fibrillation and die.
Then they took another group of New Zealand rabbits (these devils are big—they weigh seven pounds) and gave them the same treatment. But this group was given H2O2 directly into the arteries of the heart. The animals were observed for two hours without cardiac arrest developing.
Incredible, unbelievable. Someone must repeat this experiment. If the results are the same (and I am confident they will be), then this technique, or a modification of it, should be instituted all over the nation for heart attacks.
That won't be easy. There will be three very powerful forces fighting the general acceptance of this simple therapy. First, the drug industry. H2O2 is not patentable. The drug industry would lose billions in lost drug sales.
Second, the FDA works in collusion with the drug industry. They can be counted on to pull every dirty trick imaginable to stop this therapy, including declaring H2O2 an "investigational new drug.'' But right now, they seem to be going in both directions.
The third force is organized medicine. In the face of these momentous experimental results, you would think that doctors would be clamoring for more information and a quick resolution as to whether the Baylor doctors know what they are talking about. You might think that would happen, but it doesn't work that way. With most doctors, it's not greed, but pride, ignorance, and bigotry that account for their resistance to new and unusual treatments.
How would you like it if you were a doctor and a little old lady in Adidas running shoes asked you, "Hey, Doc, what about hydrogen peroxide in the treatment of myocardial infarction, cerebro-vascular accidents, and Clostridium Welchi septicemia?" (You'd probably punch her out.)
Back to the experiment. Remember that first batch of giant rabbits? The ones strangled and not getting the H2O2 ? Remember that within 12 minutes they died of heart stoppage, or ventricular fibrillation. The investigators discovered, even though the animals were "in extremis" (meaning about to croak and go to that great rabbit hutch in the sky), if they were given H2O2 , most of them would survive! Amazing—snatched back from death's door by peroxide.
Next, the researchers simulated heart attacks in the rabbits by tying off their heart blood vessels, the arteries leading to the heart muscle called coronary arteries. Ordinarily, this will lead to ventricular fibrillation and death within five to 10 minutes. Injecting H2O2 into a peripheral vein returned irregular heartbeats and blood pressure rapidly to normal. Even dripping the H2O2 directly onto the heart muscle, rather than into the bloodstream, would save the rabbit from cardiac death.
All these experiments were then repeated with pigs. The results were the same. The most remarkable observation with the pigs was that although they appeared clinically dead (no blood pressure and no heartbeat), 50 percent of them were revived when H2O2 was applied to the heart.
The researchers next treated one human. (No strangulation was attempted this time. It's hard to find volunteers.) A 60-year-old woman developed "vascular collapse" of unknown cause. She had an abnormal heartbeat and practically no blood pressure. Within one minute of H2O2 infusion, her heart reverted to normal and blood pressure returned to a normal level.
The most hopeless area for treatment of blocked arteries is in the head and neck. The surgeons do a "rotorooter" job on the large arteries of the neck when they are partially plugged. But it's a very dangerous procedure and will often cause what it is supposed to prevent: stroke. For the rest of the blood vessels in the head and neck—forget it. Surgical procedures have been proven worthless and currently used drugs are ineffective (or worse).
The Baylor doctors reported in 1967 a case of right vertebral artery blockage. The vertebral arteries are small, extremely important, and totally inaccessible blood vessels that travel from the heart, up the back of the spinal column, to the back of the brain. If one or both of these arteries become blocked you are in deep trouble. You lose speech, vision, and balance. Some victims of this type of blockage have "drop attacks." They drop to the floor just as if someone had cut their legs from under them. This happens without the slightest loss of consciousness. An inexperienced doctor will think the patient is faking because of the lack of mental change with the episode. It is a peculiar and mysterious medical phenomenon.
The Baylor case was a tough one. The patient, a 57year-old woman who had suffered a stroke due to blockage of a large main artery in the neck, now had a blockage of the right vertebral artery.
Surgeons had operated on the blocked main vessel at the front of the neck on the right side (the right, carotid artery), with what appeared at the time to be a very successful result. But, nine months later, X-rays showed that the vertebral artery on the right was also blocked. Did the previous surgery cause this important artery in the back of the neck to plug up in a mere nine months? It is a reasonable assumption.
The patient was getting worse on drug therapy (blood thinners and cortisone), so it was elected to start her on H2O2 infused into the large arteries of the neck, the carotids. It was hoped that the oxygen released by the H2O2 would reach those tiny lifelines encased deep in bone and muscle—the vertebrals.
She had a total of 100 infusions over a period of 28 days. Within a week her coordination and speech improved, and she could sit up without dizziness.
Another thing happened with this patient that the Baylor doctors had reported previously:6 Her blood cell count improved. Why putting H2O2 into the brain causes an increase in the blood elements is unknown. (One wonders what this type of treatment would do for leukemia and other blood diseases.) Subsequent to the H2O2 therapy, X-rays showed the vertebral artery was open, whereas before it had been tightly closed.
Remember that this was a "worst case" situation. There is not the slightest chance that anyone in vascular research would expect such a result from the simple infusion of hydrogen peroxide into the blood vessels of the neck. The outcome was simply beyond the imagination of the modern medical mind.
Animal experimentation also proved that H2O2 is effective rectally. Don't try this without a doctor's supervision. We don't want you to explode in the bathroom and give H2O2 a bad name.
Even nebulization works. Doctor Finney and his colleagues at Baylor had rabbits breathe H2O2 mixed in saline solution. The amount of oxygen increase found in the blood was twice what would be obtained from the average hyperbaric oxygen treatment. The HBO treatment costs about $150.00, the H2O2 nebulization, about $.10. You can see why that might upset a lot of people in the medicine business.
The chemistry is so simple that even I can understand it. Hydrogen peroxide breaks down into oxygen and water:
catalase or
H2O2 O2 and H2O
peroxidase
Hydrogen Peroxide and Cancer
Radiation therapy of cancer is a two-edged sword. In many cases, the X-ray will shrink the tumor mass; but it also shrinks the patient's immune system. In other words, the treatment is successful, in that the cancerous tumor gets smaller, but you shorten the life of the patient.
There is a direct relationship between the amount of oxygen in a cancer mass (tumor) and the effectiveness of X-ray. The more oxygen present, the more lethal the X-ray to cancer cells. The hyperbaric oxygen chambers mentioned previously would probably work, but there is no way to get the X-ray to the patient if he is sealed in a tank, under pressure. A large room which also puts the X-ray equipment under pressure would have to be built. This would be prohibitively expensive, and the danger of explosion would always be present.
The Baylor team reasoned that if they put oxygen into the tumor mass by injecting H2O2 into the artery leading to the tumor, the tumor would be much more receptive to X-ray destruction. They studied a total of 190 patients using hydrogen peroxide infused into the artery leading to the tumorous cancer. The experiment took six years. Their results were astounding.
An 88-year-old man with a squamous cell carcinoma (a lethal cancer that is usually caused by chewing tobacco or cigarette smoking) on his right cheek mucous membrane was treated by dripping H2O2 into the neck artery leading to this terrible cancer. The patient was alive and free of evidence of cancer six years later. The life expectancy of this elderly gentleman would be, under conventional treatment, about 12 to 18 months. (Less, if he was given chemotherapy.)
A 29-year-old man had a "fungating mass under the jaw with fixation of the tongue" and gangrene of the jaw bone. In other words, a horrible, disgusting mess which would ordinarily lead to a quick demise (and the sooner the better). He was treated by the same method of H2O2 infusion into the cancer, combined with X-ray. At the time of the report (1967), the doctors said the patient was alive and free of cancer.
The researchers modestly reported: "These preliminary results suggest an improvement in the radiotherapeutic ratio."
One doctor listening to the report was flabbergasted. 'You mean the tumor went down that fast? It was such a dramatic difference in size. I couldn't imagine that happening."