American Thought Leaders - How Intermittent Fasting and Dietary Changes Can Reduce Cancer Risk: Dr. Paul Marik

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Dr. Paul Marik is a pulmonary and critical care specialist and a founding member of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.“Our healthcare system is completely and utterly broken. From the top to the bottom, it’s a broken, dysfunctional system,” says Marik. “If you do an experiment, it should be reproducible. And I think that’s the most important qualifier of good science; the results are reproducible, because then, it’s likely to be true.”Best known for his revolutionary, lifesaving protocol for Sepsis and for being the second most published critical care physician in the world, Marik is now focusing his efforts on the treatment and prevention of cancer.“Intermittent fasting, in which the body was designed to eat for a while and then to starve for a while, is not a difficult concept. The human body wasn’t designed to snack and eat all the time, which is what people seem to do. And that has serious metabolic consequences, with high insulin levels and insulin resistance,” says Dr. Marik. “Vitamin D is effective in preventing cancer, but it’s also very effective in the treatment of cancer.”Views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If you do an experiment, it should be reproducible. And I think that's the most important qualifier of good sciences, because then it's likely to be true. Dr. Paul Merrick is a pulmonary and critical care specialist and a founding member of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the FLCCC. Intermittent fasting, which is the way the body was designed, to eat for a while and then

to starve for a while. It's not a difficult concept. The human body wasn't designed to snack and eat all the time, and that has serious metabolic consequences with high insulin levels and insulin resistance. He is the second most published critical care physician in the world and known for his revolutionary protocol for sepsis. Dr. Merrick is also the author of Cancer Care, the role of repurposed drugs and metabolic interventions in treating cancer. Vitamin D is effective in preventing cancer, but it's also very effective in the treatment of cancer.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Paul Merrick, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you, Jan. It's always a pleasure. Since we spoke last on camera, I've implemented intermittent fasting in my diet, and it's made huge, huge changes to, frankly, a whole lot of things that are along the vein of what you told me about. One thing that I didn't fully realize was how valuable something like intermittent fasting can be in preventing cancer. So why don't we start there? This is what's been on your mind, cancer treatment in general and cancer prevention. prevention? Yes. So it's a good question.

We think, obviously, cancer is likely caused by multiple factors. We don't really understand all of it, but it seems like obesity, insulin resistance plays a really important role in generating cancer, particularly insulin resistance. Insulin stimulates cell growth. And so part of the metabolic syndrome and diabetes is this problem of insulin resistance. And the most effective way of dealing with insulin resistance, the metabolic syndrome,

is really twofold. First is intermittent fasting, which is the way the body was designed to eat for a while and then to starve for a while. It's not a difficult concept. The human body wasn't designed to snack and eat all the time, which is what people seem to do. And that has serious metabolic consequences with high insulin levels and insulin resistance. The second is to eat real food, not highly processed food. So Americans are addicted to highly processed foods, which really causes the blood sugar to spike.

These are foods that have very little nutrition. They're not nutrient dense. And then they are contaminated with all kinds of additives, preservatives, and chemicals. So I think it's getting back to more basics is the way our body was designed in our forefathers is that you know there wasn't a 7-eleven up the road from the cave that we lived in so you ate when there was food and when there was no food you didn't eat and you ate natural food substances, not processed food. And I think that goes a long way

to dealing with insulin resistance. So I think the key point here is that obesity, it's a spectrum. Obesity, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance creates this metabolic milieu which allows cells to replicate uncontrolled. So I think it's one of the more important causes of cancer. And then on top of that, you add environmental toxins. It creates the conditions that are likely conducive to develop cancer.

In some cases, I guess, genetic predispositions. Yeah, so about 5% to 8% of cancers, there's a genetic predisposition. So sometimes it's a very clear-cut genetic predisposition. People with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene, people with familial polyposis coli, or Lynch syndrome. These are specific genetic mutations, but often it's more polygenic that there's a strong family history of cancer, but no specific gene or gene mutation. But clearly, genetics play an important role. You said today on stage that half the people in the room are likely to get cancer sometime in their lives. Yes. It's a frightening thought. We know the incidence of cancer is going up. Data from

the American Cancer Association shows the last 10 years, the incidence has gone up 17%, the mortality has gone up 5%. And so a recent-ish paper showed, which is most disturbing, is pre-COVID, that there were about 18 different tumors in which the incidence was increasing predominantly in younger people. So this is the scary part, you know, young people, people in their 30s and 40s developing very aggressive cancers.

This is pre-COVID, because essentially cancer is a disease of the elderly above 60 years old, just because of the cumulative effect of risk factors. But it seems, you know, pre-COVID, there was a tendency towards younger people getting cancer. Obviously, post-COVID, and particularly post-COVID jabs, there's been a further spike in the incidence of cancers, particularly turbo cancers. Turbo cancer is the quickly manifesting. So yeah, basically, turbo cancer refers to cancers that

are aggressive, cancers that happen in young people, cancers that happen unexpectedly, cancers that present at a late stage. And it seems that this concept of turbo cancer is strongly linked to the use of the COVID vaccines, particularly after the second shot after the primary series. Recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Soon-Shong, has been talking about this type of question, describing it, I believe, as a kind of oncogenic virus at play. Can you explain that to me? What do you make of that? Yes. So I watched the interview, and he is a very

intelligent man. And he knows a lot about the topic, particularly natural killer cells killing cancer. The SARS-CoV-2 virus link with cancer, I think he got it a little bit wrong, to be honest. Clearly, there is a link between SARS-CoV-2 and cancer, but it's mainly the vaccination. He was basically, as far as I understand, was postulating that patients get chronic infection

with the virus and then the virus becomes an oncogenic virus. The data that patients have long-term viable COVID replicative virus is not that strong. What they do have, and which is shocking, is they have persistent spike protein after vaccination. And so that's the problem.

So, you know, the recent Yale study looked at this. They looked at a number of factors. In this study, the longest person in this study that was reported was over 700 days. After the vaccine, the patient still had circulating spike proteins, a spike protein, not the virus, in the monocytes. But there was a patient who was in that study

and they excluded for a number of reasons, which is obvious. This patient had circulating spike for 1,400 days. We were told you get shot in the arm, the vaccine stays in the arm and goes away in two days. And obviously both of those were lies because it distributes out the whole body and it seems that in a certain segment of the population may stay forever. So this poor patient who is severely vaccine injured, 1,400 days of circulating spike protein and

it's not clear how to get rid of the spike protein. It's important to emphasize that it's not circulating, replicated virus. It's spike protein. You offered a very simple intervention that people that are concerned about getting cancer sometime in the future, and frankly, at some level, all of us should be, if the number really is 50 percent, I've summarized it for myself as sun, salmon, and steps. Can you tell me about that again, that study? And have you found any other interventions of this nature that could have such a profound impact on reducing the incidence of cancer? Yes. So, Sun, Salmon, and Steps is a really good start. So, what I'm working on now,

I'm working with Dr. Justice Hope, that's his pen name. He's written a book on cancer. He got the idea of using AI to answer some of these questions. And so we've been using AI to figure out the best prophylactic protocols to prevent cancer, both in people of low risk, moderate and high risk. And so we're putting this together as a document so that if you look at breast cancer, you can decide, I'll take this protocol, which has a 40% reduction,

or this protocol, which has a 90% reduction. So the higher the risk reduction, the more nutraceuticals and drugs you need to take, which would also depend upon your risk. So if you're particularly low risk, maybe you'll take three or four, we call it the route three, route four, route five. But if you have a BRCA gene, you take the route nine,

which has more extensive medications and nutraceuticals. So we're busy working on this. It should be available on our website soon. And so we've used AI to help us ratify which are the most effective drugs and we can calculate the risk reduction for different cancers. And so surprisingly, the most effective

nutraceuticals, the first most effective is green tea, EGCG, is very effective in preventing cancer, primarily because of the effect on cancer cells, but also the tumor microenvironment. So it's very effective. And then we have curcumin, which acts on multiple biological pathways. We then have vitamin D, which as we spoke this morning,

is a very strong association between vitamin D deficiency and cancer. And then number four is omega-3 fatty acids, which was in that original study. So our basic protocol, we call it Route 4, are these four drugs, which I think, you know, they're reasonably cheap, they're safe, they have no side effects. And so that I think people over the age of 60, even if you're healthy, should consider taking these drugs because it will significantly reduce your risk of developing cancer. Obviously, it won't completely eliminate it. But think how cost-effective this is because we know the cost of treating a patient with cancer with conventional chemotherapy and checkpoint inhibitors runs into the millions

of dollars, let alone the lost time of work-related activities and lack of productivity. So it's a highly cost-effective approach. And you would imagine that it would be an approach that public health would be interested in because it's public health. We should be preventing diabetes, obesity, and cancer. These are very simple interventions that need to be aggressively pursued. If I recall correctly, it was vitamin D plus omega-3s plus exercise. In that study, it was a 60% reduction in your likelihood of getting cancer. That's correct. Now you're saying if you add turmeric and green tea or matcha, I hope it fits well in that,

because that's one of my favorite things to drink. Reduce it even further. What kind of number are we looking at here? It depends upon the particular. What's really interesting is AI can stratify it because some cancers like pancreatic are really bad cancers. What this table does or what this protocol does is it will stratify it according to each cancer. So you can decide what your risk tolerance is and how many drugs you want to take to reduce your risk. So it varies anywhere between 40% to 70% depending on the particular tumor. Surprisingly, I was a little bit skeptic about AI doing this, but it seems to be scientifically very sound. It's very difficult to integrate

this without the use of artificial intelligence. How is it that you're deciding which studies to include? AI is only as good as the material that it has to work with in the first place. AI does it on its own. I don't know how it selects. There are obviously algorithms. It goes through the entire world literature of over 38 million papers in two or three minutes, and it comes up with the answer. And what's interesting is we repeat the question with different AI machines, and we get similar answers.

So we want to make sure it's reproducible. So when we do this over and over again, and we've done it over and over again with the same AI Database as well as with others we get the same thing green tea curcumin vitamin D Omega, so it seems to be reproducible and Supported by the basic papers because they give you the references So I was a bit at beginning, a little bit scary that Big Pharma and other nasty people may be trying to influence the outcome because they certainly

would be in their benefit. But it seems at this point, it's good science. Fascinating. So you took the outcome, you took the references and you thought, okay, this is very reasonable conclusion based on the references that I saw. There's this crisis in reproducibility, right? And so many of the papers right now aren't easy to reproduce or aren't reproducible. And so isn't that something that would figure into this kind of analysis? Absolutely. One has to be really careful about single studies making outrageous claims. I've always said if an observation is valid, it will be valid in New York, in San Francisco, in Bangkok, in Tel Aviv. If you do an experiment, it should be reproducible.

And I think that's the most important qualifier of good science is it's reproducible. The results are reproducible because then it's likely to be true. And so we find that these results and these studies are reproducible. So one study one has to be very careful about. I mean, you look at green tea, you look at vitamin D, there are multiple studies showing the benefit. You're absolutely right. One study one has to be very careful about.

And presumably, with AI, it's all about prompting. Somehow in your prompts, probably you'll share those with us. When you share the outcome, we'll be able to try it ourselves and also realize that this reproducibility does figure in to what you asked the AI to do. Yes, you have to ask the right question in the right way using the right language. I was surprised at how reproducible it was. And then it does give you the references, so you can go cross-check it and make sure that the references are correct. It's quite a phenomenal tool.

That's amazing. I got a hint from someone who's sort of an expert prompt designer, because I've been using AI for a bunch of purposes myself. This actually does make a difference because AI sometimes hallucinates. These models are wired to basically try to give you a result that will make you happy. That actually plays a role. It's something you have to be concerned about. Why? Because people make a lot of money from running these models. But if you tell it, don't lie, someone's life depends on it. They become a lot more strict in how they respond. It's a fascinating thing. I was kind of shocked when I heard about it, but it works. You can ask AI some really interesting questions. Sometimes

it won't give you an answer. And so it's being censored. And so if you ask AI, AI, are you not giving me an answer because you're censoring me? It'll say yes. So it seems to be reasonably honest in the answer it gives. So we've explored various avenues. The one that is least reliable is questions on SARS-CoV-2. And I think that it may be partly because the literature is so biased. When you ask really controversial and penetrating questions,

it tends to avoid giving you an answer. What do you make of Dr. Soon-Shong's bioshield approach to cancer? His general approach is that you basically need your immune system and your natural killer cells and your T cells to get rid of the cancer. and your natural killer cells and your T cells to get rid of the cancer. Absolutely fundamental concept is that you have this balance between the immune system and the cancer and immune suppression. So he's absolutely correct that you need to have active T cells and natural killer cells and which kill the tumor. So you have this, which is really kind of interesting.

The tumor is in a macro environment. It's called the tumor micro environment in which you have myeloid depressor cells, you have T regulatory cells, you have macrophages. These are all different types of cells within the macro environment of the of the tumor. So the tumor is not alone, it's got a lot of company and so you want the company to be hostile to the tumor and kill them rather than be friendly and allow the

tumor to proliferate. And so what's interesting is chemotherapy knocks out your natural killer cells and knocks out your T8 cells, your T4 cells. So it doesn't make any sense if you think of it that chemotherapy immune suppresses allowing the tumor to proliferate. In addition, as we'll probably get to, chemotherapy preserves the cancer stem cell. And the cancer stem cell is the root which drives the tumor. So the tumor proliferates from the stem cell and divides indefinitely and reproduces indefinitely and mutates and divides. So you can't cure the patient unless you get rid

of the cancer stem cell. Interestingly, chemotherapy doesn't kill the stem cell. In fact, there's some chemotherapeutic drugs which stimulate the stem cell. So it really doesn't make sense. You have to have a more holistic approach rather than this burn and cut approach which traditional oncology uses. They use this high dose, or usually high dose, chemotherapy which kills the rapidly dividing

cells. It kills the immune system, but then it allows the stem cells to grow back and it really weakens the immune system. Well, wait, clearly it does work. This is the therapy that's used by so many doctors. I know a number of people have recovered using chemotherapy and so forth from cancer. Yes, it does work to some extent. What chemotherapy does is it knocks off the rapidly dividing cells. The stem cells grow back into cancer, can take 7, 8, 10 years. Once you have cancer, you're never cured. You're in remission or you have no current disease, no detectable disease.

People don't like to use the word cure because I'm not sure if you ever cured. Now you are correct. It depends upon the type of tumor. If it has rapidly dividing cells with a low percentage of cancer stem cells, then you're more likely to be cured or go into long-term remission with chemotherapy. But some cancers, you can appear to be in remission, and 10 years later, the cancer

comes back again just because you haven't dealt with the stem cells. So cure is always a relative term. Until you told me about cancer stem cells, I had never heard of this. And I'm guessing there's probably a lot of people who have never even heard of this concept. So can you from first principles explain to me what a cancer stem cell is, what its role in the disease is, and why is it that we don't know much? Most of us have never heard of it. Yeah, so it's a really good question.

Most doctors don't know what it is. I would hesitate to say that oncologists aren't very familiar with cancer stem cells. I hadn't really heard about them until I started this path of investigation. So these are really very important cells. So the first thing is that cancer is not homogeneous. The somatic mutation theory, which is the current theory in which a treatment is based, posits that you have a mutation in a single cell, and that gives rise to a whole population of cells that look the same and have the same mutation.

But the cancer gene atlas has shown that that theory is completely wrong. Is that the cancer cells are very heterogeneous, so they're made up of very different populations of cells with different mutations and one of the populations is the cancer stem cell. So it's a subpopulation of the cancer. So these are generally slow growing, but they're distinct in that they have the ability to divide indefinitely and grow indefinitely and can change their characteristics. And so basically, if you get rid of the fast dividing cells, which is the cancer, you're left with the stem cells, which then become the roots which grow back to form the tumor.

So that's called a cancer stem cell. So by molecular biology, they have certain receptors on their surface so you can stain for them. So you can distinguish cancer stem cell from a regular cancer cell and their properties are somewhat different. Now the proportion of stem cells can vary from 2%

of the population to 70 to 80%. So the ones with the low percentage of stem cells are more likely to be cured by chemotherapy. And obviously the more stem cells there are, you need agents which get rid of the stem cells. And as I said, conventional chemotherapy does not get rid of stem cells there are, you need agents which get rid of the stem cells. And as I said, conventional chemotherapy does not get rid of stem cells, and radiotherapy is even worse because it stimulates their growth. So the stem cells are the cells that propagate to form the cancer.

It's a really interesting concept. So you don't have a homogeneous set of cells. You have many different subpopulations of cells, one of which is the cancer stem cell. So it's very interesting because now I'm thinking about how chemotherapy works. We won't get these very slow growing cells. So it could get rid of the immediate danger to your life, these fast proliferating things. But meanwhile, these stem cells just continue doing their thing over the longer period of time and bring back the same cancer, different cancer. Yes,, exactly. It may be somewhat genetically different, but it would be somewhat the same cell type. The stem cells which are left alone will proliferate and develop the tumor. But

one has to realize that for a tumor to be palpable, it has to be something like a million million cells. So it takes a while for this to happen. It's not like it happens overnight. So three, four, five years down the line if you have a tumor cell it takes that long to manifest. Now obviously the doubling time differs from different tumors, but generally, it takes a lot of cell divisions before you get a palpable detectable tumor. Well, so now the million-dollar question, how do you get rid of the stem cells? Yes. There are a number of repurposed drugs that do it, and this has been well established in the scientific medical literature.

So people are going to think that this is hocus-pocus, but there's been a lot of research in stem cells. There's been a lot of research in oncology journals on stem cells. One of the most effective treatments to knock out the stem cell is the famous horse deworming medicine. Ivermectin, really? I actually had a doctor at the most recent IMA, before it was the FLCCC conference. A surgeon explained to me that she saw some anecdotal cases where ivermectin was actually helping people recover from cancer. So she was looking to do more research in that area. So ivermectin, tell me how we know this.

People think that it acts on cancer because it's an anti-parasitic drug and that the cancer is a parasite. So that's not how it works. So they're different biochemical pathways. So ivermectin kills the parasite by targeting certain pathways in terms of neurotransmission in the parasite, but it acts on a whole host of other biochemical pathways. So it acts on, there's a pathway called Wnt, there's a pathway called Notch, there's a pathway called IKb. So for reasons that are truly astonishing,

other mechanism acts on a whole host of biological pathways distinct from the pathways that acts on parasites. And in that way, it interferes with the proliferation of cancer cells. And it seems that it's very effective for dealing with stem cells because these stem cells have primitive pathways which are evolved from embryonic development. These pathways are particularly targeted, particularly Winton, Notch, and Hedgehog. These pathways are targeted by ivermectin. That's amazing. But you're telling me that this is actually already in the scientific literature? Absolutely.

For how long? There's a reluctance for the oncology world to accept this because then they have to admit that they're not completely correct, and that they would have to use repurposed cheap drugs, which goes against their mantra. So as a newly minted doctor that sees things differently now, I would say it's medical malpractice not to give one of these drugs to a patient who has a cancer. It's fine, give your chemotherapy, use it in tolerable doses that doesn't wipe out the bone marrow, but at the same time you need to use a drug which knocks out the cancer stem cell, but that's a concept which most

oncologists have not heard of. The literature is out there. There's no question. We know from previous research that it takes about 18 years for a major medical discovery to get into clinical practice. It's just not acceptable. Here's the big question. Is there any research showing that there are no interactive negative effects of, say, using an ivermectin with chemotherapy, for example? Yes, so that's a good question. Most of the data shows that these drugs act synergistically or additively. There's no downside. Just make sure the patient has a good diet, avoid foods with high glycemic index, avoid carbohydrates, make sure they get good sleep and exercise, and give them ivermectin.

It's not a difficult concept. You may want to throw in some curcumin as well, a few other nutraceuticals that target the stem cell. Let's talk about this. Someone does have cancer, they're going through the conventional treatment process. Typically, they're not told much about diet, not told much about these augmentative therapies that don't have the downside. Is this what you just laid out for me? This is for someone who's actually undergoing treatment. There's just these things they could just choose to do themselves. Absolutely. The common story we hear, a patient asks an oncologist, well, what should I eat? An oncologist says, well, it doesn't matter. You can eat whatever you want to. Eat as much ice cream.

And we know from their own literature that that's completely false, that good glycemic control, that's intake of sugar and carbohydrate, has a profound effect on the tumor. So you have to have a more holistic approach in terms of glucose control, sleep, exercise, and then these repurposed drugs. We're not saying don't take the chemotherapy, but I think if you use this approach as adjunctive therapy, it becomes much more powerful and the likelihood of going into a remission is much higher. more powerful and the likelihood of going into a remission is much higher. And are you saying that these prophylactic approaches like green tea, like turmeric, curcumin, you say curcumin, I see turmeric, those should also be used for treatment, not just prophylaxis?

Yeah. So obviously, if a nutraceutical or drug prevents cancer, the likelihood is that because of the biochemical pathways it acts on, it will be active in the tumor. So you're absolutely right. Vitamin D is effective in preventing cancer, but it's also very effective in the treatment of cancer. The same thing for green tea, the same thing for curcumin, the same thing for omega-3 fatty acids, the same thing for berberine, the same thing for sulforaphone. So what we've tried to do more recently is rank them in terms

of those that are most effective because in a test tube or in vitro, there are about 300 drugs or nutraceuticals that have anti-cancer activity, but you obviously contact all 300. So you want to prioritize those that are most effective. So a while back, I actually toured the NutriMax facility where they make a number of nutraceuticals, and frankly, mostly for veterinary purposes, but also for humans. One of them is sulforaphon, and they're a very high quality production of this. I had really not heard about it much,

but tell me about that because it's relatively new and a lot of people are excited about it. me about that because it's relatively new and a lot of people are excited about it. It's a little bit more complicated than other nutraceuticals. If you have curcumin or turmeric or green tea, it's the actual extract. With sulforaphone, there's a precursor compound which needs to be activated to form the sulforaphone and it gets activated at the time you eat the broccoli. And so the problem with if there's a particular enzyme which activates the compound to form the sulforophone. So if you don't compound or formulate the broccoli correctly, you're not gonna get the active ingredient. And also the other thing is if you cook it at high temperatures, it kills the enzyme.

So it won't activate the compound. So it becomes a little bit more complicated, but you can get capsules that actually have the activated compound, the sulforaphone. What is it? What is it exactly? What is it? It's a chemical compound that does from... It's very good antioxidant, for example. Yeah, so most of these things are antioxidant, they act on cell cycle, they act on cell apoptosis, they act on

multiple biological pathways. I mean, it's a product of nature. Nature has all of these. It's not something that's designed in a lab. This is through natural evolution that plants have developed these compounds which protect themselves and other plants from oxidative injury and damage. So it's a plant product from mainly broccoli or broccolini. You gave me the top cancer prevention, So you gave me the top cancer prevention, nutraceuticals, foods, compounds. What about cancer treatment based on your AI work? Yes. So we asked AI to rank them in terms of tumor overall as well as targeting the stem cell and safety. So number one was Avomectin, number two was Mabendazole, number three was Venbendazole,

number four was Curcumin or turmeric as you like to say. And so this was a reproducible finding and it has largely to do with the effect of those compounds on the stem cell because it kills the cancer cell but compounds on the stem cell, because it kills the cancer cell, but it kills the stem cell as well. I've heard about turmeric as being this amazing food for years, but I just hadn't realized that it has this profound effect on cancer. Yeah, I mean, these are ancient Eastern European, Chinese, Indian herbs that people discovered had medicinal powers. They weren't able to isolate exactly what they were, but they've been around for hundreds of years. It's amazing. A while back, you were actually stripped of some of your board certifications. I want to give you an

opportunity to talk about that. Yeah. In the whole country, the three doctors had their boards removed by the American Board of Internal Medicine, which is a highly punitive, highly financially driven, private organization that has a monopoly on the certification of doctors in this country. So Dr. Corey, Dr. Sivli and myself had our board certification removed because they charged us for being misinformationists. We were spreading misinformation which was harmful for physicians and harmful for patients. We will be vindicated in time because we are telling the truth, but according to the American Board of Internal Medicine, we are premier misinformationists, and we are promoting misinformation, and therefore we need to be targeted. I remember that your vitamin C protocol for sepsis that you had published had come under

attack but then ultimately was vindicated. The journal researched it in depth and found there were no problems with your protocols. How are things going with that particular treatment? Yes, so obviously the paper was published five years later down the road, mysteriously during the COVID era, I was accused of falsifying the data. And they misused the they, whoever they are, wanted, you know, approached a journal and the medical school to get the paper retracted. The journal, you know, I gave them the paper, gave them the data, they spent a year going through the paper, finally discovered the paper was fine. There were two minor mistakes we had

made which we agreed to and they were relatively minor, so we got off unscathed. But still there's always that once you accuse someone of something, the stigma still carries weight. We were considered snake oil doctors for treating patients with vitamin C. So there are a lot of people, though, that believe it who understand it. It hasn't gained a lot of traction just because it's not a money winner. I kept thinking, Dr. Merrick, that it would be something that would make a lot of sense in places where there isn't a lot of money for medical treatment. Clearly, sepsis is obviously probably a much bigger problem than it is even in American hospitals, where it's a huge problem.

Yes. It is a good question. Many of the drugs we talk about, the repurposed, are cheap. I mean, either Mecton costs the WHO two cents. So you would imagine these drugs would be used much more widely, but it seems like there are regulatory agencies and the WHO who are obviously in cohorts with Big Pharma to direct the national or global agenda. So it's a global issue of suppression of data. And just very briefly, how is it that you came up with the idea of using high-dosage vitamin C to treat sepsis, and how does it actually work? It wasn't my brilliant idea. Obviously, Linus Pauling had used it for a number of conditions

and for cancer. There was a clinician, Dr. Fowler, at VCU, Virginia College in Richmond, and he had done some work on vitamin C. And so I had kind of stuck it at the back of my head in one of the holes at the back of my head. And so I had this patient who was dying of overwhelming sepsis, and I just remembered that reading his paper, and I thought, let me try it. So that's

how it all started. So vitamin C is a stress hormone. You really need it when you're stressed. And so if you give a human being who's stressed, and this can be academic stress, it can be emotional stress, it can be physical stress. If you give them vitamin C, it helps them overcome the stress process. It's just part of the evolutionary response. Humans lost the ability to make vitamin C, so they need vitamin C when they stress. It has a whole host of biochemical effects that are really important for dealing with stress. But that's fascinating. I vaguely remember now that that's the case, but I'd learned this years ago, but I'd forgotten about that.

So it's humans and guinea pigs can't make vitamin C, for whatever reason. Do you miss teaching? teaching? Yes. So it's a wonderful environment, teaching, particularly at the bedside, because I think you learn as much from the students as they learn from you. It's very interactive. It's very dynamic, and it's what keeps you on your toes. I find it highly stimulating, so I do miss bedside teaching. What's next for Dr. Merrick? Hopefully, before I die, which I'm not sure may be coming soon, I'm working on the cancer, the third, I suppose. You can never know everything. And so we have this new tool called AI, which is really helping us frame what we do. So I'm

going to continue working on different aspects of cancer care. Explain to me very briefly what this third edition of the cancer monograph is. We have the second edition, which was banned by Amazon because it was obviously contaminating the literature and threatening Big Pharma, and then it got unbanned. So eventually, we'll have a third edition, which will have a lot of the stuff that I'm working on now incorporated into it. Well, I might add, in our discussions, I realized that it's actually a bestseller by any measure. There's a lot of interest in a compendium of—and maybe I'll speak for you. I found this very valuable when you first shared it with me, because it's a compendium of not just what people think might work, but it's what people have shown does work rigorously.

That's your criteria, right? Yes. I'll continue on this path. It's evolving because the knowledge is evolving, and maybe people are paying attention to the fact that there may be repurposed drugs that do have a role in the treatment of cancer and other conditions. So it's very dynamic. I mean, science is never vexed. It's not decided. It's ongoing. So I think this will evolve as the science evolves. Are there any studies that you're involved in or planning related to this? I am doing a study with Dr. Corey in his practice. It's an observational study looking at the use of repurposed drugs in patients with cancer. It's observational, but it will give us some useful data to look at trends. We're not going to make outrageous claims. We're just going to look

for trends. Are you trying the ones you already know work or you're trying new things? So we're using the ones we already know work, the Macdon, curcumin, the ones we know, the bendazole. It's a very difficult area to study just because the patients are on multiple drugs. The end point usually is survival. And so it takes the patients a while to die. It's a terrible thing to say. The model that's used most commonly is glioblastoma.

So the metric study looked at four repurposed drugs in glioblastoma. They chose glioblastoma because the median survival is about 12 to 14 months. So these patients die pretty quickly. So if you have a protocol which changes the trajectory of the deaths, it becomes obvious pretty soon. So there are a few studies of repurposed drugs in glioblastoma. That's been done. So there's the metric study which used four drugs, and there's a study called Curb-9, which has nine repurposed drugs in glioblastoma. We're basically looking at all comers, and it's not going to give the most robust data, but you know what? Data is data,

and it gives you trends and information, and it can always help us to be informed. What do you make of the appointments and changes at HHS today? Yes, I think it's going to be interesting, is the bottom line, because clearly the agencies were controlled by Big Pharma. There's no question about it that the press and media are controlled by Big Pharma. So the messaging is completely distorted. I'm hopeful that there will be a cleaning out but it may be so entrenched and Pharma may still have such an influence, it could be unclear what the outcome is. It seems to be going in the correct direction,

but I think it's still early to see exactly what the final outcome will be. And this may be the beginning of a process. Hopefully it's the beginning of a process of change and there needs to be transparency and there needs to be true science. This idea that the science is fixed and finite is nonsense. It's never fixed and finite because it keeps on evolving. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his role brought together the top executives from multiple food companies with an idea

to get them to change how they do things and seems to have gotten some positive responses to that. Could there be an opportunity like that in Big Pharma as well. Yeah, so I think that collaborative model is probably the best model because he could have told the big food companies to do this is what you need to do, so they'd had no option or he could work collaboratively with them to work together with them to solve the issue of foreign chemicals and dyes in food. And he could likewise work with Big Pharma, will be somewhat difficult, but I think if he changes the rules somewhat, he may get them to collaborate with them. I think the biggest problem is that Big Pharma controls the narrative. They control the

misinformation. They control the false information that is being perpetuated. That needs to change. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Well, thank you. It's always a pleasure. I think these are interesting times. I think we are at a fork in the road, and hopefully we'll go in the right direction. This may work out for everyone's best interest because our health care system is completely and utterly broken. From the top to the bottom, it's a broken, dysfunctional system that does not provide healthcare. So hopefully, we can develop a system that actually promotes health and promotes care, and we can rehabilitate this completely broken system.

Well, Dr. Palmeric, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you, Jan. Thank you all for joining Dr. Palmeric and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.