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This is a transcript of an interview with
Dr. Darryl See, Director of the Institute of Longevity Medicine &
Chairman of the Research Division of the American Nutraceutical
Association - January 2003 Key
quotes from this interview:
Q: You
are an associate clinical professor. You have been involved with the
World Health Organization (WHO) in Western Europe; are the Director of
the Orange County Institute of Longevity Medicine; you are co-chairman
of the research division of the American Nutraceutical Association; and
you are also an immunologist and a medical doctor?
Dr. See:
Yes, I am board certified in immunology, internal
medicine, infectious disease and, yes, and MD as well.
Q: I
see that you have received numerous research grants from Upjohn
Pharmaceuticals, Schering Pharmaceuticals, Trinity Biotechnology,
Biosphere Tech, Rose Molecular Systems, and so on. Even one from the
National Institutes of Health on chronic fatigue syndrome.
I suppose the question that a lot of
people would have, is why would someone who is an immunologist, start
studying nutritional medicine and natural medicine?
Dr. See:
Yes a nice way to start. I did the straight path of 4
years of college in biochemistry, went through 8 of internal medicine
residency and then did an infectious disease fellowship for 2 years, 2
more years of an immunology fellowship, then became assistant professor
of medicine at the University of California, rising to associate
professor. I also spent a year at the World Health Organization (WHO) in
France where I honed my skills in the laboratory and in clinical
research in immunological disease so we could really make some progress
in those types of diseases.
But I had a very important experience
when I was with the National Institute of Health (NIH). I would go to an immunology conference
every single year. The basic science of immunology is so well known
there would be section after section on the basics of immunology, but
when it got down to therapeutics, there was nothing, absolutely nothing.
So, the bottom line was I learned through this process, and also through
seeing patients and trying to apply the drug paradigm to their diseases. I have seen over probably now 10,000
patients with some sort of immunologic disorder, and in a drug paradigm
there is really nothing you can do for them basically.
Intravenous immunoglobulin is sort of the
pride of the pharmaceutical/immunological industry and what is funny is
when you go from conference to conference, from year to year, it is
always about the intravenous immunoglobulin and different uses, but that
is about it. A little talk about interferon, but
interferon makes you very sick.
A little about interleuken-2 - it is very expensive and very toxic.
One month of immunoglobulin costs $2000 in the US - and they don't
work very well.
I have worked with literally thousands of
patients over the years, with a great sense of frustration that I could
not do anything with them. I was involved in clinical research and
direct patient care, and I was fortunate enough to have expertise in
laboratory medicine as well. I decided I wanted to put those three
skills together to see if we could come up with something that would
actually help these patients - most importantly - to try to prevent
disease.
Among the top 10 killers in the US, 8 of them are associated with
immunological disorders. The two that are not associated with
immunological disorders are #4, which is ADR (adverse drug reaction)
deaths, and #8, which is physician mistake. It is a tremendous problem,
and there were just no answers. So, I plunged in full-force, and I had to
go out of the standard medical paradigm. Because I knew very little
about nutrition and natural products, I basically had to teach myself. I was fortunate enough to have studied
under some experts and I was able to change my laboratory focus to
natural products to see if there was something in the natural product
realm that could help the immune
system.
I published a paper in the Journal of the
American Nutraceutical Association in February of 1999 - the results of
a 6-year study done at the University done from 1992-1998, looking at
196 promising natural products for
immune
system activity on the body. I will explain a little more about that
in a moment. There was nothing spectacular on the
list, although there were some natural products that were promising that
would raise the immune
system.
I think the leading natural product after
that study was inositol hexophosphate which all of you may recognize as
an ingredient of Transfer
Factor Plus, which I am delighted to see in there because it is a
fantastic immune modulator. That was about the best we had. Also mannans were very nice immune
modulators, and I am very happy to see those in
Transfer Factor Plus too. After doing five independent studies of
transfer factors,
it is clear to me that the Transfer
Factor Plus product from 4Life has got to be the best immunologic
modulator we have.
Dr. See:
Let me explain
immunomodulation. It is an
extremely important point. We tend to think of the immune system as
"lets get the immune system as boosted-up as we can."
People tend to have low immune systems
because of environmental factors. For example, there is an ozone hole
right over most of Australia that leads to a very high incidence of
melanomas there and also really
devastates the immune system. We have some Australian connections -
one of our cancer patients is a
CEO of a big Australian company. He was given three months to live, and
yet he is doing very well right now. I will talk about that in a
moment.
In 2002, we looked at not just 196
natural products that showed promise - we looked at over 500. We have a
very standardized, well-validated, highly accepted way of looking at
products for efficacy in
immunologic disorders. Remember, the top 8 killers in the US - and
that would be the same for the whole western world - are all related to
the immune system. Having an immune
modulator as a part of a regimen is crucial for prevention. It improves
the body's ability to fight off chronic infections,
cancers, immunologic disorders
associated with
diabetes.
Those would be the top three killers.
Interestingly enough there is
a very big immunologic component
in heart
disease as well, and that's the number one killer. Although
it's anticipated that by the year 2005, cancer will be the #1 killer in
the western world. I am going to give you something you may want to
write down. There was an incredibly important paper recently published
in Lancet, one of the most highly respected medical journals.
The study was
from Japan, a 10-year study by Saitama Center Cancer Study Group called
"
Increased Risk of Cancer in
Persons with Decreased Immune Functions" Lancet 2000
vol 356 pp. 1795-1799. That was the first time in history, believe it or
not, that a long-term prospective study has ever shown that
persons with decreased immune
system are at higher risk of developing cancer and get worse cancers
than people with normal immune systems. So, all of a
sudden the immune system just jumps
up to the forefront because when you look at western nations, cancer is
becoming rampant. There is hardly a family that does not have cancer, or
knows a friend that has cancer.
The statistics are just grim.
By the age of 70, 80% of males have
prostate cancer.
By the age of 60, 40% of women have
breast cancer.
The statistics are just devastating. and
then there's the relationship with heart disease - the #2 killer.
When the immune system is balanced
correctly, heart disease can be prevented.
The #3 killer is
diabetes, which we are very interested right now and as it turns
out, by mechanisms that we are just finding out in the laboratory now,
Transfer
Factor also lowers blood sugar levels in
diabetics. It looks like it is a very nice adjuvant for your
patients that have diabetes. As a matter of fact, there is a little bit of literature
out that suggests that transfer factors may have some benefits with diabetes.
So there are the top three killers in the western world accounting
for about 92% of all deaths, all
of them directly related to the immune system. This new study from Japan has shown us in blinking huge red lights
that we have got to do something about the decreased immune system that
we find in the general population or we are going to have a disaster on
our hands, which we are indeed already seeing.
I don't know how medicine is in Australia, but it is a disaster in
the US. 17% of gross-national product goes into the medical care and yet
a survey has just shown that 70% of all Americans are dissatisfied with
their healthcare. There is something very wrong there. I totally believe that the new paradigm in medicine is using natural
products which are not toxic.
The use of drugs is the #4 killer in Western nations. Over
108,000 deaths, just in the US, are associated with using too many
drugs, drug interactions, etc.
Drugs are poisonous, not that they are not useful in some situations,
but when we are talking about immunologic diseases, they have very
little role and there is very little progress. But in the natural realm
there is tremendous progress.
As we were looking at the ability of natural products to
modulate the immune
system we were sent Transfer
Factor to evaluate. We found that regular Transfer
Factor improved Natural Killer (NK) cell functions by about 100%.
It doubled Natural Killer cell function in people. We had never seen anything
like that. The closest we had seen to that was about 48% increase with
inositol hexophosphate, and mannans were about 47-48%. So this was a
huge find for us - we were actually stunned.
We repeated that test about 10 times. Subsequently we have repeated
that test in cancer patients and in chronic fatigue syndrome patients.
So, not only have we done it in the laboratory we have also performed it
in patients. Those two studies have now been submitted for publication
and they are being peer-reviewed right now at very high-level journals.
Hopefully we will have those out within 2-6 months so everybody can see
these studies that we have come up with. Even more to our surprise,
Transfer
Factor Plus increased the
Natural Killer cell function by 250%. There was a
synergy between the different components of TF Plus. In other words,
when you take all of the components of Transfer
Factor Plus 1+1+1 does not equal 3. 1+1+1=4. That process is called
synergy. In other words the products work together to have an enhanced
effect on the immune system. Particularly with NK cells. NK cells are the
primary defense against chronic infections, viruses in particular,
intracellular bacteria, which are associated with a large number of
disease.
Now we know that intracellular bacteria are associated with
rheumatoid arthritis, which is a devastating disease. We know that
viruses are associated with
diabetes
and with
heart disease. Viruses are associated with many cases of cancer,
with chronic lung disease, and the list goes on and on.
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