I recently joined the Oncology Association of Naturopathic Physicians.
I found this post from a Naturopath in Denver, Jacob Schor.
Imagine you have cancer and tomorrow morning some nurse is going to pump you full of Adriamycin. What do you do to get ready?
Believe it or not, you should pop some Viagra. Viagra increases nitric oxide in your blood, which in turn will make the chemotherapy more effective at destroying cancer cells and, at the same time, protect your heart from chemo-caused toxicity.
Adriamycin, the brand name for the drug doxorubicin, is a common chemotherapy drug used to treat a range of different cancers. It comes with a price. The killing action of Adriamycin is nonspecific and injures healthy cells as well as cancer cells. It is worthwhile to look for ways to increase the benefits of using it while looking for ways to lessen the harm. Increasing benefit translates as increasing Adriamycin's cancer cell killing effect. Decreasing harm means decreasing the damage to organs like the heart, liver and kidney.
A 2004 study showed you could increase the effect of Adriamycin by adding nitric oxide to the mix. Breast cancer cells exposed to nitric oxide (NO) 30 minutes before treatment were much more sensitive to Adriamycin. Adriamycin treatment alone killed 60% of the cancer cells, but pre-treating the cells with NO and then treating with Adriamycin killed 95% of the cancer cells in the experiment. [i]
