Dr. Keith Block believes chronomodulating chemotherapy is going to be the wave of the future. Chronomodulating chemotherapy is given according to the optimal time of day for that treatment, when it will do the most good. Patients of this cancer treatment need less drugs. They have less complications. They heal better.
Dr. Block is co-founder of the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Treatment. He uses both traditional and complementary medicine to treat the whole person.
(Transcribed from video interview)
Dr. Block:
Chronomodulated chemotherapy is taking advantage of time sensitive treatment. And what we know is is that every one of us has circadian rhythms, right? We, you know, sleep at night and we wake up in the morning, hopefully, but if those rhythms get disrupted we can not only develop disease but we have a harder time healing from disease.
It turns out that chemotherapy drugs have their own profile. Each one of them has their own personality, if you will. And so there is an optimal time in day and night for every drug that’s been researched and demonstrated so that you would want to give drugs when the cancer cell is the most active because that’s when it’s easiest to kill those cells and you would want to give those drugs also when the normal healthy tissue is at rest, when it’s going to be the least sensitive to toxicity.
And so by actually combining these timing issues with the drugs of a patient and with the patient’s circadian clock, you can get, and there’s good research to show it, far better clinical results. So in the United States we don’t do this much care. Our center does in Evanston. But when you go across the ocean, the Atlantic, and to get to Europe there’s 40 large centers that use a chronomodulated chemotherapy approach as their main form of medical treatment.
And even if you take just some of the basic studies that have been done, metastatic ovarian cancer patients that have advanced disease and are in deep trouble, if you give them the drugs at the optimal time of day as opposed to the inverted time of day, what you end up with the group that gets the optimal time of day as they have half the complications. The need to reduce drugs is cut by four-fifths or 80 percent. But most importantly, the effectiveness is fourfold better.
Forty four percent of the patients would be alive five years later as opposed to 11 percent. That’s rather profound just based on timing the drugs. So we believe that actually chronomodulating chemotherapy is the wave of the future. Obviously we are a little bit behind in this country, and in Europe this is already taking place.
About Dr. Block, M.D.:
Dr. Keith I. Block, M.D., along with his wife Penny Block, M.A., Ph.D., founded the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Treatment in 1980, with a focus on treating the patient as a whole person rather than simply treating the diagnosis. They developed a unique and truly integrative approach to cancer treatment which encompasses traditional and complementary medicine delivered in a caring environment.
Visit Dr. Block at http://www.blockmd.com/aboutus_letter.htm
Video:
https://www.empowher.com/cancer/content/chronomodulated-chemotherapy-what-dr-block-video