“They Killed His GI Tract Fighting the Cancer”

An Essay on What Cancer Treatment Does to the Body — and What Exists That They Won’t Use

A supporter of this Substack recently sent me a message that contains something thousands of families will recognise:

“I supported the work because I have a 21 year old has been fighting DSRCT for four years! The medical establishment killed his GI tract fighting the ‘uncurable cancer’ and now they won’t stop dumping antibiotics in him. He is a living cesspool and they just keep dumping more toxins in him. The FDA is our enemy. Why can’t we just have medicine that is good for people?”

That last line. Read it again.

DSRCT — desmoplastic small round cell tumor — is one of the rarest and most aggressive cancers in existence. Conventional oncology attributes it to a specific gene fusion (EWSR1-WT1). It strikes predominantly young men. This young man was 17 when he was diagnosed. He’s now 21. His entire adult life has been the inside of a hospital.

The medical establishment has spent four years attacking his cancer. In doing so, they destroyed his gastrointestinal tract. The destroyed gut — its terrain wrecked — calls forth microbial activity to process the mounting damage. The organisms are doing necessary work: breaking down damaged tissue, responding to the conditions they find. But the sheer volume of that work overwhelms the system. Metabolic byproducts accumulate faster than the body can clear them. The result looks like illness — and is labelled infection by a medical system that sees microbes as invaders rather than workers. Antibiotics are prescribed. The antibiotics further annihilate the microbial community. The weakened terrain loses its capacity to maintain equilibrium or fight the cancer. So they dump in more antibiotics.

His parent is watching this happen and can see the loop. The doctors apparently cannot — or will not.

This essay is about that loop: what it is, why it exists, and what an entire field of medicine has been saying about it for decades while oncology looks the other way.

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The Domino Effect

Chemotherapy targets cells that divide rapidly. Cancer cells divide rapidly. So do the cells lining the digestive tract, from mouth to anus.¹ The gut lining is collateral damage by design. When those cells die, the microbiome — the trillions of bacteria responsible for digestion, immune function, nutrient absorption, and hormone regulation — collapses.

Seventy percent of the body’s immune defence arises from activity within the gut.² Destroy the gut, and you’ve destroyed the immune system’s headquarters.

What happens next is predictable. The patient’s terrain collapses. Microbial communities respond to the devastation — not as invaders, but as workers called to process damaged tissue. Their metabolic byproducts, in a healthy system, would be cleared efficiently. In a system gutted by chemotherapy, they accumulate. The oncology team sees symptoms, labels them infections, and prescribes antibiotics — often prophylactically, before symptoms even arrive.³ The antibiotics devastate whatever beneficial microbial community survived the chemotherapy. The gut becomes a wasteland. Digestion fails. Nutrient absorption fails. The immune system, already crippled, loses its capacity to participate in fighting the cancer. The patient weakens.

Meanwhile, chemotherapy and radiation cause inflammation to spike. To suppress that inflammation, steroid medications are prescribed — typically dexamethasone. Dexamethasone elevates blood glucose levels to ranges seen in type-2 diabetes.⁴ Glucose is the primary fuel for cancer cells — the basis of the PET scan, which detects cancer by tracking where glucose is consumed fastest in the body. The steroid drug given to manage the side effects of cancer treatment is feeding the cancer.

Thomas Seyfried, professor at Boston College and author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, describes this sequence in brain cancer as “the perfect storm” — radiation provides an abundance of glutamine (cancer’s secondary fuel), dexamethasone provides an abundance of glucose (cancer’s primary fuel), and the resulting environment “guarantees the demise of most patients.”⁵ Elsewhere in the same book, assessing cancer treatment broadly, he writes: “It is not clear how many cancer patients die from their disease or die from the toxic effects of the therapies used to treat their disease.”⁶

Miriam Kalamian, a nutritionist who lost her son Raffi to a brain tumor, documented this cascade in Keto for Cancer. She watched it happen. Chemo destroys the gut lining. Disrupted microbiome causes appetite and absorption failures. Steroids suppress the immune system and raise blood glucose. Prophylactic antibiotics deliver the final blow to the gut. She asks her readers: “Are you starting to see a pattern here?”³

The pattern is visible to anyone willing to look. The parent who wrote to me has been watching it for four years.

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The Antibiotic Spiral

The FLCCC’s Cancer Care protocol, authored by Dr. Paul Marik and colleagues, states it plainly: “Antibiotics cause severe dysbiosis which is associated with an increased risk of cancer and reduced response to chemotherapy.”⁷ This is referenced to multiple peer-reviewed studies.

The same protocol notes that restoring a normal microbiome improves the response to anticancer drugs.⁷ The implication is direct: every course of antibiotics given to a cancer patient may simultaneously weaken the patient’s ability to respond to the treatment the oncologist is administering.

Dr. Nasha Winters, a naturopathic oncologist and cancer survivor who developed the Terrain Ten framework for metabolic cancer management, puts the antibiotic problem in historical context. In 1945, sixty-five people were treated with antibiotics. By 2010, over 258 million courses were prescribed in a single year. American children average seventeen courses of antibiotics by age twenty.⁸ Each course, Winters writes, is like “clear-cutting an entire rain forest to harvest one tree.”

Winters flags something that connects directly to the metabolic theory of cancer: antibiotics don’t just kill bacteria. They cause oxidative damage to DNA and directly target and damage mitochondria.⁸ Since mitochondrial dysfunction is, in the metabolic framework, the root cause of cancer, this matters enormously. A drug class given routinely to cancer patients is damaging the very organelles whose dysfunction drives the disease.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, author of Gut and Physiology Syndrome, takes this further. She documents that antibiotics don’t simply eliminate bacteria — they force them into cell-wall-deficient forms (L-forms) that are resistant to further antibiotic treatment.⁹ A course of antibiotics actually stimulates the growth of these altered forms. They persist inside human cells, participate in chronic disease including cancer, and cannot be addressed by established antibacterial methods.⁹ The antibiotics don’t solve the problem. They transform it into something the system has even less capacity to manage.

The implications for a patient like this young man are stark. Four years of antibiotics haven’t resolved his condition. The organisms the antibiotics target aren’t the problem — they’re responding to a terrain in crisis, doing necessary work that the system labels as disease. Each round of antibiotics disrupts that microbial response, forces the community into less functional configurations — Campbell-McBride’s L-forms, resistant to further treatment — and strips away the beneficial microbial activity his body depends on for equilibrium. Each round digs the hole deeper. The parent’s description — “living cesspool” — is medically accurate, even if no doctor would use those words.

Campbell-McBride’s central argument is that gut flora orchestrates the entire renewal process of the intestinal lining. When the flora is destroyed, the gut wall cells (enterocytes) degenerate and lose their ability to digest and absorb food. “You cannot develop any digestive disorder, whether it is as mild as IBS or as severe as cancer, without damaging the gut flora first.”¹⁰

The system that destroyed this young man’s gut flora is the same system that claims to be saving his life.

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Why the System Can’t See What It’s Doing

The answer is structural, and it is simple. Oncology operates on the somatic mutation theory — the idea that cancer is a genetic disease caused by DNA mutations, and that the correct response is to target those mutations with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. This has been the dominant paradigm since the mid-twentieth century.

It has also been, by its own metrics, a historic failure.

Based on data collected between 1992 and 1997 for the 22 most common malignancies, Morgan et al. estimated the overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to five-year survival in adults at 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the United States.¹¹ The five-year cancer survival rate in the US increased from 63% to 68% over a twenty-five-year period (1995-2018). The improvement in overall survival from new cancer therapies over the past fifteen years amounts to 2.4 months.¹² Over thirty years, the improvement is 3.4 months.¹³

Cancer-related medical costs in the US were $208.9 billion in 2020 — likely a gross underestimate. In 2000, two oncology drugs garnered more than a billion dollars in sales. By 2010, the top ten each exceeded a billion. By that year, there were three oncology drug sales representatives for every ten oncologists.¹⁴

Cancer is big business. Seyfried calls the current epoch of cancer therapy, extending from the 1960s to the present, “the unenlightened barbaric period.”⁶

For a rare cancer like DSRCT, the situation is worse. The disease is so uncommon that there is almost no financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop targeted treatments. The standard approach is aggressive multi-agent chemotherapy (typically the P6 protocol), debulking surgery, and radiation — the same slash-burn-poison triad that has been used for half a century. There is no tailored metabolic protocol for DSRCT. There are no large clinical trials. There is nothing in the pipeline.

When your only tool is a hammer, every cancer looks like a nail. And when the hammer fails, you swing harder.

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The Metabolic Alternative

In 1924, Otto Warburg observed that cancer cells generate energy differently from normal cells. Instead of using mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (the normal, efficient process), cancer cells ferment glucose even in the presence of oxygen. This became known as the Warburg Effect. Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his work on cellular respiration — the very process he had shown was defective in cancer.¹⁵

For decades, this observation was sidelined as a curiosity — an effect of cancer, not a cause. The somatic mutation theory dominated. Then Thomas Seyfried marshalled the evidence showing that the relationship runs the other direction: mitochondrial damage comes first, and the genetic mutations oncology obsesses over arise as a consequence of that metabolic dysfunction, not the cause.⁵ Cancer, in this framework, is a singular metabolic disease regardless of tissue origin or genetic signature. All cancers share the same fundamental problem: damaged respiration forcing reliance on fermentable fuels — primarily glucose and glutamine.

The practical implications follow directly. If cancer depends on specific fuels, you can restrict those fuels. If it depends on damaged mitochondria, you can support mitochondrial health. If it thrives in specific microenvironmental conditions — inflammation, immune suppression, acidic pH — you can change those conditions. None of this requires permission from the pharmaceutical industry.

The ketogenic diet — high fat, very low carbohydrate — is the dietary foundation of this approach. By restricting carbohydrates, blood glucose drops. The body shifts to burning fat, producing ketone bodies as fuel. Normal cells use ketones efficiently. Cancer cells, with their damaged mitochondria, largely cannot.¹⁶ The patient is nourished. The cancer is starved.

Amanda King ND, a UK-trained naturopathic practitioner and co-author of Metabolic Drugs for Cancer, has built her clinical work around this framework. One of her patients, Dale Atkinson, was given an 11.5-month prognosis. His protocol included a properly managed ketogenic diet, high-dose vitamin D3, curcumin, intravenous vitamin C, berberine, high-dose omega-3, and monthly blood monitoring to adjust as they went. Dale has no cancer tumors now.¹⁷ (I interviewed King in October 2025 for this Substack.)

Interview with Dr. Amanda King

The contrast with this young DSRCT patient could not be sharper. One patient had a practitioner systematically building him up — monitoring blood sugar regulation, inflammation markers, nutritional status, adjusting monthly. The other has spent four years being systematically torn down, his gut destroyed, his microbiome annihilated, his terrain treated as collateral damage.

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Repurposed Drugs: Pennies Against Billions

Beyond diet, an arsenal of cheap, off-patent drugs with documented anticancer mechanisms has been accumulating in the literature for years.

Jane McLelland, author of How to Starve Cancer, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and given a terminal prognosis. She mapped the metabolic pathways her cancer used and systematically blocked them with combinations of repurposed drugs: metformin (a diabetes drug), a statin (a cholesterol drug), dipyridamole (a stroke prevention drug), and an anti-inflammatory.¹⁸ She’s alive. Her insight was that no single drug is enough — cancer’s metabolic flexibility means you must block multiple fuel pathways simultaneously. The drugs work in synergy, magnifying each other’s effects. She writes: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”¹⁸

The Care Oncology Clinic in London has treated over a thousand patients with its off-label combination of metformin, atorvastatin, doxycycline, and mebendazole.¹⁹ All four drugs cost pennies per dose. All have decades of safety data from their original uses.

Marik’s FLCCC Cancer Care protocol organises repurposed drugs into tiers by evidence strength.²⁰ The King/Kuhan book details over twenty repurposed drugs with anticancer mechanisms — from berberine (which blocks both glucose and glutamine uptake) to ivermectin (which inhibits cancer cell efflux pumps and metalloproteinases) to low-dose naltrexone (an immune modulator).²¹

None of these drugs were developed for cancer. None are profitable enough to attract pharmaceutical investment. All of them target metabolic vulnerabilities that are shared across cancer types — including rare cancers like DSRCT, for which the system has no tailored treatments.

The parent’s question hangs in the air: “Why can’t we just have medicine that is good for people?”

The answer, documented across an entire library of research, is that good medicine exists. It’s cheap, it’s available, and it targets the universal metabolic dependencies that all cancers share. It’s not being offered because the system is not designed to offer it.

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The Terrain, Not the Tumor

Winters’ Terrain Ten framework identifies ten physiological elements that must be optimised to prevent and manage cancer: blood sugar regulation, inflammation, immune function, microbiome health, toxin burden, hormonal balance, stress response, and others.²² The approach treats the whole person — the garden — not just the weed. A tumor, in this model, is a symptom of terrain imbalance, not the cause of disease.

The evidence supports this. Altered gut microbiota is associated with resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs; restoration of a normal microbiome improves response to those same drugs.⁷ Gut bacteria produce over 50% of the body’s xenobiotic detoxification. They manufacture vitamins, regulate hormones, train the immune system, and control inflammation. Campbell-McBride calls the gut flora the “housekeeper” of the digestive system and notes that it produces approximately 95% of the body’s serotonin and 50% of its dopamine.¹⁰

When Kelly Turner, a PhD researcher who studied radical remission at UC Berkeley, analysed over a thousand cases of unexpected cancer recovery — people who survived cancers they statistically shouldn’t have — she found that doctors had no interest in hearing what these survivors had done differently. Some doctors asked the survivors not to tell other patients in the waiting room about their recoveries, so as not to raise “false hope.”²³

Turner’s analysis identified nine common factors across these cases. Only some were physical (diet change, herbs and supplements). Others were emotional and spiritual: releasing suppressed emotions, increasing positive emotions, deepening social support, finding strong reasons for living.²³ A 21-year-old who has spent his entire adult life in a hospital being progressively poisoned has had all of these factors stripped from him.

The metabolic approach doesn’t just offer different drugs. It offers a different logic. Instead of treating the tumor while destroying the terrain, it treats the terrain while targeting the tumor’s metabolic weaknesses. Instead of slash-burn-poison, it’s restrict-nourish-rebuild.

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What Could Be Done

For this young man — or any patient trapped in the iatrogenic cycle — the metabolic literature points toward several concurrent priorities.

The gut must be rebuilt. Campbell-McBride’s GAPS (Gut and Physiology Syndrome) protocol provides the most detailed roadmap for patients whose digestive systems have been devastated. It begins with meat stocks and well-cooked vegetables when the gut lining is most damaged, gradually introduces fermented foods and probiotics, and stages more complex foods as healing progresses.⁹ Marik’s protocol recommends diverse fermented foods, prebiotic fibre, polyphenol-rich foods, probiotic supplementation, and — critically — stopping unnecessary antibiotics.²⁰ Winters recommends 80-100 billion CFU probiotics daily, rotated every ninety days, alongside garlic, oregano oil, and other herbal antimicrobials that support beneficial bacteria while addressing microbial overgrowth.⁸

The metabolic environment must be shifted. A ketogenic or low-carbohydrate diet restricts the glucose cancer depends on. Intermittent fasting activates AMPK and suppresses mTOR — metabolic pathways that favour cancer when chronically activated. Blood glucose, insulin, and ketone levels should be monitored and managed as measurable targets.

Repurposed drugs target the metabolic vulnerabilities that oncology ignores. Metformin, berberine, a statin, mebendazole, low-dose naltrexone, and others have broad anticancer mechanisms that don’t depend on cancer type. They cost very little. They have decades of safety data.

Mistletoe therapy is the most clinically studied natural cancer medicine, with over a century of use and published evidence of improved quality of life and survival in advanced cancers.²⁴ Thomas Cowan, author of Cancer and the New Biology of Water, describes it as the “backbone” of holistic cancer treatment, used as standard practice in Germany and Switzerland.

Every one of these interventions is available now. None requires a pharmaceutical breakthrough. None costs more than a fraction of a single chemotherapy infusion.

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The Document Exists

Seyfried closes his discussion of the standard of care with a line that applies to far more than brain cancer: “The current epoch will persist as long as cancer is viewed as something other than a metabolic disease. Once cancer becomes recognized as a metabolic disease, more effective and less toxic therapies will emerge.”⁶

That recognition is not coming from within the system. The system spent $208.9 billion on cancer in a single year, achieved survival improvements measurable in weeks, and created three drug reps for every ten oncologists. It is not structured to recognise its own failure.

The recognition is coming from parents watching their children be destroyed. From survivors like Jane McLelland who mapped their own escape routes. From practitioners like Amanda King who monitor monthly and adjust based on what the blood shows. From researchers like Seyfried who have spent careers assembling the evidence. From the over one thousand cases of radical remission that no one at the major cancer institutions wanted to investigate.

A 21-year-old is trapped in a cycle of iatrogenic destruction. His parent can see it. The published literature describes it. The metabolic tools to address it exist, are cheap, and have been documented across decades of research.

The parent asked: “Why can’t we just have medicine that is good for people?”

We can. It exists. The question is why the people holding the prescription pads won’t use it.

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References

¹ Kalamian, M. Keto for Cancer: Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy as a Targeted Nutritional Strategy. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

² Stengler, M. and Anderson, P. Outside the Box Cancer Therapies. Hay House, 2018.

³ Kalamian, M. Keto for Cancer, Chapter on conventional treatment side effects.

⁴ Seyfried, T.N. Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer. Wiley, 2012. Chapter 16: Cancer Treatment Strategies.

⁵ Seyfried, T.N. Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. Chapter 17: Metabolic Management of Cancer.

⁶ Seyfried, T.N. Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. Chapter 16.

⁷ Marik, P. et al. Cancer Care (Version 2.2). FLCCC Alliance, 2024.

⁸ Winters, N. and Kelley, J.H. The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017. Chapter 6: The Mighty Microbiome.

⁹ Campbell-McBride, N. Gut and Physiology Syndrome. Medinform Publishing, 2020.

¹⁰ Campbell-McBride, N. Gut and Physiology Syndrome. Chapters on gut flora and digestive system.

¹¹ Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clin Oncol. 2004;16(8):549-560.

¹² Ladanie A, et al. Clinical trial evidence supporting US Food and Drug Administration approval of novel cancer therapies between 2000 and 2016. Referenced in Marik, Cancer Care v2.2.

¹³ Del Paggio JC, et al. Referenced in Marik, Cancer Care v2.2.

¹⁴ Marik, P. et al. Cancer Care (Version 2.2). FLCCC Alliance, 2024. Chapter 1.

¹⁵ Christofferson, T. Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

¹⁶ Seyfried, T.N. Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. Chapter 17.

¹⁷ King, A. Interview with Unbekoming, “A Naturopathic Approach: How Metabolic Interventions Are Changing Cancer Outcomes,” October 2025. See also King, A. and Kuhan, H. Metabolic Drugs for Cancer. 2025.

¹⁸ McLelland, J. How to Starve Cancer...without starving yourself. Agenor Publishing, 2018.

¹⁹ Care Oncology Clinic, London. Referenced in McLelland, How to Starve Cancer.

²⁰ Marik, P. et al. Cancer Care (Version 2.2). FLCCC Alliance, 2024. Chapter 6: Repurposed Drugs.

²¹ King, A. and Kuhan, H. Metabolic Drugs for Cancer. 2025.

²² Winters, N. and Kelley, J.H. The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Chapter 2: Assessing Your Terrain.

²³ Turner, K.A. Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds. HarperOne, 2014.

²⁴ Cowan, T. Cancer and the New Biology of Water. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019.

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Further Reading and Resources

The Interview: Interview with Dr. Amanda King — A Naturopathic Approach: How Metabolic Interventions Are Changing Cancer Outcomes (Unbekoming, October 2025)

Where to Start Reading:

• Tripping over the Truth by Travis Christofferson — the most accessible introduction to the metabolic theory of cancer

• The Metabolic Approach to Cancer by Nasha Winters — the clinical framework and Terrain Ten assessment

• How to Starve Cancer by Jane McLelland — a stage 4 survivor’s practical guide to metabolic drug combinations

• Keto for Cancer by Miriam Kalamian — the definitive guide to implementing a therapeutic ketogenic diet

• Gut and Physiology Syndrome by Natasha Campbell-McBride — the gut repair protocol for devastated digestive systems

For the Full Science:

• Cancer as a Metabolic Disease by Thomas Seyfried

• Cancer Care (Version 2.2) by Paul Marik et al. (FLCCC Alliance)

• Metabolic Drugs for Cancer by Amanda King and Dr. Hariharan Kuhan