PROSTATE CANCER FOR BEGINNERS
by William Thomas
The two most startling announcements any man can hear are: “I’m pregnant” and “You’ve got cancer.” Both declarations are life-altering. In very different ways.
Implicated in both events, in late February 2025 my prostate began acting out. Cunningly positioned to obstruct male plumbing, this walnut-size gland typically swells with age. Now, as early spring dipped into summer, it was jerking me awake every two to three hours throughout the night to empty my truncated bladder. And nearly as often during the day.
My doctor agreed that chronic sleep deprivation is a real disability. Happily, this combined male milestone and millstone is usually benign and easily treatable. So I was more annoyed than concerned when I was called back to the clinic on May 16 to review my latest blood test.
“Your PSA is 86,” I was informed.
I had never heard of prostate-specific antigens. “Is that high or low?” I inquired. Turns out, the normal PSA range for men my age is 4. Sirens shriek at 6.5.
Her next words struck like a thunderclap: “You most likely have cancer.”
BAM! Just like that. Forget “most likely”. I knew that look. You’re screwed.
As anyone might expect from a former Pacific-circling sailing master, solo mountain backpacker and longtime veteran of the eco wars, my initial reaction to this show-stopping bulletin was to remain outwardly calm. Even as every atom of my being screamed, Holy crap!
PASSING LANE
Having survived a smorgasbord of close calls during a lifetime of adventure and activism, I was on intimate terms with my own mortality. Dying did not concern me as much as the manner of my passing.
Should I opt for a medically-assisted demise and sign up for the government-sponsored MAID services that account for 1 in 20 Canadian deaths? Reserve a nearby crematorium, as some local residents were doing? Or buy an “eco-friendly” mushroom burial suit to render my decomposing remains nontoxic?
With 76 men in Canada diagnosed with prostate cancer every day — and North American cancers currently killing 1 in 3 women and 1 in 2 men — I saw that this new struggle would challenge me spiritually and mentally, as well as metabolically. At age 76, could I take on one more fight?
I needed more information. After 60 years committing journalism — including the first fully documented book on Gulf War Illness — I would now be betting my life on my research.
I booted up…
GOOD READS
We know quite a lot about cancer, including the “most commonly diagnosed malignancy” in 112 countries. “Fortunately, most prostate cancers tend to grow slowly and are low-grade with relatively low risk and limited aggressiveness,” PubMed soothed. “When confined to the prostate, the disease is considered localized and potentially curable.”
The Canadian Cancer Society pegged the 5-year average survival for prostate cancer at 91%. Ditto in the USA.
All right!
Then I struck the mother lode. Assembled by an alliance of physicians dedicated to “honest medicine” and ranking #118 out of more than 50,000 Cancer Books on Amazon, I downloaded Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer — and started highlighting diagrams showing…
... How a rogue insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1) pathway triggers the AKT pathway, “resulting in cell growth, proliferation, and inhibition” of the body’s natural apoptosis (elimination of damaged cells).
... How tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) play a major role in tumor progression and metastases by suppressing T cells, transporting tumor cells into blood and lymph, and promoting angiogenesis.
Wait. “Angio” who?
After assassinating tumor-busting T cells, in a process called angiogenesis these same turncoat Treg cells rapidly grow networks of capillaries to reroute sugar-producing carbohydrates — as well as the amino acid, glutamine — into voracious tumors.
Were these key fuels and custom-built pathways cancer’s vulnerability? Could invasive tumors be corralled and even forced into retreat if their signals were jammed and their supply lines interdicted?
SWEET DEBACLE
Don’t even think about a nutritional response, cancer industry leader, the MD Anderson Center, declared: “Does sugar make cancer spread? No.”
Hold on. Back in 2016, after its researchers traced how cancer cells produce their own insulin receptors in order to spread, MD Anderson identified the typical high sugar Western diet as a major cancer risk factor.
Sugars produce insulin, which causes inflammation — “a hallmark of cancer initiation and progression.”
“What has been found is a strong association between sugar and cancer,” FOX News confirmed. While the primary culprit is high fructose corn syrup, “white death” is often disguised in food labels as fructose, lactose, sucrose, maltose, glucose, and dextrose.
No wonder the Cancer Research UK-sponsored STAMPEDE clinical trials treated nearly 12,000 advanced prostate cancer patients with the diabetes drug metformin “on the premise that inhibiting sugar might help slow cancer cell production.”
In 2017, a headlined a nine-year study found that “Sugar makes cancerous tumours more aggressive.” According to Prof. Johan Thevelein, “the hyperactive sugar consumption of cancerous cells leads to a vicious cycle of continued stimulation of cancer development and growth.”
Findings like this, predicted The Independent, “will have a major impact on the diets of cancer patients.”
DADDY WARBURG
“Cancer cells rewire their metabolism to promote growth, survival, proliferation, and long-term maintenance. The common feature of this altered metabolism is increased glucose uptake and fermentation of glucose to lactate,” PubMed reported in 2017, after taking another look at the pioneering work of Nobel-winning Otto Heinrich Warburg.
Despite being “documented for over 90 years and extensively studied” over the past decade, the “Warburg Effect” of glucose and glutamine fermentation in rapidly dividing tumors continues to be largely ignored by a medical mafia pushing profitable “scorched flesh” radiation, chemo and surgical treatments.
Problem is: “Radiation frees up massive amounts of glucose, as well as the amino acid, glutamine as the body's threat response, contributing to the deaths of those patients” within three years, Dr. Thomas Seyfried PhD pointed out. “In the United states we have 1,700 people a day dying from cancer; 70 people an hour. And 50% of people dying from cancer are dying from the toxic treatments used to manage the cancer!”
MY FRIEND JOHN
I found Cancer Care’s arguments and Seyfried’s real-world results treating cancer as a metabolic disease convincing. Especially when an Oregonian pal about my age went full keto after being awarded a fatal Stage 4 prostate cancer verdict with a PSA reading “in the thousands”.
Supported by his family, testosterone blockers and regular oxygenation sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, John embarked on a 12-month, zero-sugar, zero-carb diet. He also fasted for 24 hours every week.
When we recently met for lunch in the cove, I was shocked by John’s appearance. His outlook and energy were robust. And his PSA was “0”.
SPOILER ALERT
But he could not afford much slack. Cancer stem cells (CSC) observed in a wide range of malignancies — including prostate cancers — are masters of self-renewal and avoiding apoptosis ambushes. As Cancer Care commented, the propensity of cancerous stem cells to adopt cellular disguises was likely “responsible for tumor progression, metastasis, resistance to therapy, and relapse.”
Relapse is a huge, dispiriting and often lethal outcome of initially promising therapies. When duck-and-cover stem cells re-emerge into a cancer-promoting environment,“CSCs will rapidly proliferate to reactivate the formation and growth of tumors.”
GINGER COOKIES
Was I prepared to make a lifelong commitment to fasting and carbohydrate restriction? Saying sayonara to ginger cookies, sandwiches and my annual slice of key lime pie at the Fall Fair seemed brutal. But feeding traitorous cells replicating in my lower chakra was even less appealing.
In my own fight to the death, I chose intermittent fasting up to 16 hours daily as the single most effective method to activate autophagy's cleanup of cancer cells knocked out by targeted supplementation and two repurposed medications.
But I was still flying blind into this invisible storm. Only a biopsy and bone scan could tell how far cancer had progressed in a body that was no longer my own. But even though my urologist’s hospital requisitions were marked URGENT, the timing was terrible for someone not owned by a car who resides on an island mobbed by tourists every summer. Finding someone on short notice willing to skip their own pressing commitments and get up at 6:30 to brave long ferry lineups while driving me across two islands into town — and back — proved problematic.
“INCURABLE”
“Let food be thy medicine,” Hippocrates proclaimed 2400 years ago. But with four years of prescription-pushing medical schooling providing just one or two days of nutritional instruction, I’d never heard a medical doctor mention nutrition as the foundation of health and healing.
(Which might explain why, during a seven day intermission to address a near fatal blood infection from a contaminated catheter, every hospital meal featured generous helpings of cancer-boosting carbohydrates and sugar!)
Back in my blessed backyard, I luxuriated in the best medicine of all: bare feet in soft grass… the warm caress of a summer breeze off the nearby Salish Sea… passing hawks and clouds.
In August 2025, a whole body bone scan showed “metastatic disease” in my pelvis, backbone, and skull. Cancer was confirmed. And it was on the move.
According to PubMed, “Prostate cancer is considered incurable if it has spread beyond your pelvis.”
The numbers showed that I would not be seeing my 110th birthday. Or even survive the next few years. But people are more complicated than statistics. In addition to many online accounts by cancer survivors, I’d met a New Zealander using a blender to customize his daily prostate cancer response. Ten years later, that Kiwi is still very much alive.
TRY THIS
Reaching for more Omega-3 oil, by late August I was augmenting protein-fortified organic salads with bountiful fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, garlic, basil and parsley harvested from the overflowing 63 square-foot raised bed garden right outside my kitchen door.
This bounty was bolstered by handfuls of cancer-clobbering nutraceuticals. That’s right. Clinical studies by institutions as prestigious as Johns Hopkins and the British Medical Journal were now extolling once-demonized dietary supplements combined with a keto diet to degrade wily tumors.
Even better, cancer-suppressing nanocurcumin, Vitamin D, quercetin, berberine, bromelain, pterostilbene, matcha, kombucha, dandelion root, propolis, artemisia, CBD oil and other traditional medicines can be supercharged by two widely-used anti-parasite medications — Ivermectin and Fenbendazole — shutting down the same cancer pathways.
As one MD put it: “The holy grail turbo cancer treatment may just be the synergistic combination therapy of Fenbendazole AND Ivermectin.”
Multiple studies confirmed the effectiveness of non-toxic Ivermectin and Fenbedazole in disrupting critical cancer nodes. Particularly PAK1, “key regulator of cancer formation, development, and invasion.”
Pharmacological Research further noted how “Ivermectin effectively suppresses the proliferation and metastasis of cancer cells and promotes cancer cell death at doses that are nontoxic to normal cells.”
As long as the daily dosage is sufficient, Ivermectin “has powerful antitumor effects, including the inhibition of proliferation, metastasis, and angiogenic activity, in a variety of cancer cells.” (Angiogenic refers to the exponential proliferation of new blood vessels needed to fuel ravenous cancer cells.)
Besides “inhibiting tumor stem cells,” Nobel-winning Ivermectin also “promotes programmed cancer cell death” (apoptosis), “autophagy” (cellular debris cleanup) and “pyroptosis” (inflammation). Inflammation is a key component of all disease.
Also non-toxic at high doses, the other half of this cancer-clobbering duo — Fenbendazole — “exhibits at least 12 anti-cancer mechanisms.” Including “inhibition of glucose metabolism.”
How cool is that?
Not cool enough, apparently, for a government “regulators” purchased by Big Pharma. Though I managed to get an MD’s prescription for Ivermectin, local pharmacies fearful of government reprisals refused to fill that doctor’s order!
I chose my life over Big Pharma profits. Alert for scammers, I checked out an online Canadian source for IVM and Fenben. But before you hit any “buy” buttons…
Read This Disclaimer:
None of this information is intended to diagnose or treat any ailment, nor to replace your own physician. Since I am not a medical doctor, I can only report my findings. Everyone’s situation is unique. Please do your own research, collaborate with knowledgeable medical professionals, and take responsibility for your own health decisions.
(And don’t forget to take time off from nutraceuticals and redirected drugs to reset your metabolism and give natural autophagy regular opportunities to dispose of all those destroyed cancer cells.)
EMBRACING MY FATE
Regarding my spiritual health, I continue to frequently express gratitude at every opportunity. I’m also quick to stop the negative tapes playing doom loops in my head. Especially after learning of my heart’s continuing deterioration following two heart attacks just before Covid. Taking time to focus on each breath helps keep this old seadog on an even keel.
In the meantime, to help “remember” what’s really going on, I’m also revisiting my Buddhist books by such helpful guides as Robert Wright, B Alan Walker, David Loy, Stephen Batchelor and Brad Warner — while delving deeper into Walsh’s provocative Complete Conversation’s with God, providentially gifted to me by a fellow sailor months before my diagnosis. Having once been lucky enough to find myself hovering above my supine body, I know that “death” is a transitional event akin to taking off a too-tight pair of shoes. Though I'm in no hurry, it will be interesting finding out what’s on the other side of the veil separating our tenuous lives from whatever comes next.
Perhaps I'll post a blog!
If you or someone you know has received a cancer diagnosis, remember three things:
1. Taking action is the best antidote to fear and despair.
2. It’s not over, even when it’s over.
3. Always follow the light.
William Thomas
Sept. 21, 2025
Photo Credits:
Homepage: Prostate cancer cells
1. Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer
2. Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer
3. Otto Warburg -YouTube
4. Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine -millionfacts.co.uk
5. My 13-foot raised bed garden of abundance -Will Thomas photo
6. Harvested tomatoes storage preparation -Will Thomas photo
7. PubMed logo -zhuanlan.zhihu.com
8. Proven cancer interventions published by FLCCC's "honest physicians"
9. Moments before sighting Ua Huka after 28 days at sea, the author cools off -Thea Mortell photo