Janne Newdick talks about how vitimin C has help her recovery.
Janne Newdick talks about how vitimin C has help her recovery.
A well-known Tauranga natural health practitioner spoke out recently urging doctors to prescribe intravenous vitamin C to cancer patients, in addition to conventional medications. Reporter Juliet Rowan caught up with Tauranga’s Janne Newdick to hear her story.
Personal story
Janne Newdick celebrated her 60th birthday last week with a flight to Australia and dinner with her children at Jupiters casino on the Gold Coast.
It was a trip she could not have contemplated in the past because Janne was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006 and was fearful of going far from her doctors.
But this year, something remarkable has happened. For the first time in eight years, Janne's tumour has shrunk.
And what is perhaps more remarkable is the change in the tumour's size has coincided with the Tauranga woman trying a new treatment for the first time.
Janne now has weekly doses of intravenous high-dose vitamin C on top of her usual regimen of cancer drugs, natural foods and supplements prescribed by a team of doctors.
The tumour presses on the speech centre of her brain, causing a severe slur and epilepsy, but since beginning the 25g vitamin C drips, Janne says she is talking better and no longer has headaches.
She has decreased some of her epilepsy medication with her GP's knowledge and has been able to return to part-time work at a real estate office.
"I'm into intravenous vitamin C big-time because it helps me so much," Janne says in an interview at her Welcome Bay home.
Communicating through a combination of speech and written words, she tells Bay of Plenty Times: "I can get up and do things. I go to work one day a week. Going to work helps me with getting back my..." - she pauses to write and underline a word - " ... confidence".
Her grandson, who lives with her, says Janne's energy levels have increased considerably since she started intravenous vitamin C.
"She used to take two or three naps a day," the 23-year-old says. "Sometimes she's not even sleeping now during the day. It's made a big difference."
Janne's tumour is on the left side of her brain, and although she has had several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and three operations to mitigate its effects, it is too risky to remove.
By the end of last year, it had worsened from a two to a three on a cancer scale, for which four is the most severe grade.
"I couldn't drive. I couldn't talk. I couldn't text," Janne says. "My world was not nice."
After she began the high-dose vitamin C infusions in February, she noticed her headaches disappear and her energy increase.
Janne pays $95 a week for the treatment, which takes about an hour to administer.
She says a scan taken before she began intravenous vitamin C and another a few months later showed shrinkage of the tumour. She had no chemotherapy in the intervening period.
Going public
Janne wanted to share her experience after reading an article in The Bay of Plenty Times featuring natural health consultant Janice Priest, who is urging more doctors to prescribe intravenous vitamin C to cancer patients.
Medsafe registered intravenous vitamin C as a drug in 2010 and doctors must be licensed to administer the treatment. Currently, no doctor in Tauranga is licensed and cancer patients wanting intravenous vitamin C are referred to practitioners in Hamilton and Auckland.
A recent story on TVNZ's Sunday programme featured a Northland police officer who was diagnosed with terminal leukemia but is now in remission after having intravenous vitamin C and radically altering his diet.
Now, Janne wants to add her voice to calls for the treatment to be routinely prescribed by doctors because she says she was unaware of it until informed by Janice Priest, who she sees as a patient.
Janice has spent decades working with cancer sufferers.
She says the positive effects of intravenous vitamin C have been well documented in international studies and New Zealand's medical fraternity contravenes the Health and Disability Act by not prescribing the treatment as a matter of course.
Tauranga's Pink Walk. The annual walk raises money and awareness of breast cancer. Photo / Andrew Warner
"Any known registered drug that helps a patient should be given. It's really painful watching people die when they can be given something that helps." She says all registered drugs have to go through rigid research in order to be considered a drug for dispensing.
"This means that intravenous vitamin C has already been proven as a beneficial therapy by our very own medical regulators."
One Tauranga clinic, Godfrey Medical, is hoping to get licensed to administer intravenous vitamin C.
Clinic manager Truly Godfrey says at present the clinic can advise people about the treatment and refer them to authorised clinics out of town.
She says many GPs are reluctant to prescribe intravenous vitamin C because it sits outside standard treatments approved by DHBs and presents a logistical challenge, in that it has to be imported from overseas and requires a dedicated room where patients can sit for up to an hour-and-a-half while the drips are given.
"You've got to believe in it," Truly says.
Her father, retired GP Mike Godfrey, is a staunch advocate of intravenous vitamin C.
He began using it for cancer patients in the 1980s and says he administered more than 60,000 treatments in his career.
He told the Bay of Plenty Times vitamin C and especially high-dose vitamin C had the ability to improve patient well-being and extend life beyond specialists' forecasts.
"Intravenous vitamin C is not a cure-all, but it is a major player than can slow down and sometimes stop cancer cells from multiplying."
Dr Godfrey says most people are vitamin C deficient,. Deficiencies in cancer patients are particularly bad, he says, and everyone with cancer should be given intravenous vitamin C in outpatient departments.
"If New Zealand oncologists were to combine vitamin C with standard treatments, they would find that not only did their patients sail through with much reduced side-effects but that more would survive."
At the moment, intravenous vitamin C is not routinely given to cancer patients in hospitals, and the Bay of Plenty District Health Board does not offer it as a treatment.
• When taken by intravenous infusion, vitamin C can reach much higher levels in the blood than when taken by mouth. • Studies suggest these higher levels of vitamin C may cause the death of cancer cells in the laboratory. • High-dose vitamin C has been studied as a treatment for cancer patients since the 1970s.
