Michael Wright:  

In my past posts here I have urged cancer patients to consider contacting Dr Rigdon Lentz, MD in Prien am Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany and seek out his apheresis treatment prior to allowing their US doctors to treat their cancers with radiation and chemo. Dr. Lentz, a US born and trained physician, is a former US Naval Surgical unit commander and a respected immunologist who had an astounding 75% success rate with patients who had healthy immune systems, (that is, were naive to chemo and radiation treatments). That is the lesson I learned too late to save my wife's life. She died 19 July 2014, only 55 years of age and otherwise in perfect health. My biggest regret is that we blindly, stupidly followed our local oncologist's advise and allowed them to treat her with chemo drugs and radiation for a year. The radiation helped a little. The chemo only resulted in the cancer blowing up and spreading like wild fire. Chemo killed her quicker than the cancer would have had we left it untreated, and what is worse, it made her ineligible for Dr. Lentz to treat successfully. He only had about a 25% success rate with patients treated with chemo and radiation first. You had to have a normally healthy immune system to be able to benefit from his immunoaphoresis treatments. This is an update on the status of Dr. Lentz's practice in Bavaria, Germany. Basically, I am sad to report that Dr. Lentz's practice became a victim of the COVID pandemic and of his age. He is 78 this year and at the end of 2019 he was faced with mounting losses as patients stayed away and travel restrictions clamped down on those who would have taken the chance of catching COVID in order to access his treatment. Upon realizing the gravity of the spreading COVID virus, especially to his type of patient, he made the painful decision to discontinue operations, file a world wide patent on his equipment designs and treatment procedures (See patent WO2019 / 053031A1) and retire back to his home in Tennessee, USA. Although he has closed his practice and retired, his patent stands ready for someone else to take up the treatment approach he invented. To date, no one has approached him about doing that in any meaningful way. We are left only with his ideas about how to beat cancer at this point. If you care to know more about those ideas I would refer you to a pair of You-Tube videos he produced that demonstrates the medical basis for his treatment ideas. You can find them by searching for "Dr Rigdon Lentz onco apheresis video" The success of Dr. Lentz's procedure depends on your own immune system's natural ability to find and destroy the cancer cells. Therefore, you have to have an immune system capable of a normal response to foreign proteins before it works. What his procedure does is reduce the cancer cell's ability to mask its presence by removing the cloud of soluble tumor necrosis factor receptors (sTNFRs) a cancer cell produces in its immediate microlocation. The concentration of sTNFRs in your blood and interstitial fluids are reduced through the apheresis process so that your normal immune cells can find the tumor and are not overwhelmed by high concentrations of sTNFRs in the area of the cancer cell. As a result of a number of parallel scientific developments, the sophistication of his equipment took dramatic leaps between 2013 and 2019, greatly increasing the patient comfort during the apheresis process. However the high cost of that instrumentation development was also a factor that led to the closure of the practice. It became clear that the pandemic years were not going to provide adequate "catch up" funds to create a reasonable return rate on the investment in instrument improvement. To persist in the practice at that point would have led to eventual bankruptcy before any turn-around in the arch of COVID infection rates subsided. As an analytical biochemistry scientist, this immunoapheresis procedure, now patented by Dr. Lentz, is the only cancer treatment protocol I have seen which makes complete sense to me from a metabolic and technical feasibility point of view. I fully subscribe to Dr. Lentz's view that it makes no sense in treating cancers to try to kill the cancer before killing the patient with chemo and radiation nor does it make any sense to give a patient immuno-boosting drugs if their immune system is normally functioning, nor is it a high probability of success approach to giving drugs that are specific for cancer genetic flaws when so few cancers actually display such flaws. What does make sense is an approach that relies on normal immune system function by reducing the small molecule sTNFRs concentrations in a patient's blood and interstitial fluid with apheresis procedures so that the immune system can do its normal job unimpeded by the cancer cell's ability to mask its position by shedding sTNFR proteins in high concentration. Wish I'd known this when my wife was first diagnosed with inoperable non-small cell lung cancer. Still, too little knowledge & to0 late awareness for my Jeannie. Jeannie and I were married 28 years and one day. She was my business partner and best friend. We owned & operated an analytical laboratory and consulting business based in Texas. We were what the Agrochemical industry identifies as "contract regulatory research chemists". We were together 24/7 and specialized in conducting food safety and pesticide residue evaluation studies in raw agricultural products, processed food, animal feed, meat, milk, eggs, water and soil. The data from our studies have been used for dietary exposure risk assessments by regulatory agencies, such as EPA, from around the world. Something different every day and a good woman with whom to share it. What more could a lucky guy have ever asked for. Our glory days are gone and in the past now. Jeannie died the day following our 28th wedding anniversary, at 2 p.m. on the 19th of July 2014 after an 11 day stay as an in-patient at Hospice Brazos Valley, Bryan, TX. The memorial service was at Holy Cross Lutheran church in College Station Texas on 23rd of July 2014. A second memorial service was held 12 Aug 2014 at her home church, St John's Lutheran in Westboro, MO where most of her childhood friends and family still live. Most of the immediate family tended to Jeannie during her hospice stay, they all attended the service in College Station and the service in Westboro, MO. In lieu of flowers we are asking that anyone moved to make a memorial gesture, please make a donation to Hospice Brazos Valley, 502 W. 26th St, Bryan, Texas 77803. Please do so in memory of Jeannie K. Wright. This is the oldest and only hospice in the Brazos Valley area of Texas with an in-patient facility capable of handling the difficult lung cancer patients and others with acute respiratory problems who are in the terminal stage of their disease. The doctors, staff and volunteers are the very best and deserve far more support than they are getting. As part of my grieving process I intend to volunteer there as soon as and for as long as I am able. In previous posts I have recounted our family's medical odyssey with my wife's inoperable, non-smokers, non-small cell, stage IV lung cancer with which she was diagnosed 17 Feb 2013. By July 2013 she was recovered sufficiently from the simultaneous radiation/chemo treatment side-effects (resulting pneumonia and the nagging cough) that the Dr.s felt it was time to do another CT scan to see how they did in treating "Alice", as my wife called the golf ball sized tumor growing around her aorta in the medial hilar region of her right lung. The July 2013 contrast CT scan confirm that the inoperable tumor that had her aorta in its grip was less than half the original size and there were no signs of mediastinal or hilar lymphadenopathy present. However there was a new area of "ground-glass opacity" in the medial and lateral aspect of the right lung that could have been residual effects of radiation induced edema and resulting pneumonia or it could have been signs that the carcinoma had begun to metastasize to those regions of her lung. So things looked much improved over what we saw in the initial February 2013 CT and PET scans. The doctors wanted to wait until early October, 2013 to do another contrast CT scan to determine if things were the same, clearing up or changing in some other manner. So we waited until late October 2013 to get the CT scan done and because Jeannie had recently had some unexplained soreness in her right hip, we also did a bone scan. 28 Oct 2013 we sat down with her oncology team and discussed the results of those follow-up scans. The news was not what we had hoped to hear. Alice probably didn't live in her right lung anymore, but before she died she had babies; lots of babies. There were, at that time, a number of small 1/4 inch spots in both lungs that were probably cancerous and the cancer had also very clearly metastasized to her right ilium. On the basis of the Oct 2013 scans, my wife was given a life expectancy of from 6 to 12 months. We had high hopes in July, 2013 that we had discovered her lung tumor and gotten into treatment in time to save her life....Expand for more