Patient Zero Comes Back From Stage Four Cancer: Was It Ivermectin?

Guest Post by Mary Beth Pfeiffer

After ten rounds of radiation and six of chemotherapy, Paul Mann, fifty-five years old, wanted to know his chances. “You’re squeaking by day to day,” his doctor told him. It had been five months since his diagnosis. He was referred to a hospice service and seen by a minister.

Then something happened of which most end-of-the-line cancer patients can only dream.

Mann, a government intelligence analyst from Fenton, Missouri, received a call from a doctor he had heard about from a friend; the doctor had treated breast cancer for thirty years. They talked for three hours in calls that became a Tuesday routine. Early on, a drug named ivermectin came up. It was approved, had few side effects, and had been shown in laboratory and animal studies to kill several kinds of cancer cells.

Mann got some of it himself, making an eight-hour round-trip drive to Tennessee, the only state where ivermectin can be bought over-the-counter. He took it every day. And two months later, this man with almost no chance of survival was in remission.

“In Paul Mann’s case, the response to treatment after two months of ivermectin was nothing less than astonishing,” said Mann’s guardian angel, Dr. Kathleen Ruddy, a retired cancer surgeon and author of a book on breast cancer. “Off the charts astonishing.”

Mann may someday be called Patient Zero in a first-of-its-kind study, announced by the FLCCC Alliance at its conference today, to see if old drugs like ivermectin work for cancer. Dr. Paul Marik, FLCCC chief scientific officer, and Dr. Ruddy, who was trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will become partners in an “observational study” involving 500 patients and five clinics nationwide. The goal will be to learn if repurposed drugs improve five-year survival rates for several types of cancer, including breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal, an FLCCC press release states.

Dr. Ruddy did not treat Mann but rather talked a dying man through his options. In the same manner, patients in the new study will choose which FDA-approved drugs—like ivermectin, mebendazole, nitazoxanide and others—they want to use to treat their cancers, either along with or instead of traditional therapies. Their progress will be overseen and tracked by clinicians who will share anonymous patient information across sites in a collaboration to see what works.

Of prime importance, “If you have a look at the list of drugs, they are completely safe and devoid of significant side effects,” said Dr. Marik, who wrote a book on repurposing drugs for cancer. “That’s what oncologists don’t like.”

Indeed, the idea to challenge American cancer care with off-the-shelf drugs is, indisputably, a daring undertaking. That’s just one reason why it will be performed “methodically, impartially, and according to the highest standards of medical research,” Dr. Ruddy said.

“We must make sure this is absolutely above board because people are going to go after us furiously,” Dr. Marik told me.

‘Not dying now’

Mann told his story today at the sold-out FLCCC conference in Phoenix; before going public, he and Dr. Ruddy shared it with me.

When Paul Mann was diagnosed in June of 2022, his chest, abdomen, and pelvic region were riddled with tumors. The cancer had invaded his spine and sternum; it was in his ribs and shoulders. His PSA level, the prime indicator of prostate cancer—where the cancer began—was “off the charts,” said Ruddy, who trained at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and cared for 10,000 breast cancer patients.

Here are some of the things Mann recalls doctors telling him during his four months of traditional care:

“You are completely full of cancer; you are well beyond any kind of surgery.”

“There’s no cure. We’re just trying to prolong things as much as we can.”

“We’ve done the best we can. That’s kind of all there is that can be done.”

At one point, Mann was hospitalized for more than a month for chemotherapy complications and radiation esophagitis, his timeline shows. At the end of treatment in October 2022, he could only say that radiation had eased the debilitating pain in his right pelvis and chemotherapy had resolved the cancer in his skull.

That was when Mann got the call from Ruddy. A month later, he started ivermectin. But he took other things too: ground flax seed to reduce tumor-feeding testosterone; chaga mushroom powder and antioxidant-rich soursop extract; high-dose vitamin D and zinc. He stopped eating sugar.

“He was dying, and the man’s not dying now,” said Dr. Ruddy. “He goes out and dances three times a week.”

His current PSA level is so low that Ruddy said it indicates “complete biochemical remission.” The tumors disappeared and cancer in other parts of his body appear to have stopped growing. “His clinical remission over the past year has also been remarkable—very close to a ‘complete clinical remission’ at this point in time.”

Having run five marathons and many more half marathons, Mann was strong and ready for the fight of his life. He is happy to be alive, but the experience has left him “kind of just numb and shell-shocked.”

“People know cancer is bad,” Mann told me. “People know chemo makes you throw up. They don’t know about the cold table you lay on in the radiation treatment room.  Or how lonely it is at 3 a.m. in a hospital room when you’re so cold you can’t sleep.”

No miracles promised

Prompted by her experience with Mann, Ruddy launched a small study in which, over the last year, she monitored cancer patients treated by other doctors. The patients, like Mann, took repurposed drugs, made lifestyle and diet changes, and often also took traditional cancer therapies. “I’ve seen truly astonishing results, not in every case but in a sufficient number of cases,” she said in the press release.

Her project is not about a miracle cure. Rather, it hopes to offer a new model for cancer remission that is affordable, readily available, and has few of the devastating side effects known to many chemotherapy patients. On cost: I recently checked with an international distributor of ivermectin, which many doctors used effectively against Covid-19. The price was 25 cents per 12 milligram pill, not including $35 for shipping.

Big Pharma will not like this movement, which is a problem in itself.

So is ivermectin’s false reputation—honed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a way to usher in Covid vaccines—as harmful “horse paste.” Mann didn’t buy it. “IVM was really raked over the coals and given a bad name,” he said. “I believed the good things about ivermectin,” including that its developers won the Nobel Prize in 2015 and that it effectively treated Covid-19. Beyond that, the scientific literature is rife with studies of common, old drugs—ivermectin, mebendazole, fenbendazole, and more—that killed cancer cells or otherwise facilitated the process. 

Ruddy’s study is overseen by an ethics board that helps guide the project’s goals of patient safety, scientific rigor, independent statistical analysis, and eventual peer review. In looking for improved survival rates compared to historical controls, the study will also attempt to tease out the role of other factors—for example the menu of supplements Mann took.

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