Cancer is a devastating disease that has claimed many lives, and pharmaceutical medicine is still no closer to an actual cure. This is why people are turning to alternative medicine in an attempt to save their loved ones and pets. One of these alternative treatments is a common, low-cost pet dewormer that has been shown to have surprising anti-cancer properties.
This dewormer, levamisole (commonly called Fenbendazole), is used to treat parasites in dogs and cats. But it has recently become the subject of controversy when posts claiming that it cures cancer in humans started to gain popularity on social media platforms, including Facebook and TikTok. The claims are based on the anecdotal account of Joe Tippens, who had advanced lung cancer and reported that his condition improved after he began taking Fenbendazole based on a veterinarian’s recommendation.
But medical experts say the claim is false. Levamisole has never been tested in humans for this use and there is no scientific evidence that it works as a cancer treatment.
A few years ago, a Mayo Clinic cancer researcher named William Moertel published some remarkable test results. His team had lowered the rate of recurrence and death from colon cancer by 41%, using a combination of two drugs — levamisole, which has been used for 30 years to rid farm animals of worms, and fluorouracil, an established but not particularly effective chemotherapy drug.
The researchers found that levamisole suppressed the growth of microtubules in human cancer cells by blocking an enzyme. These tubules are a structural building block of all cells and are vital to cell function, but they can be altered by certain mutations in tumors, making them grow out of control. This explains why a tumor can develop into a mass of cancerous tissue and why standard cancer medications usually don’t work on these types of tumors. The researchers also found that combining levamisole with sorafenib, a standard treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), was even more effective at killing HCC-causing liver tissue engrafted into experimental mice. dewormer for cancer