On Thanksgiving Day, while you were feasting and thinking about the election, a great doctor, Donato Perez Garcia y Bellon, MD, ("Donato 2") died in his home in Mexico City, at age 70, quietly, unexpectedly, in obscurity. While tragic for his family, his wife, and two young children, this was an even bigger tragedy for the world. You never heard of him, but he was a living treasure of humanity. You never knew that billions of people could benefit from the knowledge that he passed on, and that millions could suffer for lack of the details we let him die with.

On that day, I was chatting by computer with his son, Donato Perez Garcia, MD ("Donato 3"), when he got the phone call from his father’s wife, crying. The shocking message appeared on my screen: his father, weak from a three-day illness, was no longer breathing. "No!!", I prayed quietly, "please don’t let this happen."
But it did.

You never knew that Donato 2 was the master of insulin potentiation therapy (IPT), a medical procedure that his father Donato Perez Garcia, MD ("Donato 1") discovered in 1926. IPT is a non-diabetic use of the hormone insulin to induce a brief pulse of mild hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which somehow boosts effectiveness of regular drugs, transports them better into cells and parts of the body that are normally inaccessible, and has other beneficial effects. IPT is not a magic bullet, but a magic gun. In IPT, normal drugs act like super drugs, in smaller doses, with reduced toxicity. 75 years after its discovery, IPT is still a radical new idea. I call it "the second discovery of insulin".

You never knew that, with IPT, many cancers have been treated without surgery or radiation, getting better and faster results, and often complete remissions, using regular chemotherapy drugs in 1/10 the normal dose, and with no side effects. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and even pancreatic cancer and melanoma have been treated without surgery or side effects, using this simple modification of chemotherapy.

You never knew that, with IPT, arthritis symptoms have routinely gone away after only two or three treatments, with relief lasting five to seven years.

You never knew that, with IPT, antibiotics and antiviral drugs become so effective and are so well delivered into cells, and into sequestered tissues like the brain, that infectious diseases have responded with unprecedented rapidity and completeness. Complete remissions of herpes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS have been obtained. Perhaps IPT could offer better treatment of other infectious scourges in both rich and poor countries: malaria; tuberculosis; Lyme disease; mycobacteria in lungs; and hidden infections that may be the real cause of heart disease, mental illness, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and obesity. IPT may also be an answer to the emerging peril of multiple drug resistance.

You never knew that, with IPT and penicillin, Donato 1 was able to completely heal ulcers non-surgically in the late 1940s, 47 years before general recognition that they are caused by H. pylori infection. Antibiotic treatment for ulcers became standard in 1997; it might work better and faster with IPT. With IPT, Donato 1 was even able to completely heal pyloric stenosis (ulcer-caused stricture of the stomach’s exit), for which surgery is still the only standard treatment. He was ahead of his time, and even ahead of our time.

You never knew that with IPT, Donato 1 and Donato 2 were able to quickly reverse the paralysis of polio in children in the 1950s. (This could come in handy if polio returns.) And you never knew that another IPT doctor reported incredibly rapid reversal of stroke paralysis. Could IPT be a simple and inexpensive way to medically proliferate stem cells in the nervous system, perhaps a part of the cure for spinal cord injuries that Christopher Reeve is seeking?

You never knew that, with IPT, remarkable rapid results have also been reported in treatment of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. IPT appears to offer better patient outcomes, faster, safer, at lower cost, over a broad spectrum of human illnesses.

You never knew. But why? Because, despite the efforts of Donato 1, Donato 2, and the three doctors he taught, no one has listened. They published books and papers reporting their results. Donato 1 toured the US several times, even appearing in Time Magazine in 1944, like a time traveler from the 21^st century whose message was lost in the tumult of World War II. Donato 2 toured the world and corresponded with doctors, researchers, and drug companies, to no avail. Jean-Claude Paquette, in Quebec, was censured by his peers. SGA, MD, a Chicago area physician, has published numerous papers about IPT, some with Donatos 2 and 3. The IPT doctors have presented their best cancer cases to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) twice, in 1997 and on September 18 this year, but so far without tangible response. Nothing.

I have been involved with IPT for 14 years, and have experienced similar difficulties first hand. In my efforts to help get IPT researched and adopted, and to get the Drs. Perez Garcia invited to the US to teach and practice, I have approached many people and organizations about IPT. And I have been rejected, ignored, sometimes sneered at, by billionaires, millionaires, foundations, government and university officials, researchers, doctors, and drug companies.

If they respond at all, it is usually with the same 15 or 20 arguments: if it were real, I would have heard about it by now (not necessarily); if it were real, someone else would have done something with it (they haven’t); there are no controlled clinical studies cited (no, because they haven’t been done or funded yet); it is not credible because it works for too many different things (is that a problem?); giving insulin to non-diabetics might be dangerous (not in 135 doctor-years of safe IPT experience); it could be just a placebo (unlikely, but if so it’s a great one, worth studying); it is "too far out of the box", and "coming from left field" (so what, if it works?); you can’t trust medicine coming from Mexico (nonsense!); and so forth.

If and when IPT is validated, it will confirm that a 75-year holocaust of omission has been going on. Unnecessary surgery and radiation treatments, unnecessarily toxic chemotherapy treatments (hair loss, nausea, immune compromise), slow and ineffective treatment of arthritis and infectious diseases, and more. Unimaginable suffering and death, often at the hands of well-meaning physicians, one patient at a time. Every one of us, among our families and friends, has sustained tremendous losses in this hidden holocaust.

You never knew about IPT because all of us involved with IPT have run into pervasive arrogance, skepticism, and both types of ignorance (passive, from lack of exposure, and active, from turning away) among doctors, researchers, and people in high places. It appears that the people we count on to search the world for things like IPT, study them, and make them available, have let us down. Drug companies have shunned IPT, perhaps because lower drug doses with IPT could disrupt their markets. The mammoth NIH has so far done nothing about IPT, either scientifically or clinically. These huge organizations have brought us many wonderful things. But IPT, with its great promise, has fallen completely through their filters, for three generations. This is our tragic loss.

That is why I am turning to the private sector, seeking the right philanthropists to lead a broad nonprofit initiative to turn the tide for IPT research and implementation.

IPT, invented in 1926 and ignored for 75 years, could become a cornerstone of 21^st century medicine. Fortunately, the core of Donato 2’s IPT knowledge has been preserved, enough for us to eventually reconstruct or rediscover the details that he took with him in death. The IPT knowledge he left now resides in his papers (I have put many of them on a large IPT website, IPTQ.org), and in the minds and practices of Donato 3 and the eight doctors (five in the US) that he has trained. Today, while we still wait for IPT research to begin, any doctor can learn IPT in a three-day seminar with Donato 3, and can legally practice this simple technique now, since it is merely an unlabeled use of existing approved drugs.

You never knew about IPT, and now its master, Donato 2, is gone. How many other great medical discoveries have been similarly ignored or lost? How can we avoid other tragic delays and hidden holocausts like this one? How can we ensure that all avenues are explored to bring the best of medicine to the people of this world?