This is a story about innovation, technology, bioelectricity, cancer and caution.
It is a carefully worded story because, unless you’re Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline, placing the two C words, “cancer” and “cure” together in the same sentence is a perilous thing to do in Western society. It gets alternative medical clinics and alternative health magazines shut down, and brave, pioneering doctors disbarred … or worse.
Andrew Hague, president of CellSonic Ltd., is unafraid of putting the two Cs together. In fact, he has added a third C to the list.
He boldly and frequently states that his CellSonic VIPP device is a cure for cancer. Which is also why his company is based in the United Arab Emirates and his manufacturing facilities are in India—two countries where it is safe to pursue research on alternative cancer treatments and apply them in medical practice, unhindered by the presence of the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, the Medical Research Council or the Health Research Authority.
A self-taught engineer, Hague is clear that the world would be a better and much healthier place if the bioelectrical aspect of the human body was given precedence over the biochemical and mechanical elements when it comes to medicine. Why? Because the biochemical approach focuses on pharmaceuticals, and most pharmaceuticals have side-effects—many worse than the illness they’re prescribed to treat. Surgery is painfully invasive with common side-effects ranging from wound infection to shock, hemorrhage, reactions to anesthesia and pulmonary embolisms, to name a few.
In comparison, emerging technologies focused on the bioelectrical components of the body, using electromagnetic frequencies and other electrically based devices for treatment, have few if any known side-effects when used properly. “If physics and not chemistry was the required subject for medical students beginning their training, the world of medicine would be completely different,” says Hague.
“The only thing doctors know today is the information that gets rammed into them during eight years in medical school. And much of that information is provided by the pharmaceutical industry. Frankly, the medical profession today is an absolute scandal.”
It’s not that the biochemical and mechanical approaches are wrong. They have their place. But the human body has the natural ability to repair itself. Cuts and broken bones heal themselves. Intestines regenerate their lining. Our lungs self-repair when we quit smoking. A section of a donated liver regenerates itself in a matter of weeks.
Differences in electrical potential in cells and tissues throughout the body, also known as voltage gradients, predict and correlate with the body’s growth and development, and additionally drive wound healing and regeneration processes. And yet, rarely are the electrical self-healing aspects of the human body taken into account in the development of new healing technologies.
In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley visited the British Romantic poet and satirist Lord Byron, taking part in a literary gathering at his villa in Geneva. As the story goes, Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story. Inspired by the recent discoveries of two Italian physicists, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, revealing the electrical nature of the human body, two years later, Shelley finished her ghost story, titling it Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
In the meantime, “galvanism” jolted Western imagination. Giovanni Aldini shocked spectators throughout Europe using his uncle’s recently invented voltaic pile (the first crude battery) on the bodies of dead dogs and the cadavers of convicts, appearing to bring his subjects back to life by running a direct current through their bodies.
Medical practitioners (and a lot of quacks) jumped on the bandwagon, developing “cure-all” treatments based on galvanism and quickly tarnishing the value of and interest in bioelectrical research and treatments. Much more appealing was the rapidly growing field of biochemistry and the spectacular rise of pharmaceutical treatments based in chemistry.
And yet the human body is demonstrably electrical as well as biochemical in nature. Our cells are designed to conduct electrical currents. The central nervous system depends on electrical impulses sent throughout the body, enabling us to think and move. The 180 billion neurons (nerve cells) in the human brain communicate via electrical signals that go hand in hand with chemical signaling.
Our heart controls the timing of our heartbeat by sending electrical signals through conducting cell pathways. Electrically active cells in our bodies generate currents in the tissues surrounding these cells, making it possible to measure electrical changes in the heart and brain with electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG), respectively.1
Almost every cell in our bodies functions as an electrical circuit, using charged elements of potassium, calcium, magnesium and sodium, called ions, to generate electricity. Each cell has a protective membrane made up of lipids (fats) that creates a barrier against the outside environment, only allowing certain substances to reach the cell interior.
Not only does the cell membrane function as a barrier, it also acts as a way for the cell to generate electrical currents by allowing charged ions to flow in and out of the cell via passages called ion channels.
When at rest, cells carry a negative charge in their interior relative to the environment outside the membrane. Because the membrane serves as an insulator separating opposing charges inside and outside the cell, the cell membrane has the electrical characteristics of both resistance (impeding the flow of ions) and capacitance (electrical storage capacity, as measured in volts).
This parallel circuit of resistance (R) and capacitance (C) is known as an RC circuit, which is commonly used in electronics. And yet we’re not talking technology—we’re describing every cell in the human body.
Hague started out in the business world making bicycle parts in his small factory in the UK. Then, as he puts it, “one thing led to another,” and he ended up working as a medical device distributor. He eventually took a job at Dornier Flugzeugwerke, a German aircraft manufacturer that also designed and made medical equipment, specifically the HM3, an extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) device traditionally used to treat patients with kidney stones.
The HM3 was also being used experimentally to help heal wounds faster. “There was one particular case where they had a lady from Holland come in who had had a nonhealing wound since she was a teenager,” says Hague. “At that point she was in her nineties, and they healed it with the ESWL.”
Hague was intrigued by the technology and its many possible applications for killing infection and triggering tissue regeneration. Plus, he had a more outrageous application in mind. “At that time, I came across a hypothesis from Beijing where a few Chinese doctors were arguing that pressure waves—the same pressure waves that break up kidney stones—would also kill cancer. Trouble is, they had no idea how to deliver the pressure wave.” The Chinese doctors didn’t know how, but Hague did.
Hague launched CellSonic Ltd, redesigning ESWL devices until he eventually came up with the design of the CellSonic VIPP (VIPP stands for Very Intense Pressure Pulses). The VIPP, which is made in India, uses a wand with a round bulbous delivery head filled with water and containing two electrodes separated by a one-millimeter gap. A cable leading to the wand carries a charge of 25,000 volts, which is fed into the electrodes.
The resulting high-voltage arc impacts the water in the delivery head, creating a pressure wave in the device, which is placed on the patient’s body. The pressure wave travels from the device head, through a thin layer of gel coating the skin at the proper location, directing the pressure wave into the body.
Treatments consist of hundreds of rapid “bangs” or pressure pulses aimed into the body in either a focused or a more diffuse manner, depending on the specific type of treatment needed.
The VIPP’s first test cancer case was in-house. “Our distributor in Bangladesh knew me and trusted me,” says Hague. “He had prostate cancer and asked me if I could do anything, and I thought ‘Yes!’”
In November 2016, the man was admitted to Sai Lee Hospital, Mumbai, to be treated with CellSonic VIPP under the supervision of a physician. The results of bloodwork and scans carried out in Bangladesh and in Mumbai indicated the cancer that had begun in the prostate had spread.
“I sent instructions to our guys in India to pick him up at the airport and take him to the hospital,” says Hague. “And they said he looked ghastly and could hardly walk. He got the first treatment on Monday and then another treatment with the CellSonic VIPP on Wednesday.
I called after the second treatment and asked him how he was doing. ‘Oh, I am better now. I am fine,’ he said. That afternoon he and his wife went for a long walk around the Mumbai Zoo. Three weeks later they got all the scans and blood tests back, and he no longer had any cancer.”
Kidney and bladder stones have plagued humanity since time immemorial. For thousands of years—at least since 10 A.D. when the first surgical removal of bladder stones was recorded—the only treatment was to make an incision near the perineum toward the bladder (without anesthesia), then inserting a metal hook and pulling the stone out through the incision. The wound was not sutured, and the operation was frequently fatal.
This gruesome method didn’t change much until the nineteenth century, when Bavarian doctor and astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen proposed the practice of destroying stones through other means, from mechanical force to an electric current—so-called “lithotripsy”—thus allowing patients with all but very large stones to avoid surgery.
There were many incremental improvements to this approach over the next century, but it still required doctors to insert catheters and other devices into the patient.
Then, in 1980, extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) was developed, using focused external shock waves to pulverize stones completely noninvasively.
Based on the nature of the sound waves it uses, ESWL does no damage to surrounding healthy tissue.
The first device approved for medical use was the Dornier HM3, derived from a device used for testing aerospace parts.
In the last 40 years, millions of patients have been treated for kidney stones with ESWL, with no long-term side-effects linked to the technology.1
There is still a tremendous amount of uncertainty about how the CellSonic actually works to help fight cancer. Research has shown that cancer cells exhibit both lower electrical membrane potentials (voltage) and lower electrical impedance (the amount of opposition to current or voltage) than normal cells.
The idea of classifying cancers by their electrical properties is not new. It was first introduced to the scientific community in 1926 by researchers H. Fricke and S. Morse.1 They showed that in cancerous cells, electrical conductivity and permittivity (a measure of how a material behaves in an electrical field) were greater than in normal cells.
The membrane potential in a healthy cell regulates the flow of nutrients and other chemical exchanges into and out of the cell. Cell membrane changes—especially drops in voltage—interfere with the flow of oxygen and nutrients into the cells, impairing their function.
All living cells have a membrane potential—a difference in the number of positive and negative charged molecules, or ions, between the interior and the exterior of the cell membrane. And it turns out that the membrane potential of a cell appears to be a good indication of whether it’s cancerous or not.
In a healthy cell, the inside surface of the cell membrane is slightly negative relative to its external cell membrane, corresponding to an overall negative charge of ions inside the cell relative to outside, and the membrane potential is about -60 to -100 millivolts (mV, or thousandths of a volt).2 In comparison, cancerous cells have a membrane potential of just -15 mV, roughly the same membrane potential that is seen in healthy cells while they undergo mitosis (cell division).
Research on many cancer cell types has revealed that this phenomenon of depolarization—the process by which a cell’s membrane potential gets closer to zero—promotes cell proliferation.
Additional research suggests that membrane potential plays a role in cancer cell migration, and researchers from the University of York have also theorized that membrane potential might be a valuable marker for tumor detection and “could even be artificially modified in order to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis.”3
“I think it really comes down to permittivity,” says Dr Andrew Dickens, NMD, a practitioner at the Dayspring Cancer Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Permittivity is the inability of the cell to hold onto an electric charge. A higher permittivity value, let’s say 9.6, indicates a cancer cell. The lower the permittivity, the better a cell holds onto an electric charge. Let’s say 3.2 is a normal cell. Higher permittivity is more indicative of cancer.”
Dickens continues, “How does the CellSonic work? I really don’t know any more than I know how my cell phone works. But the best guess is that the shock waves and electromagnetic fields created by the device change the permittivity value of the cells through electroporation. [Electroporation increases the permeability of the cell membrane, allowing more ions to flow through it.] I can’t explain how it changes the voltage, it just does it.”
This change in voltage is borne out by the wide array of health conditions that have been successfully treated with extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT), far beyond the original application to kidney stones (see box, right).
The Dayspring Clinic has Institutional Review Board approval to treat wounds, and Dickens uses the CellSonic VIPP freely for that purpose. Dayspring does not advertise or treat cancer with the CellSonic, although they do use it if the patient wants it after they have been advised it is not approved for cancer treatment in the US and that the clinic is only using it at their request as an adjunct tool for helping their health. Patients also must sign a waiver to that effect.
“I think it’s a very powerful tool,” says Dickens. “I like to use analogies, and one analogy I use is how to build a house. If somebody has a crosscut saw and they’ve been sawing lumber, and somebody came along and said, ‘Here’s a generator and electric saw,’ you would think that was the greatest thing that ever came along. But you also still need all the other tools—hammers and nails and everything else—to build the house. You don’t build a house with one tool. I use a lot of different tools. But CellSonic is one of the big guns.”
Dr Lloyd Jenkins, a practitioner at the Budwig Center, an alternative cancer treatment clinic in Málaga, Spain, also calls the CellSonic VIPP an important tool in a comprehensive, multipronged approach to dealing with cancer. “I think it’s a good supportive device that restores the bioelectrical charge of the cells from an unhealthy to a healthy level,” Jenkins says.
“However, I don’t think somebody could just buy it and successfully treat cancer on its own. You definitely need all of the other elements involved—the change of diet, making sure you’re eating the right foods, detoxing, taking the right kinds of remedies and supplements—to deal with all the things that feed cancer, plus emotional healing. I think putting it all together, it’s a very helpful tool in the clinic. We’re happy to have it.”
He relates two stories of patients who had blood tests with cancer markers. One woman, “Anna,” came to the clinic in February 2020 and after a few CellSonic sessions, saw her levels of a cancer marker fall by nearly half.
Another woman, “Liliana” from Italy, arrived with stage II breast cancer. “We did a two- week treatment on her using the CellSonic, and then she went and had a cancer marker test at a city nearby,” says Jenkins. “They couldn’t find any cancer activity.” The tumor was still present, and Jenkins says she had a lumpectomy shortly thereafter to get the tumor out.
“She’s doing very well and is very healthy,” he says. “All the same, you shouldn’t think that it’s the magic bullet.”
Studies show that exposing cells to extracorporeal shock waves (ESW) affects their proliferation as well as differentiation, gene expression, growth factor production and cytokine release. ESW is also thought to produce biochemical changes in cells.1
Extracorporeal shock wave treatments (ESWT) have proven effective for a variety of musculoskeletal disorders including plantar fasciitis and calcifying tendinopathy.2
ESWT has also been used in the treatment of long bone fractures that fail to heal with the usual treatments, death of bone tissue in the femur, chronic diabetic and non-diabetic ulcers and ischemic heart disease.3
Oncotripsy, or pulsed ultrasound, produces acoustic standing waves that have been proposed to selectively kill cancer cells with no harm done to the healthy surrounding tissues.4
According to the Budwig Center, an alternative cancer clinic in Málaga, Spain, extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy can be used to treat the following conditions (and more):
In October 2008, Don Skelton, 73, fell and hurt his back. He went to the hospital in Gloucestershire to have a checkup, and when they ran a blood test it came back showing an elevated level of PSA (prostate-specific antigen).
“They sent me off to have a biopsy, and it came back that I had early-stage cancer,” says Skelton. “The urologist said since it was early, they’d just do watchful waiting—which is what I did
for years.”
Gradually, his PSA level rose to over 10, and another biopsy was done under anesthetic. This time the doctors advised that he have hormone treatment and then radiotherapy. “I had hormone therapy for about two months, and it was just awful,” he says. “It’s basically chemical castration, for lack of a better term. It’s not much fun, and I absolutely hated it.”
He then tried an alternative therapeutic approach in Germany called transurethral hyperthermia, which is a technique that uses radiotherapy to heat the prostate without damaging surrounding cells.
After the procedure, his PSA level dropped to virtually zero. But then it gradually increased again over time. “The last time I had the PSA test it was in the 24 range and stable. At that point I was receiving a fair amount of pressure from the regular medical profession that if I wanted to live, I should have more hormone treatment and then radiotherapy. But the side-effects for both of those are pretty horrendous.”
Determined to find an alternative, shortly thereafter he and his wife stumbled across a television interview with Andrew Hague, President of CellSonic Ltd. “The penny dropped,” says Skelton. “Literally the interview ended and I sent him an email, and he phoned me back. After he realized I was here in the UK, he introduced me to Dr Angelyna Coady, ND, in London.”
Skelton visited Coady twice, two weeks apart, and had two treatments starting off with oxygen and then a hydrogen treatment. She then used the CellSonic VIPP for general pain and discomfort. “It’s an interesting feeling, like a bang or a pulse that you can feel. I didn’t find it unpleasant or anything. It is like being tapped.”
Since those visits to Coady, Skelton says he hasn’t had any major problems. “I can’t say that I’m cured, but I certainly feel very positive about it,” he says. “All of the stuff that I’ve read about the electrical field dynamic makes sense.
“Plus,” Skelton continues, “I think one of the other really important things about Dr Coady is that she is so positive. The regular medical profession and oncologists put the fear of God in you. They tell you things like, ‘If you don’t do this, we can’t help you. And when we can’t help you, you will die.’ They’re just incredibly negative, whereas she was incredibly positive and supportive. I’m very confident that when I get the PSA reading it will be clear.”
RESOURCES
CellSonic Ltd.: cellsonic-medical.com
Dayspring Cancer Clinic: dayspringcancerclinic.com
Budwig Center: budwigcenter.com
Main Article
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1 |
J Cancer Res, 1926; 16: 310–76 |
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Electroporation-Based Therapies for Cancer, 2014, pp 103–25 |
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3 |
Front Physiol, 2013; 4: 185 |
The body electric
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Modeling and Imaging of Bioelectrical Activity, 2004, pp 281–319 |
History of lithotripsy
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Urology, 2015; 85: 991–1006 |
Supporting research
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Sci Rep, 2016; 6: 30637 |
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2 |
J Bone Joint Surg Am, 2018; 100: 251–63 |
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J Orthop Surg Res, 2012; 7: 11 |
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4 |
J Mech Phys Solids, 2016; 92: 164–75 |
