Re: Regarding Oleander, OPC and Marc Swanepoel

Hi Tony,

You wrote: “I want to make it crystal clear to you that I believe you have seriously crossed the line here. I am now warning you in no uncertain terms that if you want to get along with me, stop taking potshots at a man and a product you know absolutely nothing about... I will promise that if you continue taking these kind of personal cheap shots, I will not stand idly by. In fact, I will take off the gloves and go toe to toe with you here and on any other forum in CureZone all night long and the following day as well.”

If you want to get into a shouting match, you will certainly win – I have neither the time nor the inclination to fight with you (or anyone else for that matter). I only provide information – if you don’t like something I say, make a compelling argument that it is false and I will apologize and rectify any inaccuracies. Otherwise, your ranting will get so tiresome that I won't even read it (I also doubt that it will do you or your cause any good). It’s undoubtedly true that you have more free time than I do. It’s also undoubtedly true that you can shout louder than I can. However, the fact that you can shout louder doesn’t make you right.

Sorry, but my purpose in posting on this website is not to make friends with you. My purpose is to tell the truth to people with HIV. The FACT that Mr. Swanepoel distorts information and tells flat out falsehoods is NOT “merely [my] own completely unscientific opinion”. The evidence of Mr. Swanepoel’s duplicity is right before you – the only question is: will you look at it, or are you too invested in Oleander to admit that in vouching for Mr. Swanepoel’s credibility, you’ve backed the wrong horse?

I don’t consider “distortions and outright falsehoods” to be slurs. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone could read his paper and come to a different conclusion. How are these statements of Mr. Swanepoel NOT playing dirty with the truth? How are they NOT distortions and/or outright falsehoods? (note that these are just a few, I could cite MANY more if I had endless time)

(1) “All the patients who had taken part in the 1986 AZT study had died by 1989” (p.25 of his “dissertation” – no reference, not even a secondary source, so unless he’s a plagiarist, I can only assume he made it up himself)
BLATANT FALSEHOOD! 1989 follow-up from the original 1986 study is right here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2677429?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.P...
The survival rates in 1989 among the original participants, all of whom took AZT, ranged from 45% to 93% (they were stratified by treatment group and disease stage).

(2) “As the evidence shows, there have not been any double blind, placebo controlled studies on the efficacy of the antiretrovirals” (p. 36 of his paper)
BLATANT FALSEHOOD! Here’s just ONE such study from the post-HAART era

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10597779?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2....

(double-blind, placebo-controlled study on the efficacy of antivirals in asymptomatic patients).
But since Swanepoel is mostly focused on AZT (I have no idea why! The drug should soon be relegated to the dustbin of history [I don’t know a single HIV physician in the US who would even prescribe AZT to a naive patient in 2008 – due to its toxicity, it’s obsolete as first-line therapy. The NRTIs that are used as first-line therapy do not cause mitochondrial toxicity like ddI and d4T do or myelosuppression like AZT does], and when there is so much interesting data on HAART, it seems strange to focus on AZT monotherapy), here are placebo-controlled studies on AZT:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3299089?dopt=AbstractPlus


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1970466?dopt=Abstract



(3) “The results of a study by Dr. Jens Lundgren, published in the April 1994 issue of The Journal of the American Medical association, suggested that the use of AZT shortens the lives of AIDS patients. The study involved 4,484 patients over a 5-year period. The death rate of those who took AZT was substantially higher during the third and fourth years than those who never took it” (p.25-6)
DISTORTION!
The primary source is right here:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/271/14/1088
. There is no suggestion (from the article or the data) that AZT “shortens the lives of AIDS patients”. Actually, to the contrary! The people who were on AZT had a lower mortality rate during the first two years (which suggests that AZT gave some of them an extra year or two) – the problem was that the effect did not last. The AZT stopped working and those who would have died a few months or a year into the study, instead died 3 years into the study, when the AZT stopped having an effect (likely due to the development of resistance, which occurs pretty quickly on monotherapy). Their death rates were then higher than those who did not take AZT, who were basically dying the whole time at a constant rate. That’s the problem with NRTI monotherapy: it’ll give a few months or a year (which is hardly the same as shortening your life!), but eventually, the virus catches up. To say that AZT shortens your life because more people died later in the study is as ridiculous as saying diet and exercise shorten your life because more people who diet and exercise suddenly dropped dead 83 years into the study instead of 81 (“6% of people who exercise die when they are 83; only 1% of people who don’t exercise die when they are 83”. Yeah, that’s because the non-exercisers already died! Exercise lengthened their lives! Same thing here!


(4) (in an attempt to discredit studies showing that AZT and/or nevirapine can decrease the rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission): “At the same time, a Malawian study showed HIV transmission to be closely related to Vitamin A levels of the mother. In that study, mothers with the lowest Vitamin A levels had a transmission rate of 32.4% while those with the highest Vitamin A levels had a transmission rate of only 7.3% which is LOWER than that of the mothers receiving AZT.”
DISTORTION! Well, there was no source for this (surprise, surprise!), I found the actual study and it made no suggestion that Vitamin A could be used to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The only Malawi study that actually tested the use of vitamin A supplementation and rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV is the following:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/342297
(no effect on HIV transmission, but healthier babies in other ways). Most other studies bear out that Vitamin A supplementation has no effect on transmission, including a meta-analysis
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1131887

Only one study found that Vitamin A had ANY effect on transmission, and it found that it actually INCREASED transmission
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12351954
(Vitamin A actually increased risk of transmission, but other vitamins decreased it)
Again, Mr. Swanepoel makes an implication (that Vitamin A can prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV -which would make it better than AZT or obviate the need for AZT), and that he has a study to back him up on this. That simply is not true, and all of the data existed when he wrote this paper. Why would someone who is NOT trying to distort the evidence do this?

(5) “it takes from 6 to 18 months for babies born to HIV-positive mothers but who are NOT infected with the HIV virus themselves, to revert to a negative status. HIV tests on babies during this period can thus often return false positives – an aspect that is not taken into account when conducting studies on mother to child transmission.” (p.16-17)
BLATANT FALSEHOOD!
Every study on mother-to-child transmission takes this into account, either by testing after 18 months, or by using a non-antibody based diagnostic method (DNA PCR) that can be used sooner without picking up artifacts from the mother. The studies he cites clearly took this into account:
HIVNET 012: tested infants at 18 months
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11264&page=35

Malawi Vitamin A Study: tested at 24 months
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12173139?dopt=Abstract

ACTG076 (NVP vs. AZT) – tested at 18 months

You like to call this “naysaying” or “nit-picking” or “anal-retentiveness”. I call this a pesky habit of insisting that people tell the truth if they want others to believe them. And you know what? A researcher (which Mr. Swanepoel claims to be) really OUGHT to be a bit anal-retentive. The people I’ve met who were excellent in their chosen profession – be they scientists, lawyers, independent contractors, or anything else – were excellent because they paid attention to details, worked hard, and did not let things slip through the cracks – i.e. they were what most people (who aren’t all that great at what they do) call “anal-retentive”.

Whatever Mr. Swanepoel’s biography may be, that does not change the fact that half of what he says is untrue.
The facts in his paper are certainly loose – if he wasn’t deliberately playing loose with them, then the only conclusion I can come to is that he’s too incompetent to be conducting any sort of research.

The only “evidence” we have at this time for OPC’s success is Mr. Swanepoel’s word that he’s telling the truth. If he’s not someone with a high regard for the truth, then there is no “evidence” any of us can rely on. Even a quick review of his paper reveals that he is not someone with a high regard for the truth. You’ll notice my major criticism of Mr. Swanepoel’s study is not that it wasn’t fancy or expensive enough; it’s that he has no credibility. The trial was obviously too short, but it still would have been interesting preliminary data if there were some guarantee of veracity.

I may like you, but you asking me to accept Mr. Swanepoel’s integrity and honesty on the basis of your recommendation is a bit insane. Even if my daughter were the one vouching for him, that would not change the fact that he’s already proven through his misstatements that he is either not a man of honesty or integrity, or he is completely incompetent. Mr. Swanepoel has a problem with the truth – if you insist on standing there saying “no he doesn’t, no he doesn’t” in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, then you really can’t take it as a personal insult to you when someone comes out and points it out. I’m sorry Tony, but when I'm guaging Mr. Swanepoel’s credibility, his actions weigh more heavily than do your feelings towards him and oleander. Wish it could be different, kiddo.

Why would one death be reported? NOTHING is being reported! Mr. Swanepoel claims thousands of success stories with HIV, and yet he only has one testimonial, despite openly soliciting them on the website where he is selling the stuff? (and, incidentally, the one testimonial is from a man who had tuberculosis, which one could say is a partial confounder:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/514598
). I imagine that if OPC herbal cancer cure stopped working, people wouldn’t go back for more, but would rather seek out a different treatment. My point was not to say that most of the people ARE dead, my point was that you cannot assume that they are all alive just because you haven’t heard of any deaths (unless you follow it with the qualification “but they could be dead and I wouldn’t know it”. Otherwise, it’s misleading – it gives the impression that you know for a fact that all of them are alive, when really, you are just guessing based on your own assumptions – e.g. the assumption that if it didn’t work, they would come back for more rather than try a different treatment; Similarly, you cannot say that it has ALWAYS increased CD4 counts in the thousands of people who took it, when you have no idea what the CD4 counts were before-and-after for more than 99% of them. When you make such unqualified statements, it detracts from YOUR credibility, because you are pushing your lovechild rather than admitting the uncertainties).

The fact that you interpret any comment about the lack of data on OPC herbal cancer cure or about Mr. Swanepoel’s untruthfulness as “personally insulting” and “cheap potshots” tells me that you’re so invested in the idea of Oleander that you can’t view the substance or the man objectively.

As I’ve said before, I’m optimistic that the product will have some effect (although I’m not sure how any virostatic effect of powerful NF-kB inhibition can be separated from the toxic effects of powerful NF-kB inhibition), more because I think preventing apoptosis by Fas, TNFa and TRAIL may be beneficial than because I think the effect on viral replication will be worth the cost. Also because corticosteroids often have good effects, at least in the short term, it’s reasonable to think Oleander may as well. Unless it’s combined with some sort of tat-inhibitor, I don’t see how it can turn off HIV transcriiption completely (which is, after all, the goal) without having too high a price in terms of toxicity. The fact that the researchers at MD Anderson, who will jump at any shred of data even semi-worthy of publication, didn’t find anything in Anvirzel’s scheduled phase II trial worth reporting, concerns me (if you would like, I will contact the Anvirzel researchers and ask why the Phase II wasn't carried out and/or published). It’s only because I think that oleander may, in fact, have promise that it is disappointing to see its proprietor’s poor behavior.

ps: if you’ve found an inaccuracy or logical flaw in anything I’ve written in my “so-called scientific posts” (so-called by whom?), please let me know – I will be more than willing to correct them (in fact, when I make mistakes – and I’ve made plenty of them in this life – I appreciate when someone points them out to me. I am not so arrogant as to presume that I know all or could possibly be infallible).

You’re more than welcome to follow after me in various forums and yell at me all you want. I would suggest that unless you have something productive to say, attempting to make my “forum life” miserable is a rather large waste of time, since it won’t affect my emotional well-being, and it will probably make you look unbalanced. More importantly, that is time you could be using to understand every damn thing that has ever been written about oleander and its components. It’s your call, though, so if you wish to do so, let ‘er rip. Just do not expect me to respond to “more of the same”. I’m on this forum to lend my knowledge to other HIVers, not to waste my time either stroking or inflaming other people’s egos.

Now I have to go to work. I hope that you will have a productive day enjoying life and helping people rather than feeling angry, bitter, or "personally insulted".

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