EDMOND, Okla. —
When you tell someone a medicine for dogs cured your cancer, you better be ready for some skeptics, but Joe Tippens says it saved his life, and the lives of others.
Now, even cancer researchers are open to the possibility it might be true."My stomach, my neck, my liver, my pancreas, my bladder, my bones -- it was everywhere," Tippens said. Tippens said he was told to go home, call hospice and say his goodbyes two years ago. The doctors were unanimous, he was going to die of small cell lung cancer.
"Once that kind of cancer goes that far afield, the odds of survival are less than 1 percent, and median life expectancy is three months," Tippens said. Tippens said he went from 220 pounds to 110. "I was a skeleton with skin hanging off of it," he said. "It was difficult."
But that was January of 2017. Today, Tippens is very much alive and what he credits for his survival has doctors scratching their heads, and the rest of us raising eyebrows. "About half the people think I'm just crazy," he said. "And about half the people want to know more and dig deeper."
Tippens said he received a tip from a veterinarian, of all people. And in his desperation, he turned from people medicine to dog medicine. Specifically, something you give your dog when it has worms. "The truth is stranger than fiction, you know?" Tippens said, laughing. Just three months later, Tippens says, his cancer was gone.
"I'm usually skeptical, and I was and maybe still am about this one," said Stephen Prescott, president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. "But there's interesting background to this." Cancer researchers like Prescott are skeptical, but they also are not dismissing this anti-parasitic's potential. He says Tippens is not the first person to potentially benefit, and not the last.
"Scientists and many credible places have done work on this for years," Prescott said. But was it the de-wormer, or was it something else? Tippens took the dog medicine with daily vitamin E supplements and CBD oil. He was also taking an experimental cancer-fighting drug. But Tippens says out of the 1,100 patients on that clinical trial, he was the only one cleared of cancer.
Tippens says he was saved by the dog de-wormer and he plans to take it for the rest of his life. "My insurance company spent $1.2 million on me with traditional means before I switched to a $5 a week medicine that actually saved me," he said. Prescott says he's now working with Tippens to organize a case study.
"We're going to do it and see if we can confirm, in a very rigorous and clinical sort of way, that these patients had that kind of response," Prescott said.As for Tippens: "I've got over 40 success stories other than me," he said. He's sharing his story on an online blog that has been read more than 100,000 times. Most of the feedback is positive, or curious.
Some accuse Tippens of giving cancer patients false hope. "Oh, how do I answer that?" he sighed. "I mean, if I've saved one other p
