Quack or Savior, Italy’s Pop Cancer Therapist Is on a Roll
With his shock of white hair, high-domed forehead and white lab coat, Luigi di Bella, 85, looks like a slightly mad scientist. Indeed, he is contrarian and irascible, but he is also widely described as brilliant and selflessly devoted to his cancer patients.
Such are the two portraits of Italy’s most celebrated and notorious physician--a witch doctor pushing a quack cancer cure, or a savior battling an inept medical establishment.
Over the past 25 years, Di Bella says, he has treated 15,000 to 20,000 patients--charging nothing for the visits--and cured “about half” with a drug cocktail that supposedly stops tumor growth without harsh chemotherapy. But he can’t back his claim with scientifically documented evidence.
Why not? Years ago, he explains, when he taught at the University of Modena, his superiors warned that, as a physiologist, he had no business meddling in cancer research. “They threatened to fire me unless I kept quiet,” Di Bella says. “But I have a bundle of letters confirming my results.”
In many developed countries, Di Bella’s “cure” would be illegal. But in Italy, popular agitation has forced the government to bend its rules and distribute the untested remedy, which costs $300 a day at pharmacies, to hundreds of patients as another free benefit of the nation’s socialized health-care system.
The excitement reflects the low esteem of Italy’s public health system, plagued by long lines, shortages of hospital beds, shoddy research and corrupt ties between drug companies and drug licensers.
“Italy is in some respects a medieval country,” says Carlo Croce, an Italian-born geneticist who heads the Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “Quite understandably, Italians don’t trust biomedical research. At the same time, they love miracles.”
They also know the power of judges.
Last December, the father of a 2-year-old boy in Maglie, in southern Italy, who had been taking Di Bella’s hormone-and-vitamin treatment for a brain tumor sued to force the town hospital to supply the drugs free. Sniping at the “multimillion-dollar interests of traditional medicine,” the judge ruled for the father, the first of many such victories by patients across Italy.
Di Bella’s supporters, known as dibellisti, have also pressed his cause with marches and sit-ins in nine cities. After two regions run by right-wing parties ordered their health services to offer his treatment free, the center-left government in Rome agreed, reluctantly, to test it in a four-month clinical trial.
“We were faced with a problem of public order and anxiety,” Health Ministry spokeswoman Chiara Rinaldini said after about 10% of the country’s cancer patients quit conventional treatment.
One dropout is Icilio Cervelli, a 77-year-old Roman who said he was losing a battle against prostate and bladder cancer when he stopped radiotherapy last year. After six months on Di Bella’s formula, he says, the cancer receded, along with the pain.
Traditional doctors are unmoved. They argue that some patients may not really have had cancer when they started Di Bella’s treatment and that others, while taking it, may have had spontaneous remission. Without charts on such cases, which Di Bella cannot provide, it’s impossible to tell.
Many specialists say Di Bella’s cocktail probably won’t pass the government trial because none of its ingredients has been proven effective against cancer. They include somatostatin, a hormone used for treating growth abnormalities; melatonin, touted as a sleep aid; and vitamin A derivatives.
But failure in the trial may not end the feud; Di Bella has criticized the testing procedure. While his drugs work best on patients without prior treatment, he says, most of the test subjects have already been “destroyed by chemotherapy.”
