"Simply Doomed to Achieve Complete Remission"

I don't know who Vladimir Savostianov is, but he claims to be a hematologist in Minsk, Belarus, and he claims to be able to put up to 60% of CLL patients into prolonged complete remission using old drugs and techniques, regardless of stage (though the patient must be treatment-naive).

He has posted an interesting protocol on his blog, http://dr-savostianov.blogspot.com/2008/08/chronic-lymphocytic-leukemia-treatment.html

I confess that I find his English to be of the sort of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". However, one needs to accept the premise that his therapy for CLL is interesting and worth a second look, primarily because it is cheap and, if verified, provides a vastly superior complete remission rate than most therapies, with the exception of FCR.

He apparently begins his therapy with prednisone and radiation to the tonsils, spleen, abdominal lymph nodes, and liver. He then administers chlorambucil. He believes that knocking back the pool of CLL with the prednisone and radiation permit the chlorambucil to deal a heavy blow to the CLL. He warns, however, that any departure from his schedule will leave the patient with a case of drug-resistant CLL.

He says this technique is free of immunosupression, and if it does occur, it is a simple matter to remediate.

Make up your own mind, but there is enough sense in this that perhaps there is some merit to it. Certainly it does not depend on expensive drugs such as rituximab, fludarabine, and Campath.