Page 81 - Speedhorse May 2019

time the cisplatin or carboplatin stays in the surrounding tissue. Or you can make beads
of chemo that you can implant, especially in areas that you can’t excise. These beads keep releasing the drug into the tissue, extending the length of effective treatment.
“There are several radiation treatments, including a linear accelerator and localized radiation beads called brachytherapy, but the newest way to increase the concentration of chemotherapy within the cells is electro-che- motherapy. This new method uses a machine
R. G. Kekich, a horseman and rancher, created 41 Laboratories LLC in Sheridan, Wyoming, to market a product for treating sarcoid tumors. He was a professional cowboy (PRCA) for a long time, and a contender at the National Finals as a steer wrestler and roper.
In an interview with him a few years ago, he mentioned that he’d had horses and cattle his whole life but never knew what a sarcoid was until his rope horse got one when he was rodeo- ing in Arizona.
“My horse developed a small black bubble, about the size of a pea, in the corner of his eye,” explained Kekich. “He’s a dark horse with a freeze brand number 41, and that’s what I named him when I got him. So, I named my product after him.
“I brought the horse back to Wyoming when he got the growth by his eye and took him to a good vet who was an old friend of mine, Dr. Ray Smith. He looked at the horse and thought it was a melanoma. Dr. Smith
was semi-retired and not doing any vet work anymore and told me to take the horse to Dr. Ted Vlahos at Sheridan Equine Clinic. Ray told me Ted was a young vet who knew all the new tricks. So I took the horse to him.
“Dr. Vlahos told me it was a sarcoid, and suggested chemotherapy and immunotherapy shots and said it would take a shot every two weeks and we’d have to do two or maybe three shots. Dr. Vlahos started giving the horse this regimen of shots and we got up to the eighth week and were ready to give another shot, and the sarcoid had blown up and looked awful.” It was much worse than when they started.
“To best describe a sarcoid, it’s like a bear sleeping under a tree,” said Kekich. “If you wake up that bear, it tries to eat you. A sarcoid may lay on a horse for two or three years, looking like a rough wart. Someone might decide to take it off, and 99% of the time the tumor comes back, and blows up
that creates a current across the lesion which changes the polarity of the cell membrane
and increases uptake of the drug. This form
of treatment has actually shown the most promise. In one study, more than 90% of the treated horses had no recurrence in the several years following the treatment, and all of them remained free of sarcoid for greater than a year.
“The problem when you simply inject the drug without the added sesame oil, is that it just disperses very quickly into the body and doesn’t stay in the target area long enough.
- and then you’ve got a battle. That’s exactly what happened to my horse.”
This horse was only five years old,
an excellent rope horse, and had a lot of potential, and Kekich hated to lose him. “Dr. Vlahos said we could take the horse to the vet college in Fort Collins to remove the tumor surgically, but told me there was no guarantee it would save the eye. So, I decided to treat him with an old herbal remedy.”
Kekich was already using the herbal remedy on other medical problems. “I had this formula and it was really good, but I didn’t realize all the things it could do. It was an old remedy called Compound X, and a lot of people have used it on themselves. I made up a big batch and Dr. Vlahos and I started putting it on the tumor every day. Dr. Vlahos could not believe the results. The tumor started shrinking and drying up, and within 31 days it was gone.”
Later, after Kekich decided to market the herbal product, calling it Sarco-41, Dr. Vlahos wrote a letter of endorsement. He stated that he’d been treating a very invasive periocular sarcoid with four regimens of combination chemotherapy and immunotherapy, with disap- pointing results. “My frustrated client asked me to consider treating the horse with Sarco-41. I considered myself to be very skeptical of most topical herbal therapies for equine sarcoid tumors. Watching this invasive mass disappear from my patient over a few short weeks changed my opinion. The tumor completely disappeared without adverse effects. I now include Sarco-41 as a treatment option for tumors not amenable to surgery, and where conventional therapies have failed,” wrote Vlahos.
For this to work, however, you have to be diligent and dedicated to removing the tumor. “If you don’t put the treatment on every day until the tumor is gone, it won’t work,” Kekich said.
So, once you inject the area, you need to change the cells very quickly with current. The problem with this treatment is that the horse needs to be anesthetized. It’s not like an electrical jolt, but it does stimulate the mus- cles so you don’t want to do it with the horse standing. We are getting ready to buy one
of these machines here, and more hospitals are offering this kind of treatment. This is a challenging disease, and the challenge grows exponentially with every failed treatment,” Smith concluded.
“In another instance, we used it on a 14-month-old colt for eight weeks,” he contin- ued. “He had a big sarcoid on his leg - one of the worst we’ve seen, and this treatment took it off. After we used it on my 41 horse, Dr. V said he’d never seen anything like this and told me I should market it.”
The basic ingredient in Kekich’s product
is blood-root. “Researchers are finding that a certain type that grows in mountainous terrain in North America has definite adverse effects on cancer cells. This remedy has been around for generations. The family I got the formula from lives in Hudson, Wyoming, and it was in their family for many years. Two brothers, Howard and Mickey McQuarry, started using it to treat squamous cell carcinomas in cattle (cancer eye). The cancer might eat the eye out, but the herbal treatment would cure the cancer and the eye socket would hair over again.
“Some years back, I was at their place and watched them treating cattle. They gave me a small bottle of this herbal remedy - about two ounces. I took it myself when I had an ulcer and got rid of it. Then I used it on a horse that had proud flesh. It took off the proud flesh. I had a calf with pinkeye in both eyes, and the eyes were blind and ulcerated (with bulging ulcers). I put that remedy right in his eyes and he healed up. I have used this in many ways, and it is phenomenal how well it works,” Kekich said.
His herbal product for sarcoids is now being marketed in 60 countries. He signed a contract in 2010 with a company in Denmark to distribute it around the world.
The important thing is to be diligent when using it, until the tumor is completely gone. “The good thing about it is that it has never harmed healthy tissue. If you get it in the horse’s eye, it won’t hurt it. Some of the other remedies are just a joke, but this works so well that I couldn’t keep it a secret.”
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