#FyourTumor: fyt club health
Founder: Vatsal G. Thakkar, M.D.
- Physician & Contrarian Thinker
- Exited Founder of Reimbursify (PE acquisition)
- Op-Ed Contributor read by > 1M readers
- Integrative Medicine Fellow, Univ of Arizona
- Previous: Clinical Trial Sub-investigator (Vanderbilt & NYU), Medical Student Course Director (Vanderbilt), Director of the GME Wellness Team (NYU), Private Practice Psychiatrist
- More about Vatsal on LinkedIn
The Mission
fȳt club health's mission is to bend the mortality curve of cancer towards survival by spreading awareness and boosting access to LIFEBOATs: Low-cost & Integrative, Fortifying & Elemental, Benign Open-Access Therapeutics.
My Hippocratic Oath (abridged)
I solemnly pledge to consecrate my life to the service of humanity. I will practice medicine with conscience and dignity. The health and life of my patient will be my first consideration. Even under threat I will not use my knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity. These promises I make freely and upon my honor.
-Vatsal G. Thakkar, M.D.
06.05.1998
Origin Story
"It's not FDA-approved"
Those words still haunt me, a reply by a man telling my father that even with chemotherapy, he only had 6 months to live, but that he shouldn’t seek other options. I became indignant--I had done the research, so I faxed him the stunning data that showed when combined with chemo, my proposed integrative treatment shrank the majority of pancreatic tumors over 12 weeks and even put some patients into long term remission. The oncologist read the data and agreed with my treatment suggestion.
Weeding out Misinformation
As physicians, we are taught to have a skeptical eye so I did not expect to find any useful information to help my dad, but I had to do the diligence for my family’s sake. To keep track of all the supplements and substances I found in my deep-dive on “how to cure cancer”, I logged over 100 items into a spreadsheet. Then came the grueling task of vetting the list (this was pre-AI). I established a minimum level of evidence to find a signal.
Setting the Bar
The studies had to be:
- Legit: Peer-reviewed, published journal articles (no preprints)
- Robust: Randomized & controlled (with a preference for placebo-controlled)
- Durable: repeated by different teams showing the same results
In addition, I was only interested in add-ons to standard cancer treatments that:
- Would NOT have major adverse effects or require medical monitoring on their own
- Would NOT have any (major) interactions with cancer treatments like chemotherapy or radiation
Finding the Gems
A whopping 90% of my list didn’t make the cut. But those gems which remained were what I have come to refer to as LIFEBOATs:
Low-cost & Integrative, Fortifying & Elemental, Benign Open-Access Therapeutics.
Many are available without a prescription. Those that require one have been used by tens of millions of people for decades. It is these integrative treatment options that make up the fȳt club survival stack. They need to be part of the cancer care conversation ASAP.
Why is this Necessary?
While standard cancer treatments can be very effective, they rarely have 100% success rate (defined as 5-year survival). Even more importantly, they cannot be stacked. Yes, taking 5 different chemo drugs at the same time might kill a tumor, but it will probably kill the patient as well.
This is the secret weapon of integrative treatments: they can be combined—stacked, if you will—and the results are additive. If one supplement boosts survival by 10%, adding a synergistic one that provides a similar 10% boost, you’ve now doubled the success rate to 20%. Studies show this has the potential to significantly boost cancer treatment survival rates. The only problem? They are not FDA approved.
What about FDA Approval?
When my dad’s oncologist told him vitamin C infusions were not FDA approved, my dad assumed that meant they were dangerous. There’s no evidence of that. What it means is that a company did not spend the millions of dollars necessary to seek FDA approval.
One of the researchers I spoke with shed light on this–FDA approval requires a phase 3 multi-site study costing $10M or more, and they are mostly funded by pharma and sometimes foundations (the NIH only funds phase 1 and 2 studies). Since LIFEBOATs are available as generics or unpatentable compounds, there is not enough research ROI to fund progress. FDA approval is NOT coming anytime soon for most of these compounds.
Signs of Change
My dad’s oncologist received my fax and changed his tune–he approved the addition of high-dose IV vitamin C infusions. However, my father didn’t live long enough to try it–he died within weeks.
The year after he died, Dr. Joseph Cullen at the University of Iowa doubled the survival rate of pancreatic cancer (from 8 to 16 months) by combining IV vitamin C with chemo in the largest study yet–a phase 2 trial. The biggest surprise? He still has participants from his phase 1 study that are alive nine years after the trial ended.
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After secretly launching videos the day before World Cancer Day 2026, it feels the time is right for this message. Join the fight against cancer by following fȳt club md: