Dr. Ken Rybicki joins Mark Alyn on Late Night Health to discuss Pancreatic Cancer patients and why they are usually given a death sentence.

Per the Mayo Clinic:

"Pancreatic cancer begins in the tissues of your pancreas — an organ in your abdomen that lies horizontally behind the lower part of your stomach. Your pancreas secretes enzymes that aid digestion and hormones that help regulate the metabolism of sugars.

Pancreatic cancer often has a poor prognosis, even when diagnosed early. Pancreatic cancer typically spreads rapidly and is seldom detected in its early stages, which is a major reason why it's a leading cause of cancer death. Signs and symptoms may not appear until pancreatic cancer is quite advanced and complete surgical removal isn't possible."

Dr. Ken Rybicki was 45 when he felt a pain in his stomach. He gave himself a blood test and did a self-diagnosis. Then he quickly sought out an oncologist.
He had pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Rybicki was a medical doctor, an internist who practiced in St. Louis and was on the faculty at Washington University. He underwent surgery and more than six months of “horrendous” chemotherapy.

“I pretty much had a terminal diagnosis,” Dr. Rybicki told the St. Louis Business Journal in 2009. “It was pretty clear I wasn’t going to be around for more than a year, so you start grasping at straws.”

One of his straws was to research how vitamins and supplements could help him regain his energy and the 80 pounds he had lost after his therapy.

He found a combination of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that he said helped him recover. After he returned to his practice, friends and patients wanted to know what he had been taking.

He decided to formulate all of the supplements into a single tablet instead of the five or six tablets he had been taking daily.

He invested $50,000 of his own money and started a company, Alive & Well LLC, to market a product he called NeoVitin.