Prof. Luigi Di Bella - It would be pointless to say how puzzled I am to speak in a place that is completely new for me. For the past forty years my audience were students, and that's a rather different thing.  
I don't want to waste time so I would immediately go to the essential points of this meeting you are honouring me with.  
The essential points are chiefly three. The first point is freedom of treatment. In order  to deeply understand what this concept means, I would  merely remind you that there are hospitals (I won't reasonably give any names) where patients who have just had an operation performed and who are then going to receive the subsequent treatment, are not informed about how the treatment itself works. In other words, a fundamental principle is completely overlooked in this case, that is freedom of treatment and freedom of choice.  
But there is more. Lately we have seen some measures being taken - let's call them unofficial, although they're official, too - that hadn't been seen even during dictatorship's darkest times: I'm speaking of  a therapeutic compulsion on the part of physicians. If there is a profession that is rigorously connected with a person's  knowledge and consciousness is actually that of physicians. The fact that an individual who belongs to an association - or order if you wish - dares to impose a specific logical and therapeutic orientation to an entire medical class that is culturally on his same level, if not on a higher one, is an absurd thing that a nation that calls itself democratic cannot tolerate.  
This is the first point that is inalienable for me, that must not absolutely be touched,  and that is that of freedom of  prescription, freedom of treatment on the part of the doctor and of the patient, after the latter has properly been informed about the characteristics of the therapy itself. I firmly believe this first point to be a fundamental one.  
The second point to be kept into consideration here in this meeting is the possibility to find the drugs physicians decide to prescribe. In this case one clashes against traditions, against lobbies which are unfortunately inspired by direct concepts of caste. In other words, the clash is against minor interests, particular interests, pharmaceutical companies' interests and so on. Within such a context, it would not be inopportune to speak with truth and to take the right measures through truth, however bitter it may be.  
One of the objections most frequently raised to the method I propose concerned the price. I  personally have already  been attacked - which pushed me to resort to the law - by the Medical Association. I was attacked because the therapy described would have probably been impossible to be carried out from an economic standpoint. This is a fundamental point which I must explain very clearly. In the first place it is not true that the therapy entails in every single case the same costs as those which were published and continue to be published by the media. Let me explain this with a very simple example: my therapy is essentially based on substances to be taken orally and others to be taken parenterally (some injections); it is the vial that costs a little whereas the prices of the substances to be taken orally were never so high as not to be afforded by most of the patients. Thus, the impossibility to carry out this therapy due to prescription methods, due to the protocol as a whole, does not exist. It would only exist for the substances to be introduced parenterally.  
I will not speak about the things which have already sufficiently and very clearly been published by the media, also because I want to avoid gossips which should anyway be avoided in this case in every possible way. However, if a one-milligram vial of somatostatin bought in a pharmacy costs 220 thousand lira, the one-milligram vial has never been surpassed by the tens of thousands of prescriptions that I made. So, as far as this point is concerned, we don't exceed 220 thousand lira per day: the millions are still far off.  
In the second place, if the therapy begins to have some effects and these effects can be seen, a diligent doctor will carry out and adapt the directions to the course of the disease. In other words there will gradually be a decrease of the posology. As far as I am concerned, at the beginning I use one milligram (220 thousand lira) and then I reach one tenth of a milligram (20 thousand lira). 20 thousand lira are clearly not be thrown out of the window but can be afforded by a larger number of people. It is highly unlikely that a Local Health Care Unit refuses these 20 thousand lira, despite all the restrictions normally being made for economical questions. Thus, a therapeutic impossibility within such a context does not exist and if it does it is limited. The third point is the following: as far as the formal aspect is concerned, my protocol is different with respect to all the other treatments currently being carried out. The main difference lies in the following point: chemotherapy's basic principle is to destroy abnormal elements, that is tumoral cells. In my view no actions that can be so toxic as to destroy these cells exist. In other words, I think I can produce a whole series of actions that make the life conditions of neoplastic cells impossible or difficult. These actions, though, won't destroy them because the dose and the composition of the drug that can destroy these cells are not so different than the dose and the composition of the drug that can destroy just as many normal cells, if not even a higher number of them.  
It would be useless for me to remind you of what currently occurs in the hospitals where oncologic therapies are carried out. Just watch the people who underwent such treatments. Clearly, the opposite of what I am saying now could be said. I call on the painful experiences that each and everyone of us had in our lives, unfortunately.  
Thus, the principle radically changes and, still according to such principle, I will not hesitate to state that with my method nobody ever died, nobody ever felt sick, over 90% of the patients who were using my drugs had advantages. I have been taking one of these drugs for the past forty years, I am still alive and, despite my age, I am an efficient man so that the toxicity of this drug must not be so high. Thus, there is no toxicity in my protocol and, most importantly, there are no dangers of death. Furthermore, a person who has rather bad health conditions either because of the disease or because of the cure he underwent and starts using my protocol will soon begin to feel better, to live. What I mean is that the quality of life is held in a very high consideration.  
You can have the specific elements until up to a certain extent here because your activity is devoted to other aspects. The information I can give you fall within a rather general context. However, a therapy aiming at eradicating a tumour and that does not have a toxic effect is what we want to obtain, what we have always wanted to obtain and what we strongly want to achieve. These are not dreams but rather aspirations which I believe I got a little closer to.  
The reason is the following: as a university student I began to work as an intern in the institute of physiology; my background is physiology; I grew up and matured in physiology, so that I can think about life and not about death. Whatever flashes in my mind is always tinged with an ideal representation of the fundamental processes to make life better so that the representation of a protocol whose ultimate goal is the eradication of a neoplastic cell arises from such a frame of mind that developed over some decades.  
There are some other things to be kept into consideration. I am now referring to the fact that nobody ever died with my protocol. People can possibly feel better, and certainly not worse, with my protocol. However, there are some problems which are extremely serious. Here is one. A vigorous young boy aged 32 suffering from an osteosarcoma came to my office: his left limb had been amputated but he already had some pulmonary metastases. What was the effect of the amputation of his limb? What was added to the prognosis and to the life conditions of that patient? This, however, is not a single fact. Let's speak of breast tumours. I would like to speak about this more in depth. Today the incidence of the breast tumour seems to have really, statistically and considerably increased for a whole series of reasons: food, the kind of life women lead, habits, wrong advice and so on. The breast, however, is a part of the body that represents woman's beauty. The amputation of a breast affects women in an extremely serious way. Its consequences are visible and have strong repercussions, even more so when - and this is a frequent occurrence - this operation, that can be rather easy, leaves disfiguring scars where the breast once was. If we had a means to remedy such a situation, that is a carcinomatous degeneration,  and then minimise the damage instead of having a poor woman who continually has to undergo chemotherapy for years, sometimes even decades, we would have made a step forward, actually a considerable step forward, for the patient as well as for society, the family and the person itself.  In such a situation, the possibility of resorting to a therapeutic protocol that does not manage to protect the breast should not only be simply seen with respect to the fact that a woman can also live without a breast; the question concerns how one lives, the seriousness that such a loss may entail for a woman and, last but not least, the woman's family as well. In other words, a protocol that in the first place may make us avoid devastating operations such as the amputation of a limb as in the osteosarcoma I mentioned before or the amputation of a breast (but there are many more examples), a protocol, I said, that may allow to us to live rather well with a tumour for a considerable period of time is certainly not a negligible thing.  
As far as this aspect is concerned I think that here we are, if we want,  paving the way for two ways to be considered when we have to tackle these cases. Are we really forced to choose surgery that is to say to resort to a just as devastating chemotherapy, or choose to isolate patients in hospitals for long periods, to impoverish the quality of their life for years, for decades until death finally eliminates all their suffering? Is the way that today medicine is choosing where patients are forced to undergo all these devastating and disfiguring therapies for years an expression of civilisation? The whole issue does not merely concern a protocol for a tumour. It is also a project to change directions, to follow another path. I do not believe that I did find such ways, but if you don't begin you won't achieve anything. I have tried to lay bare the often terrible harshness of these situations that those who play a leading role in them are forced to consider in every respect. However, if we could - I was using this word before - live with a tumour, the whole thing would change. Things would be different if we had a different idea, if we could think about a tumour not as a terrible attack we should avoid in every possible way and with every possible means, however high its price may be.  
The way I tried to propose depends upon these assumptions. It might seem a utopia but I already have some cases which are not utopias: a woman who was operated for a suprarene carcinoma five years ago. She had four pulmonary metastases in both sides. Five years have elapsed since then and she is still alive, she works, she takes care of her house and she never even comes down with a cold. This woman has a cancer; she knows she has it, she agreed to live with a tumour, but what matters to her is the kind of life she leads; a normal or almost normal life within a family and society. Will it be possible for us to achieve such a goal, or an illusion, a utopia, an ideal point we will refer to without ever achieving it? I believe, according to the experiences I have had so far, that maybe this point is not so far away. It has yet to be achieved but we are getting closer to it. We are not just talking of remedying or recovering from a tumour: the scenario is much wider, there is a fact that a person lives in extremely miserable conditions for years.  
Costs are another issue to be considered and they both concern the somatostatin and other aspects related to it.  
The question that is exceptionally important for you - due to your position as the nation's representatives - is to know the precise extent of the measure. In my opinion this is an essential point which I had to inform you about.  
I would like to thank you for having given me the opportunity to outline my far wider ideas that I have been nourishing in my mind for years. Thanks for your attention.  
(Applause)... 

President - I would like to thank Professor Di Bella for his speech.  
This is certainly not a scientific seat, as he highlighted before; here organisation-related issues pertaining to the law are tackled as well as topics pertaining the cultural debate. Considering diseases not when death occurs but when there is still life, diseases that men and women want to eradicate but with which whole families have to cope with and live, is a theme that we broached in our Commission several times, and we clearly asked science, research and medicine the best they could give us every time.  
I would now like to call upon the deputies who wish the ask questions or to participate in the debate for three minutes each. Professor Di Bella will answer at the end of this first series of questions.  

Domenico Gramazio - First of all I would like to thank Professor Di Bella. This hearing was necessary in order to take to an institutional seat a debate which developed in the press and triggered contrasts and barriers.  
I remember that during the September demonstration before the Ministry of Health's headquarters, as National Alliance's members of the Parliament we asked the Minister to receive a delegation of the demonstrators and the Commission to discuss Di Bella's issues. Our requests received no answer at the time. In January we asked the Commission's president himself to be received and he was so kind as to listen to the group's presidents and finally organised today's hearing. We think that this hearing is important, extremely important, as it takes a debate which had to be tackled both politically and culturally back to the institutional seats.  
By coming here today after yesterday's close encounter - that I believe contributed to solve some problems hard to understand - on television with the Ministry of Health, and a few hours before the meeting you will have today with the Minister herself and the oncologic Commission, you, Professor Di Bella, established a constructive discussion which had hermetically been interrupted by those who did not support your therapy.  
My question, and I'll ask it to you, is whether the clinical records already given to the Ministry, the publication of a volume made up by over thirty clinical records were enough for the involved ministerial commissions to tackle the issues concerning them; my question is whether the need to have one hundred clinical records to tackle the issues and not using those they already had is not a fake problem. Today you claimed that your therapy also depends upon living together with the disease. Today's hearing will certainly make it possible for the patients who are trying to use your method to feel more willing to go to those doctors who, throughout the nation, are forced to endure a pressure exerted by the Medical Association that forbid them  - and this is the scandalous thing in Italy - to use your therapy.  
We firmly believe in the freedom of treatment and of choice. We too, as you and the people who want to use your method, do not believe that the President of the National Federation of the Medical Association may be really committed because of his negative decisions towards a treatment that should be properly considered in every respect. 

(To be continued)