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In talking with people about IPT for 13 years, I have run into a number of very common barriers, both mental and emotional.  IPT is a procedure, but it is also a thought structure, it is software.  And it must interface with all the other thought structures and software that are already out in the world.  Thought structures and software do evolve.  So instead of seeing these as barriers, I see them as hurdles to leap over, as opportunities for evolution.  Here they are:

1. "Information about IPT is hard to find, and hard to communicate."
2. "Insulin is only for treatment of diabetics."
3. "If you give insulin to a non-diabetic person, it is dangerous and they could die."
4. "IPT doctors claim that it does too many things.  There is no such thing as a panacea."  
5. "IPT crosses the boundaries of too many specialties."  
6. "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." 
7. "IPT is too big.  People can only work on small bite-sized projects."
8. "IPT is too new and different for people to easily accept and adopt."
9. "If IPT is for real, and has been around for more than seventy years, I would have heard about it by now."
10. "If insulin really potentiates other drugs, why haven't we heard about it from diabetics?"
11. "IPT could be just a placebo effect."
12. "IPT is not coming through acceptable medical information channels, such as peer-reviewed journals, and there have been no large placebo-controlled trials."
13. "IPT comes from Mexico.  Doctors there have no regulation and are all quacks.  A famous actor went to Mexico for cancer treatment, and he died."
14. "You will have a hard time getting IPT approved by the FDA in the United States."
15. "Insulin is not a new drug or device, so no one can make any money from IPT.  Getting funding for research will be difficult."
16. "If IPT really works, then our friends and loved ones have been denied its benefits."

1. "Information about IPT is hard to find, and hard to communicate."  With IPTQ.org now available to anyone with a web browser, this hurdle is no longer present.  Comprehensive IPT information is now available worldwide at any time of day, on demand.  And the web address can be communicated quickly and easily to anyone.
   
   
2. "Insulin is only for treatment of diabetics."   While medical schools generally teach that diabetes is the only appropriate use of insulin, this is not true.  Insulin has been successfully used for many other purposes.  Read the page on non-diabetic uses of insulin.
   
   
3. "If you give insulin to a non-diabetic person, it is dangerous and they could die."    This is a taboo that most doctors have picked up in medical school since the 1920s and 1930s.  Yes, exogenous (from outside) insulin should be given with care and under medical supervision.  Yes, unsupervised and careless insulin dosing can be hazardous and can lead to coma and death if not counterbalanced with glucose.  This is true for diabetic as well as for non-diabetic patients.  But insulin administration in IPT is always done with careful observation in a controlled clinical setting, and has a superb safety record.   Aspirin is much more dangerous.  Bone marrow transplantation is a more common and much more serious intervention, and it takes a patient much closer to death.  Radiation, surgery, high-dose chemotherapy, and general anesthesia are all more dangerous than IPT, and can have serious side effects, yet doctors use them routinely.
   
   
4. "IPT doctors claim that it does too many things.  There is no such thing as a panacea."    First, no one is claiming that IPT is a panacea.  It does not help all patients, and certainly does not cure all diseases.   But, like sleep,  drinking water,  taking deep breaths, and taking antibiotics, IPT can apparently help patients who have many different disease conditions.  
   
           Second, people have limited attention resources.  If they have to think about too many things at once, if a subject has too many facets, they can get overloaded, their fuses blow, and they have to think about something else.  (It's the same thing when you go to see a venture capitalist.  The wisdom is that you should keep things simple and propose one project, not many.)  
   
           I have had several people tell me that, for just this reason, I should talk only about IPT and breast cancer or maybe IPT and arthritis on IPTQ.org.  But time is short, and I need to help make the big picture as well as all the little pictures available to everyone.  I think it would be unethical not to make all the information available.  Yes, it looks like IPT could be very big, and could help improve treatment for many diseases.  But you don't have to think about them all at once.  You can relax, take a deep breath, and read just one IPTQ.org web page at a time.
   
   
5. "IPT crosses the boundaries of too many specialties."  This is a sociological and institutional problem, not a problem with IPT itself.  If a simple innovation can help many different diseases, we should not ignore or shun it.  We should welcome it.
   
   
6. "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is."   
   This is a common negative thought.  I prefer to look at the other side:  
   "If it looks too good to be true, it might still be true."
   
   
7. "IPT is too big.  People can only work on small bite-sized projects."    True, we are taught more and more to specialize, to live more and more in our personal microcosms.  True, the IPT picture is big, and until now has never been presented in its correct scale.  But although the IPT picture is big, it is also simple and easy to understand.  Like the new millennium, it is a big picture that everyone can relate to and respond to in their own personal way, focusing on it in small bites.
   
   
8. "IPT is too new and different for people to easily accept and adopt."   The most important factor is whether it works or not.  Medicine has gone through many immense changes over the last 70 years.  IPT is not so different in that context.  It is only a slight change in standard medical procedure, that reportedly improves results dramatically.
   
   
9. "If IPT is for real, and has been around for more than seventy years, I would have heard about it by now."   Not so.  IPT information has been slow to get out because of all these hurdles, and because there has probably been someone in the information chain between you and the IPT doctors who has not found it in his personal or financial interest to take the time and make the effort necessary to pass the information on.  Even if this person was interested, he was probably overwhelmed by the task of communication (faxing, photocopies, mailing), and then got distracted by something else.  Multiply this situation, and you get seventy years of inaction and ignorance about IPT.  IPTQ.org is seeking to overcome this information barrier.  All you need to do now is send someone an email.
   
   
10. "If insulin really potentiates other drugs, why haven't we heard about it from diabetics?"  Actually, it is well known that diabetics should not mix insulin and alcohol due to the potentiating effect.  And I know of anecdotes of new diabetics noticing a potentiation effect for other drugs.  It is just that after long term daily insulin administration, diabetics apparently undergo down-regulation of their insulin receptors, and other changes in their whole insulin-interaction system, which may partially mask the potentiation effect of insulin.  The Drs. Perez Garcia reportedly have found ways to work around this.
    
    
11. "IPT could be just a placebo effect."   True, but if so it is a really good placebo.  And at least it does not have harmful side effects like a lot of standard drug treatments.  There is some evidence that people's response to insulin can be learned.  ["Classical conditioning of insulin effects in healthy humans," by Stockhorst et al. (1999) Psychosomatic Medicine, volume 61, pp 424-435.]  We will not be absolutely sure that IPT is effective beyond placebo until we do real placebo-controlled clinical trials.  Everyone involved with IPT will welcome such trials.  Let's do them!  
    
    
12. "IPT is not coming through acceptable medical information channels, such as peer-reviewed journals, and there have been no large placebo-controlled trials."  I have also heard this expressed personally by established medical researchers as "coming from left field", and "coming from too far outside the box".  First, there actually are a few articles about IPT in the peer-reviewed literature, even though they have not drawn much attention.  Second, in baseball, if you  want the ball to come from the infield, but it is actually coming from left field, it is still the ball.  And if the thing you are looking for is not inside the box, but is outside the box, then perhaps the box needs to get bigger.  Everything has to start somewhere.  (Each of us started from a single fertilized egg.)  Yes,  IPT got started through a doctor in Mexico, not at a US medical school, not at the NIH, not in a pharmaceutical company lab.  Yes, it has not appeared in the AMA Journal, or Lancet, or the New England Journal of Medicine... yet.  And yes, there have been no large placebo-controlled trials.  But that is not a good reason to reject IPT.   For those who wish to wait, IPT will eventually come through your favorite channels, with all the trimmings.  But for those for whom time is important, this is the place and stage where IPT exists right now:  a few private doctors with generations of empirical experience and some theories,  and this website.
    
    
13. "IPT comes from Mexico.  Doctors there have no regulation and are all quacks.  A famous actor went to Mexico for cancer treatment, and he died."    Yes, I have run into a lot of blatant prejudice and faulty logic about Mexico.  These embarrassing memes are more common in the US than you might think.  I have even heard them from well educated US doctors.  
    
            First, it was a historical accident that IPT was discovered in Mexico.  That is where Dr. Perez Garcia 1 was born.  He was very proud of his country, and he chose to stay there to develop his therapy, despite a lack of support from his colleagues.  Human beings and human bodies are just the same in Mexico as they are anywhere else in the world, and medicine that works there will work anywhere.
    
            Second, there are some very good doctors in Mexico.  And some very innovative work has been done there.  A recent example was the first implantation of fetal cells into the brain for treatment of Parkinson's disease.    Yes, there are probably some bad doctors in Mexico, as there are in any country.  But the less regulated medical environment, while perhaps allowing some abuses,  could also spur more rapid exploration and innovation by individual physicians.  We could learn a lot from Mexico's example.
    
    [Actually, the very first medical school in North America was established in Mexico City in the mid-1500s, more than a century before the founding of Harvard.]
    
            Third, not all doctors and treatments in Mexico are the same.  And the multifaceted medicine of a whole large country should not be judged by the story of a single famous patient who went there and died.  Dr. Perez Garcia y Bellon 2's second wife told me that she met him because she had heard from people that there are many good doctors in Mexico, but if you really want results, go to Dr. Perez Garcia in Mexico City.
    
            Fourth, there is no longer any room or time in this world for prejudice against medicine in Mexico, and for other manifestations of the NIH (not invented here) syndrome.  Mexico, with NAFTA, is a major trading partner for the US.  The percentage of people of Mexican and other Hispanic origin in the US population has become quite large.  US presidential candidates find it advisable to learn to speak Spanish.   Many advertising campaigns in the US find it advantageous to speak to the Hispanic population.  And the new president of Mexico is talking about having an open border between the two countries within 10 years.
    
            There is no more time for professional or national jealousy.  If IPT works, it will work for all of us.  If it is real, IPT is a treasure for all humanity.  Like Lister and Pasteur, the Drs. Donato Perez Garcia could rightly become heroes to people of all ethnic origins, not only in Mexico and the US, but worldwide and for all time to come.
    
    
14. "You will have a hard time getting IPT approved by the FDA in the United States."     Not necessarily true.  While the FDA regulates drugs, it does not regulate the unapproved use of approved medications.   Since IPT uses standard, approved drugs in a subtly new way, any doctor should be able to practice IPT right now, if he believes it is in the best interest of his patients.  IPT has been approved twice for multicenter trials for cancer treatment, by an institutional review board.  The only real hurdles to the widespread practice of IPT are:  (1) Lack of knowledge and training, and (2) Imagined or real lack of approval by medical colleagues.  With IPTQ.org we are seeking to leap over these hurdles.
    
    
15. "Insulin is not a new drug or device, so no one can make any money from IPT.  Getting funding for research will be difficult."   The first sentence is not true.  See the business page for some ideas of how IPT can create large financial opportunities.  Remember that Linux software is given away free, but is creating a huge multifaceted industry based on providing support and services, with numerous publicly traded companies now listed on stock exchanges.  You can think of IPT as medical software, a better way to use the hardware tools we already have.  As people see this opportunity, as patients demand IPT, as doctors begin to realize that some of their own dreams can come true, as insurance companies and government begin to see the savings, as drug companies see the new product possibilities, there could be a fabulous wave of investment in IPT research, training, and implementation.  The second sentence has been true for the last 70 years, as funding sources have had other priorities.  But I think that soon this will change.
    
    
16. "If IPT really works, then our friends and loved ones have been denied its benefits."    Yes, so true.  And this represents a big emotional hurdle.  Why is it a hurdle?  Because the emotional reaction can be traumatic and overwhelming.  Which of us has not had friends and family members (or, for doctors, patients) suffer and die from diseases for which IPT may be a better treatment?  We are talking of hundreds of millions of people.  Living beings just like us who have suffered and died over the past 70 years.  More deaths and misery, perhaps, than were caused by all the wars of the 20th century, one patient at a time.   Some of us may at times feel tremendous guilt, if IPT is real.  (As I sometimes do, for taking over a year to create this website.)  Others may feel enormous grief at our unfathomable personal and collective losses.  And  we may all find ourselves occasionally feeling anger that IPT has been ignored and denied to us for more than seven decades, by one person at a time.  Overwhelmed by these powerful emotions, some people may go into a state of denial, in which they cannot even think about IPT, or get interested in it, or acknowledge its existence.   These emotions are natural.  But I think there are enough of us who can go beyond them, look straight at this situation, and take conscious action.

And of the quickest action you can take is to send an email to someone about IPT and IPTQ.org.