Medical Cancer Remedies

Brief Overview of Chemotherapy Cancer Remedy Figures

This page gives research based information from a highly reputable medical journal about the effectiveness of chemotherapy on cancer survival rates. It is not intended to be a page full of detail about surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy for cancer, but to give the briefest overview of some figures about the effect of chemotherapy on survival.

The reference is given below and I suggest that any patient being offered chemotherapy as a cancer remedy should get a copy to look at before agreeing to such treatment.

The message of the figures below is that if you are looking for medical cancer remedies, then chemotherapy is not the place to go for most cancers.

The message of this website is that as the contribution of chemotherapy to survival is so low in so many cancers then surviving cancer must be natural and be able to be encouraged. Most survivors must have a large component of self healing. This issue then becomes how to maximize the body’s ability to self heal using natural healing and alternative cancer therapies.

The overall 5-year survival rate for cancer in the US and Australia in now more than 60% and chemotherapy only contributes just over 2% to that (2.3% in Australia, 2.1% in the US).

To make this clearer, let’s take the example of breast cancer survivors. The average length of survival is over 20 years (Australia). Between 78% and 85% of Australian women with breast cancer survive 5 years, but only 1.5% of that survival is due to chemo.

This news is not new. Every decade at least one major paper is published in reputable international journals saying how hopeless current treatment is for cancer. The issue is political. It is "believed" that chemotherapy works because almost all the oncologists, most medical practitioners and patients "believe" it works. Just watch the news when a new drug comes out. There is a clamour to make it available to all claiming it is not fair if the poor cannot afford it.

What about the science of it all? Sadly the science does not support the advertising. The statistics of it all are not all that complicated. Any reasonably up to date researcher can understand them if they take the time to drill down to the facts. Clinicians are trained to understand them. They just don't bother because they "know" that chemo works and the FDA wouldn't let them use them if they didn't. There is a lot of politics involved and as with any politics and firm belief system any questioning just shows you are personally inadequate and shouldn't have a say in patient care. The whole process of marketing cancer treatment is stunning - incredibly successful advertising.

My response when I first found this out was intense anger – why had my friend been subjected to it? She had been lead to believe it was either chemo or death and no medical person gave her any reassurance that survival was more likely than death without treatment.

There was another aspect to the knowledge that took a while to come to me, and that is, if chemo was not contributing much to the mortality rates then the body’s own ability to heal must be central to a healthy future. Therefore we need to look to every aspect of self care that has been shown to improve outcomes.

To make your own set of cancer remedies look at:

	Your diet – eat foods shown to encourage cancer cells to die and avoid those that encourage cancer cells to grow
	Physical activity – three to six hours of moderate walking a week improves the chances of recovery for many cancers
	Psychological self care – look at what increases and decreases your stress and find out what has been most important to other survivors
	Social connections – survivors have, or develop, strong social networks
	Spiritual – find a way of connecting with your deepest sense of life and goodness

Find out what psycho-social-spiritual aspects were common to all survivors in one research study – go to www.beatthemedicalodds.com, or read a review of the Beat the Medical Odds ebook first.

Reference: Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clinical Oncology 2004;16:549-560. This is reasonably readable and anyone with cancer should get a copy (try your university medical library – they can download it for you). It isn’t very chatty, mostly just how they came to the figures for each of the main cancers.

 

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