Should Chemotherapy Be Stopped?..

Cancer is an awful thing to hear you have in any case and being told you must undergo Chemotherapy is scary as well. I'm not speaking from personal experience first hand but I have quite a few family members that have had cancer and underwent Chemotherapy.

Did you know, a study doctors performed on patients going through Chemotherapy and the success rate of the cancer coming back was at 97%.. That's a 97% chance that Chemotherapy IS NOT going to work, then why even go through the agonizing pain?!

I think they should fund different ways of curing Cancer such as old Chinese Medicine and honestly any other practices that will ACTUALLY work.

The only reason Chemotherapy is still being used is because the money; normal medication doctors don't get any profit off of but chemotherapy is different. Any chemotherapy drug/session (or what have you) the doctor makes money off of it and pockets a big chunk. For example A pharmacy can have a pill that cures cancer for $1,000 and the doctor that buys it from that pharmacy will sale it to the patient for $15,000 the insurance will pay for $9,000 and the doctor will pocket that extra $4,000.

So when all these women who have survived cancer and their families or supports that do these marathons and fundraisers for cancer, do you think the money is going to useful things LIKE research on old Chinese Medicine and other things to find curse or treatments for cancer? NO, it's going straight back into surgery and chemotherapy treatment - the two things that are proven not to work.. It's a shame.

What is your opinion on this concept?
Do you have family members/relatives with cancer?
Do you agree with me or disagree?

 

Chemotherapy has worked for many cancer patients, too, and will be around as long it's needed and recommended by doctors. Cancer treatments are not limited to chemotherapy though. There are other options such as brachytherapy, immunotherapy, stem cell transplant, etc. These are all products of research and has helped extend many people's lives. As for Chinese Traditional medicine, a lot of people are making money on them, too, by convincing people that certain plant extracts can cure cancer, diabetes, etc. Yet, most plant extracts/teas fail clinical testing, if any. Some even turned out to be poisonous.

 

You are talking absolute nonsense. On some cancer types, chemotherapy has very low chances, however on those forms the patient will be told that. There are often other treatments. Other options. Including surgery which despite your blithe assertion; often does work. For other kinds of cancer there are different success rates. All the time throughout this we are running clinical trials to try and improve patient life spans, quality of life and reduce the chances of recurrence or progression. Not all cancers are treated with chemotherapy, in fact the same cancer caught at a different point in time may or may not be treated with chemotherapy.

Take prostate cancer for example; in very low risk cancer or very elderly patients doctors may choose no treatment at all which is called Active Surveillance and will require regular check ups but if the cancer doesn't grow, nothing happens. If however caught early through screening or luck then the standard treatment is surgery called a prostatectomy, however if the cancer has spread beyond the localised area this will not be effective. The surgery may be accompanied by radiotherapy, or radiotherapy may be done without surgery. Radiotherapy is often done as a targeted treatment but again can be used for widespread cancer for palliative care reasons. Another option is hormone therapy which is used to slow the progression of the cancer by stopping testosterone which is what causes the cancer to grow quickly. Then finally, there is chemotherapy where until recently it was only used to relieve symptoms with advanced or metastatic disease, however multiple studies have shown that docetaxel (a form of chemotherapy) prolongs the life of men who have hormone resistant prostate cancer.

That is just one kind of cancer. Look at how many different kinds of treatment there are. Think that each form has different specific drugs which can be used. Doctors don't just chuck chemotherapy at people because of financial reasons. That is a conspiracy theory at it's worst. Wordwide research has shown that chemotherapy works. That same worldwide research shows that other medications and treatments also work and many of these are being incorporated as and when they have passed clinical trial.An example of both the success and the limitations of chemotherapy show in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) which has a response rate of 80-90% and a complete remission rate of 50-60% with chemotherapy treatments however has a high recurrence rate and only 40% of patients will be alive at the 2 year mark, down to 15-25% at 5 years. Chemotherapy is not a miracle cure. It is also horrendously nasty on the human body which is why it is done in between 6 and 12 cycles of treatment. We are trying to find other treatments; STOMP* which is a trial running at Birmingham University Clinical Trials Unit is looking at Olaparib to try to reduce remission rates.

You also state blithely that surgery doesn't work which is simply untrue. Surgery will not work on metastatic cancer - i.e cancer that has spread to multiple regions of the body. It is too widespread. Caught in infancy however surgery can be hugely effective. It is widely used in prostate cancer and breast cancer for example for exactly this reason. There have been full clinical studies done on the best margins of healthy cell to cut in surgery; this is best practice for a reason. The trials and the success rates bear the results. Stop spreading misinformation. In this case your scare mongering could actually put someones life at risk if they decide not to have chemotherapy against medical advice because their 'friends' say that Chinese medication is better.

*http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/mds/trials/crctu/trials/stomp/index.aspx

 

Basically, i see oncology has a branch that buys extra time for patients. Chemotherapy, at least will kill cancerous cells, but in the process kill other normla body cells like hair follicular cells, enterocytes and others.
The side effect are still bearable when compared to how important the persons life is. Chemotherapy should be continued until other alternatives are discovered.