Cancer drugs are considered "effective" if they merely shrink tumors. But medical research indicates that radiation and chemotherapy, while shrinking tumors, do NOT necessarily increase survival. One researcher reaching this conclusion was German biostatician Dr. Ulrich Abel, writing in 1990. He found that reduction of tumor mass not only does not prolong expected survival but can cause the cancer to return more aggressively, since killing off most of the cancer mass allows drug-resistant cell lines to grow.[3] An article in the British Medical Journal concurred. It observed that while tumor shrinkage is the usual way to measure the efficacy of chemotherapy, "radiological shrinkage of solid tumours . . . often has little or no survival benefit . . . . Unfortunately, few studies have compared chemotherapy with supportive care alone."[4]
One of the few studies that had made this comparison was conducted by Dr. Hardin Jones, professor of medical physics and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He told an ACS panel, "My studies have proven conclusively that untreated cancer victims actually live up to four times longer than treated individuals. For a typical type of cancer, people who refused treatment lived for an average of 12-1/2 years. Those who accepted surgery other kinds of treatment lived an average of only three years. . . . I attribute this to the traumatic effect of surgery on the body's natural defense mechanism. The body has a natural defense against every type of cancer."[5]
Dr. Jones was speaking twenty years ago, but more recent data are lacking, because studies comparing treated and untreated patients are no longer being done. To fail to treat potentially curable patients with "proven" methods is now considered unethical. Most drug studies merely compare the effects of two treatment regimens, both more or less equally toxic, on the size of tumor growth.[6]
A 1984 review of 80 studies of chemotherapy for breast cancer found that 76 of them had looked only at tumor shrinkage, not at effects on survival or quality of life; and three of the remaining four had found no survival advantage for the drugs.[7] Other reviews reached equally disquieting conclusions.[8]
As for surgery and radiation, they were grandfathered in before the FDA's "effectiveness" requirement. For surgery, large-scale controlled trials haven't been conducted proving a survival benefit as compared to no treatment at all; and for radiation given after surgery, large-scale randomized controlled trials haven't shown a survival benefit as compared to surgery alone.[9]
Radiation is given to shrink tumors in critical situations (e.g., when the tumor is pressing on an artery, airway, vital organ, or nerve), but the long-term effect can actually be to shorten survival.[10] A 1987 review of eight trials from around the world found that the risk of death after ten years for women who had not gotten radiation after their breast surgeries was 26 percent lower than for women who had gotten.[11] "The majority of cancers," wrote Dr. John Cairns of Harvard in 1985, "cannot be cured by radiation because the dose of X rays required to kill all the cancer cells would also kill the patient."[12]
With chemotherapy, progress has been made in treating certain cancers; but the drugs haven't done much to prolong survival from the big killers -- cancers of the breast, colon and lung.[13] According to Dr. Cairns, chemotherapy prevents death in only 2 to 5 percent of cancer cases. The chance the drugs themselves will kill the patient is about the same: somewhere between 2.5 percent and 5 percent.[14] In a 1991 study in which chemotherapy was compared to no treatment in 250 women with metastatic breast cancer, the drugs not only did not improve survival but significantly decreased the quality of life.[15]
With early breast cancer, on the other hand, a modest survival benefit has been found. A 1992 British review of 31 randomized trials involving 11,000 women found a slight increase in overall survival after 10 years for patients given "polychemotherapy" (more than one drug for more than one month). The women's chances of being alive 10 years later, however, were still only 51.3 percent with the drugs, versus 45 percent without them a mere 6.3 percent survival benefit. And this grim prognosis was for women with breast cancer in the early, "treatable" stages.[16]
Despite these very modest benefits, the National Cancer Institute has recommended chemotherapy for all breast cancer patients, whether or not they have visible signs of cancer after surgery. The theory is that projected over thousands of women, a significant number of lives will be saved.[17] The problem especially for the 93.7 percent who aren't benefited is the drugs' crushing side effects. Virtually all chemotherapeutic drugs are toxic and immunosuppressive. Being unable to distinguish between cancerous and normal cells, they wind up killing both. Most also cause secondary cancers, which can show up many years after "successful" chemotherapy.[18]
-- Adapted from Forbidden Medicine by Ellen Hodgson Brown, available for $19.95 from Third Millennium Press,