Chemotherapy & Cancer

[Bill Giman]

To everyone with patients on chemotherapy:

There is a new book by G.B.Faguet, M.D., "The War on Cancer: Anatomy of
Failure, A Blueprint for the Future." Faguet is a cancer researcher,
Professor, Dept of Med, Hematology & Oncology, Medical College of
Georgia (USA).

He writes, "the process of anti-cancer drug development remains mostly
anchored on this century old, conceptually antiquated, technically
inefficient, labor intensive, costly, and low-yield 'hit or miss'
(mostly miss) screening approach engineered and sponsered by the
National Cancer Institute (NCI)." Also, "...chemotherapy is responsible
for curing approximately two percent of those who receive it for
advanced cancer."

Wow only 2% effective, great products.

Regards,
Bill Giman

[Shannon Nelson]

Interesting! What "blueprint" is he suggesting?
Shannon
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[Tanya Marquette]

and we know that a huge percentage of allopaths would/do refuse
chemotherapy since it not only has little efficacy, but also causes
serious damage

tanya
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[Rosemary C. Hyde, Ph.D.]

Unfortunately, the cure rate for chemotherapy is lower than generally
publicized, since the research reports base their findings on relative risk
rather than absolute risk.

Absolute risk would be that out of every 100 people with x condition or
treatment, 4 are cured, as measured by, say, 10 year survival (which is a
higher standard than is usually applied). That cure rate would be 4%.

But let's say they tweak the treatment, and suddenly 6 out of every 100
people in this category survive for 10 years with no obvious recurrence.
Absolutely speaking, this is an increase of 2% in the cure rate. Relatively
speaking, though, based on the previous 4%, an additional 2 people is a 50%
increase -- they're both true but the relative statistic sounds so much
better. You'd be much more likely to undergo the treatment, no matter how
sickening, for a 50% improvement in your chances -- much less likely to do
so for a 2% increase.

The fact is that virtually no one with advanced cancer (Stage IV, where
there are distant metastases) has their lives prolonged by chemotherapy.
With advanced cancer, they talk about "time to progression" and use the
same relative statistics. So if the time it would take the cancer to grow
more had been one month and with a new treatment the average time becomes 2
months, that's a doubling of effectiveness based on this statistical
calculation. However, time to progression has zero correlation with overall
survival, so this statistic is pretty meaningless in terms of what counts --
AND the increased toxicity is often severe, making the person;'s remaining
life time dramatically more uncomfortable than it would have been without
the treatment.

Chemotherapy, while always sickening, does increase survival somewhat in
certain early tumors. It's really important for people to know the "true
facts" -- the real statistics -- before deciding whether or not it is good
for them. Often patients and their families have to know what they're
looking for, and be very persistent with doctors to get the real absolute
statistics. It helps to ask for absolute statistics rather than relative
ones. And the onlhy acceptable answer consists of those numbers.

Rosemary