In many cases, chemotherapy does more harm than good. From Dr. Vernon Coleman at vernoncoleman.com:
Drug companies, cancer charities and doctors recommend chemotherapy because there is big money in it. The least forgivable of these are the cancer charities which exist to protect people but which seem to me to be ruthless exploiters of patients.
As always the medical literature is confusing but in the Annals of Oncology I found this: ‘the upfront use of chemotherapy does not seem to influence the overall outcome of the disease’.
Most doctors won’t tell you this, or even admit it to themselves, but cancer drugs are killing up to 50% of patients in some hospitals. A study by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK, which was published in The Lancet, found that 2.4% of breast cancer patients die within a month of starting chemotherapy. The figures are even worse for patients with lung cancer where 8.4% of patients die within a month when treated with chemotherapy. When patients die that quickly, I feel that it is safe to assume that they were killed by the treatment not the disease. At one hospital, the death rate for patients with lung cancer treated with chemotherapy was reported at over 50%. The one month mortality rate in one group of teaching hospitals was 28% for patients receiving palliative care for lung cancer. One in five breast cancer patients in another group of hospitals died from their treatment. Naturally, all the hospitals which took part in the study insisted that chemotherapy prescribing was being done safely. If we accept this then we must also question the validity of chemotherapy. The study showed that the figures are particularly bad for patients who are in poor general health when they start treatment. The problem, of course, is that chemotherapy does not differentiate between healthy cells and cancerous cells, and the cell-destroying properties of chemotherapy can be lethal. One senior oncologist said: ‘I think it’s important to make patients aware that there are potentially life threatening downsides to chemotherapy. And doctors should be more careful about who they treat with chemotherapy.’ Sadly, I fear that most doctors do not share full details of the risks associated with chemotherapy, and a good number of patients take chemotherapy thinking that the only downside will be a short-term loss of their hair. This in truth is the least of the problems associated with these drugs.
A study published in JAMA Oncology studied the use of chemotherapy among 312 terminally ill cancer patients. All 312 patients had been given no more than six months to live by their doctors and all had at least one, and in some cases multiple rounds of chemotherapy, which had failed. Their tumours had, despite the chemotherapy, spread to other parts of their body. And yet half of these patients were on chemotherapy, despite its obvious ineffectiveness. The analysis published in JAMA Oncology showed that these patients were worse off than if they hadn’t had treatment. Their quality of life was less than it would have been without chemotherapy. The patients on chemotherapy were less able to walk, take care of themselves and stay active than the patients not taking chemotherapy. Most surprising was the fact that the patients who were feeling the best at the start of their chemotherapy were the ones who ended up feeling the worst; they were the ones who suffered the most. The chemotherapy consequences for those patients had been to make their lives worse without any benefit.
