[back]

What doctors say about Chemo Therapy ?

Scientists based at McGill Cancer Centre sent a questionnaire to 118 lung cancer doctors to determine what degree of faith these practicing cancer physicians placed in the therapies they administered. They were asked to imagine that they had cancer and were asked which of six current trials they would choose. 79 doctors responded of which 64 would not consent to be in any trial containing Cisplatin - one of the common chemotherapy drugs they were trialling, (currently achieving worldwide sales of about $110,000,000 a year) and 58 of the 79 found that all the trials in question were unacceptable due to the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptably high degree of toxicity

When the cancer patient hears the doctor say "effective," he or she thinks, and logically so, that "effective" means it cures cancer. But all it means is temporary tumor shrinkage.

Chemotherapy usually doesn't cure cancer or extend life, and it really does not improve the quality of the life either. Doctors frequently make this claim though. There are thousands of studies that were reviewed by Dr. Moss as part of the research for his book -- and there is not one single good study documenting this claim.

What patients consider "good quality of life" seems to differ from what the doctors consider. To most it is just common sense that a drug that makes you throw up, and lose your hair, and wrecks your immune system is not improving your quality of life. Chemotherapy can give you life-threatening mouth sores. People can slough the entire lining of the intestines! One longer-term effect is particularly tragic: people who've had chemotherapy no longer respond to nutritional or immunologically-based approaches to their cancers. And since chemotherapy doesn't cure 96% to 98% of all cancers anyway...People who take chemotherapy have sadly lost their chance of finding another sort of cure.

It's especially telling that in a number of surveys most chemotherapists have said they would not take chemotherapy themselves or recommend it for their families. Chemotherapy drugs are the most toxic substances ever put deliberately into the human body. They are known poisons, they are designed poisons. The whole thing began with experiments with "mustard gas," the horrible chemical-warfare agents from World War I.

Dr. Moss' position on chemotherapy is supported by many major students of the study of cancer treatment. Following are some examples: Dr. John Bailar is the chief of epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal and was formerly the editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In 1986 the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Dr. Bailer and Dr. Elaine Smith, a colleague from the University of Iowa. Bailer and Smith wrote: "Some 35 years of intense and growing efforts to improve the treatment of cancer have not had much overall effect on the most fundamental measure of clinical outcome - death. The effort to control cancer has failed so far to obtain its objectives.

Dr. John Cairns, a professor of microbiology at Harvard, published his view in Scientific American in 1985, "that basically the war on cancer was a failure and that chemotherapy was not getting very far with the vast majority of cancers."

As far back as 1975, Nobel Laureate James Watson of DNA fame was quoted in the New York Times saying that the American public had been "sold a nasty bill of goods about cancer."

In 1991, Dr. Albert Braverman, Professor of Hematology and Oncology at the State University of New York, Brooklyn, published an article in Lancet titled "Medical Oncology in the 1990s," in which he wrote: "The time has come to cut back on the clinical investigation of new chemotherapeutic regimens for cancer and to cast a critical eye on the way chemotherapeutic treatment is now being administered."

Dr. Braverman says that there is no solid tumor incurable in 1976 that is curable today. Dr. Moss confirms this and claims that the greatest breakthrough in the objective study of chemotherapy came from a biostatistician at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Ulrich Abel. His critique focused on whether chemotherapy effectively prolonged survival in advanced epithelial cancer. His answer was that it is not effective. He summarized and extended his findings and concluded that chemotherapy overall is ineffective. A recent search turned up exactly zero reviews of his work in American journals, even though it was published in 1990. The belief is that this is not because his work was unimportant -- but because it's irrefutable.

With the extensive documentation in Dr. Moss' book, and all the statistics developed by the experts, why is chemotherapy still pushed by the large majority of oncologists? Dr. Moss feels that "there's a tremendous conflict going on in the minds of honest, sensitive, caring oncologists." They're in a very difficult position because they've been trained to give these drugs. And they've devoted many years to reaching a very high level of expertise in the knowledge of poisonous, deadly compounds. They're really in a bind, because they went into oncology to help the cancer patient, yet the tools they've been given don't work. And they see what happens to physicians who "step out of line" and treat cancer with alternative means.

Armed raids, loss of licensure, professional smearing and ostracism are some of the consequences. These could all be related to the quotation in the book made by Dr. Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. At a recent National Institute of Health meeting, he said of chemotherapy: "[It's] a marvelous opportunity for rampant deceit. So much money is there to be made that ethical principles can be overrun sometimes in a stampede to get at physicians and prescribers." You never heard that on the evening news.

The economics of cancer treatment are astounding. Cancer treatment is close to $100 billion annually ($100,000,000,000). The chemotherapy part of that by 1995 will be up to $8.5 billion. Looking from another angle: the Bristol Myers company owns patents on twelve of the nearly forty "FDA-approved" chemotherapeutic drugs. The president, past president, chairman of the board, and a couple of the directors of Bristol Myers all hold positions on the board at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Moss' book details the failures (and very few successes) for chemotherapy with more than fifty types of cancer, includes a complete description of the major chemotherapy drugs, and has a section about questions to ask your doctor. All of Dr. Moss' books and Cancer Chronicles newsletters are available from Equinox Press, 1-800-929-WELL or 718-636-4433



Not Only is Chemo Ineffective...

By shrinking tumors, chemotherapy encourages stronger cancer cells to grow and multiply and become chemo resistant.

Then there are the new cancers caused by chemotherapy, or secondary cancers. This quaint side effect is often overlooked in the lists of side effects in a drug's accompanying literature, though you can find this information quite easily at the National Cancer Institute.

We pride ourselves in America for being technologically advanced and that our technology is rooted in a foundation of good science.

Wrong. When it comes to medicine, little at all is based upon science. Again we shall point to the Office of Technological Assessment’s paper: Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies in which we are told that fewer than 20% of all medical procedures have been tested, and that of those tested, half were tested badly.

Medicine in America is not about healing.

When you are diagnosed with cancer, you are suddenly worth $300,000.00 to the cancer industry.

Most telling, according to Ralph Moss in his book Questioning Chemotherapy , is that in a good number of surveys, chemotherapists have responded that they would neither recommend chemotherapy for their families nor would they use it themselves. One of our advisors, Dr Dan Harper, reported to us about an unpublished cohort study in which it was revealed that only 9% of oncologists took chemotherapy for their cancers.

Let’s hear from a couple of physicians and doctors who have not yet succumb to the heavy hand of the cancer industry:

"...as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good." - Alan C Nixon, PhD, former president of the American Chemical Society.

Walter Last, writing in The Ecologist, reported recently: “After analysing cancer survival statistics for several decades, Dr Hardin Jones, Professor at the University of California, concluded “...patients are as well, or better off untreated." Jones’ disturbing assessment has never been refuted.

Professor Charles Mathe declared: “If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.”

“Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure,” Albert Braverman MD 1991 Lancet 1991 337 p901 “Medical Oncology in the 90s.

“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors,” Allen Levin, MD UCSF The Healing of Cancer.

“Despite widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years,” Thomas Dao, MD NEJM Mar 1975 292 p 707.

Additionally, Irwin Bross, a biostatistician for the National Cancer Institute, discovered that many cancers that are benign (though thought to be malignant) and will not metastasize until they are hit with chemotherapy. In other words, he's found that many people who've been diagnosed with metastatic cancer did not have metastatic cancer until they got their chemotherapy.

For many cancers, chemotherapy just does not improve your survival rate. Some of these are colorectal, gastric, pancreatic, bladder, breast, ovarian, cervical and corpus uteri, head and neck.

Knowing this, oncologists still recommend a regimen of chemotherapy.

Here are two stories we received from Frank Wiewel:

When President Reagan had his colon cancer successfully removed by surgery, his health was reported daily as he recovered. On his return to work, a spokesperson appeared, proclaimed him cured, and that was that.

However, very nearly every patient who undergoes surgery for colon cancer gets put on chemotherapy afterwards. Why not Present Reagan?

...and since a picture says more than a thousand words, here is a reduced-size rendering of the burning and scarring resulting of chemotherapy fluid spilling onto the unprotected hand. Does this picture make one feel safer to have such an extremely aggressive toxic chemical administered within one’s body via intravenous injection? Knowing that our outer skin is actually better protected against any impacts than our inner body? That is also why nurses administering chemotherapy have to wear protective gloves and follow the most stringent security measures in case of any accidental spills of chemotherapy beyond 5 cc, see High risks involved in accidental spillage of chemotherapy drugs.

Chemotherapy can cause cancer

An amazing admission is made on a web page supported by the US National Cancer Institute. Giving the reader information on the treatment of Wilm's Tumour ( a children's cancer which affects the kidney) the site goes on to state:

When very high doses of chemotherapy are used to kill cancer cells, these high doses can destroy the blood-forming tissue in the bones (the bone marrow). If very high doses of chemotherapy are needed to treat the cancer, bone marrow may be taken from the bones before therapy and frozen until it is needed. Following chemotherapy, the bone marrow is given back through a needle in a vein. This is called autologous bone marrow reinfusion.

Radiation therapy uses x-rays or other high-energy rays to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Radiation for Wilms' tumor usually comes from a machine outside the body (external radiation therapy). Radiation may be used before or after surgery and/or chemotherapy.

After several years, some patients develop another form of cancer as a result of their treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. Clinical trials are ongoing to determine if lower doses of chemotherapy and radiation can be used."

The site can be accessed at http://www.cancerlinksusa.com/kidney/wilm/treatment.htm



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did you know that 30 years ago Dr Hardin B. Jones, Professor of Medical Physics & Physiology at Berkeley, found that the life expectancy of untreated cancer cases appears to be FOUR TIMES LONGER than that of treated individuals?

1969 Science Writers Conference of the ACS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chemotherapy is effective in only 2 to 4% of cancers----Hodgkin's disease, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL, childhood leukemia), Testicular cancer, and Choriocarcinoma?

Ralph Moss interview 1995

http://www.livelinks.com/sumeria/canc/rmoss.html



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



There is no scientific evidence for chemotherapy being able to extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers, which accounts for 80% of all cancers? (Dr Ulrich Abel. 1990)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chemotherapy drugs are of benefit to at most 5% of cancer patients they are given to, but are routinely given to 50% of patients?

John Cairns of Harvard in Scientific American

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



75 % of oncologists, in one survey, said if they had cancer they would not participate in chemotherapy trials due to its "ineffectiveness and its unacceptable toxicity"?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Grouped together, the average cancer patient has a 50/50 chance of living another 5 years; which are the same odds he or she had in 1971?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



With some cancers, notably liver, lung, pancreas, bone and advanced breast, our 5 year survival from traditional therapy alone is virtually the same as it was 30 years ago?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



After $50 Billion spent on cancer research, the list of cancers responsive to chemotherapy is almost identical to what it was 25 years ago?

Questioning Chemotherapy by Ralph Moss, p81

the War on Cancer is a failure with a death rate not lower but 6% higher in 1997 than 1970?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Did you know that one of the worlds leading nuclear medical scientist, John Gofman M.D.,Ph.D. found that past exposure to ionizing radiation, primarily medical x-rays (eg mammograms), is responsible for about 75 percent of the breast-cancer problem today?

http://ratical.co./radiation/CNR?PBC/Overview.htm



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Radiation therapy does not improve the survival of patients with breast cancer !

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Did you know that the mortality rate for breast cancer in women over 55 was about 20% higher in 1995 than in 1970 (so much for mammograms)? (Irwin D. Bross, Ph.D.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did you know that two large studies found an increase in mortality of women (under 55) from breast cancer who were regularly screened with mammograms?



http://www.alternativehealth.co.nz/cancer/chemo/index.htm