 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
Chemotherapy
"Most
cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy."
-Dr. Alan Levin
A
six- or twelve-month course of chemotherapy not only is a very unpleasant
experience but also has its own intrinsic mortality...treatments now avert...perhaps
2 or 3 percent...of the 400,000 deaths from cancer that occur each year
in the U.S."
- Prof John Cairns
Scientific American, 1985
Chemotherapy Report
Do We Need a New Approach to Cancer?
In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced the War on Cancer and promised
a cure by the 1977 bicentennial. In each of the 25 years since, more Americans
have died of cancer than the year before.
The failure of chemotherapy to control cancer has become apparent even
to the oncology establishment. Scientific American featured a recent cover
story entitled: "The War on Cancer -- It's Being Lost." In it,
eminent epidemiologist John C. Bailar III, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department
of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University cited the relentless
increase in cancer deaths in the face of growing use of toxic chemotherapy.
He concluded that scientists must look in new directions if they are ever
to make progress against this unremitting killer.
Adding its voice,
the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, decrying the failure
of conventional therapy to stop the rise in breast cancer deaths, noted
the discrepancy between public perception and reality. "If one were
to believe all the media hype, the triumphalism of the [medical] profession
in published research, and the almost weekly miracle breakthroughs trumpeted
by the cancer charities, one might be surprised that women are dying at
all from this cancer" it observed. Noting that conventional therapies
-- chemotherapy, radiation and surgery -- had been pushed to their limits
with dismal results, the editorial called on researchers to "challenge
dogma and redirect research efforts along more fruitful lines."
John Cairns, professor of microbiology at Harvard University, published
a devastating 1985 critique in Scientific American. "Aside from certain
rare cancers, it is not possible to detect any sudden changes in the death
rates for any of the major cancers that could be credited to chemotherapy.
Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet
to be established."
In fact, chemotherapy is curative in very few cancers -- testicular, Hodgkin's,
choriocarcinoma, childhood leukemia. In most common solid tumors -- lung,
colon, breast, etc. -- chemotherapy is NOT curative.
In an article entitled "Chemotherapy: Snake-Oil Remedy?" that
appeared in The Los Angeles Times of January 9, 1987, Dr. Martin F. Shapiro
explained that while "some oncologists inform their patients of the
lack of evidence that treatments work...others may well be misled by scientific
papers that express unwarranted optimism about chemotherapy. Still others
respond to an economic incentive. Physicians can earn much more money
running active chemotherapy practices than they can providing solace and
relief...to dying patients and their families."
Dr. Shapiro is hardly alone. Alan C. Nixon, PhD, Past President of the
American Chemical Society wrote that "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."
In 1986, McGill Cancer Center scientists sent a questionnaire to 118 doctors
who treated non-small-cell lung cancer. More than three quarters of them
recruited patients and carried out trials of toxic drugs for lung cancer.
They were asked to imagine that they themselves had cancer, and were asked
which of six current trials they themselves would choose. Of the 79 respondents,
64 said they would not consent to be in a trial containing cisplatin,
a common chemotherapy drug. Fifty-eight found all the trials unacceptable.
Their reasons? The ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable
degree of toxicity.
Famed German biostatistician Ulrich Abel, PhD, also found in a similar
1989 study that "the personal views of many oncologists seem to be
in striking contrast to communications intended for the public."
Breast cancer activist Rose Kushner wrote that by 1981 "indiscriminate,
automatic adjuvant chemotherapy was replacing the Halsted radical mastectomy
as therapeutic overkill in the United States." Thomas Nealon, MD,
Professor of Surgery at New York University School of Medicine, concluded
in 1990 that "The treatment of this tumor now has slipped from too
much surgery to too much adjuvant therapy."
Why so much use of chemotherapy if it does so little good? Well for one
thing, drug companies provide huge economic incentives. In 1990, $3.53
billion was spent on chemotherapy. By 1994 that figure had more than doubled
to $7.51 billion. This relentless increase in chemotherapy use was accompanied
by a relentless increase in cancer deaths.
Oncologist Albert Braverman, MD, wrote in 1991 that "no disseminated
neoplasm (cancer) incurable in 1975 is curable today...Many medical oncologists
recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged
by almost invariable failure."
Why the growth in chemotherapy in the face of such failure? A look at
the financial interrelationships between a large cancer center such as
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and the companies that
make billions selling chemotherapy drugs is revealing. James Robinson
III, Chairman of the MSKCC Board of Overseers and Managers, is a director
of Bristol-Myers Squibb, the world's largest producer of chemotherapy
drugs. Richard Gelb, Vice-Chairman of the MSKCC board is Chairman of the
Board at Bristol-Myers. Richard Furlaud, another MSKCC board member, recently
retired as Bristol Myers' president. Paul Marks, MD, MSKCC's President
and CEO, is a director of Pfizer.
E-mail this sites address to someone and help spread the word