I’m currently involved in a tedious argument with an “alternative health” advocate who has taken to advising anyone everyone he knows (including a mutual friend of ours who has survived cancer and, consequently, faces an increased risk of its reoccurrence) that chemotherapy is an ineffective poison which only hurts and never helps. The basic gist of his argument is this:
Chemo kills healthy cells as well as malignant cells.
It destroys the immune system, which is actually the most useful cancer fighting asset we possess.
There is no proof that chemo works because it is never used in isolation and Doctors attribute the survival of any patient treated with chemo exclusively to chemo (as opposed to the myriad other drugs they are treated with) because that’s where the money is.
Now, I’m no expert, but this smells like bullshit to me. However, my google fu is weak and I’ve not been able (as strange as it may sound) to find any clear studies which shows that chemo is an effective agent against any form of cancer (I’m aware it’s not effective against all of them).
Would anybody be able to provide me with links to some studies which show unambiguously that chemo works, or that survival rates would be lower without it? The more the better. Thanks.
As you said, chemo is used with other therapies.
So the studies will be X+chemo vs X without chemotherapy.
But basically, if it didn’t work, FDA wouldn’t approve it.
Once you say that, your ‘friend’ will call you a sheeple, and there you go.
Ask him how a doctor on a salary makes more money from a more expensive treatment.
You’ll get a nonsensical answer about Big Pharma controlling all the medical scools and brainwashing doctors.
Well he is right about some things. With the exception of new biologicals, chemo is poison, designed to be more toxic to rapidly dividing cells than normal cells.
Most chemotherapeutic agents do weaken the immune system.
Chemo does work. That is why good medical science is based on controlled experiments. As best as can be achieved two groups of people are studied, and they differ only in the aspect being studied, in this case, a chemo drug. These drugs do work. Unfortunately, many drugs only work for a short time, extending life by less than a year. They rarely cure things.
I am not a Doctor. But you may have better luck searching for individual drugs rather than the generic term "chemo’. For example, I took Geevec.
That may be one that your friend won’t accept as chemo, because I took it orally and it was more specifically targeted to my form of tumor (GIST) than chemo normally is. But my doc did occasionally refer to it as my chemo. And it had the same side effects (nausea, hair loss, etc) as chemo traditionally does. But it was milder than most cancer drugs are.
At uni we are told not to cite anything found on regular google. We have to use google scholar. If you need to do research, try it out - http://scholar.google.com
*please note - don’t take that as a snarky suggestion that you google it yourself. Just a suggestion for anyone trying to find published research and having no luck with vanilla google.
1) Chemo kills healthy cells as well as malignant cells.
Yes, but not at the same rate.
2) It destroys the immune system, which is actually the most useful cancer fighting asset we possess.
Weaken =/= destroy. Experience shows that the immune system, however useful, is (often? usually?) not sufficient to overcome cancer, so the result of “protecting” it from chemo is not particularly desirable.
3) There is no proof that chemo works because it is never used in isolation and Doctors attribute the survival of any patient treated with chemo exclusively to chemo (as opposed to the myriad other drugs they are treated with) because that’s where the money is.
Not being used in isolation is a specious argument. The traditional one-two punch of chemo and radiation is demonstrably much more effective than either treatment alone (for certain cancers). Accusing physicians of being more concerned with money than with effective treatment reveals more about the accuser than about the physicians.
My understanding was that part of why cancer is so insidious is because the immune system doesn’t consider them “foreign” cells and therefore won’t act upon them
Proof one:
When most “alternative medicine” practitioners get real cancers, they sneak off to “traditional medicine” oncologists, and go back to “alternative” medicine only when they can no longer be helped–i.e., as a last resort.
Proof two:
The approach in traditional medicine for deciding if a given agent is useful is to perform a formal, clinical study. These are often double blinded. Neither the researcher nor the patient knows specifics about what was administered. When “alternative” medicine begins using this model, instead of anecdotal bullshit, their therapies will begin to be taken seriously.
For any particular chemotherapeutic approach, you need to look up studies for that exact agent and regimen. Medicine grows increasingly dangerous and increasingly effective. The “dangerous” part of it is certainly a reason to give anyone concern, and protection of the patient makes all clinical studies problematic.
If you want a proof case for chemo, look up some effective success cases, such as testicular cancer.
But in the end, it’s probably better to just let it go, and admit that chemotherapy is dangerous and often ineffective. When the alternative health advocate gets their cancer, that’ll be the test of what they really think.
I went to PubMed, typed in “cancer chemotherapy double-blind” and got over 1300 hits. Amusingly, the first one is entitled “Ginger as a miracle against chemotherapy-induced vomiting”, which should make your alternative therapy friend happy, but a cursory scan of the other hits shows a large number of reports of double-blind trials of various chemotheraputic agents.
In brief, any new drug - chemotheraputic or otherwise - is required to do through double-blind studies before they’re approved for use. In these studies, you take a group of patients who have whatever form of cancer you’re interested in treating. Half of them are given the experimental drug, and half are given a placebo instead. Neither the patients nor the doctors know who’s in which group. After some time is passed, you look and see how the treated patients are faring compared to the non-treated patients. If there’s not a significant effect seen in the treated cohort, the drug doesn’t get approved. That’s really what it all boils down to. EVERY SINGLE chemotheraputic drug MUST be proven to have some benefit to the patients taking it. That’s just absolutely basic science. If you dig into it and see all the various hurdles and proofs that must be obtained, you’ll be amazed that anything ever gets approved. This is one large reason why new drugs are so expensive.
And really, shows a misunderstanding of how doctors get paid.
Doctors don’t get a cut for each drug they prescribe. It looks that way on the billing, but doctors get paid a salary, not per item.
That salary depends on a number of factors, and ‘success’ is one factor.
If chemo didn’t work, doctors would abandon it in self interest if for no other reason.
That’s what I thought. Is there any proof…heck, any suspicion that “the immune system” is any protection – let alone “our best protection” – against cancer?
First, most alties don’t have a good idea of what chemotherapy is - for them, it’s a generic term for anticancer drugs and ignores more targeted therapies commonly in use for a variety of cancers (Gleevec (as noted), Tamoxifen, Herceptin, drugs for hematologic malignancies etc.).
If the immune system was so wildly effective in fighting cancer, it’s a wonder that untreated patients have been consistently dying for so long.
Repeating that there are tons of studies available through a PubMed search that show good evidence for efficacy of chemo.
If chemotherapy was such a financial bonanza for doctors prescribing it, it’s surprising that even smallish cuts in Medicare reimbursement can have such a great impact.
Alties hate to think about this, but doctors, their families and friends come down with cancer too, and are faced with the same treatment options as everyone else. If there were better cancer drug options, physicians would not hesitate to prescribe them.
Do tell us what this “alternative health advocate” suggests as alternatives to nasty toxic cancer drugs. We could use a good laugh.
There are numerous examples of chemo cures nowadays. One of the earliest was for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a disease of kids. A death sentence before chemo, the CURE rate is now over 90 percent.
It is important to note that the notion of “chemo” is beginning to change with the use of so-called “biologicals” (various antibodies, growth-factor inhibitors, etc.). Such agents have a relatively (or absolutely) benign toxicity profile and are providing cures (or at least sustained remissions) in cancers such as certain leukemias and certain stomach cancers.
Is this person extremely old and right wing? I ask only because I have a 72 year old co-worker who was talking about this today and your alternative health advocate and my co-worker are probably both on the same crank email list.
“Mommy, mommy, why is Santa here is September?”
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Sheldon - you’ve got leukemia!”
Of course that joke was funnier before chemotherapy when childhood leukemia usually meant death within a few months, not a few years with a good chance of survival…
Smeg has it right - any drug that is sold as a “treatment” has been tested; double blind means neither the doctors giving the drug nor the patients know which drug they get, the patients are randomly assigned, so that nobody will influence the treatment or perceptions. you may argu that moderm expensive drugs are getting less “miraculous”, that they are not much of an improvement over older, cheaper drugs; but actual chemo drugs have made a huge difference.
Short version: the research/development of chemo as a treatment/cure for cancer predates “big pharma.” It’s not an “ineffective poison which only hurts and never helps;” it was initially used (and still is used today) because for decades, doctors have observed - in closely controlled trials - that it works.
Steve Jobs was a big advocate of alternative medicines. So much so that when he had the very rare kind of treatable pancreatic cancer that he treated it with alternative medicine rather than traditional medicine. He is dead as a result. A direct result. Alternative medicine quackery is the only thing that convinced Steve Jobs that it could cure his curable cancer by foregoing traditional proven medicine. Despite his legendary reality distortion field of imaginary reality, science works whether you believe it or not. Thus he is dead, dead, dead.
When I was a child, I was a ventriloquist, and did shows with my dad who was a magician and Punch and Judy puppeteer. One charity event we played every year was “Christmas in July”…for kids who very likely not make it to late December.
I did a search to find if they still hold the event with no luck. I believe that is a very good thing.
