This video is part of a popular internet series that makes startling claims about cancer treatment. Having a science background, some of this makes a sense.
One particular claim is the chemotherapy has only a 2% cure rate past 5 years. Apparently, this apparently is from a well received study.
I’m am calling on the experts to counter or support this claim.
Not going to watch. Is it talking about ALL chemotherapy for ALL cancers? If so, it’s bunk.
No particular deep knowledge here, but one thing I learned only recently is that with many cancer treatment options the goal is to raise the percentage of survivors after 5 years, not to cure it. Cure would be fantastic, but this kind of goal is more realistic.
And if you get enough of those “5 year extensions” you might live to a ripe old age.
I have experience with exactly two cases:
- Mother. Lung cancer at age 73. Hated the chemo which made her sick and killed her pride-and-joy red hair. Died 6 months later.
- Former co-worker, Testicular cancer. Chemo destroyed his liver. He had a healthy wife and enough money to do some of his bucket list. Not much, and he couldn’t even walk a golf course (a serious sport for them both).
If anyone ever suggests “chemo” for me, I am going to want to know exactly which drugs, and why.
There is a growing discussion (we boomers are dropping fast) about the obscene money spent in the last 6 months of life.
I knew a guy who had surgery, then chemo, for urinary bladder cancer. The chemo was, according to him, the worst thing he’d ever been through. When he told me the type of cancer I did some reading that suggested his prognosis sucked.
Next time I saw him I gently prodded about what prognosis his doctors felt he had, but he said it was never discussed. He was diagnosed, then scheduled for surgery and chemo as if there wasn’t any other option.
I told him what I’d read. A very short time later his doctor told him the cancer had returned. He declined any intervention, and the last three months of his life he was happy as a clam. Pissing blood and slowly dying, but happy.
That claim is widespread among the “alternative medicine” crowd, and it’s baloney. It’s a misinterpretation of a 2004 study, taken out of context.
Lots of good sources online that debunk the 2 percent claim, like this one.
Looking for any and all comments. Thanks for this one.
What brought him happiness?
A bit of back story and then I’ll get to my point.
Last year I was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma in my lung. On the up side it was found early and the tumor was only about 8mm and growing very slowly. In December I started a new form of chemo designed specifically for melanoma. It was in the news last August when Jimmy Carter was pronounced “cured” of melanoma in in brain, lung, and liver.
The drug is able to attach itself to a specific protein on the cancer cell wall. This protein works to mask the tumor from the bodies immune system. By the drug attaching to it the body can now “see” the tumor and attack it directly (at least this is all my understanding). After 3 of 8 treatments the tumor was well over 90% gone. The oncologist had to go back to some previous pet scans and mark the spot of the tumor to be able to find a glimmer of a trace of it on the new scan.
The worst part of the therapy by far has been having to drive the 30 miles to the VA in Reno, it’s every 3 weeks. I do feel just a bit tired sometimes. Nothing debilitating, just that I’d like a nap. Everything else is just fine and dandy.
The point is that chemo is possibly in for a major change in the next few years. I can’t imagine that the drug companies aren’t seeing this a major opportunity. As you’d imagine it’s a tad pricey, around $150,000. My understanding is that a lot of research is going on to apply this to other cancers.
The drug I’m taking is pembrolizumab. There are 4 or 5 such drugs, all for melanoma, on the market. The one I’m taking seems to have the fewest side effects.
Traditional chemo is tough. My mother-in-law had stomach cancer and was taking chemo and radiation. Of her children my wife is the only one that lives away from where they all grew up, in Ohio. In 2010 we were back there and she just announced that since all her children were there she was gong to quit and get it over with. She was 88 and live a couple of weeks after stopping.
You can’t talk in generalities about chemotherapy. It depends on what kind of cancer, what stage, and what kind of chemotherapy. In some cases, chemotherapy combined with surgery and/or radiation does actually cure people. If you have an aggressive stage IV cancer, chemotherapy may not be in your best interests.
Realizing he could forego noxious treatment that would not significantly alter his life expectancy. Choosing quality over quantity. Enjoying his final days. He was blissful, and not just from the occasional oxy.
Cancer is a required reportable disease. Each state collects cancer registry data, and then the feds collect from the states. The aggregate data is studied, and statistically analyzed. Many data points are collected for each case, not just diagnosis and stage but demographic data as well.
Many cancers are very treatable. You will want to get cancer registry data, but basically for a given dx and TNM staging, it is usually quite well understood how that cancer should be treated. And there are some rare cases or rare combinations of cancers, and the data just isn’t there to support a tx protocol. Tx data is also collected in registry DBs, as well as survival rates for 2, 3, 5 years out or more.
Many cancers are well understood, and for given dxs the protocols are well established.
It is sad, but if Steve Jobs got his cancer treated with the well-established tx protocol he likely would be alive today. But instead he pursued wacky treatments, Jobs being Jobs and thinking he knew best. Well, he F’d up and by the time he realized his approach wasn’t working, it was too late, the cancer had progressed too far, and he was past the point of no return.
Get the registry data for the dx and stage, and you should be able to see survival statistics for the different treatment protocols.
Aside from the “2% cure” nonsense (a claim one can only make by disregarding inconvenient evidence, such as the great strides made in curing leukemias and lymphomas and significant increases in life expectancy for a number of other cancers), there’s the definition of chemotherapy to take into account.
Alties would like you to believe that the only medical treatments for cancer are chemo, surgery and radiation. This ignores a host of targeted treatments that have been developed in recent years (like the one mentioned for melanoma). They are not “chemotherapy” in the accepted definition of the word (which applies to nonspecific drugs that work to kill rapidly dividing cells of various kinds).
Even if the “2%” lie was true, it’d still be a hell of a lot better than the 0% cure rate demonstrated for alt med.
By the way, a tandem bogus altie claim says that most physicians would refuse chemotherapy for themselves. The genesis of this one is a small-scale survey about 30 years ago which involved using a brand new drug (cisplatin) for incurable lung cancer. There have been surveys since then which demonstrate that most doctors would in fact (and have done in my experience) accept chemotherapy in appropriate circumstances.
[QUOTE=SandyHook]
The drug [pembrolizumab, brand name Keytruda] is able to attach itself to a specific protein on the cancer cell wall. This protein works to mask the tumor from the bodies immune system. By the drug attaching to it the body can now “see” the tumor and attack it directly (at least this is all my understanding). After 3 of 8 treatments the tumor was well over 90% gone. The oncologist had to go back to some previous pet scans and mark the spot of the tumor to be able to find a glimmer of a trace of it on the new scan.
[/QUOTE]
Hooray for a good response!
Immunotherapy and MABs (monoclonal antibodies) are really the brave new world of cancer treatments. My husband is on a MAB called blinatumomab (brand name Blincyto) for lymphoma. Similar to Keytruda, Blincyto seeks out and latches onto specific “markers” on the tumor cell surfaces. For Blincyto, it’s one called CD19. It hooks onto CD19 and essentially puts out a sign saying “EAT ME” to attract a passing T cell with a CD3 receptor. Amgen, Blincyto’s manufacturer, calls this mechanism a CD19/CD3 BiTE or “Bi-specific T-Cell Engager.”
Sadly, the immunotherapy drugs are blindingly expensive. Blincyto costs about $3,000 per day, and each treatment cycle runs for 28 days on a continuous home infusion. Right now, my fridge is worth more than the average car, thanks to its contents. :eek:
My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Estimated 2 month life expectancy without treatment. With chemo, she lived almost 2 and a half years, with pretty damn good quality of life except for the last 3 weeks.
She had 6 months of chemo that worked so well she had a 6 month chemo holiday until the tumor started to come back. Then went back on chemo for about another 8 months until the tumor stopped responding (as we knew would happen). Didn’t take too well to the new drug they switched her to - it was reducing the tumor but gave her such big “chemo brain” that she had to stop it (it was like she had advanced alzheimers for about 3 days after each treatment). When she stopped treatment, she lasted about a month.
Still, chemo was absolutely the way to go for her.
My mother had follow-up chemo after a tumor on one of her ovaries. They were pretty sure they got everything, but the type of cancer was hard to detect, so they did a 3-month course. My mother did experience a thinning of her hair that was significant, but she never experienced any nausea, or unusual tiredness, and pretty much went on with life as usual. She was not typical, but it’s a data point. Some people are on the far end of the bell curve in the lucky direction. They also caught the cancer as early as possible, and she is doing really well 2 years later. She is also already in her late 70s, so she’s past the average life-expectancy, and she’s very active, and except for this blip, generally healthy.
Not saying chemo “cured” her, because the surgery probably did that, but I just thought I’d add the info that not everyone suffers through it.
I thought he had pancreatic cancer. Isn’t that one of the ones that can only be delayed a bit?
He had islet-cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer - its a rare form that is much more treatable. Chemo probably wouldn’t have cured him, but people with this form often survive for 5 years or more before dying (rather than less than a year).
Here’s the survival curve. Look at the top line. Bottom line is regular pancreatic cancer.
Yeah. My father died in short order of the common type of pancreatic cancer. I’m always suspicious of those Cancer Treatment Centers of America commercials where the show a person talking about surviving for years after pancreatic cancer thanks to CTCoA, but they don’t say which type of pancreatic cancer.
I’m also suspicious of CTCoA in general, because they promise that your care team will pray with you.
Here’s the Wiki: Cancer Treatment Centers of America - Wikipedia
FTC, FDA actions against them.
They take only young, wealthy, and VERY well-insured.*
And the founder is behind a group aligned with the Tea Party!
What’s not to like?
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- which gives them, Surprise! better outcomes than national results which include the old, poor folks who never see a MD unless it’s a trip to the ER.