Never-ending Chemotherapy
Anyone who has followed even a few of my blog, Twitter, and Facebook posts knows that one of my greatest hopes in life is to see a significant reduction, if not and end, to chemotherapy as the cancer therapy of choice. Integrative oncology seeks to complement conventional treatments such as chemotherapy lessening its duration and side effects. The purpose of natural complementary therapies is to make chemotherapy more effective in killing the cancer cells, thereby reducing the prescribed number of doses and accompanying devastating damage to the body.
So, you can image my shock to learn that two recent studies show that patients with certain types of cancer can benefit from longer term use of certain chemotherapy treatments. These results will be presented to the 2010 annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology. Many oncologists will no doubt return from that meeting to their practice with the green light to prescribe longer periods of chemotherapy for their patients. Ralph Moss’s Cancer Decisions report (www.cancerdecisions.com) states that the New York Times raised three concerns about the long-term maintenance therapy. First, the studies did not reveal any improved rate of survivability. Second, we can’t determine in advance the extra adverse effects of the prolonged treatment. And, third, the cost of such virtually unending treatment could be astronomical.
It is amazing that, in spite of all the effort of integrative oncologists to reduce the dependence on chemotherapy, conventional researchers find that the best use of their time and our money is to test the extended use of such harmful and historically unsuccessful treatment. I believe the defeat of cancer as we know it is impossible until the medical community and the general public become serious about vastly expanding research into complementary therapies.
What do you think?
September 30th, 2010 at 20:00
Chemotherapy may be a promising cure for cancer but I really think that it causes more damage to the patient. I hope doctors will find a new way to make it work without the side effects.