wtargentina wrote:But eating raw foods can cure cancer...

http://www.naturalnews.com/042848_organic_produce_cancer_cure_sick_car_industry.html

renekawa wrote:Sorry for my earlier rant. My mother succumbed to ovarian cancer early this year and apparently I'm quite touchy on this subject. Peace!

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Most cancer patients die of cancer.

Chemo's toxic. When it works though it allows a much longer lifespan than you would have been provided had the cancer been allowed to progress normally. Your life will be shorter than it would have been had you never had cancer but longer than it would have been had you had cancer and no chemo.

Spearthrower wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Every cancer is different as is every chemotherapy regimen so blanket statements just don't apply to the discussion of chemotherapy cost/benefit analysis.

We've all seen someone suffer through chemo and die. It's not a valid argument against.

Precisely: As, I expect, we've all seen someone die from cancer without undergoing chemotherapy.

It's the cancer that's the killer, and the chemotherapy is a calculated risk fully explained to the patients. No patient goes into chemo thinking 'Well, that's me sorted - I'll be right as rain in a few days cos the doc promised me'.

Drugs in the CHOP combination:
C = Cyclophosphamide
H = Doxorubicin Hydrochloride (Hydroxydaunomycin)
O = Vincristine Sulfate (Oncovin)
P = Prednisone
Chemotherapy is often given as a combination of drugs. Combinations usually work better than single drugs because different drugs kill cancer cells in different ways.

Steve Cara expected to sail through the routine medical tests required to increase his life insurance in October 2014. But the results were devastating. He had lung cancer, at age 53. It had begun to spread, and doctors told him it was inoperable.

A few years ago, they would have suggested chemotherapy. Instead, his oncologist, Dr. Matthew D. Hellmann of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, recommended an experimental treatment: immunotherapy. Rather than attacking the cancer directly, as chemo does, immunotherapy tries to rally the patient’s own immune system to fight the disease.

Uncertain, Mr. Cara sought a second opinion. A doctor at another major hospital read his scans and pathology report, then asked what Dr. Hellmann had advised. When the doctor heard the answer, Mr. Cara recalled, “he closed up the folder, handed it back to me and said, ‘Run back there as fast as you can.’”

Main findings

Most of the people who died within 30 days were receiving palliative treatment (where the cancer cannot be cured and chemotherapy is given to relieve symptoms and improve quality of life): 569 breast cancer patients and 720 lung cancer patients.

There were also a small number of deaths in those patients given treatment with the intention to cure: 41 breast cancer patients and 53 lung cancer patients.

There were no clusters of these deaths. The majority of hospitals had no curative intent deaths at all; those deaths were scattered across 53 different Trusts (just under half of the total).

Older patients with more advanced disease, who also had other illnesses and a worse performance status, were more likely to die.

Patients with a high body mass index (BMI) were less likely to die than those with a low BMI.

Patients were most likely to die when being given their first round of chemotherapy.

Early death rates from clinical trials in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer with curative intent are around 0.8%.

Chemotherapy is a vital part of cancer treatment and is a large reason behind the improved survival rates over last 4 decades.
However, it is powerful medication with significant side effects and often getting the balance right on which patients to treat aggressively can be hard. Studies like this help improve our understanding of how people are affected by chemotherapy in the real world and most importantly help us to treat patients better.

Macdoc wrote:What a crock of bullshit. Before you dish out such hogwash ask yourself how you'd feel if someone delayed their treatment ....as say Steve Jobs did following your type crackpot advice and turned a treatable disease to a death sentence.

I'd be dead now without chemo. It was diagnosed, excised, treated with the entire spectrum of chemo, spinal chemo and radiation.
I am cancer free 7 years later and as the onco cracked ...I might see you back for another type of cancer but it won't be this one.

Look yourself in the mirror an ask yourself if pedding this nonsense is worth a life.

Vermeulen J. wrote:Also, what's hard to understand about "for every 100 nonpalpable cancers found through mammography alone, 54 would presumably have gone away (174 / 324 × 100 = 54%)."

Chemotherapy and breast cancer

There’s one study that I like to cite to people who claim that chemotherapy doesn’t work, and this post seems as good a place to do it as any. It’s a large meta-analysis from two years ago. Funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation and the UK Medical Research Council, this study was carried out by the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group (EBCTCG) at the Clinical Trial Service Unit at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom and entitled “Comparisons between different polychemotherapy regimens for early breast cancer: meta-analyses of long-term outcome among 100,000 women in 123 randomised trials.”

It’s really quite an incredible effort to collate patient-level data for so many women in so many clinical trials. I sometimes say about meta-analyses the prototypical complaint about meta-analyses, namely that the quality of the output is critically dependent on the quality of the input. In other words, “garbage in, garbage out.” However, the inclusion criteria for the EBCTCG are actually pretty stringent. More importantly, the EBCTCG has access to unpublished data and patient-level information, as is explained here. The EBCTCG also goes to great lengths to try to include data from every randomized trial ever published, or an unbiased subset of them, in order to try to minimize selection bias that all-too-often results from too-rigid selection criteria used for meta-analyses. All in all, it’s an enormous effort.

Overall, this meta-analysis involved over 100,000 patients involved in 123 randomized trials over 40 years, and the authors made these comparisons: (1) taxane-based versus non-taxane-based regimens (data for 33 trials, begun in 1994-2003); (2) any anthracycline-based regimen versus standard or near-standard (cyclophosphamide/methotrexate/5-fluorouracil (CMF, 20 trials, begun in 1978-97); (3) higher versus lower anthracycline dosage (six trials, begun in 1985-94); and (4) polychemotherapy versus no adjuvant chemotherapy (64 trials, begun in 1973-96, including 22 of various anthracycline-based regimens and 12 of standard or near-standard CMF). Several meta-analyses were performed, which produced five main findings:

Standard CMF and standard 4AC (ACT without the “T,” which is an older chemotherapy regimen used before taxanes were developed) were roughly equivalent in efficacy. Both of them roughly halved two-year recurrence rates and resulted in a proportional decrease in recurrence over the next eight years by approximately one-third. Overall, breast cancer mortality rates were reduced proportionally by 20-25%.
Regimens with lower chemotherapy doses per cycle were less effective.
Regimens with a lot more chemotherapy than the old standard 4AC (but not so nasty that they required stem-cell rescue) were somewhat more effective. They further decreased breast cancer mortality by 15-20%. The most prominent of these regimens is 4AC plus four cycles of “T” (a taxane), which became the standard of care for node-positive breast cancer after taxanes were developed.
In all chemotherapy comparisons, the ten year overall mortality was reduced because there was not very much excess mortality due to causes other than breast cancer during the first year.
In all meta-analyses looking at taxane-based regimens or anthracycline-based regimens (doxorubicin is an anthracycline), the proportional reductions in early recurrence, any recurrence, and breast cancer mortality were more or less independent of age, nodal status, tumor size, or even estrogen receptor status.
The authors conclude:

While awaiting the results of these new trials, it appears that ER status, differentiation, and the other tumour characteristics available for the present meta-analyses had little effect on the proportional risk reductions with taxane-based or anthracycline-based regimens. The more effective of these regimens offer on average a one-third reduction in 10-year breast cancer mortality, roughly independently of the available characteristics. The absolute gain from a one-third breast cancer mortality reduction depends, however, on the absolute risks without chemotherapy (which, for ER-positive disease, are the risks remaining with appropriate endocrine therapy). Although nodal status and tumour diameter and differentiation are of little relevance to the proportional risk reductions produced by such chemotherapy (and by tamoxifen therapy), they can help in treatment decisions as they are strongly predictive of the absolute risk without chemotherapy, and hence of the absolute benefit that would be obtained by a one-third reduction in that risk.

Vermeulen J. wrote: I try to stimulate people to educate themselves about the implications of the placebo/nocebo effect and the theory of 'German New Medicine' as to be prepared for when they, sooner or later, get caught in the mazes of the medical industry... If one doesn't understand that I'm trying to help here, then, by all means put your faith simply in the hands of the official medicine.

Vermeulen J. wrote:" 'Modern medicine' doesn't understand much of the placebo/nocebo effect...

Journal of Clinical Oncology in December 2004 called “The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies

The total number of newly diagnosed cancer patients for 22 major adult malignancies was determined from cancer registry data in Australia and from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results data in the USA for 1998.

Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast… (A lesson from history)

Posted by David Gorski on October 28, 2013
If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of “alternative medicine” love to hate, it’s chemotherapy. Rants against “poisoning” are a regular staple on “alternative health” websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the “cancer industrial complex” in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit massively from administering them. Indeed, I’ve lost track of the number of such rants I’ve deconstructed over the years. Usually, they boil down to two claims: (1) that chemotherapy doesn’t work against cancer (or, as I’ve called it before, the “2% gambit“) and (2) that the only reason it’s given is because doctors are brainwashed in medical school or because of the profit motive or, of course, because of a combination of the two. Of course, the 2% gambit is based on a fallacious cherry picking of data and confusing primary versus adjuvant chemotherapy, and chemotherapy does actually work rather well for many malignancies, but none of this stops the flow of misinformation.

As slow as it seems to those of us living it, cancer research has produced a lot of breakthroughs. Those who wonder why we haven’t cured “cancer” yet should read earlier posts I’ve written on the topic. Cancer is hard. Real hard. It is also hundreds of diseases, not some monolithic disease, just as chemotherapy is dozens of drugs and hundreds of drug combinations, not some monolithic mythical “chemotherapy.” It is not reasonable to expect that a span of a mere few decades or even a century is enough to cure all cancer. We have, however, brought the cure of several cancers within reach and do actually cure many cancers. Also, contrary to popular belief, the death rate from cancer is decreasing. In the US, it’s been decreasing for nearly the last 25 years, as shown in this graph from the most recent American Cancer Society statistics:

Cancer statistics, 2013
Note that this is happening even as the age-adjusted incidence of cancer is remaining steady or slightly increasing. Fewer and fewer people with cancer die of their disease. I realize that this is no consolation to anyone who has lost loved ones to the disease (as I have), but it does give hope for the future.

And, yes, promoters of alternative cancer cures can deny it all they like, but chemotherapy is indeed a major part of the reason for better outcomes and more hope in cancer. “Cut, poison, burn”?

Well, yes. Unfortunately, that’s what works, including the “poison” part.

Until we find something that works without as much morbidity, “cut, poison, burn” will have to do.

Diffuse large cell lymphoma is the most common, accounting for 60%-70% of the cases. In decreasing frequency, the remainder of the cases are made up of anaplastic large cell lymphoma and peripheral T-cell lymphoma. Potentially curable with combination chemotherapy, if left untreated, the median survival of patients with these lymphomas is measured in months.

Lymphoma - Cancer Council Australia
http://www.cancer.org.au › About cancer › Types of cancer
Sep 14, 2016 - For people diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, prognosis is ... with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Australia have a five year survival rate of 71%.

Survival for high grade lymphomas
High grade (aggressive) lymphomas generally need more intensive treatment than the low grade types. But they often respond well to treatment. Many people are cured. The most common type of high grade lymphoma is diffuse large B cell lymphoma.

There are no UK-wide survival statistics available for the different types and stages of NHL.

Survival statistics are available for each stage of diffuse B cell lymphoma in one area of England. These are for people diagnosed between 2004 and 2011.

Stage 1

Around 65 out of 100 people (around 65%) will survive for 5 years or more after they are diagnosed.

Stage 2

Around 70 out of 100 people (around 70%) will survive for 5 years or more after diagnosis.

Stage 3

Over 50 out of 100 people (over 50%) will survive for 5 years or more after diagnosis.

Stage 4

Almost 50 out of 100 people (almost 50%) will survive for 5 years or more after their diagnosis.

Burkitt's lymphoma is a less common type of high grade lymphoma which can grow quite quickly. We don't have statistics for the different stages of Burkitt's lymphoma. But overall, almost 60 out of 100 people with Burkitt's lymphoma (almost 60%) will survive their cancer for 5 years or more after they are diagnosed.

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Survival for all non Hodgkin lymphoma
Generally for people with non Hodgkin lymphoma in England and Wales

about 80 out of every 100 people (about 80%) will survive their cancer for 1 year or more after they are diagnosed

around 70 out of every 100 people (around 70%) will survive their cancer for 5 years or more after diagnosis

almost 65 out of every 100 people (almost 65%) will survive their cancer for 10 years or more after they are diagnosed

Read more at http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-c ... eIpY6TG.99

Vermeulen J. wrote:

Chemo toxins are about the only kind of 'medicine' that isn't tested against placebo's (because chemo has severe side effects which would immediately distinguish the placebo group from the group of patients getting the real thing poison). Also, because of the medical dogma that 'cancer rarely goes away by itself'....

Sendraks wrote:

Vermeulen J. wrote: I try to stimulate people to educate themselves about the implications of the placebo/nocebo effect and the theory of 'German New Medicine' as to be prepared for when they, sooner or later, get caught in the mazes of the medical industry... If one doesn't understand that I'm trying to help here, then, by all means put your faith simply in the hands of the official medicine.

IS that you Kyranni? Back in a new guise to continue the spread of idiotic, unevidenced, harmful advice about cancer?

Macdoc wrote:


....
Aggie - send your friend the NYT article.