Chemotherapy can backfire and worsen cancer, a new study has found

Global Post ^ | 05 AUG 2012 | Amy Silverstein

[BCW]

Despite its life-saving qualities, chemotherapy has long had a nasty reputation, known as a necessary poison for people suffering from cancer. But in some cases, chemotherapy is so damaging that it may even backfire and make the cancer worse, a new study has found. The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that chemotherapy causes damage to healthy cells, which triggers them secrete a protein that actually sustains tumor growth, Cancer UK reported.

[goodwithagun]

Over the past three years two very prominent docs in our community were diagnosed with cancer. They were both given the surgery, chemotherapy, radiation option. Both of them chose to treat the pain and live out their shorter lives to the fullest. What does that tell you about their beliefs in the surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatments?

[goodwithagun]

“One is because people are living longer and not dying of all the other things that were getting people before they developed cancer. The second is that cancer is better detected now than thirty years ago. It doesn’t count as cancer unless the cancer is detected. In 1960 Grandma would die of liver failure. In 2010 she died of liver cancer. The only differnce being the detection.”

Have you noticed how much younger cancer patients are getting? I said a prayer for your daughter and your family. I read a fantastic book when my mother in law was diagnosed with renal carcinoma: Anticancer by Dr. David Servan-Shreiber. He was an M.D., Ph.D, and 20 year brain cancer survivor at a time when the diagnosis was a death sentence.

[aruanan]

Over the past three years two very prominent docs in our community were diagnosed with cancer. They were both given the surgery, chemotherapy, radiation option. Both of them chose to treat the pain and live out their shorter lives to the fullest. What does that tell you about their beliefs in the surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatments?

It tells me a lot more about your beliefs and an unseemly hastiness to abstract a general principle from an absurdly small sample size than it does anything about the efficacy of treatment modalities or how they related to the two physicians in particular.

For instance, my father was diagnosed late in life with non small cell carcinoma. Surgery was not an option and he elected not to undergo chemotherapy because of his age and because he had had what he considered to have been a long and productive life. At one point he elected to have some successful radiation treatments to shrink the tumor since it was impinging on nerves and was causing excruciating and unremitting pain. But he knew that life was never going to be forever and that his remaining time could be either be relatively pain free or suffering the short term effects of chemotherapy with the end being the same. If this had happened when he was 60 rather than almost 90, his choice would have been different. But that was not a comment on his beliefs about surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, only their relative value at that stage of his life and for the extensiveness of his disease.

[BCW]

That says alot.

I know this is a sensitive subject - as you can see from the poster with the daughter in MD Anderson - but I too watched my father go through all this - and resulted in his death.

Youth has many advantages - and even those doctors are telling this mother that she’s going to live pass 60 - doesn’t mean that cancer has been cured - there are other opinions on treatments and cures - but emotionally charged persons discount all of it when the one they love survives.

I watch top of the line doctors who couldn’t explain to me why my father was dying — so for me - they are people who have been trained in a certain method - and they deploy it - it may work for one and not the other — so it’s a practice - not a cure. My point on diets and fat people are to demonstrate that the US diet is allowing cancer rates to soar - despite the other health factors - cancer is an opportunistic virus - given the right conditions - it flourishes — take that away - and it dies (i.e. Japanese Diet - where they have the lowest cancer rates in the world) When people eat nutrient and organic foods they do not get sick nor do they develop life threatening diseases unless there are other factors that come about. That’s all I’m saying - next you know - people are calling me small minded and full of BS...

We are all entitled to look at all the research. To look away due to an emotional response may hinder progress.

[duckbutt]

Was part of a study at the Cleveland Clinic 20 years ago. Folks that had head and neck cancers and were nonsmokers. Diagnoised at age 40 with squamous cell cancer in the left tonsil that metastasized to the lymph nodes. Treated with radiation, cycplatin & 5FU as chemo drugs.

Oncologist at the time said he was seeing rarer cancers in younger people. Because I was in a study as a young child on Strontium 90 in cow's milk at my school (Washington University gathered baby teeth to see if it was showing up via cows milk) I suggested he ask his patients where they grew up and if they were subjected to some of the atmospheric atomic testing that went on....seems like there could be a correlation between folks that were children at the time and where they were situated when those clouds moved over the Midwest —
PJ

[CMAC51]

Have you noticed how much younger cancer patients are getting?

Actually that is part of the point I was making about diagnosis. Many, if not most cancers are diagnosed in much earlier stages now.

[jbern]

I am no expert on chemotherapy,but I do remember my sister who died of stomach cancer 15 yrs ago. She told me that she wished she had never accepted chemo. In her case it made the cancer spread and did not help. I think that for every person it is different. My sister would have tried alternative ways to try to cure the cancer,but I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I just hope that someday they find a cure. At least they are trying to find a cure. Let’s give them credit where credit is due.
Janet

[CMAC51]

Please pardon my poor manners. I failed to say thank you for the prayer. They are of course the strongest medicine and always appreciated.

[CMAC51]

Please pardon my poor manners. I failed to say thank you for the prayer. They are of course the strongest medicine and always appreciated.

[aruanan]

I love it when people get on here and are rude - knowing nothing about me - with one liners.

Knowing nothing about you? What you're mistaking for rudeness is an appropriate response, not just to the absolute crap you push, which could have been lifted directly from an Adelle Davis, Eat Right to Stay Fit, food fad website, but to your wholly unjustified attitude about the adequacy of your knowledge:

1. The problem with the US public as of now - is not “quality” of food - it’s over-processed and lacks nutrients.

Absolutely and wholly without foundation. There has never been a time in U.S. history when the general public has had easier access to a more inexpensive and wider variety of more nutritious and wholesome food products at any time of year than the present.

2. Cancer rates have soared in the last 30 yrs - and it’s due to large volume of food being processed for easy meals - easy pick-up - and the results is a population that is fat and sick all the time.

Absolutely and wholly without foundation. Cancer death rates, except for those related to tobacco products, have been decreasing. For both men and women cancer deaths have fallen since 1975. If, for instance, you have a country whose average age is lower, you'll have lower cancer rates since many types of cancer take a long time to develop and come as a result of senescence of DNA repair mechanisms and other cell repair/programed cell-death mechanism more typical of the elderly.

As far as being sick all the time, the health consequences of a population suffering consequences of hypernutrition aren't anywhere as bad as one suffering from under-nutrition. Look at Robert Fogel's Nobel lecture to see how things used to be in the bad old days of caloric restriction, diets limited by season and geography and income, and foods having only drying, smoking, or salting to preserve them. The ravages of incomplete tissue and organ development due to less than optimum pre and peri-natal nutrition made themselves felt throughout a person's lifetime and, in many cases, ended it prematurely compared to today's life span.

The single most important thing anyone can due to reduce risks to health due to smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, short of not smoking and reducing caloric intake to match expenditure, is to get adequate physical activity, followed by reducing insults to the body from tobacco, and a bit of dietary tweaking. On the last, if you eat from a wide variety of foods including fruits, meats, vegetables, and grains at a level sufficient to meet your daily caloric needs, your diet will be adequate except for, perhaps, vitamin D and calcium, especially if you're a woman.

3. Other cultures that do not participate in the US Diet don’t have these problems. Japan for one.

Absolutely and wholly without foundation. Guess what the Japanese stomach cancer rate is compared to the United States? About ten times higher. Other countries with different traditional diets have other problems, such as mental retardation in the Middle East from the phytate sequestration of zinc in unleavened bread or pellagra suffered by indigenous populations in America or by the maize-eating poor for a couple hundred years in certain European nations or protein malnutrition suffered most often by children in third world countries when they are being weaned by the use of the traditional farina or by adults with excessive physical labor coupled with inadequate protein intake resulting in compromised immune systems.

And I will put my Ph.D. in Human Nutrition/Nutritional Physiology (together with my thesis work in molecular neurobiology and a 4 year post-doctoral cardiology fellowship) up against your "research studies from an Anti-Terrorism perspective on germ warfare."

[BCW]

"if you eat from a wide variety of foods including fruits, meats, vegetables, and grains..." Those have to be organic - not laced with chemicals - mutated by Monsanto - and processed to the point where there is an overgrowth of yeast in one's body. Your Ph.D work is impressive - but field experience and access to information that you don't have you don't have a clearance for has lead me on this path. You're an insider - I get it. So am I. I've just chosen not to participate in the average food from grocery stores. Now that I'm on a high organic vegetable intake - no meat - except for the eggs from farm raised chickens - all kinds of symptoms have been elevated. My allergies gone by not eating sugar, dairy, and wheat products. Other aliments as well. I take a lot of vitamins that apparently I wasn't getting from all those things you listed above from the big name stores. What does your PhD in Nutrition day about that? How did man make so far in history without chemicals being added to their animals and produce? With oil product came population rise - and with that came all this neat and inexpensive things we could manipulate from the chemist. That's not natural - none of it is. Remember this guy and what he said: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” ― Hippocrates Don't doctors still take that oath - then why are we treating people with a host of chemicals instead of nutrition? That website you listed - I've never heard of it...you assume alot doctor...