There are millions of people who have had successful 5FU treatments who would disagree with that.
Previously, before the chemotherapy regimes for Hodgkin's disease were developed, the disease was a uniformly fatal disorder and it remains one today if untreated.
Today, in children, the survival rate for treated Hodgkin's disease is up to 94 percent.
The usefulness of blood-letting or the usefulness of curing Hodgkin's disease by doing nothing more than "strengthening the immune system" in an unspecified manner have never been documented by survival rate data.
Sometimes, a strong immune system is simply not enough. That is why, prior to antibiotics, bacterial infections killed strapping young adults by the millions every year.
The success of chemotherapy in the treatment of Hodgkin's disease by chemotherapy is more that proven by the 94 percent survival rate the are possible today.
Whether or not the therapy should have been forced on the boy is a totally separate issue but, in Hodgkin's disease, chemotherapy has definitely has changed an invariably fatal disease into a disease with a 94% survival rate.
Um, yea.
I know more then a few people who have had chemo and would disagree, though I used to know a few folks who didn't have chemo, but I'm not sure how they would feel now.
They have since died.
That said..I am disgusted with this Judge. The young man was no ordinary 16 year old and was mature beyond his years.
I pray that he stays away from infection while he is on Chemo. IF he should die from Chemo complications, then that Judge should rot in hell!
sw
In 1996, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, rt side. Had surgery, 1 yr chemo & 4 mo. radiation. Tamoxifin to be taken for the rest of her life "as a preventative." She discontinued it after a year because she felt like total s*%t. In 1999, she was diagnosed with cancer in the left breast (wow, a whole year of chemo really helped it not come back...idiot oncologist blamed her discontinuance of Tamox.). She opted for a double mast. which I thought was like hitting a gnat with a sledgehammer - due to another horrible family event (my 30-yr old bro had a heart attack - endocarditis) her surgery was put off for three weeks, and she opted for just the lumpectomy.
I had three weeks to "prep" her with stuff out of Mexico & Canada, plus heavy hitter supplements.
When the day came for surgery, surgeon *was unable to find* the tumor and told me he cut around the area where it was thought to have been on the first mammogram. No cancer in lymph nodes. She did do radiation but not chemo.
In 2003, a mass grew in her brain. Immediately, they called it brain met. We were devastated. She went for all the other scans & tests, because if it was in her brain, it would be all through her. Took 2 days for tests to come back because several radiologists had to look at them - WHY? Because where they assumed they would find cancer, THERE WAS NONE.
Turns out it was a brain abscess.
You're absolutely correct. My Brother did the same treatment this young man wants to do...diet and alternative therapies to build his immune system. He lived another seven years after the Doctors at the Mayo clinic gave him only months. After doing Chemo once he said, enough...I'm going to do it my way and he did.