The takeaway is obvious - seek the best medical cancer treatment you can afford where they have outstanding success for patient cancer survival rates. Avoid mediocre care at all costs with treatment that may be imminently more deadly than the disease. Your life may depend on it.
I read these results as the NHS trying to gin up evidence so as to justify cutting its budget.
So chemotherapy kills 50% of patients.
Cancer kills about 100% of them.
This said from a guy whose wife went through a stem cell transplant for advancde breast cancer 20 years ago. Was it hell? You bet. But she saw her boys graduate college, one get married, and is still my beautiful bride today.
well..... many chemotherapy drugs are really “poisons” (starting with mustard gas derivatives in WW2) ...designed to attack dividing cells...
but they are still poisons ... the trick is that they attack the rapidly-dividing cancer cells more than regularly-dividing healthy cells.... its a careful game....
sometimes.. SUCCESS!!! happy patient, living patient. sometimes, though...... well, see the article...
A man I know died last week, two days after his first chemo treatment. Yes, he had cancer, but was still very active. He had planned to spend the weekend fishing at the river. His doctors were saying there was every reason to expect a full recovery. He was 46.
Since this is NHS, I wonder what impact the delay in beginning treatment has on this study?
Good post!
The chemo/radiation route is (or can be) very deadly. I know many who said to me on their death-beds, “Die like a man, and trust in God, not in oncologists.”
May God Bless their Eternal Souls...
But don’t try alternative medicine - that could be dangerous.
Doesn’t everyone already know this? Chemothereapy involves infusing poison heavy metals into the patient’s blood. Repeatedly, and on a schedule.
It made me sicker than I have ever been in my life and it very near killed me, but then it saved my life. And here I am.
p.s. The radiation is no party either.
Interesting... I have been around for a few years and have watched battle with Cancer and the search for a cure. Billions, trillions? have been spent on research and yet treatment hasn’t changed much in 20/30 years — the two options: chemo and radiation.
Early detection seems to be what has improved longevity but some even now argue that, for example, mammograms are not beneficial.
Where has all of the money gone!
Cancer treatments often involve medications and radiation that is highly toxic to normal cells.The treatments are a balancing act...that balancing being on a knife’s edge.If a particular hospital or health system has a particularly bad record treating cancer then serious self examination is in order.
I had chemotherapy for Hodgkins about 30 years ago. It was extremely unpleasant and painful, but it worked.
It might have killed me, but if I hadn’t had it, I certainly would have died within a year or two from the cancer.
“This pertains to England’s socialized National Health Service conducting a first time study that found up to 50 percent of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy died within 30 days in some hospitals, implying treatment caused mortality. “
IIRC, cancer survival rates in the UK/NHS have always been poor. This may reflect more upon the care than the method of treatment. What are the comparable figures for US ?
Why do they nail down the coffin lid at funerals?
To keep the oncologist from giving one more round of chemo.
Don’t do chemo!
I can testify to that with the affects it had on my husband.
A reporter too stupid to know what palliative care is, or was her source the idiot?
Whole purpose of chemotherapy based on my wife’s oncologist is to kill cell growth as the cancer cells grow and die faster than normal cells - by killing the cell growth the cancer cells die off faster than the good cells which after the treatment can recover.
Radiation basically does the same thing, but more localized. Hormone therapy prevents some, not all, cancer cell types from reproducing but this is dependent upon the hormones present in the body (pre-post menopause for example) and the persons genetic makeup can also have an impact.
THAT being said - every cancer type and every chemotherapy assigned to the type s different and each type (breast, liver, lung, etc) has different meds and doses depending upon current state in the body (tumor size, in the nodes, in other organs) and the specific metabolic rate of the cancer in question. Type, Stage and rate drive the selection of the therapy to be used.
My wife did surgery, chemo, radiation all in 5 months and then hormones for 5 years. Thank the good Lord and her docs she’s still here to harass me every day.
It saved me from stage b3- I remain a big fan!
My chiropractor told me this last year.
What an atrocity.
And all for the big bucks for the pharm industry.
The timing is incredible. NHS was in the news just a few days ago for announcing that “routine” surgeries will now be denied anyone who is deemed to be overweight or a smoker. Now, after decades of providing Chemo, suddenly they are “concerned” about the outcomes.
I hate Chemo as much as the next guy, and pray for the day a more civilized treatment regimen is available. But the timing? The overseers are ready to begin their planned Euthanasia.
The timing is incredible. NHS was in the news just a few days ago for announcing that “routine” surgeries will now be denied anyone who is deemed to be overweight or a smoker. Now, after decades of providing Chemo, suddenly they are “concerned” about the outcomes.
I hate Chemo as much as the next guy, and pray for the day a more civilized treatment regimen is available. But the timing? The overseers are ready to begin their planned Euthanasia.