Why Alternative Cancer Treatment

On Chemotherapy

Quotes & facts to be aware of

Copyright © 2004–2023 Healing Cancer Naturally

Welcome to page two of Healing Cancer Naturally’s “Why Alternative Cancer Treatment?” series featuring concise but impressive statements on the euphemistically named chemo"therapy".

[C]hemotherapy is basically ineffective in the vast majority of cases in which it is given.
Ralph Moss, PhD, former Director of Information for Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center

Three Australian oncologists — Associate Professor Graeme Morgan, Professor Robyn Ward and Dr. Michael Barton — undertook a meta-analysis aiming to determine the actual contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to survival in adult cancer patients.

Their results, published in "Clinical Oncology" in 2004 under the title The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies found the overall contribution of these drugs to 5-year survival in adults to be an estimated 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA. See Table: Impact of cytotoxic chemotherapy on 5-year survival in American adults showing the percentage of 5-year survivors after chemotherapy for 22 types of cancer. The authors concluded that "it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival".

A detailed review of this important paper is owed to Dr. Ralph Moss and can be read for instance at www.icnr.com/articles/ischemotherapyeffective.html under the title "How Effective Is Chemo Therapy?"
Healing Cancer Naturally

Chemotherapy is ineffective in treating most cancers, the exceptions being acute lymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, nonseminomatous testicular cancer, as well as a few very rare forms of cancer, including choriocarcinoma, Wilm's tumor, and retinoblastoma.
paraphrasing Dr. Ralph Moss in Questioning Chemotherapy

To my knowledge the only good evidence for the use of chemotherapy is with some blood and lymph cancers, especially with leukaemia in children. However, even then there is a high price to pay. A long-term follow-up study shows that such children develop 18 times more secondary malignant tumours later in life, and girls face a 75 times (7,500%) higher risk of breast cancer by the time they are 40.
www.health-science-spirit.com/cancerchoice.html

(Also compare Dr Tim O'Shea quote in On Cancer Business regarding “effectiveness”!)

Testicular cancer has yielded to platinum containing drugs... It is extremely damaging to the body [impotence being one of many likely consequences), but it does lead to a very extended life for people with this problem.
Dr. Ralph Moss on Chemotherapy, Laetrile, Coley's Toxins, Burzynski, & Cancer Politics, Laura Lee radio show, 1994

...as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.
Alan C Nixon, PhD, former president of the American Chemical Society

Cancer researchers, medical journals, and the popular media all have contributed to a situation in which many people with common malignancies are being treated with drugs not known to be effective.
Dr. Martin Shapiro UCLA

”Best book I've ever read on chemotherapy.”
Ralph Moss' Questioning Chemotherapy is a book that every person faced with cancer must read before submitting to toxic chemicals which may very well destroy the body's immune system. Unlike many alternative health authors who base their conclusions on anecdotal evidence, Moss uses the medical establishment's own research to prove that in almost all instances chemotherapy is NOT a viable approach to improving cancer survival rates.

Moss also makes the important point that current cancer research has never bothered to examine the mental anguish, physical suffering, and poor quality of life endured by almost everyone whose doctors talk or scare them into undergoing chemotherapy.

Learning about the economics behind chemotherapy drives the final nail into the coffin of a "therapy" that educated people in the future will consider outrageous and reflective of the current dark ages of so-called modern medicine. This is a must read book for anyone who wants to know the truth behind chemotherapy or anyone whose doctor wants to inject toxic chemicals into their bloodstream.
Chet Day’s review of ”Questioning Chemotherapy: A Critique of the Use of Toxic Drugs in the Treatment of Cancer” by Ralph W. Moss

Except for two forms of cancer, chemotherapy does not cure. It tortures and may shorten life...
Dr. Candace Pert, Georgetown University School of Medicine

[D]espite ...widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years.
Thomas Dao, MD NEJM Mar 1975 292 p 707

Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.
Albert Braverman MD 1991 Lancet 1991 337 p 901, "Medical Oncology in the 90s"

Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.
Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer

Question: "How in the world, Dr Moss, can [chemotherapy] be considered a standard cure, when it works for 2-4 [percent of cancer patients], and very specific ones?

Answer: We are dealing with an industry. It is not supported by the facts. The way that it is done is this. The drugs are tested in test tubes, and they look for things that will kill cells. After you have found something that kills cells, cancer cells, cell lines which are very abnormal non-typical sort of growths, maybe a new life form almost, then you put it into animals. Then if it kills the cancers before it kills the animals, and shrinks the tumours, you consider you have an active agent. You then put it into people, and go through the 3 phases the FDA prescribes for this, and basically if you can shrink the tumour 50% or more for 28 days you have got the FDA's definition of an active drug. That is called a response rate, so you have a response.

Quite a bit [different from a cure] because when you look to see if there is any life prolongation from taking this treatment what you find is all kinds of hocus pocus and song and dance about the disease free survival, and this and that. In the end there is no proof that chemotherapy in the vast majority of cases actually extends life, and this is the GREAT LIE about chemotherapy, that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumour and extending the life of the patient. [Or that there is a correlation between looking at a cancer cell in a test tube and the tumour in someone's body.]

What happens as you grow those cells in cell lines they become very weird. Hundreds and hundreds of generations later they don't even look like even normal human cancer cells. They are things that grow under glass, immortal cells, unlike ... normal cancer cells. So much cancer research is very questionable because it is based on this cell line research.
Ralph Moss, PhD, former Director of Information for Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center

CHEMOTHERAPY: AN UNPROVEN PROCEDURE
How can that be true of the main cancer treatment in the U.S.? Fact is, no solid scientific studies or clinical trials prove chemotherapy's effectiveness, except in a small percentage of very rare types of cancer. For solid tumors of adults, the vast majority of cancer, or anything that has metastasized, chemotherapy just doesn't work.

A German epidemiologist from the Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, Dr. Ulrich Abel has done a comprehensive review and analysis of every major study and clinical trial of chemotherapy ever done. His conclusions should be read by anyone who is about to embark on the Chemo Express. To make sure he had reviewed everything ever published on chemotherapy, Abel sent letters to over 350 medical centers around the world asking them to send him anything they had published on the subject. Abel researched thousands of articles: it is unlikely that anyone in the world knows more about chemotherapy than he.

The analysis took him several years, but the results are astounding: Abel found that the overall worldwide success rate of chemotherapy was "appalling" because there was simply no scientific evidence available anywhere that chemotherapy can "extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers."

Abel emphasizes that chemotherapy rarely can improve the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as "a scientific wasteland" and states that at least 80 percent of chemotherapy administered throughout the world is worthless, and is akin to the "emperor's new clothes" — neither doctor nor patient is willing to give up on chemotherapy even though there is no scientific evidence that it works! — Lancet 10 Aug 91 No mainstream media even mentioned this comprehensive study: it was totally buried.
Dr Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT
Also compare the detailed scientifically referenced article Death by Medicine at mercola.com/2003/nov/26/death_by_medicine.htm.

When any chemotherapeutic drug is spilled in the hospital or anywhere en route, it is classified as a major biohazard, requiring the specialists to come and clean it up with their space-suits and all their strictly regulated protocols. Yet this same agent is going to be put into the human body and is expected to cure it of disease? What's wrong with this picture?
Dr Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT www.thedoctorwithin.com

Click on picture to see enlarged version.

...and since a picture says more than a thousand words, here is a reduced-size rendering of the burning and scarring resulting of chemotherapy fluid spilling onto the unprotected hand. Does this picture make one feel safer to have such an extremely aggressive toxic chemical administered within one’s body via intravenous injection? Knowing that our outer skin is actually better protected against any impacts than our inner body? That is also why nurses administering chemotherapy have to wear protective gloves and follow the most stringent security measures in case of any accidental spills of chemotherapy beyond 5 cc, see High risks involved in accidental spillage of chemotherapy drugs.

...chemo drugs are some of the most toxic substances ever designed to go into a human body, their effects are very serious, and are often the direct cause of death. Like the case of Jackie Onassis, who underwent chemo for one of the rare diseases in which it generally has some beneficial results: non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She went into the hospital on Friday and was dead by Tuesday.
Dr Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT

PROSTATE CANCER
is one of the worst areas of chemotherapy abuse, according to Norman Zinner, MD. He states: "Most men with prostate cancer will die from other illnesses never knowing they had the problem."

Hormones have been used as therapy since the 1940s, with no overall improvement in survival. Early detection of prostate cancer has resulted in thousands of men being treated for a condition that would have been self-limiting. No figures are available for those who have died from the side effects of treatment when the condition would never have caused any problems or symptoms during the patient's entire lifetime...Some studies show rates as high as 40% in autopsies of men over 70 in which prostate cancer was discovered which the patient never knew about, and which was not the cause of death. (American Cancer Society, 1995).

There are no randomized clinical trials proving that chemotherapy for prostate cancer increases long term survival. Au contraire, a 1992 study published in JAMA demonstrated that there was no difference in 10 year survival rate between the men who did nothing at all and those who had treatment. (Johansson)
Dr Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT

In a survey of 79 oncologists from McGill University Cancer Center in Canada, 64 said they would not consent to treatment with Cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug, while 58 oncologists said they would reject all the current trials being carried out by their establishment.
Why? “The ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable degree of toxicity.”
Philip Day, Cancer: Why We’re Still Dying to Know the Truth

THE BI-PHASIC EFFECT: WHY CHEMO DOESN'T WORK
Every time we put a drug in our body, two things happen:
1. what the drug initially does to the body
2. how the body adapts to the drug

Any example will do. Antibiotics? First, the drug kills all bacteria in the body. Then the body responds by growing them back, often with the bad bacteria out of balance, which come back in more powerful, mutated forms. Steroids? First, muscles are built because testosterone has been mimicked. Then the body responds by cutting production of natural testosterone, which eventually feminizes the athlete by shrinking the gonads... Obviously these are simplifications, but you get the idea.

“Drugs tend to worsen whatever they're supposed to cure, which sets up a vicious circle.” Dr. Dean Black in Health at the Crossroads p. 20

The Bi-Phasic Effect is well-explained by Dean Black and many other researchers who were trying to figure out why tumors seemed to come back with such a vengeance after chemotherapy. Some original work was done by American Cancer Society researcher Robert Schimke in 1985, who discovered that the way cancer cells resist chemotherapy is to replicate even harder and faster. Chemo drugs are lethal; so the cancer cells are stimulated to try and survive any way they can, which means faster growth.

In the presence of any toxin, cells will resist it to stay alive. The more they resist, the stronger they get. Black sees cancer itself is just an adaptation; a normal response to an abnormal poison. Chemotherapy simply provokes adaptation. (Black, p. 45) This is why we all know people who have had chemotherapy and experienced temporary remission. But when the tumor came back, it did so with a vengeance, and the patient was quickly overwhelmed.

Schimke talks about the possible effects chemotherapy might have on a tumor that otherwise may have been self-limiting:
"Might such treatments convert relatively benign tumors into more lethal forms?" Robert Schimke p. 1915

Think about this the next time you hear an oncologist talk about "mopping up" with powerful chemo drugs just to be sure we "got it all." Or prescribing powerful chemotherapy for a "pre-cancerous" or even a benign situation.

To understand the bi-phasic effect, one begins to realize that drugs are fighting the body. The whole military motif — medicine imposes its will upon the body, even though we have vastly incomplete information to be doing something that arrogant.
Dr Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT

In 1986, McGill Cancer Center scientists sent a questionnaire to 118 doctors who treated non-small-cell lung cancer. More than three quarters of them recruited patients and carried out trials of toxic drugs for lung cancer. They were asked to imagine that they themselves had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they themselves would choose. Of the 79 respondents, 64 said they would not consent to be in a trial containing cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug Fifty-eight found all the trials unacceptable. Their reasons? The ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable degree of toxicity.

Famed German biostatistician Ulrich Abel, PhD, also found in a similar 1989 study that "the personal views of many oncologists seem to be in striking contrast to communications intended for the public."
”Chemotherapy Report”

It is estimated that roughly 40% of cancer patients actually die of malnutrition rather than their disease itself [for background see Advice what to do when the digestive tract has been damaged by chemotherapy].
www.doctormurray.com

If your friend touches chemotherapy, he's a goner.
Chemotherapy expert Ernst Wynder, former professor at Sloan-Kettering Hospital and recipient of a medal from the American Cancer Association, in a warning to a friend of professor Gearin-Tosh who healed himself of one of the most lethal cancers known using natural means.

More quotes and facts on chemotherapy

Read Dr. Tim O'Shea’s excellent article TO THE CANCER PATIENT in its entirety at www.thedoctorwithin.com .

Also see On Conventional Cancer Treatment, On Drugs and History of Alternative Cancer Treatment.

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• Why Alternative Cancer Treatment