The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies
Such is the title of a landmark study − a "systematic review", to be exact − published in the peer-reviewed medical journal "Clinical Oncology" in 2004.
So what is a "systematic review"? I quote from Wikipedia: "A systematic review aims to provide a complete, exhaustive summary of current literature relevant to a research question." It does this by: "collecting and critically analyzing multiple research studies or papers, using methods that are selected before one or more research questions are formulated, and then finding and analyzing studies that relate to and answer those questions in a structured methodology".
Scientists began doing systematic reviews in the 1980s, and the method was soon recognized as being extremely important for researchers. Why? Because it takes all the relevant published literature and data into account.
You see, many so-called "scientific studies" are paid for by the Pharmaceutical Industry, which has a clear financial interest in obtaining results that will shed a positive light upon the drugs they produce. Thus, they routinely manipulate the studies they are funding, so that the results indicate that their product is good, whereas in reality, it may well be of not much use at all, or worse: it could do more harm than good.
You may (understandably) think that I am exaggerating. I assure you, I am not. I myself need not go into details about the despicable tricks the Industry uses to convince others that their products are much better than they in fact are. Fortunately, there are physicians, experts in their fields, who have already recognized these abuses, and have written extensively about the full extent of this problem. Two such experts are Dr. Ben Goldacre and Dr. Peter C. Gotzsche, whose books I recommend to anyone who would like to learn of just how bad the situation with "Big Pharma" is. (Click on their names above to see their books at Amazon.com).
Getting back to the concept of the "systematic review", here is what Dr. Goldacre has to say:
"A systematic review is an unbiased survey of all the evidence on a given question. It is the best-quality evidence that can be used."
In other words, a systematic review, since it deals with all the evidence available, not just the information that the Pharmaceutical Industry wants us to believe, is the best method there is for getting to the truth about which drugs, or methods of treatment, are in fact useful.
The study "The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies" set out to find the facts about the extent to which chemotherapy actually helps patients. Due to the great amount of time necessary to complete such a study for even a single kind of cancer, the authors decided to limit their research to 22 of the most common types. Also, the study did not cover other treatment methods: "We did not attempt to evaluate the effect on cancer outcomes of hormones, immunotherapy, antibodies, tumor vaccines, gene therapy or other novel techniques."
Therefore, keep in mind when viewing the study that it only deals with chemotherapy, and its contribution for the 22 types of cancer studied.
Yet despite the admitted narrowed focus of the review, its results are absolutely shocking, for it reveals that for many varieties of cancer, chemotherapy contributes either extremely little, or even nothing at all, to helping people survive.
You can read the study yourself, and indeed: I encourage you to do so. No, it is not easy to find this systematic review. Not to get "conspiracy-minded" here, but it would almost seem as if certain powers (perhaps including your own physician) do not want us to know of this scientific study. How else could you explain why cancer.org, the site of the American Cancer Society itself, does not even mention this tremendously important work, let alone tell us what it reveals? Clearly, the industry is putting its own financial prosperity well ahead of your health and well-being. But more on that site later in this book.
The information that the systematic review "The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy" reveals is of the utmost importance to anyone who is considering receiving chemotherapy treatments. As a matter of fact, in my opinion, if an oncologist does not provide his/her patients with the information given in this review, he or she is guilty of malpractice, at least ethically speaking. Legally, it is a different matter: our laws are such that medical practitioners can get away with much more than you could imagine. (I learned that lesson first hand during my encounter with the oncologist who wanted to "help" my mother with chemo.)
Here are several links where you can download the study, for free. (Note that there are other sites that charge the hefty sum of $35.95 to download this very same pdf file. Those sites are typically ones that distribute − for a fee − scientific papers. You would think that where such crucial information is concerned, they would provide them free of charge to everyone. Or could it be that such sites receive funding from the Pharmaceutical Industry, and thus have little interest in informing the public of studies whose revelations could cost that industry billions of dollars in losses every year?)
I would like to add that when looking for sites to download this study, even though I typed in its exact name (which someone not familiar with it would of course not know), it was very difficult to come up with even two links where it can be obtained for free. Why is it that such an important paper is so hard to find on the Internet? Decide for yourself.
In any case, the download is free at a few sites; here are three links, including one from my own site.
The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies
Link 1 Link 2 ( Link 3 ) Caution! This third link should only be used if you wish to pay $35 for exactly the same PDF file that the first two links offer for free. So why am I including this third link? Because it links to an “official”, that is, mainstream medical site (Clinicaloncologyonline.net). I include it so you can see that yes, this is a serious mainstream medical study. It is interesting, though, that “Clinical Oncology”, which almost no doubt has ties to “Big Pharma”, wants you to pay $35 to download the PDF. Could it be that they don’t wish this information to fall into the hands of the unsuspecting public? Once again, decide for yourself!
Should you for some reason not be able to download it from any of these places, never fear: simply send me an email, and I will be glad to send it to you (dboltoncreations@gmail.com).
Once you have the study, I encourage you to please send it to anyone you know who has been diagnosed with cancer (or to one of that person's family members). You could well be saving a life by doing so. In addition, please also send them this eBook as well, so they learn even more.
Although the results speak for themselves, I would like to go over the most important details here, since it is vitally important that you be able to understand just what this ground-breaking work reveals. However, for anyone not used to reading such scientific documents, it could be easy to reach wrong conclusions about the information contained therein.
Here is the table that you will find on page 4 of the study:
I would like to explain the different categories and numbers on this page, since it might be easy to get confused. Here is an explanation of each column:
1) Malignancy. This gives the name of the type of cancer studied.
2) ICD-9. Not relevant for our purposes. This gives the code number of this specific disease, according to the "International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems".
3) Number of cancers in people over the age of 20. This gives the total of the cases studied for that type of cancer.
4) Absolute number of 5-year survivors due to chemotherapy: the number of people who survived for at least 5 years thanks to chemotherapy.
5) Percentage of 5-year survivals due to chemotherapy. In other words, out of all the people with this type of cancer who were studied: what percentage lived for five years thanks to chemotherapy?
This last column deserves a bit more attention. Imagine that one day, your physician hands you a diagnosis of cancer. Trying to help you see the "bright side", he suggests that you opt for chemotherapy treatment. After your initial shock and dismay, you might (indeed: you should) ask the simple question:
"Doctor, according to the statistics, what are the chances that chemotherapy will help me live another five years or more?" Of course, you might phrase that question differently, for example:
"Doctor, please tell me what the chances are of chemotherapy curing me?"
I'm sure that many thousands of people ask their doctors this question when they receive the sobering diagnosis. And I'm equally sure that many, if not most of those doctors, do not tell their patients the truth, either because...
1) They themselves are negligent, have not done their "homework", and are therefore not aware of this study (though it was published years ago).
2) They don't want to "scare" you by revealing just how unlikely it is that chemo could ever help.
3) They know that if you do accept chemotherapy, there will be a lot of money to be made.
For whatever the reason(s), most doctors will not give you the information shown in this document − even though it is, I stress once again, a scientific study that was published in Clinical Oncology, a peer reviewed journal.
Before we go on, allow me to express my opinion on this situation, in clear and strong terms:
1) Any doctor who does not know of this paper has been negligent in his/her duties, for the results of the study are of tremendous importance for patients who have been diagnosed with one of these types of cancer. Any physician who deals at all with people who have cancer is under an ethical obligation to keep abreast of any scientific studies pertaining to cancer treatments, most especially to cancer treatments that involve the use of poisonous substances (such as chemo), and that could actually do much more harm than good. Of course, it is quite possible that your doctor does not know of the study merely because the "cancer industry" in the U.S. does its best to keep such documents from reaching even physicians. Nonetheless, any oncologist who doesn't know of it is in my view plainly negligent. Of course, you can help here...
2) If you ask your family doctor or oncologist about this work, and he claims to never have heard of it, offer to send him a copy by email, so that he may educate himself. (Feel free to send him this eBook as well. As a matter of fact, I urge you to do so!)
3) As a follow up, you might then later ask that same physician if he still plans to use, or recommend, chemotherapy for all those types of cancer for which it is totally useless. And should you do this, please let me know: I'd be very interested in his/her answer!
4) If you have recently been diagnosed with cancer, and your doctor is aware of the study, and has just recommended chemo for a type of cancer that the study shows to be untreatable with chemotherapy, then ask him how he could dare to suggest such a treatment, considering the fact that it would obviously do much more harm than good.
If he is offended by your question − big deal! After all: we're talking about your health here − indeed, about your very life!
Now let's turn to the statistics given by the report, so that we can see clearly what those numbers mean. We will choose stomach cancer as an example; the data is from the table on page 2 of the study (the fourth page of the pdf file):
The number of patients was in this case 3,001. The absolute number of 5-year survivors due to chemotherapy was 20; thus, the percentage of 5-year survivors due to chemo was 0nly 0.7%. That's right: over 99% of stomach cancer patients who received chemotherapy were not helped at all by that invasive treatment. One might even speculate (though the study does not suggest this) that at least some of these patients were not only not helped, but were even seriously harmed by chemo, since, as the American Cancer Society itself admits, chemotherapy can indeed be a cause of cancer, or of secondary cancers. Here some of the side effects they list on one of their pages:
"Some chemo drugs can damage cells in the heart, kidneys, bladder, lungs, and nervous system." and: "Some chemo drugs cause long-term side effects, like heart or nerve damage or fertility problems." and: "Many side effects go away fairly quickly, but some might take months or even years to go away completely. Sometimes the side effects can last a lifetime, such as when chemo causes long-term damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, or reproductive organs. Certain types of chemo sometimes cause delayed effects, such as a second cancer that may show up many years later."
Don't make the mistake of believing that they are telling us about these horrid side effects in the interest of honesty, or your well-being. No doubt they are listing them for legal reasons: if they failed to mention such effects, everyone who then suffers from these conditions after receiving chemo could get a lawyer, and sue them for millions.
If you read that page of their site, you will find that as horrifying as the possible side effects are, the text does as much as it can to play them down, using phrases such as...
"Many side effects go away fairly quickly after treatment ends."
Naturally: if you are being gradually poisoned, and then they stop giving you the poison, you would hope that at least some of the side effects would disappear, wouldn't you? Also notice that they mention neither which of the many side effects go away, nor how quickly they disappear. Could they not give us the statistics on this?
Or else:
"Side effects are not always as bad as you might expect."
OK, so they are not always as bad as I might expect. But pray tell, cancer.org: How often are they not as bad as people expect? In other words: where, on this page, are the statistics showing just how many people suffer the worst side effects?
Or else:
"Doctors try to give chemo at levels high enough to treat cancer, while keeping side effects at a minimum. They also try to avoid using multiple drugs that have similar side effects."
Gee, I sure hope so! Isn't that the least we could expect?
Or else:
"Every person doesn’t get every side effect, and some people get few, if any."
Once again: why don't they show us the statistics as to just how many people get each of those side effects? Or are they trying to "sugar coat" the subject, in order to convince us to opt for chemo despite the terrifying side effects?
These are but a few examples of how the American Cancer Society, through its site cancer.org, uses carefully crafted written propaganda to sell us treatment methods that in many cases will not help us, but will rather do us significant harm.
Think it through a moment:
1) As the "Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy" study shows quite plainly, chemo contributes nothing whatsoever to curing, or even to achieving five-year survival, for many types of cancer, and does next to nothing for other types.
2) Chemotherapy, as even cancer.org admits, leads to extremely strong negative side effects.
3) Therefore, if you are given chemotherapy for many types of cancer, it is doing you no good, and only harm.
The subject of how the ACS employs finely crafted propaganda to achieve its ends is, I feel, of tremendous import, which is why there is a chapter in this book on that subject alone. But for now, back to the systematic review.
First of all, I feel it is important to make sure that you do not draw any wrong conclusions from the numbers in this report. The study was very specific in its scope, investigating the contribution of chemotherapy to 5-year survival rates. However, the results do not indicate that (using stomach cancer as an example) 0.7% of the people were cured of cancer through chemo; it merely means that of those thus treated, (only) 0.7% were still alive after 5 years, due to chemotherapy. In other words, of the very few (20 out of 3001 patients) who were helped by chemo, it is quite possible that at least some of these 20 individuals still had cancer.
On the bright side, do not conclude from the study that stomach cancer will definitely kill 99.3% (100% - 0.7%) of the people who get it. This statistic is not saying that at all. Cancer.org tells us that in 2017, approximately 28,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with stomach cancer; of these, 10.960 will die. Thus, 39% will die, and 61% will live. Therefore, if you (or a loved one) have stomach cancer, you have a 61% of being alive after 5 years (not a meager 0.7%). However, as we can plainly see from the study, if you choose chemotherapy, it will do practically nothing at all (0.7%) to contribute to a cure. In addition, the side effects of chemo may be: loss of appetite; hair loss; diarrhea; mouth sores; increased chance of infection; bleeding or bruising after minor cuts or injuries; fatigue or shortness of breath; damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, or reproductive organs; some other sort of cancer, in addition to the one you already have.
There are a few statistics at cancer.org, but they are all but irrelevant, and indeed useless, if you have cancer. What would most interest a cancer patient is this: of those who survived the type of cancer I have, just what treatment methods did those survivors choose? Was it chemo? Radiation therapy? Or perhaps did a good number of them survive, and even cure themselves, due to a radical change in diet and/or life-style? And yet, on the huge site of cancer.org, this crucial information is nowhere to be found.
Considering the facts that the systematic review shows − namely, that chemotherapy contributes to 5-year survival in only 0.7% of cases − would you really want to choose chemotherapy if you get stomach cancer? I know I sure wouldn't: the chances of it helping me would only be 0.7%, and due to its extreme side effects, the chances of it doing me harm are no doubt significantly greater.
Returning now to the page of the study, let's focus our attention on those results that are given by a little hyphen ( − ) instead of a number. As a matter of fact, it is of the utmost importance that you take careful note of the places in this table where those little hyphens appear, for they reveal a terrifyingly shocking truth.
Why? Because on this table, a hyphen ( − ) mean 0%. Yes, ZERO percent.
Where do those horrifying hyphens appear? They are placed in the columns for the following types of cancer:
Pancreas - Soft tissue Sarcoma - Melanoma - Uterus - Prostate - Bladder - Kidney - "Unknown Primary Site" - Multiple Myeloma
That's right: for nine types of common cancer, chemotherapy contributes nothing whatsoever to 5-year survival rates; and of course, nothing at all to curing patients.
When perusing a number of "alternative medicine" sites, I came across references to this study, yet saw that they really did not do it justice, and in my view − somewhat unfairly criticized chemotherapy.
"What?" you are no doubt thinking, "You, David, who seem to have declared war on chemotherapy, are saying that some alternative medicine sites unfairly criticize it?"
Yes, I am saying just that. The only statistic those sites mentioned was the "Total" at the bottom of the fourth page, namely, 2.1%.
I quote from one of those sites:
"FACT: approximately 2% of all cancers respond to chemotherapy."
Put that way, this is not a fact. Of the 22 types studied, 13 respond at least a tiny bit; 13 is not 2% of 22, but rather, 59%. The types that do respond are:
Hodgkin's (40.3%), Testis (37.7%); Cervix (12%); Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (10.5%); Ovary (8.9%); Esophagus (4.9%); Brain (3.7%); Rectum (3.4%). (Note: I recently read that as far as cancer of the testis is concerned, the success rate of chemotherapy has gone up since 2004, from 37.7% to about 40%.)
Thus, if you have Hodgkin's, or cancer of the testis, there's around a 40% chance that chemo could help. That total of 2.1% is the average of all 22 types. Why is it so dismally low? Because, as mentioned earlier, there are nine types of cancer which do not respond at all to chemotherapy. So what would I do if I had, for instance, NonHodgkin's lymphoma (10.5% in the list)? Would I think: "Well, a 10.5% chance of chemo helping is at least something; I might as well give it a shot!"
Truthfully, no, since the chances of it not helping, and therefore, due to its side effects, of doing more harm than good, would be 89.5%. Instead, I would opt for the line of (mainly) self-treatment that I discuss in a later chapter of this book. If, after about 2-3 months, alternative treatments were doing no good at all, and I were desperate, then yes, I might try chemo. But I believe that after three months of living as I shall describe in that later chapter, I would most likely be well on my way to a cure, and would have no need for chemo.
And if I had Hodgkin's, with its 40% likelihood of being treatable with chemo? Once again, I would first try natural methods, but would certainly remain open to the possibility of chemo, should all else fail.
In other words, to properly evaluate this tremendously important systematic review, we must not take that total figure of 2.15% and generalize to all types of cancer. Keep in mind also that there are many more types of cancer that are not mentioned here, since they were not within the scope of the study. For some of those types, chemo may well help to a degree. If the Pharmaceutical Industry has those figures thanks to its own studies, why don't they give them to the general public? Could it be because the figures for other types of cancer are every bit as depressing as the ones for the 22 types studied in this review?
Naturally, this is something we will only ever know if further studies (especially systematic reviews) reveal to us just how much chemotherapy contributes to the conquering of those other sorts of cancer. It is easily possible that the "Industry" already knows those figures. For this reason, we must demand that the government force the Medical-Pharmaceutical Industry to reveal to the public all the study results in their possession, and as soon as possible.
Therefore, I would like to invite you to join a Facebook group I have set up, called “Make Big Pharma accountable!”. Once we have a large number of members in this group, I plan to set up a petition, at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov When a petition is started at whitehouse.gov, it has only one month to achieve 100,000 signatures. If it reaches that goal, it will be passed on to people who will respond, and also, will be put in line to be reviewed by the White House.
Naturally, getting 100,000 signatures in only a month is no easy task! That’s why I am doing this in two steps:
1) Get as many people into the Facebook group as possible over the course of thenext 8-12 months.
2) When we have well over 100,000 people there, I can then make an announcement to the group, telling them that is is now time to sign the petition that I will have started. In this way, perhaps we can get 100,000 (or ideally, many more) signatures on our petition, to ensure that those higher up in the White House (and maybe even the president himself?) see our petition, and are convinced that certain abuses on the part of the Medical-Pharmaceutical Industry must be stopped as soon as possible.
Therefore: please join the group, so that you will be able to take part in achieving real and positive change in what is at present an intolerable situation.
Here the link to the group: Make Big Pharma accountable!
***
As we saw in the study (whose data, though they are the result of a serious "official" scientific investigation are nowhere mentioned by the American Cancer Society at cancer.org), chemotherapy helps on average in only 2.1% cases of people who have 22 of the most common forms of the illness. For nine of those types, it contributes absolutely nothing: 0%. The side effects of chemo − freely admitted (though "sugar-coated") by cancer.org − are quite obviously so extreme, that no person in their right mind would ever want to suffer them.
Therefore, we can conclude, and very reasonably so, that chemotherapy should never be chosen to treat at least nine types of cancer.
But do the physicians behind cancer.org tell us this?
No, not at all. Although the ACS must know about the study discussed above, they mention chemotherapy as a treatment option for each and every one of the nine cancers that do not respond at all to chemotherapy (0% in the last column of the fourth page of the review). That's right: even though chemo does not help at all with these types of cancer, as the systematic review shows plainly, the American Cancer Society nonetheless lists it as a valid treatment option for all of these types.
And as the study also shows, for many other types of cancer, chemo contributes so little that almost certainly, it is doing much more harm than good. True, the study did not deal with other varieties of cancer, but only 22 of the main ones. Yet now I ask you: If the average contribution of chemo to 5-year survival rates for 22 common types of cancer was a meager 2.1%, do you really believe that its success rate will be a lot higher in the other types, those that were not included in the review? Sure, perhaps for one or two of those other types, chemo could help somewhat, maybe as much as 40%. But I would bet that even for