Positive Health Online

 

This article is Copyright ©2014 Dr Tim O’Shea www.TheDoctorWithin.com    doc@thedoctorwithin.com and is published in 3 parts in Positive Health PH Online. Part I in this series was published in Positive Health PH Online Issue 221. Part III to be published in Issue 223 concludes with a review of natural treatment approaches. Republished with permission from www.thedoctorwithin.com/cancer/to-the-cancer-patient/

 

The Business of Cancer

Industry. Politics. Big money. Health care. Buying and selling. You know – life. More people living off cancer than ever died from it.

As we saw above, throughout the 1980s, working through Nixon’s illusory War on Cancer, we were spending less than $50 billion per year on cancer.

By 2009 the total spent on cancer care, treatment and research exceeded $305 billion per year, according to the British Medical Journal, 28 August 2009, [49]

At present there are more than 569,000 cancer deaths per year in the U.S. [CDC: Leading causes of death] [50] - now second only to heart disease on the list of killer diseases. Yet all this money has not improved the overall chances of survival from cancer during the past 25 years even slightly.

Many cancer patients will tell you they eventually feel that they’re just a mark, a number, an insurance account. The goal of every visit seems to be selling them on new drugs, new procedures, running up the bill, not just not improving their overall health, but ignoring it altogether.

An industry this immense has one goal - self-preservation. A cure for cancer would mean its demise. This is a pivotal fact one should learn at the beginning of any honest look at the cancer industry, which most sources will vehemently deny, by that cleverest of techniques - misdirection.

The American Cancer Society, for example, collects hundreds of millions per year. Very little of this money ever finds its way to research. The majority of the money goes into investments and towards administration - lavish salaries and perks for the Society’s officers and employees. A funny thing is that written into the charter of the American Cancer Society is the clause that states that if a cure for cancer is ever found, on that day, the Society will disband. (The Cancer Industry [5]) So is this an organization that is going to be motivated to find a cure for cancer?

This is the underlying reality, but what do we hear on the surface, coming at us every day from the TV newsreaders, and scripted online health blurbs, or from the lips of the oncologists making their reassuring pronouncements on the outlook for our loved ones’ chances of survival? We’re “making progress.” “Early detection” is giving us a much better chance of “getting it all” by means of immediate surgery or by chemotherapy and radiation. Then after surgery they tell us we need to do chemo to put “the icing on the cake,” “just to make sure”… etc., and other slick closing phrases. Phrases which have not changed much in 25 years.

Frightened to death, uninformed, and having nowhere else to turn, people keep buying this same line year after year. Your grandparents bought it, maybe your parents bought it, and perhaps now your siblings are buying it. As a result, people keep dying on schedule. And the figures go up and up.

But there’s a limit to everything. More and more of us have watched our family or our friends die wretched deaths, as all the ‘big guns’ were pompously wheeled out, with the hospitals happily billing the insurance until coverage runs out. And some of us are saying Wait a minute, this isn’t about money - this is about my life. And people are deciding to take their chances without standard slash-and-burn protocols, either by just staying home and doing nothing, or else by experimentation with alternative therapies, which have always been there all this time, just below the surface.

But in order to have the confidence to make such a courageous stand, a little self-education is required. And here is the onion.

Chemotherapy

Considering chemotherapy? Consider this:

“chemotherapy is basically ineffective in the vast of majority of cases in which it is given.” - Ralph Moss, PhD [22]

“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 [21]

“despite widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years” – David Greenberg MD NEJM Mar 1975 [31]

“Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumour, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.” - Albert Braverman MD Lancet 1991 [32]

“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 tumours.” - Allen Levin, MD UCSF The Healing of Cancer [51]

Let’s say you get cancer - in America it’s 1 in 3. Your doctor says you need chemo and sends you to an office in the hospital. You have no symptoms yet, no pain, and you feel fine. But you’re very frightened. You walk into the office and everyone else there is in obvious pain, with their hair falling out, etc., and most of them are dying. It’s like a scene from a horror movie. Your first instinct is to run: I’m not like them! I’m alive! What am I doing here?

Then ask yourself this: in your entire life, how often have your true instincts been wrong?

Chemotherapy: An Unproven Procedure

How can that be true of the #1 cancer treatment in the U.S. for the past 50 years? The plain fact is, no legitimate scientific studies or clinical trials independent of the companies selling chemo drugs have ever proven chemotherapy’s effectiveness, except in a small percentage of very rare types of cancer. For solid tumours of adults, the vast majority of cancer, or anything that has metastasized, chemotherapy simply doesn’t work.

If one is going to even begin to look at the legitimate research regarding the failure of mainstream cancer therapies, all that initial research was done by Ralph Moss, and elaborated very clearly in his two books The Cancer Industry and Questioning Chemotherapy. Even though they were written in the 90s, the fundamental objections to the philosophy behind chemotherapy are timeless. Cancer therapy has simply not advanced in the past 20 years enough to make Moss’ work anything but essential reading for learning about the ongoing problems with mainstream cancer treatment. Moss didn’t really continue his research at that level after that initial effort, but these two books remain as landmarks in the field.

When he was researching his first book, Dr Moss uncovered the shocking research of a German epidemiologist from the Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, named Dr Ulrich Abel. This Dr Abel did 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 centres 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 Abel two 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 [35]

No mainstream media even mentioned this comprehensive study: it was totally buried.

Similar are the conclusions of most medical researchers who actually try to work their way past the smoke and mirrors to get to the real statistics. In evaluating a therapeutic regimen, the only thing that really matters is death rate - will a treatment significantly extend a patient’s life? Not life as a vegetable, but the natural healthy independent lifespan of a human being.

Media stories and most articles in medical journals go to great lengths to hide the true numbers of people dying from cancer, by talking about other issues. In Questioning Chemotherapy, Moss talks about several of the ways they do it:

Response Rate is a Favourite

If a dying patient’s condition changes even for a week or a month, especially if the tumour shrinks temporarily, the patient is listed as having “responded to” chemotherapy. No joke! The fact that the tumour comes back stronger soon after chemo is stopped, is not figured into the equation. The fact that the patient has to endure horrific side effects in order to temporarily shrink the tumour is not considered. That fact that the patient soon dies is not figured into the equation. The idea is to sell, sell, and sell. Sell chemotherapy.

Also in the media we find the loud successes chemotherapy has had on certain rare types of cancer, like childhood leukemia, and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But for the vast majority of cancer cases, chemo is a failure. Worse yet, a toxic one.

Even with Hodgkins, one of chemo’s much-trumpeted triumphs, the cure is frequently a success, but the patient dies. He just doesn’t die of Hodgkins disease, that’s all. In the 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, [38] they published a 47-year study of more than 10,000 patients with Hodgkins lymphoma, who were treated with chemotherapy. Even though there was success with the Hodgkins itself, these patients encountered an incidence of leukemia that was six times the normal rate. This is a very common type of reported success within the cancer industry - again, the life of the patient is not taken into account.

Another thing is, in evaluating any treatment, there must be a risk/ benefit analysis - a carefully standardized protocol for measuring the actual risks vs. the proven, unvarnished positive outcomes from the procedure being studied. A very fundamental part of the scientific method.

Due to gigantic economic pressures fearful of the results, such evaluation has been systematically put aside in the US chemotherapy industry for the past 40 years. Primarily because a favourable report would be impossible, considering the toxic nature of the drugs involved.

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.

Heroin? First it blocks the pain receptors and sends happy hormones called endorphins through the body, giving an overall feeling of wonderfulness. The body responds, by getting so used to this euphoria that when the heroin is stopped, the reality of pain receptors going back to work again is unbearable.

Obviously these are simplifications, but you get the idea.

The Bi-Phasic Effect is well-explained by Dr Dean Black[39] and many other researchers who were trying to figure out why tumours 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.[36]

Chemo drugs are lethal to all cells; 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 as just such 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 tumour came back, it did so with a vengeance, and the patient was quickly overwhelmed. All too common.

Schimke talks about the possible effects on a tumour that otherwise may have been self-limiting:

“Might such treatments convert relatively benign tumours into more lethal forms?” - Robert Schimke p. 1915 [36]

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. You don’t introduce cell-killers unless you absolutely have to. These drugs kill normal cells, by definition.

The Bi-Phasic Effect is also called the Rebound Phenomenon. The drugs attack the tumour cells, which then resist and rebound twice as strong, often mutating in the process.

In the above study, Robert Schimke noted that with chemo combos the rebound effect may bring about a tumour cell proliferation rate which may be 100 times faster than before.

Cytotoxic

is the word that describes chemotherapeutic drugs. It means “cell-killing”.

Chemo-therapy kills all the cells of the body, not just the cancer cells. The risk is that chemo will kill the patient before it kills the cancer. Which often happens. Therefore the only question that should be asked when deciding whether or not to begin chemo is this: will this drug prolong the patient’s natural lifespan? Not his drugged ICU horror-movie lifespan - his natural lifespan.

The unadorned data say no.

Breast Cancer

which today 1 in 8 American women may expect, is an obvious area of confusion and misinformation. A professor at Northwestern U School of Medicine, Dr Edward Scanlon stated:

“over a period of 100 years, breast cancer treatment has evolved from no treatment to radical treatment and back again with more conservative management, without having affected mortality.” Journal of the American Medical Association.[17]

In their next mood swing, the medical consensus, whatever that means, reverted toward more radical mastectomy again. In an article from the New York Times,[30] a new Mayo Clinic study being published in the New England Journal of Medicine, backtracked to a former position. Bilateral radical mastectomy of healthy breasts supposedly “reduces the risk of getting breast cancer” by 90%! I am not making this up. Obviously, if a woman doesn’t have breasts, how can she get breast cancer? This type of insanity - a recommendation to remove healthy breasts with the idea to prevent a disease a woman doesn’t have - makes you wonder what’s next. How about euthanasia? - that way the patient will have a zero percent chance of ever getting any disease again.

What effects are these fickle, intellectualized medical opinions having on death rate? None. Actually it’s worse than ever. From the same hard data sources cited above, Vital Statistics, [26] we can look up the actual death rate for breast cancer:

year - deaths/ 100,000

1958: 13.1

1970: 14.3

1979: 15.4

1989: 17.4

1991: 17.4

By 2005, the figure had climbed to 24 deaths per 100,000, according to CDC.   [www.cdc.gov/Features/dsBreastCancerTrends/longdesc.html] [52] Yet virtually all articles on breast cancer for the past 2 years have headlines of death rate down from breast cancer.

How does that work?

Early mammograms: no effect. [43]

Chemotherapy: no effect.

Surgery: no effect.

Figures like the above are extremely well hidden and can only be unearthed with great effort.

A netsearch can instantly turn up 100 articles on the latest chemotherapy drugs and their anticipated “breakthroughs” and “response rates” that have always been “just around the corner” since 1971. Every week shows dozens of magazine and newspaper articles spouting the “latest thing” in chemotherapy. This is world class dog-wagging.

Mammograms

Way back in 1976, the American Cancer Society itself and its colleague the National Cancer Institute terminated the routine use of mammography for women under the age of 50 because of its “detrimental” (carcinogenic) effects. A large study done in Canada in 1992 found that women who had routine mammograms before the age of 50 also had increased death rates from breast cancer, by 36%. (Miller)[27]

John McDougall MD made a thorough review of mammograms. He points out that the $13 billion per year generated by mammograms controls the information that women get. Fear and incomplete data are the tools commonly used to persuade women to get routine mammograms. What is clear is that mammography cannot prevent breast cancer or even the spread of breast cancer. By the time a tumour is large enough to be detected by mammography, it has been there as long as 12 years! It is therefore ridiculous to advertise mammography as “early detection.” (McDougall p. 114 [28])

McDougall’s paper Early Detection is a must read for anyone considering mammogram.[43]

The other unsupportable illusion is that mammograms prevent breast cancer, which they don’t. On the contrary, the painful compression of breast tissue during the procedure itself can increase the possibility of metastasis by as much as 80%! Dr McDougall notes that a between 10 and 17% of the time, breast cancer is a self-limiting non-life-threatening type called ductal carcinoma in situ. This harmless cancer can be made active by the compressive force of routine mammography. (McDougall, p. 105 [28])

More recent data on mammograms was brought to light through the research of Samuel Epstein MD.[3] In a 2009 interview, Epstein reminds us that 5 radiologists have been recent presidents of the American Cancer Society [ACS]. This might help to explain why routine annual mammograms have been their standard recommendation for years, despite any proven upside. The mammogram business is extremely lucrative and very competitive. ACS ads consistently make unsupported claims of 100% detection, with no clinical studies whatsoever to back it up.

Without question, the biggest danger of mammograms is ionizing radiation. That means the mammogram itself can be the cause of cancer. A woman who gets a yearly mammogram for 10 years would get the same cumulative radiation as a woman standing one mile away from Ground Zero at Hiroshima, according to Epstein and others.[44]

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.”

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.

Composer Frank Zappa, now decomposing, found out this fact before he died at 52, but it was too late. 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).[33]

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) [41]

Irrepressible in the dog-and-pony show for prostate cancer: palladium implants.

A couple hundred radioactive implants each about the size of a grain of rice are sewn into the scrotum with the unproven claim that the radioactive grains will kill the cancer cells! Many undiscriminating men buy this unproven method every year, ignoring the fact that radioactivity from the implants is also delivering ionizing radiation to the normal prostate and generative cells in that area, thus acting as a powerful carcinogen.

This preposterous and still experimental procedure harks back to the days of radium implants in the blood, a very popular procedure in the 1950s, when the Big Three were surgery, radiation, and radium implants. To see what radium implants looked like, rent Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes. No cancer was ever cured from radium. Even though it was finally replaced by chemotherapy, which has roughly the same success, these implants continue to be hawked today.

Here’s why palladium implants are unlikely to work: it’s not the prostate that has cancer; it’s the man himself. Cancer is systemic - it’s all through you.

Side Effects Of Chemotherapy

It’s already a word game. Drugs don’t really have side effects. They just have effects.

When you say Side Effects you’re acquiescing to the illusion that we can direct the action of these wildly reactive pharmacological agents to the exact systems of the body we want, and make them bring about the exact results we desire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even more so in the case of chemotherapy where there’s almost never any upside.

Since chemo drugs are some of the most toxic substances ever designed, their effects are very serious, and are often the direct cause of death. Like the case of Jackie Kennedy, who underwent chemo for one of the rare diseases in which it generally has some beneficial results: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She went into the hospital on Friday and was dead by Tuesday. What happened? Most of that type patients survive, but even the ones that don’t usually won’t die for a year or so. Some sources imagined that since this was such a high profile patient, they’d given her an “extra strong” dose to “kill the cancer” faster. Unfortunately they miscalculated: there was a patient attached.

Remember this: Cancer is a general condition that localizes rather than a local condition which generalizes. That’s the main reason chemotherapy - and radiation - don’t work.

Aside from the standard hair loss, nausea, vomiting, headache, dizziness, and digestive trauma, many chemotherapy drugs have other specific severe effects.

Most have an immediate suppressive effect on bone marrow. This is where new blood cells are normally being produced all the time. This is the #1 way chemo knocks out the immune system, at the one time in your life you need it the most. And that is precisely the strongest argument against chemotherapy: immune annihilation just when the body is struggling to marshall all its resources in order to survive.

Chemotherapy drugs have an entire array of effects, possibly the worst being immediate destruction of the gastric mucosa, which explains loss of appetite, which means the patient cannot heal since starvation is being set up.

Other effects include accelerated osteoporosis, kidney damage, liver fibrosis, psychosis, arteritis, blood disease, and cartilage destruction in the joints.

This is just a partial list of some of the more common side effects, but it really makes you wonder: are these effects really worth the possible benefit of temporary tumour shrinkage with no proven increase in survival? People rarely ‘get better’ with chemotherapy. If they recover, it’s in spite of it.

All chemo drugs are extremely hard on the liver, because that’s the organ whose job is to try and break down toxins that have made it past the digestive tract. Liver fibrosis is a very common sequella of methotrexate.

Why Not Drano?

The beginning of the hype that promised to cure all cancer by means of chemo drugs, came as an offshoot of the postwar excitement with the success of antibiotics and the sulfa drugs. Caught up in the heady atmosphere of visions of money and power in vanquishing cancer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering began to make extravagant claims that to this day have never been realized. Some 400,000 “cytotoxins” were tested by Sloan-Kettering and the National Cancer Institute. The criterion in order to be tested were: will the toxin kill some of the tumour cells before it kills the patient. That’s it! Many were brand new synthetic compounds. But thousands of others were existing poisons which were simply refined. Finally about 50 drugs made the cut, and are still the basis of today’s chemotherapy medicine cabinet.

Popular Chemotherapy Drugs

It is startling to discover what chemotherapy drugs are made from. The first ones were made from mustard gas contained in the weapons that killed so many soldiers in WWI, eventually outlawed by the Geneva Convention. In the 1930s, Memorial Sloan-Kettering quietly began to treat breast cancer with these mustard gas derivatives. No one was cured. More Nitrogen mustard chemotherapy trials were conducted at Yale around 1943. 160 patients were treated. No one was cured. Despite this track record, the major derivative - methotrexate - gradually gained popularity over the decades.

Methotrexate has been one of the most common chemotherapy drugs for the past 25 years. The fact that it’s still at the top of the list and that cancer survival has not improved during that period tells the story.

As Methotrexate begins to kill the body’s cells, it causes bleeding ulcers, bone marrow suppression, lung damage, and kidney damage. (HSI Newsletter Apr 1999 p. 5) [37] It also causes “severe anaemia, and has triggered or intensified cancerous tumours.” (Ruesch, p. 18)

Other common effects are permanent sclerosing (hardening) of the veins, blood clotting, and destruction of skin and mucous membranes.

Cytoxan is another of the most common chemo drugs. Besides the “normal” side effects, it causes urinary bleeding, lung disease, and heart damage. This preposterous sentence actually appears at www.webmd.com  as a rationale for Cytoxan:

“Cytoxan also works by decreasing your immune system’s response to various diseases.”

And decreasing response to disease is going to benefit any patient exactly how…??? They can print ridiculous sentences like this largely because nobody reads them. Most patients sheepishly accept whatever drugs the doctor dreams up, without question. It’s truly marketing from heaven - unquestioned compliance, even if ordered to suicide.

Cisplatin

Appearing in the 1980s, one of the newer chemo agents is Cisplatin, which has as its base one of the most toxic heavy metals known to man: platinum. The way this horror works is that the platinum rings clog up the cell DNA so forcefully that the cell initiates its own early death sequence (apoptosis). Despite this level of toxicity and long term side effects from the permanent bioaccumulation of the heavy metal, cisplatin remains the drug of choice for most cases of sarcoma, small cell lung cancer, germ cell tumours, lymphoma, and ovarian cancer. Cisplatin all but destroys the immune system.

Another popular chemo drug is a sheep-deworming agent known as Levamisole.

It has been around for 60 years. With no major clinical trial ever showing significant increased long term survival with Levamisole, it is still a standard chemotherapy agent even today! The weirdness is, Levamisole was included for its “immune system modulation” properties. However, its major actions include:

• Decreased white cell count (!)
• Flu symptoms
• Nausea
• Abdominal cramps
• Dizziness

Some immune booster!

A 1994 major study of Levamisole written up in the British Journal of Cancer[53] showed almost double the survival rate using a placebo instead of Levamisole! The utter mystification over why this poison continues to be used as a standard component of chemo cocktails can be cleared up by considering one simple fact: when Levamisole was still a sheep de-wormer, it cost $1 per year. When the same amount was suddenly relabelled as a cancer drug given to humans, it cost $1200 per year. (Los Angeles Times 11 Sep 93.) [24]

Today Levamisole is also used to cut cocaine, as much as 70% of the US supply. (SF Chronicle 29 Dec 09 [54]). It is still used as a veterinary deworming drug for sheep and horses, and continues to be one of the most popular chemotherapy drugs, especially with colon cancer.

You say you’d rather try the coke?

Interleukin-2

is another colossal failure. When the oncologist starts talking about interleukin-2, it’s usually time to start thinking about where you put all those Neptune Society papers, because by then the big stuff has been pretty much tried and met with its usual failure.

The brilliant sales job behind interleukin-2 and other ‘vaccine’-type cytokine agents is that now we’re gonna transform the patient’s lymphocytes into an army of killer T-cells, which will then descend on those troublesome cancer cells and “root them out of there.”

Just one problem with this theory: no foreign antigens have ever been identified in tumour cells.

And that’s the only way that lymphocytes work - destroying foreign antigens - the not-self cells. So even if the T-cell count can be boosted, there is simply no way these lymphocytes can be directed at cancer cells, because the cancer cells don’t appear that different from normal cells. That’s why they were able to grow in the first place.

The other vexatious feature of interleukin-2 therapy is that because of its last-ditch status, the patient’s immune system is generally so depressed there’s simply not much of it left to work with. Once your immune system’s gone, so are you. And interleukin’s side effects are often the worst of any cancer drug. The list is too long to include here.

Professor George Annas, a medical ethicist, who analyzed the original controlled clinical trials done at the National Cancer Institute on interleukin-2 was slightly less than festive about interleukin-2 for patients:

“more than 80% of the patients did not do any better and they actually did worse. They died harder. That’s not irrelevant. We always tend to concentrate on the survivors, but we’ve got to make the point that 80 per cent had terrific side effects and didn’t get any measurable increase in longevity.”

 New York Times 3 Mar 94

Dr Martin Shapiro agreed:

“revelations about the apparent ineffectiveness of the experimental cancer drug interleukin-2 are but the tip of an iceberg of misrepresentation and misunderstanding about cancer drug treatments in general.”[21]

Los Angeles Times 9 Jan 87

The same interleukin-2 is still used today, all over the country.

Chemo For Non-Cancer Cases

In a desperate attempt for new revenues, a brilliant new marketing technique for chemo emerged in the 2000s: prescribing chemo drugs for non-cancer cases. This off-label prescribing is now so rampant that it is impossible to track or even estimate its extent. By virtue of his license, any MD can prescribe most drugs for any diagnosis he chooses. Laws absolutely protect him from being sued, no matter what happens to the patient. So for the past 10 years we are now seeing these very expensive chemotherapy drugs being routinely prescribed for many other untested unrelated conditions. To list just a few:

• Endometriosis
• Infertility
• Benign prostatic hypertrophy
• Pneumonitis
• Vasculitis
• Lupus
• Dermatomyositis

(Intravenous Cyclophosphamide for Non-Cancer [7])

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Copyright Acknowledgement Citation

Republished with permission from www.thedoctorwithin.com/cancer/to-the-cancer-patient/

This article to be published in 3 parts in Positive Health PH Online is Copyright 2014 Dr Tim O’Shea www.TheDoctorWithin.com  doc@thedoctorwithin.com