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Alternative Cancer Therapies

By Harriet Denz Penhey

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 21Dec2009 Word count: 835 Viewed: 267 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

There are very strong feelings surrounding alternative cancer therapies. There are frequent television snippets and online blogs bemoaning the deaths lost to alternative treatments used after well recognized medical treatments have been turned down by the patient. There was one a few weeks ago when a well known mini-celebrity had turned down chemo to use alternative therapies and the message to the public was clear: she would have lived if she had been sensible, like most people, and submitted to the chemotherapy treatments.

However it is not as simple as just a choice between something that is not proven to work and something that has been proven to work (statistically and selectively). In the case above the celebrity could have undergone chemotherapy but the research showed that for one year of having horrendous side effects she would, on average, get another four months of life.

Statistically the drugs were shown to work. But in a practical and clinical sense the year of misery of chemotherapy treatment was not sufficient for the patient to choose a possible few more months.

Of course she might have been the one person in 50 who got another five years. But on the other hand she might have one of the many who found the chemotherapy experience so exhausting and debilitating that she gave up hope and died early. It does happen and it happens frequently. We have to remember that the chemotherapy is intensely toxic - it is a poison that is not very selective and affects every system of the body. A heavy load of toxins reduces the body's immune system and reduces the body's natural ability to heal. So if the figures are so bad, why do people believe otherwise?

I suggest that this situation is due to a number of factors. Most doctors are very caring. They want to offer the best for their patients and many accept uncritically the "fact" that drugs are needed to help patients get the best out of the life they have left. Chemotherapy has been statistically proven to give significant improvement. Natural cancer therapies have not.

But please note that if a drug is statistically significant this does not necessarily mean that it is useful to the patient. Significant, in the research sense, just means that the effect is not due to chance. It does not mean that the improvement or the cure rate is much better. It may be much better in terms of additional years to be lived, but it equally may mean that those who have the drugs might get a few additional months of longevity. Or it may mean, as is often the case, that there is no additional longevity but there is a longer time before the cancer recurs.

Many doctors truly believe the advertising figures given to them by the drug companies about their products, but do not take the time to find out what the figures actually mean in terms of additional months of disease free time and increased longevity for their patients.

As an example one drug was touted as 62% reduction of the risk of recurrence of one form of cancer. It sounds great and some oncologists were telling patients they would be 62% better off.

This 62% of risk reduction was actually a 37% improvement over no treatment, and as 22% would have had a recurrence, this is 37% of the 22% - this is an 8% actual improvement - a long way from the 62% the drug companies were promoting.

And when you looked at actual survival, as against recurrence, the figures were much worse again. It was less than 1% (9 in 1000) or if averaged out over all the patients, an increase of four or five months.

We can't blame the drug companies - they are there to make profits, not as a public benefit and so, of course, they are going to make the best case for their drug. The medical profession and the public need to make it their business to know the games the pharmaceutical companies play with statistics. The problem isn't statistics, it's how they are used.

So, as chemotherapy across all cancers only contributes an average of just over 2% to the 5-year survival rate of people with cancer we need to be much more tolerant of those who turn to alternative cancer therapies.

It is much more difficult to prove statistically that changes in supplements, food, emotional support, or exercise is what has made the difference because of issues surrounding research method and the way we do the statistics. This fact privileges drugs and demeans the values of patient self care through alternative cancer therapies. But don't let that stop you or those you care about from undertaking them.

Alternative cancer therapies can certainly improve the quality of life for the time a person has left and it may be possible that enough changes might just make the difference and increase longevity.

Reference: Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clinical Oncology 2004;16:549-560.

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