ADVANCED HOLISTIC CANCER TREATMENT (Part 5) By Dr. Dirk Wiedbrauck M.D. & N.D. Germany
Chemotherapy: An Unproven Procedure
How can that be true of the main cancer treatment in the World? The 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! 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 all 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? I'm not talking about 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 underlying numbers of people dying from cancer by talking about other issues. In Questioning Chemotherapy, Dr. Ralph Moss talks about several of the ways they do it:
"Response rate is a favorite. If a dying patient's condition changes even for a week or a month, especially if the tumor shrinks temporarily, the patient is listed as having "responded to" chemotherapy. No joke! The fact that the tumor 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 tumor 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 bust. Worse yet, a toxic one.
Even with Hodgkin's, one of chemo's much-trumpeted triumphs, the cure is frequently a success, but the patient dies. He just doesn't die of Hodgkin’s disease, that's all. In the 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they published a 47-year study of more than 10,000 patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, who were treated with chemotherapy. Even though there was success with the Hodgkin’s 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.
In evaluating any treatment, there must be a benefits/risks analysis. Due to gigantic economic pressures, such evaluation has been systematically put aside in the U.S. chemotherapy industry.
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.
Dr. Dean Black puts it this way:
"Drugs tend to worsen whatever they're supposed to cure, which sets up a vicious cycle."
— Health at the Crossroads p20
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 p1915
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.
Gene Amplification
Is an important concept to understand if you are being given combinations of more than one chemotherapy drug at once. "Cocktails" have become standard treatment in many oncological protocols: concoctions of two or more powerful cytotoxic agents which supposedly will "attack the tumor" in different ways. In the above study, Robert Schimke noted that with chemo combos the rebound effect - the second phase where the tumor responds to the drug - may bring about a tumor cell proliferation rate which may be 100 times faster than the response to one single chemo drug may have been. Proliferation means the rate at which the tumor cells reproduce themselves, i.e., grow.
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 usually 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? Is it likely to? The unadorned data says no.
We'll have more information on Breast Cancer, in particular — next time.