Why 75% of Doctors Would Refuse Chemotherapy on Themselves

Since this post has generated a lot of comments and traffic, I’m adding a solution to the post rather than just posting about the problem. For information on natural solutions to cancer please visit Dr. Lorraine Day’s website and be sure to read the information on her Questions and Anwers page. Dr. Day cured herself of cancer using natural therapies and she is a medical professional. Also see my post on Questioning Chemotherapy.

From Cancer Therapy:

The great lack of trust is evident even amongst doctors. Polls and questionnaires show that three doctors out of four (75 per cent) would refuse any chemotherapy because of its ineffectiveness against the disease and its devastating effects on the entire human organism.

This is what many doctors and scientists have to say about chemotherapy:“The majority of the cancer patients in this country die because of chemotherapy, which does not cure breast, colon or lung cancer. This has been documented for over a decade and nevertheless doctors still utilize chemotherapy to fight these tumors.” (Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, “The Healing of Cancer”, Marcus Books, 1990).

“If I were to contract cancer, I would never turn to a certain standard for the therapy of this disease. Cancer patients who stay away from these centers have some chance to make it.” (Prof. Gorge Mathe, “Scientific Medicine Stymied”, Medicines Nouvelles, Paris, 1989)

“Dr. Hardin Jones, lecturer at the University of California, after having analyzed for many decades statistics on cancer survival, has come to this conclusion: ‘… when not treated, the patients do not get worse or they even get better’. The unsettling conclusions of Dr. Jones have never been refuted”. (Walter Last, “The Ecologist”, Vol. 28, no. 2, March-April 1998)

“Many oncologists recommend chemotherapy for almost any type of cancer, with a faith that is unshaken by the almost constant failures”.(Albert Braverman, MD, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, Lancet, 1991, Vol. 337, p. 901)

“Our most efficacious regimens are loaded with risks, side effects and practical problems; and after all the patients we have treated have paid the toll, only a miniscule percentage of them is paid off with an ephemeral period of tumoral regression and generally a partial one” (Edward G. Griffin “World Without Cancer”, American Media Publications, 1996)

“After all, and for the overwhelming majority of the cases, there is no proof whatsoever that chemotherapy prolongs survival expectations. And this is the great lie about this therapy, that there is a correlation between the reduction of cancer and the extension of the life of the patient”. (Philip Day, “Cancer: Why we’re still dying to know the truth”, Credence Publications, 2000)

“Several full-time scientists at the McGill Cancer Center sent to 118 doctors, all experts on lung cancer, a questionnaire to determine the level of trust they had in the therapies they were applying; they were asked to imagine that they themselves had contracted the disease and which of the six current experimental therapies they would choose. 79 doctors answered, 64 of them said that they would not consent to undergo any treatment containing cis-platinum – one of the common chemotherapy drugs they used – while 58 out of 79 believed that all the experimental therapies above were not accepted because of the ineffectiveness and the elevated level of toxicity of chemotherapy.” (Philip Day, “Cancer: Why we’re still dying to know the truth”, Credence Publications, 2000)

“Doctor Ulrich Able, a German epidemiologist of the Heidelberg Mannheim Tumor Clinic, has exhaustively analyzed and reviewed all the main studies and clinical experiments ever performed on chemotherapy …. Able discovered that the comprehensive world rate of positive outcomes because of chemotherapy was frightening, because, simply, nowhere was scientific evidence available demonstrating that chemotherapy is able to ‘prolong in any appreciable way the life of patients affected by the most common type of organ cancer.’

Able highlights that rarely can chemotherapy improve the quality of life, and he describes it as a scientific squalor while maintaining that at least 80 per cent of chemotherapy administered in the world is worthless. Even if there is no scientific proof whatsoever that chemotherapy works, neither doctors nor patients are prepared to give it up (Lancet, Aug. 10, 1991). None of the main media has ever mentioned this exhaustive study: it has been completely buried” (Tim O’Shea, “Chemotherapy – An Unproven Procedure”)

“According to medical associations, the notorious and dangerous side effects of drugs have become the fourth main cause of death after infarction, cancer, and apoplexy” ( Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998)

From Cancer Inform:

“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy.”
-Dr. Alan Levin

A six- or twelve-month course of chemotherapy not only is a very unpleasant experience but also has its own intrinsic mortality…treatments now avert…perhaps 2 or 3 percent…of the 400,000 deaths from cancer that occur each year in the U.S.”
- Prof John Cairns
Scientific American, 1985
Chemotherapy Report
Do We Need a New Approach to Cancer?

In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced the War on Cancer and promised a cure by the 1977 bicentennial. In each of the 25 years since, more Americans have died of cancer than the year before.
The failure of chemotherapy to control cancer has become apparent even to the oncology establishment. Scientific American featured a recent cover story entitled: “The War on Cancer — It’s Being Lost.” In it, eminent epidemiologist John C. Bailar III, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University cited the relentless increase in cancer deaths in the face of growing use of toxic chemotherapy. He concluded that scientists must look in new directions if they are ever to make progress against this unremitting killer.

Adding its voice, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, decrying the failure of conventional therapy to stop the rise in breast cancer deaths, noted the discrepancy between public perception and reality. “If one were to believe all the media hype, the triumphalism of the [medical] profession in published research, and the almost weekly miracle breakthroughs trumpeted by the cancer charities, one might be surprised that women are dying at all from this cancer” it observed. Noting that conventional therapies — chemotherapy, radiation and surgery — had been pushed to their limits with dismal results, the editorial called on researchers to “challenge dogma and redirect research efforts along more fruitful lines.”

John Cairns, professor of microbiology at Harvard University, published a devastating 1985 critique in Scientific American. “Aside from certain rare cancers, it is not possible to detect any sudden changes in the death rates for any of the major cancers that could be credited to chemotherapy. Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet to be established.”

In fact, chemotherapy is curative in very few cancers — testicular, Hodgkin’s, choriocarcinoma, childhood leukemia. In most common solid tumors — lung, colon, breast, etc. — chemotherapy is NOT curative.

In an article entitled “Chemotherapy: Snake-Oil Remedy?” that appeared in The Los Angeles Times of January 9, 1987, Dr. Martin F. Shapiro explained that while “some oncologists inform their patients of the lack of evidence that treatments work…others may well be misled by scientific papers that express unwarranted optimism about chemotherapy. Still others respond to an economic incentive. Physicians can earn much more money running active chemotherapy practices than they can providing solace and relief…to dying patients and their families.”

Dr. Shapiro is hardly alone. Alan C. Nixon, PhD, Past President of the American Chemical Society wrote that “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.”

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.”

Breast cancer activist Rose Kushner wrote that by 1981 “indiscriminate, automatic adjuvant chemotherapy was replacing the Halsted radical mastectomy as therapeutic overkill in the United States.” Thomas Nealon, MD, Professor of Surgery at New York University School of Medicine, concluded in 1990 that “The treatment of this tumor now has slipped from too much surgery to too much adjuvant therapy.”

Why so much use of chemotherapy if it does so little good? Well for one thing, drug companies provide huge economic incentives. In 1990, $3.53 billion was spent on chemotherapy. By 1994 that figure had more than doubled to $7.51 billion. This relentless increase in chemotherapy use was accompanied by a relentless increase in cancer deaths.

Oncologist Albert Braverman, MD, wrote in 1991 that “no disseminated neoplasm (cancer) incurable in 1975 is curable today…Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.”

Why the growth in chemotherapy in the face of such failure? A look at the financial interrelationships between a large cancer center such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and the companies that make billions selling chemotherapy drugs is revealing. James Robinson III, Chairman of the MSKCC Board of Overseers and Managers, is a director of Bristol-Myers Squibb, the world’s largest producer of chemotherapy drugs. Richard Gelb, Vice-Chairman of the MSKCC board is Chairman of the Board at Bristol-Myers. Richard Furlaud, another MSKCC board member, recently retired as Bristol Myers’ president. Paul Marks, MD, MSKCC’s President and CEO, is a director of Pfizer.