Cancer Drugs - Cause for Alarm

Dr Mercola has just notified me of some interesting reading in USA Today. We already know that traditional cancer medications are incredibly expensive, but perhaps these recent articles from USA today might bring the point home to some of the many remaining believers in conventional treatments.

Let’s face it, medication costs of up to $10,000 per month (Erbitux) are no small change, and now the insurance companies are sounding alarm bells. It looks like the cost of a typical cancer drug prescription rose almost 16% last year, compared with 3% for other prescriptions. The average cost of a 1-month prescription for cancer drugs is now nearly $1,600. And this isn’t including drugs such as Avastin (typical cost $4,400 a month), which can be given at a doctor's office.

Avastin is a newer drug used to treat colorectal cancer and that costs about $50,000 a year. If it is approved to treat lung and breast cancers, that cost could easily double to around $100,000 a year. And let’s face it, rising costs of treating cancer affect almost everybody, simply because most cancer patients are covered by government insurance schemes.

And if truth be known, most new cancer drugs will improve survival by only a few weeks or months. For example, although Erbitux costs almost $10,000 a month, studies have failed to show that it helps patients live longer.

In addition, many of the new cancer drugs work only when combined with chemotherapy. So adding drugs such as Erbitux and Avastin to existing therapies serves not only to increase costs but also side effects. What is more, patients today still don't live significantly longer on many of the new medications. For example, survival of patients with advanced colon cancer has increased from one year to about two years over the past decade. Of course, the patients themselves might well disagree about the significance of this! Yet in the cold light of reality, in terms of the investment made, the return looks somewhat poor.

So what am I trying to say here? That’s right – much more effort ought to be placed in getting details of some of the highly effective alternative cancer treatments out to physicians, hospitals and the public at large. I think that perhaps many insurance companies might now agree.

You can read the full stories here:

USA Today - 07/10/2006
USA Today - 07/11/2006

And here’s what Dr Mercola has to say about it:
Exploiting Cancer Patients With $10,000-a-Month Drugs

Alternative Cancer Treatments: Debunking the Myths

There is a lot of adverse propaganda and many widespread misconceptions about alternative cancer treatments. For example, you might hear that they have been developed by quacks and have no foundation in science.

In fact nothing is further from the truth - the most wellknown alternative treatments were frequentlu developed by brilliant chemists, physicians, and even Nobel Prizewinning scientists. Other successful alternative therapies result from time-tested ancient herbal traditions from India, China and Native America.

Another frequently heard myth is that alternative cancer treatments are solely about eating organic food and taking lots of supplements from the local health food store. This would be laughable, if the implications weren’t so grave. In fact, with some notable exceptions, most alternative cancer treatments are highly sophisticated approaches that you cannot purchase at the local health-food store.

In fact many alternative therapies are highly effective, and certainly significantly less dangerous than conventional treatments. This is for a number of reasons, primarily:

(1) They target all cancer cells throughout the body.
(2) They are non-toxic and so may be taken on a daily basis over a prolonged period.

The fact that alternative therapies treat cancer cells no matter where they are in the body is crucial since that in about 75% of people diagnosed with cancer, the disease that has already metastasized by the time it is first diagnosed (meaning that the cancer has already spread to other areas). So, using a treatment that targets all the cancer cells at once is often the only way to target them.

In contrast to this, conventional surgery and radiation, or other highly expensive (and dangerous) procedures can only affect cancer cells in localized regions.

The non-toxic nature of alternative cancer treatments is another big reason they are so highly effective. Because they are non-toxic, they can be used continuously over a prolonged period of time without stopping. In contrast, conventional therapies rely heavily on toxic chemotherapy drugs and toxic radiation treatments. These treatments must not be administered continuously because they are so damaging to the patient’s body that continuous administration on a daily basis would also kill the patient! Furthermore, toxic treatments damage a person’s immune system to such an extent that they make it easier for the cancer cells to multiply and spread in-between treatments.

So, just a few myths about alyernative cancer treatments debunked! Plus a few positive and crucial fundamentals.

Cancer and Diet

Since I guess most people reading this blog will be in the USA, let's take a look at some statistics and forecasts for the incidence of cancer in North America. And yes - prepare to be shocked!

About 100 years ago, approximately 1 person in 50 contracted cancer (admittedly; medical records weren't as detailed as they are today). By the middle of the century - the 1950s, the incidence had increased to 1 in 45. Now in the new millennium, the incidence has increased to 1 in 3 (at least for men - think 'prostate') !!! Yes, cancer is a major killer in the western world.

Note that I say "western world" ! The statistics aren't quite the same when we investigate the statistics for Asia. And there's a good reason for this - diet! Yes, our dietary intake has been getting unhealthier and unhealthier as the years pass. Think "sugar" and "processed foods". We'll be looking more closely into this very soon, so don't go away.

Something else to think about - during the past century, conventional medicine (i.e. government-approved hospitals and physicians) has limited the treatment of cancer to surgery, radiation and laboratory-created drugs. Incidentally, these happen to be some of the most expensive treatments on the planet! And what's the result? An increasing incidence of cancer and more deaths. Surely this doesn't seem right!

Alternative Cancer Treatments

Alternative Cancer Treatments

As a physician in Europe with many years spent in treating so called "terminally ill" patients, many suffering from cancer and immune system related diseases such as AIDS, I've seen far too many "victims" of aggressive surgical and chemo-therapeutic treatments, who have been given a temporary remission, then gone on to die perhaps six months or a year later as the result of advanced metastases.

Now let's look at the world situation realistically - globally! After the energy industries, the pharmaceutical industry is the second biggest money earner in the world. And introducing new drugs, clinical procedures and therapies costs a huge amount of money - if only to satisfy the requirements of various country's health standards requirements (such as the FDA in the United States). Clinical trials cost a lot of money!

Result - massive marketing campaigns and pushes by Big Pharma to have their procedures and medications become THE standard!

Now, imagine what would be the outcome if I told you that a cancer could be cured with about 80% success rate, just using products which could be found in many kitchen cupboards !!!

Ridicule! Derision! And yet, there is much evidence to indicate that many natural treatments for cancers and other degenerative diseases can be highly effective either alone or in combination with other therapies. Of course, most of these therapies haven't the benefit of strictly controlled clinical trials. Why? Because they are too cheap!!! There is no profit to be made by Big Pharma, who would have to finance the trials. Nor can many of the therapies be patented, since major components of theerapies often occur naturally.

Result - many natural treatments and therapies are derided as quackery and publicity campaigns started against them almost immediately.

And yet there is much statistical and ethnographic evidence, even if a lot is anecdotal, that many alternative cancer treatments are indeed highly effective. And many have been in use for decades. At the very least these therapies tend not to have adverse side-effects, unlike many of their countermarts in alopathic medicine.

So in this blog I want to take a look at many of these alternative cancer treatments and therapies - both from a clinical perspective and from an ethical point of view.