Cancer treatment and success rates

[Robert Ryan]

Hey, I'm newly registered to this forum and honestly one of the main reasons I registered was to find a larger community for questions like the one I'm about to post. Hopefully someone can help me find a straight, accurate answer when I have trouble.

 

That being said lately I've been seeing a lot of articles and arguments over the effectiveness of chemo therapy on cancer as opposed to other forms of treatment, usually natural or alternative methods. When I try to find straight statistical information on the success rates of chemotherapy and alternative treatments I usually end up looking at articles which are biased on one side and don't give actual statistic or percent values of success rates or treatment on either side.

 

Has anyone here ever seen the statistics for chemotherapy success rate in the U.S. or alternative medicine? Any thoughts on either side of the debate are welcome as well.

Edited July 31, 2015 by Robert Ryan

[hypervalent_iodine]

You really need to be more specific here. The effectiveness of chemotherapy depends on the type of chemotherapy, the type of cancer and the patient themselves. What kind of studies are you looking at? Why do you think they are bias? What type of alternative medicines are you comparing them to?

[Robert Ryan]

I say most of the studies are biased because while they may list individual examples or studies they never actually address the basic question originally posed at the beginning of the article: for instance, in one of the alternative treatment side articles they had one example of an individual being cured of cancer after switching to a vegan diet and removing highly processed sugars from his system. They gave several cases in which other people were cured alternatively, without any citations, then went on demonizing modern medical cancer treatment as being ineffective and only practiced due to the money making aspect of its use. They didn't go into any real detail on the alternative treatments nor did they post any information about Chemotherapy aside from the original article claiming 2% chemo success rate.

 

On the other hand I read an article which was seeking to counter these claims and in fact went into a lot of the factors you mentioned, such as type of cancer, health of the person being treated and the resulting treatment based on the above as well as cost. Throughout the article they likewise demonized alternative treatment proponents at nut jobs and crank cases and never actually gave any statistics as to the argument it was originally set out to trounce, which was the claim that chemotherapy is effective 2% of the time. They described the development and medical breakthroughs which chemo therapy treatment but never actually addressed the statistic value of chemo therapy succes. There were estimates and percentages of the cancer types found and the frequency off cancer among age groups, but no actual success rates.

 

Ideally what I would one is a flat, graph or list of success rates for the different types of cancer and treatments practiced for those cancers. I would hope to see as much information as possible; cancer type, location, treatment used, treated patients orgnanizec by age group with general health, attitude and time treated.

 

I believe this list work be very extensive and long but it's still what I think I need to figure out the truth.

[hypervalent_iodine]

It is high past my bedtime here, but I will leave a few short words.

 

- You would do better to source where the 2% claim came from in the first place to assess how accurate it is. Could you provide a link to the article here?

 

- I am not sure you will find the exact information you are looking for. You could probably find some data from various sources and perhaps there are even reviews that cover a decent portion of it. Still, I'm not sure what you yourself would get out of it. There is plenty enough literature on chemotherapeutics to say that they work to varying extents in many cases. There are only sketchy anecdotes in support of the many alternative therapies out there. IMO, they exist only to make money for the snake oil salesmen promoting them. As much as pharma is also out to make money, they at least have science behind them.

 

- Do you have any particular alternative treatments that you were comparing against, asides from the diet one? I am aware of some of the more out there ones such as the Rife machine, peroxide and alkaline diets and in all cases, the science is very much against them. Have you tried looking into scientific literature on them or just general articles and blog posts, etc? if you aren't, it may be part of why you're not finding out what you want to know.

[CharonY]

As hypervalent said, you should confine yourself to specific types of cancers. From there, you need to find actual studies (or reviews) in the scientific literature. Also you will have to define success rate a bit. E.g. in terms 5-year survival, remission, etc. Also, one need to define alternative treatments carefully as the latter can be very diverse and may have benefits as supplementary treatment. Likewise, there a lot of variations in in the implementation (e.g. how patients are monitored during treatment, how many intervention strategies are actually available) and their usefulness for different groups in the population (e.g. young vs older persons).

If people are biased it is easy to skew results by comparing the worst case scenario from one with the best case in the other.

 

For sake of discussion let us start with Hodgkin lymphoma. Generally, with modern treatment methods, the 5 year survival rate is generally reported to be around 80% (higher for early stages). Before that, treatment typically was limited to surgery and radiation which resulted in a 5y survival of less than 30% (G. T. Pack and D. W. Molander, Cancer Research 1966). The survival dropped sharply beyond stage I.

 

Similar data can be found for most treatable cancer forms and it is clear that the rate have increased with the development of new and improved therapies, far exceeding an increase of 2% over spontaneous remissions or early-generation therapies.

 

Unfortunately, you will find much less data on alternative methods used exclusively for treatment (most likely as untreated. Most uses are complementary to alleviate symptoms. That is a general theme you will find as most form of cancers are serious enough that it will be hard to find a large study group to partake in unproven natural healing or similar treatments. As such there will be a lot more anecdotes than data sets. That being said, the NIH had set up a whole study section devoted to exploring alternative treatments, but I have yet to see a study that claims superiority to traditional treatment options.

[Strange]

There are a lot of statistics showing the increase in survival rates and survival times over the last few decades (for example: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/survival/all-cancers-combined#heading-One- just the first search result, there are many others).

 

You can be certain that these are due to modern treatments (and improved diagnosis) not "alternative" treatments. (As someone said: "You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.")

[Robert Ryan]

This is the article that's being cited as the study for 2% chemo therapy success rates: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15630849/

 

To be honest one of the major concepts that drew me to look into the success rates, aside from the above article, is the "food as medicine" idea. A part of me would love to find out that the human body is capable of being free of disease with healthy living and avoiding chemicals and processing that people are claiming contribute majority to the sickness were experiencing today. The other part of me thinks though, like hypervalent_Iodine stated above, that a lot of it is just another way for representatives to make money off of these alternative treatments which may or may not work.

 

What I've been reading recently do include a lot of the typical alternative medicine arguments, such as vegan dieting and herbal treatments or people claiming wheatgrass juices everyday cleansed their body of cancer. Those are often without much citation of study though. Aside from that. are articles about new upcoming treatments like magnetic nano particles which cause the cancerous cells to self destruct.

http://www.nanoprobes.com/newsletters/2013-08-Curing-Cancer-with-Magnetic-Nanoparticles/

 

I'll have to look up specific studies for different cancer treatments. Honestly I knew there were different types of cancer and various organs that could be affected but it never occurred to me to look into them separately. Seems obvious in hindsight though.

Edited August 2, 2015 by Robert Ryan

[CharonY]

The need to distinguish the various sub-types is also a criticism on the paper you cited. In a commentary Mileshkin et al (R Coll Radiol, 2015) criticized that Morgen et al. used all diagnosed adults as baseline, which includes groups for which chemo is not indicated.