Literature by Robert Gorter

The war against cancer is a stalemate since the 1950s

Health professionals, the media and the public belief spending enough money will let find the cure for cancer. The perception already exist that medicine is quite successful in treating cancer. Yet with the spending of more that 105 billion dollars by the National Cancer Institute since 1971 and at least an equal amount by the pharmaceutical companies, the same percentage of people are dying now as in 1971 as shown in figure 1.

Table 3

Table 3. Adapted from: Kolata, G. (2009). Advances elusive in the drive to cure cancer. New York Times, April 24, 2009.

It is obvious, through the past 55 years that this approach has been disappointing, to put it mildly. Cancer is on the rise: about 50% of all Americans and Europeans will get a cancer diagnosis in their life times. And still, about 70% to 80% of all people who get a cancer diagnosis die of the disease, although they have received all possible forms of therapies, directed at killing or eradicating the cancer cell. Despite a few rare successes such as the treatment for testicular cancer and acute myeloid leukemia can be controlled for years with medications, cancer death rates have not changed (Kolata, 2009). The war against cancer initiated by President Nixon in 1971 has been a failure. The death rate of cancer has decreased by about five percent unlike that of heart disease and flue and pneumonia. This implies that the current fundamental treatment model is incorrect and inappropriate.

The five percent decrease in the last fifty-five years suggests that the fundamental model of the war against cancer, to cut it out through surgery, to burn it out with radiation and cyber knife, to destroy by chemotherapy, or to block by hormone treatment seems to be the incomplete, and maybe the wrong approach. Most likely, the five percent decrease in cancer death rate is related to changes in life style or other unknown factors. Stopping smoking has had a greater impact reducing lung cancer (and other forms of cancer) than any known therapeutic treatment strategy; similarly, menopausal women stopping hormone replacement therapies has reduced breast cancer by 3% percent so far.

Cancer treatments are highly ineffective as compared to the treatment of the flu and pneumonia. Bacterial pneumonia (like tuberculosis or pneumococcal pneumonia) used to be a deadly disease; however, with the advent of the appropriate antibiotics, it is highly treatable with a 58 percent drop in death rate since the 1950s. Similarly, heart disease death rates have decreased by 64 percent with the changes in life style as the main factor, and appropriate medication and treatments.

Although we are taught that mammogram screening reduces the death rate of breast cancer, the research data is much more ambiguous. It is possible that early screening identifies cancers such as intraductal carcinoma in situ which is a precancerous condition characterized by proliferation of malignant-looking cells in the lining of breast ducts without evidence of spread outside the duct breast. It is often a precursor of breast cancer. However, in some cases intraductal breast carcinoma it will not spread and disappear in about 20 percent of people (spontaneous remission) (Lewison et al: 1976).

Yet, despite early diagnosis, the outcome of metastatic breast cancer has not shown much success; even with the aggressive and destructive treatment approaches the five year survival rate of metastatic breast cancer is about 20 %. This means that only one in five women with metastatic breast cancer will survive five years. It may even be possible that the aggressive treatments could increase the cancer death rates because anesthesia, chemotherapy, and radiation all act as carcinogenic agents and as immune suppressants which means that the immune system will be less competent to cope with spontaneous (new) cancer cells after treatment. Patients who receive chemotherapy and radiation are more likely to develop another (primary) cancer in their lifetime.

read more: Progress occurs by leaps and bounds not by incremental change