Is Chemotherapy Given to Cancer Patients Helping or Hurting?
The above picture is of an Oncologist with his wife who was diagnosed with breast cancer that metastasized.  The article is called, “The Day I Started Lying to My Wife.” http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter-bach-2014-5/
Chemotherapy Use, Performance Status, and Quality of Life at the End of Life
While there are many non-published articles pointing out the clear disingenuous agendas of chemotherapy, there are not many mainstream publications which decidedly call it out – until know. The paper was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in their September, 2015 issue.
The mainstream media is coming unravelled as a JAMA’s publication is making the rounds which calls out chemotherapy as “ineffective” versus late stage or end-stage cancers where patients are nearing death.
Of course, the “late stage” and “nearing death” variables aren’t an open admission to the entire chemotherapy application, but they are rare for publications which often take sides with chemo as the absolute best treatment for cancer in all FOUR stages.
This article states, “Physicians have voiced concerns about the benefits of chemotherapy for patients with cancer nearing death.[1– 5] In 2012, an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) expert panel identified chemotherapy use among patients for whom there was no evidence of clinical value [6] as the most widespread, wasteful, and unnecessary practice in oncology.
Let’s put this into perspective – having a major medical journal widely viewed as the top of the medical science food chain calls the application of chemotherapy under these specific circumstance as “widespread, wasteful, unnecessary” is incredibly telling. Think of the money which chemotherapy producers make by peddling chemo to people who are clearly at a state of near death. The study finds it is, “widespread, wasteful, unnecessary” and telling everyone that the for profit aspect of the treatment supercedes any real life-goals for helping people live longer or live better.
Specifically, ASCO guidelines recommend against the use of chemotherapy in solid tumor patients who have not benefited from prior treatment and who have an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG)[7]
Prior to this statement, the study has found that people who haven’t responded to chemo were given chemo again even after the chemo did NOT work the first time! So the chemotherapy treatment failed and yet they were put through the treatment again.
Despite the lack of evidence to support the practice, chemotherapy is widely used in cancer patients with poor performance status and progression following an initial course of palliative chemotherapy.[1,4,10,11]
Chemotheroapy has no evidence in working with people at this late or end stage cancerous condition, and yet the oncologist would administer the treatment expecting a different result? This is the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result!
Chemotherapy’s willingness to rake in billions of dollars from Big Pharmaceutical companies at the expense of those who have cancer could not be more egregious than in this case. This study loudly states egregious, contemptible actions yet with no responsibility to those who have so often contributed to the issue.
[1] Kelly RJ, Smith TJ. Delivering maximum clinical benefit at an affordable price: engaging stakeholders in cancer care. Lancet Oncol. 2014;15(3):e112-e118. doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(13)70578-3. Published online February 14, 2014.
[2] Meier DE. ‘I don’t want Jenny to think I’m abandoning her’: views on overtreatment. Health Aff (Millwood). 2014;33(5):895-898.
[3] Bach PB. The day I started lying to Ruth.2014. http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter-bach-2014-5/ . Accessed June 10, 2015
[4] Braga S. Why do our patients get chemotherapy until the end of life? Ann Oncol. 2011;22(11):2345-2348.
[5] Anders CK, Peppercorn J. Treating in the dark: unanswered questions on costs and benefits of late line therapy for metastatic breast cancer. Cancer Invest. 2009;27(1):13-16.
[6] Schnipper LE, Smith TJ, Raghavan D, et al. American Society of Clinical Oncology identifies five key opportunities to improve care and reduce costs: the top five list for oncology. J Clin Oncol. 2012;30(14):1715-1724.
[7] Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. ECOG performance status. http://ecog-acrin.org/resources/ecog-performance-status . Acessed June 3, 2015.
[8] Stanley KE. Prognostic factors for survival in patients with inoperable lung cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst. 1980;65(1):25-32.
[9] Pater JL, Loeb M. Nonanatomic prognostic factors in carcinoma of the lung: a multivariate analysis. Cancer. 1982;50(2):326-331.
[10] Wright AA, Zhang B, Keating NL, Weeks JC, Prigerson HG. Associations between palliative chemotherapy and adult cancer patients’ end of life care and place of death: prospective cohort study. BMJ. 2014;348:g1219. doi:10.1136/bmj.g1219.
[11] Emanuel EJ, Young-Xu Y, Levinsky NG, Gazelle G, Saynina O, Ash AS. Chemotherapy use among Medicare beneficiaries at the end of life. Ann Intern Med. 2003;138(8):639-643. PubMed | Link to Article
[12] Salloum RG, Smith TJ, Jensen GA, Lafata JE. Survival among non-small cell lung cancer patients with poor performance status after first line chemotherapy. Lung Cancer. 2012;77(3):545-549.
[13] Massarelli E, Andre F, Liu DD, et al. A retrospective analysis of the outcome of patients who have received two prior chemotherapy regimens including platinum and docetaxel for recurrent non-small-cell lung cancer. Lung Cancer. 2003;39(1):55-61.
[14] Anshushaug M, Gynnild MA, Kaasa S, Kvikstad A, Grønberg BH. Characterization of patients receiving palliative chemo- and radiotherapy during end of life at a regional cancer center in Norway. Acta Oncol. 2015;54(3):395-402.
[15] Jones SE, Erban J, Overmoyer B, et al. Randomized phase III study of docetaxel compared with paclitaxel in metastatic breast cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2005;23(24):5542-5551.
[16] Cortes J, O’Shaughnessy J, Loesch D, et al; EMBRACE (Eisai Metastatic Breast Cancer Study Assessing Physician’s Choice Versus E7389) investigators. Eribulin monotherapy versus treatment of physician’s choice in patients with metastatic breast cancer (EMBRACE): a phase 3 open-label randomised study. Lancet. 2011;377(9769):914-923.
[17] Fumoleau P, Largillier R, Clippe C, et al. Multicentre, phase II study evaluating capecitabine monotherapy in patients with anthracycline- and taxane-pretreated metastatic breast cancer. Eur J Cancer. 2004;40(4):536-542.
[18] Kassam F, Enright K, Dent R, et al. Survival outcomes for patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer: implications for clinical practice and trial design. Clin Breast Cancer. 2009;9(1):29-33.
[19] Pfeiffer E. A short portable mental status questionnaire for the assessment of organic brain deficit in elderly patients. J Am Geriatr Soc. 1975;23(10):433-441.
[20] Charlson ME, Pompei P, Ales KL, MacKenzie CR. A new method of classifying prognostic comorbidity in longitudinal studies: development and validation. J Chronic Dis. 1987;40(5):373-383.
[21] Oken MM, Creech RH, Tormey DC, et al. Toxicity and response criteria of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. Am J Clin Oncol. 1982;5(6):649-655.
[22] Zhang B, Nilsson ME, Prigerson HG. Factors important to patients’ quality of life at the end of life. Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(15):1133-1142.
[23] Abbott CH, Prigerson HG, Maciejewski PK. The influence of patients’ quality of life at the end of life on bereaved caregivers’ suicidal ideation. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2014;48(3):459-464.
[24] Greer JA, Pirl WF, Jackson VA, et al. Effect of early palliative care on chemotherapy use and end-of-life care in patients with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2012;30(4):394-400.
[25] Teno JM, Gozalo PL, Bynum JP, et al. Change in end-of-life care for Medicare beneficiaries: site of death, place of care, and health care transitions in 2000, 2005, and 2009. JAMA. 2013;309(5):470-477.
[26] Institute of Medicine. Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2014.
[27] Earle CC, Neville BA, Landrum MB, Ayanian JZ, Block SD, Weeks JC. Trends in the aggressiveness of cancer care near the end of life. J Clin Oncol. 2004;22(2):315-321.
[28] Saito AM, Landrum MB, Neville BA, Ayanian JZ, Earle CC. The effect on survival of continuing chemotherapy to near death. BMC Palliat Care. 2011;10:14.
[30] Bach PB, Schrag D, Begg CB. Resurrecting treatment histories of dead patients: a study design that should be laid to rest. JAMA. 2004;292(22):2765-2770.
[31] Lamont EB, Schilsky RL, He Y, et al; Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Generalizability of trial results to elderly Medicare patients with advanced solid tumors (Alliance 70802). J Natl Cancer Inst. 2015;107(1):336.
– See more at: www.phoreveryoung.com
The Cure for Cancer? That’s an easy question to answer! The Cure for Cancer is Found in its Prevention NOT in its Treatment! – Dr. Robert O. Young
Do you know what rotten apples, grapefruit or bananas look like? If you do then you know what cancer cells look like. Cancer cells are nothing more that healthy cells that are spoiling because of a compromised environment! Look at the picture below and you will see colorized cancerous body cells rotting in their toxic acidic environment.
What compromises the internal environment of a human body that causes body cells to begin spoiling and rotting? The answer is simple! The body’s build-up of acidic metabolic and dietary waste that has not been properly eliminated through the four channels of elimination – urination, defecation, respiration and perspiration!
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