Posted September 20, 2017: by Bill Sardi
A stinging report reveals patients who solely choose alternative over conventional cancer therapies are likely to die sooner over a 5-7 year period. But is it all as it seems?
Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the report didn’t delve into the different types of alternative therapies utilized by cancer patients who shunned conventional chemotherapy and radiation. A wide range of alternative therapies are available and include Essiac tea, vitamin B17/apricot pits, shark cartilage, to name a few.
It’s possible more scientifically backed alternative therapies such as vitamin D, vitamin C, ketogenic diets, resveratrol, garlic, zinc-based T-cell activation would produce better outcomes.
It is incomprehensible that only therapies controlled by doctors that generate huge insurance claims are life prolonging. No self-care is allowed. More controlled studies where consecutively treated patients were analyzed reveal chemotherapy is produces 5-year survival ~2% of the time. This suggests patient selection bias.
Recall that Drs. Linus Pauling and Ewan Cameron added oral and intravenous vitamin C to conventional cancer treatment regimens in the 1970s and demonstrated prolonged survival of terminal cancer patients. Cancer patients were living beyond what chemo and radiation therapy could achieve. Of course, that study was quickly denounced. After more than four decades of denial, researchers are only now reconsidering vitamin C therapy for cancer. It is unknown how many of the 280 patients that opted for alternative therapy in this study chose vitamin C treatment.
Part of that renaissance in vitamin C therapy now includes the use of an antibiotic (doxycycline) + vitamin C therapy which is abolish remaining cancer stem cells that thwart efforts to eradicate cancer.
For every patient who chose alternative cancer therapy, two patients who chose conventional care were included in the study of 840 total subjects.
Survival was more predicated on the type of cancer rather than the type of treatment. There was almost no survival difference for prostate cancer, whereas there was a broad difference for colorectal cancer (~35% survival for alternative therapy vs. ~78% for conventional treatment). Among 34 patients with colorectal cancer who chose conventional care, none survived at the 7-year point whereas 16 of 68 patients who chose conventional care were still alive.
In regard to prostate cancer, an alterative interpretation is that most subjects with intermediate or early-stage prostate cancer are likely to achieve very little survival benefit and more likely to live with the side effects of treatment (incontinence, impotence) that impair the quality of their lives by choosing surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment.
It would be so easy to mischaracterize cancer patients who solely elect to use alternative therapies as dumb and ignorant. But that wasn’t the case. For whatever reasons, young, female, higher educated, higher income cancer patients tended to opt for alternative care.
So another way to characterize this study is that smarter, wealthier, younger cancer patients valued the quality over the quantity of their remaining lives.
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