Ung thư và Chemotherapy
Có hơn 14 triệu người đang sống với bệnh ung thư ở
Hoa Kỳ, và thực tế đáng buồn là nhiều người đang chết vì hóa trị liệu của bác
sĩ hơn là chính căn bệnh. Hoá trị liệu không khác gì hơn là hóa chất độc hại và
chúng không có lợi gì ngoại trừ việc giúp người bệnh thêm đau đơn, và chết
nhanh hơn.
Thật không may,
đó là một sự thật đáng buồn, ngành công nghiệp ung thư là một ngành công nghiệp
giống như tất cả những ngành công nghiệp khác, và nó cũng chỉ làm việc với mục
đích đạt được lợi nhuận mà thôi. Điều này có nghĩa là mỗi khi bệnh nhân đồng ý
điều trị thì các bác sĩ, bệnh viện, công ty dược phẩm, các ngành liên quan là
người có lợi mà thôi.
Bác sĩ Berkeley
Hầu hết các
phương pháp điều trị hiện nay bao gồm tiêm hóa chất vào cơ thể, bức xạ ion hóa,
hoặc phẫu thuật; đôi khi là sự kết hợp của cả ba. Các bác sĩ sẽ nói dối bạn, nói
với bạn rằng bạn đang chiến đấu với căn bệnh này. Nhưng sự thật là, bạn chỉ
đang chi tiền mua thời gian, sau một thời gian các hiệu ứng này sẽ biến mất và
bạn sẽ chết một cái chết đau đớn hơn là do ung thư gây ra.
Một cựu giáo
sư vật lý y học và sinh lý học tại Đại học California, Berkeley, Tiến sĩ Hardin
B. Jones đã nghiên cứu tuổi thọ của bệnh nhân ung thư trong hơn 25 năm. Sau đó,
ông đi đến kết luận; mặc dù tất cả mọi người đều tin vào hoá xạ trị nhưng chúng
lại không hề có tác dụng như kỳ vọng.
Ông nhận thấy đa số những người đã được điều trị bằng
hóa xạ trị đều mất trong đau đơn. Ông đã đăng tải công khai điều này, và khẳng
định rằng, ngành công nghiệp ung thư đang cố tình lừa dối người bệnh, vì lợi
nhuận.
Tiến sĩ Jones
đã công bố trong nghiên cứu của ông tại Học viện Khoa học New York
«Những người chấp nhận hóa trị liệu đều mất
trong vòng ba năm sau khi được chẩn đoán, một số lớn những người khác đã mất
chỉ sau vài tuần.»
«Bệnh nhân ung thư vú, những người bác bỏ
liệu pháp thông thường, sống lâu hơn bốn lần so với những người điều trị theo
liệu trình của bác sĩ. Vì vậy, đây là điều mà các bạn sẽ không bao giờ được
nghe thấy trên các phương tiện thông tin đại chúng, họ vẫn luôn tuyên truyền
rằng trị liệu là liệu pháp tốt nhất trong cuộc chiến chống ung thư»
Ps: Bài viết chỉ dịch lại và có dẫn nguồn tiếng anh
bên dưới. Nếu ai đọc được tiếng anh thì xem trực tiếp trên link gốc.
Nguồn:
Chemotherapy Doesn't Work,
Doctor Blows the Whistle
A compendium of misrepresentations led to a Facebook
rumor claiming a long-dead doctor had recently revealed that chemotherapy
doesn't work.
Dr. Hardin B. Jones recently revealed that
chemotherapy doesn't work 97% of the time, and doctors only recommend it to get
kickbacks. See Example (s)
In June 2016 several alternative health and
conspiracy blogs published posts claiming that a Berkeley doctor had recently «blown the whistle» on chemotherapy as a
treatment for cancer, revealing that it doesn’t work 97% of the time and is
only recommended due to practitioner greed (i. e., oncologists get kickbacks
from suppliers).
Most of those posts featured a video published to
YouTube under the title «Chemotherapy
Does NOT Work 97% of the Time and Kills 97% of the Time,» a five-minute
clip featuring a conversation between an interviewer and naturopathic physician
Peter Glidden (in which the latter misrepresented a study to claim that «chemotherapy kills an average 97% of cancer
patients») and cited the work of a Dr. Hardin Jones:
One aspect of note is that the clip was published to
YouTube in May 2014, but identical blog posts trumpeting it as a bombshell
showing a doctor «blowing the lid off the
scam of chemotherapy» weren’t published by AnonHQ and RealFarmacy until 8
June 2016 and 10 June 2016, respectively:
People who refuse chemotherapy treatment live on
average 12 and a half years longer than people who undergo chemotherapy, says
Dr. Jones.
According to recent statistics, approximately 1 in 2
men and 1 in 3 women will develop cancer in their lifetimes. This saddening
reality is made worse when it is acknowledged that modern methods of ‘treating’
the disease are often ineffective and only make the symptoms of the disease
worse. In fact, according to one Berkeley
In the eye-opening video above, Dr. Hardin B. Jones, a
former professor of medical physics and physiology at the University
of California , Berkeley
He has personally studied the life expectancy of
patients for more than 25 years and has come to the conclusion that
chemotherapy does more harm than good. The bone-chilling realization prompted
Dr. Jones to speak out against the billion-dollar cancer industry.
«People who
refused chemotherapy treatment live on average 12 and a half years longer than
people who are undergoing chemotherapy,» said Dr. Jones of his study, which
was published in the New York Academy of Science.”
«People who
accepted chemotherapy die within three years of diagnosis, a large number dies
immediately after a few weeks.»
According to the physician, the only reason doctors
prescribe chemotherapy is because they make money from it. Such an accusation
doesn’t seem unreasonable, as cancer treatment runs, on average, between $300, 000
— $1, 000, 000 per treatment.
Is any of this true? First off, as David Gorski wrote
for Science-Based Medicine, such claims about chemotherapy by alternative
medicine practitioners and aficionados are quite common and are typically
misleadingly based on cherry-picked statistics, misunderstandings (or
misrepresentations) of how chemotherapy works, and a focus on chemotherapy’s
very visible drawbacks rather than its (less-obvious) successes:
If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of «alternative medicine» love to hate, it’s
chemotherapy. Rants against «poisoning»
are a regular staple on «alternative
health» websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations
that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the «cancer industrial complex» in which big
pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists
and hospitals profit massively from administering them. Usually, they boil down
to two claims: (1) that chemotherapy doesn’t work against cancer (or, as I’ve called
it before, the «2% gambit») and (2) that
the only reason it’s given is because doctors are brainwashed in medical school
or because of the profit motive or, of course, because of a combination of the
two. Of course, the 2% gambit is based on a fallacious cherry picking of data
and confusing primary versus adjuvant chemotherapy, and chemotherapy does
actually work rather well for many malignancies, but none of this stops the
flow of misinformation.
Chemotherapy, not surprisingly, is easy to demonize. There
are few treatments that cause such odious side effects, and when taken to its
fullest extreme, such as complete ablation of a cancer patient’s bone marrow in
preparation for a bone marrow transplant, chemotherapy can be brutal. It’s also
true that for advanced solid malignancies, it only tends to produce palliation
or a prolongation in survival, not a cure, and people with cancer want a cure. Palliation
just isn’t that appealing, for obvious reasons. When people think of
chemotherapy, they think of hair falling out, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, and
death. Since chemotherapy is often given for more advanced malignancies, it’s
sometimes hard to tell how many of these symptoms (other than the hair loss) are
due to the cancer and how much they are due to side effects of the chemotherapy,
and many people incorrectly blame chemotherapy for the deaths of their loved
ones with cancer. Also, because, like radiation therapy, chemotherapy is often
given in the adjuvant setting (i. e., in addition to curative surgery in order
to decrease the risk of recurrence and death), it’s very easy to produce
stories in which people with cancer refuse chemotherapy and/or radiation
therapy after surgery and attribute their survival not to the conventional
therapy (surgery) but to whatever quackery they chose to use. When used in
early stage cancer, although its relative efficacy can seem large, for example
a 30% decrease in the risk of dying, if the risk of dying of cancer is only 10%
to begin with, that’s only a 3% survival benefit on an absolute basis.
In reality, the use of alternative medicine instead
of effective treatment for cancer, where it’s been studied, is always
associated much poorer survival, even in pancreatic cancer, for which conventional
treatments don’t do so well. Still, among the treatments in the «cut, poison, burn» terminology that
believers in alternative medicine like to use to describe conventional cancer
therapy, it is the «poison» that
causes the most fear and is most viciously demonized in the alt-med «literature.»
As well, the key information that none of these
alternative health sites presented regarding Dr. Hardin’s statements on the
efficacy of chemotherapy was that they were based on work published in the
Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences way back in 1956, and a paper (not
a study) titled «A Report on Cancer»
that he presented at a science writers’ conference on 7 March 1969. All of this
material is fifty to sixty years out of date, and Hardin himself passed away in
1978, so even if he had researched cancer and chemotherapy until his dying days,
all of his findings would now be upwards of forty years old. In the field of
medical science that’s a huge time difference, as exemplified by the plethora
of now standard medical technologies that didn’t emerge until 1978 or later: in
vitro fertilization, MRI machines, the identification of HIV, hepatitis
vaccines, the first draft of the human genome, etc.
But even back in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Hardin’s
conclusions were highly questionable due to his use of old and flawed studies
as their basis:
Hardin Jones was working with data from very early in
the last century, mainly from four studies containing the remarkable numbers of
651, 100, 64, and 100 untreated breast cancer patients along with a treated group.
These were published in 1926 (!), 1937, (no reference given), and 1937
respectively. With the advanced cancers generally treated in those days, it is
likely that most of these patients would be incurable even today.
None of the studies he examined were properly
controlled trials. Well-planned clinical studies of any kind were still rare in
those times, and it would also have been quite unethical even then to randomise
very destructive cancers to a «no
treatment» group, as demanded by any reliable comparison of treated with
untreated patients.
Where, then, did the untreated patients come from? They
were those who «refused operation or who
had already advanced to an inoperable state.» There are innumerable
possible misleading influences in such studies.
Moreover, our understanding of cancer and its
treatment has advanced greatly since Dr. Hardin’s days. Although what he said
sixty years ago may have had at least some element of supportable plausibility
to it, that information is now woefully out of date and has been supplanted by
additional research and a superior understanding of cancer that has been
developed in the last several decades:
Hardin Jones’ views (the documented ones, as opposed
to the alleged ones) were actually not far off the planet once he is placed in
the context of his times. It happens that in the late fifties and early sixties
there was some ‘therapeutic nihilism’ in relation to the treatment of cancer, especially
breast cancer [on which he focused].
Despite numerous trials of different surgical
operations for breast cancer, with and without radiotherapy, survival rates
stayed frustratingly much the same (chemotherapy was still in its infancy and
not mentioned at all in [his 1956 paper] — another area where truth seems to
have been dealt with rather loosely).
In addition, death rates of treated breast cancer
patients did not seem to level out at those of the normal population at five or
even ten years, as might be expected if patients surviving for that long were
likely to be then cured.
Hardin Jones used this and other data to build a
whole statistical theory proposing that”… the death rate for all kinds of
cancer remains nearly fixed from the moment when cancer is identified…”
It was becoming apparent to oncologists that breast cancer
could metastasise (spread to distant parts of the body) much earlier than
generally thought, and that, rather unusually among cancers, the tiny occult (hidden)
metastases could remain dormant for years before making themselves known. Breast
cancer patients thus had to be followed up for very much longer than the usual
five or ten years before they could be pronounced cured, and on the data
available at that time it was difficult to know how many were being permanently
cured. The biology of the disease, rather than the treatment, appeared to be
the main determinant of survival.
While Hardin Jones was part right, his data and his
overly pessimistic views are very much a product of his times.
One obvious indication of this is that the overall
five year survival from breast cancer in the studies he examined was a dreadful
25%, whereas NCI statistics for 2002 give an overall (all comers) five year
survival of about 80%. Some of this difference will be simply due to «lead time bias» (i. e., longer survival simply
due to most cases being diagnosed earlier in the course of their illness, but
it illustrates the very different times.
Finally, although chemotherapy undeniably causes bad
side effects in many cases, doesn’t work well for some forms of cancer, and may
be over-recommended by some practitioners, its benefits (especially in cases of
breast cancer) are undeniable:
The bottom line is that, contrary to what you will
hear from cranks and alt-med supporters who believe in «alternative» cancer cures, in the case of early stage breast cancer,
chemotherapy saves lives. In women with breast cancer, it decreases the risk of
their dying from breast cancer by approximately one-third. This is nothing to
sneeze at, as it means thousands upon thousands of women who would have died
but did not, thanks to chemotherapy. This study simply represents yet another
in a long line of studies, another strand in the web of evidence that support
the efficacy of chemotherapy in prolonging the lives of women with breast
cancer. It’s not perfect, and it has a lot of potential complications, but it
works. This is but one example.
Indeed, as [Vincent DeVita, one of the pioneers of
chemotherapy] points out, besides its well-demonstrated role in treating
hematological malignancies, chemotherapy now has a role in the primary
treatment of advanced malignancies such as bladder cancer, breast cancer, cervical
cancer, colorectal cancer, esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, head and neck
cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic
cancer, and prostate cancer. It’s also used to prolong survival in the adjuvant
setting for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, gastric cancer, head
and neck cancer, pancreas cancer, melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, osteogenic
sarcoma, and ovarian cancer.
I realize that chemotherapy is imperfect and doesn’t
work well for a lot of cancers. Many of the drugs cause bad side effects, and, as
I’ve explained before, in the adjuvant setting you have to treat a lot of
patients to benefit relatively few. I also realize that chemotherapy is
sometimes oversold. At the same time, I also know that now is the best time
there has ever been for treating cancer with drugs. Targeted agents allow us to
attack more precisely the molecular derangements driving cancer growth with
lower toxicity. Molecular profiling is paving the way for precision medicine, in
which someday (or so we hope) we will be able to target treatments to the
specific abnormalities in a specific patient’s tumor.
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