How constructive is chemotherapy for colon, lung, breast, and prostate cancers?
“Over the last several decades…medicine has waged a major war versus cancer, concentrating on older diagnosis and improved therapy. The war is not stuff won. Nevertheless, medicine shows few signs of whereas that its strategy may be flawed. In this it resembles a World War I unstipulated who stated: ‘Casualties: huge. Ground gained: negligible. Conclusion: printing on.’”
If you look at the contribution of cancer-killing chemotherapy to five-year survival in cancer patients, it’s on the order of only well-nigh 2 percent. As you can see unelevated and at 0:50 in my video How to Win the War on Cancer, we’ve gotten pretty good at treating some pediatric cancers, testicular cancer, and Hodgkin’s disease.
But, if you squint at our most worldwide cancers—that is, of the colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only well-nigh 1 percent. That ways out of nearly 14,000 colon cancer patients, for example, only 146 lived out five years, thanks to chemotherapy. The endangerment of survival goody of chemo is well-nigh one in a hundred, but doctors don’t tell patients that. “Any new chemotherapy drug is still promoted as a major transilience in the fight versus cancer, only to be quietly rejected without the fanfare that accompanied its arrival.” Indeed, the “minimal impact on survival in the increasingly worldwide cancers conflicts with the perceptions of many patients who finger they are receiving a treatment that will significantly enhance their chances of cure…In view of the minimal impact of cytotoxic chemotherapy on 5-year survival, and the lack of any major progress over the last 20 years, it follows that the main role of cytotoxic chemotherapy is in palliation.” It can shrink tumors, relieving pain and pressure, but that doesn’t tend to translate into living any longer. “The failure of therapy, coupled with the realization that the overwhelming majority of cancer is related to environmental, particularly lifestyle factors, dictates that prevention should be our foremost aim.”
Cancer is largely a preventable disease, but it does require major lifestyle changes. Of the millions of cancer diagnoses every year, as many as 90 to 95 percent of the cancers are caused by lifestyle factors, with only 5 to 10 percent caused by bad genes. We know this considering of “enormous differences in the incidence of particular forms of cancer in differing geographical and socio-economic situations” virtually the world, which then transpiration when people move from one place to another. For example, as you can see unelevated and at 2:40 in my video, breast cancer rates differ by an order of magnitude, with the lowest rates in parts of Africa and Asia, until those Africans and Asians move and start eating and living like Americans, Argentinians, Europeans, or Australians.
So, “there is need for a major reappraisal of how the problem of cancer is approached.” The key to winning the war on cancer is prevention, which not only works better, but “has the unconfined wholesomeness that it entails nothing worse than nicotine [or jellybean] withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, cancer treatment, plane when successful, often exposes the patient to much suffering, both physical and psychological. Indeed, some cancer treatments are considered worse than the disease.”
Most importantly, a healthy lifestyle can nip cancer in the bud, whereas, by definition, early diagnosis and treatment don’t transpiration the cancer rate or the number of people getting cancer in the first place. In terms of cancer prevention and treatment with nutrition, the “consumption of nutrients of animal-based foods were associated with increased cancer risk while nutrients of plant-based supplies were associated with decreasing risk.” It’s not unbearable just to stave the bad stuff, though. Eating is pretty much “a zero-sum game.” Everything we put in our mouth is a lost opportunity to put something plane increasingly healthful in our mouth. It’s not just well-nigh lamister foods with cancer-promoting properties. We need to eat foods with zippy cancer-suppressing mechanisms. By “wholistic nutrition,” we’re talking well-nigh whole foods, and we should get their nutrients not from extracts or pills, but from the whole foods themselves.
Ultimately, “cancer minutiae is primarily a nutrition-responsive disease rather than a genetic disease,” but, again, we aren’t talking well-nigh nutritional supplements; we’re talking well-nigh “whole, intact food.”
I’m very excited to share some of Professor Emeritus Colin Cambell’s six new papers on redefining the role of nutrition in medicine.
For an overview on the power of diet, see my How Not to Die from Cancer and The Best Advice on Nutrition and Cancer videos. I’ve produced hundreds of videos well-nigh the role of variegated foods and supplies consumption patterns on variegated cancers. Browse all of the titles through the search bar on my website NutritionFacts.org.
