Some years ago a book was written regarding cancer treatments, which were referred to as the Cut, the Poison and the Burn. This book was written in German and was vilified by the medical and pharmaceutical professions. However, in recent years a film has been produced, called Cut Poison Burn.
Aside from causing fatigue, pain, nausea and hair loss, chemotherapy can be toxic to the brain, leading to confusion, memory loss and impaired speech- Kathryn Borg
Wayne Chesler’s Cut, Poison, Burn documents the ways in which pharmaceutical companies, and the American Cancer Society (ACS), in league with the American Medical Association and the FDA, govern the state of cancer treatment and research in the US by absolute decree, rewarding political candidates and CEOs, and failing the victims of this disease and their families, and the many brilliant independent research associates who struggle in vain to advance a real cure.
The film follows the story of the Navarro family, who fight to the point of congressional hearings for the right to treat their four-year-old son Tommy Navarro at an alternative treatment facility in Texas.
The review of the film explains that this facility, established by Polish doctor Stanislaw Burzynski, has been treating patients with a non-toxic, non-patented amino-acid drip with enormous success. However, the FDA had already barred the way to his door for the Navarros by reducing his clinic access to end-case patients only.
The fate of this clinic is an interesting sub-plot in itself. In its determination to defend pharmaceutical companies’ rights to dominate treatment options, the FDA waged a 13-year, $8 million (€6 million) legal battle to indict Burzynski on various charges, 75 counts in all, but were forced to merely sideline his clinic after prosecution failed on all counts to eliminate him from the game entirely.
The fate of Dr Burzynski, of other alternative-treatment practitioners, and of innovative scientists and research teams, who have for decades been thwarted and smeared as quacks by the ACS, not to mention the fate of patients like Navarro and tens of thousands like him, makes for a very sobering, sometimes infuriating, sinister and heartbreaking film, but it is an object lesson in how the US works.
The review confirms that the film is expertly produced, narrated, and formally balanced. It is an example of what great documentary filmmaking is all about.
Looking at chemotherapy in isolation, chemo being the poison part of the above description, a study has been published online ahead of print by the journal Science.
Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, reported that cancer cells on the brink of self-destruction are more likely to respond to certain chemotherapy agents than cancer cells that have yet to reach that stage.
What this suggests is that chemotherapy may be ineffective when faced with cancer cells that are not already close to death. Essentially, this new study suggests that chemotherapy may only target cancer cells that are dying anyway.
At best, it may simply be that chemotherapy can speed up the natural process of cell suicide, which is what every healthy cell in the body is programmed to do, but which, in cancer patients, has become disrupted.
The Dana-Faber team used a profiling technique to measure how close the cells of patients taking part in the study came to the suicide threshold. The technique was used on a variety of tumours and found the same association in all patients.
These latest findings challenge the conventional thinking about how chemotherapy works. The traditional view is that it targets fast-growing cells such as cancer cells, but the new evidence in the study suggests that the chemo homes in on cancer cells that are already on the brink of death and may not work on the cells that aren’t.
Australian researchers assessed the benefit conferred by chemotherapy in the treatment of adults with the most common types of cancer. They concluded that chemotherapy contributes only slightly more than two per cent to improved survival in cancer patients.
Only 13 out of 22 malignancies evaluated showed any improvement in the five-year rates of survival, and the improve-ment was greater than 10 per cent in only three of those 13 malignancies.
“Despite the early claims of chemotherapy as the panacea for curing all cancers, the impact of cytotoxic chemotherapy is limited to small subgroups of patients and mostly occurs in the less common malignancies,” the researchers concluded.
This evidence conflicts with the perception of many patients who believe they are receiving a treatment that will significantly enhance their chances of cure and survival. Aside from causing fatigue, pain, nausea and hair loss, chemotherapy can be toxic to the brain, leading to confusion, memory loss and impaired speech, according to latest findings.
Ultimately, the findings that chemotherapy targets the cancer cells that are already close to cell suicide leaves open the possibility that the cancer could have gone away on its own without the help of chemotherapy.
Alternatively, it could be that the cancerous cells may not have died without the chemo cocktail to give them the final push.
These are questions that still need answers, but what seems clear from this research is that chemotherapy is ineffective in a significant number of people.
Nevertheless, the latest find-ings could well lead to more personalised cancer management, thereby sparing many patients from a variety of side effects which they do not need to suffer.
kathryn@maltanet.net