Friday, January 1, 2010

Issues With Brain Cancer and Orthodox Cancer Treatments

While radiation may be necessary in cases of dangerous swelling and inflammation, using radiation to treat cancer is almost guaranteed to be useless. Let me start with the observations of one person familiar with brain cancer treatments:

  • "Orthodox treatment for brain cancer, especially Children's, is absolutely appalling. Chemotherapy and radiation treatment cause horrific side-effects and permanent retardation. Very few survive for five years with this treatment. Their quality of life is ghastly, constantly sick from the chemotherapy/radiation treatments, their immune system wrecked by this barbaric treatment."
    http://www.cancerinform.org/kids1.html

I wanted to emphasize the concept of permanent retardation. The wife of a good friend of mine developed brain cancer. She had radiation therapy that bascially made her mentally retarded. It was only after this happened that the radiologist admitted to my friend that radiation probably didn't do any good. Needless to say his wife died.

  • "As a rough estimate, neurosurgeons do well to cure one in every 1,000-brain cancer patients they operate on. Radiation therapy slows the growth of adult tumors, gaining perhaps one month of life, and may result in a cure of only one in 500-1,000 patients. Similarly, chemotherapy, despite 30 years of clinical trials, has not resulted in the development of a single drug or drug combination that elicits more than an occasional transient response in primary brain tumors."
    Dr. Robert Burdick, oncologist and professor at the University of Washington Medical School

Brain cancer and brain tumors are somewhat unique because of the "blood-brain barrier," which severely restricts the types of substances in the bloodstream that are allowed by the body into the brain. While the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is great for protecting the brain from danger, when the brain has cancer cells, the BBB can be a problem.

While there are new chemotherapy drugs which can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, because chemotherapy is worthless in the rest of the body, why would someone think that chemotherapy would do any good running around among the extremely delicate brain cells?

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