It's embarrassing now, never mind later. We just don't often have better alternatives than to pump already sick people full of poison in the hope that the poison kills the cancer faster than the rest of the person. It is horrible, and has (in my opinion) only improved slightly in the last few decades.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for explanation/references/proof of what you mean when you say 'poison'. I don't know your particular experiences with chemotherapy, but I hear this soundbite parroted too often without any effort to actually research what chemotherapy is actually trying to accomplish. I'm not saying people shouldn't investigate their recommended treatment plans, but this often unwarranted suspicion of modern cancer treatment techniques is mystifying to me.
This is just not true.
I provide you with this list of cases where chemotherapy can cure people (established in phase III double blind randomised controlled trials):
Early stage breast cancer
Early stage colon cancer
Acute myeloid leukaemia
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia
Diffuse large B-cell Lymphoma
Paediatric neuroblastoma, retinoblastoma, nephroblastoma etc etc
Testicular seminoma and non-seminoma
Testicular germ cell tumours
Note that breast and colon cancer are among the top 3 most common cancers.
At one extreme, early stage (solid) cancers are primarily cured by surgery. At the other extreme (metastasis), chemotherapy is a terminal rollercoaster.
In between those extremes (e.g. some limited local progression), adjuvant chemotherapy seems to be useful for breast cancer, but has only a very small effect for colon cancer (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607...) and none for lung cancer (http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/19/1453.short).
But this is the holy grail of oncology, is it not? To reach cancer cells non-invasively with spot-on accuracy so healthy cells are spared?
The dose makes the poison. Even water can become toxic with a high enough dosage. Calling chemo drugs poisonous isn't really helpful. At best, it's like saying water is wet. At worst, you wind up misinforming people and contributing to decisions that are based on bad information. The side effects of cytotoxics make chemotherapy difficult on the patient, but the alternative is a good deal worse and permanent to boot.
We don't actually know this. We don't really understand what cancer is. We know that in some cases viral infection is the cause of a specific cancer, but we don't really know the exact mechanism behind what makes cancer, cancer.
I am not a fan of the idea of "auto-immune disease." I think that's bullshit. I think it basically is an admission we have no fucking clue what we are talking about.
The body does things for a reason. Just because we don't understand it does not mean the body has simply lost its mind.
We fundamentally need a better mental model of these things.
They do pump cancer patients full of poison. The patients know it. The doctors know it. Maybe I am a little too deep in the weeds here, but I am astonished this assertion is being questioned at all.
Most medication is "poison" to people who are otherwise healthy. NSAIDs are bad for the stomach, pills for insomnia will make you fat, narcotics will make you fall asleep, epinephrine can stop your heart. We take them because their ill effects aren't as bad as the good they produce.
Cancer chemotherapy is mostly unique because it produces a lot of suffering to someone who appears to be quite healthy. There are other medicines with horrible side effects, but you'll usually have to be obviously sick with something like malaria in order to be treated with one of those.
Modern treatments include immunotherapy such as YERVOY[1] and KEYTRUDA[2].
With that said, the side effects of YERVOY put him the ICU with kidney failure.
I mean, it isn't like researchers pull these ideas out of thin air. Some forms of cancer are more thoroughly researched than just about any other topic in medicine.
The path forward here is to come to a completely different understanding of the problem space. Allopathic meds have their uses, but it comes at a known high cost. This is why medications routinely have a long fold-out of warnings, provisos and explanations of the side effects.
We know that chemo can permanently impair brain function as well. We know that it does all kinds of bad things to the body. We also know that overuse of antibiotics both harms the gut function and promotes antibiotic resistant infections.
I think a first step in the right direction would be for conventional medicine to counteract the drug side effects after therapy is done. I have never had a doctor tell me that I should consume yogurt after being on antibiotics, though that is common knowledge in some circles. We just issue drugs and even when the side effects are known and some fairly easy counter to the side effects is also pretty well established, few doctors tell their patients "You need to undo the damage the drugs do to you and here is how."
If we at least did that much, we could ameliorate some of this. That approach is totally within reach and essentially ignored.
I am pretty sure leeches are still used, they are highly effective for the reasons you describe, but bloodletting is a dangerous practice of trying to get rid of blood from the body to cure someone.
Here's an excerpt from the BMJ:
>Bloodletting was done by the barbers in England at the request of patients and must, therefore, have had some beneficial effect even if it was just a placebo effect. It is very possible, however, that there were very real benefits in selected patients especially those in left ventricular or congestive cardiac failure. In withdrawing blood the venular outflow pressure from capillaries and cardiac filling pressures would have been immediately reduced. The pressure gradient between capillary and interstitial fluid may have been decreased or even reversed if it was elevated(6,7). A reversal of the pressure gradient in oedematous patients would have promoted the mobilisation of oedema fluid and excretion in urine provided renal function was normal. Bloodletting would also have improved capillary blood flow, which can be severely disturbed in septic patients, by decreasing viscosity and improving the rheological chacteristics.
>Repeated epsiodes of bloodletting will cause anaemia which is an independent risk factor for adverse outcome in patients with heart failure (8). As heart failure may cause anaemia by compromising the synthesis in the Krebs cycle of substrate needed for haemoglobin synthesis and blood formation in the bone marrow this risk might be a consequence of the heart failure rather than the cause. In adequately nourished and oxygenated bone marrow haemoglobin pools should be replenished by resynthesis unless the bloodletting was repeated too often.
>In the short term bloodletting achieves what the venodilators glyceryl trinitrate and isosorbide mononitrate achieve, a reduction in venular outflow pressure in capillary beds. In patients with heart failure venodilators improve exercise performance and reduce mortality (9). Whilst ACE inhibitors, angiotensin II receptor agonists and beta blockers may also decrease mortality in patients in heart failure, partly or wholly by similar mechanisms, inotropes and beta agonists may increase mortality from heart failure. These medications have not been established to improve disability-adjusted or un-adjusted longevity.
>Bloodletting might have been much more effective than venodilators and as effective as diuretics for in increasing th tone of the precapillary sphincters and establishing a pressure gradient between interstitium and capillary the excretion of oedema fluid would have been promoted. If in inducing a gastric intramucosal acidosis bloodletting were also to induce preconditioning by, for example, activating anf K(atp) channel, bloodletting might even have had extended benefits not seen with medical therapy. [1]
I wouldn't agree that patients' requests meant that it must have been beneficial, since people willingly do all sorts of crazy things to their bodies based on the most tenuous new age theories. It also doesn't make sense that regular bloodletting would be beneficial to an already healthy subject, since we'd presumably have evolved with a mechanism to dispose of excess "bad humors". However, as an alternate mechanism for achieving results that treat a condition like congestive heart failure, it seems a lot like drilling a hole in your head to treat a head injury — ridiculous sounding, but effective in certain cases.
[1] http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/29/treating-heart-...
Here is a good overview:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2...
What is the evidence for this?
I'd say, in contrast, that chemotherapy is analogous to amputation. Both are crude and horrific treatments, but both have and are used with strong evidence that they are beneficial to the patient. Bloodletting, on the other hand, has only weak theoretical arguments that it may have been very slightly useful in a tiny minority of cases, but was definitely ineffective or harmful in the vast majority of cases.
surely all "modern medicine" will fall into that category.
Of course that's ignoring that there is a lot of medicine that obviously does work and is great. No one is going to dispute that antibiotics are literally the greatest thing ever, or that insulin saves tons of diabetics, or that cancer treatment has saved a lot of lives. On the other hand some things we do are quite horrible, like keeping old people alive long past the point it's worth it. Or not cryogenically preserving everyone because it's "weird".
As I recall, you could boil down medical progress up to the publication date as "discovery of germs" as in "washing hands," "cleaning things," "vaccination," "isolate people with plague from the well" and "don't drink water you pooped in" -and the discovery of anesthesia, which made complex surgery possible. I'd say antibiotics is the main further improvement.
I suspect that in the future there will be a few "boil water" or "wash your hands" type lessons learned that will affect how we do medicine that aren't dependent on futuristic technology.
1. 'Weakening' of the immune system is the wrong idea. Preclinical and clinical studies have shown that there is synergy between the immune system and chemotherapy, and also between the microbiome and chemotherapy. For some cancers, combining modern immunotherapies with other treatments including chemotherapy is likely to be necessary to achieve the best outcomes.
2. Your analogy to medieval blood letting is totally ridiculous. The chemotherapy used today has been carefully studied in randomised controlled trials with many thousands of patients. These patients have been followed up for many years with meticulous documentation of early and late side effects, disease outcomes and patient reported quality of life measures. This information is invaluable to patients who have to make decisions about the pros and cons of cancer therapy.
Is chemotherapy pleasant? Definitely not. Do some people experience terrible side effects that may be permanent and life threatening or even fatal? Yes. But it saves lives, and it comes with a host of supportive therapies designed to make the process as tolerable as it can be.