Well, I guess Leukemia has been somewhat cured I heard, so that's pretty huge. When I was a kid it was a death sentence IIRC.
I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that seems to indicate that we'll have a radically new and effective form of treatment for cancer only for it to never materialize.
"Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo.
5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the last decades. We're not talking 0.5% here, breast cancer for example has gone from 72% to 93%. Early detection of prostrate cancer has near 100% survivability.
But you're right, improving survivability doesn't make for sexy headlines. Yes there's a social media appetite for "breakthroughs", but the underlying "boring" stuff is doing well, and getting better all the time. It's just not "news".
There are different cancers, different stages different, different chemos, and of course different people.
Ultimately individual experiences of chemo run the whole gauntlet. At one end it can be little more than a bit of fatigue, at the other end a horrendous nightmare.
Yes, chemo has, as it's goal, a poison function. It sets out to poison you, hopefully killing the cancer first. It's never going to be the "fun" part of treatment.
I'm not a Dr, much less a medical historian. I would be ill equipped to quote specific drugs or dosages. Outcomes however are easily Googled, and those don't seem to be controversial.
I get that improved statistics don't make individual loss any easier.
* Many breakthroughs from the first research stages never make it into medical application.
* Many breakthroughs are touted as some kind of "novel treatment", but when they get into the hands of the doctor, they talk about it as chemotherapy, because it kills cancer cells. So you might not even notice that you're getting something novel.
* Many breakthroughs take decades until they actually land in mainstream treatment.
* Many breakthroughs are specific to some kinds of cancer.
That said, in most developed countries, survival rates/times for cancer have been steadily improving for decades.
It's a bit like with solar cell and battery tech breakthroughs: you hear about them all the time, but it takes 20 to 30 years until they make it to production. But both have been improving steadily for an impressively long time.
These are not your parents cancer treatments.