Chemotherapy Reports

(ED. After 25 years of use and over $30 billion...)

Do We Need a New Approach to Cancer?

In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced the War on Cancer and promised a cure by the 1977 bicentennial. In each of the 25 years since, more Americans have died of cancer than the year before.  The failure of chemotherapy to control cancer has become apparent even to the oncology establishment.  Scientific American featured a recent cover story entitled: "The War on Cancer - It's Being Lost."  In it, eminent epidemiologist John C. Bailar III, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Bio-statistics at McGill University cited the relentless increase in cancer deaths in the face of growing use of toxic chemotherapy.  He concluded that scientists must look in new directions if they are ever to make progress against this unremitting killer.

Adding its voice, the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, decrying the failure of conventional therapy to stop the rise in breast cancer deaths, noted the discrepancy between public perception and reality. "If one were to believe all the media hype, the triumphism of the [medical] profession in published research, and the almost weekly miracle breakthroughs trumpeted by the cancer charities, one might be surprised that women are dying at all from this cancer" it observed.  Noting that conventional therapies - chemotherapy, radiation and surgery - had been pushed to their limits with dismal results, the editorial called on researchers to "challenge dogma and redirect research efforts along more fruitful lines."

John Cairns, professor of microbiology at Harvard University, published a devastating 1985 critique in Scientific American. "Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet to be established."

In an article entitled "Chemotherapy: Snake-Oil Remedy?" that appeared in The Los Angeles Times of January 9, 1987, Dr. Martin F. Shapiro explained that while "some oncologists inform their patients of the lack of evidence that treatments work...others may well be misled by scientific papers that express unwarranted optimism about chemotherapy.  Still others respond to an economic incentive. Physicians can earn much more money running active chemotherapy practices than they can providing solace and relief...to dying patients and their families."

Dr. Shapiro is hardly alone. Alan C. Nixon, PhD, Past President of the American Chemical Society wrote that "As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good."

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Alan C. Nixon, PhD, Past President of the American Chemical Society wrote that "As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good."

Steve McQueen contracted cancer and was treated by conventional "allopathic" medicine without success.  After this failure, he went to the Oasis clinic in Mexico where he was successfully treated for cancer despite the damage that had already been done to his immune system by allopathic medicine.

Laetrile does not shrink or destroy NON-malignant tumors, only destroys the cancer cells which leaves benign lumps. On return from Mexico Steve McQueen decided that he would have some (by now) non-malignant tumors removed for purely cosmetic reasons.  He died from complications of this operation - killed by straight allopathic medicine.

In 1986, McGill Cancer Center scientists sent a questionnaire to 118 doctors who treated non-small-cell lung cancer. More than three quarters of them recruited patients and carried out trials of toxic drugs for lung cancer.  They were asked to imagine that they themselves had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they themselves would choose.  Of the 79 respondents, 64 said they would not consent to be in a trial containing cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug Fifty-eight found all the trials unacceptable. Their reasons? The ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable degree of toxicity.

Famed German bio-statistician Ulrich Abel, PhD, also found in a similar 1989 study that "the personal views of many oncologists seem to be in striking contrast to communications intended for the public."

Breast cancer activist Rose Kushner wrote that by 1981 "indiscriminate, automatic adjuvant chemotherapy was replacing the Halsted radical mastectomy as therapeutic overkill in the United States." Thomas Nealon, MD, Professor of Surgery at New York University School of Medicine, concluded in 1990 that "The treatment of this tumor now has slipped from too much surgery to too much adjuvant therapy."

Why so much use of chemotherapy if it does so little good? Well for one thing, drug companies provide huge economic incentives. In 1990, $3.53 billion was spent on chemotherapy. By 1994 that figure had more than doubled to $7.51 billion. This relentless increase in chemotherapy use was accompanied by a relentless increase in cancer deaths.

Oncologist Albert Braverman, MD, wrote in 1991 that "no disseminated neoplasm (cancer) incurable in 1975 is curable today...Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure."

Why the growth in chemotherapy in the face of such failure? A look at the financial interrelationships between a large cancer center such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and the companies that make billions  selling chemotherapy drugs is revealing. James Robinson III, Chairman of the MSKCC Board of Overseers and Managers, is a director of Bristol-Myers Squibb, the world's largest producer of chemotherapy drugs. Richard Gelb, Vice-Chairman of the MSKCC board is Chairman of the Board at Bristol-Myers. Richard Furlaud, another MSKCC board member, recently retired as Bristol Myers' president. Paul Marks, MD, MSKCC's President and CEO, is a director of Pfizer.

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U.S. Pursues Probe of Bristol-Myers Over Marketing of Anticancer Drugs
By DAVID S. CLOUD  - Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors have sent grand-jury subpoenas to Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. seeking information on the marketing of its anticancer drugs and other products, the company confirmed.  Bristol-Myers Squibb is the second pharmaceutical company whose marketing efforts for its oncology treatments and other drugs administered  by doctors have come under criminal scrutiny by federal prosecutors in Boston as part of a long running federal-state probe of industry marketing practices.

The first was TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc., a Lake Forest, Ill., affiliate of Abbott Laboratories, that is now negotiating a plea deal.  Investigators are looking at whether Bristol-Myers Squibb provided oncologists with inducements, such as free drugs and devices, in exchange for purchases of other Bristol pharmaceuticals,  people involved say.  Another focus is whether the company encouraged doctors to improperly bill Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly, and Medicaid,  a federal-state program serving the low-income and the disabled.

INVESTIGATION EXPANDS
Federal prosecutors' probe of major drug companies continues. Highlights of the case:  The subpoena is part of a long-running state/federal probe of drug-industry marketing practices for cancer drugs and other injectable treatments.
A major focus of the probe is determining whether drug companies marketed their products by providing doctors with free drugs and

MORE CHEMOTHERAPY REPORTS:
"An effort was made to choose patients who were  well  enough to withstand the anticipated toxicity. Unexpected early death of two of the first five patients treated caused a reduction to 8mg/kg/day. No  significant anti-tumor benefit of any duration was observed..."
"In this study, 6 of the 8 child patients died...No therapeutic effect was observed. Toxic clinical manifestations consisted of vomiting, hypotension, changes in oral mucous membranes, and diarrhea, in that order of frequency.  Renal damage and cerebral edema were observed at post mortem examination in each of 6 children who died while receiving the drug....It was our opinion that drug toxicity contributed to the rapid demise of these patients..."

"Because of the severe toxicity, which led to the death of a number of the forty patients initially treated with the full 5-day "priming doses" used by the Wisconsin workers, investigators in the Eastern group voted to omit the fifth "priming" doses of each course"... "It is difficult for the average person to fathom the full depth of these legalized tortures and murders committed on unsuspecting victims in the name of science. And very sad that so many people in and near the medical profession accept these treatments without protest. In fact is insult added to injury when the FDA finances and encourages the wide use of these killer-drugs while at the same time forbidding doctors to experiment with Laetrile, which is known to be non-toxic, on the absurd contention that it has not yet been proven safe . . ."