Trends in Cancer Survival

[AussieNeil]

"The largest and most up-to-date study of international cancer registries shows that survival trends are generally increasing, even for some of the more lethal cancers, such as liver and lung.

The CONCORD-3 study analyzed individual patient records from 322 cancer registries in 71 countries and territories to compare 5-year survival from diagnosis for more than 37.5 million adults and children with one of 18 common cancers."

cancernetwork.com/news/tren...

This is not the news that alternative practitioners promising a cancer cure want to hear.

This article looks at the impact of alternative and complementary and alternative medicine on the survival rates of patients with solid cancers: sciencebasedmedicine.org/al...

The bottom line: Alternative medicine kills cancer patients .

Neil

[Spacee]

In our family we are 50/50. The liver cancer patient lasted 2 months. Our state 4 lung cancer patient is in her 2nd year. Still having treatments but doing ok.

Linda

[rcknow]

Thanks for sharing the Concord study. I provided cancer data from my state registry to the study and got to meet the researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was a huge undertaking on their part getting all those data and dealing with many privacy offices.

[Name-1]

Wonderful picture,Neil!

[Newdawn Administrator]

This is highly promising news Neil but noticeably the U.K. didn’t feature amongst this list and it isn’t good enough;

‘For most cancers, 5-year net survival remains the highest in the world in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.’

I recall reading that the one area the U.K. are doing well with are skin cancers but for a highly developed country, I think it needs to improve overall.

Regards,

Newdawn

[wmay13241]

I really enjoy your beautiful flower pictures - they brighten my day.

[crystalsky]

The closing remark was: "Use of alternative medicine alone to treat cancer is likely to be a death sentence, or at least to cause delays that make ultimate cancer treatment with conventional medicine more difficult and less likely to be successful."

It seems a bit obvious if a person has a tumor and decides not to have it removed, it will most likely continue to grow. Therefore, their wording is misleading. Not removing the cancerous tumor resulted in death, not choosing alternative medicine. More like, refusing conventional medicine and corresponding treatment killed the person.

I don't even know what is considered alternative medicine. On this board, paying attention to one's diet, and eliminating toxins in ones environment seems to classify as alternative. Perhaps, even taking charge of one's health is considered alternative. Conventional medicine doesn't have all the answers. If it did, no one would die of sickness or disease.

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to crystalsky]

Hi Crystalsky,

You are obviously astute enough to appreciate that your husband needed Ibrutinib to control his CLL and it's great that he is doing well on that. I would say that your approach with diet and nutrition supplementing Ibrutinib would put you into the Complementary/Integrative Medicine category. Pure Alternative Medicine adherents tend to refuse proven medicine therapies by choosing an alternative approach, hence the name and the danger - refusing something that clinical trials have proven to work well for most patients and choosing an unproven alternative that may and more likely will not work - as evidenced in the discussed CONCORD-3 study.

I would hope that every community member appreciates that one of the primary functions of this community is to provide members with the means to take charge of their health, by providing them with evidence based information on what they can do to live better and longer with CLL. The clinical trial process is the best way to work out answers about what is likely to work and what unintended consequences may also occur.

With regard to the debate on alternative vs conventional medicine, you note: "It seems a bit obvious if a person has a tumor and decides not to have it removed, it will most likely continue to grow. Therefore, their wording is misleading. Not removing the cancerous tumor resulted in death, not choosing alternative medicine. More like, refusing conventional medicine and corresponding treatment killed the person."

Sadly and most unfortunately, it isn't obvious, which is why people are dying unnecessarily! It's because many people are adverse to surgery/radiation/chemotherapy and choose an alternative to conventional medicine and do not use the best that both have to offer in what would be deemed an integrative/complementary/holistic approach. (It is very tempting to avoid the pain and side effects from proven approaches and be swayed by promises of a pain free, natural approach.)

A classic example of how confusing the debate is made by proponents of alternative medicine is Chris Wark, who has a large following of people wanting to cure themselves of cancer following his dietary advice. Chris did exactly the obvious action you outlined. He had bowel cancer and had it surgically removed. He was offered the standard 'belt and braces' approach of further improving his chance of survival by having adjuvant chemotherapy, which is designed to mop up any cancer cells missed by the surgeon's knife. He refused that and credits his cure to his dietary interventions, giving minimal acknowledgement of the primary role that his surgeon had in curing his bowel cancer and misleading his readers, many of whom are hoping to cure their cancers without having their tumours surgically removed. While I don't appreciate the somewhat disparaging 'woo' comments in this article, it does explain well how significant the surgery was to Mr Wark's recovery and how relatively minor his subsequent embracing of diet and natural cures was to his survival: sciencebasedmedicine.org/ch...

Neil

[Sucee in reply to AussieNeil]

Well said, Neil.