… How common are you implying that is? It wouldn’t shock me if it happens occasionally, but I have heard nothing suggesting that it is a common problem with standard treatments.
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Thanks for the reply. First, let’s look at my claim: “Those who express cancers with certain genetically determined traits have something akin to a death sentence. Those with other cancers can sometimes be successfully treated”.Looking at the SEER data quickly, they are too over-aggregated to tell us much about the impact of treatments, or the differential evaluation of different treatments. In the period from 1975- today everyone is living longer and healthier lives. So there are general factors at work in the data that have nothing to do with treatment. Further, when we turn to the most aggressive cancers, even the SEER data show no significant improvement. Cervical cancer (notoriously aggressive) survival rates have not changed at all. Earlier diagnosis will impact all of these data, as younger people have more years of life ahead of them than older. In breast cancer, the withdrawal of hormone replacement therapy has significantly improved survival rates - a case where the treatment was harming the patient and withdrawing it was responsible. The significant survival of colon cancers (not generally aggressive) result from colonoscopy and surgery, not pharma. As for my sources, let me admit up front that I have no particular expertise in medicine. A family member is an oncologist who gives me weekly reports of the case conferences she attends, and feeds me readings and videos from time to time to help raise my awareness.
So to be clear your statement I replied to has none of that context, even though you did make it in earlier posts. It wasn’t even a matter of missing context, it’s that even if unintentionally, you were making huge sweeping statements, and to that I feel like the data I provided clearly rebuts the statements you made. (E.g “the success rate in the cancer cure biz in near zero”) - given that you still haven’t really provided any sources to back that up.
In the specific case of deadlier cancers still proving to be very difficult, I would agree that yes, there are significant problems still, but your statement about the war against cancer being misconceived is, I think, unfair. The media interpretation against the war on cancer is certainly misconceived, but no cancer researcher shares that view - investigations into treatements are almost always targeted at either any shared traits between cancers, or very specific investigations into specific cancers, both of which are valuable investigations. If you feel that this is misconceived, can you provide an alternative to the current state?
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Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Used to be a near-100% lethal disease of children, now has a 5-year survival in the 90%+ area - and the treatment is mostly or only chemotherapy.
Testicular cancer? Cisplatin alone took 5-year survival from 10% to the high 80%s.
Breast cancer isn’t a single disease. The HR/PR - positives do much better with hormone blockers, the triple-negatives do much better with chemo than without, many but not all HER2-positives do much better with Herceptin. And this is all compared to earlier treatment schemes, not compared to doing nothing (because that’s so much more lethal that no ethics board would let you).
But sure. It’s all bad; the industry is just hiding cures to milk patients for money; the researchers are all in their pockets, and survival isn’t getting better despite getting a lot better. (For the latter, ref the statistics from the Norwegian cancer registry, at http://www.kreftregisteret.no/en/General/News/Cancer-in-Norway-2011/ ).
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“Secondary cancers now make up the sixth-most-common group of malignancies, in part because more survivors are living longer.”
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/new-cancer-threat-lurks-long-after-cure/?_r=0
According to the NCI the number of secondary cancers, at number six most common should be around 70,000 newly diagnosed cases annually. And my risk increases each year I am alive.
Ironically, this means that I have a greater risk of secondary cancer than I do of a myeloma relapse. If I combine both risks, after 20 years of surviving cancer my risk of getting some kind of cancer, any kind, is pretty high.
I’m not saying that the BRI has found a cancer cure. And I think that Burzynski himself could figure out how to work with conventional oncology better. What I am saying is that there are enough cancer survivors who have benefited enough from ANP therapy for the NCI to study this therapy further.
David Emerson
PeopleBeatingCancer.org
I was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 3/94. I relapsed in '95, relapsed in '96 and again in '97. This pattern is common in myeloma. As I said, my onc said that I had undergone many different chemos, local radiation and an auto bmt and that nothing could be done for me.
After all my therapies, relapses, stage 4 and terminal determination, how can any intelligent person conclude that 17 months of ANP is actually spontaneous remission?
David Emerson
PeopleBeatingCancer.org
I see the whole Burzynski thing in 2 ways. Either:
- Burzynski has a cancer cure but for some reason is keeping everything that could possibly expand its use and understanding incredibly private so he can be the only one allowed to make any profit from his findings.
OR:
- Burzynski is a fraud taking dying people’s money and offering them a snake oil pseudo-cure in return.
Either way you look at it, Burzynski is not a good person. If anyone has any other ideas that don’t boil down to “blame big pharma” tin-foil-hattery, please put your case forward.
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Under that theory he’s not just protecting his profits – he’d get more profits if he licensed others to use his ideas – he’s keeping it as a trade secret and a monopoly. Which might be fair in another industry, but which seems antisocial when lives are potentially at stake.
Actually, let me refocus this slightly. [Just fixing formatting]
Peer review is a sanity-check for whether what someone wants to publish appears to be credible – whether their protocol, and analysis, actually supports the claim they’re trying to make.
More importantly, peer review is a sanity-check for whether the publication provides enough information for someone else to replicate the work and confirm or refute those claims.
And THAT’S what’s important. Whether the publication was peer-reviewed or not, has he published enough for someone to check his data analysis, and for someone to replicate the experiment and determine whether – even if the data is correct – his procedures reliably produce that data or if it’s just a statistical fluke or caused by some other factor?
If not, then one has to ask why not, and suspect that it’s because he does not, in fact, believe he has anything that will stand up to scrutiny.
Peer review isn’t essential to the scientific process (though it’s a convenient tool that saves everyone from having to wade through a slush pile of badly written reports)… Independent confirmation of results IS part of the scientific process.
In other words: “Put up or shut up, guy. Either it can be reproduced, or it isn’t what you think it is. Heck, don’t YOU want to know whether you’ve really got something or are just kidding yourself?”
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(And that seems to have killed the conversation. Apologies if I spoiled a good fight by injecting some some common sense.)
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