Critique of Chemotherapy Effectiveness

I described chemotherapy at the beginning as barbaric.

Um,

y- and,

you know, it, it seems like this is an incredibly out-of-date...

When you hear it like we have Nicholas Holscher on the show, epi- epidemiologist,

um, uh, from the McCullough Foundation, and he's described it, I

think the, the numbers of success seen from radiation

and chemotherapy is incredibly low. Is that s- is that still the case?

It is, and, and, you know, I look at chemotherapy as, as a very

old, outdated technology that goes back decades.

And

chemotherapy is, is,

you know... The thing about chemotherapy that's,

that's been so

difficult is that it hits the cancer,

but it also hits healthy, rapidly dividing cells indiscriminately.

That's why people's bone marrow gets hit, their blood counts go down, then you have

to wait between cycles so that your bone marrow

and blood counts recover, and then

you hit it again. Um, decades old,

and, you know, I think what Nick was referring to, um,

was there was a study that came out almost 20 years ago now,

uh, that looked at the five-year success rate

of

chemotherapy and how much did chemotherapy contribute to the survival

of cancer patients, and that number was 2 or 3%.

And, and, and-

2 or 3%?

That was it. That was the contribution of chemotherapy to

the

survival of cancer patients when they looked at cancer patients at

five years.

And, uh, and I believe, you know, the number was 2% in Australia and

I think 3% in the, in the United States.

And so the success of chemotherapy over the long term is very low.

In the short term, chemotherapy can look pretty good and,

you know,

the oncologists have the patients go through this ritual where after they're

done their chemotherapy and maybe they have their scans,

the scans show that

they're clear, they do the ringing of the bell.

You know, and, and it's sort of this ritual

that cancer patients go through and,

and cancer patients, you know, they're very happy

when they can ring the bell

because that means that, you know, they've gone through the treatment,

they're

cancer-free. The problem is it's, it's very deceptive.

It's very deceptive because chemotherapy kills only rapidly

dividing cancer cells. It doesn't kill cells that are

resistant to the chemotherapy regimen, and it doesn't kill cells that are cancer

stem cells that are quiescent and are not dividing

rapidly. And so those cells can hang around for,

you

know, a couple of years after the chemo

and then become reactivated,

causing metastases and spread of the disease.