Only adult cancers and excludes leukemia, which means that acute lymphocytic leukemia in children, which is perhaps one of the most effective uses of chemo, is doubly out.
But that is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. It says right at the start of the first section that head and neck cancer are normally treated with surgery and radiation, not chemo. And that studies done to see if adding chemo would improve survival rates showed no real improvement. And that really is useful information for anyone dealing with that sort of cancer. But what in the world is the point of averaging that and a bunch of other cancers where chemo isn't generally used and some cancers for which it has been shown to be quite effective together to find an average that depicts chemo as horribly ineffective? It's lie doing a study of vitamin C and diseases of nutritional deficiency by seeing how scurvy, beriberi, rickets, goiter, and pellagra respond to vitamin C supplements, and saying since average is quite a low number, vitamin C is not a good solution to nutritional deficiencies.
It also has too narrow of a definition of success. Sometimes chemo is used to shrink a tumor to make surgical removal easier and allow them to take less tissue. It may not add much to the five year survival rate, but isn't a less complicated surgery that is a bit easier to recover from a success? Or a woman able to have a lumpectomy insead of losing an entire breast? Or with some types of breast cancer, chemo has been shown to be quite effective in decreasing the number of reoccurances years down the road. This doesn't do much for the five year rate, but does mean that fewer women have to start treatment and undergo surgery all over again, and does have a larger effect on ten and fifteen year survival rate. Is that not a success?
Do you really think that back in the day they didn't have studies and evidence to show the effectiveness of blood letting? They recorded things back then, they weren't dribbling fools, they were just in a different era. They suffered the same superiority complex we still do, the same medical arrogance.
I would say it had "actual evidence to show just how ineffective it is". I think you're in the minority with the idea that we can't quantify and qualify the effectiveness of chemo... it is far from absurd. For how else do we evaluate it? Oh yes, that's right, we don't. It's just what doctors do, so it's what we do. Chlorine dioxide, so quickly ridiculed, has killed not one of the hundreds of thousands who have used it, and the FDA even stresses it is so dangerous because it causes "nausea and dehydration" in some. Yeah. Tummy upset is real scary, better not drink that "bleach" which has a lethal dose less than table salt. Better off mainlining liters of toxic radioactive chemicals that are the same chemicals that are being measured leaking from Japan's recent disaster. THAT makes so much more sense.
Pot. Meet kettle.
I don't think they were dribbling fools, and I don't doubt that many records were kept of so and so who was pulled back from the brink of death and such. But the power of the anecdote is an amazing thing - still is today, even - and the scientific method is much improved since the days of yours. Unless you can point me to controlled randomized studies of a decent size or the like from back then which showed how effective it was?
If it were shown to be an effective treatment, FDA would have no problem with the side effects. Where are the peer reviewed double blind placebo controlled random trials? It's bleach. Good for killing germs on surfaces and water, but not so good at getting to them in the human body.
Lovely to hear that you are curing AIDS though. Bet the doctors formerly treating your patients were just absolutely shocked when their patients started coming in with proof that they were no longer HIV positive. I'm surprised none of them thought to call a reporter to get it in the news and spread the word!
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