BY DR AMIR FARID ISAHAK

In a preceding article, I opined that we have to look for alternatives in the fight against cancer considering the limitations of chemotherapy.

The overall success (or failure) rate with chemotherapy is summed up in a landmark study published in 2004.

Three oncologists co-authored a large-scale review of all studies done on the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments in Australia and the US.

They studied the number of cancer patients who survived more than five years following diagnosis and treatment and found that overall, chemotherapy contributed just over 2% to improved survival in the cancer patients.

The authors strongly questioned the continued use of chemotherapy [Clinical Oncology (2004)16:549-560].

Since evidence-based medicine shows that the success rate with chemotherapy is so poor, any nutritional or non-conventional (ie. not yet generally accepted by mainstream medical practice) or complementary therapies that can give 2 per cent or better success rates should be considered, especially if they are safer and less expensive.

However, no matter how poor chemotherapy results are, these are backed by adequate scientific studies, while the others are not. That is why chemotherapy is so widely prescribed despite the outcomes. It is the best among the "proven" therapies.

Patients opting for the other therapies should be clearly told about this. Proponents of nutritional, non-conventional, and complementary therapies should not be giving patients false hope. But it is not wrong to give them some hope, especially after conventional therapy has failed, and they have nothing to lose by trying other methods.

Moreover, many of these other methods do have recorded success cases. While such documented cases do not qualify as scientific studies, they give us hope to try on those patients who refuse conventional therapy (for whatever reason), and for those in whom conventional therapy had failed.

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