Given Its Track Record, Why is Chemotherapy Used?

Executive Summary

• Chemotherapy has a dismal track record of extending the life of cancer patients and has terrible side effects.
• So why is chemotherapy still used as a treatment?

Introduction

Before reading this article, it is good to read the evidence that questions the effectiveness of chemotherapy as it is the baseline assumption of this article. For this, see the article How Effective is Chemotherapy? 

Why is Chemotherapy Used?

If something does not work but is widely applied, there is usually a good reason for this, and it is related to market control. The medical establishment can use chemotherapy because of its control over the information that patients receive. Insurance companies pay for chemotherapy because it is part of the approved treatment protocol.

This is explained in the following quotation from the website Waking Times.

Money is the Driving Force Behind Chemotherapy

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies make money from it. That’s the only reason chemotherapy is still used. Not because it’s effective, decreases morbidity, mortality or diminishes any specific cancer rates. In fact, it does the opposite. Chemotherapy boosts cancer growth and long-term mortality rates. Most chemotherapy patients either die or are plagued with illness within 10-15 years after treatment. It destroys their immune system, increases neuro-cognitive decline, disrupts endocrine functioning and causes organ and metabolic toxicities. Patients basically live in a permanent state of disease until their death. The cancer industry marginalizes safe and effective cures while promoting their patented, expensive, and toxic remedies whose risks far exceed any benefit. This is what they do best, and they do it because it makes money, plain and simple.

Why the Relative Survival Rate is Measured at 5 Years

The reason a 5-year relative survival rate is the standard used to assess mortality rates is due to most cancer patients going downhill after this period. It’s exceptionally bad for business and the cancer industry knows it. They could never show the public the true 97% statistical failure rate in treating long-term metastatic cancers. If they did publish the long-term statistics for all cancers administered cytotoxic chemotherapy, that is 10+ years and produced the objective data on rigorous evaluations including the cost-effectiveness, impact on the immune system, quality of life, morbidity and mortality, it would be very clear to the world that chemotherapy makes little to no contribution to cancer survival at all.