How Effective is Surgery Against Cancer?

Executive Summary

• One of the least questioned treatments for cancer is surgery.
• The evidence from studies on cancer surgery indicates that it should be questioned.

Introduction

Cancer surgery intuitively makes sense and is often considered the most direct cancer treatment. However, this understanding is based upon a flawed assumption about how cancer works.

The following quotes are from the article The Efficacy of Surgical Treatment of Cancer – 20 Years Later.

Important Point #1: Cancer Surgery is Not Shown to Improve Outcomes

A review in 1993 found no evidence that surgery affected the course of the disease and an alternative paradigm was proposed. To identify evidence that the primary treatment of cancer, surgery, has been shown to affect the course of the disease.

If there is no such evidence, then to identify the correct paradigm of what cancer is from other cancer treatments that have been shown to be effective.

None of the seven indirect methods used showed that surgery clearly affects the course of the disease for any type of cancer. The lack of benefits from cancer screening now includes not only from breast cancer but also from bowel, lung, prostate and ovarian cancer screening. This confirms that cancer surgery is based on an invalid paradigm of what cancer is. Survival figures following treatments based on an alternative paradigm that assumes cancer is a systezmic disease were found to be superior to those following surgery, reinforcing the conclusion that cancer is a systemic disease and that cancer surgery is unlikely to be of benefit in most cases.

No benefits can be expected to be achieved from using cancer surgery except in a few immediately life-threatening situations. Surgery appears to be based on an invalid paradigm of what cancer is. Cancer appears to be a systemic disease and therefore standard treatments need to be reassessed in this light.

Yet while this study was published in 2014, it has not impacted the frequency of cancer surgeries, although surgeries are now more targeted than they were in the past.

Important Point #2: Understanding Cancer as Not Merely a Local Disease

A major part of the error of relying upon surgery is viewing surgery as a local disease. That is, if a person has a tumor, the issue is local to that item and can be addressed by removing that item. This is explained in the following quotation.

The current paradigm is that cancer is a local disease that sometimes later spreads, so removing the tumour means removing the disease. Based on this paradigm the accepted primary treatment for cancer once a solid tumour is diagnosed is surgery. Prior to the acceptance of this paradigm cancer was considered a systemic disease. Over 130 years have passed since surgery became accepted as the primary treatment for cancer.