Executive Summary

• Cisplatin is presented as effective against cancer by medical authorities and cancer centers.

• How accurate is this presentation?

Introduction

Cisplatin is a major chemotherapy drug.

What cancer centers, oncologists, and medical authorities don’t do is explain the actual effectiveness of Cisplatin for chemotherapy.

Common Side Effects

The following quote is from Chemocare, a biased website run by The Cleveland Clinic that is just a business development front end for their very profitable chemotherapy treatment business.

The following side effects are common (occurring in greater than 30%) for patients taking Cisplatin:

• Nausea and vomiting. Nausea may last up to 1 week after therapy. Anti-nausea medication is given before the infusion, and a prescription is also given for use after.
• Low blood counts. Your white and red blood cells and platelets may temporarily decrease. This can put you at increased risk for infection, anemia, and/or bleeding. Nadir: Meaning low point, is the point in time between chemotherapy cycles in which you experience low blood counts.
  • Nadir: 18-23 days. Recovery: 39 days
• Kidney toxicity. Effects on kidney function are dose related, observed 10-20 days after therapy, and are generally reversible.
• Ototoxicity hearing loss, ringing in the ears.
• Blood test abnormalities (low magnesium, low calcium, low potassium)

And what must be compared against this truncated listing of the side effects is that this type of chemotherapy has a poor history of effectiveness.

The Establishment Explanation of Chemotherapy

This video explains how chemotherapy works and does explain some of the negative aspects of chemotherapy. However, anyone can propose a hypothesis of how the mechanism works — particularly after a treatment has been around for decades, it is not only the mechanism that must be explained, but there must be strong evidence that the treatment works. The proposed improvement explained in this video is primarily due to pharmaceutical companies rigging the math. 

How the Reality of Chemotherapy is Hidden from the Public

The problems with chemotherapy became apparent nearly immediately after the discovery of chemotherapy — or the use of mustard gas as a treatment against cancer. This is explained in the following quotation.

“If one reads the literature of the time, there was a real sense of excitement that perhaps drugs could cure patients with cancer,” Vincent DeVita, Jr., the prominent oncologist, wrote of the first widespread use of nitrogen mustard as a chemother- apeutic agent. Sadly, after the drug was widely distributed and some time had passed, the excitement proved premature. The remissions induced by nitrogen mustard turned out to be brief and incomplete. The drug was able to”soften” the typically hard nodes for only a matter of weeks.

The cancer then sprang back to life, again packing the lymph nodes full of solid malignancy. It was a blow to the fragile, tantalizing hope for chemotherapy.
The euphoria was followed by pessimism, and the prospect of drugs affecting the outcome for cancer patients in any meaningful way was again shrouded in uncertainty.

However, not only is the origin of chemotherapy as mustard gas not explained to the public, but the apparent limitations of chemotherapy are also not explained.

Oncology Drugs Average of Less Than Three Months Improvement in Increased Lifespan

A 2017 paper published in JAMA Oncology presented some stunning conclusions. Of sixty-two new oncology drugs approved between 2003 and 2013, only 43 percent offered a survival benefit of three months or longer, 11 percent offered a survival benefit of less than three months, 15 percent had an unknown survival benefit, and 30 percent offered no survival benefit at all.

45% of Oncology Drugs Reduce Patient Safety

Furthermore, 45 percent were associated with reduced patient safety. A 2017 study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that looked at the survival and quality-of-life benefits of forty-eight cancer drugs approved in Europe by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) between 2009 and 2013 reached similar conclusions: “This systematic evaluation of oncology approvals by
the EMA in 2009–13 shows that most drugs entered the market without evidence of benefit on survival or quality of life. At a minimum of 3.3 years after market entry, there was still no conclusive evidence that these drugs either extended or improved life for most cancer indications. When there were survival gains over existing treatment options or placebo, they were often marginal.”