All About Cancer Chemotherapy

Cancer chemotherapy is a medical process used in treating all forms of cancer in the human body. Basically, the therapy makes use chemical compounds in dealing with cancerous tumors and other growing cells in the human body.

Cancer chemotherapy has a specific mechanism. It is meant to eradicate the mutating cells of cancer in the body with the help of the chemical compound in use. Oftentimes, the medical approach also destroys essential cells of the body in the bid to deal with the cancerous cells. This is usually one of the side effects of the therapy.

Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs
Some special drugs are usually used in cancer chemotherapy. In most cases the therapist decides on the right drug for each patient. Every form of cancer also has specific drugs used in dealing with it especially during chemotherapy. Among the various drugs used in chemotherapy include CPT-11, Accutane, Vectibix, Cyclophosphamide and many others. The drugs used in chemotherapy are actually numerous. The medical center and the therapist involved determine the kind of drug to be used. Again, your kind of cancer also determines the kind of drugs that can be used. The status or level of the cancerous condition is also considered when deciding on the drugs to be used.

In most cases, the drugs used in chemotherapy do cause side effects in the body of the patient. You may experience hair loss, heart damage, lung damage, severe headache, fever, nausea, change in taste, change in the nervous system and a lot more. These side effects can adequately be minimized or even prevented when qualified therapist is engaged in carrying out the chemotherapy process. Oftentimes, some drugs are combined in order to deal with some of the side effects.

How Chemotherapy works
Basically, chemotherapy works by destroying the growing cancerous cells in the body of the patient. The only danger here is that, the human body also has other vital cells such as the white blood cells, the red blood cells and the hair cells. Chemotherapy can as well destroy all of them if proper precaution is not taken. There's always the need to make distinction between the cancerous cells and other vital cells of the body. This is exactly where the help of a qualified therapist is needed. Hence, when thinking of going into the process of cancer chemotherapy, you really need to visit a reliable medical center where qualified therapists can be reached.

Cancer Chemotherapy is used to treat localized cancers but also to fight Metastatic cancers or cancer cells scattered throughout the body.

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The Dismal Success of Anti-Cancer Treatments

A placebo is a term that describes the administration of a sugar pill or dummy procedure in order to test whether a drug or procedure is more effective than the power of belief. In an article in the Guardian (Thursday, June 20, 2002), Jerome Burne reported that "new research suggests that placebos work surprisingly well, ­ in fact, rather better than some conventional drugs."

A placebo (which literally means, "I shall please") is included as an indispensable element of every scientific study conducted today. The placebo effect is purely based on the subjective feelings of a person. Each person who is tested for the efficacy of a medical drug believes in the drug in a unique and unpredictable way. A certain number of people may have a hopeful, trusting disposition and, therefore, a stronger placebo response than others. Others may be suffering from depression, which is known to affect a person's ability to respond positively to any kind of treatment. As a result, one study may "prove" a particular drug to be effective for, let us say, a certain kind of cancer. However, if a repeat experiment is conducted with different subjects, this drug may turn out to be ineffective when compared to the placebo response.

For this reason, pharmaceutical companies instruct their paid researchers to publish only the most favorable findings from these various experiments. Those parts of the study where the drug has had no or only an insignificant advantage over the placebo effect are simply omitted from the study's final report.

The drug companies reporting their findings to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only need to prove that the tested drug has shown some benefit in some people. If the researchers manage to recruit enough candidates with a positive disposition that are likely to produce a good placebo response to the drug treatment, they may hit the jackpot and produce a "convincing" study, and a marketable drug.

This is a no-brainer for drug makers since FDA approval is granted to anti-cancer drugs based on response rates that are at best in the 10-20 percent. In addition, the "success" of most clinical cancer studies is measured by tumor shrinkage instead of mortality rate. In other words, even if most of the subjects died but had their tumors shrunk through aggressive treatments, the study would be hailed as a great success and a medical breakthrough.

Any such attempt to treat the human body as if it were a machine that just responds to mechanical or chemical manipulation is bound to have serious setbacks. Such an approach is not only unscientific, but also unethical and potentially harmful. For many cancer patients whose immune systems are already compromised, just one dose of chemotherapy or radiation can turn out to be fatal.

Senior cancer physician, Dr. Charles Moertel of the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, once aptly summarized the modern cancer treatment dilemma in the following words: "Our most effective regimens are fraught with risks and side effects and practical problems, and after this price is paid by all the patients we have treated, only a small fraction are rewarded with a transient period of usually incomplete tumor regression."

The success record of modern cancer therapy is dismal, significantly less than even the weakest placebo response. On the average, remission occurs in only about 7 percent of cancer patients. Moreover, there is no evidence that this discouragingly low 7 percent "success rate" results from the treatments offered; it could just as well be in spite of the treatments. This is more likely, since not treating cancer at all has a much higher success rate than treating it. A drug treatment that promises temporary tumor shrinkage in 10 percent of patients is not a promising therapy; rather, it is a dangerous gamble with their life.

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[This is an excerpt from the book CANCER IS NOT A DISEASE, IT'S A SURVIVAL MECHANISM by Andreas Moritz, available on http://www.ener-chi.com/book.htm ]

Moritz is a writer-practitioner in the field of Integrative Medicine and author of 13 books on various subjects pertaining to holistic health such as 'Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation', 'Feel Great, Lose Weight', 'The Amazing Liver & Gallbladder Flush' and his newest book 'Vaccine-Nation: Poisoning the Population, One Shot at a Time'.

Andreas Moritz can be contacted on http://www.facebook.com/enerchi.wellness

Copyright © 2011 Andreas Moritz

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Childhood Cancer: Why Me? Why Her? Why Us?

When your child is diagnosed with cancer, you can't help but ask yourself all sorts of practical "why" questions.

You scour your brain trying to figure out why your child got cancer when there are millions of other children that don't? Was it the fluorinated water we gave our children thinking it was good for them? Was it the fertility medications that I took while trying to conceive? Was it the prednisone that the doctor told me that I had to take in order to sustain the pregnancy? Why didn't I force her to eat more fruits and vegetables?

Then I moved on to spiritual questions. Why would God allow this to happen to a child? Why would He allow a child to be diagnosed with a disease that is so painful? Why didn't we have more warning so we could have caught it earlier? Why us? We are good people. We haven't done anything bad. We have attempted to take good care of our children and be upstanding people in the community.

Colleen was diagnosed in September 2007. I continue to ask myself many of these questions to this day. The frequency at which I ask myself has slowed and I feel like I can answer some of the questions, but I continue to ask them anyway because I am not always content with the answers.

I vividly remember a conversation that I had with a close friend and spiritual advisor shortly after Colleen was diagnosed. I remember asking her "How could God allow this to happen to her?" Her answer was brief but powerful and I will never forget it.

"God is crying along with you," she said. She continued on to remind me that God has given us all free will. As a result, we sadly live in a fallen world full of pollutants and dangers that have the potential to harm us (and our children). He can't save us all. What He can do is support us on our journeys if we choose to let Him.

One of the hardest situations for me was when people told me that they were praying for Colleen to get her miracle. I am a woman of deep faith. Sadly, however, I did not have faith that the multitudes of tumors in my daughter's body were going to suddenly disappear from the scans. So those prayer offers often upset me. Prayers for comfort, peace and pain-free days were much more welcome. But how do you say that to someone?

I was speaking to a friend the other day whose son has terminal brain cancer. He was in hospice for several months, the family in a holding pattern, not quite sure how many days they had left with their precious son. When people asked her what they should pray for, she would say that she just didn't want him to suffer.

A couple of months ago, he began to gain his energy back. He started to feel better and he was happy and playful. The family excused hospice, as their services did not seem to be needed any longer. I spoke to his mom last week, she was devastated because the new scan results came back and they were "all lit up," meaning that the cancer had spread significantly. She was so confused. How can this little boy that seemed to be feeling so much better be riddled with cancer? I told her that I was very sorry to hear about the scan results. She must be horribly confused. But it sounds to me like God had answered her prayers. He wasn't suffering.

I asked her if she had peace. She said she did but that she felt guilty for having it. Boy, can I relate to that! I feel guilt every time I consider that I am happier in my career now, as a result of my newfound career (helping children with cancer and their families) than before Colleen died. But then I have to remind myself, as I did my friend on the phone that day, that this is a beautiful gift that God bestowed on me and we should never, ever feel guilty for the gifts God gives us.

So why her? Why us? Nobody can answer that question. Why anyone? What I do know is that each of us is put on a path in our lives, and we can choose to live that life triumphantly like Colleen did or choose to kick and scream the entire time. I am very proud of my daughter and the number of lives she touched through her unfortunate and painful journey. However, I found my purpose and that is an incredible gift that I will always be grateful for.

Diane Moore is the founder and executive director of Striving for More, a Triangle-based nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that children with cancer and their families receive quality emotional and spiritual support. Visit http://www.striving4more.org/ for more information.

Diane Moore, Founder and Executive Director
Striving For More, Inc.
http://www.striving4more.org/
Info@Striving4More.org

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