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.