Why is the success rate of chemotherapy very low? And is it possible to improve that?

One of the main reasons for cancer chemo-resistance is increase patient drug tolerance due to increase in cellular drug excretion of the chemotherapeutic. Furthermore chemotherapeutic drugs are generally not specific for particular cancers, they generally affect only cells that divide, dormant cancer stem cell are generally not effected by chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy approach also ignores the fact that most cancers are heterogeneous and not homogeneous, this is a further cause of chemo-resistance

Other possible reasons include: increase drug detoxification, alter drug receptor sensitivity , increase cellular repair mechanism and genetic polymorphism and altered pH gradients across cancer cells and poor cellular immunity.

In many case chemotherapy is a self defeating immune therapy as most chemotherapeutic drugs decrease white cell counts.

Chemotherapy can be improved by using a ketogenic diet with the chemotherapy and inhibiting or down regulating drug excretion cellular transporters with the supplementation of luteolin, quercetin, curcumin, green tea polyphenols

There are many other nutritional techniques that can improve patient survival. I encourage people to read my text book published by BioConcept press

Cancer The Importance of Clinical Nutrition in Prevention and Treatment - Henry Osiecki 2012""

Thank you so much, Henry, for your answer. Yes i have heard that chemotherapy kills the healthy cells too. So, are you suggesting that chemotherapy can still be used if it is accompanied with correct nutrition? Best wishes

Chemotherapy is especially successful with testicular cancer and leukemias. The issue is side effects of the chemotherapy particularly long term such as chemo brain symptoms and increase in cognitive decline and heart disease. The benefits of chemo can be improve, side effects minimized by instigating a preventative nutrition strategy. I f applied the chemotherapeutic dose will reduce the effectiveness of chemo will be greater.

Another way of reducing side effects is to give the chemo at night when white blood cells are less active this reduce the risk of neutropenia. i.e chronobiology must also be considered.

I am not personally against chemo or radiation, I just know through my clinical experience that you can drastically improve outcome and quality of life of these patients if more thought was used in the selection of drugs and nutritional strategies and timing of the treatment

Thank you, Henry, for your insightful comments. Best wishes

Peter M Couttie

Chemotherapy is wrong in principle in that you are destroying the immune system of the body which fights the cancer. We should be giving the body the help it needs; the nutrients which are used by the body , iodine, selenium and ascorbic acid primarily and the lesser vitamins and minerals eg zinc etc . We must remember that every vitamin and mineral needs about 20 others to work properly as any "assembly line" or chemical cascade uses many enzymes and every enzyme uses several different VMTE (vit. minerals, trace elements) so it is silly to try only one as the drug firms do looking for a "magic bullet" Dr Hoffer treated over a 1000 terminal cancer cases with natural nurients especially ascorbate as it is the only one that can act alone and most animals make it in their liver, - except for us poor humans who suffer from that dreadful genetic liver enzyme disease, hypoascorbemia due to a mutation in our evolution. Dr Hoffer's results far exceeded chemotherapy. The latter of course is worth billions to the drug industry.

We should be using the ODA of iodine and selenium to prevent cancer and mega dose sodium ascorbate to cure it.

Might as well speak to a brick wall. Money rules this world.

@Peter, thank you for your answer. I agree with you that the very low success rate of chemotherapy seems to indicate that there is something wrong with the accepted approach. Btw do you know a paper or did your write a paper on this issue? Thank you

No, - This is just a summary of my of my opinion of reading and research for the past

50 odd years. A full answer would take weeks ! I suggest you use the web on people like Drs Guy Abraham. Cathcart, Klenner, Hoffer,Brownstein, Linus Pauling etc and look up past articles in the Journals of OrthoMolecular Medicine, Australian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine, the Townsend Letter, etc.There are literally thousands of papers on the use of natural remedies of just ascorbic acid. I can forward my own unpublished summary papers on iodine, selenium ,boron ,ascorbates.

Peter M Couttie

@Peter, thank you. Yes i remember that Dr. Linus Pauling once suggested large dose of ascorbate acid, but its correlation with cancer survival is debatable. But if you have a paper or two, please kindly send to my email: victorchristianto@gmail.com. Thanks

Doctors of Traditional Chinese Medicine think chemotherapy destroy the immune system of the patient.

@Yongsuo. Thank you for your answer. Do you know a paper explaining further how chemotherapy destroys the immune system? And how can we improve it? Thanks

there are lots of related articles about this. You can search with google scholar.

@Yongsuo. Ok thanks

A problem is surely that many therapies were developed with xenograft models in immunocompromised mice, simply ignoring the imapct of chemotherapy on the immune system. I think it is very important that during drug development people also take the effort to test their candidate in an immunocompetent model with murine tumors or in humanized mouse.

In our company we make an effort of establishing more and more models where this kind of study can be performed with several mouse cell lines. http://www.proqinase.com/content/view/32

@Katrin: thanks for your answer. Do you have a paper on your method? Best wishes

chemo drugs are not specific to specific cancer.one reason is there are multiple causes of cancer and in many cases definative etiology is not known.

now with help of nanotechnology targeted therapies are developing which help in reaching specific targets and killing them only and sparing noramal tissues thereby reducing toxicity.. various formulations are in various stages of trials with some avaible for use.

Why is the success rate of chemotherapy is very low? And it is possible to improve this?

This is a startling questions.

At the present time, had already had 3-5 generations oncologists and gone into oblivion initial chemotherapy appointment as "therapy of last chance." The lack of real clinical experience plays a bad joke with scientists researching in the field of Oncology: chemotherapy initially was neither etiotropic or pathogenetic treatment and, therefore, was not designed to cure cancer patients. What can be improved in the chemotherapy? If chemotherapy was originally intended to make it clear to the doctor and the patient that there is still hope? If the severity of the condition during chemotherapy gave a moral right to tell the doctor (for relatives of patients) that "the body of patient suffered no treatment, we did everything we could" but the truth remains buried forever in the heart doctor? The problem is not chemotherapy but distant from the real scientific medicine representations about cancer.

Because of the impotence of science to cancer, the chemotherapy gradually became the most advanced cancer treatment.

This situation gives rise to questions such as: how to improve what was originally not intended for normal operation.

PS: Rather than "therapy last chance" - "therapy of despair."

@Shrikant and Denis: thank you for your answers. Yours

Let me advise you of our article, which sanctified these questions - "Pathogenesis of Cancer: Cancer Reparative Trap" Online http://www.scirp.org/journal/JCT/ (DOI: 10.4236 / jct.2015.65043).

The success rate of chemotherapy is not very low. It's actually very high in certain cancers. You can't lump all cancer together. Hematological cancers, for example, respond very well to chemotherapy nowadays. For example, acute promyelocytic leukemia can be cured with all-trans-retinoic acid (a form of vitamin A) combined with chemotherapy in over 80%. The cure rate for a metastasized choriocarcinoma is over 90% with methotrexate alone or methotrexate combined with other chemotherapeutics. Some cancers respond well to chemotherapy, others not so well, and for some cancers, chemotherapy is not even indicated.

There is not just one 'chemotherapy', but lots of different drugs regarded as chemotherapy. The above mentioned vitamin A, for example, is a chemotherapy.

I don't know where you got the information from, that 80% of oncologists would not undergo chemotherapy if they had cancer. Someone must have made this up.

Your link to the "herbal chemotherapy" does not lead to a credible scientific website, but instead to a sales website for overpriced dietary supplements and questionable books. You can't cure cancer with dietary supplements, vegetable juice etc.

I suggest that one studies the application of i/v ascorbateas used by many doctors  in OrthoMolecular medicine also Dr Levy's books as "Curing the Incurable" etc.

Also lifestyle changes of diet etc as detailed for example  in Dr Budwig's Clinic 

I would suggest that far more than 50% cures would be achieved.

Dr Peter m Couttie

It seems like it's easy to read the cited study incorrectly and the authors don't help much with that. Just looking at hemotherapy has substantial success rates in some areas but those are mostly relatively rare cancers. It has low success rates in some other rare cancers where we just have no success with any treatment. And, in that cited paper, it's also showing a low success rate in relatively common cancers where surgery and radiation are pretty successful (if not ideal, i.e. breast cancer). As near as I can tell those successful treatments are included in the denominator against chemotherapy because it's the total number of cases reported in the denominator but only successes exclusively attributable to chemotherapy in the numerator. Consider that in breast cancer chemotherapy is only given as a last resort in very stubborn cases, that successful treatments of other kinds are counted in the denominator, and that it's a very common cancer then this total average is going to be a low number.

The other link on holistic cures doesn't actually cite any verifiable research reports and the links don't ever go anywhere to provide further information.

thanks John

vic

A few papers of interest, for those interested:

Triptolide Inhibits Lung Cancer Cell Migration, Invasion, and Metastasis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26298168

Triptolide Inhibits the Proliferation of Prostate Cancer Cells and Down ...

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037693

Triptolide inhibits the migration and invasion of human prostate cancer ...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332216312008

Targeted treatment of cancer with artemisinin and artemisinin-tagged ...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16185154

Antitumor Activity of Artemisinin and Its Derivatives: From a Well ...

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2012/247597/

Oridonin inhibits breast cancer growth and metastasis through ...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319016417301019

Proteus mirabilis inhibits cancer growth and pulmonary metastasis in a ...

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188960

Clove extract inhibits tumor growth and promotes cell cycle arrest and ...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24854101

Astragalus extract inhibits proliferation but enhances apoptosis in ...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27731799

Livistona extract inhibits angiogenesis and cancer growth. - NCBI - NIH

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11605065

Green tea (Camellia sinensis) extract inhibits both the metastasis and ...

www.arthroplastyjournal.org/article/S0955-2863(13)00260-X/fulltext

and more...

I am not a doctor, but I have spoken with countless individuals who have survived cancer through natural means (diet, colonics and supplements) to boost their immune systems and detoxify their bodies. I have had a natural health store for more than twenty-five years and have read many books and articles as well as heard testimonials on this process.

What is ironic is that now the "breakthrough" method of cancer treatment that is touted by the medical establishment is the use of the individual's own immune system. Of course they say that the immune system must be "enhanced" by their drugs in order to work. They call it CAR-T cell therapy and they will provide it for one-half million dollars with the disclaimer that the boosted immune system might attack other organs. (TIME Mag. 12/25/2017).

Here's an idea - let people keep their one-half million dollars and use a small portion of it to buy organic vegetables and supplements, and maybe pay a practitioner to monitor their progress. Their naturally tuned-up immune systems will love all of their organs rather than attack them.

How gullible do we have to be to believe that we should pay the medical community one-half million dollars to use our own system that is in place naturally?

Any update on this question and its answers 4 years later?

It is well known that cancer survival success for the most part uses a five-year survival rate as a benchmark. This doesn't mean that cancer/s can't recur after five years, as a matter of fact over the past 35 years that I have been in practice, I have seen it happen more times than I can count.

Trying to ‘broad brush’ treatment and survival stats is an impossible task because there are so many variables to take into account.

Many cancers can recur decades after first being discovered and treated, especially if radiation is also part of the treatment plan. And if it isn’t the original cancer that was treated that comes back, it may be some other form. Biochemical individuality, lifestyle, age and so many other environmental components all factor into your survival rate.

A study in ‘05’ looked into the survival rates of chemo patients, and without going into a lot of detail one of the researchers made this statement, “Some practitioners still remain optimistic that cytotoxic chemotherapy will significantly improve cancer survival; however, despite the use of new and expensive single and combination drugs to improve response rates...there has been little impact from the use of newer regimens" (Morgan 2005).

They also stated that "...in lung cancer, the median survival has increased by only 2 months [during the past 20 years, ed.] and an overall survival benefit of less than 5 percent has been achieved in the adjuvant treatment of breast, colon and head and neck cancers."

It is also a known fact that chemo suppresses immune function and causes an enormous amount of systemic cellular damage, which in many cases the patient never recovers from. There is also the issue that chemo has little or no effect on cancer stem cells. New research reveals that new cancer stem cells that have not been differentiated can multiply in spite of being exposed to chemotherapy.

It is unfortunate that tumors can and do initially respond to chemotherapy, which leads to a false sense of hope. Using chemo as part of any treatment plan can cause the cancer to eventually become resistant to it. This can, and often does contribute to aggressive tumor progression.

This is a multi-billion dollar business that because of politics, the insurance companies and the medical community’s lack of desire to think outside the lines, will most likely not change any time soon. Sorry about this last part being outside of the purview of your question, but it all ties in.

I am not an expert in the field of medicine, rather I am, and have been, a student of holism for more than 30 years. I also have the audacity to believe that, as thinking individuals, we have a responsibility to learn how our bodies work to the best of our abilities. In far too many instances, the medical profession has abdicated the right to demand, from all patients, total submission to its authority now that corporations are clearly in charge.

My understanding is that chemotherapy not only kills cancer (and healthy cells) but it has the capacity to drive remaining cancer deeper into the tissues where it can live quietly and undetected for long periods of time. Eventually, those cells again become apparent, appearing as "the return of cancer." Actually, it probably never left and has merely been dormant.

Holistic beliefs maintain that cancer is not an entity that invades the body from the outside. Instead, once- normal cells become renegade for any variety of reasons and proliferate in ways that do not follow the blueprint dictated by the body' DNA. Environments containing chemicals, preservatives, and other foreign agents are suspects. Extreme stress, and depletions from other cause vulnerability to the immune system.

The immune system plays a vital role in the avoidance of cancer and the cure must then involve the improvement of the environment in which the cells live, most notably the immune system.

I am trying some herbomineral formulations in Ovarian cancer. I got a significant result. Ayurveda Medicines like Pushpadhanwa rasa, Shilajatwadi Lauha, Kanchanar guggulu. Kindly find this article.

Kindly find these two research Paper.

I am very heartened by your work Dr. Dash and the work of your colleagues, as well, with regard to ovarian Cancer and Ayurvedic herbal formulas. I am, admittedly limited in knowledge of the advanced biochemical terminology contained in your article, having stated previously that I am not a medical professional.

It is your acknowledgment of the limitations of the currently-used therapies for cancer treatment that will motivate others in y our profession to work towards more effective treatments. Congratulations!