Our clinic studied the results of treatment of all 379 consecutive cancer patients, all types of cancer, all stages, without exception, who came to our clinic over the course of 8 years and stayed at least two weeks in our care. We opened our clinic in 2006, and began to collect data from the patients who came to us. We stopped collecting data in 2014 due to the cumbersome nature of trying to reach a quickly increasing number of people. Patients did not necessarily continue with the same doctor as we grew, which impaired continuity of care. Also, voice mail and competition with enormous amounts of spam e-mail further hindered efforts at ongoing contact with patients who had left our clinic years earlier. So we stopped looking at this particular information in 2014.

However, every year we now survey patients while they are at our clinic, and ask more limited and more focused questions than we used to, every year focusing on a somewhat different topic. In 2015, we asked questions regarding a long list of foods and beverages. In 2016, we asked questions regarding outlook: optimism vs pessimism. Most years we ask questions regarding nutrition and exercise.

This article addresses specifically the difference in outcome between those patients that had chemotherapy and those who did not, among those who chose to come to our clinic and had natural treatments for cancer. Of course, those who did not come to our clinic did not have information that was available to us for our study. So all of the following patients had natural treatments for their cancers, and are therefore not representative of the whole of US cancer patients. Let’s compare those who had chemotherapy with those who did not.

Summarized outcomes of naturopathic treatment of 379 consecutive cancer patients

Table A

*This column has not been updated since 2010, due to the labor-intensive nature of this research, and not much expected change or significance of any change.

** Please see legend of abbreviations at the head of Table 1. For example, DDD: death after dietary dispute.

Now let’s summarize the above table to look at all of those in remission, and whether they had chemotherapy or not:

If we look at the two shaded columns of Table B, chemotherapy was far more correlated with death, and not having chemotherapy was far more correlated with remission.

Table B

We see in Table B that 88% of all the patients we treated did not have chemotherapy. However, 93% of those patients in remission did not have chemotherapy. Therefore, remission was more highly correlated with not having chemotherapy treatment than in the average patient. However, it is even more likely that chemotherapy was not helpful, or was harmful to cancer patients generally for this reason: People who choose to have naturopathic treatment for cancer are probably the least likely people to have chosen to have chemotherapy treatment. So therefore, the 88% figure is artificially high, and again not representative of the US cancer population as a whole.

The cornerstone of conventional treatment of cancer patients in the United States and many other countries is chemotherapy treatment. Of those who attended our clinic, and who later died in hospitals or conventional medicine clinics, only 32% did not have chemotherapy. 68% (=15 of 22) of those dying in conventional medical settings had received chemotherapy treatment.

Let’s look more specifically at what happened to the patients who left to have chemotherapy:

Table C:

Results for patients who left our treatments in order to have chemotherapy prior to 2013

This table has not been updated since July 2013. It shows that leaving our treatments to pursue chemotherapy only possibly benefited 4 of the 24 patients who had left (17%), but 9 others died after leaving for chemotherapy (38%). However, it is possible that those 4 would have gone into remission if they had continued with our treatments alone. This table has not been updated since 2013, because others who were thought to have left for chemotherapy could not be reached by phone. As of now, we have not attributed either pessimistic or optimistic outcomes to those we cannot reach; we simply record “NFI” for “no further information” in Table 1 of our long paper.ⁱ Sometimes good or bad information comes much later. In 2014, we were absolutely delighted to welcome to our clinic visits from two cancer survivors, after only our treatments, who had not been in contact with us for 5 years and 4 years respectively (Patients #288 and 295 of Table 1). One lives in an RV trailer, and happened to be passing through our area again. Similar long absences have ended in unexpected and very pleasant visits in each year since.

Of the patients who left our treatments to pursue chemotherapy, comparing only those who then went into remission or died, (13 total), 4 went into remission and 9 died. This is a 31% short-term success rate for chemotherapy, and a 69% fatality rate for chemotherapy among those who left to pursue it. This is similar to the figure of 68% in Table B, for those who died in hospitals at some point in time after having chemotherapy treatments.

Chemotherapy is known to be toxic, life-threatening and at times fatal. It is known to have a very poor track record long-term.ⁱⁱ

It is a long-held (and heavily purchased) dogmatic belief that chemotherapy is the weapon of choice against cancer. There are some problems with this:

One, there usually is no choice given. Newly diagnosed cancer patients are not told that there are any options other than chemotherapy. If a patient suggests to the oncologist that alternatives exist, that patient is usually told: But your cancer would respond especially well to chemotherapy; therefore, that is the treatment that you should have.

Two, chemotherapy is been oversold for its anti-cancer effect, and has been falsely promoted as effective against all cancers. A July 2017 article in Science Translational Medicine ⁱⁱⁱ found that chemotherapy actually increases the risk of metastasis. This progression to metastasis is what makes cancer especially deadly and beyond medical control.

Although chemotherapy generally dramatically reduces the size of tumors, not only does the remaining cancer metastasize more readily, but it also becomes more resilient to subsequent treatment.

After 10 years of working with cancer patients, I have become more and more convinced that the worst thing a cancer patient can do is choose to have chemotherapy. Those are the people who get sick and die, in my experience. Whereas those who avoid it have generally had much better success^iv in eliminating cancer from their bodies for the long-term.

Chemotherapy has been a financial boon to hospitals. Whereas “health” insurance has been slow or stubborn about paying for cheaper alternatives, those same insurance companies lavish enormous sums on oncology clinics for exorbitantly priced chemotherapy drugs, some of which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per dose.

The chemotherapy paradigm has been a misguided paradigm for cancer treatment, ever since it was first recycled from World War I and II chemical weapons. Isn’t it time to consider the many safe and effective natural alternatives ^v that exist?

The above information should give people pause before choosing to embark on chemotherapy.

This article was adapted from Chapter 6 of Manifesto For A Cancer Patient