For more than 60 years, traditional cancer treatments, including chemotherapy for solid tumors, have failed in about 90 percent of cases. Despite huge amounts of money spent, the results have been very disappointing. Up to 50% of patients with early-stage cancers experience recurrence, meaning that even after successful initial treatment, the cancer can return and pose further challenges.
According to a 2018 analysis published in Clinical and Translational Medicine the majority of cancer treatments including chemotherapy fail to effectively treat cancer:
“For over six decades reductionist approaches to cancer chemotherapies including recent immunotherapy for solid tumors produced outcome failure-rates of 90% (±5) according to governmental agencies and industry. Despite tremendous public and private funding and initial enthusiasm about missile-therapy for site-specific cancers, molecular targeting drugs for specific enzymes such as kinases or inhibitors of growth factor receptors, the outcomes are very bleak and disappointing.” (PMID: 29541939)
This highlights a critical issue: while these treatments sometimes show promise in controlled laboratory settings, they often fall short in real-world clinical scenarios. These treatments are narrow in their scope, targeting specific aspects of the cancer cells without addressing the broader systemic nature of the disease. This limited approach can result in treatments that are not only ineffective but also potentially harmful, because they do not consider the complex interactions within the body that contribute to cancer progression. Consequently, while significant resources are invested in developing these therapies, their impact remains disappointingly limited.
Why do cancer treatments keep failing?
- Most research has been dedicated to finding and targeting specific genetic mutations in cancer cells. This method may work well in the lab or in animals but often fails in humans because cancer is much more complex. In addition, genes often play no role in causing cancer.
- Most treatments are dedicated to killing cancer cells. However, who’s to say what replaces the cancer cell won’t be cancerous?
- As a result, conventional treatments can be ineffective or even harmful.
There are several contributing factors:
- Non-Specific Treatments: Traditional chemotherapy and radiation therapy target rapidly dividing cells, including healthy tissues causing non-selective toxicity. This causes severe side effects and limits the dosage that can be safely administered.
- Patient Variability: People react differently to treatments due to each patient’s unique bio individuality, overall health, and other terrain factors, making it hard to predict who will respond well to a particular therapy.
- Hormonal Output of Cancer: Cancer cells produce excessive or abnormal levels of hormones such as estrogen and cortisol. This hormonal dysregulation can promote cancer growth and survival, interfere with the body’s normal metabolic processes, and complicate the effectiveness of treatments. Chemotherapy & radiation do not address these imbalances, so they fail to fully control or eradicate the cancer.
- Tumor Microenvironment: Tumors create a supportive environment for themselves, including blood vessels that provide nutrients and pathways for metastasis. This environment can also protect cancer cells and help them evade treatments.
- Hypoxia: Many tumors have areas with low oxygen levels which hinder the delivery of chemotherapy drugs. Poorly oxygenated areas may have abnormal blood vessels that are leaky or irregular, which makes it difficult for drugs to penetrate these regions and reach all cancer cells.
- Immune Suppression: Cancer can suppress the body’s immune response, making it harder for the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells.
- Lactic Acid: Cancer cells often produce an excess lactic acid which creates a highly acidic extracellular environment. The acidity promotes cancer growth and can cause blood vessels to become leaky and irregular. This disruption can impair the delivery of drugs into the tumor, reducing the effectiveness of cancer treatments and the ability of treatments to target cancer cells.
People often die going through cancer treatments, rather than from the cancer:
- Sepsis: Cancer treatments can increase patients’ vulnerability to infections. If an infection escalates to sepsis, a severe and widespread response to infection, it can cause widespread inflammation, organ dysfunction, and severely impair the immune system. This not only disrupts cancer treatment but can also lead to life-threatening complications and, in severe cases, contribute to patient mortality.
- Cachexia: This severe wasting syndrome as a result of chemotherapy, characterized by significant loss of weight, muscle mass, and appetite. Cachexia weakens patients and increases their vulnerability to the severe side effects of cancer treatments, potentially leading to organ failure and death.
- Drug Toxicity: Cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation are nonspecific and target healthy tissues. This can lead to severe side effects and damage vital organs, further weakening the patient and increasing the risk of mortality.
Unfortunately, many cancer drugs are expensive and ineffective, offering little benefit to patients. Despite significant investments in development and research, many drugs fail to provide the hoped-for results.These treatments also can have severe side effects, including drug resistance, relapse, organ failure, and increase patients’ mortality risk.
Current cancer treatments fail because they focus too narrowly and fail to address the environment which allowed cancer to develop in the first place. To improve outcomes, we need to adopt broader strategies that include prevention and a better understanding of how cancer interacts with the body.
Cancer is a complex, systemic disease and each patient has a unique biological makeup. This poses significant challenges when treating cancer. Individual variations among patients make it difficult to develop universally effective treatments. We need to take a holistic approach and consider all possible treatments for patients, taking into account their metabolic, hormonal, immune, and toxin profiles. By addressing the full complexity of the disease and the individual patient, we can develop more effective and personalized treatment strategies.