Newsletter #366
Lee Euler, Editor
Lee Euler, Editor
2 February 2014
What if the very thing the big-money-medical system developed to stop cancer is actually the thing that fuels its growth?
It’s mind-boggling but true: New bombshell evidence from the prestigious science journal Nature Medicine in the U.K. shows that chemotherapy is not just ineffective, but very likely causes cancer cells to grow and spread. This news is a catastrophe for cancer patients who rely on conventional treatments.
Three strikes against it,
Why isn’t chemo out?
Why isn’t chemo out?
Here’s what we know for sure about chemo: Its goal is to kill cancer cells, but it can’t do that without traumatizing normal, healthy cells. That’s why chemo is so hard on the body—it damages the good along with the bad.
Unlike local treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy that act only in one area of the body, chemotherapy is typically a systemic treatment because it travels throughout the body to reach cancer cells wherever they’re located.
Efficacy rates for chemo aren’t that impressive, but side effects are practically guaranteed, numerous, and severe. They range from nausea and other gastrointestinal issues to severe loss of appetite, hair loss, fever, infertility, heart and kidney problems, nerve damage, lung tissue damage, and death. Some chemotherapy drugs actually list “death” as a side effect.
Over a hundred different chemotherapy drugs and drug combinations are used to treat cancer, backed by a drug industry that pulls in billions of dollars a year.
According to Medical Alerts put out by the Johns Hopkins Medical System, one in five cancer patients under 65 years of age delay treatment because of the high cost (65 being the magic age when you qualify for Medicare).
Given the high cost and the serious side effects, chemotherapy is far from ideal. It might be worth it if the success rates were more impressive, but they aren’t – especially for late-stage cancer.
But now this? The possibility that chemotherapy not only doesn’t work well … but actually grows cancer cells? It’s a wonder anybody still bothers with it.
Why chemo promotes cancer growth
and resistance to therapy
Here’s what the study in Nature Medicine says: Once started, chemotherapy makes it harder to stamp out cancer than it would have been if you’d never begun treatment at all.
Up till now, most folks thought chemotherapy drugs were supposed to damage quickly-dividing cancer cells so those cells stop dividing and taking over the patient’s body. And it’s well known that, as part of the chemo process, healthy cells also get damaged. But because healthy cells divide less frequently than do cancer cells, they are thought to suffer less damage.
But here’s where it gets interesting. According to this study, the healthy cells that are damaged often include a type of cell called a fibroblast. Once damaged, the fibroblasts then begins to play a significant role in promoting cancer growth in the area around the tumor, the tumor’s microenvironment.
The damaged fibroblasts do this by ramping up their transcription of RNA coding for the protein WNT16B by up to 64-fold. This particular protein is a signaling molecule. Oddly enough, this signaling molecule plays a role in the development of cancer (also called oncogenesis).
So when healthy cells produce WNT16B and release it into extracellular fluid, it has a strange effect on the tumor microenvironment. You can think of the microenvironment as the tumor’s neighborhood. The WNT16B proteins “activate” the Wnt signaling pathway. In turn, this promotes cell growth for any cancer cells in the area. So those cancer cells grow and flourish, and they do it with a renewed resistance to chemo.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in conjunction with several other research centers. They found this elevation of WNT16B transcriptions in the stroma (supportive tissue) of prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers that were treated with chemotherapy.
When these same researchers examined prostate cancer patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy (treatment given before primary therapy), they found higher post-therapy levels of WNT16B in the tumor microenvironment. In turn, these patients showed an increased chance of cancer relapse.
So chemo doesn’t work… “let’s keep trying it!”
At a minimum, these tests underscore the fact that substances released into the tumor environment by nonmalignant cells have the power to influence cancer growth. They can also affect cancer invasiveness and response to chemotherapy. This helps explain why it’s a nearly universal problem that patients with solid tumors, especially those tumors that have spread throughout the body, become totally resistant to chemo.
What’s even more annoying is that some scientists interpret this study as a way to understand cancer drug resistance and solve it. Rather than seeing chemotherapy as an ultimate failure, they look at its cancer-promoting properties as problem to be solved on the way to making it work.
Specifically, they want to find a way to block the work of those fibroblasts that crank out the WNT16B protein.
Scientists behind the therapies claim that the real problem with chemotherapy is that the necessary dose to wipe out cancer is lethal to the patient. They claim to be able to “cure” just about any kind of cancer in a petri dish, but can’t replicate those results in humans because the lethal doses required kill a patient’s healthy cells and, if pushed far enough, the patient. Scientists keep looking for a way around this by strategizing more ways to target specific cells with chemo.
Underscores the value of proven
natural treatments, don’t you think?
Here’s the thing. People are not petri dishes full of cancer cell cultures. They’re composed mostly of healthy cells (one hopes). Chemotherapy merely sets up a race to see if all a patient’s cancer cells can be killed off before the patient dies of the collateral damage to his healthy cells. Quite a few patients lose the race. And nearly ALL late-stage patients lose the race.
Conventional scientists, mostly funded by drug companies, put much of their energy into figuring out chemo resistant cancer cells instead of working with compounds that have proven themselves against cancer and are harmless toward normal cells.
They also put a great of their energy into researching “targeted” drug therapies that interrupt cancer at the molecular level. Such drugs, if successful, WOULD kill only cancer cells while doing no harm to healthy cells. It sounds like a great idea, and Big Science puts out a steady stream of press releases about progress on this front.
Unfortunately, this strategy is also doomed to failure, because cancer cells mutate very rapidly and adapt quickly to almost any targeted drug. The cancer cells we’re fighting now aren’t the same as the cancer cells we were fighting ten years ago. And as far as that goes, the cancer cells a cancer patient is fighting in his last days of life aren’t the same as those he or she was fighting when first diagnosed. That’s how fast cancer cells change.
For these reasons, most of the billions of dollars spent on cancer research are wasted. The entire thrust of their efforts is misguided and hopelessly off the mark.
Imagine if even ten percent of that money was used to explore the many herbs and alternative treatments we already know hold promise.
