New research carried out by an international team of scientists has further confirmed that chemotherapy encourages the spread of cancer. Published in the Nature Cell Biology journal, the study looks at two commonly used chemotherapy drugs, paclitaxel and doxorubicin, and examines how breast cancer cells respond to them. Confirming what other studies have reported for years now, the researchers found that use of this extremely toxic class of drugs can trigger the onset of new tumors in other parts of the body.
The study describes how use of the two chemotherapy drugs in breast cancer results in specific proteins being produced. These circulate in the blood and, upon reaching the lungs, cause the release of further proteins and immune cells that can facilitate the development of metastatic cancer cells. Through its continued sale and promotion of toxic chemotherapy drugs for cancer, the pharmaceutical industry is thus ensuring that, far from eradicating the disease, it continues to exist. Small wonder, therefore, that the size of the global oncology market is expected to reach an eye-watering $200 billion annually by the year 2022.
The toxicity of chemotherapy drugs is hardly a modern phenomenon. The first ones were derived from mustard gas, a chemical warfare agent used in the First World War. Introduced as cancer treatments from the 1940s onwards, the search for medical applications of mustard compounds continued through to the 1970s. Illustrating how little progress has since been made in the conventional treatment of cancer, chemical derivatives of mustard gas are still being used on patients today.
As a result of this medical blind alley, the World Health Organization estimates that cancer is now responsible for 9.6 million deaths per year. Breast cancer and lung cancer are the most common forms of the disease, with each seeing over 2 million cases per year.
The total annual economic cost of cancer is equally startling, amounting to more than $1 trillion each year. Not only is there no sign of this decreasing, but with the price of some new so-called monoclonal antibodies or biosimilar molecules for cancer now reaching $700,000 per patient per year, the damage to national health services and economies is likely to increase still further in the coming years.
Clearly, therefore, with both the incidence of cancer and its economic costs continuing to rise, the pharmaceutical approach is not the answer to this deadly disease.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the fact is that chemotherapy drugs are not the only pharmaceutical chemicals that encourage cancer. In their groundbreaking Victory Over Cancer book, Dr. Rath and Dr. Niedzwiecki describe how, in the 9th edition of the United States National Institutes of Health Report on Carcinogens, almost half of the substances listed as causes of cancer are pharmaceutical drugs. Examples include the vast majority of drugs used in the treatment of cancer, around half of all antibiotics, more than half of drugs prescribed for depression and mental health disorders, almost all immunosuppressive drugs, as well as anti-ulcer drugs, anti-allergy drugs, and many other types of medications.
Seen in this light, the new study confirming the dangers of chemotherapy acts as a timely reminder of why we have to terminate the pharmaceutical ‘business with disease’. Not only does drug-based medicine fail to correct the micronutrient deficiencies that are the primary cause of chronic diseases, it is also self-perpetuating: the incidence of cancer – one of the biggest killers in industrialized countries – is being further fueled by the treatments patients are given to supposedly make them well again. The need for us to bring this immoral charade to an end is both urgent and growing.