We are always bombarded with all sorts of claims of improved treatments for cancer, along with reports of increased survival rates from cancer.  The standard statistic used to describe the effectiveness of cancer treatment is the 5 year survival rate.  This report will be an analysis of this statistic and other related issues.  In short, the cancer survival statistics appear to be ‘massaged’ in order to make conventional cancer treatments appear to be more effective than they really are.  If the true cure rates were widely known, most people would shun them and demand better strategies.

The first problem is with the 5 year survival rate.  The way that this metric is tabulated is in such a way that the condition of the patient is not a consideration.  It is misleading for a person to have been deemed a success if have survived for 5 years, but have suffered in serious pain, or some other malady that is not pleasant.  In short, they do not factor in the patient’s quality of life.  What good is it if the patient is alive, but in excruciating pain?  Traditional cancer treatments are notorious for doing damage to the body and causing very unpleasant side effects.

In addition, it is reported that physicians and statisticians now count patients that do not actually have cancer as treatment successes.  They also count many who have non-lethal skin cancers as being successfully treated, and this serves to make it appear as if there are significant breakthroughs in the effectiveness of conventional cancer treatments. Data from both local and metastasized cancers are combined, and the comparisons are not randomized.  Early diagnosis of cancer also has the effect of making it appear as if patients are living longer, but this is not true because the survival time is extended in the front end of diagnosis, not because of the effectiveness of the cancer treatment.

There are other serious problems with the way in which cancer research is conducted. Researchers have been known to ‘cherry pick’ the subjects in their studies.  If cancer patients in the control group die during the study, they are reported as deaths in the control group, but if the patients in the experimental group die (i.e., the ones receiving the treatment being tested), they are removed from the data.  This obviously skews the results and makes the treatment appear to be safer and more effective than it really is.  Researchers and physicians have been known to value the conventional treatment regimen more than the welfare of the patient. This is how they can say that the treatment was a success even though the patient died.

It has also been found that many cancer patients who receive conventional cancer treatment may technically die from other causes, but the chemotherapy and radiation were ultimately responsible for the death.  So when chemotherapy destroys a patient’s immune system, the patient may succumb to the pneumonia, or some other infection from which a healthy person would easily be able to recover.  The death will be reported to have been caused by pneumonia or another disease, but not from cancer, and especially not from the cancer treatment.  It is known that radiation can cause strokes in patients, even years after radiation therapy is done.  These fatalities are not recorded as being caused by radiation.

The lesson to be learned is that the cancer statistics that we are being given by organizations like the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are not what they appear to be.  So when you are told about survival rates for treatments by medical professionals, you should be very wary.  The statistics that I have seen indicate that the true 5 year survival rate for patients who take chemotherapy is around the 2-3% range.  These are some of the critical facts that cancer patients need to know before they decide to rely on conventional cancer treatments.