When I was at med school (ever so many years ago!) there was a professorial joke: “Half of what we are going to teach you will be out of date in ten years. The trouble is, we don’t know which half!” It has always been like that.
Medical science (legit medical science) continues to move apace. About 15 years ago I wrote a book called Cancer Confidential, now Cancer Research Secrets. At the time, orthodox oncology was stuck in a really bad rut, killing and maiming, rather than healing and comforting.
I do give myself credit however, for predicting future successes would come from working with Nature, not against her. About that time photodynamic therapy made an appearance. That’s a technique where chemo is activated by light but only where it is needed.
Then (at last!) came the start of immune therapies… persuading the body to produce competent antibodies against cancer cells. That would be the ultimate treatment, wouldn’t it? And the end to the problem of chemo resistance. The body itself could mop up the last of the rogue cells, from every nook and cranny, which is what chemo really fails to do. That’s why the tumor comes back.
One of the big successes has been the immune method against skin melanoma, a pretty gloomy cancer. But, according to a Feb 2023 article in the journal Cancers, we have entered a “new era” of treatment for melanoma. The use of immunotherapy in the treatment of advanced and high-risk melanoma has led to a striking improvement in outcomes. Although the incidence of melanoma has continued to rise, median survival has improved from approximately 6 months to nearly 6 years for patients with advanced inoperable stage IV disease.1
One of the greatest triumphs is against childhood leukemia of the acute lymphoblastic type (ALL), which is now the most common malignancy of childhood, accounting for approximately 25% of all childhood cancers.
In 1960, the survival rate was horrible: less than 20% lived 5 years. Using nature’s own natural anti-inflammatories, corticosteroids, that rate has now increased to 90% survival overall. The great thing in this case is that if the child survives disease-free for 5 years, they are effectively cured. It is very rare for leukemia to come back after that length of time.2
But there is another cancer treatment I want to tell you about… You may not have noticed this major breakthrough a few years ago. It doesn’t help all cancers. In fact only a very narrow band: notably chronic myeloid leukemias (CML).
It’s so effective, this treatment has dropped the mortality rate dramatically. From having, at best, just 3 to 5 years of survival from diagnosis, CML sufferers now enjoy the same life expectancy as someone who has never had CML!
What is it? This treatment is called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). A modern oncologist describes it as “one of the greatest, most effective cancer drug interventions over the past 25 years.”3
Obviously TKIs need a bit of explaining.
Protein kinases are fundamental to the mischief caused by cancers. They send out “growth signals”, leading to tumor spread! If we could block their evil properties, we could hold back or even terminate cancers; at least render them relatively harmless, so that the body has a chance to fight back naturally.
Around 1 in every 40 human genes codes for a protein kinase.4
Interest in protein kinase inhibitors began with the FDA approval of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) imatinib in 2001. Since then, the application of TKIs has been ever-expanding, particularly for cancer treatment, due to tyrosine kinases’ critical roles in cellular signaling.
These really are miracle drugs. Of course the pharmaceutical industry is sitting on the patents, charging astronomical prices. And they abuse their income and play tricks to extend their monopoly and block the timely emergence of generics, once the patent expires. That’s business as usual. But we’ll get there in the end, thanks to help from those criminal Indian pharmacies! (please don’t wrote to me from India, I’m being sarcastic)
The world of cancer treatments really is changing. Not that cancer isn’t scary as hell. Or that obscene profits are being made by exploiting terrified patients (I nearly wrote customers!) But that, in the end, Nature has the wisdom and controls ALL the shots. If only Big Pharma would listen to Her, or doctors would break free of the corporate stranglehold over clinical choices…
Anyway, back to TKIs… according to Mikkael A. Sekeres, MD, MS, there has been one study which showed that life expectancy in successfully treated leukemia patients is now similar to the age-matched population as a whole who never had a diagnosis of leukemia. The average survival for these patients used to be 3-5 years.5
Mind you, for the patient, treatment is no walk in the park — unless that parkwas set in a bleak, Road Warrior-like post-apocalyptic landscape, says Sekeres. Blood counts quickly became devastated, with all the consequent vulnerabilities.
But that may be because the dose is simply too high. Sekeres comes up with the radical, not to say heretical, idea that maybe a lower dose would work just as well for some patients. Of course that would be blocked by Big Pharma, who want top dollar for their drugs.
One can only wait hopefully.
But since (statistically) one in two of us will get cancer, these humble markers of progress are comforting. It is possible to believe that we WILL beat cancer someday, not with the kack-handed, clumsy smash-everything-patient-will-die-but-who-cares? approach of standard chemo but with cunning and subtlety, totally alien to the drug industry!
Maybe chemo will be beaten in my lifetime! Haha!
To Your Good Health,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
References
- Cancers (Basel). 2023 Feb; 15(4): 1106. Published online 2023 Feb 9. doi: 10.3390/cancers15041106
- https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/leukemia-in-children/detection-diagnosis-staging/survival-rates.html
- Mikkael A. Sekeres, MD, MS, chief of the Division of Hematology and professor of medicine at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami. He is author of the books When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia (The MIT Press 2020), and Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public’s Trust (The MIT Press 2022)
- Roskoski R. Properties of FDA-approved small molecule protein kinase inhibitors: A 2020 update. Pharmacol Res. 2020 Feb;152:104609
- Ibid.
