Monday, September 10, 2007

Chemotherapy: Why Not

A book highly rated on amazon written by Dr. Ralph Moss, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's science writer. He started out writing praiseworthy articles on chemotherapy's merits and then did a total 180. Check out this page on amazon, which contains Dr. Moss' reason for writing the book as well as other related items such as "Outsmart Your Cancer: Alternative Non-Toxic Treatments That Work".

How I came upon this material. Cardiac surgeon Dr. Donald Miller wrote an article on one of his contemporaries: Dr. Peter H. Duesberg, who is a member of UC Berkeley's faculty and has done some controversial (but I believe probably correct) work on AID$. With regards to cancer, Dr. Duesberg has advanced the theory of aneuploidy. Normal cells are euploids (i.e. they contain 46 chromosomes) but aneuploids either contain too many or too few. Per Dr. Miller, "Since aneuploidy is inherently unstable, cancer cells continually spawn new cells with differing numbers and assortments of chromosomes and therefore a unique genetic makeup (karyotype). This enables the cancer to survive when threatened by chemotherapy and radiation because a subpopulation of its cells becomes genetically resistant to these challenges. The aneuploidy cancer hypothesis better explains why these treatments offer only a remission (while the surviving subpopulation regroups) and not a cure for cancer."

On Duesberg's webpage, he references a Dr. Gerald B. Dermer, who authored the book "The Immortal Cell: Why Cancer Research Fails." When I Googled Dr. Dermer, it brought up another article on the site WDDTY (What Doctors Don't Tell You). As per the article "Chemotherapy -- when it work, when it doesn't", breast cancer is one type of cancer for which there is little evidence to support the use of chemotherapy.

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