How Effective is Radiotherapy?
Executive Summary
- Radiotherapy is presented as effective against cancer.
- What is the actual effectiveness of Radiotherapy?
Introduction
Centers that provide radiotherapy treatment usually do not discuss the general effectiveness of chemo. This article will delve into this topic.
About The Search for Evidence on the Effectiveness of Radiotherapy
- The first thing that I found interesting was that I could not quickly find the effectiveness of radiotherapy when I searched for this topic.
- I found no articles with the title of the one you are reading — which is “How effective is radiotherapy?”
- Instead, nearly all the articles I received for my query explained how radiotherapy works — which is not the same question.
- Many of the articles returned by Google were titled some variant of “How radiotherapy works.”
However, one should ask why Google replaces an entered search term, considering both its effectiveness and how the treatment works.
The quotes you will find in this article are extremely rare. There are thousands of websites promoting the benefits of radiotherapy, but very few seem interested in uncovering the actual effectiveness of radiotherapy.
The following quotes are from the book (one of the few books to address the effectiveness of radiotherapy)
According to the prominent French oncologist Dr. Lucien Israel, in early cases of some kinds of cancer radiotherapy sometimes gives brilliant results. Yet, apart from Hodgkins disease and lymphosarcoma, there is much disagreement as to its effectiveness— indeed, there have been no conclusive trials. . . .
This book, written in 1991, cites a 1978 quote highlighting the lack of transparency in radiotherapy’s effectiveness and side effects. Despite this, the field has made little progress in revealing its effectiveness, a point underscored in the following quotation.
Radiotherapists don’t report their results … in such a way as to differentiate between the percentage of complete regressions and the percentage of objective partial regressions, and to indicate the distribution of length of those regressions (Israel, 1978)
In effect, Israel is saying that radiation therapy is an unproven—not a proven—method in many cases. Dr. Irwin D. J. Bross, formerly director of biostatistics at the famed Roswell Park Memorial Institute, went further:
For the situations for which most radiotherapy is given, the chances of curing the patient by radiotherapy are probably about as good as the chances of curing him by laetrile. This is because the chances of curing any patient in advanced stages of cancer are very poor, regardless of the method employed (Bross, 1979).
Israel embraces the use of radiation therapy, but as a palliative.
This approach aims to reduce symptoms and extend life, rather than being a curative treatment.
It is “absolutely irreplaceable” in bringing about an “attenuation of symptoms,” such as relief of pain, in advanced lung, esophageal, pancreatic, breast, and colon cancer.
“It is obvious that the limitations of this method are similar to that of surgical resection,” said the late Michael B. Shimkin, M.D., a prominent specialist formerly with the U.S. Public Health Service. “The cancer is curable only if it is destroyed entirely by being within the field of radiation at levels lethal to the cancer” (Shimkin, 1973). “The majority of cancers,” Prof. John Cairns has written, “cannot be cured by radiation because the dose of X rays required to kill all the cancer cells would also kill the patient” (Cairns, 1985).
This, of course, undermines the use of radiotherapy. Essentially, radiotherapy must be set at a level that is reasonably low-powered, thereby killing some of the cancerous cells. Increasing the power beyond this would lead to far too much collateral damage.
Radiation is frequently used as an adjuvant—i.e., along with surgery or chemotherapy. Such use is becoming more common, critics charge, as more and more women opt for limited breast surgery augmented by radiation. Dr. Bernard Fisher of the University of Pittsburgh has disputed the value of this procedure. In a 1968 study of 3,000 women at over forty institutions, he found that those receiving postoperative radiation did no better than those receiving only surgery in the treatment of breast cancer (Fisher, 1968). While this use of postoperative radiation is still subject to debate, it has become common practice in the United States. A 1989 study found that irradiation following lumpectomy significantly decreased the chance of re-currence in the affected breast, although it did not increase survival time (New York Times, March 30, 1989).
This is a common issue with conventional cancer treatments. The treatment improves an intermediate endpoint (shrinking tumors, reducing re-assurance) without improving the main endpoint – which is life extension.
Why, then, is radiation used so extensively—if it is of such limited and questionable value in most cases? Basically, says Bross, because doctors regard it as harmless.
“It is an added precaution and doesn’t cost anything’’ is the surgeon’s attitude when he sends a patient to the radiation therapy department.* Many surgeons, adds the Roswell Park statistician, do not really believe in the value of the beam. “But if it’s really harmless, it makes sense’’ (Bross, 1979).
Here we come to the nub of the controversy, for many critics charge that radiation is not harmless, but carries with it numerous dangers and drawbacks. In fact, they believe there is a massive, long-standing cover-up on the part of government officials and some scientists to hide the dangers of radiation. An integral part of that cover-up has been to minimize the dangers of radiation therapy while extolling its supposed virtues.
Since radiation will often cause temporary remissions, some of the first reports were highly enthusiastic. William B. Coley, later to become famous for his Coley’s toxins (see chapter 7), wrote at the same time of ten cases of abdominal cancer with entire disappearance in one case of cancer of the cervix . . . marked improve- ment in three other uterine cases . . . more or less temporary improvement in most of the remainder. … In two cases of epithelioma of the head and face the tumors have entirely disappeared, one the size of a silver dollar on the forehead, one three-fourths of an inch in diameter on the face. . . . And one case of Hodgkin’s disease, a practically hopeless condition, has shown the most remarkable improvement that has yet been reported. . . . The man has resumed his usual occupation (Considine, 1959).
Coley soon noted that in many cases there was “a recurrence within a year.” Disappointment with radiation apparently increased his interest in even more innovative approaches.
Slowly it became apparent that the “quiet, dreamlike process, in which nothing of significance seems to happen” (Glemser, 1969), was fraught with danger. Radiation enthusiasts ignored these signals, and some of them as a result succumbed to the toxic effects of radiation. Within a year or two after the discovery of X rays (1895), it was found that the rays could cause skin disease and systemic problems.
By 1902, 171 cases of accidental X-ray bums had been reported in the medical literature, including those of radiation pioneers Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie.
The Atomic Energy Commission Promotion of Radiotherapy
The Atomic Energy Commission was quite successful in hiding these troubling facts, not only from the general public, but from the medical community who actually administered the therapeutic beam. The AEC provided much of the information for the medical textbooks on radiation and its hazards.
This gets into the topic of the false information and promotion of radiotherapy by the Atomic Energy Commission, which I will cover in a separate article.
Important Point #1: Is There a Type of Palliative Radiotherapy?
The following explanation of radiotherapy from Cancer Research.uk provides curious information immediately.
Radiotherapy to relieve symptoms is also known as palliative radiotherapy. Palliative radiotherapy aims to shrink cancer, slow down its growth or control symptoms. It doesn’t aim to cure cancer.
Depending on the type of cancer you have, and where it has spread to, you might have external or internal radiotherapy. External radiotherapy is the use of radiation to destroy cancer cells from outside of the body. Whereas internal radiotherapy means having radiation treatment from inside the body.
You might have palliative radiotherapy to:
Telieve bone pain
Treat pressure on the spinal cord (spinal cord compression)
Shrink a tumour to relieve pressure or a blockage
Treat symptoms of cancer in the brain
Treat symptoms of cancer in the lungs
Control an ulcerating cancer and reduce bleeding
Treat a blood vessel blockage in the chest called superior vena cava obstruction (SVCO)
Not all cancers respond well to radiotherapy. So other treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy or targeted cancer drugs may be more help.
Important Point #2: 40% of People Who are Cured Receive Radiotherapy
The following is an excellent example from The Telegram, which asserts that radiotherapy saves lives without pointing to the evidence before discussing how effective this advanced radiotherapy is.
Radiotherapy is one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment; 40 per cent of people who are cured receive it and recent advances mean it can now be delivered with remarkable precision.
“Radiotherapy is curative, cutting-edge and cost-effective. The more we invest in fine-tuning it, the more patients we will be able to save in the future.”
Where is the link included in the article to the measured benefits of radiotherapy?
Important Point #3: Is Radiotherapy as Effective as Chemotherapy?
The following quote is from the Cleveland Clinic, one of the Internet’s most prominent medical information providers.
Radiation therapy, along with chemotherapy and surgery, is one of the most powerful tools we use to treat cancer. Radiation therapy includes the most common type, external beam radiation therapy (EBRT), and internal radiation therapy. Your radiation oncologist can recommend radiotherapy tailored to your condition and the kind of cancer you have.
This is a problematic statement — as covered in the article How Effective is Chemotherapy? chemotherapy is not all that effective.
Therefore, to state that radiation is, along with chemotherapy, one of the most powerful tools is not an endorsement of radiation.
How Effective is Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer?
In 1995, a meta-analysis of 64 randomized trials was conducted to find out if irradiation following either mastectomy or lumpectomy improves survival of patients with breast cancer.
Published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the study reports, “The addition of radiotherapy to surgery resulted in…no significant difference in 10-year survival.”
So far the evidence suggests that at best, radiotherapy doesn’t improve survival of breast cancer patients, and at worst, radiotherapy is killing cancer patients more quickly than they would have died without it.
Couple these findings with similar findings about radiotherapy following lung cancer surgery and it seems likely that the latter is true.
How Effective is Radiotherapy for Lung Cancer?
Example Study #1
A 1998 review of nine randomized trials compared survival rates of 2,128 lung cancer patients who received radiotherapy following surgery with patients who received surgery alone.
Published in The Lancet, results showed that patients who received radiotherapy following surgery had a 27% increased risk of death.
Example Study #2
Scientists from the United Kingdom conducted an extensive review in 2005 evaluating the efficacy of radiotherapy following surgery in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.
Published in the journal Lung Cancer, they wrote, “Results continue to show PORT [postoperative radiotherapy] to be detrimental, with an 18% relative increase in the risk of death.”
Covering Up the Lethality of Radiotherapy
One of the most fascinating statements made by whistleblower Dr. Ralph Moss in his book The Cancer Industry is that official cancer mortality statistics are being intentionally manipulated in order to make it appear like cancer treatments are better than they actually are.
Since radiotherapy damages all organs and systems of the body, including the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, thyroid, immune system, and impairs the healing process, there are endless ways that its side effects can eventually kill a person.
However, as with other cancer treatments, death from cancer treatments — which are much faster than deaths from cancer, meaning it is a loss of lifespan, for some miraculous reason, doesn’t reduce the life extension claimed by those running the cancer treatment studies.
Allocating Radiotherapy Deaths to Heart Disease
One of the most common ways is heart disease; so what Dr. Moss was referring to, was the fact that if a patient receives radiotherapy then has a heart attack and dies a week, month or even a few years later, their cause of death will be deemed a heart attack rather than a cancer death due to treatment failure; and consequently, the public never finds out just how unsuccessful radiotherapy actually is.
Deaths from Cancer Treatments
In 1993, Texas researchers from the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston questioned the validity of official government cancer mortality statistics by examining non-cancer deaths of 470,000 cancer patients.
Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the study found that 27% of patients who were reported dead for reasons other than cancer had died within a year after diagnosis, suggesting they were probably killed by their treatments;
The Overall Effectiveness of Radiotherapy
This synopsis is from the book (one of the few books to address the effectiveness of radiotherapy)
In conclusion, radiation therapy appears to be of limited value in the treatment of cancer although it is probably preferable to surgery in some cases, such as cancer of the larynx or prostate. There is little controversy over the number of patients currently being cured by radiotherapy—it is small.
Many doctors believe that radiation is a relatively harmless procedure. They therefore recommend it to patients (especially advanced cases) as a palliative. It is also being used in earlier cases, such as in conjunction with limited mastectomy. Some researchers believe that this use of radiation is not only ineffective, but positively harmful for its recipients. It is part of a disastrous national policy that has always downplayed the hazards of radiation, while promoting its spread to every comer of the country.
Asking AI Bots About Chemotherapy
So, it’s become an increasingly significant source of information for people. Let’s take a look at what the AI chatbots say about chemotherapy’s ability to extend.
Chat Bot Response #1: The AI Bot Claud Opus on Radiotherapy’s Life Extension
The following quote is from the chatbot Claud Opus on the topic.
Overall Population-Level Benefit
On a broad population level, radiotherapy provides an estimated 6% improvement in 5-year overall survival for all cancers combined.1 This translates to different absolute survival benefits depending on the baseline prognosis of each cancer type.
A 6% improvement in 5-year survival is low.
Palliative Radiotherapy Survival Times
For patients receiving palliative radiotherapy (treatment aimed at symptom relief rather than cure), median survival times from the point of treatment include:
- Bone metastases: Median survival ranges from 5.0 to 11.9 months depending on the radiation fractionation schedule used2
- Risk-stratified metastatic cancer patients:
- Low risk: 11.66 months median survival
- Medium risk: 5.09 months median survival
- High risk: 3.28 months median survival3
- Older patients receiving radiation therapy: 6 months median survival4
These last estimates do not explain how much longer cancer patients live when they receive radiotherapy. This point is described in the following quotation from Opus.
It’s crucial to understand that these figures represent median survival times from the point of radiotherapy treatment, not direct comparisons of life extension versus no treatment. The actual life extension benefit would require comparing matched groups with and without radiotherapy, which is ethically challenging to study in randomized trials.
Well, that should happen if the medical establishment is going to initially and then continue to recommend radiotherapy as being highly helpful and or curative.
The wide variation in survival times reflects the heterogeneous nature of cancer and the individualized approach needed for each patient. Factors affecting outcomes include cancer type, stage at diagnosis, patient age and overall health, and whether radiation is used alone or combined with other treatments.
Conclusion
Non-Journal Sources
We find very little focus on whether radiotherapy is effective when we focus on non-journal sources on radiotherapy effectiveness. Nearly all the articles shift the focus from the effectiveness of radiotherapy to its underlying principles and mechanisms.
Journals Sources
Switching to journals reveals that some articles demonstrate radiotherapy effectiveness in limited circumstances, but the information is unclear. It is also far more challenging to interpret the data than in other similar types of research. Since radiotherapy is one of the three most prominent treatments for cancer, it is concerning how little evidence there is regarding its effectiveness.