Over the years I have repeatedly found that all medical recommendations are best treated with a large dose of scepticism.
Nowhere is this more true than in the treatment of cancer.
Patients who are diagnosed with cancer find themselves in a state of shock. And yet, while in a state of shock, they find themselves needing to make a number of vital decisions very quickly.
One of the big questions is often this one: ‘Should I have chemotherapy?’
Chemotherapy might improve a patient’s chances of survival by three to five per cent though that modest figure is usually over generous. For example, the evidence suggests that chemotherapy offers breast cancer patients an uplift in survival of little more than 2.5%.
When you consider that chemotherapy can kill and does terrible damage to healthy cells, and to the immune system, it is difficult to see the value of taking chemotherapy.
I don’t think it is any exaggeration to suggest that much of the hype around chemotherapy has taken the treatment into the area of fraud – far more fraudulent indeed than treatments which are dismissed as irrelevant or harmful by the establishment.
Chemotherapy is a cull, designed by the conspirators and the medical establishment to cut the cost of caring for cancer patients.
The chances are that the doctors looking after you – especially the specialist oncologists in hospital – will recommend chemotherapy. They may push hard to accept their recommendation. They may even be cross or dismissive or assume you are ignorant or afraid if you decide you don’t want it. Cancer charities often shout excitedly about chemotherapy. But they are also often closely linked to the drug companies which make money out of chemotherapy – which in my view makes them part of the large and thriving ‘cancer industry’. It is important to remember that drug companies exist to make money and they will do whatever is necessary to further this aim. They lie and they cheat with scary regularity and they have no interest in helping patients or saving lives. Remember that: the sole purpose of drug companies is to make money, whatever the human cost might. They will happily suppress potentially life-saving information if doing so increases their profits. It is my belief that by allying themselves with drug companies, cancer charities have become corrupt.
Little or no advice is given to patients about how they themselves might reduce the risk of their cancer returning. The implication is that its chemotherapy or nothing. So, for example, doctors are unlikely to tell breast cancer patients that they should avoid dairy foods, though the evidence that they should is very strong.
The one certainty is that it is extremely unlikely that anyone you see will tell you all the truths about chemotherapy. The sad truth is that the statistics about chemotherapy are, of course, fiddled to boost the drug company sales and, therefore, drug company profits. And the deaths caused by chemotherapy are often misreported or under-estimated. So, for example, if a patient who has been taking chemotherapy dies of a sudden heart attack their death will probably be put down as a heart attack – rather than as a result of the cancer or the chemotherapy. There may be some mealy mouthed suggestion that the death was treatment related but the drug will probably not be named and shamed. Neither the chemotherapy nor the cancer will be deemed responsible. What this means in practice is that the survival statistics for chemotherapy are considerably worse than the figures which are made available – considerably worse, indeed, than whatever positive effect might be provided by a harmless placebo.
Here’s another thing: patients who have chemotherapy and survive five years are counted as having been cured by chemotherapy. And patients who have chemotherapy and then die five and a bit years after their diagnosis don’t count as cancer related deaths. And they certainly don’t count as chemotherapy deaths.
A 2016 academic study looked at five year survival rates and concluded that in 90% of patients (including the commonest breast cancer tumours) chemotherapy increased five year survival by less than 2.5%. Only a very small number of cancers (such as testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s disease) were treated effectively by chemotherapy. On top of this dismal success rate it must be remembered that chemotherapy cripples the immune system (now, at long last, recognised as important in the fight against cancer), damages all living cells, damages the intestines, can cause nausea and tinnitus, can damage nerves, can and does damage the bone marrow with the result that leukaemia develops,(staggeringly, iatrogenic myeloid leukaemia, usually known as ‘therapy related’ in an attempt to distance the disease from doctors, is, in ten per cent of cases, a result of chemotherapy), damages the heart and the hearing and will, in a significant number of patients, result in death.
It is true that chemotherapy may reduce the size of a tumour but in stage 4 cancer chemotherapy seems to encourage a cancer to return more quickly and more aggressively. The cancer stem cells seem to be untouched by the chemotherapy drugs.
Despite all this, the protocol in the treatment of cancer is to turn to chemotherapy and doctors are always reluctant to try anything else.
The Academy of Royal Medical Colleges, which represents 24 Royal Colleges, and a number of other important health bodies, has reported that chemotherapy can do more harm than good when prescribed as palliatives for terminally ill cancer patients. The colleges criticise chemotherapy advocates for ‘raising false hopes’ and doing ‘more harm than good’. They concluded that chemotherapy drugs are unlikely to work.
On the other hand, I wasn’t surprised to see a big cancer charity disagreeing with the 24 medical colleges and claiming that thousands of patients do benefit. My view, which I recognise is probably not shared by the majority of family doctors or oncologists, is that many cancer charities around the world are the unacceptable face of cancer care. It seems to me to be more concerned with making money and keeping the drug companies rich than in caring for patients.
Another report has concluded that chemotherapy can, in some circumstances, actually promote the spread of cancer cells. It was reported in 2017, for example, that when breast cancer patients have chemotherapy before surgery the drug can make the malignant cells spread to distant sites – resulting in metastatic cancer and sending the patient straight from Stage 1 to Stage 4.
Scientists analysed tissue from 20 breast cancer patients who had 16 weeks of chemotherapy and the tissues around the tumour was more conducive to spread in most of the patients. In five of the patients there was a five times greater risk of spread. In none of the patients was the tissue around the tumour less friendly to cancer cells and to metastasis. The problem, it seems is that cancer cells have a great ability to transform themselves and the chemotherapy, designed to kill cancer cells, may encourage the development of cells which are resistant to drugs, which survive the treatment and which form a new cancer.
The one side effect associated with chemotherapy that is widely known is the loss of hair. But that is, to be honest, the least of the problems. Chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer cells and the severity of the side effects depends on the age and health of the patient as well as on the type of drug used and the dosage in which it is prescribed. And whereas some side effects do disappear after treatment (as the good cells recover) there are some side effects which may never go away.
I mentioned the serious side effects a little earlier but here, as a reminder, is a list of just some of the problems that can be caused by chemotherapy drugs:
The cells in the bone marrow can be damaged, producing a shortage of red blood cells and possibly leukaemia.
The central nervous system can be damaged with a result that the memory may be affected and the patient’s ability to concentrate or think clearly changed. There may be changes to balance and coordination. These effects can last for years. Apart from affecting the brain, chemotherapy can also cause pain and tingling in the hands and feet, numbness, weakness and pain. Not surprisingly, depression is not uncommon.
The digestive system is commonly affected with sores forming in the mouth and throat. These may produce infection and may make food taste unpleasant. Nausea and vomiting may also occur. The weight loss associated with chemotherapy may be a result of a loss of appetite.
In addition to hair loss (which can affect hair all over the body) the skin may be irritated and nails may change colour and appearance.
The kidneys and bladder may be irritated and damaged. The result may be swollen ankles, feet and hands. Osteoporosis is a fairly common problem and increases the risk of bone fractures and breaks. Women who have breast cancer and who are having treatment to reduce their oestrogen levels are particularly at risk.
Chemotherapy can produce hormone changes with a wide variety of symptoms.
The heart may be damaged and patients who already have weak hearts may be made worse by chemotherapy.
And the other problem with chemotherapy is that it can damage the immune system.
And it is known that chemotherapy can damage DNA.
And does chemotherapy alter the nature of cancer cells? Can it, for example, trigger a change from an oestrogen sensitive cancer cell to a triple negative cell – much harder to treat?
And then there is that risk that chemotherapy might spread cells around the body.
Finally, there is increasing evidence to show that chemotherapy may hasten the death of a number of patients.
Drug companies, cancer charities and doctors recommend chemotherapy because there is big money in it. The least forgivable of these are the cancer charities which exist to protect people but which are ruthless exploiters of patients.
As always the medical literature is confusing but in the ‘Annuals of Oncology’ I found this: ‘the upfront use of chemotherapy does not seem to influence the overall outcome of the disease’.
Most doctors won’t tell you this, or even admit it to themselves, but cancer drugs are killing up to 50% of patients in some hospitals. A study by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK found that 2.4% of breast cancer patients die within a month of starting chemotherapy. The figures are even worse for patients with lung cancer where 8.4% of patients die within a month when treated with chemotherapy. When patients die that quickly, I feel that it is safe to assume that they were killed by the treatment not the disease. At one hospital the death rate for patients with lung cancer treated with chemotherapy was reported at over 50%. Naturally, all the hospitals which took part in the study insisted that chemotherapy prescribing was being done safely. If we accept this then we must also question the validity of chemotherapy. The study showed that the figures are particular bad for patients who are in poor general health when they start treatment.
Next think about this.
In the UK, the National Health Service publishes comprehensive guidelines on what must be done if chemotherapy drugs are spilt. There are crisis emergency procedures to be followed if chemotherapy drugs fall on the floor. And yet these drugs are put into people’s bodies. And residues of these dangerous chemicals are excreted in urine and then end up in the drinking water supply. (I explained several decades ago how prescription drug residues end up in our drinking water.)
It is hardly surprising that many patients being treated with chemotherapy report that their quality of life has plummeted.
The standard oncology approach to cancer is to give chemotherapy and then wait and see if the cancer returns. If it does then more chemotherapy is prescribed. The tragedy is that for so many patients chemotherapy will do more harm than good. Astonishingly, a quarter of cancer patients die of heart attacks – often triggered by deep vein thrombosis and by emboli and brought on by the physical stress of chemotherapy. But these deaths are not included in the official statistics – either for cancer or, just as importantly, for chemotherapy. It is no exaggeration to say that the establishment fiddles the figures to suit its own largely commercial ends – extolling the virtues of drug company products at every opportunity and never failing to throw doubt on any remedy which might threaten the huge cancer industry
Here’s another thing you might not know.
During the lockdowns and concerns about covid-19, patients who were on chemotherapy were taken off their treatment. They were told that since their treatment would affect their immune systems they would be more vulnerable to the coronavirus. That’s an important admission because the one thing we know for certain is that a healthy immune system is vital for fighting cancer.
Doctors probably won’t tell you any of this but they won’t deny it because it is all true.
The bottom line is that treatments described in clinical trials, paid for by drug companies and generally reviewed by doctors with drug company links, and then published in medical journals which accept huge amounts of drug company advertising, are the only treatments the medical profession accepts. There is much talk about ‘peer review’ trials but all this means is that another doctor or two, with drug company links, will have looked at the paper and given it their approval.
The word ‘corrupt’ doesn’t come close to describing this whole incestuous system.
Anyone who wants to have chemotherapy should have it. I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from using whatever drugs they believe might help them. I’m only interested in providing unbiased, independent information which might help patients make the right decision for themselves.
But too often, I fear, patients beg for treatment, completely understandably, because they want something to be done and because they have been misled by the drug company inspired, and paid for, hype about chemotherapy. And doctors provide that treatment, even though a little research would tell them that they may be doing more harm than good. There are a very few cancers which can be treated well with chemotherapy – but they are very few and they are unfairly and unreasonably promoted as success stories by the drug companies and their shills.
The thing that is forgotten is that chemotherapy can badly damage the patient’s body’s own protections – and with some patients may, therefore, do infinitely more harm than good.
Every patient should decide for themselves – and discuss with their doctors the evidence for and against chemotherapy in their situation. But I think that all patients are entitled to be provided with the background information they would need to help that process of assessment.
Tragically, however, the ignorance about chemotherapy is, sadly, widespread and all pervasive.
When Progress isn’t Progress at all
20TH AUGUST 2023 by Dr. Vernon Coleman
Much of what is happening is described as progress but it isn’t really, of course – it’s just change. And a good deal of it is change contrived to keep us all too busy to notice what is going on in the world, and too wrapped up in our own daily problems to take action against the conspirators, the collaborators and the constant attacks on our freedom and humanity. Even small things become incredibly time consuming and exhausting. The bizarre and indefensible ‘recycling’ programmes which were introduced globally (everything happens in lockstep these days) were designed to make us worry about non-existent climate change, to make us compliant (and to force us to accept that we must do what we are told, even in our own homes and to keep us busy. Most of the carefully washed and sorted recycling material is dumped or burnt, and the environmental cost of collecting recycling material far exceeds any value that might accrue. In the UK, for example, much of the recycling material has been carried to countries far away to be dumped or burnt. There isn’t even any point in recycling paper (the most traditional recycling material). It is better for the environment to grow trees for that purpose and to burn the discarded paper to produce electricity or heat.
If you order a book (or whatever else) online you will be bombarded with emails. There will be a message to say that the purchase has been made, one to say that your order is being dealt with, another to let you know that the book has been passed to the delivery company, one to let you know that the delivery company has received the package, one to inform you that the delivery company has received the book, one to let you know that the book is on its way and one to tell you that the package has been delivered. Then you will receive an email from the seller to let you know that the delivery company has done their job and delivered the book. Later there will be another email from them wanting you to rate their service and one from the delivery company wanting you to let them know how well you think they did. If you don’t reply immediately those emails will be repeated at regular intervals. This barrage of unnecessary emails keeps us occupied with pointless trivia. (Not infrequently, I receive two copies of each of the emails in this tedious chain.)
The word ‘progress’ is used as a synonym for ‘better’; but how do you define ‘better’? Is receiving an email from a friend on holiday better than receiving a postcard? Is the world better when cars all look exactly the same? Is it better when log fires are forbidden by health and safety officials? Are trains better now that there are no restaurant and sleeper cars? Or has life been destroyed by fanatics, cultists and ignorant meddlers, acting, unknowingly, on behalf of conspirators aiming for a Great Reset? Is life better now that there are no junk shops, no rag and bone men and no odd job men who could repair just about anything you couldn’t deal with yourself? Is life better now that family doctors work the same hours as librarians and you have to plan your emergencies a day or two ahead if you hope to ride to hospital in an ambulance? Are hospitals better now that nurses spend more time in meetings than on the ward and are always too busy, and self-important, to find a bedpan, plump up pillows, help a frail patient with their meal or put a bunch of flowers into a vase? Is it progress that children now learn with the aid of iPads instead of being taught with pens and paper and chalk and a board? Is a smart phone real progress over a piece of slate and a slate pencil? Children half a century ago played hopscotch, skipped with ropes and in the winter played football with coats as goalposts while in the summer they played cricket with stumps chalked on lampposts. On their summer holidays they splashed in paddling pools or sailed toy yachts on boating ponds (all now filled in for health and safety reasons) and they rode on donkeys and played one penny games on the pier. Is it simply nostalgia when you know in your heart that things really were better then?
If you object to all progress then the conspirators will label you a ‘Luddite’, even if much of what they label progress isn’t progress at all.
It isn’t difficult to argue that children have little or no future today. The conspirators and the collaborators have taken away their education, their hope, their sense of comfort and even their happiness. Mental health problems among the young are rising at a rate never seen before. Even before the fake pandemic of 2020 the incidence of such problems among the young was frighteningly high. Today, there is an epidemic of mental illness. Millions of children, teenagers and young people are taking tranquillisers and anti-depressants (even though these have been proven to be of no value) and often taking them for years at a time. The lockdowns, the social distancing regulations and the partial or complete closure of hospital departments mean that those requiring specialist help will be on waiting lists for years if not for life.
Is a pub with a log fire and friendly bar staff better than a pub with a good internet connection? Are motorways, with endless queues, better than winding country roads which take you to your destination just as quickly and with far more pleasure? Are self-driving cars better than cars which have to be driven? How will self-driving cars manage to navigate English country roads and all those tiny, blind junctions? Who is going to provide a suitable call out service for all the electric cars which are stranded in country lanes when their batteries run out?
Is a traditional English breakfast better or worse than a bowl of sugar coated cereal? Why does it now take a week or more for a postcard to reach its destination when in Victorian times, in the 19th century, a postcard put in a pillar box in the morning would arrive at its destination in the afternoon? The postcode or zip code was, surely, an early sign of the end of civilisation. I recently bought around 1,000 old Edwardian postcards (no one wants them these days – they cost just a few pounds) and although the addresses consisted of nothing more than (at most) a name, a number, a street and a town, the cards clearly reached their destinations safely. There is less mail today because so many people use email – so why does the mail take so much longer to get where it’s going?
Is reading a book on a smart phone easier and more fun than reading a paperback – with no need to squint and constantly adjust the position of the screen on a sunny day? Was the NHS better when there was a dental service for all? Were charities more or less inclusive when they served merely to serve those in need rather than to enrich executives and advertising agencies? Was life better when we used public phone boxes instead of having to carry a mobile phone with us? Were radio and television programmes worse when traditional events such as the Promenade Concerts celebrated cultural traditions rather than global ones?
Was the Tate Britain art gallery better when it paid more attention to traditional artists than to the demands of the woke? The Tate Britain gallery now has just one room for art from 1545 to 1640 but 14 rooms devoted to art from 1940 onwards. Of the work on view, 200 items were made since the millennium and the work in the publicly funded gallery has been carefully curated to ensure that men and women are equally represented among living artists – regardless of reputation or the value of their work. Modern art on display, representing just a twentieth of the time span of the collection, takes up a quarter of the space. Culture, as well as history, has been changed to fit the requirements of the conspirators and the collaborators. Labels attached to older pictures highlight social injustice, colonial exploitation and prejudice. The gallery seems to illustrate the way in which the feelings of the few now dominate the views of the many in every sphere of activity.
The aims of the WEF and other organisations seem to be to destroy each nation’s heritage, to destroy every country’s culture. In the UK, all major institutions seem to have become very woke. The National Trust, the Marylebone Cricket Club and other former institutions are now unrecognisably woke – to the great confusion of long-standing members. Long established regiments in the army have disappeared or been merged.
The aim of the conspirators is to change the world by erasing nations, families and communities and by destroying everything humans consider to be personal and valuable. Immigration (whether legal or illegal) is encouraged in order to create impoverishment, resentment, racism, terrorism and plenty of excuses for war. (As an aside, it used to be thought that patriotism was good but nationalism was bad. Today, however, both are unacceptable because there can be no countries in the New World Order.)
Naturally, immigration programmes have led to resentment on both sides and, especially in France, the development of racial and cultural ghettoes is leading to civil war.
Dishonesty in Medical Research
20TH AUGUST 2023 by Dr. Vernon Coleman
Recent research suggests that a quarter of all the papers published in medical journals are either ‘plagiarised’ or simply ‘made up’.
Some observers seem surprised by this.
They shouldn’t be.
The paragraphs which follow were taken from my book The Health Scandal which caused quite a storm when it was published in 1988. The Sunday Times said `This book detects diseases in the whole way we deliver health care’. Nursing Times described it as ‘central to the health of the nation’ and the British Medical Journal said it was ‘a book to stimulate and to make one argue’. Nothing has changed. The Health Scandal has recently been republished and is now available via the bookshop on this website).
‘With enormous pressures on them to make discoveries and produce startling results a growing number of researchers are 'cooking the books' and 'fiddling the figures'.
In my book Paper Doctors, published in 1976, I described two examples of doctors who had been found out. The first was Dr William Summerlin, who was hired by the Sloan Ketting Institute in New York at a salary of$40,000 a year to do work on the problems of transplanting skin and overcoming rejection problems. Summerlin seemed to have made a major breakthrough in this area but no other laboratory anywhere in the world was able to duplicate his excellent results. Then, under pressure, Summerlin admitted that he had cheated. He was supposed to have transplanted skin from black mice to white mice. In fact he had simply inked in the transplant sites with a black felt-tipped pen.
The second medical trickster was Dr J. P. Sedgwick, a GP working in London's West End. Dr Sedgwick was offered £10 per card to fill in a number of trial cards showing the effects of a new hypotensive drug on the blood pressure of some of his patients. Dr Sedgwick filled in 100 cards and accepted £1,000 from the company concerned, Bayer. (See also page 34.)
Bayer became concerned when the cards were returned for not only were they still clean and unmarked but the blood-pressure figures (which all seemed to have been filled in at the same time) were identical on several sets of cards. The drug company eventually reported the doctor to the General Medical Council and inJ uly 1975 Dr Sedgwick had the dubious distinction of being the first medical practitioner to be struck off for such unprofessional behaviour.
Since those early days of deceit, dishonesty among researchers has become sadly and regrettably all too commonplace and the journalsare these days constantly reporting more and more instances of over-zealous researchers falsifying or inventing results.
In 1980, for example, the world of medicine was devastated by a series of scandals involving such prestigious centres of excellence as Yale School of Medicine, Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard. At the Boston University Medical Center a three-year $1 million cancer research project was tainted by false data. At Cornell University Mark Spector seemed on the brink of winning a Nobel Prize for his work explaining how tumour-causing viruses could turn a cell cancerous. Then suddenly his spectacular career was in ruins. Findings that were originally described as fundamental breakthroughs were branded as fraudulent. Colleagues discovered that Spector had cunningly doctored isolated bits of cellular matter to look like things they were not.
In 1983 there was an even bigger scandal in America when Dr John Darsee who had worked as a researcher at Harvard was accused of falsifying data. Darsee had done research work on a project funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute designed to help assess the effectiveness of drugs to treat heart attacks. After the research project was discredited Harvard was asked to return the $122,371 it had received as funding.
In the autumn ofl986 Professor Michael Briggs, who had worked at an Australian University, admitted 'serious deceptions' in his research into changes in the fats in blood caused by oral contracep tives. Briggs published papers dealing with contraceptive pill side effects between 1976 and 1984 and claimed that his research work had been done at Deakin University. Two drug companies who had provided Briggs with financial backing were shocked when details of his fraudulent behaviour were revealed. Professor Briggs had, after all, been an expert adviser to the World Health Organization.
Then in November 1986 yet another fraudulent medical author was exposed. Robert Slutsky of the University of California at San Diego withdraw fifteen published papers. His action immediately put fifty-five other papers under a cloud. Towards the end of his stay at the University Slutsky had been producing new scientific papers at the rate of one every ten days.
Inevitably all this fraudulent research work leads to problems for other researchers. Once a fraudulent paper gets into the system it can be quoted hundreds of times by other researchers within months of its first publication. The Index Medicus, the most important listing of research papers, does not correct false information or list fraudulent authors or fraudulent papers. There is, therefore, no way for an author to check on the validity of the papers he wants to use in his own research work. In October 1986 a quick survey of papers that were known to be fraudulent revealed a total of forty-three papers published in the last five years or so. If each one of those papers was quoted by only ten other authors, then that makes 430 papers of questionable quality hiding in the world's medical literature.
Medical research is not only costly and of questionable value.
Much of it, it seems, is downright misleading.
As a final footnote to this section it is also perhaps worth pointing out that in a recent analysis of research work published in his book The Clay Pedestal (published in the United States by Nadonna Publications) T. Preston pointed out that one survey of research work showed that almost seventy-five per cent of all the reports published contained invalid conclusions that had been based on the incorrect use of statistics.’