Is aspirin ever safer and more effective than chemotherapy for cancer patients?

October 21, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

The following essay is taken from Dr Vernon Coleman’s book `What doctors won’t tell you about chemotherapy.’

In studies involving one million patients with 18 different cancers, about a quarter of the patients took 75mg of aspirin a day. Analysis showed a reduction of 21% in mortality among the patients who had taken the small dose of aspirin. Doctors are, however, still largely reluctant to recommend that people take prophylactic aspirin – despite its proven anti-inflammatory effect and its usefulness in protecting cancer patients and patients liable to heart attacks. A small daily dose of aspirin is extraordinarily cheap and seems to work well but there is virtually no profit in selling plain, common or garden soluble aspirin and so drug companies are uninterested. The medical establishment always does what it is told to do by the pharmaceutical industry. There does however now seem to be a move towards endorsing the use of low dose aspirin as part of a treatment programme for cancer. In November 2023, the British Medical Journal published an article entitled Aspirin and cancer treatment: systematic reviews and meta-analyses of evidence: for and against. The authors (there were ten of them) concluded: ‘…given the relative safety and the favourable effects of aspirin, its use in cancer seems justified, and ethical implications of this imply that cancer patients should be informed of the present evidence and encouraged to raise the topic with their health care team.’ (I wonder how many GPs bothered to get in touch with their cancer patients.) In November 2022, an article from the Royal Society in London concluded: ‘We believe that the series of studies we have reported – and in particular the evidence on the relative safety of aspirin – have provided evidence that is sufficient to justify the recommendation of aspirin to patients with cancer. We see our task now to be persuading oncologists to examine the evidence.’ Sadly, this is likely to be an uphill battle since many oncologists are unduly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, which sees no value in persuading patients to take aspirin (which is, of course, a generic product available very cheaply). And, remember, large charities are often very closely linked to drug companies.

NOTE
The essay above is taken from Vernon Coleman’s new book `What doctors won’t tell you about chemotherapy’.

To purchase a copy of `What doctors won’t tell you about chemotherapy’ just CLICK HERE

Copyright Vernon Coleman October 2024