Dan Wilson
Senior Member.
Chris Beat Cancer is a blog that tells the stories of cancer survivors and how they believe their cancer was cured thanks to their diet and lifestyle choices as opposed to surgery and medicine. Here I will explain the problems with these claims and the advice given on this blog.
The author of the blog, Chris, had stage IIIC T3 N2a M0 colorectal cancer. To interpret this, "T" refers to the size of the tumor (scale of 1-4), "N" refers to the incursion into surrounding tissue layers and lymph nodes (scale of 1-4, N2a refers to 4-6 lymph nodes being affected, Chris had 4), and "M" refers to metastases, whether or not the cancer has spread to distant sites (scale of 0-1). If a cancer is metastatic, the other scores don't matter very much because metastatic cancer is incredibly difficult to treat. Chris had surgery to remove and resect (meaning to cut out a section and connect the two severed ends) a part of his colon as well as remove 49 surrounding lymph nodes. He claims that surgery did not cure his cancer and, instead, a raw vegan diet that was eventually supplemented with organic meats was what saved him. His and similar stories are told on his web site. These stories are used to support his advice to avoid chemotherapy and focus on healing yourself with a variety (really nothing too specific) of juicing/vegan/organic/raw diets. There is a big red flag and couple general things to think about when hearing these kinds of stories.
1) Alternative treatments are not always given alone. Many of these stories include the patient receiving chemotherapy or some other conventional treatment at some point. Chris had surgery. In any experiment, when two variables are tested within one sample without the proper controls, you cannot say with any confidence that one of the variables alone was responsible for the observed outcome. Chris argues surgery did not cure his cancer [bolding is mine].
2) Misdiagnoses happen. Cancers are misdiagnosed in an estimated 15% of new cases every year. The most common kinds misdiagnosed are colorectal, breast, lung, and pancreatic. 26 out of the 49 stories on Chris's blog are patients who had one of these cancers. Now, I am not saying these are all cases of misdiagnosis. This is just another thing to think about when hearing anecdotes of people being cured of cancer.
3) The unsatisfied customers are not around to tell their tale. Those who forgo medical treatment and replace it with alternative treatments put themselves at risk, especially when their condition is treatable. Those who go to alternative treatments but still receive conventional treatment, are misdiagnosed, or just get lucky (yes, contrary to what Chris says luck IS a factor when it comes to this disease) and end up walking away healthy are very satisfied and probably feel very happy. Countless others can't say the same, but the data can tell their story.
Being diagnosed with cancer is a distressing and serious situation. As with any medical situation, its important to talk to your doctor(s) and get professional advice. Don't be afraid to discuss hopes and concerns either, make sure your doctor knows what is important to you and the lifestyle you wish to live. Poor quality of life at the end of a terminal cancer patient's life is a major pitfall of the current medical practices. Be aware of as many options as possible, but do not take treatment advice solely from web pages like Chris's blog.
The author of the blog, Chris, had stage IIIC T3 N2a M0 colorectal cancer. To interpret this, "T" refers to the size of the tumor (scale of 1-4), "N" refers to the incursion into surrounding tissue layers and lymph nodes (scale of 1-4, N2a refers to 4-6 lymph nodes being affected, Chris had 4), and "M" refers to metastases, whether or not the cancer has spread to distant sites (scale of 0-1). If a cancer is metastatic, the other scores don't matter very much because metastatic cancer is incredibly difficult to treat. Chris had surgery to remove and resect (meaning to cut out a section and connect the two severed ends) a part of his colon as well as remove 49 surrounding lymph nodes. He claims that surgery did not cure his cancer and, instead, a raw vegan diet that was eventually supplemented with organic meats was what saved him. His and similar stories are told on his web site. These stories are used to support his advice to avoid chemotherapy and focus on healing yourself with a variety (really nothing too specific) of juicing/vegan/organic/raw diets. There is a big red flag and couple general things to think about when hearing these kinds of stories.
1) Alternative treatments are not always given alone. Many of these stories include the patient receiving chemotherapy or some other conventional treatment at some point. Chris had surgery. In any experiment, when two variables are tested within one sample without the proper controls, you cannot say with any confidence that one of the variables alone was responsible for the observed outcome. Chris argues surgery did not cure his cancer [bolding is mine].
What I bolded is true but as we established before, Chris's cancer was not metastatic, it had not spread to distant sites. His doctors were likely recommending adjuvant chemotherapy as a precaution to reduce his chances of local recurrence in case stray cancer cells were not removed during surgery. The study he references claiming 100% recurrence is also overshadowed by a much larger meta-analysis.Didn’t surgery cure your cancer?
If surgery cured colorectal cancer it would not be the #2 cause of cancer death in the U.S. today. Nearly every colorectal cancer patient has surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, and then the cancer “comes back” (it never left). In the vast majority of cases, surgery does not cure any type of metastatic solid-tumor cancer, because cancer is a systemic disease affecting the entire body, and circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating stem cells (CSCs) are already in other parts of the body. This is why new tumors form after surgery, and why doctors recommended chemo and radiation after surgery. They recommended 9-12 months of chemo for me. My surgeon and my oncologist didn’t think surgery cured my cancer, and I don’t either.
According to one study, published the same year I was diagnosed, the recurrence rate of cancer after colon resection was 100% after 4 years.
The 5-year survival rate he lists for his kind of cancer is also incorrect. Maybe it was different at the time he was writing, but the data collected from 2004 to 2010 say that patients with stage IIIC colorectal cancer have a 5-year survival rate of about 53%. It is entirely possible that Chris's cancer was completely removed thanks to the surgery he received. This explanation is much more likely than the idea of cancer being cured by diet.More than 140,000 people in the united states are diag- nosed annually with colorectal cancer.1 Unfortunately, ~25% to 40% will develop a tumor recurrence despite a potentially curative operation.2
2) Misdiagnoses happen. Cancers are misdiagnosed in an estimated 15% of new cases every year. The most common kinds misdiagnosed are colorectal, breast, lung, and pancreatic. 26 out of the 49 stories on Chris's blog are patients who had one of these cancers. Now, I am not saying these are all cases of misdiagnosis. This is just another thing to think about when hearing anecdotes of people being cured of cancer.
3) The unsatisfied customers are not around to tell their tale. Those who forgo medical treatment and replace it with alternative treatments put themselves at risk, especially when their condition is treatable. Those who go to alternative treatments but still receive conventional treatment, are misdiagnosed, or just get lucky (yes, contrary to what Chris says luck IS a factor when it comes to this disease) and end up walking away healthy are very satisfied and probably feel very happy. Countless others can't say the same, but the data can tell their story.
Cancer is a disease of mutated genes accumulated over time. These mutations cannot be reversed. Once a cancer develops, the cells must be gotten rid of one way or another. That is the only way someone can be "cured" of cancer. Diet has no known way of doing this. Some might speculate that healthy eating can stimulate the immune system or something along those lines. This is unlikely because even cancers that have been engineered to express powerful antigens (molecules that trigger immune responses) are not cleared from the body in mouse models. To be clear, diet is very important to health and can be powerful in the prevention of certain cancers. Once cancer has formed, however, there is little evidence that diet plays any role in actively removing it.Where alternative cancer cures have been tested, they have generally been shown not to work. That said, an extraordinary number and variety of different alternative cancer cures have been described,36 and clearly only a minority have been subject to clinical trial. What then should we believe about alternative treatments that have yet to be evaluated? We would argue against being agnostic in the absence of clinical trials; other evidence can be used to come to reasonable, if provisional, conclusions. For example, it would be rational to have more faith in a new targeted therapy for which there is a good understanding of mechanism, cell line studies, and promising animal data than in an alternative therapy based on an entirely fanciful notion that is without any substantive evidence at all.
Being diagnosed with cancer is a distressing and serious situation. As with any medical situation, its important to talk to your doctor(s) and get professional advice. Don't be afraid to discuss hopes and concerns either, make sure your doctor knows what is important to you and the lifestyle you wish to live. Poor quality of life at the end of a terminal cancer patient's life is a major pitfall of the current medical practices. Be aware of as many options as possible, but do not take treatment advice solely from web pages like Chris's blog.
