Surgery and Chemo for Ovarian Cancer

Surgery and chemo for ovarian cancer are what the conventional oncologists will recommend. With full sincerity and concern for your welfare, the medical machine will roll into action following your diagnosis. Within a week of seeing the oncologist you’re likely to be programmed for either surgery or chemo for your ovarian cancer or both. What's involved?

A Hysterectomy

A review of some conventional websites about ovarian cancer will show the view that a hysterectomy is almost ‘standard’ treatment. I would offer the following comments on that:

* Cutting out the tumour(s) and removing “the cause” of your illness can be a great psychological boost - it was for 'Mum'. Keeping up your moral would seem to be a good thing to help you cope.

* But at what cost? A hysterectomy is major surgery - even for an otherwise fit woman - and takes weeks, if not months, for a full recovery (as we already knew from family experience).

* My 76 year old mother-in-law (‘Mum’ for short) was almost clear of cancer after her first 3 month bout of chemotherapy (plus alternative cancer treatment – see my page about a combination of treatments) with a low, roughly normal ca125 (an ovarian cancer biomarker) blood count. A hysterectomy was recommended and carried out; Mum recovered well and quickly from the operation as such, then the cancer returned with a vengeance – her ca125 count went up to 8,000 (the highest since diagnosis). The oncologist admits that the hysterectomy may have been a mistake!

* A long established hypothesis for the cancer mechanism is that it is the body's healing mechanism gone awry (see causes of ovarian cancer). Adding more injury which needs healing seems very risky if the healing process is already out of control?

Chemo for ovarian cancer

Chemo (or more fully, but perhaps falsely, chemotherapy) is the modern euphemistic and patient-friendly name for what was first called in scientific terms “cytotoxic treatment”. This is using chemicals that are good at killing cancer cells which grow and replicate quickly. The consequences are:

* To be successful at killing cancer cells the drugs are powerful

* Vital cells in your immune system also grow and replicate quickly – so they suffer from the ‘chemo’ too, leaving you vulnerable to other diseases and illnesses

* As well as the damage to your own immune system the different drugs have other so-called ‘side effects’ (i.e. direct consequences of the particular poisons being used which are not the destruction of cancer cells)

* Despite decades of research and billions of pounds/dollars the pharmaceutical industry seems no nearer finding a patentable drug that will selectively kill cancer cells without harming the rest of the body (though see my page on cyanide (when uploaded))

Past mistakes repeated?

We look back on the efforts of learned doctors in the past with incredulity. Based on inadequate information and mistaken philosophy they bled their patients, weakening them just when they needed all their strength to fight their disease. They treated other complaints such as syphilis and depression with mercury, poisoning the patient even if the original complaint appeared to be improved.

Does this sound familiar? With hindsight we can see the gross errors in those ‘treatments’. We actually know that the chemotherapy drugs are poisonous and cause severe problems for patients. Logic demands that there has to be overwhelming proof that their use gives the patients a longer, healthier and more productive life than not using them. Doctors and health care systems say that they are following/using "evidence based medicine". Can they show you the evidence?

"Dr. Hardin Jones, lecturer at the University of California, after having analyzed for many decades statistics on cancer survival, has come to this conclusion: ‘… when not treated, the patients do not get worse or they even get better’. The unsettling conclusions of Dr. Jones have never been refuted”. (Walter Last, “The Ecologist”, Vol. 28, no. 2, March-April 1998)

Albert Braverman, MD wrote in “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, (Lancet, 1991, Vol. 337, p. 901) “Many oncologists recommend chemotherapy for almost any type of cancer, with a faith that is unshaken by the almost constant failures”.

Does chemo for ovarian cancer look less like the automatic choice now?

Return to Ovarian Cancer Survivors from Surgery and Chemo for Ovarian Cancer

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