Scientists from the Seattle based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have stumbled upon a very inconvenient truth.
Chemotherapy is so damaging to the healthy cells surrounding a tumor that it changes their DNA, causing fibroblasts, those cells involved in wound healing and maintaining connective tissue, to produce a molecule called WNT16B that actually encourages prostate tumors to grow and invade neighboring cells.
The researchers also confirmed these findings for breast and ovarian cancer tumors.
The unsettling findings reported by the journal Nature Medicine in August 2012, helps explain why cancer patients sometimes derive little to no benefit from chemo treatments, essentially enduring the worse than death side effects for naught.
Peter Nelson, the study co-author said, “The increase in WNT16B was completely unexpected”.
It also sheds light on why tumors might shrink from an initial round of chemo only to regrow later becoming resistant to further rounds of the devastating treatment. Â Peter Nelson confirms the eventual resistance tumors develop to chemo adding:
“WNT16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumour cells and cause them to grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy“.
Professor Fran Balkwill, a UK based expert on the tumor microenvironment commented that these findings are in line with other research which has demonstrated that “cancer treatments don’t just affect cancer cells, but can also target cells in and around tumors”.
Researchers seem unfazed by these disquieting results that, though unexpected, did not seem to give them any pause whatsoever in questioning chemo as a valid tumor treatment for the long term.
Instead, they chose to stick their heads further into the sand suggesting that drugs to inhibit the production of WNT16B were in order for “new and improved” chemo treatments.
If one drug doesn’t work, let’s just add another, then another, then another ….
Apparently, “chemo brain” affects cancer researchers too.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Very element of information. I discovered your site as well as in accession money to state which i obtain the fact is appreciated bill your website articles. In whatever way I’m going to be registering to ones feeds and even I personally fulfillment you receive suitable involving use of continually fast.
Wow that was odd. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but
after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr…
well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyway, just wanted to say
great blog!
Please read the embedded medical journal in this article. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n9/full/nm.2890.html You will see that it is ONLY about resistant prostate cancer. What’s with the picture to the right of this article. SHE doesn’t have prostate cancer!
This was a very interesting and educational read until you got snooty at the end. What exactly do you propose they do? Stop chemo altogether? What’s wrong with adding a WNT16B inhibitor? Calling researchers who spend their entire lives trying to save others’ lives “chemo brain” is extraordinarily arrogant and rude of you. Shameful.
“Chemo brain” is an actual documented medical condition. And yes, I expect drug researchers to actually think and not just do what their corporate taskmasters expect them to do just to pull down a paycheck.
PREVENTATIVE care and a healthy lifestyle is a must. I take an antioxidant called OPC-3 that neutralizes free-radicals, available from . Not only does OPC-3 help deter free radical mischief, it has a myriad of other health benefits. Preventative care is a MUST!!!
My mother in law is seeing results from using Doterra essential oils for example Frankincense. I am not saying the oils will work for everyone but her tumor on her breast is shrinking. Also, not all essential oil brands are the same. A lot of them can be synthetic. Doterra essential oils are Pure Certified Therapeutic Grade oils. Just wanted to pass on the information.
Alternative medicine, healthy lifestyle, juicing and prayer are wonderful ways to prevent cancer and prolong healthy life but In most cases, when you have cancer you need something very aggressive to stop and treat the disease process. There are very few clinical studied an treating cancer effectively with only alternative treatments. I think before you alarm people whose lives could be saved be chemo, you should have much more documention and supporting research for whatever you are presenting as the alternative. Some cancers have a 80+ percent long term survival rate with standard medical treatment. Are you telling those people not to get chemo for some unproven treatment that’s only supported by anecdotal evidence.
>>only supported by anecdotal evidence
Isn’t that what they use in the courtroom?
My stepfather was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 2010. I don’t know what stage or type. A lifelong smoker, he expected it to some extent. It was inoperable and he was given the option of chemo.
He refused. He’d been reading about some aluminium-free baking soda protocol and made up his mind to give it a try. Granted, he figured that being in his 70s, he’d had a pretty decent life to date and he believed that it was his decision to make whether to let nature take its course or to put himself and the family through the chemo process. The arguments with my mother were pretty acrimonious. She wanted him to listen to science and do the chemo. But then she also believes everything her GP tells her and is a true believer in everything about conventional medicine.
My stepfather understood that this protocol had to be done without having had chemo first. It needed a good immune system and healthy cells. So, it was a leap of faith really to eschew the chemo and just follow some internet protocol.
His doctor, the oncologists, all of them were bitterly opposed (as they would be) but granted that he had the ultimate authority to refuse conventional treatment.
I live away from my folks but went to see them later in 2010. He was a few months into the protocol and looked thin from the recent weight loss, but seemed to be hanging in there.
His oncologists had given him six months without the chemo. I have to admit, even being the hippy of the family (and I am the most radical of the bunch), that I thought the whole protocol was outlandish and pretty questionable, but I respected his choice to make his own decisions.
Fast forward to now. 2013. He’s still around. The latest scan showed the tumour in his throat is gone, as is one smaller one in his lungs, and the other two in his lungs have not grown in two years. He’s put on weight, looks healthy. At the last oncologist visit, he cheekily said to his doctor, “Don’t you have sick people to look after?” and the doctor asked him to leave.
Is it a cure? I’m not sure. Would I recommend it to others? No. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their own unique circumstances. All I know is that my stepfather refused chemo in 2010 for his lung cancer and yet in 2013, he is still alive and looking well. Even if things go awry next year, he’ll have had almost four good years with my mother without the side-effects of the chemo.