Recognise this?

Side effects of cancer treatment and your prospects 

Mouth sores, loss of taste, loose teeth, blurry vision, diarrhoea, constipation, peripheral neuropathy (aching / burning sensation in hands and feet), lost all your hair, you are nauseated most of the time, you are constantly tired, and your doctor told you that your cancer is treatable, but not curable. You honestly don't know if you can spend the rest of your life feeling so miserable.

To add insult to injury, people are telling you that you will be fine, when they quite clearly have no clue what they are talking about. Although you manage to keep up appearances of "business as usual", deep inside there is total and utter disbelief of what is happening to you. 

Image courtesy of Science Photo 

Library

You have had every approved mainstream therapy, including countless rounds of chemo, but during the most recent consultation your doctor tells you sorry, the cancer has spread too far and that another round of chemo would kill you. He or she can no longer do anything for you, other than provide you with palliative care (e.g. relieving pain using morphine injections).

Stunned by this information, you still hear yourself ask the doctor how long you have.

The doctor’s response is as clear as it is evasive. He or she tells you that on the basis of other people with similar disease parameters, or patients faced with a similar scenario that you have between 2 – 6 months to live, possibly 12. It is apparently difficult to predict!

By the sounds of it, you will not live long enough to see another spring. Just like 1.700.000 other cancer patients in Europe, or those 700.000 cancer patients that will die in North America, or those 8.000.000 cancer patients world wide that will die this year. Just like every other year… (see world cancer report 2014 from the WHO).

Obviously, currently approved mainstream treatments are not working as well as they should. If they did, 8 million cancer patients would not end up dead every year…

In other words, if today you are suffering from inoperable metastatic cancer, you will eventually die of that disease in most cases.

So what are your options at this stage?

1. Do nothing, accept palliative care and wait for death to come
2. Get access to promising “not-yet-approved” therapies – but which ones and how?

I plan to use this blog as a platform to provide the type of information that will possibly allow you to address point 2 above. In addition, I will be posting information that relates to cancer prevention and the latest in vitro diagnostics (IVD). 

Please note: Any medical or scientific information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice from a physician and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. 
For more information, please read my terms & conditions.