Why is “Hot Chemo” an Acceptable Cancer Treatment—But IV Vitamin C is “Too Far Out There”?
January 31, 2012
Patients liken hot chemotherapy to “being filleted, disemboweled, and then bathed in hot poison.” Best patient care, or merely the biggest moneymaker?
According to the New York Times, hot chemotherapy, which couples extensive abdominal surgery with blasts of heated chemotherapy to the abdominal cavity and its organs, was once a niche procedure used mainly against rare cancers of the appendix. Most academic medical centers shunned it. Now it’s being offered to patients to treat more common colorectal or ovarian cancers.
Dr. David P. Ryan, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, says there is little evidence that it really works and “has almost no basis in science.” The treatment is extremely costly, and is something of a desperation move by leading medical centers because the competition for patients and treatments is so intense.
So why is this dangerous, scientifically unsound, and outrageously expensive procedure considered a viable treatment option for cancer patients, when intravenous vitamin C—safe, effective, and far less expensive—is questioned as an adjunct therapy? Why is this common vitamin, administered in high doses intravenously, labeled an unapproved drug by a hostile FDA?
Read the whole article here
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