Breast cancer trial finds half of women who get chemo don’t need it
If you or someone you love has received chemotherapy for breast cancer, you know what a miserable experience it is.
You may have spent months too tired to move off the couch, doubled over the toilet, or watching your hair fall out in clumps. And you were promised all along that the chemo was saving your life.
Now imagine finding that you never needed to have those toxic drugs pumped into your body at all.
Believe it or not, that’s the exact situation that countless women are in right now. A frightening new study has found that half of chemo treatments for breast cancer are totally unnecessary.
Chemo drugs are being handed out based on little more than guesswork – and it’s all because the mainstream is turning its back on a simple test that could help you avoid needless misery.
You know by now that I’m no fan of chemotherapy. Aside from all of the sickening side effects, we know that chemo can trigger aggressive secondary cancers down the road.
So it’s an outrage that we’d ever expose anyone to chemo who couldn’t possibly benefit.
But it’s happening all the time – especially to women with breast cancer.
You see, the mainstream likes to pair breast cancer surgery (which is also often unnecessary) with chemo, supposedly to keep the cancer from coming back.
But for nearly a decade now, a genetic test called MammaPrint has been available that can tell patients with breast cancer the chances of that cancer returning and whether there’s any benefit to chemo.
You’d think no woman would ever be asked to endure chemo without getting a test like this first.
But many docs aren’t using it – and that’s needlessly putting countless women right in harm’s way.
A major, nine-year study using the MammaPrint test has just been wrapped up, and it involved nearly 7,000 women with breast cancer from all over the world.
And it found that nearly half of those women never needed chemo at all. These poor women went through untold amounts of suffering for absolutely no benefit.
That’s not just wrong – it’s practically criminal.
In fact, the outcomes were so similar (a 95 percent survival rate) between the chemo group, and the ones who didn’t undergo chemo based on the genetic test, one expert said they were practically identical.
But instead of using tests like MammaPrint, lots of docs just look at cancer cells under a microscope and basically guess how aggressive a tumor might be.
That’s a little like telling the weather by licking your finger and sticking it in the air.
And if there’s one place where we shouldn’t be doing any guesswork, it’s in cancer care – especially when we’re asking women to submit to treatments that can wreck their quality of life.
Dr. Martine Piccart, lead investigator in this study, said that it’s clear that many women who get chemo don’t need the treatment, yet suffer all the side effects with no benefits.
And it’s important to make sure you’re not one of them.
Now, there are some doctors (but not enough) using genetic tests like MammaPrint or another called Blueprint. And it’s worth finding out if your doc is one of them.
And it’s always a good idea to get a second or third opinion before you agree to any cancer treatment, and to make sure you research your alternatives.
Because fighting cancer is tough enough – and the last thing you need is to find out you got some sickening and dangerous treatment you never needed in the first place.
Sources:
“Many breast cancer patients get unneeded chemo” Newsmax, April 19, 2016, newsmax.com
