Experts shocked by group’s cancer-drug advice

When making therapy decisions in treating cancer, you would think that doctors would rely on a group that would only back drugs based on the best available information.

But a new study has turned up some shocking discoveries about the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), one of the most influential organizations that you’ve probably never heard of when it comes to writing guidelines for treating all kinds of cancers.

A large group of experts that’s supposed to carefully weigh and measure trials, data, and results before putting a drug on its list of recommendations, the NCCN is believed to be doctors’ best source fact-based medicine.

In fact, the group’s motto is “Your best resource in the fight against cancer.”

Many doctors consider it the gold standard in deciding which therapies to give their patients.

But as we’re now finding out, doctors aren’t being given the details on some expensive and risky cancer meds. Perhaps that’s because there’s something missing – actual evidence indicating that they might work.

I know that if you’re currently battling cancer, news such as this can be disheartening. But if you’re being prescribed a drug, you deserve all of the facts and information available to help make the very best decisions about the your treatments.

‘Conflicted physicians’

Prescribing meds off-label is perfectly legal – and doctors do it all the time.

A new analysis has revealed, however, that many of the cancer drugs doctors are being advised to prescribe by the NCCN are not only for off-label uses (that is, for different types of cancer than what the FDA approved them for), but they are being recommended without a shred of proof that they’ll do anything to help.

What Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Sciences University, and his team have just uncovered is that when it comes to “evidence” of those cancer drugs’ effectiveness, in many cases, it’s just not there.

It turns out that the NCCN frequently promotes “costly, toxic cancer drugs” to doctors with few supporting facts to back them up.

And when Dr. Prasad uses the word “costly,” he’s talking about drugs in the range of $100,000 that are being approved for insurance payments (by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers) based solely on the advice of the NCCN.

So, is that organization just pulling this advice out of a hat… or is there more to it than that?

Well, that brings up the second part of this study, which revealed that close to 90 percent of NCCN members — the ones those who come up with these policies — are also on Big Pharma’s payroll.

Dr. Prasad describes those “conflicted physicians” as possibly being a bit overly “optimistic” about the drugs they recommend.

Well, that’s certainly putting it mildly! When practically the entire group is receiving payments from drugmakers, I’d call it a lot more than just being optimistic.

And while all of this is going on, as I told you last spring, the FDA is misdirecting its efforts by leading a charge against what it calls “bogus” cancer claims and sending out threatening letters to companies selling treatments. Those include some therapies that just happen to have proven track records in fighting cancer – the most outrageous warning going to a distributor that dared to state how vitamin C can treat a variety of cancers.

Unlike many of the obscenely priced meds recommended by the NCCN, vitamin C happens to have a lot of research to back it up – including a study currently going on at the University of Iowa’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center, where researchers are using high-dose IVC to treat several deadly cancers.

That begs the question: What can you do if you’re a cancer patient who’s being prescribed drugs as part of your treatment?

According to Dr. Otis Brawley, head honcho of the American Cancer Society, you can ask your doc what the “scientific basis” is for being prescribed a certain drug, and you can ask if it’s being used off-label.

And while cancer treatments are constantly evolving, you shouldn’t lose sight of the natural remedies that are already known to be extremely valuable in helping to fight this disease.

These approaches include better nutrition, exercise, meditation, and non-toxic therapies such as IV-C, which unlike many of the meds the NCCN promotes, have decades of science to back them up.

“Cancer treatment guidelines questioned in new study” Jacqueline Howard, March 8, 2018, CNN, cnn.com