Is chemotherapy a blessing or a curse? Why?

Chemotherapy is a double-edged sword. While it kills tumor cells, it also has certain side effects on normal humans. Therefore, the pros and cons must be weighed. If chemotherapy is appropriate, chemotherapy is strongly recommended. If chemotherapy is not appropriate, chemotherapy should not be given. As a doctor, I found that both situations exist. Some patients do not need chemotherapy, but some doctors and patients’ families are not reassured and insist on chemotherapy. In fact, it is a transitional treatment. No benefits are obtained, but instead A range of side effects.

On the contrary, some patients clearly need chemotherapy, but the patients and their families strongly refuse. This is wrong, and recurrence and metastasis are prone to occur after surgery.

Let me talk about which patients do not need chemotherapy:

First, early-stage cancer does not require chemotherapy

In early-stage cancer, tumor cells only It grows locally and does not spread to distant places. It only needs to be removed and no chemotherapy is required. For example, stage I and stage II colorectal cancer without high-risk factors do not require postoperative chemotherapy.

Second, chemotherapy is not needed for tumors whose chemotherapy is unknown.

Some tumors are not sensitive to chemotherapy at all. It will be useless if you give chemotherapy. Can't kill cancer cells. For example: differentiated thyroid cancer, liver cancer (systemic chemotherapy is useless), gastrointestinal stromal tumor, etc.

Third, patients who cannot tolerate chemotherapy cannot receive chemotherapy.

Patients who are too weak, have poor liver and kidney function, and have severe bone marrow suppression cannot receive chemotherapy, because they My body cannot handle the chemotherapy. Before chemotherapy, we all have a scoring standard. The physical condition must reach a certain level before chemotherapy can be performed.

Therefore, chemotherapy is a blessing for some patients, as it can extend life and reduce pain. For some patients, chemotherapy is a curse, and chemotherapy is not needed or cannot be tolerated.

For some patients, they are afraid of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but for some patients, it is actually a very happy thing to be able to undergo radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Because being able to undergo radiotherapy and chemotherapy actually means that there is a chance for rescue. If there is no chance of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, then it is time to go home and wait for the end of time.

However, it is not possible to cure cancer with radiotherapy and chemotherapy. If we do not have better countermeasures to reduce the side effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the efficacy of chemotherapy will be reduced ~ so some people I wonder if chemotherapy is a harmful poison?

Does chemotherapy save people or harm them?

It is also a "blessing" for cancer patients to receive chemotherapy

There are 4 types of chemotherapy: alkylating agents (chlorobutanbarbital), plant alkaloids (actinomycin) D), anti-metabolites (purine antagonists), anti-tumor antibiotics (doxorubicin).

After chemotherapy drugs enter the human body, they can spread throughout the body. Therefore, whether the cancer has spread or not, chemotherapy drugs can be used for treatment. The functions of chemotherapy are as follows:

1. Inhibit the division of cancer cells

2. Induce cancer cells to commit suicide

3. Cut off the nutrient supply to cancer cells, mainly Cut off the enzymes and hormones needed by cancer cells

4. Block the growth of tumor cardiovascular systems and "starve" cancer cells

5. Cut off the supply of blood and oxygen to cancer cells (There are still doubts in the medical community)

Chemotherapy drugs are similar, but everyone’s physique is different, resulting in everyone’s response to chemotherapy being different. In addition, local medical conditions will affect the final outcome. Treatment results.

Clinically, it is true that many patients have significantly worse bones after chemotherapy. This is because chemotherapy drugs sometimes "distinguish between friend and foe" and have a very strong impact on healthy cells, which leads to side effects of chemotherapy.

When it comes to the side effects of chemotherapy, there are many, including hair loss, nausea and vomiting, hearing damage, low immunity, anemia, etc.

Chemotherapy is actually more about saving people. When faced with the side effects of chemotherapy, we can find ways to solve a series of side effects caused by chemotherapy, such as adjusting the dosage and changing dressings.

Treatment of side effects of chemotherapy

First, low resistance (low number of white blood cells)

Chemotherapy will basically bring about a decrease in human white blood cells, which will lead to human immunity decrease in strength. If the white blood cells do not increase, the effect of chemotherapy will be greatly reduced or even counterproductive. Therefore, patients should increase the number of white blood cells in a timely manner:

Nutritional supplement: First of all, be sure to supplement selenium, vitamin E, carotene and other foods. These foods are necessary nutrients to ensure the recovery of white blood cells. You can supplement them with some malt selenium and vitamin E tablets. This is a nutrient mixture that can be taken once a day in the morning and evening to replenish the number of white blood cells and improve immunity. Of course, you can also eat some kiwi fruit, carrots, milk, etc.

Treat wounds: If you are accidentally bruised, you need to disinfect it as soon as possible to prevent bacteria from entering the skin. Once an infection occurs in chemotherapy patients, they need immediate treatment.

Second, anemia (low red blood cell content)

Red blood cells are responsible for loosening oxygen to body tissues, and low red blood cell content will lead to insufficient oxygen supply to the tissues. You will feel fatigue, shortness of breath and heart palpitations, and you can't avoid anemia. If the anemia is too severe, an emergency blood transfusion may be needed. The drug can be erythropoietin (EPO), which is a drug that promotes the body's production of red blood cells.

In terms of food, you can eat more green leafy vegetables, beans, apricots and raisins.

Third, bleeding (low platelet content)

This is thrombocytopenia, and platelets are used for coagulation. If the platelet content is insufficient, it may lead to abnormal coagulation function. For example, nosebleeds, bleeding gums, etc. will usually cause bleeding.

To reduce the risk of bleeding, minimize the use of blade razors and replace them with electric razors.

When choosing a toothbrush, try to choose a soft-bristled toothbrush. In life, you must be careful when using sharp objects, or it is best to wear gloves to prevent injuries. Chemotherapy can "melt" people down, and the side effects are particularly severe. This concept is wrong! Xiao Jiawen, director of the Second Department of Medical Oncology at the Fifth People’s Hospital of Shenyang, will give you an analysis.

Chemotherapy will only be used when necessary. Trust the judgment of professional doctors in this regard.

Many patients and family members hold a view to reduce the dose of chemotherapy. In fact, there is a clear relationship between the dose intensity of chemotherapy and patient survival. Insufficient dosage not only fails to effectively treat cancer, but also reduces patient survival, so ensuring the dosage is necessary.

"Take it down" and "put it down" are misunderstandings among patients and their families. In the process of treating cancer, new drugs are emerging one after another, and the side effects are not as big as imagined. Moreover, it is worth facing the side effects of chemotherapy for patients to achieve long-term survival and greater benefits.

New drugs to deal with adverse reactions are also playing an increasingly important role.

Thirty or forty years ago, it was almost rare to see patients holding a basin and vomiting. There are many kinds of antiemetic drugs. There are also many options for protecting the gastric mucosa, heart, liver and kidneys, and chemotherapy can achieve a smooth transition.

In addition to being biased against chemotherapy, some patients believe that after getting cancer, they should eat less and starve the cancer cells to death! This concept is also wrong!

Nutritional guarantee is very important to patients.

However, eating well will help cancer cells grow faster. It is widely said that eating less or not eating will starve cancer cells to death.

In fact, only by ensuring adequate nutrition can chemotherapy and radiotherapy be kept up. Otherwise, the body will collapse before the individual can defeat the cancer. The nutritional status cannot keep up, and effective treatment cannot be achieved.

500 famous doctors from Liaoning and Shenyang are an online health think tank for you and your family!

I am the founder of Chinese non-drug therapy. Is chemotherapy a blessing or a curse? This issue is definitely very controversial. We need to calm down and understand it carefully. Comparing every chemotherapy session with before chemotherapy, you will understand whether your condition is better or worse. I have watched many videos of young people after chemotherapy. , I don’t know what to say to them.

First of all, we need to understand a question: Does chemotherapy treat a disease or a symptom? This should be obvious, it is to treat the disease, because its purpose is to kill cancer cells. This is not wrong. What is wrong is that chemotherapy does not only kill cancer cells, it also kills our immune forces. It can be said that No matter what the means, although the result is that many cancer cells are killed, our only immune system also completely collapses, and the consequences are unimaginable.

It is different from taking antihypertensive drugs for high blood pressure, and different from taking antihyperglycemic drugs for diabetes. Although antihypertensive drugs and hypoglycemic drugs treat the symptoms, they are still mild after all, while chemotherapy drugs are extremely dangerous. Therefore, antihypertensive drugs and antidiabetic drugs are similar to boiling frogs in warm water. We don’t feel it is so obvious, but chemotherapy is just boiling frogs directly in hot water, and of course it is obvious.

I have repeatedly called for a city in China to pilot a ban on allopathic therapies such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgery for cancer patients. I can guarantee that the cancer mortality rate in this city will immediately drop by more than 40%. Chemotherapy is a blessing.

But specific patients require further careful analysis. Not only are the therapeutic effects involved but also the economic costs involved, so individual blessings and harms can be completely opposite to overall blessings and curses.

Chemotherapy is an important means of fighting tumors. Before chemotherapy, all non-solid tumors, such as leukemia, had no treatment. Patients could only wait to die, and they died really quickly.

Chemotherapy is used to treat tumors, starting with blood tumors, namely leukemia.

From just waiting to die to having drug treatment that can save lives or greatly extend life, this is how the reputation of chemotherapy started. Nowadays, the treatment effect of leukemia is quite good. 90% of patients can survive successfully, but in the past, 100% will die soon. This difference cannot be overstated.

Imatinib (trade name: Gleevec) mentioned in the recent movie "I Am Not the God of Medicine" is a miracle drug for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia. So, would you say chemotherapy is a blessing or a curse?

For solid tumors, patients who can undergo surgery have to depend on their luck, because if the cancer has metastasized, even if surgery is performed, the cancer will soon recur in other parts of the body, and like It is like mushrooms, not in one place, but in many places. It cannot be removed through surgery at all. Once the patient relapses, he will die quickly. Later, radiotherapy was added, which was effective for some patients, but the effect was weak. This had a lot to do with people's insufficient understanding of tumors at that time. Today, the effect of radiotherapy has been improved, and it has become an important auxiliary in the treatment of certain tumors, even during surgery. Radiation therapy has unique advantages in areas of the body that cannot be used.

After chemotherapy became famous in the treatment of leukemia, pharmaceutical companies began to develop other drugs, trying to enter the treatment of solid tumors, as an important auxiliary, killing those who have metastasized but have not really started. Crazy growing tumors. This treatment strategy has achieved good results in a variety of tumors, thus greatly extending the lives of many cancer patients. However, there are still some obstacles, such as triple-negative breast cancer, intermediate and advanced lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, etc. .

Let’s hope for better medicines. At the same time, pray that you have money to afford these drugs.

Is chemotherapy a blessing or a curse? Why?

I’m afraid it takes the person involved to truly know the answer!

1. From the perspective of medical treatment and doctors, half a century ago, there were no chemotherapy drugs and programs, and cancer patients could not get effective treatment and were left with a dead end. Now, with chemotherapy drugs and proven regimens, cancer patients have hope. Clinically, some of the early-stage cancers detected in time can be completely cured and become cancer-free through special means such as surgery + radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Obviously, this type of chemotherapy is definitely a blessing!

Let’s not talk about the examples of many famous people in the world who got cancer and were cured through systemic chemotherapy.

In clinical practice, I have treated many cancer patients, such as early-stage lung cancer and breast cancer. More than ten years have passed and there has been no recurrence and they are all living well! It cannot but be said to be "blessing".

2. From the perspective of patients and their families, except for a few cancer patients who have achieved clinical cure effects through surgery + radiotherapy and chemotherapy, most cancer patients, for one reason or another, are found too late. Late stage, unable to tolerate chemotherapy and giving up, economic conditions cannot keep up, etc., resulting in unsatisfactory chemotherapy treatment results or even failure.

At most, it only improves the patient’s quality of life and prolongs the patient’s survival period.

Especially for the family members of patients, when a loved one has died of cancer, they calm down and think about it carefully. The money has been spent, the suffering has been suffered, and the person has died. They all feel that chemotherapy is not worth it. "disaster".

I often meet some family members of former patients on the street. Months and years have passed, and they have gone from being nervous, anxious, painful, helpless, and even crazy and irrational. In the state, I came out. Listening to their opinions, they all believed that chemotherapy was not a wise move. Perhaps, without chemotherapy, our loved ones would live longer.

Apparently, is chemotherapy a blessing or a curse? In clinical practice and in life, there is no standard or unique answer! We can only talk about specific problems, specific analysis, and specific solutions.

Recommendation------Patients, family members, and oncology experts should work together to formulate a scientific and reasonable plan based on reality, rationality, and understanding.

Objection------Doctors make their own decisions, family members interfere too much, and patients are confused.

I am particularly opposed to it------I heard that so-and-so was a "miraculous doctor" who "cured" a cancer patient with a folk prescription. As a result, thousands of cancer patients flocked to this "miraculous doctor" to seek remedies. In the end, it’s just harming others and harming yourself!

Any treatment method will have its own value, otherwise it would have been eliminated long ago.

Chemotherapy, as a lethal treatment, still plays an irreplaceable role so far. The reason why it is often questioned is because chemotherapy has serious side effects and will bring a certain degree of side effects to patients during the treatment process. damage. However, as an important means in the field of human anti-tumor treatment, the advent of chemotherapy is definitely a blessing, not a gain.

1. Postoperative chemotherapy can effectively reduce the recurrence rate

Most cancers that are staged later after surgery require chemotherapy. The purpose is to remove the possible remaining cancer. The cells are further killed and the recurrence rate is reduced. Clinical studies over the years have proven that patients who undergo chemotherapy at a later stage have a lower risk of recurrence than patients who do not receive chemotherapy.

2. For advanced patients, chemotherapy can control the progression of tumors

For many chemotherapy-sensitive advanced cancers, the tumors will shrink significantly after chemotherapy. These visible effects are not significant. It can be questioned, and as powerful drugs to combat side effects enter the clinic, most patients can tolerate the side effects of chemotherapy.

3. Tumors that are extremely sensitive to chemotherapy are expected to be cured by chemotherapy alone

Before the advent of chemotherapy, the mortality rate of choriocarcinoma (choriocarcinoma) could basically reach 100%. After the advent of chemotherapy, even choriocarcinoma with multiple metastases can be cured through systemic chemotherapy. Choriocarcinoma has also become the first human cancer that can be cured by chemotherapy alone. In addition, many lymphomas and testicular seminoma can also be cured through chemotherapy alone.

In short, chemotherapy will bring serious side effects, but this cannot deny the good news that chemotherapy brings to mankind.

This question is like asking: Are knives a blessing or a curse to us? The answer, of course, is that it’s both a blessing and a curse, it all depends on how you use it. If you use it well, it will help you do things and become a good helper in life; if you don't use it well, it will become a tool to hurt or even kill people.

The same is true for chemotherapy (in fact, isn’t it the same for other treatments? Everything has two sides). If your cancer and your condition require chemotherapy, then chemotherapy is a blessing to you. It can cure the disease. Eliminate or control cancer in your body. Without chemotherapy, cancer cells will overgenerate in your body and may kill you very quickly. For example, if choriocarcinoma is not treated with timely chemotherapy, the mortality rate is extremely high, but if timely and standardized chemotherapy is given, most of the cases can be cured. It can be seen that in this case, chemotherapy is a great blessing. Although it has side effects, it is worth the effort. .

If you don’t need chemotherapy, or the cancer you have is not sensitive to chemotherapy, or your physical condition is too bad to bear chemotherapy, at this time, the former should not undergo chemotherapy, and the latter should be cautious Chemotherapy (can still be considered in some cases).

In short, whether chemotherapy is a blessing or not depends on: the sensitivity of your cancer to chemotherapy; your stage; your physical condition; whether the doctors and nurses in the hospital department who give you chemotherapy understand it Chemotherapy... used rationally, the benefits of chemotherapy outweigh the harms, otherwise it will become a disaster.

Hello.

I believe that many people have a bad impression of the word "chemotherapy". More than one person is even curious: "I was living well before I was diagnosed with cancer. Why did I not have chemotherapy for a long time?" The person died? ”

Let me have a brief chat with you.

Chemotherapy is a treatment method that uses chemical drugs to prevent the growth and metastasis of cancer cells until the cancer cells are eventually eliminated. It can be said that both postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy and preoperative neoadjuvant chemotherapy (referring to systemic chemotherapy before local treatment is implemented) have contributed to our victory over tumors.

However, since the biggest difference between cancer cells and normal cells is rapid cell division and growth, the principle of action of anti-cancer drugs is usually based on Inhibits the growth of cancer cells by interfering with mechanisms of cell division, such as inhibiting DNA replication or preventing chromosome segregation. Since traditional chemotherapy is mostly non-selective, it can also affect our normal cells. But one concept must be made clear. For cancer patients who receive chemotherapy, the cause of death is not chemotherapy but the cancer itself.

Chemotherapy is just a treatment used to kill cancer cells. Of course, the statement that "some current chemotherapy drugs not only kill cancer cells but also promote the metastasis of cancer cells" is not alarmist.

In 2017, scientists discovered that paclitaxel in chemotherapy drugs would increase the probability of tumor metastasis microenvironment, thereby promoting breast cancer metastasis. . A month later, another researcher, Tsonwin Hai, discovered that in addition to helping cancer cells escape from the primary site, paclitaxel in chemotherapy drugs can also directly act on the lungs, change the lung microenvironment, and help cancer cells colonize in the lungs.

Recently, Ioanna Keklikoglou and Michele De Palma of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and others discovered another mechanism by which paclitaxel promotes tumor metastasis. Their research found that commonly used chemotherapy drugs paclitaxel and doxorubicin can promote the release of exosomes from tumors, change the microenvironment in the lungs, and promote breast cancer lung metastasis. Relevant papers were published in Nature Cell Biology.

Despite this, we still cannot deny the effectiveness of chemotherapy in treating cancer. When choosing a treatment method, the most important thing is to believe in modern medicine Treatment level, go to a regular hospital to receive treatment from a doctor.

One of the important means of cancer treatment today is to kill cancer cells and normal cells at the same time. It is unavoidable! Some chemotherapy drugs can really kill and control cancer cells, thereby prolonging survival time. However, no matter how cancer cells are controlled, long-term chemotherapy will basically lead to a dead end! Chemotherapy drugs can cause major organ failure in the body and lead to death! The pain and harm caused by chemotherapy are unimaginable to outsiders! There are three major causes of death for cancer patients: one is death from fear, two is death from despair (no money for treatment, worry about family destruction), three is death from poison (organ failure caused by chemotherapy), and the remaining one may die because of cancer!

Chemotherapy should not be taken lightly by the weak. Generally speaking, I personally think that chemotherapy brings more harm than blessing.