Radiation>>

Surgery:

    It was obly with the discovery of asepsis and anesthetics that surgery, against much opposition, became accepted. The first recorded surgical cure for a cancer was in 1809, when a 10kg (22 lb.) ocarian tumour was removed from a patient who went on to live a further thirty years,. Though whether this should be called a cure is a moot point - the tumour was clearly benign.Since then, surgical procedures and technology have improved by leaps and bounds. There is no doubt that for cases of severe physical trauma, surgery
is essential if many victims are to survive. Surgery also offers wonderful gifts to children born with birth defects, such as hare-lips. But cancer is not a severe physical trauma or a physical malformation that needs to be corrected. It matters not what great advances have been make in the area of surgery - the question of its appropriateness in the case of cancer remains contentious; no amount of technological improvement can change this; because the problem relates almost entirely to the nature of cancer rather than to the nature of surgery.

Dangers of Surgery:
    The simple fact is that surgery is dangerous and results in deaths. That is the combined death rate from all forms of surgery? Recent investigations in Britain suggest that the average surgeon have a patient mortality rate of between two and seven per cent. This is measurable greater among those who have had the least experience. It is better not to be in hospital than a small local one. It is better not to be in hospital when medical students graduate and relieve their more experienced superiors. Surgeons undertaking fewer than five breast cancer operations a year have a death rate of up to twenty-one per cent. A specialist is always better than a general surgeon is.

Simple Surgery:
    The argument for simple surgery to extract a tumour only appears to make a degree of sense. As long as metastasis has not occurred and the tumour is accessible and small enough to be removed the chances, most surgeons say, are reasonable good that surgery will be sufficient treatment. However, cancer tumours are highly individualistic. Just because a tumour is small does not mean it hasn't metastasised; just because it is big does not mean it is going to metastasise. So, it is not obvious before an operation which tumours are best treated by simple surgery and which are not. Moreover, when a tumour appears to be singular and operable, in only fifty per cent of cases is the entire tumour removed. In half the cases some cancerous cells are left to rebuild the tumour. When this happens, the result is that not only does surgery not cure, it hastens death.
    It is also not widely known that a primary tumour in one site, as wall as seeding metastases to other sites, may also have the ability to control these metastases in such a way as to prevent them from growing. Once the primary tumour is removed, the means of control is also removed, with the result that each metastasis can blossom into a full-grown tumour in its own right. This is another argument against proceeding automatically with surgery.

Radical Surgery:
    Radical surgery is almost always worse than useless. It is a desperate, and almost certainly vain, attempt to remove a cancer that has spread by cutting out all the tissue surrounding a tumour - or trying to locate and remove all the metastases of a tumour. With any such major surgery, the mortality risk must necessarily be greater. For the patient, the pain and suffering are appalling. They may not only be seriously disfigured, lacking in basic bodily functions and weakened, but on top of that their remaining life span may be reduced.
    For most patients, the stated reason for radical surgery will be that the tumour is known to have metastasised - or is assumed to have done so. Once this has happened, there is no knowing where the secondary tumours will appear. The tissue closest to the tumour will not necessarily be the tissue first affected by a new matastasis. The cancer cells may have been borne by the bloodstream to areas of the body far from the original site. Once a tumour is suspected of metastasising, then surgery ceases to be a sensible option: what is the surgeon going to cut out? When will the surgeon finish cutting?