• The patient was adequately treated by effective means such as surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy before
unorthodox treatments were started. Perhaps the surgical procedure performed to establish the diagnosis of
cancer was in itself curative. This may happen, for example, when a malignant polyp is removed from the
bowel.
• The follow-up time was too brief. Patients may appear to be doing well initially, but later their cancer may be
found to have been progressing all that time, unrecognized.
• Occasionally, cancer spontaneously regresses. Although spontaneous regression occurs less frequently than
one patient in a thousand, more than two thousand cases are well documented in the medical literature.
Although this chapter is clearly cautionary in tone, it is recognized that several effective medical therapies that are used today were first derived from agents that occur naturally in plants and animals. In these situations, beneficial effects were noted by observant individuals, additional tests were carried out, the active agent purged, the dose standardized, effects and side effects carefully documented, and then (and only then) were the agents made available to appropriate patients. A more effective and efficient process for identifying and examining new agents, including those derived from "natural" sources, may well enhance our efforts to reduce the burden of cancer.
Such a process should examine effects on the quality of life of cancer patients as well as effects on tumor size and survival.
