Cancer patients blamed for chemotherapy failures

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22 September 2010

Conventional cancer treatments don’t work very well – chemotherapy has a 10 per cent success rate, for instance – and now doctors are blaming it all on the patient. People who are stressed before the procedure – which must be pretty much everyone – negate the good work the drug might otherwise do, they say. Stressed people initiate a series of biological events that allow cancer cells to survive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, say researchers at Ohio State University. Otherwise, presumably, the therapies would be a great success. Stress isn’t just limited to the natural psychological stress that most cancer patients must experience before they begin treatment. Stress that is the result of extreme physical exercise can also stop the therapies from working. Their advice? Don’t exercise before a course of chemotherapy – and stop being worried about your cancer and a debilitating drug that may lead to hair loss and complete incapacity. (Source: Molecular Cancer Research, 2010; September 21: doi: 10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-10-0181).

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