What is Salvage Chemotherapy

It varies a lot on the patient and the dosage of chemotherapy. Usually its around the one month mark (3-4 weeks), but sometimes as early as 1-2 weeks. And then some people don't lose any hair at all.

Cancer runs really high in my family. My grandfather didn't lose any hair when he had lung cancer (although he died from the cancer), nor did my mother when she had thyroid cancer, and nor my father when he had non-hodgkin's lyphoma cancer.

Haha. Wow both grandparents on my mom's side, my mom, and my father have had cancer. Just realized that…

Anyway, god bless your girlfriend! When she does start to lose hair, tell her she's gorgeous everyday because she may lose self confidence, I've seen a lot of people go through that.

-Catherine

The idea that cancer feeds off of sugar is based on a misconception of cancer biology and an incomplete understanding of how PET scans work.

When you have a PET scan done you quit eating any sugar or carbs prior to the test because most tumors consume more glucose than normal body organs. Tumors have an increased blood supply and this increased vascular supply helps feed the glucose into the tumor. Having no excess glucose in the bloodstream makes the tumors light up much better on PET scans.

All aspects of metabolism in the human body are dependent on glucose for fuel. You can not stop consuming enough glucose to make any difference in the growth of a tumor because the tumor always gets first dibs on any glucose that becomes available. In other words, you would starve to death before your reducing your glucose intake would have any affect on the growth of the tumor.

Your father could have a PET scan and this would tell if the tumor is still active or not. If your dad has medicare for his insurance you should know that medicare does not like to pay for PET scans but if they are medically necessary and he has his Dr's support it is possible to get a PET scan approved by and paid for by medicare.

all the best to you both

Chemotherapy works by destroying cancer cells; unfortunately, it cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and some healthy cells. So chemotherapy eliminates not only the fast-growing cancer cells but also other fast-growing cells in your body, including, hair and blood cells.

Some cancer cells grow slowly while others grow rapidly. As a result, different types of chemotherapy drugs target the growth patterns of specific types of cancer cells. Each drug has a different way of working and is effective at a specific time in the life cycle of the cell it targets.

So, the chemicals are designed to go after specific cells that have a particular metabolic rate.

Chemotherapy has NOT been very effective and the 5 year survival rate is very poor. It is expensive; a cancer patient is worth about $300,000 to the medical community.

In 1972, according to the American Cancer Societies own figures, 33% of cancers had a five year survival rate. We should also point out that at that same time 33% of cancers went away on their own. Today, according to the ACS, the five year survival rate for cancer has risen to 40%. However, what they do not tell you is that:

1.The statistics are invalid because they combine data of both local and metastasized cancers; and that the comparisons are not randomized [Ulrich Abel, Advanced Epithelial Cancer", 1990 (no longer in print) ]
2.Cancers not factored into the original statistics are now factored in, such as skin cancers, many of which are not fatal and that the statistics are purposely inflated by including people with benign cancers.
3.Technology has helped us to find cancers earlier, thus the survival time from diagnosis to eventual death has lengthened.
4.They are now including in their stats non deadly skin cancers.

By shrinking tumors, chemotherapy encourages stronger cancer cells to grow and multiply and become chemo resistant. Then there are the new cancers caused by chemotherapy, or secondary cancers. This quaint side effect is often overlooked in the lists of side effects in a drug's accompanying literature, though you can find this information quite easily at the National Cancer Institute. We pride ourselves in America for being technologically advanced and that our technology is rooted in a foundation of good science.

Wrong.

When it comes to medicine, little at all is based upon science. Again we shall point to the Office of Technological Assessment’s paper: Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies in which we are told that fewer than 20% of all medical procedures have been tested, and that of those tested, half were tested badly.

Medicine in America is not about healing.

Most telling, according to Ralph Moss in his book Questioning Chemotherapy, is that in a good number of surveys, chemotherapists have responded that they would neither recommend chemotherapy for their families nor would they use it themselves. In an unpublished cohort study in which it was revealed that only 9% of oncologists took chemotherapy for their cancers.

"Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors,” Allen Levin, MD UCSF The Healing of Cancer.

Additionally, Irwin Bross, a biostatistician for the National Cancer Institute, discovered that many cancers that are benign (though thought to be malignant) and will not metastasize until they are hit with chemotherapy. In other words, he's found that many people who've been diagnosed with metastatic cancer did not have metastatic cancer until they got their chemotherapy.

For many cancers, chemotherapy just does not improve your survival rate. Some of these are colorectal, gastric, pancreatic, bladder, breast, ovarian, cervical and corpus uteri, head and neck. Knowing this, oncologists still recommend a regimen of chemotherapy, why?

The answer you will get from oncologists that are honest is this: “We give it to patients so they won't give up hope and fall into the hands of quacks.” Quacks? Implicit in the definition of quackery is the sale of worthless or dangerous nostrums for profit. Who exactly are the quacks? Just because someone is wearing a white smock, has a title, and works in a nice air conditioned office, does NOT take away what he is. Con men don't look like crooks or they would never get anyone to buy into what they are selling. Looking credible does NOT mean they are.

Dr Ulrich Abel, who poured over thousands and thousands of cancer studies, published his shocking report in 1990 stating quite succinctly that chemotherapy has done nothing for 80% of all cancers; that 80% of chemotherapy administered was absolutely worthless.

To give a fair and accurate assessment of chemotherapy in your report, you should also tell people how it is NOT very effective and only a smal

If you want a really general overview with how each type of chemotherapeutic agent works, wikipedia is the best place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy

Elementally speaking, a small number of elements are used to form complexes, which can bind to DNA causing apoptosis. The best example of this is cisplatin, which is platinum based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisplatin

The most basic explanation is that the majority of chemotherapy drugs act against cancer cells by inhibiting mitosis. There are many different ways to act against mitosis, such as inhibiting microtubule growth, inhibiting topoisomerases (enzymes which allows the compacting of DNA via formation of coils).

good luck with your project!