Why the “Slash-Poison-Burn” Approach to Cancer Has Failed

Slash, poison, burn. That’s what a leading cancer doctor calls the protocol of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. We spend $150 billion each year treating cancer, yet a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it today — with a few exceptions — as one was 50 years ago. Today we spend the hour with renowned cancer doctor, Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. She argues that experiments and the funding for eradicating cancer look at the disease when it is in its later stages, when the cancer has grown and spread. Instead, she says, the focus should be on the very first stages — the first cell, as her book is titled. She says this type of treatment would be more effective, cheaper and less toxic.

TRANSCRIPT

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Why has there been so little progress in the war on cancer? According to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, quote, “Americans are living longer, healthier lives. Life expectancy for a baby born in the U.S. has risen from 47 years in 1900 to more than 78 years today. Among the advances that have helped to make this possible are a 70% decline in the U.S. death rate from cardiovascular disease over the past 50 years, and a drop of more than 1% annually in the cancer death rate over the past couple of decades.” A drop of just over 1%? For the trillions of dollars that have been poured into cancer research, just over 1%? Today, we spend the hour with a renowned oncologist who says we should be treating the disease differently.

AMY GOODMAN: In her new book, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, our guest for the hour, Dr. Azra Raza, notes we spend $150 billion each year treating cancer, yet a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it today — with a few exceptions — as one was 50 years ago. She argues experiments and the funding for eradicating cancer look at the disease when it’s in its later stages, when the cancer has grown and spread. Instead, she says, the focus should be on the very first stages, the first cell, as her book is titled. She says this type of treatment would be more effective, cheaper and less toxic.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Raza criticizes what she calls the, quote, “protocol of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation” — the slash-poison-burn approach to treating cancer, which she says has remained largely unchanged for decades. She calls for a transformation in the orientation of cancer research, writing, quote, “Little has happened in the past fifty years, and little will happen in another fifty if we insist on the same old, same old. The only way to deal with the cancer problem … is to shift our focus away from exclusively developing treatments for end-stage disease and concentrate on diagnosing cancer at its inception and developing the science to prevent its further expansion. From chasing after the last cell to identifying the footprints of the first,” Dr. Raza writes.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, Dr. Azra Raza joins us to speak in her own words. Oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, she’s also the director of the MDS Center. MDS is myelodysplastic syndromes, a form of bone marrow cancer. In her book, she notes, again, that we spend $150 billion each year treating cancer, yet a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it today than one 50 years ago — it is an astounding fact — with a few exceptions.

Dr. Azra Raza, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. How can this be? How can it be, the lack of progress that has been made in this last half-century?

DR. AZRA RAZA: Thank you for having me again, Amy. I’m delighted to be here.

Since 1903, it has been well appreciated, actually, that it’s not cancer that kills; it’s the delay in treatment that kills. So, forever we have been making attempts to try and diagnose this disease early. In the last three decades, we have seen a 26% decline in cancer mortality, which is about 1% a year, as you pointed out. But that’s not happened because we have developed some grand, new treatment strategy. It has happened because of two main things. One is the anti-smoking campaign, so the incidence started going down. And second is because we started using screening measures to diagnose cancers earlier and earlier.

This approach of preventive medicine, where you catch the disease early and intercept early, is what caused the drop in cardiovascular disease by 70%, because, there, the cardiologists were smarter than oncologists. They realized that if they allow a myocardial infarction, or a heart attack, to damage the heart muscle, then the only treatment would be a heart transplant, which is so draconian and so terrible. They started to diagnose not only earlier and earlier, but try and prevent the appearance by using anti-cholesterol drugs, for example. That’s a very clear case of early detection, but then even prevention of the disease. And 70% decline in mortality. Why aren’t we doing the same in cancer?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So what is the answer to that?

DR. AZRA RAZA: Well, the answer is that we have been trying to do it. And the screening measures that were put in place, like mammography, colonoscopy, PSA testing, Pap smears, they’re the ones that caused the decline by 26% mainly, in addition to anti-smoking campaigns. But those measures were put in 50 years ago. Imagine, in this day and age of technology, we are still putting a tube into someone’s gut and looking to find cancer. That is primitive. That’s paleolithic for today.

AMY GOODMAN: And the alternative is?

DR. AZRA RAZA: The alternative is that we have milked these technologies as much as we could . They have yielded the 26% decline in mortality. They’re not going anywhere else. We need to invest in developing technology based on current imaging, scanning devices, detection of biomarkers, for example, from blood, sweat, tears, saliva, urine, stool samples, and find the earliest footprint of cancer and see how we can intervene. And this is a strategy that is not limited to just cancer, Amy. This is a strategy that is going to apply to every single chronic disease in the coming years.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what has prevented that from happening?

DR. AZRA RAZA: I wish there was a very neat kind of answer about this, but it’s something like this. You take a frog and put it in cold water and start heating it slowly; nothing is going to happen. On the other hand, you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you heat it slowly, the frog dies without jumping out, because it slowly gets used to it. This is an apocryphal story, by the way; scientifically, it’s incorrect. Just a warning. As a purist, I have to add that. But the analogy is true, that things have happened so slowly that we keep getting desensitized to the next step. One thing is that there is so much hyperbole around cancer treatment. If a few months of survival are added by a drug, it is welcomed as a game changer. Let me —

AMY GOODMAN: At the end of life.

DR. AZRA RAZA: Yes, exactly. Let me give you just a few statistics. I want to be very clear that using the slash-poison-burn approach, we are curing 68% of cancers that are diagnosed today. We are curing them. Thirty-two percent that present with advanced disease, their outcome is the same exact outcome that it was 50 years ago. The 68% we are curing, why are we still using these Stone Age treatments? You know how terrible it is to get chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how it works.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Explain what — yeah, yeah. What happens?

DR. AZRA RAZA: The first rule of medicine is “first, do no harm.” In fact, when a patient is diagnosed with cancer, it’s a silent killer. That’s the problem. It can reach stage IV disease without producing symptoms. So, somebody comes to us — I recently saw a 42-year-old young man who has just finished a game of tennis and come to see me, and suddenly, because he was exhausted and feeling so tired, and now I diagnosing him acute myeloid leukemia. I look at this toned and tanned young man, and the first thought that comes to me is about what we are going to do to him with the chemotherapy we are going to give him.

It is unconscionable that in 2019 I am still going to give this young man the same combination of two drugs that we — popularly known as 7+3, that I was giving in 1977, when I arrived in this country. I feel ashamed of myself, having to repeat the same side effects, that you are going to lose all your hair, throw your guts out, and your counts are going to tank. Your blood counts will go down to essentially zero for weeks on end, where you are going to be susceptible to all kinds of terrible infections. You will be in the hospital suffering with shivering night sweats and fevers and all kinds of aches and pains and constitutional symptoms. And then there is a chance that a percentage of those patients will improve. So, this is what we do with just chemotherapy alone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion and also hear about your personal story with your own husband, also a renowned cancer doctor, who died of the very disease that he was studying, and hear the stories of your patients. We’re talking to the renowned cancer doctor, the oncologist, the professor of medicine at Columbia University, Dr. Azra Raza. She has a new book. It is called The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Stay with us.