What Cancer Survival Statistic Really Mean

In this video Doctor Patrick Quillin, the creator of the website BeatingCancerWithNutrition shares his point of view on cancer survival statistics.

It is allowed for various clinics to say on TV that their patients’ cancer survival statistics is 90%. Obviously, the situation is not that bright taking into account that every year thousands of people die because of different types of cancers. Is these statistics that deceiving or is there a miraculous cure?

PhD Patrick Quillin believes that there are ways of messaging numbers to make them look better than they really are. He quotes Mark Twain who said that if you beat statistics long enough, they will tell whatever you want. The main problem of this data is that it doesn’t comprise all of the treatment methods that are used. Currently, in America, 2/3 of patients with cancer receive chemotherapy, a half of patients also receive radiation therapy, and those who are appropriate get a surgical removal of the tumor. There are different statistics for all of these methods but the data we hear is based on the combination of all of them even though not all cancer patients receive all three treatments. Doctor Quillin also believes that we can do much better if we take into account more effective, natural treatment methods.

As an example, he brings up melanoma, which is considered a poor prognostic cancer with about 5% survival at five years after the primary diagnosis. He says that there was conducted a study that compared the survival rate of patients with this type of cancer who received standard treatment and those who followed nutritionist approach developed by Gerson. Doctor Quillin says that the study clearly showed that Gerson treatment is much more effective. He believes that comparing therapies is extremely valuable. Nowadays, after many years of silence, we are finally getting some statistics on that which is quite good.

PhD Patrick Quillin is also convinced that there is another paradigm in the American health care system that needs to be shifted: the pharmaceutical industry generates 380 billion dollar revenues a year in the U.S. alone and the companies are not willing to produce effective drugs if they work but do not make them money. We have to keep in mind that this is a business in the first place. He believes that if we start looking at cancer from the standpoint of advances rather than entrenched vested interest, we can have much better cancer survival rates.