Cancer Options Blog If Cancer Care is heading for a perfect storm, why are we not steering a different course?

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Patricia Peat

In England, treating and caring for people with cancer has in more recent times restricted itself to the one dimensional approach of biochemical attack via pharmaceuticals. It is measurable, approved of by the scientific world and uptake by approximately 95% of people who are diagnosed with cancer.
It is also extremely expensive, brutal and except in certain circumstances does not provide a cure. I use the word cure because that is the measure that is always applied to integrative medicine, “herbal treatments do not cure people of cancer” – we know, but they can help, often a lot. So if they don’t cure, do they help, sometimes they do bring relief of symptoms and increase longevity, but always with the balance of great impact on the person’s quality of life.
The big, and I mean big problem with the way we treat cancer (not help the person with cancer – we treat the cancer) is that we cannot afford it. There are new treatments in development which may bring greater benefits than what we currently have, but the rub is – we won’t be getting them and if we do, in a limited way.
Professor Karol Sikora revealed the true folly of heading into the perfect storm that is so many more people being diagnosed with cancer, treatments massively expensive and this country having less money to buy them. Increases in the incidence of cancer and price of drugs means that in 20 years time we shall need to spend the whole NHS drug budget just on drugs for people with cancer.
Hopefully this government will lead to some sense in the health service as Karol said 2000’s NHS Cancer Plan had led to a ‘highly bureaucratic way of doing things that lost huge amounts of money without trace”. ‘We’re spending the same amount on cancer as our European colleagues, but the care people are getting is of a lower quality.
So, why are we going to continue sailing into the eye of the storm? Because, as Fiona Goodlie pointed out last year medicine is currently run for the doctors benefit.
We are facing a situation where more people will have cancer for much longer periods of time as it can be controlled as a chronic illness like diabetes and heart disease. Unfortunately our current model does not suit or support people to cope with living with cancer and keeping them well whilst they do so. The focus is the cancer, blast it, then come back when it grows again, totally reactive and unempowering at a time when fear and vulnerability is at it’s highest.
So what is the answer, to parody the man who left this country in ruins Tony Blair – Integration! Integration! Integration!.  Help people find the best ways of helping themselves, relieve symptoms with natural compounds and herbs,  good dietary programmes to help the immune system fight cancer, not deplete it and support towards a healthy life after treatment,.
Change the environment of the body in which the cancer started, don’t just sit there!
Snake oil?
Is it all baloney, is everything complementary a lot of  useless overpriced rubbish pedalled by people desperate to make a quick buck – no. Some of it is, sometimes a lot of it is but there are treatments, approaches people can use to enhance their health, lead to greater quality of life and sometimes longevity.
They do it in Europe, much more so, here our doctors frequently try to cut us off from everything apart from their approach, in Europe they integrate with greater confidence and success. They think that we are crazy in our narrow mindedness and the fact so many people here die with malnutrition from our poor dietary advice. The survival league tables for cancer where we languish with less developed countries is not all about having expensive drugs, it’s about treating the whole person not just the cancer. It can be done, it can be very beneficial and it can save the NHS a ton of money!