Winter update

Recent news scathingly states that breakthroughs in cancer drugs – which could drastically extend lives – can take decades to reach patients in the NHS. This has been evidenced through a study by the Institute of Cancer Research, who found that between 2009 to 2016 it took an average of 14 years for treatments to become available on the NHS. It took 22 years for a drug called trabectedin, used in soft tissue carcinoma, to go from being patented to getting the final go-ahead from NICE, our British regulatory body. The problem is that these breakthrough lifesaving drugs have to not only pass relevant clinical trials and then be authorised, but they then have to be approved as cost-effective and that puts a massive burden on the manufacturers because they may be curative but not cost-effective. By the time they have gone through the red tape, many more people will have died. Another drug created to treat bone cancer took 20 years to reach NICE approval, whilst the breast cancer drug olaparib, which got the go-ahead from the FDA in the States more than 2 years ago, still has to be approved by NHS watchdogs.

Whilst on the dreaded topic I expect most people will have realised by now I take this cancer very VERY seriously. I intend to beat it, if it can ever be beaten. My view is that something has gone wrong organically with misidentification of rogue cells, but that there must be – conversely – a way to reprogramme those same cells to be identified as invaders, as parasitic, and destroyed accordingly.

Conventional chemotherapy is systemic, in that it targets something but attacks everything within its path to catch the ‘bad guys,’ but often it is like zapping a wasp with an atom bomb. (okay, I exaggerate, but you do see my point) I wanted to flag up that there is a new organic product that I am trying, sent to me from the United States, but is not available here.

It is currently being ‘put through its paces’ by the FDA, as a tumour killer, sometimes destroying tumours within a matter of months. I’ve read the research papers and have been trying this particular product for only a few weeks. Having been on a merry-go-round of scans during the past month, my latest results are showing a previously unseen (til now) reduction in tumor activity. The oncologist was baffled by this apparent progress, and their report remarked that I ‘seem to be responding to treatment.’ Well, if anything, I think it might be a combination of conventional and alternative methods. But there remains the possibility that the change could be credited to the maverick product.