Cancer (Integrative Support)

How much chemotherapy helps depends on the cancer. It cures most people whose testicular cancer has spread [Einhorn 2002, PNAS], and childhood leukemia 5-year survival rose from 50% to 89%, much of it through chemotherapy [ACS Cancer Statistics 2026]. For most advanced solid tumors the gain is small. Across adult cancers as a whole, one Australian and US estimate found that of every 100 adults diagnosed with one of the 22 most common cancers, only about 2 were alive at 5 years because of curative or post-surgery chemotherapy (2.3% in Australia, 2.1% in the US), a figure critics say understates the benefit in the groups who need it, since many of those adults were never given chemotherapy [Morgan 2004, Clin Oncol; Mileshkin 2005, Clin Oncol]. New cancer drugs approved in the US from 2000 to 2016 extended median survival by 2.4 months [Ladanie 2020, JAMA Netw Open], and 49% of the new cancer drug uses approved in Europe from 2009 to 2013 still had no proof of longer or better life about 5 years later [Davis 2017, BMJ]. Late in the illness, treatment can do more harm than good: a UK national review judged that treatment caused or hastened death in 27% of people who died within 30 days of it [NCEPOD 2008]. Harms can last, such as nerve damage in about 30% of people given chemotherapy drugs that can damage nerves, 6 months on [Seretny 2014, Pain]. And standard care gives less attention to what you can do alongside treatment, even though a 3-year exercise program after colon cancer chemotherapy raised 5-year survival free of recurrence or new cancer from 73.9% to 80.3% in a randomized trial [Courneya 2025, NEJM].