Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
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Multiple Myeloma Therapy- Survival Depends on Clinical Trails
Unfortunately, the (clinical trials) program is bloated, cumbersome, inefficient, slow-paced, overmanaged, and expensive. Layers of bureaucracy at participating institutions…
I am a survivor of an incurable but treatable blood cancer called multiple myeloma. Thats the standard description of oncologists when they refer to MM. Incurable but treatable…WTF?! The fact that multiple myeloma therapy is a series of chemo regimens resulting in remission, relapse, remission…and multi-drug resistance and end-stage multiple myeloma should tell you that
- MM patients and survivors depend on chemotherapy to live and
- The clinical trial system is woefully inadequate when it comes to MM therapy.
- No, FDA approved chemotherapy regimens did not help me. A supposed “quack” therapy put me into complete remission in early 1999 where I’ve remained ever since.
According to the article below Cancer Clinical Trials in the United States are a mess. That’s the bad news. The good news is that cancer patients and survivors may need to enroll in a clinical trial and may benefit from a clinical trial.
I am both a multiple myeloma survivor and MM cancer coach. I participated in a clinical trial way back when. I’ll never know which group I was in…
For more information on the how what, and why of clinical trials, scroll down the page, post a question or a comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
thank you,
David Emerson
- Long-term MM survivor,
- Clinical Trial Survivor,
- MM Coach,
- Creator and Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading:
- Multiple Myeloma Diagnosis- Can’t Trust Conventional Cancer Research
- Multiple Myeloma Therapies- Why Chemotherapy May Not Work for African Americans-
- Top-Rated US Cancer Center- Multiple Myeloma NOT the same as “Cancer”
Cancer Clinical Trials – A Chronic But Curable Crisis
In April, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a comprehensive review of the clinical trials program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in which it concluded that “the system for conducting clinical trials in the United States is approaching a state of crisis.”1
The report, which was commissioned by the National Cancer Institute, drew the attention of the New York Times, which published an editorial on April 25 highlighting cumbersome procedures, excessive bureaucracy, poor coordination, and failure to complete 40% of the trials.2 On May 5, during hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which holds jurisdiction over funding for the NIH, committee member TomHarkin (D-IA) cited the report and the editorial in expressing concern about the funding of the NCI’s clinical trials network and the impending crisis.
Created 55 years ago and modified intermittently since then, the NCI’s clinical trials program is by far the largest trials network in the country. The program includes 10 cooperative groups, more than 3100 institutions, and 14,000 investigators and enrolls more than 25,000 patients in trials each year. Cancer-related clinical trials are also performed by industry, individual institutions and cancer centers, international cooperative groups, and theDepartment of Veterans Affairs.
The program has been central to many important clinical advances in cancer in the past 50 years. Its trials have defined effective treatments for childhood cancers, improving survival rates from less than 10% to more than 80%. Its landmark trials in early breast cancer defined standard surgery for localized breast cancer. Other group-led trials have established the standard of care for many advanced cancers, demonstrated that adjuvant therapy improves survival in many cancers, and shown that certain drugs have preventive effects in patients at high risk for colon adenomas, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. With such a stream of accomplishments, the clinical trials program is crucial to continued progress in cancer treatment.
Unfortunately, the program is bloated, cumbersome, inefficient,slow-paced, overmanaged, and expensive. Layers of bureaucracy at participating institutions, the NCI, and other government agencies slow the review process, so it takes about 3 years, on average, from concept to protocol approval. Trials remain uncompleted because of poor enrollment, lack of interest, excessive administrative burdens, and inadequate funding. These abandoned trials are at best a terrible waste of resources and at worst unethical, since they subject patients to risks without producing definitive results. The program currently costs $145 million per year, but the budget has been flat in recent years and since 1999 has actually declined 20% when adjusted for inflation.Clinical investigators see this level of funding as insufficient to sustain a clinical trials infrastructure, support enrollment, and ensure proper follow-up.
Cancer Patients and Survivors May Benefit From This New Type of Cancer Clinical Trial-
The current model for the cancer clinical trial is broken according to the illustration below.
Cancer patients face three big challenges.
- conventional oncology generally offers toxic chemo and radiation based on what organ the cancer originated in even though it is understood that genetic mutations drive cancer not organs.
- if the patients cancer does not respond to the “standard-of-care” chemo or radiation the patient faces a “double blind, placebo-controlled” clinical trial system that is woefully inadequate.
- if “standard-of-care” therapies don’t work for the patient and the patient is facing an end-stage cancer, he/she wants to undergo an untried, unproven therapy (at the patient’s own risk)- something called “right-to-try” he/she cannot.
The article linked an excerpted below talks about a possible solution to the challenges listed above. The article talks about “basket studies.” A sort of clinical trial that studies cancers based on genetic mutations rather than where the cancer came from.
It is important to remember that basket studies are new. Like most new things in oncology there are challenges. But if you are a cancer patient talk to your onc about basket studies.
I am a long-term cancer survivor and cancer coach. Conventional toxic chemotherapy simply don’t help most cancer patients who have advanced stage cancers.
For more information on both conventional or non-conventional cancer therapies, or clinical trial help, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
Thank you,
David Emerson
- Cancer Survivor
- Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading:
A Faster Way to Try Many Drugs on Many Cancers
“She is part of a new national effort to try to treat cancer based not on what organ it started in, but on what mutations drive its growth….
Cancers often tend to be fueled by changes in genes, or mutations, that make cells grow and spread to other parts of the body. There are now an increasing number of drugs that block mutations in cancer genes and can halt a tumor’s growth…
And this spring, a federally funded national program will start to screen tumors in thousands of patients to see which might be attacked by any of at least a dozen new drugs. Those whose tumors have mutations that can be attacked will be given the drugs.
The studies of this new method, called basket studies because they lump together different kinds of cancer, are revolutionary, much smaller than the usual studies, and without control groups of patients who for comparison’s sake receive standard treatment.
The new studies pose new problems. With no control groups, the effect has to be enormous and unmistakable to show it is not occurring by chance. When everyone gets a drug, it can be hard to know if a side effect is from the drug, a cancer or another disease. And gene mutations can be so rare that patients for a basket study are difficult to find…”