Questioning Chemotherapy is a book written by Ralph W. Moss who is an author of eight books and three documentaries on cancer-related topics. He is also an advisor on alternative cancer treatments in various institutes in the Unites States. He researches and writes individualized “Healing Choices” reports for cancer patients. He began his career in the early 70s as a science writer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was a believer in chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Questioning Chemotherapy is a book that focuses on his changed perspective about chemotherapy, limitations and side effects of chemotherapy, cancer research as a lucrative career option and the huge money market of cancer research institutes and pharmaceutical companies.

It is essential that some constructive progress is made in the field of cancer research and new drugs are developed without considering only the monetary prospects. However, it is essential to go to the root of the causes of cancer to find out what we can do to prevent them.

These are some facts about cancer given by a cancer research institute-

1. Everyone has cancer cells in the body. These do not show up in the standard tests until they get multiplied and become a few billion in number. After treatment, when there are no cancer cells left, it just means that they cannot be detected because they are few in number.
2. Cancer cells develop for at least 6 - 10 times in a person’s lifetime.
3. If your immune system is strong, it would destroy the cancer cells and prevent them from multiplying and forming tumors.
4. The fact that someone has cancer indicates that the person has various nutritional deficiencies due to factors that are genetic, environmental, dietary and lifestyle related.
5. You can overcome these deficiencies by making changes in lifestyle, diet, strengthening the immune system, etc. Actually, this is a lifetime process and needs to be inculcated at a very early age.
6. Chemotherapy poisons the rapidly growing cancer cells along with the fast growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract, nerve cells and damage organs like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs and the reproductive system.
7. Radiation also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs along with cancer cells.
8. Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation reduces tumor size. However, prolonged use makes the tumors resistant.
9. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation, the immunity is weakened making the body susceptible to a variety of infections and complications.
10. Chemotherapy and radiation make the cancer cells to mutate, become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery causes cancer cells to spread to other parts.

Looking at these facts, it makes us wonder why chemotherapy is such a dominant line of treatment across the world. Questioning Chemotherapy mentions that although chemotherapy is useful in some kinds of cancers like Wilms’ tumor, Ewing’s sarcoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, and retinoblastoma, some cases of ovarian cancer, some cases of small-cell lung cancer (SCLC), etc. It also helps as an adjuvant therapy in breast cancer and is used in leiomyosarcoma chemotherapy. However, it is often used unnecessarily in many other cancers as a part of clinical trial or even in hospitals where the patients are almost like guinea pigs; several new chemotherapy regimes are tried on them to see if a new regime is more effective than a conventional one.

Even for the above-mentioned cancers, it is an extremely grueling therapy for the patients that even many oncologists admit. Generally, for these and all other cancers, more effective and less-toxic substitutes are desperately needed. There are many long term side effects of chemotherapy that continue to haunt the cancer patients after the treatment is over.

A New York based cancer specialist once mentioned that chemotherapy should be prescribed only when there is a reasonable prospect either of cure or of benefit in quantity and quality of life. Oncology trainees should be taught that chemotherapy is not a part of the management of every cancer patient.

However, Moss does admit that there are doctors who use this treatment in the most innovative way. The author’s book Questioning Chemotherapy has kind of sparked off an international debate in the effectiveness of chemotherapy and toxic drugs in cancer treatment.