Dr. Trelford is not alone in his observation. In a courageous letter to Dr. Frank Rauscher, his boss at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Dean Burk condemned the Institute's policy of continuing to endorse these drugs when everyone knew that they caused cancer. These now well established facts have been reported in numerous publications from the National Cancer Institute itself, as well as from throughout the United States and, indeed, the world. Frankly, I fail to follow you here. There is little evidence for long-term survival with chemotherapy.
Worthwhile palliation is achieved in many patients.
However, there will be the inevitable relapse of the malignant lymphoma, and, either because of drug resistance or drug intolerance, the disease will recur, requiring modifications of the chemotherapy program and eventually failure to control the disease process. Some patients with gastrointestinal cancer can have very long survival with no treatment whatsoever. However, progress has been slow, and no chemical agents capable of inducing a general curative effect on disseminated forms of cancer have yet been developed. The answer is that they don't know what else to do. Patients usually are not scheduled into chemotherapy unless their condition seems so hopeless that the loss of life appears to be inevitable anyway.