Myths of Tumor Treatment

The mode of tumor treatment is that people always think that the tumor should be completely killed or even the last cancer cell in the body should be removed, for this reason, most of the tumor treatment experts keep pursuing extended radical resection surgery, repeated, multiple, continuous, impact chemotherapy, etc. However, the practice over the years proves that people’s good wishes are not what they want, and some patients not only cannot achieve “tumor-free survival” after treatment, but also have a reduced quality of survival and even die because of intolerance. However, over the years, it has been proven that people’s good intentions are not met, and some patients not only fail to achieve “tumor-free survival” after treatment, but also experience a decrease in quality of survival, and even die because they cannot tolerate it. The highest efficacy is only clinical cure. Tumor recurrence and metastasis is still an inevitable and difficult problem to solve. The criteria for evaluating the efficacy of solid tumors proposed by WHO are: complete remission (CR), partial remission (PR), no change (NC) and lesion progression (PD). Therefore, clinical CR does not cure the tumor completely. From the law of tumor cell proliferation kinetics as well as anti-cancer pharmacokinetics, it is almost impossible to achieve complete elimination of tumor cells in vivo. Because a cell in the body has to undergo 30 times of multiplication (division and proliferation) after cancerous transformation, when the number of cells reaches 109, it can grow into a visible tumor of about 1cm in diameter and become a clinically diagnosable tumor lesion. The killing of tumor cells by anti-cancer drugs follows the law of “primary kinetics”, that is, a certain amount of anti-cancer drugs kills a certain ratio rather than a fixed number of cancer cells. Therefore, even if 99.99% of tumor cells are killed, i.e. 5 logarithmic levels are reached to kill residual tumor cells in the body, no tumor can be detected clinically at this time and CR has been achieved, but after a period of time, the residual tumor cells start to multiply again and tumor recurrence occurs. However, after a period of time, the residual tumor cells start to proliferate and multiply again, resulting in tumor recurrence. After repeated administration of systemic chemotherapy, the tumor cells often develop drug resistance, making the treatment less sensitive. In 1994, a professor from Canada, Professor Schepiber, mentioned in the concept and treatment model of cancer tumor that effective treatment does not require complete tumor regression, and the overall response of the body is crucial to the treatment of cancer. Our oncologist Professor Sun Yan also said that people are not satisfied with curing the tumor while the patient becomes crippled or lives a miserable life with serious dysfunction; the phenomenon that the disease is cured and the person is disabled can no longer continue. The US FDA has included the improvement of tumor patients’ survival quality and prolongation of survival time as important indicators in the evaluation criteria of tumor efficacy, and proposed the clinical benefit rate (CDR). Therefore, in the process of tumor control to improve the quality of survival and prolong the survival time of patients should be our main medical model and prescription purpose today. The characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine in treating tumors, “survival with tumor”, are consistent with the above-mentioned view, and have obvious advantages in comprehensively regulating the balance of internal environment, strengthening physical constitution, improving own resistance to disease, improving survival quality and prolonging survival time. We believe that it is also necessary to select or develop different individualized treatment plans at different stages of the disease at different times, not to combine all the forces to attack comprehensively.