Medulloblastoma, Proton Beam Therapy, and Patient Choice

Medulloblastoma is a cancer, an invasive, rapidly growing cancer, the most common type of brain cancer in children. It is the disease Ashya King was diagnosed with in 2014 - a case I blogged about in September that year.

I return to the story because today (23rd January 2019) the NHS has proudly announced a new £125 million facility dedicated to Proton Beam Therapy at Manchester's Christie hospital.

               "The specialist radiotherapy targets cancers without damaging tissues around the tumours. This is good for children who are at risk of lasting damage to organs that are still growing but it is available in only a handful of countries around the world."

In today's press coverage (which as usual merely parrots the NHS press release) there is little or no mention of Ashya King. Indeed, the NHS say that proton beam therapy has been funded since 2008, but that patients had to travel overseas to receive it.

Given Ashya's 2014 story, outlined and discussed in my blog, this is a surprising claim. The facts of what happened to him and his parents can be quickly related.

• Ashya was diagnosed with medulloblastoma.
• Doctors recommended brain surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
• The parents disagreed, and wanted their son to have Proton Beam therapy.
• The NHS refused; they thought the treatment was 'too aggressive'.
• The parents took Ashya to Europe to seek treatment, eventually arriving in Spain.
• The NHS triggered an international alert.
• The family was found, and the parents were imprisoned!
• A request for their extradition from Spain was denied.
• Spanish doctors found that Ashya's condition was not as serious as British doctors had said.
• The case went to the High Court in August 2014, which ruled that the parents could take Ashya to Prague for Proton Beam therapy.
• The treatment was successful, and later it was announced that Ashya's cancer was in remission.

My 2014 blog raised the important questions this raised about patient choice. In this case, the choice of Ashya's parents for a treatment that was denied by the NHS, which went to enormous lengths to prevent them exercising it, and punishing them for failing to do what they were told. More than many other similar examples that could be quoted, this situation highlighted the extreme arrogance of doctors, not only in their uncompromising and (apparently) unchallengeable clinical judgement, but the drastic legal action they took against the parents who had dared to challenge them.

If Ashya had died, either before or after Proton Beam therapy, I can only imagine what the NHS (and their friends and allies in the media) would have said and done about it.

This specific case, and indeed most other consultations that take place between conventional doctors and patients, highlights the problem. 

• Conventional doctors to not discuss treatment with patients. They impose it upon them - on the simple basis that they know best. 
• Informed choice is something that seems quite alien to our doctors. Rarely to they discuss treatment options with patients, many time not even inform patients that there are alternative treatments, and the relative benefits and drawbacks of each available treatment.

This new NHS unit proves that the consultants who denied Ashya treatment is 2014 were WRONG, and that their arrogant actions were UNJUSTIFIED.

It demonstrates that Health Freedom and Patient Choice are NOT alive and well within the NHS today! The doctors rule. Patients are expected to obey.

The NHS emphasises another point, that this new treatment is safer and more effective than existing treatments. The obvious retort to this claim is that it could hardly be more harmful! The BBC article, referred to above, talks of the 'catastrophic complications' of operations, and states that the new treatment does 'less damage' to surrounding tissue and organs.

Note.
The media is allowed to criticise older conventional medical treatments - although only when there is a new treatment available!

So what about this new treatment. Is it safe? Is it more effective than existing treatments? Two years ago, in January 2016, the Independent newspaper outlined the results of a study published in the Lancet Oncology Journal. This found that radiotherapy and proton beam treatment "had similar survival rates for medulloblastoma". 

Similar! Not better! So what about safety?

               “Our findings suggest that proton radiotherapy seems to result in an acceptable degree of toxicity and had similar survival outcomes to those achieved with photon-based radiotherapy."

'An acceptable degree of toxicity'! Any study of conventional medicine will show that it is extremely accepting of high levels of toxicity and patient harm! The study found that Proton Beam Therapy had less side effects, but still had an impact on hearing, endocrine, and neurocognitive outcomes, particularly in younger patients.

This less than striking endorsement does not seem to have been mentioned in today's news, in which nothing has been said to moderate or question this new medical triumph. As usual with new treatments this will probably only come in the years to come.

So what should the news have been today? What should conventional medicine be doing about the ever-increasing numbers of people who now contract cancer, not least those who are now contracting it in childhood?

It is important to remember that the treatment cancer comes only at the END of a long process. The patient has already contracted the disease. Something has caused the cancer - but conventional medicine does not seem to know much about cancer causation. 

• Look at the Wikipedia article on Medulloblastoma. Cause is not even mentioned! 
• Look at the NHS Choices webpage on malignant brain tumours. Cause is not mentioned here either!

I wonder why? Is it because cancer rates have demonstrably increased alongside, and in exact parallel with, the rise in drug consumption (including vaccination) in recent decades? Could pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, with their known, published side effects, be the major cause? 

See here, these drugs are all known to cause cancer.

How do we know that pharmaceutical drugs cause cancer? The evidence is reported in the doctor's drug bibles', like MIMS and BNF, which list their side effects. So when considering causation why is this not mentioned in NHS Choices, or Wikipedia, or indeed in most other sources of information readily available to patients? Why are patients not routinely warned that taking pharmaceutical drugs could lead to them contracting cancer?

The answer is disarmingly simple. It is not in the interests of doctors, or the conventional medical establishment generally, to make such an admission. There are vested interests at stake. Informing patients that drugs and vaccines cause cancer would reduce confidence in conventional medicine, it would shrink their business. So patients cannot be allowed to know the truth about the drugs they are prescribed, and the vaccines they have been given. Much better they (that's you and me) remain ignorant!

Much better too to treat the side effects of drugs and vaccines, to diagnose them as an illness or disease, and then to come up with new treatments (marginally more effective, a little less unsafe, and always ruinously expensive) that expands rather than shrinks the conventional medical empire!

So patients should not rejoice at this new medical breakthrough. Instead they should avoid all conventional medical treatment by avoiding one of the most important causes of illness and disease. Patients should be encouraged to say 'No' to pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. And to find a safer, more effective, less expensive natural therapy to maintain health.