MIRACLE CANCER CURES!

If you’ve been following the Four Seasons Holistic Veterinary Care blog for a while you’re probably not expecting a post which is actually about a miracle cancer cure, but with cancer a common cause of early death for our pets it’s not surprising that many owners are searching for miracles…or that there are regular articles claiming to have found them. Today we look at three ‘miracle’ cures and try to find what hope they really offer.

GREEN TEA CURES LYMPHOMA IN DOGS!

There are several good studies showing that artificially induced cancers in mice can be inhibited by the use of extracts of green tea but often the doses and preparations used are not easy to transfer to larger animals such as dogs or people. Recently a paper has been doing the rounds which seems to offer a lifeline to the many dogs diagnoses with lymphoma each year. The basic gist is that a really sick, 7 year old Labrador cross showed dramatic improvement with treatment including green tea and was still alive and happy nearly a year later. Brilliant…so let’s put the kettle on! Or, not.

This paper is limited in it’s usefulness as it’s a single case study. It’s impossible to know what would have happened if the dog had not received the green tea as part of it’s chemotherapy protocol. Lymphoma is not a single entity in dogs; there are types which will kill most patients in a couple of weeks not matter what treatment is tried, others where the dogs would be expected to live for nearly two years with no treatment at all and some where life expectancy can be improved with chemotherapy. It is important to note that green tea was used alongside conventional drugs in this paper and though it may have worked synergistically it’s hard to see that the tea alone could have improved the dog so dramatically. Then we get to the tea itself! This is not the stuff you buy in the supermarket…the tea used was selected for high levels of green tea catechins and brewed in a very specific way to ensure these were not lost or damaged.

So, this paper offers some hope but a lot more research would be needed including randomised, blinded trials with large numbers of dogs before we could claim this to be a miracle.

CV247

This combination of vitamins, minerals and aspirin was designed by a vet to treat cancers. There are a number of papers showing that it can delay the return of cancer after surgery in mice and dogs as well as an increase in wellbeing, and now there is some evidence that it can kill cancer cells from human trials on breast and bowel cancer too. Studies of prostate cancer patient using CV247 did not show huge increases in life expectancy but patients did feel better in most cases.

CV247 is certainly not a miracle cure, and the aspirin content limits it’s usefulness in some dogs and particularly in cats but it offers a relatively safe and cheap therapy, especially for preventing the return of solid cancers which can be removed.

A spanner has fallen into the CV247 works however…the company which has taken over it’s production has tripled the wholesale cost of the product, despite it’s fairly cheap ingredients and increasing demand. While it remains cheap in terms of human cancer therapies the cost is rapidly becoming prohibitive for the animal patients it was originally designed for.

INTERNET MAGIC PILLS

It would be wrong to mention brand names but there are several ‘miracle’ herbal cancer cures being sold on the internet. Most contain a large number of ingredients all of which have some scientific or historical literature to support their use in cancer. None have been tested as a complete product in a randomised, controlled way though some have glowing case studies and testimonials (with the same limitations as the green tea case).

At Four Seasons we are always wary of herbal medicines that don’t come from our trusted suppliers as there have been many cases of substitution, adulteration and otherwise poor quality herbs being sold. We also think that a scattergun approach of giving small amounts of a large number of herbs will be less effective than preparing an individualised herbal tonic using herbs with evidence  relevant to that particular patient.

MIRACLE CANCER CURES? SADLY, NO.

So far we’ve yet to find a magic cure for cancer, but we’ll keep looking. And in the meantime we have many ways of treating and supporting pets with cancer to ensure they live with the disease with a good quality of life for as long as possible.