Doll made of liver cancer cells
Many proponents of alternative medicine claim that surgical removal of cancer is very dangerous because it will cause the cancer to spread. Therefore, they strongly advise against any kind of surgery in case of cancer.
On Tony Isaacs’s Curezone, a forum member is asking advice on how to treat advanced liver cancer. The patient in question – the forum member’s mother – has previously undergone surgery. But according to Tony Isaacs it is precisely surgery that causes cancer to metastasize:
The thread is here.
Tony Isaacs, as well as many other alternative “health advisors” for that matter, regularly make the claim that surgery is the main cause for cancer to metastasize. So I decided to ask our pathologist whether there is any truth in this. Here’s what he said:
There is no such thing as a protective coating separating a cancer from the normal structures of an affected organ. Some cancer cells loose their adhesiveness, which probably contributes to their invasiveness, but this is a property of the cancer cells itself.
There has been a discussion of risks of implants of cancer cells after needle biopsy of metastatic lesions. Because of this risk it has been contraindicated to do a liver biopsy if curative surgery was an option. But the risk is so low, that this restriction is being removed from the forthcoming guidelines.
Surgeons strive to remove healthy tissue at a safe distance from the cancer itself. And the surgical margin clearance is a very important factor in the chance of survival. With rectal cancer we have increased the survival to 82 % by introducing chemoradiation before the operation. See for instance this study. This makes the tumor shrink to such an extent that margin clearance is technically possible.
But Tony has not explained how he believes metastases arise when the tumor has not been touched in anyway by a surgeon.
No, indeed he has not. Well, perhaps he’d care to enlighten us on this some day.
Cancer Research UK Science Update Blog
Anaximperator blog 
When Tony first made his appearance on this blog, he told us that he had conducted extensive research on cancer, and that he understood the alternative as well as the conventional aspects. This is an example of how Tony completely misunderstands some very simple facts about cancer anatomy and conventional cancer treatment. If he had done his research properly he would have known that the surgeons make their best efforts not to cut into the cancer, and that the pathologist reports it if they do. This is also an aspect where the usual big pharma shill is useless. Involvement of the surgical margin is a factor (in some cancers) in determining if a patient will be offered chemotherapy. In other words pathology reporting of free surgical margins reduces the profits made by the pharmaceutical industry. For photos of cancers that were cut into by me (after they where removed by the surgeon) you are welcome to look at these: http://www.123hjemmeside.dk/cancer_is_not_a_fungus/21160725 . They show what cancer really looks like, and also illustrate that if a protective coating really existed it would be easy do detect.
This a case of evidence of absence. Not simply absence of evidence.
Thanks jli.
Given the countless blunders on his website, I can’t help wondering whether this man is crazy, stupid or intentionally deceptive.
Well – one thing is for sure: He is demonstrably wrong – and very fact-resistant thus far.
“Given the countless blunders on his website, I can’t help wondering whether this man is crazy, stupid or intentionally deceptive.”
All of this and more, serving to misinform others and to turn a profit for himself.
Gee, if all those potions and formulas he peddles are so effective in health maintenance, why did his partner-in-crime Luella need to be recently hospitalized and treated with **gasp** allopathic/western medicine? Or why did Tony himself suffer from a back ailment for weeks?? You do use these ‘natural’ products yourself, doncha?? Why didn’t they work??
**crickets**
Thankfully, Luella binned all her conventional medication the minute she left the hospital and was only cured with Tony’s colloidal silver – or at least that’s what we’re told.
How Tony could ever suffer from anything at all except a broken bone is a complete mystery to me.
@jli:
That’s a very serious affliction, wouldn’t know what to cure it with.
I´m not sure fact-restistance is curable as the only remedy available is “facts”. I´m afraid we will have to settle with vaccination 😀
Oh dear… I’m afraid that won’t go down smoothly at-all.
That would certainly explain why he banned a participant on his blog who (based on his extensive knowledge of modern oncology) expressed disagreement with him.
Hi..
This is my first time visit your site and seen your site was very good in appearance and contain a lot of useful information and knowledge.
I hope you can keep up posting at your site so based on that I can guarantee that I will always visit your site to read a new post..Good jobs dude..Keep it up!!
Thanks..
Tnx!
Cancer cells can not thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily, and took a deep breath can help get more oxygen to the cellular level. Oxygen therapy is another means to destroy cancer.
Why do you believe all this nonsense??
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/eto/content/eto_5_3x_oxygen_therapy.asp
How did the statement “cancer surgery often results in the spread of cancer” become “surgery is the only way that cancer spreads”or even the main way that cancer spreads?
Of course surgeons try to not cut into the cancer, but in many instances they do and often they are unable to get all of the cancer. The result can be the spread of cancer the same as can biopsies.
Forty years of the “war on cancer” and we are still stuck with the mostly failed paradigm of trying to cut out, poison out or burn out the symptoms of cancer without addressing the root cause(s) that enabled cancer to defeat the body’s natural first line of defense – the immune system, nor trying to build the immune system back to optimal function.
Someday man will look back on today’s cancer treatments and today’s system of managed illness with drugs that mask symptoms instead of curing and have side effects over 95% of the time (resulting in over 100,000 deaths each year and millions adverse reactions) as the true dark ages of medicine.
Have a great day!
Yeah Tony –
It’s so much better to sell the desperate your worthless shit so they can die painfully from malnutition, lack of proper medical care, just keep on peddling your worthless yet overpriced ‘treatments’ and ‘remedies’.
Nothing like bilking people out of money, destroying their health and contributing to an early death then blaming them for not buying your snake-oil garbage earlier and in large quantities.
It’s never your fault that your ‘protocals’ didn’t work, oh noooo…
You are scum, now f*ck off and die. Cruella the whore too.
Given that you are a writer it is a bit surprising that you don´t see why your readers might come to that conclusion. But okay – let´s see if we can solve this puzzle for you.
In principle you are right that “often” can mean anything from at least once a day somewhere in the world to almost always. But then you go on stating that
By doing that you have created (in your readers mind) a connection between spread and disruption of a protective barrier. The keyword here from a readers perspective is “protective“. If you don´t think the reader believes that protective (in this context) means preventing spread, then what else do you think he/she thinks this layer protects from? And when you state that spread often happen because of this disruption you are saying that it is a main way – unless often to you is rarer than other causes of spread.
The scenarios you describe do happen, but not as frequently as you seem to believe. But again often can mean anything from “at least once a day somewhere in the world” to “almost always”. And not all primarily incompletely excised cancers spread to other parts of the body.
@ Tony Isaacs
You say (July 18, 2010 at 2:40 pm):
Well, since you implied as much in the comment on your website which this post refers to.
As you undoubtedly know, “often” means “many times”, or “frequently”:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/often
http://define.com/often
In case you have forgotten, here’s what you said (bold by me, I’ll get back to that):
Given the definition of “often”, what else are we to understand but that surgery is very dangerous because of the high risk it carries of the cancer to spread?
You underpin this with stating that cancerous tumours are protected by an outer coating (which is not the case, as jli has already explained in the post) and insinuate that in the process of operating, surgeons are wont to “cutting tumours open”, thus causing the cancer to spread (which isn’t the case either, as jli explains here and here).
Ergo, whatever you do, don’t do surgery!
You actually insinuate that it is common practice to cut tumours open during surgery.
This is so ludicrous that I find it hard to believe you are being serious here.
What surgeons will do, as no doubt you know very well, is try to get the tumour out with as much cancer free tissue around it as possible. After surgery, the pathologist examines the tissue and if necessary, a second operation is performed to remove all cancerous tissue.
Given the fact that surgery is the primary and most effective treatment for solid cancers, your advice is not just stupid, but also downright dangerous and may cost people their life should they follow it.