At a meeting at the National Cancer Institute, we were told that today surgery is given credit for 60% of those cured from cancer. Radiation therapy is credited for 25% and chemotherapy 15%. As you can see from these statistics, if someone has a tumor that is surgically removable, their case has an optimistic outlook.
But don't get the wrong impression. First of all, not too many years ago surgery was the only possible treatment for cancer. Therefore, surgery's current cure rate of 60% is a reduction from 100% a short time ago.
Secondly, don't confuse inoperable with incurable. Maybe they sound somewhat alike, but they don't mean anything similar. I was inoperable and here I am writing this book. Inoperable means that at the moment, in the opinion of the doctor who is examining you, it cannot be operated on. It does not mean that the patient cannot be successfully treated without surgery. Also, it does not mean that other treatments could not make the patient operable. In my case, radiation and chemotherapy reduced the size of the tumor to the point where it was operable. In addition, it does not necessarily mean that another surgeon with more experience or skills could not successfully perform the surgery.
Surgery, other than taking a biopsy or debulking a tumor, is generally used in cancer treatment only when it can cure a patient or solve a particular problem, such as a stopped-up colon or ureter. Therefore, if surgery cannot be expected to completely cure a patient, it would not be considered the treatment of choice, and other options should be examined. There is no reason to debilitate the patient, postponing possibly curative treatments, for the sake of performing surgery.
Furthermore, in my personal opinion, while surgery is properly given credit for 60% of those cured from cancer, I believe that failure to give additional treatments prior to or following surgery is responsible for many of the deaths from cancer. I was given radiation first to make my tumor operable, but I was also given a short course of chemotherapy prior to surgery so that my cancer would not metastasize during the period of time I was recuperating from the surgery. That is why I urge every patient to receive a multidisciplinary opinion prior to any treatment, or to confirm with a board-certified oncologist the surgeon's statement that no further treatments are necessary.
Some refuse surgery because of the fear that it will spread cancer. This should never be a concern. In the hands of a properly trained surgeon today, cancer cannot and will not be spread because of surgery.
Since surgery is the treatment of choice in many cancers, the National Cancer Institute is proposing to direct a major expenditure for improving the use of surgery in cancer cases. At the beginning of a presentation on improving surgery, we were given a note of caution in the form of a quotation from an eminent surgeon: "There must be a final limit to the development of manipulative surgery. The knife cannot always have fresh fields for conquest and although methods of practice may be modified and varied, and even improved to some extent, it must be within a certain limit, that this limit has nearly if not quite been reached. It will appear evident if we reflect on the great achievements of modern operative surgery; very little remains for the boldest to devise or the most dexterous to perform." This quote is from Sir John Erickson and was published in Lancet, a leading British medical publication on June 15, 1863!