Many doctors believe that radiotherapy is relatively harmless, so they continue to recommend this highly lucrative treatment to patients as a palliative. But even "safe" levels of radiation are suspect. Early studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York showed that radiotherapy was deadly and that patients who received no radiation lived longer than those who were irradiated. These and similar findings were presented to Congress in 1953 in the famous Fitzgerald Report, which charged that the medical establishment was actively conspiring to suppress promising alternative cancer therapies.28 But these important studies were ignored, and the radiotherapy industry got its way. "For 30 years radiologists in this country have been engaged in massive malpractice," charged Dr. Irwin Bross in 1979.24 Bross, former director of biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, was unable to get adequate funding to research the thirty-year cover-up of what he calls doctor-caused cancer from radiation therapy.

Surgery
Surgery is sometimes a necessary, lifesaving procedure in treating cancer. It is effective as a cure for early, small tumors that have not spread to other parts of the body. For example, surgery achieves roughly 70 percent five-year survival in uterine cancers, 85 percent in skin cancers, 60 percent in breast cancers, and 40 percent in colon cancers. But once a tumor has grown beyond a certain size or has spread to other sites, it is frequently inoperable. There is no reliable way to tell whether a tumor is localized or has metastasized. In early-stage breast cancer, 30 percent or more of women given a favorable prognosis after surgery experience recurrences of their cancer, according to the latest figures from the National Cancer Institute.25

Surgeons routinely tell cancer patients, "I got it all," but many studies have shown that some cancer cells are left behind in 25 to 60 percent of patients, allowing malignant growths to recur. Surgery itself is often responsible for the spread of the cancer, according to many physicians. A microscopic miscue or careless manipulation of tumor tissue by the surgeon can "spill. literally millions of cancer cells into the bloodstream. Surgical biopsy, a procedure used to detect early-stage cancer, can also contribute to the spread of cancer. "Often while making a biopsy the malignant tumor is cut across, which tends to spread or accelerate the growth. Needle biopsies can accomplish the same tragic results," observed Dr. William Kelley.26