15,000 people die every year because of cancer treatments

More than 15,000 people die every year because of cancer treatments rather than the illness itself, Lord Saatchi has said.

The peer, who lost his wife to a form of ovarian cancer in 2011, is attempting to introduce new legislation to enable doctors to carry out alternative treatments without fear of litigation, The Daily Telegraph reported.

He said he had been told by senior medical professionals that an estimated one in 10 people are killed by their cancer treatment.

Cancer drugs and radiotherapy weaken the immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to potentially fatal infections.

Lord Saatchi told the House of Lords: “What we do know is that the cancer drugs do such damage to the immune system that the patient is helpless to resist fatal infections like E.coli or septicemia.”

He said the Office for National Statistics under World Health Organisation guidelines only recorded “the single underlying cause of death”.

“In other words it doesn’t record what is known as the sequence of causation, sometimes known as the sequence of conditions that led to the actual death,” he said.

The reason that doctors give patients these very damaging drugs is because there is nothing else.”

He has introduced a Medical Innovation Bill in the House of Lords, which intends to encourage doctors to come up with more creative forms of treatment.

He said: “We don’t want patients being treated like mice, but the current state of law on medical negligence requires them to stick to the standard, well-worn procedure. We want responsible innovation.”

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Posted by Tahir Khan on May 21 2013. Filed under Health, Latest News, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.