Do not resect liver metastases in colon cancer

One of the unpleasant by products of modern medicine is its tendency to treat needlessly and even over treat.[v. Presentation: “Overdiagnosis and needless treatment. Liver metastasis resection is such a useless treatment and should be avoided. Listen why.

Liver metastases appear shortly after the resection of a colon tumor. When only a few metastases appear it is recommended to remove them surgically, e.g. by lobectomy. For more abundant metastases, medicine recommends to insert a port at the liver entry an treat it locally with chemotherapy.  Both recommendation are unnecessary since sooner or later metastases will recur.

Some common misconceptions: 1. When observing a single liver metastasis surgeons take it as an isolated phenomenon. According the statistics here they are wrong. For each overt metastasis there are many too small to be detected. In the liver and elsewhere.

2. The second misconception is that metastatic resection cures colon cancer   In my breast cancer presentation I show that once a tumor recurs, cancer is incurable. Which applies also to colon cancer. Let’s look at some recent data from the SEER data base.

3.. Liver is not the first site of disease recurrence. It is the first site where metastasis was detected. Other micrometastases, which spread all over the body  were too small to be detected.

4. For the same reason it is not the only site of disease recurrence. This so called  single metastasis is only  a biomarker of  a swarm of micrometastases..
All these misconceptions are due to the fact that medicine ignores the role of the host in cancer. Organism controls tumor growth. All along cancer progression, organism and tumor maintain homeostasis