Unorthodox cancer cures have included vitamin C, laetrile extracted from apricot stones, and the Gershon diet of raw vegetables. The discovery of a small group of patients who unexpectedly recovered could yield new insights into the disease, researchers say.

A study of patients with incurable lung cancer who were given weeks to live and received only low-dose radiotherapy to make their final weeks more comfortable found a small number recovered completely.

Researchers who followed 2,337 patients whose disease was too advanced for curative treatment found that 25 had survived five years and 18 had achieved "an apparent cure." They appeared to have been cured by treatment that "would not normally be considered to have any curative potential whatsoever."

Novel Treatment Strategies

The researchers, led by Michael MacManus, a consultant radiation oncologist in Melbourne, say: "Our data indicate that a chance for prolonged survival and possibly even cure exists for approximately 1 percent of patients with non small-cell lung cancer who receive palliative radiotherapy.

"It is important that the frequency of this phenomenon should be appreciated so that claims of apparent cure by novel treatment strategies or even by unconventional medicine or 'faith healing' can be seen in an appropriate context."

New Insights Possible

Unorthodox cancer cures have included vitamin C, laetrile extracted from apricot stones, and the Gershon diet of raw vegetables.The discovery of a small group of patients who unexpectedly recovered could yield new insights into the disease, the researchers say.

The findings are published in the online edition of Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society.