Normally, your cells grow and die in a controlled way. Cancer cells keep forming without control. Chemotherapy is drug therapy that can kill these cells or stop them from multiplying. However, it can also harm healthy cells, which causes side effects.
During chemotherapy you may have no side effects or just a few. The kinds of side effects you have depend on the type and dose of chemotherapy you get. Side effects vary, but common ones are nausea, vomiting, tiredness, pain and hair loss. Healthy cells usually recover after chemotherapy, so most side effects gradually go away.
Your course of therapy will depend on the cancer type, the chemotherapy drugs used, the treatment goal and how your body responds. You may get treatment every day, every week or every month. You may have breaks between treatments so that your body has a chance to build new healthy cells. You might take the drugs by mouth, in a shot or intravenously.
— nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cancerchemotherapy.html
In this most recent study, The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) found that more than four in 10 patients who received chemotherapy toward the end of life experienced potentially fatal effects! And after reviewing data from over 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of receiving treatment, it was found that chemotherapy hastened or caused death in 27 percent of cases.
“The majority of the cancer patients in this country die because of chemotherapy, which does not cure breast, colon or lung cancer. This has been documented for over a decade and nevertheless doctors still utilize chemotherapy to fight these tumors,” said Dr. Allen Levin, MD, author of The Healing of Cancer.Despite its reputation as the gold-standard cancer treatment, chemotherapy has an average 5-year survival success rate of just over 2 percent for all cancers, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Oncology in December 2004.
— articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/02/chemotherapy-can-do-more-harm-than-good.aspx