Chemotherapy: The Shocking Truth They Really Don't Want You to Know

In Britain today, it’s near impossible to find someone who hasn’t heard the word Chemotherapy. It’s woven into the national consciousness — whispered in hospital corridors, clung to like a lifeline by families, and presented as the only hope for millions facing cancer. Nearly half the population is likely to be offered it at some point in their lives. But how many really know what it is — or where it came from?

Chemotherapy is treated almost like a modern sacrament — the mythical cure for the modern plague. To question it is to risk excommunication from polite society. Ask what’s actually in the chemical cocktail, or dare to wonder how — or even if — it really works, and watch how quickly the health establishment, Big Pharma, and government apparatchiks close ranks. Labels like anti-science, conspiracy theorist, or worse, are fired like bullets at anyone who strays from the official line. Mention alternative treatments? Now you’re not just ridiculed — you risk prosecution.

Yet behind the curtain, the real story of chemotherapy is more unsettling than its spotless reputation suggests. Its roots don’t lie in a peaceful lab or a eureka moment of pure science — but in chemical warfare.

What does Chemotherapy actually mean?

The very word “chemotherapy” reveals its true nature. It fuses two Greek roots: khēmeia — alchemy, the medieval dream of transforming metals — and therapeia — healing. The term was popularised by Paul Ehrlich in the early 20th century. Ehrlich, a brilliant German scientist, imagined chemicals that could act as “magic bullets” to kill infections without harming patients. But that vision took a darker turn when chemical weapons entered the mix.

The Origins of Chemotherapy is Mustard Gas.

During World War I, mustard gas, an extremely dangerous chemical weapon, was used by both sides to poison soldiers in enemy trenches.  The gas, (called mustard gas because of its bright yellow appearance), caused severe blistering, burning of lung tissue and in most cases death.

In the 1940s, doctors studying autopsies of soldiers exposed to mustard gas noticed it severely damaged rapidly dividing cells, especially white blood cells.  This gave scientists an idea: if a chemical could destroy fast-dividing healthy cells, maybe it could kill fast-dividing cancer cells too.

Two American pharmacologists; Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, began experimenting with nitrogen mustard — a deadly component of mustard gas — on mice that reportedly had lymphoma.  The two reported that after application the tumours shrank.  In 1942, the first patient — a man with advanced lymphoma — was treated with nitrogen mustard at Yale. It produced temporary tumour regression.  On the strength of this an entirely new industry has emerged.

From that dubious beginning, the chemical weapons legacy mushroomed into the world’s biggest cancer treatment. Today, over 200 chemotherapy drugs exist — all poisoning the body in the hope of killing cancer faster than the patient themselves.

But has this brutal legacy delivered the miracle it promised?

Cancer deaths are now double what they were before Chemotherapy was invented. In the 1940s, before chemotherapy’s rise, cancer killed about 120 out of every 100,000 people in the US. Now? The UK’s age-adjusted rate is over double that — at 252 deaths per 100,000, despite 80 years of “progress”. Over 400,000 Britons hear the word “cancer” every year — about 1,100 every single day. Some 167,000 die annually. That’s 460 funerals every 24 hours.

Yet speak this uncomfortable truth aloud, and the backlash is immediate. No one is allowed to question the war-chemical origins, or the logic of poisoning patients to cure them. No one asks why no large, independent trials ever pit chemo head-to-head with promising alternative approaches. For the cancer industry, the only acceptable path is more chemo, more radio, more of the same.

Once, the word “alchemy” meant a quest to turn base metal into gold. For chemotherapy’s faithful, the quest is to turn poison into hope. Try to question it, and watch how fast the white coats, Big Pharma suits and obedient regulators pile on. You’ll be smeared, ridiculed, maybe even prosecuted if you suggest anything but more poison.

This is not modern medicine. It’s mustard gas, repackaged as hope, sold to desperate people as salvation. And it’s the only “treatment” you’re allowed to have, yet the truth is deaths from Cancer now are more than double that seen before Chemotherapy was even invented.

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