Best-case analyses of 4 current unconventional therapies in ontology

Best-case analyses are - under certain circumstances - a useful method to d ecide on the tumor-specific efficacy of unconventional treatments, without performing formal clinical studies and with limited expenditure. As part of the activities of the 'Arbeitsgruppe Biologische Krebstherapie', sponsored by the 'Deutsche Krebshilfe', an analysis and second-opinion judgement (ac cording to internationally accepted standards) of their 'best cases' was of fered to 36 manufacturers and users of unconventional cancer drugs and meth ods, who in public propagated these as effective cancer therapies. Only few of the approached offerers were both willing to cooperate and able to prov ide significant documentation for such an analysis. Therefore, only four be st-case analyses could be performed completely. The work-up of the availabl e documentation was not very convincing in all four cases, especially when considering that a positive selection from hundreds or even thousands of ap plications had taken place. The results of the analyses did not reveal any well-founded evidence for a tumor-specific effectiveness of the correspondi ng applications. The discrepancy between the offerers and the working group 's judgements results especially from the circumstance that the majority of the treatments were not performed on patients with advanced tumor disease without any other conventional therapies, but additionally to established t herapies or as an adjuvant treatment protocol. Other reasons were the obvio us misjudgement of findings, the assessment of unimportant or unsuitable pa rameters, the misinterpretation of the probably normal development as a tre atment success or also documentation inappropriate for evaluation.