Refusing Treatment for Breast Cancer

Most women diagnosed with breast cancer are willing to do whatever they can to try and beat this disease, regardless of how far it may have progressed. But for some women, the choice of what to do about breast cancer is not so easy. Some women choose not to accept treatment for breast cancer, either because they want to wait for a while to see what happens, or because they decide to accept their fate and let nature take its course.

Refusing treatment for early stage cancer
Breast cancer caught in stages one or two can be cured approximately 90% of the time, through a combination of treatments that may include chemotherapy, lumpectomy or mastectomy, radiation and hormone therapy. This is a medical road well traveled, and most women are happy to accept the guidance of medical professionals at this point. When treatment is refused in the early stages, it is usually for one of two reasons – either because the woman in question has a religious objection to accepting medical treatment, or because she wants to wait and see how the disease progresses before deciding what to do.

Because five year survival rates are over 80% for stage one breast cancer, a woman may decide to put off treatment until at least stage two, if she is not suffering and if her tumor is not of a particularly aggressive type. Age could also be a factor here – if a woman is over the age of 70 or 80, she may feel there is no urgency to treat a condition that they may not outlive anyway. Some women with early stage breast cancer prefer to take time to research alternative treatments for breast cancer rather than traveling down that familiar medical road immediately. In a small percentage of cases, breast cancer will go into remission for no discernable reason, so this may provide hope for some women in the early stages of the disease.

Refusing treatment for later stage cancer
Stage 3 breast cancer is broken down into three different stages, labeled A,B and C. It is at the second of these stages, 3B, that five-year survival traits drop below 50% for the first time. At this point, a woman’s reasons for refusing treatment are likely to be based on the fact that even if normal medical protocols are followed, the chances of beating the disease are not favorable.

One of the biggest factors that will lead to women refusing treatment at this stage is fear of the side effects associated with the medical procedures normally used to treat breast cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation cause a series of potentially debilitating side effects that include nausea, fatigue, hair loss and a persistent feeling of sickness. These symptoms can often be quite severe, and both of these cancer treatments have become quite notorious based on the frequent severity of the side effects they cause.