My graduate advisor, a friend of mine, died at age 50 from the "side-effects" of Chemotherapy for kidney cancer.

It was ironic, as a couple of years before he realized he had cancer, he'd made the off-hand remark that "if you try to kill all the fleas on your dog, you'll end up killing the dog."

One of the more promising alternative therapies for cancers of various types is IV Vitamin C in mega-doses, as first suggested by Linus Pauling, who was branded a "quack" for suggesting that high doses of Vitamin C could kill the cancers without the toxic side-effects of Chemo, doses that are much higher than you can achieve in the bloodstream by taking pills. (The intestines won't absorb Vitamin C beyond a small percentage of what's needed, so you have to get the Vitamin C infused directly into the bloodstream via IV, doses in the 2-3oz range.)

The Mayo Clinic ran a "test" of his hypothesis back in the '70s using Vitamin C pills, which naturally didn't achieve the concentrations in the bloodstream necessary to kill the cancers, and based on their "test", declared that Vitamin C for treating cancer was "quackery". They've only recently repeated his tests using IV Vitamin C and found exactly what he said was true, right down to the apparent means by which the cancerous cells died - by the generation of hydrogen peroxide, which Pauling said was due to the cancerous cells being so "hungry" for glucose that they mistake Vitamin C for glucose, which generates hydrogen peroxide as a by-product of metabolizing Vitamin C as if it were glucose.

It doesn't work as well on patients who've already had the cancer and their immune system damaged by Chemo. There are a few clinics in the US and around the world where you can get IV Vitamin C administered as a cancer treatment, as the FDA still regards it as "quackery" despite the successful tests done only recently, so the doctors at the clinics are risking their careers by administering unlicensed therapies to cancer patients.