http://www.cancermonthly.com/ Conventional Approaches to Cancer en-us Copyright 2008 Cancer Monthly. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cancermonthly.com/cancerwire.asp Why are toxic drugs the continual focus of conventional cancer therapy despite the fact that so little progress has been made in treating advanced and metastatic solid cancers in the last 50 years? In this edition of CancerWire we focus on the conventional paradigm - how the cancer industry approaches the treatment of cancer. We begin with a fascinating article about the esteemed physician and researcher Dr. Andrew Ivy and what happened to him after he discovered a potential cure for cancer from an unlikely source - the blood of horses. We will also look at current alternative and complementary clinical trials for cancer and highlight the few that address survival. And finally, we review the approval of the expensive new drug Avastin for breast cancer despite the fact that it did not improve survival in the patients tested.