Letter: Cancer

IN THE article "Tell me, doctor" (Real Life, 15 November), Lynne McTaggart states that "No cancer incurable then [1971] is curable today. Chemotherapy's modest successes are almost identical to what they were then".

She is wrong. Thousands of men are alive and well owing to the effective introduction in the late 1970s of a chemotherapeutic drug called Cisplatin. In 1971, the mortality rate for advanced testicular teratoma was 100 per cent. It is now nearly always curable.

DAVID IZOD

Hove, East Sussex