Patients and families are prey to many treatment traps, both standard and alternative. Knowledge, experience and careful, unflustered reasoning are among our greatest tools. I want to thank everyone that has shared their direct experiences. ko1300cc, I am sorry for your family's pain and loss - thank you for your mom's story.
Many of the biologically based alternative treatments have small order individual effects, percentage gains, that might be best leveraged through early, long term use as add-ons in eclectic combination. Only a few unapproved treatments seem to provide pronounced, standalone, easy to see survival benefits like perioperative cimetidine and the celebrex-oral treatment pairings, both known and promoted by Life Extension for over a dozen years. However, gains like 3%+2%+4%+5%... should not be discounted either. A dozen of them become a game changer in their own right.
Last ditch efforts are understandable. They could potentially provide quality of life, some life extension, perhaps extra chances. Everyone hopes for a miracle. Poorly conceived or executed efforts overinfluenced by marketing easily turn tragic, whether standard medicine or CAM. It's the biologically based, early CAM efforts used to complement the best standard techniques that may provide the big survival and QoL benefits at lower costs.