Hi Reg2,

Weirdly, this is my favourite topic - apart from sailing and scuba diving!
There are two reasons for this - professional and personal. 
Before my early retirement I worked for the NHS in an IT/Information capacity.
In 2013 I was diagnosed with stage 4 oesophageal cancer and given between 2 and 6 months without chemo and up to 18 months with, along with a less than 5% chance of survival after 5 years.
13 years later, I am a statistical outlier and excluded from national stats.

Survival stats are:
1. based on average patients, but none of us are average
2. ignore factors such as age, fitness and co-morbidities
3. great applied to large numbers of patients but useless for individuals

I hope this helps!
Dave

Hello, and thank you for getting in touch.

I’m sorry to hear about everything you’ve been through with your cancer treatment; that must have been an incredibly difficult time for you.

Understandably, you’re questioning statistics when your own experience has been so different from what you were told. Cancer statistics are based on large groups of people, so they can never predict exactly how long any one person will live. Everyone is unique, cancers behave differently from person to person, and treatments continue to improve.

Researchers do use real patient data, but it can take time to collect and analyse, so it doesn’t always reflect what patients are experiencing right now. We have information on our website about understanding cancer statistics -incidence, survival, and mortality, which I hope you find helpful.

If you have any further questions or would like to talk things through, please do get back in touch.

Kind regards,

Jemma