if you have been fighting cancer for 12yrs and the drugs no longer work would you quit taking them?

Typically they would switch to a new drug which may work if you've stopped having a response to the other drug(s). I assume you're talking chemo...there are many types of chemo used for many types of cancer. There are usually several options for chemo based treatment.

When you say "no longer work" do you mean that its not shrinking or reducing the cancer anymore? Because it is possible for chemo to still "work" and just stop the cancer from progressing. Example-my friend had serious CC spread thru her body and her doc put her on Cisplatin which typically has a good result for CC patients, it did not shrink anything but it did keep it from progressing. Now she is on a new chemo I believe called Taxol or something similar, it is working to shrink the cancer. If she had not received the Cisplatin from the first doctor, she would probably have died by now.

It depends on your specific situation.

Your question is strange . . a doctor usually monitors a patient and if the drugs stop working everyone knows it pretty quickly and the drugs are stopped. If it is possible the patient is switched to another drug to see if that one will help control the disease. There is no 'cure' for cancer . . only treatment . . and sometimes that treatment will stop working (that's why we say there is no cure because treatments can stop working - no one knows why - except that cancer has the ability to mutate and if it mutates or evolves enough it can render current treatment less effective.

So . . yes, if the drug is no longer working . . your doctor would immediately know from doing CT or diagnostic testing and hopefully a new treatment can be found to control the disease before progression.

well i am petrified of needles, always have been. i would not stop the medicine though without the go ahead from my doctor. i would make sure it was a safe decision to do, and find out all the other options of treatment Needles being refered to as chemo) but also no matter hwat the treatment is if i feel it is no longer working i would still talk to my doctor, also the term no longer working really refers to the fact that the tumor is still growing even though you are getting treatment. if the tumor is stable (not growing or shrinking) then the treatment is still working.

that is entirely up to you, what I would recommend is to make sure they don't work.

some people might think their treatment is not working, but if fact it might be slow growing. Also, it will depend of the kind of cancer that you are fighting, is this drug an oral pill to help prevent cancer from recurrence like tamoxifen? or it is really a chemo drug. If you have fail one chemotherapy drug, they generally have other combinations that you are supposed to try. BUt before you quit, make sure you talk to your doctor first

If they for sure aren't working i would quit.

Yeah. What's the point if they aren't working..?