Does chemotherapy actually do good? Or does it just kill you faster?

As the previous responder pointed out, chemo can indeed be a "mixed medium": it can and DOES prolong life in many cases, and frequently leads to relatively long "remissions" (almost nobody in the mainstream medical world speaks of cancer ever being "cured"), especially when things are caught early on in the game. Cancer very seldom goes into remission by itself, although some forms progress very slowly or may speed up and slow down according to the condition of the person's immune system - so, in the vast majority of cases it is a death sentence to leave cancer untreated. It is true that most people do live longer with chemo - sometimes very much longer - BUT, their quality of life is often poorer while they are being actively treated, than if they had just let things progress naturally. It all comes down to probabilities in the end: in a particular situation: if a cancer is deemed inoperable, there is an X probability that aggressive chemo treatments could lead to a remission. Most doctors don't take the time to fully explain the pros and cons of even the most drastic of treatments to the patient or their family, so quite often people just go with the doctors recommendations and hope for the best. // Personally, if i ever find myself in such a situation, i would probably try everything under the sun before submitting to chemo, unless the odds given were quite good - and even then i would think long and hard and do my homework the best that i could, regarding treatment options. Chemo treatments have not advanced very quickly over the past few decades and still have a lot of problems: they are not anybody's "magic bullet", that;s for certain!!