(US National Institute of Health website - NIH)
"The use of mistletoe to treat cancer has been studied in Europe in more than 30 clinical trials; improvements in survival or quality of life have been reported."
but then go on to say:
"almost all of the trials had major weaknesses that raise doubts about their findings. These weaknesses have included small numbers of patients, incomplete data, lack of information about the dose of mistletoe, and problems with the design of the studies."
What they did't say it they didn't get better. What they're saying that can't say much more about it. Ok, you don't have to, they got better.
Now that text was taken from the US Federal Government National Institute of Health ("NIH") website that deals with non-patented medicine. Every once in a while they change the name and the web address. Back when it was called the "CAM" division I took the text from the site and pasted it here. The current name is now different and the text was changed. However the Rexall drug chain, I suppose interested in selling the stuff, has some text from it they also lifted from the original CAM site, which was slightly more generous that what is currently there. Here is the text from the Rexall site.
"Studies in laboratory settings have found that this herb kills cancer cells and stimulates the immune system. It has also been studied in European clinical trials as a cancer treatment. There have been some positive outcomes from these trials, but all of these trials have had major design weaknesses that makes the findings questionable."
Pay particular attention to the words they took off the current version of the fact sheet about this: "kills cancer cells and stimulates the immune system". Because it's not true? No, it was on there a while and is true.
One can only speculate why a government service purported to increase health would do this.
This sort of revisionism when documenting the US medical system is not new, look at the archived and current versions of the Wikipedia page on "Iatrogenesis" or "diseases caused by the medical system" noting that only a very small fraction arr surgery; more so our surgical prowess makes leaps and bounds. In the 1960s the life expectancy of a heart transplant patient was measured in days and took two days to perform. Noe we can transplant a liver, lungs and a heart and expect the patient to live a normal life. But the medicine side of this equation? That's the problem.
But look what words used to be in Wikipedia and what are not there now. Again in this case they are not there now not because they are not true, because they are inconvenient: if you want to see who controls something, see who you are not allowed to criticize. It is not the surgeons. Here is the quote from the 2011 version:
"Based on these figures, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer."
Flat out, this is the third leading cause of death in the US today. Rather than fixing it they took the words out of Wikipedia.
But, notice what words are in there now:
"Globally it is estimated that 142,000 people died in 2013 from adverse effects of medical treatment up from 94,000 in 1990"
So, as bad as the problem was, it got worse fairly quickly.