I'm not sure that you can tell Jim. Oftentimes new drugs and procedures are tried in Europe because the regulatory issues are not as cumbersome as in the US. The studies and experimental drugs or procedures may well be initiated by US companies as well. The FDA also allows clinical data from overseas studies as long as it meets their investigational criteria.

I wrote this while Brian was writing his post so I didn't realize that she was trying "Mistletoe" therapy. From what I read it was as Brian said, an adjunctive therapy to her conventional treatment which she went through first.

Advanced anal cancer is serious business. It has a tendency to metastesize and is very stealthy so it can be very large by the time it is discovered. My best friends wife had rectal cancer and the tumor weighed 6 lbs. Miraculously she survived. The survival rate is relatively poor. My friends wife had ACC not HPV. Evidently Farrah's was caused by HPV or at least that's what the media is implying. See: http://www.dailypress.com/health/sns-health-farrah-fawcett-anal-cancer,0,5421582.story