Is there anytime doctors wont recomend chemo therapy?

Very good question and several excellent answers above.
"lo-mcg" is giving us the British perspective.
Perhaps in the U.K. the doctors make decisons about chemotherapy based on cost effective considerations - a sensible system.
Chemotherapy was my medical specialty for 20 years.
I spent much of my time trying to talk people out of taking chemotherapy.
This was mostly because 1/6th of my patients had advanced non-small cell lung cancers. In NC, almost all of my lung cancer patients were long term smokers.
We have over 100 drugs and hundreds of combinations.
But there are always side effects and usually tremendous expense.

As others have said, it depends on the type of cancer.
Non-small cell lung carcinomas do not respond well.
Pancreatic cancers and advanced stage gastric carcinomas do not respond well.
Brain tumors do not usually respond well to chemotherapy.
Metastatic renal cell cancers and melanomas are notoriously poor responders to cytotoxic chemotherpay
People who have failed front line chemotherapy regimens often will not respond to second line regimens.

We frequently wind up treating people even with low chances for partial, temporary responses because people in the U.S. often will not accept a supportive care only / no treatment option.

The decision is often left to the patient in this country (USA) which is why so much explanation time is necessary. If someone understands that there is a 16% partial response rate with a much higher risk of toxic side effects - and they still want treatment - they get it in America. Some busy oncologists I have known just go ahead and treat without all of the time consuming explanations. The idea of no treatment is so unacceptable in America that some find it easier to just treat. There is always a chemotherapy regimen to try no matter how limited the response may be.

People will not like this answer, and I expect the thumbs down - but that is reality in the U.S. This is one of the reasons health care costs have spiralled out of control here. And the greatest expense is the cost of the drugs - not the oncologist's fee.

The drug companies charge an absolute fortune for each new drug. There is good and bad in that. The incentive to make big money drives the research. The brilliant scientists who come up with the new, innovative treatments are not the ones who make the big money - it is the business executives who market the new drugs.

One of my best friends - an infectious diseases specialist - once quipped that for many types of advanced cancers "chemotherapy didn't make people live longer, but the time they had seemed like forever." I have seen many people made miserable by treating with chemotherapy with no extension of life. Yet people do have the right to try if they wish. I wish we had better treatments to offer people with advanced pancreatic cancers, non-small cell lung cancers, renal cancers, metastatic melanomas and some other cancer types.

If you think about it, all doctors try to "buy time" for their patients. All of us die eventually. The touble with aggressive chemotherapy when there is no possibility of cure is that we may be doing more harm than good. The first rule of medicine is "primum non nocere" - "first do no harm."

If chemotherapy is far more likely to cause harm than benefit, it should not be used - in my opinion. BUT - people will choose treatment with only a 1% chance of temporary benefit because it seems like giving up to do nothing to fight an advanced malignancy. There is a great deal of human psychology invoved in all of this. You can't know what
you would do until you are in this situation yourself - facing death from an advanced widespread cancer.

OK - If you are asking about brain tumors - which type?
Ted Kennedy did not do so well with chemotherapy for his brain malignancy, and he had all the money and political clout in the world. Most chemotherapy will not cross the blood/brain barrier, and the drugs which do get into the CNS are not often effective against most types of brain malignancies. I did not recommend chemotherapy for brain tumors, but my partner would try with experimental regimens from Duke University in NC (USA). Duke is where Ted Kennedy was treated for his brain tumor.

Yes. Sometimes if it has already spread too much. Sometimes if chemo is not the indicated treatment; some cases of early breast cancer are treated with surgery alone. Often, elderly men with prostate cancer are left untreated because in all probability they will die of something else before the prostate cancer does any harm. Sometimes they won't give chemo because the patient is so sick from other problems that the chemo would kill him. If there are multiple tumors in the brain already, chemo will probably be of no use. Non-chemo drugs will then be given mainly to make the person more comfortable. Steroids may be given and steroids are often a part of mixture of drugs referred to as chemotherapy although steroids do not kill cancer cells.

Yes its always a balance between the chance of getting a response against quality of life. Some cancers respond poorly to chemo. Some relapse and second line chemo may no be effective

Yep. My mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By the time she was diagnosed she had already dropped quite abit of weight. The Oncologist told us she had 3 months to live, and that she was not healthy enough for chemo. He figured the chemo would kill her before the cancer.

Yes; it depends on the type of cancer, and on the individual patient's cancer.

Whether or nor chemotherapy is recommended depends on a number of factors involved in the individual's cancer, including the type of cancer (there are some types of cancer for which chemotherapy is not the appropriate treatment); the grade and/or stage of the cancer (less aggressive and advanced cancers are less likely to be treated with chemotherapy), where in the body the cancer started, or whether the cancer has spread.

Many people who are diagnosed with cancer are not offered chemotherapy.

I will give an example of my friend who has prostate cancer. His cancer has not spread for a few months. He is to receive 5 radical radiation treatments..no chemo because the cancer has not changed/spread.

it depends on which type of cancer it is
some cancers will respond to chemo, while others may respond to radiation, hormone therapy, medication....but sometimes sadly some respond to nothing at all

a great site to check out would be the Mayo clinic site...they have a lot of great info.

my prayers and best wishes are w/whomever is going through this

A few cancers don't respond to chemo.

Very well said Spreedog.
Couldn't have said it better myself, altho you are probably right about the thumbs down. Many just don't want the truth.