Mainstream Medicine

       vs. Alternative Treatments

So, what does mainstream medicine say about alternative cancer treatments in general? The Pavlovian response is a rather supercilious, “They rely on anecdotal evidence which is not scientific.”

Scientists attempt to sweep all patient testimony, verified by a doctor or not, into the realms of myth and legend. They tell us that in order to test the efficacy of a cancer treatment it must be subjected to the rigor of countless double blind studies, clinical trials and peer review groups.  In theory this sounds fine, but in practice several flaws become apparent. In fifty years of cancer research and umpteen experiments, no headway has been made in finding an effective treatment or cure for the deadliest cancers. The incidence of cancer is continually on the rise.

Another point is that these supposed exacting scientific drug trials are in fact nothing of the sort.  Clinical oncologists have an obvious vested interest in producing positive results from cancer drug trials. Controlled clinical trials are appropriately named because it is the scientist who controls the outcome. Scientists are under enormous pressure by the pharmaceutical companies to produce the “right” results. There are obvious cases of outright fraud as you will see in the Tamoxifen trials (also see May 16, 1999 New York Times article). There is also intentional and unintentional bias such as not following the protocols of the experiment, burying negative results, patient selection and statistical interpretation.

I see another factor here that has far more to do with human nature than science. By trying to exclude first person testimony, scientists try to control the path to truth. Only they have access to more exacting truths through their complex procedures and mounds of statistics.  Nonsense, scientists have not copyrighted truth.  They are fallible men and woman who have fallen for some ages old human pitfalls; extreme arrogance and the craving for more power. I will take the word of a relative or friend who has cancer and no ax to grind, over these scientists with all their personnel and political interests to serve.

The Establishment

Now I turn my attention to the cancer establishment. The agencies involved are the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the American Medical Association. These agencies have a long history of endemic corruption and conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. I will begin with the cancer establishments three primary treatments; surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

Surgery has been around for centuries and is the most successful.  Surgery is most effective against localized tumors, a small percentage of cancer patients. If the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, it is far less successful. If during surgery only one cancer cell reenters the blood stream, cancer often starts again. How many times have cancer sufferers heard the words, “we got it all”, only to find a few months later that it has returned.

Chemotherapy drugs were derived from the mustard gas experiments during World War I and World War II. They were heavily promoted in the early 1950s by Cornelius Rhoads, head of the newly formed Sloan-Kettering Center for Cancer Research. Chemotherapy is toxic, causes cancer and wrecks the immune system. Cancer patients often die from opportunistic infections, or from the drugs themselves due to their high toxicity.

Alan C. Nixon Ph.D, past president of the American Chemical Society writes, "As a chemist trained 
to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence 
that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good."

Chemotherapy has had good results with a few rare cancers, about five percent of cancer patients yearly. But according to author Ralph Moss, the drugs were given to at least 700,000 people in 1991. It is alarming to note that very few doctors would take their own medicine if they contracted cancer. In one survey of 118 doctors, 79 responded.  Fifty-eight (73 percent) said they would never take any chemotherapy due to its high toxicity and ineffectiveness. The pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune though. Chemotherapy drug sales were 3.1 billion in 1989, by 1995 they had almost tripled to 8.6 billion. Predicted sales in 1999 were 13.7 billion.

The final option, radiation treatment, has similar side effects to chemotherapy. It’s effectiveness is difficult to judge due to the fact that it is most often given to patients after surgery. It may have some use against a few rare cancers, but is given to hundreds of thousands. There is a multibillion dollar investment in radiation equipment throughout Americas hospitals and enormous profits to be made by using it.

Another grubby secret of the cancer establishment is their definition of the word “cured.” According to them you are “cured” if you remain cancer free for five years. If the cancer returns in six or eight years, then that becomes a new case to be “cured” all over again. This brings about the absurd situation of some people being “cured” two or three times in a twenty year period. The fact is of course that they were never cured at all, just sent into lengthy remissions.  But it is a convenient way for the cancer establishment to artificially inflate their success rates.

The National Cancer Institute

The NCI was established in 1937 and was supposed to find a cancer cure or effective treatment.  In over sixty years there have been some small successes with rarer cancers and some technological advances. But for most cancer patients the chances of surviving have not changed since the 1950s.

It would be great if the NCI was even half as good at controlling cancer as their public relations department is at pronouncing its imminent demise. Over the years there have been dozens of headline smashing “miracle” drugs which invariably failed to perform anywhere close to the hyperbole. In the mid 1960s Dr. Lawrence Burton produced a very promising treatment called Immuno-Augmentative Therapy. The treatment boosted the patients immune system. He moved the treatment to the Bahamas in 1977. Burton claimed the NCI tried to steal his formula and then take credit for it.

Dr. John Beaty sent twenty advanced cancer patients to Burton’s clinic. Ten experienced tumor regression. According to Beaty, “All ten owe their survival to Dr. Burton’s treatment...”

In 1985 the newspapers carried the story that Burton's treatment had become infected with the AIDS virus. The clinic was closed down. Shortly afterwards  it was revealed that a top NCI official had spread lies which were published in the AMA journal and in the press in order to close the clinic down. In 1987 Dr. Vincent DeVita, head of NCI from 1980-1988, recommended to 13,000 cancer specialists in North America to give chemotherapy and surgery to all woman with breast cancer, regardless of whether it had spread. DeVita was a Chemotherapy specialist.

Dr. Alan Levin of the University of California put the argument against DeVita bluntly:  "Most cancer patients in this country die of Chemotherapy.”

In 1988 DeVita left NCI for a 400,000 a year position with Sloan-Kettering in New York as physician-in-chief of the cancer research area. A major scandal rocked the NCI in 1994 when the Chicago Tribune broke the story of large scale fraud in the Tamoxifen drug trials. Dr. Bernard Fisher was in charge of the taxpayer funded (about 68 million dollars) National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project of NCI. Fisher used data he knew to be fraudulent in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Samuel Broder, director of the NCI, was also informed about the fraud but remained silent.

Tamoxifen received enormous media exposure thanks to the NCI. They stated that in clinical trials it had a success rate of preventing cancer in 45 percent of the woman who took part in the trials. But two smaller trials of Tamoxifen in England and Italy showed no preventative benefit. Tamoxifen may just delay the onset of breast cancer. The NCI hardly mentions (if at all, I could not find any mention of it on their website. Gavin) the fact that Tamoxifen is a known carcinogen. It increases the risk of uterine cancer for woman under fifty by two times and woman over fifty by four times, as well as other serious side-effects. Yet this drug is approved for cancer prevention in healthy woman. After the embarrassing Tamoxifen episode, NCI director Samuel Broder resigned in 1995. He took a position at Ivax, Inc, a company producing chemotherapy drugs. His salary is approximately twice what he was earning at the NCI.

Another little known fact is that many drugs developed by the NCI, at taxpayer expense, are then handed over to pharmaceutical companies who reap the massive profits. A good example of this is the anticancer drug Taxol which was approved in 1992. The NCI had spent a fortune on clinical trials and developing the drugs’ manufacturing process. They then gave exclusive rights to Bristol-Myers Squibb who charge us $4.87 per milligram, twenty times what it costs to make.

The American Cancer Society

Formed in 1913, the ACS was reorganized in 1944. The new leadership comprised of Albert Lasker, an advertising tycoon and Elmer Bobst, president of two drug companies. Albert Laskers wife, Mary, ran the ACS for thirty some years. Mary was only interested in researching profit motivated patentable drugs. The big payoff for Mary came in December 1971, when President Nixon signed into law the "war on cancer." During the decade of the 1970s Mary Lasker and prominent private cancer research hospitals such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering ruled the national cancer program.

The ACS has a committee to identify any doctor prescribing treatments that are not endorsed by them. 
For years, the
 ACS's Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management and the AMA's Committee on 
Quackery (disbanded 1974) collaborated in persecuting anyone threatening the status quo. According 
to journalist Ruth Rosenbaum, they "form a network of vigilantes prepared to 
pounce on anyone who promotes a cancer therapy that runs against their substantial prejudices 
and profits."

Samuel Epstein writes about the ACS’s Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management;

"Periodically, the committee updates it's statements on "unproven methods"...Once a clinician or oncologist becomes associated with "unproven methods", he or she is blackballed by the cancer establishment. Funding for the accused "quack" becomes inaccessible, followed by systematic harassment." What happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars the ACS collects every year? In September 1990, a study by Dr. James T. Bennett of George Mason University  concluded;

"The American Cancer Society...had a fund balance of $426.2 million in 1988, and it held net investments (after depreciation) in land, buildings and equipment of $69 million. That same year, the ACS spent only $89.2 million, or 26 percent of its budget on medical research.”

In January 1995 “The Phoenix New Times” wrote a lengthy investigative article about the Arizona 
chapter of the ACS. They found that in 1994 the Arizona ACS had only given $47,183, out of the 
millions raised, directly to people suffering with cancer.  A staggering 95% of funds received 
went to salaries and overhead.

The ACS is famous for making highly exaggerated and misleading statements.  On March 15, 1987, the ACS officially announced, "Caught early enough, breast cancer has cure rates approaching 100 percent." There is no such thing as a cure for breast cancer, only survival rates. As Dr. Dean Burk said, "They (ACS) lie like scoundrels."

The ACS and NCI have been intertwined since the 1950s. About half of the ACS board is comprised of oncologists, radiologists, clinicians and others with a vested interest in traditional cancer research. Key ACS and NCI officials often sit on each others committees.  ACS board members and their colleagues receive grants from one or both institutions. This old boys network maintains the status quo and guarantees that the vast majority of funding stays within orthodox medicine.

The Federal Drug Administration

In 1970, former FDA commissioner Dr. Herbert Ley said, "The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day."

In 1974 eleven FDA scientists testified in the Senate “...That they were harassed by agency officials...Whenever they recommended against approval of marketing some new drug.”

The FDA’s generic drug scandal hit the news in 1989. Several FDA reviewers were accepting bribes from some drug companies to speed their drugs through the process and derail those submitted by competing companies. According to a Tuft's University study released in 1990, it now takes 12 years and costs 231 million dollars to research, test and obtain approval for a new drug. Because of the FDA’s glacially slow and inept bureaucracy, many potentially useful drugs cannot be brought to market due to the excessive cost and time involved. 

A battle being fought now epitomizes how far the FDA will go in order to protect the drug companies profits. For over a year Jim and Donna Navarro have fought the FDA for the right to give their five year old son, Thomas, an alternative treatment. Thomas suffers with Medulloblastoma, a type of malignant brain cancer. After surgery, chemotherapy was recommended. Jim and Donna asked what the side-effects were.

“...Fluid on the middle ear, hearing loss, memory loss, hyperthyroidism, spinal growth deficit..." The list went on. Worse, permanent retardation.  Jim and Donna researched their sons cancer for thousands of hours. They found Dr. Burzynski’s treatment (antineoplastons) in Houston, that has had some very good success with this type of brain cancer, with minimal short term side effects.

The FDA has been persecuting Dr. Burzynski for over 15 years. They refuse to allow Burzysnki to treat Thomas until he has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment first. Jim and Donna pleaded with the FDA commissioner Jane Henney, her superior Donna Shalala and several politicians, all to no avail. The FDA would rather see Thomas Navarro dead than taking the medicine of his parents choice. The FDA’s motives are explicitly clear. Prominent FDA officials protect the pharmaceutical companies profit margins and are later rewarded with lucrative positions within those same companies. As Burzysnki says;

“The past commissioner of the FDA-now he is an official of one of the large pharmaceutical companies, with a salary of 2 million a year.”

If the FDA allow Thomas Navarro access to Burzynski’s treatment they open the door to other people demanding the same option. Very soon people will want the right to choose any alternative treatment. That is a road the FDA definitely does not want to go down.

The American Medical Association

The AMA is responsible for licensing of all Doctors in America. They play an important role in suppressing alternative treatments by networking with the ACS and FDA in identifying and punishing doctors that step out of line.

 Since Morris Fishbein’s day the AMA has relied on the revenue received from drug manufacturers to advertise in their various medical journals. 

On February 6, 1973, two former chairman and 1 vice chair of the AMA's council on drugs testified before Congress and said that the AMA was, “...A captive of and beholden to the pharmaceutical industry." In 1987 the AMA was found guilty of conspiring for 20 years to destroy the profession of chiropractitioners.

The War On Cancer

The supposed “war on cancer” is little more than a grand illusion conjured up by the cancer establishments propaganda gurus. The formula is eons old. Repeatedly chisel your message into peoples psyches; “cancer breakthrough”, “scientists say they are “...Turning the tide on cancer.”  We become unwitting human satellites, bouncing the deception from one person to another.

There never was a determined, no holds-barred war on cancer.  There is a fanatical and hate-filled war being waged against the few courageous doctors and innovative healers who prescribe natural treatments. There is a war of protectionism. Protecting the status quo, protecting the grant money trough, and above all, protecting the pharmaceutical cartels’ monopoly. There have been at least a dozen very encouraging cancer treatments in the last seventy years.  The Rife frequency machine, Laetrile, Hoxsey, Antineoplastons, Coley’s Toxins, Glyoxylide, Hydrazine Sulfate, Krebiozen, Immuno-Augmentative Therapy, Dr. Max Gerson’s Diet, to name a few. They all have two things in common. The people advocating the therapy are branded charlatans or quacks and the treatment is denounced as worthless by scientists who have been selling us out for generations.

A radical change in cancer research is needed. The natural, nutritional and other innovative approaches should be studied and made available to cancer patients immediately. Most important, we must have medical freedom of choice. For us to achieve those changes, we have to overcome a far tougher opponent than cancer. A battle Royal against the $110 billion a year cancer industry.  Ultimately, our greatest enemy is apathy.

To succeed, we will need people willing to step up to the plate and speak out, undeterred by being 
labeled politically incorrect. People with plenty of good old fashioned guts, character and an iron will to 
see it through until the job is done.  We will prevail. It’s inevitable. Because when good woman and men 
put their minds to something, the mightiest walls of oppression can and will be shattered.

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