Originally published October 17 2012
What Went Wrong? An indictment of the for-profit cancer industry
by Dr. Carolyn Dean
(NaturalNews) What Went Wrong is not a question, it's a statement of fact in the raging war between alternative cancer therapies and allopathic medicine's standard of cancer care with drugs, chemo and surgery. I added the word Again, because these battles have happened countless times and have cost countless lives.
Dr. Nick Gonzales begins his book, What Went Wrong, with the following words.
"From 1998 to 2005, my colleague Dr. Linda Isaacs and I worked closely with physicians and scientists from Columbia University, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), developing and pursuing a formal clinical trial comparing our nutritional treatment to chemotherapy in patients diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. When the project first began we were excited by, and grateful for, this opportunity to have our regimen tested under what we hoped would be rigorous academic supervision. In a personal sense, the study represented the culmination of nearly 15 long years of our own research efforts and our battles to have our therapy properly evaluated and eventually mainstreamed. We also hoped that in a more global sense, this effort would help usher in a new era of cooperation between mainstream institutions and serious alternative practitioners with promising new treatments. In those long ago days we truly believed that the endless and fruitless war between academic medicine and more unconventional approaches might be coming to an end, to everyone's benefit.
...Now, some 14 years later, I am sorry to report that despite our early optimism the study collapses in a morass of poor management and indifference by those assigned to supervise the project. Our enthusiasm long ago died, along with our faith in the academic research world, its concern for such noble ideals as scientific truth and compassion for the serious ill. In a more practical sense, we strongly believe that any serious-minded alternative cancer practitioner or researcher should avoid working with NCCAM, the NCI and academic medical centers at all cost, and instead search for other avenues of support, either from industry or private foundations."
What follows is a large book of almost 600 pages with an historical account of what most alternative cancer researchers and clinicians have experienced for the past two hundred years. You may not have been privy to exactly what happened to Dr. Max Gerson, Gaston Naessens, Royal Rife or Harry Hoxey as their cured cancer and were demonized for it. But you can be in on the ground floor of this latest tragedy that keeps alternative cancer therapies from being shared with the public. Similar attacks have been made against Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski because of his excellent cure rate with his cancer therapy.
But this is an account of the cancer establishment funding Dr. Gonzales' to do a scientific trial of his work - and then proceeding to ignore, obfuscate and corrupt the data.
I strongly encourage you to buy this historical account of a cancer system gone terribly wrong. Since medicine is all about the money, driving Dr. Gonzalas' book to the top of Amazon's sales ranking will send its own message.
Here's an overview of the cancer industry the Death by Cancer, Inc. from my Death by Modern Medicine Seeking Safe Solutions book.
"Why Fix a System That's Earning Billions
Drug companies and modern medicine do not see the need to change what they are doing. After all they are making billions of dollars, so their strategists wonder why they should change a winning game. Doctors are earning a sizeable income, and American medical conventions attract 20,000-30,000 participants where newer and more expensive drugs and surgical techniques are touted. Modern medicine is very pleased with the monopoly it has created. However, for the majority of North Americans, modern medicine is a losing game. This is nowhere more evident than in the business of cancer.
Cancer Inc.
If something is not working in a business do we keep doing what doesn't work? Absolutely not! That would be stupid if not insane. Therefore why do we keep using the same methods of attack on cancer when forty years of the same approach has been disastrous? That is, if one questions whether our end point is to save more lives!
You may think that there is no other way to treat cancer than by surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation because your information about this disease comes from modern medicine alone. Media coverage of cancer reinforces the modern medicine way to treat this devastating disease every day. Unfortunately, we don't hear about the major advances that have been made using natural medicine. In fact, as much as there is a war on cancer, there seems to be a war against people finding out that there are alternative treatments to cancer and there are even more ways we should be mobilizing our society to prevent the disease in the first place. The war on cancer exemplifies the rigidity of modern medicine and the extent to which the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies will go to maintain a monopoly on medicine, even if it is killing us.
Losing the War on Cancer
The following overview of the failing war on cancer will make many feel uncomfortable. Almost all of us have been touched by cancer and pray that we do the right thing for our loved ones when they develop this disease. This overview may make us mad because we haven't done enough to ensure that our loved ones have gotten the proper care. But this section on cancer and the entire chapter and book should make us question why we are allowing modern medicine to continue to operate as a monopoly and not a more level playing field with other therapies.
Medical cancer writer, Dr. Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D., in his Weekly Cancer Decisions newsletter about the 40th annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in 2004 states that he found, in spite of the fact that one doctor presented a report showing that 91 percent of cancer patients seek some form of alternative medicine (what we call natural medicine), there were almost no presentations on cancer and natural medicine at the conference. It's as if it doesn't even exist.
We all know that cancer is a big business; you may not know that modern medical conventions themselves are also big business. It is not unusual to see ten, twenty, or even thirty thousand participants in convention centers the size of small towns. At this particular ASCO convention, Dr. Moss reports that there were 25,000 participants, mostly medical oncologists. To give some perspective, a traditional medical conference of naturopathic doctors, alternative medicine practitioners, herbalists, or acupuncturists, at most might have 1,000 attendees.
As Dr. Moss notes, thousands of cancer doctors "... came to lecture and be lectured to about the latest advances in cancer treatment. In addition to the gargantuan plenary sessions, there were hundreds of smaller sessions, approximately 1,500 poster and oral presentations, and 8,500 other research summaries given as abstracts."
Chemotherapy Cocktails
The focus of the research presented was on how to mix different chemotherapeutic drugs with what is called "targeted drug therapies". There were no new breakthroughs; nobody talked about the failure to win the war on cancer. They just continued the illusion that they are heroes fighting the war on cancer and helping people.
Fortune Magazine's Expose' on Cancer
Clifton Leaf, Executive Editor of Fortune magazine and himself a survivor of adolescent Hodgkin's disease, also reported on this particular convention, his own personal experience, and his research into the war on cancer. His article, "Losing the War on Cancer," in Fortune, March, 2004, is nothing short of devastating but netted barely a blip on the radar screen of the major media.
Mr. Leaf said that we hear every day about new cancer drug breakthroughs that claim the cure is in sight. "But it's not," he says. "Hope and optimism, so essential to this fight, have masked some very real systemic problems that have made this complex, elusive, relentless foe even harder to defeat... we are far from winning the war. So far away, in fact, that it looks like losing."
Here are some shocking facts (presented in point form) about our losing battle that Mr. Leaf expanded on in his widely read mainstream journal. While they are U.S. statistics, we can apply them equally to Canadians suffering with this disease and to the war on cancer in Canada:
1. Each and every 14 months, more Americans will die from cancer than have died from every war that the U.S. has fought... combined.
2. Cancer is about to replace heart disease as the number one U.S. killer. It is already the biggest killer in many age groups. (Our Death by Medicine statistics show that the number one killer is medical errors. See Appendix B.)
3. Even adjusting for age, the percentage of Americans dying from cancer is about the same as it was in 1971 (when Nixon declared the war on cancer) or even back in 1950!
4. The much-touted improvement in survival from cancer is largely a myth. "Survival gains for the more common forms of cancer are measured in additional months of life," says Leaf, "not years." Yet the headlines try to make it seem like much more.
5. Most of the improvement in longevity of cancer patients can be attributed to lifestyle changes (the promotion of which has not been a conspicuous priority for the National Cancer Institute) and especially to early detection.
6. A few dramatic breakthroughs (such as in Hodgkin's disease) occurred in the early days of the war on cancer. There has been little substantial progress in recent decades... despite nearly ubiquitous claims to the contrary.
7. According to one biostatistician at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, long-term survival from common cancers (such as prostate, breast, colorectal and lung) "has barely budged since the 1970's."
8. According to Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel and a major cancer financer, "It's like a Greek tragedy. Everybody plays his individual part to perfection, everybody does what's right by his own life, and the total just doesn't work."
9. The cancer effort is "utterly fragmented - so much so that it's nearly impossible to track down where the money to pay for all this research is coming from."
10. Leaf estimates that U.S. $14.4 billion is spent each year on cancer research alone. "When you add it all up, Americans have spent... close to $200 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, since 1971." It is certainly justifiable to ask for an accounting.
11. Research has become increasingly irrelevant to the real-life problems faced by cancer patients. "The narrower the research niche," says Leaf, "the greater the rewards the researcher is likely to attain."
The Basic Flaw of Cancer Research
Leaf warns that cancer research is fundamentally flawed in its orientation. He says this is because cancer scientists have applied the same tactics they have in all other diseases and self-confidently created "animal models" and artificial cell lines that supposedly mimic an equivalent human disease, such as breast, colon or lung cancer. These scientists then triumphantly "cure" cancer in these laboratory models over and over again with their chemotherapy drugs.
But cell lines and tumors growing in mice are drastically different from spontaneous human tumors, the kind that afflict us and our mothers and fathers. When you begin with a flawed model, you end up with flawed results. People that try to keep up with cancer research have become accustomed to an endless series of so-called breakthroughs in mice that never seem to work in clinical trials in actual human patients. But by that time there is no headline telling people about yet another failure, we just keep seeing the false-hope headlines.
Various researchers in Mr. Leaf's article made the following statements:
"A fundamental problem, which remains to be solved in the whole cancer research effort, in terms of therapies, is that the pre-clinical models of human cancer, in large part, stink." -Dr. Robert Weinberg, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"Cancer researchers say, 'I've got a model for lung cancer!' "Well," says Prof. Bruce Chabner of Harvard University, "It ain't a model for lung cancer, because lung cancer in humans has a hundred mutations. It looks like the most complicated thing you've ever seen genetically."
"Hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted every year by drug companies using these models," says Weinberg. "But with the huge profits to be made from tumor-shrinking drugs... what incentive do they have to stop?"
"It is exciting to see a tumor shrink in mouse or man and know that a drug is doing that," says Leaf. "It is a measurable goal." But, he adds, "Tumor regression by itself is actually a lousy predictor for the progression of disease." The sad truth is that "regression is not likely to improve a person's chances of survival.""
What is the average citizen supposed to do when doctors are prevented from providing alternatives that you may want? Personally I have layers of information that people can follow to take responsibility for their own health. And as I said above, buy Dr. Gonzales' book and support doctors who provide you with alternatives. Pouring more money into the alternative medicine community rather than the allopathic community is one way to let everyone know that change is afoot.
Death by Modern Medicine: Seeking Safe Solutions is available on Kindle.
About the author:
About the Author:
Carolyn Dean MD ND is The Doctor of the Future�. She is a medical doctor and naturopathic doctor in the forefront of the natural medicine revolution since 1979.
She is working on several patents on novel products including the iCell in RnA Drops. Dr. Dean is a leading expert in magnesium and she has created a picometer, stabilized-ionic form of magnesium, called ReMag that's 100% absorbed at the cellular level and non-laxative making it one of the only magnesiums that can be taken in therapeutic amounts with no side effects. ReLyte is her multiple mineral product that is also completely absorbed at the cellular level and contains the 9 minerals necessary for supporting proper thyroid function. RnA Drops help make perfect cells via RNA through Chromosome 14 affecting DNA. ReNew, which is highly concentrated RnA Drops is a powerful skin serum and ReAline is a safe detox formula with methylated B's, l-taurine and dl-methionine (the precursor to glutathione), all available at www.RnAReSet.com
Dr. Dean is the author/coauthor of 33 health books (print and eBooks) and 106 Kindle books including The Magnesium Miracle, Death by Modern Medicine, IBS for Dummies, IBS Cookbook for Dummies, The Yeast Connection and Women's Health, Future Health Now Encyclopedia, Death by Modern Medicine, Everything Alzheimers, and Hormone Balance.
She is on the Medical Advisory Board of the non-profit educational site - Nutritional Magnesium Association (www.nutritionalmagnesium.org).
Dr. Dean has a free online newsletter and a valuable online 2-year wellness program called Completement Now! at www.drcarolyndean.com/fhn. She also runs a busy telephone consulting practice and has a weekly radio show Mondays at 4pm PST on www.achieveradio.com. Find out more at www.drcarolyndean.com, www.drcarolyndeanlive.com, www.RnAReSet.com, and www.howionic.com.
About the Author:
Carolyn Dean MD ND is The Doctor of the Future�. She is a medical doctor and naturopathic doctor in the forefront of the natural medicine revolution since 1979.
She is working on several patents on novel products including the iCell in RnA Drops. Dr. Dean is a leading expert in magnesium and she has created a picometer, stabilized-ionic form of magnesium, called ReMag that's 100% absorbed at the cellular level and non-laxative making it one of the only magnesiums that can be taken in therapeutic amounts with no side effects. ReLyte is her multiple mineral product that is also completely absorbed at the cellular level and contains the 9 minerals necessary for supporting proper thyroid function. RnA Drops help make perfect cells via RNA through Chromosome 14 affecting DNA. ReNew, which is highly concentrated RnA Drops is a powerful skin serum and ReAline is a safe detox formula with methylated B's, l-taurine and dl-methionine (the precursor to glutathione), all available at www.RnAReSet.com
Dr. Dean is the author/coauthor of 33 health books (print and eBooks) and 106 Kindle books including The Magnesium Miracle, Death by Modern Medicine, IBS for Dummies, IBS Cookbook for Dummies, The Yeast Connection and Women's Health, Future Health Now Encyclopedia, Death by Modern Medicine, Everything Alzheimers, and Hormone Balance.
She is on the Medical Advisory Board of the non-profit educational site - Nutritional Magnesium Association (www.nutritionalmagnesium.org).
Dr. Dean has a free online newsletter and a valuable online 2-year wellness program called Completement Now! at www.drcarolyndean.com/fhn. She also runs a busy telephone consulting practice and has a weekly radio show Mondays at 4pm PST on www.achieveradio.com. Find out more at www.drcarolyndean.com, www.drcarolyndeanlive.com, www.RnAReSet.com, and www.howionic.com.
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