-Caveat Lector- found on the net... Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart Researchers have known for decades that most cancers could be treated simply and effectively-- so why are we hooked on expensive therapies? by Peter Barry Chowka Year after year, public opinion surveys find that Americans fear cancer more than any other illness, a concern that is not unjustified: Cancer is currently the second leading cause of death in the United States and by the end of this decade it is predicted to become the number-one killer. This year, more than one million Americans will learn that they have cancer--and 600,000 of them will die from it. The bottom line is that the cancer death rate in America is rising every year. In May 1997, John Bailar III M.D., made headlines with the publication of his article in the New England Journal of Medicine questioning the impact of conventional cancer treatments. Ten years ago, in an earlier issue of the same publication, Bailar had written, "Some 35 years of intense effort focused largely on improving [cancer] treatment must be judged a qualified failure." Bailar and his co-author, Heather L. Gornick, now write, "with 12 more years of data and experience, we see little reason to change that [earlier] conclusion." Other studies in publications like Scientific American (November 1985) found essentially the same thing. For example, chemotherapy drugs, the leading conventional therapy for cancer, help no more than 5 percent of patients who receive them (while more than 50 percent of cancer patients are treated with them). It is not surprising, then, that people diagnosed with cancer are turning increasingly to alternative therapies. But although alternative cancer therapies have always been popular during this century, they have seldom been without controversy. One has only to recall the high-profile medical, legal, and media skirmishes involving alternative therapies like Hoxsey (1950s), Krebiozen ('60s), laetrile ('70s), Burton's Immunoaugmentive Therapy ('80s), and Burzynski's antineoplastons ('90s) to get a sense of this dynamic. The words "cancer" and "politics" are inextricably intertwined. As Samuel Epstein, M.D., author of The Politics of Cancer (Sierra Club Books, 1978) notes, "The politics of cancer is more complex than the science of cancer." Epstein is referring primarily to cancer causation and the environment. One side of the cancer-politics issue is the fact that economics and politics are at the heart of most cancers. According to WHO, it has been known conclusively for several decades that 80 percent to 90 percent of human cancers are associated with environmental factors including toxins in the air, water and food; carcinogens in the workplace; dietary imbalances; cigarette smoking, and other personal lifestyle choices. But dealing with these causes entails touchy economic--and often political--choices. Bailar notes the dilemma: "If we are to effectively prevent cancer, we will have to change our diets and our smoking habits; we're also going to have to clean up our environment, change industrial processes, and do a number of things that will be difficult, expensive, time-consuming and intrusive." In addition, Bailar adds that "A change [to prevention] at NCI would mean a massive disruption in ideas and momentum in the research community and in the businesses that support that research community." An example of how politics and economics have prevented solutions from being implemented came to my attention in 1977 when the late Dean Burk, Ph.D., a brilliant chemist and a founder of NCI (in 1937), showed me a series of dusty scientific papers stored in his Washington basement. To my surprise, the documentation revealed that in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, the dietary link to cancer was a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. This was surprising news because, in the 1970s, linking the words "diet" and "cancer" invited immediate attack and ridicule by the medical powers-that-be. But experiments with laboratory mice and rats and primitive epidemiological studies early in this century revealed that there was indeed such a thing as an anticancer diet--one low in calories and fat and high in certain micronutrients. (For more information, please see the accompanying two articles on pages 456 and 464.) But according to Burk, these intriguing findings were never implemented. As he explained, after World War II along came chemotherapy [treatment for cancer], a byproduct of the military's poison gas experiments. Suddenly, the expensive, high-tech, career-making chemotherapy drug treatment-approach was fashionable and "hot," while there was little to be gained--economically, professionally or otherwise--by suggesting that people change their diets to prevent cancer. It was not until the late 1970s that scientists and policymakers finally began to open the door a crack to seriously re-examine the diet-cancer link. Meanwhile, more than a generation had passed, during which the diet and cancer connection was ignored, denigrated and covered up. Important progress in the field was delayed, and Americans were denied the benefit of information that might have saved or prolonged millions of lives. During that very time as well (mid-1940s through the 1970s), America witnessed the rise of a "fast food culture" which emphasized and institutionalized the very kinds of dietary imbalances that the ignored scientific studies on diet and cancer had warned against. The "politics of cancer," however, entails much more than cancer's cause and prevention--it also involves cancer therapy. Ultimately, all medical treatment entails economics and politics. The kinds of therapies that we have access to are determined by complex economic and political considerations. The treatment conventional physicians may recommend, especially for a condition as serious as cancer, represents the endpoint of a long, convoluted and conflicted process. The single statistic that most clearly highlights the forces at play is the fact that, as June Goodfield first concluded in her 1975 book The Siege of Cancer (and the statistic holds true today), more people make a living from conventional cancer research and treatment than die from the disease on an annual basis. Also, the average cancer patient spends in excess of $100,000 treating his or her disease conventionally. There is thus a tremendous vested interest in maintaining the medical, scientific--and economic--status quo. In contrast to expensive, invasive, high-tech, conventional cancer treatments stand nontoxic alternatives. These represent an entirely different paradigm or system of healing--one exemplified by turn-of-the-century physician William Osler's comment that "it is more important to know what kind of person has the disease than what kind of disease the person has." This philosophy views cancer as a systemic disease involving the body's entire immune system that is best treated by primary or complementary attention to the body as a whole, and not just to the tumor or outward manifestation of the cancer. Throughout this century, most alternative cancer therapies have become quick and high profile targets of official attack. Still, for every alternative cancer treatment that one hears about (like laetrile, macrobiotic diets, vitamin C, the Kelley therapy, shark cartilage or creative visualization), there may be 10 or 20 equally promising ones in clinical use or being researched and tested (albeit usually quietly and outside of conventional institutions). They range from primary treatments that may be classically traditional or highly innovative to complementary approaches that can be used along with, not directly challenging, conventional methods of treating cancer (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy). Occasionally, aspects of these nontoxic alternatives, such as limited dietary guidelines or stress management, are accepted grudgingly by the mainstream. For decades, momentum has been building to reposition many of the most credible alternative cancer therapies away from the shadowy, underground fringes that they have often inhabited, to their more appropriate places alongside of--or even within--the huge conventional medical establishment. The accumulation of positive clinical data, the impressive quality of innovative research, and, most importantly, the public's increasing utilization of alternative therapies all suggest that this evolution is now inexorable. Moving the process along have been the tireless efforts of people with cancer who have influenced the Congress. For example, in 1986 Congress ordered OTA to undertake an unprecedented four-year study of alternative cancer therapies, published in 1990 as Unconventional Cancer Treatments. It then funded OAM at NIH from 1991 to 1992). But serious obstacles continue to block the integration of alternative cancer therapies into the medical mainstream. A Medical Vietnam The war on cancer was officially declared by the medical establishment and the federal government in 1971, and enthusiastically signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The strategy of the cancer war presents a stark case history of the politics and economics, as well as the failure, of modern medicine. Now in its 26th year, the cancer war has in reality become a "medical Vietnam"--a no-win war-without-end. It is a consistently profitable part of a de facto domestic "permanent war economy"--the medical-industrial complex--the fortunes of which, as in the Vietnam war itself, are tied to the perpetuation of a tragic and largely unnecessary conflict. Since 1971, according to official figures, over $1 trillion has been spent on conventional cancer research and treatment in the U.S. The current cost is at least $110 billion a year--over 10 percent of all U.S. medical expenditures and 2 percent of the entire Gross National Product. Yet despite--or perhaps because of--these unprecedented costs, the cancer establishment remains largely closed to most truly independent, innovative ideas. In the view of journalist Robert Houston, the war on cancer has become a "war on answers." The late Bob DeBragga, a cancer patient who survived a terminal prognosis for more than a decade using alternative therapies and founded Project CURE (a patient advocacy group), blamed "the system that has grown up around medicine" and "the way of doing business that has been established." Patrick McGrady Jr., a science writer and founder of Cancer Help (CANHELP), a clearinghouse for information on cancer treatments, put it this way: "Whoever comes up with a cure for cancer," he told me recently, "will be judged guilty of malpractice--because the definition of 'malpractice' today is 'operating outside the mainstream.' And for sure, whoever cures cancer is going to come from far outside of the mainstream." Supporting McGrady's theory is substantial evidence of an entrenched, reactionary resistance to exploring and integrating independent, innovative ideas that might well offer effective solutions to the cancer problem. This resistance, a kind of "medical McCarthysim" (named after the notorious 1950s Red-baiting U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy), includes the distribution of blacklists, continued official rejection of innovative research proposals, SWAT-team style raids on the offices of alternative cancer specialists, prosecutions of progressive clinicians and researchers, coordinated efforts to lift the licenses of alternative cancer practitioners, and numerous other appalling harassments more typical of a dictatorship than a free society. An ironic victim of this "medical McCarthyism" is Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D., one of the leading contemporary pioneers in the field of nontoxic cancer therapy. After being a target for years, however, Burzynski's recent legal triumph against his accusers may portend a more positive future for him and others in the field. Burzynski was one of the youngest and brightest M.D.-Ph.D.s in his native Poland, which he left in 1970 in search of personal and professional freedom in the West. What he found instead was a situation reminiscent of the authoritarian, one-party, communist state he left behind--an American scientific system run like a Stalinist politburo, where true innovation and independent discovery were frowned on and where pioneering thinkers were relegated to a "medical gulag." In 1977, Burzynski left Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he had been an assistant professor, to start his own small research and treatment facility, the Burzynski Institute. There, he and his colleagues pursued myriad ideas and treated late-stage cancer patients free of bureaucratic rigidity and interference. Burzynski and his associates published numerous scientific papers on antineoplastons--his term for the nontoxic urinary peptides that he discovered and that form the basis of his novel approach to treating cancer. Typical of Burzynski's extraordinary work were the outcomes for early groups of advanced-cancer patients treated with antineoplastons--the results were far superior to anything reported then or now for standard cancer treatments. By choosing to work independently, outside of a mainstream institutional setting, however, Burzynski ran up against the closed minds and vested interests that dominate orthodox cancer research and treatment. In 1983, the influential, private but quasiofficial ACS, without actually testing Burzynski's therapy or even visiting his facility, added Burzynski's antineoplastons to its list of "unproven" or "questionable" methods--a kind of blacklisting that typically represents the first step in official marginalization. On July 17, 1985, with the ACS actively denigrating him, Burzynski's institute in Houston was raided by FDA agents and at least one armed federal marshal. Using a vague warrant that allowed search for unspecified violations, the government raiders seized Burzynski's office file cabinets containing all his scientific, medical, financial and personal records--including the private, confidential medical records of all his patients. The continued difficulty in gaining access to more than 200,000 of his own medical files seriously impaired Burzynski's ability to treat many of his patients during the following decade. It took more than 10 years, and another raid in 1995, before Burzynski was finally indicted by a federal grand jury on three-score felony counts that could have sent him to jail for 300 years. His first trial in the winter of 1997, however, ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, and this past May he was acquitted by another jury after being retried by the government. The government's double failure to convict Burzynski carries hopeful signs of changing times--the public's (in this case, the jury's) skepticism that Burzynski was guilty of criminal acts, and its interest in and willingness to embrace controversial medical alternatives. Numerous public opinion polls consistently find that a majority of Americans, political leanings notwithstanding, support basic medical freedom of choice--and would consider using an unapproved, alternative therapy if they had untreatable cancer. These more progressive public attitudes about alternative cancer treatments--and the billions of dollars Americans are spending on alternative medicine--suggest that one part of the cancer war may be reaching an end. NSN � 1997 by Peter Barry Chowka Peter Barry Chowka is a journalist, medical-political analyst, lecturer and consultant who has documented traditional approaches to healing. Chowka has been a consultant to the U.S. Congress and was appointed to the first advisory panel of the NIH Office of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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