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• About the
Author of the Cancer Section .
Mainstream Medicine and
Cancer
============================================
Modern medicine usually treats disease
as if it is the only valid cure possible. Lest we
forget, doctors do not cure disease; drugs and
procedures do not cure disease; nature through the
immune system cures disease. A wise doctor and the
right medicines can help the immune system do its
work. In treating disease, sometimes the symptoms are
treated with little emphasis on prevention or
effecting a thorough cure. Here is some background on
why some people might want to consider alternative
medicine, health foods, and supplements, along with a
healthy lifestyle, to stimulate the immune system to
effect a cure, instead of expecting doctors, drugs,
and procedures to provide it. This is especially true
for cancer.
First, there are many ailments that your
doctor should be your choice to deal with them. For
example, if you have a malignant melanoma, go to your
doctor and have it removed. Don't wait around with
diet or putting ointments on it. But there are many
ailments that are not that simple to deal with.
What follows is some information on
problems of mainstream treatments for cancer, heart
disease, etc., including chemotherapy, drugs, and
other procedures. If you don't need to be convinced
that the war on cancer is not being won with
mainstream medicine, skip all this and go to the
health recommendations given in the Alternative
Medicine webpage.
======================================================
CANCER INCIDENCE -- found on several
websites.
In 1900, cancer was practically unheard
of in this country. By 1950, there were about 150
cases of cancer per 100,000 population.
In 1971, Nixon introduced his War on
Cancer, opening the floodgates of massive research
funding backed by the government. This situation
escalated until by the 1980s, over $50 billion per
year was being spent to “find the cure.” A pittance,
compared to the $300 billion today.
We’re hit with endless media stories
about progress in this war on cancer with new
“breakthrough” drugs and miracle procedures being
right around the corner… And of course the
ever-present ‘new’ experimental drugs offered to
almost every cancer patient. It’s astounding how each
new generation of cancer patients keeps falling for
the same lame rap, year after year. A combination of
fear and ignorance is what keeps this train rolling.
What is the real story behind the story
here?
From the U.S. government’s own
statistical abstracts we find the disconcerting truth.
The simplest thing is to look at actual
deaths from cancer. In epidemiology, deaths from
disease are always measured in deaths per 100,000
population.
So let’s start back in 1950:
Mortality from Cancer in the U.S.
year — deaths/ 100,000
1950 -- 150
1967— 157.2
1970— 162.9
1990— 203.2
Does that sound like progress? Yes,
progress for the disease.
Jumping ahead now to 2000, the overall
rate had climbed to 321 per 100,000
– OECD Health Data 2010
Why does nobody know this? Because they
are forbidden in mainstream media.
Numbers can be twisted and made to do
tricks. This chart is the raw data, not age adjusted
or divided by race, or type of cancer. It will take
you hours to find the simple data by internet
searches, because the uncomfortable truth is
deliberately obscured by overcomplicating it into
dozens of useless categories.
Try finding a medical reference or
journal article or a URL that admits these figures.
Try finding a newspaper or magazine article in the
last 15 years that uses the raw data.
And this data says one thing: more
people are dying of cancer now per capita than ever
before, and nothing is slowing the increase. Not early
detection, not better screenings, not new high tech
machines, not radiation, not surgery, and definitely
not chemotherapy.
All the journal articles will say the
opposite -- that cancer rates are falling. But when
you look closely at the data they cite, it never
stands up to scrutiny, because they twisted the
numbers by selecting only those groups who showed the
assigned outcome.
Unfortunately the general population
continues to have more deaths from cancer, not less.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everyone should know that the 'war on
cancer' is largely a fraud."
Linus Pauling, PhD, Two Time Nobel Prize
Winner
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Chemotherapy - A scientific wasteland
The following extract is taken from Dr
Tim O'Shea at The Doctor Within:
http://www.thedoctorwithin.com/cancer/to-the-cancer-patient/
A German epidemiologist from the
Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, Dr. Ulrich Abel
has done a comprehensive review and analysis of
every major study and clinical trial of chemotherapy
ever done. His conclusions should be read by anyone
who is about to embark on the Chemo Express. To make
sure he had reviewed everything ever published on
chemotherapy, Abel sent letters to over 350 medical
centers around the world asking them to send him
anything they had published on the subject. Abel
researched thousands of articles: it is unlikely
that anyone in the world knows more about
chemotherapy than he.
The analysis took him several years,
but the results are astounding: Abel found that the
overall worldwide success rate of chemotherapy was
“appalling” because there was simply no scientific
evidence available anywhere that chemotherapy can
“extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients
suffering from the most common organic cancers.”
Abel emphasizes that chemotherapy rarely can improve
the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as “a
scientific wasteland” and states that at least 80
percent of chemotherapy administered throughout the
world is worthless, and is akin to the “emperor’s
new clothes” - neither doctor nor patient is willing
to give up on chemotherapy even though there is no
scientific evidence that it works! - Lancet 10 Aug
1991 No mainstream media even mentioned this
comprehensive study: it was totally buried.
"Success of most chemotherapies is
appalling…There is no scientific evidence for its
ability to extend in any appreciable way the lives of
patients suffering from the most common organic
cancer… Chemotherapy for malignancies too advanced for
surgery, which accounts for 80% of all cancers, is a
scientific wasteland" Dr Uhlrich Abel, Stuttgart, 1990
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McGill University study:
“Several full-time scientists at the
McGill Cancer Center sent to 118 doctors, all experts
on lung cancer, a questionnaire to determine the level
of trust they had in the therapies they were applying;
they were asked to imagine that they themselves had
contracted the disease and which of the six current
experimental therapies they would choose. 79 doctors
answered, 64 of them said that they would not consent
to undergo any treatment containing cis-platinum – one
of the common chemotherapy drugs they used – while 58
out of 79 believed that all the experimental therapies
above were not accepted because of the ineffectiveness
and the elevated level of toxicity of chemotherapy.”
(Philip Day, “Cancer: Why we’re still dying to know
the truth”, Credence Publications, 2000)
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Ralph Moss, PhD, former Director of
Information for Sloan Kettering Cancer Research
Center:
Question: "How in the world, Dr Moss,
can [chemotherapy] be considered a standard cure, when
it works for 2-4 [percent of cancer patients], and
very specific ones?
Answer: We are dealing with an industry.
It is not supported by the facts. The way that it is
done is this. The drugs are tested in test tubes, and
they look for things that will kill cells. After you
have found something that kills cells, cancer cells,
cell lines which are very abnormal non-typical sort of
growths, maybe a new life form almost, then you put it
into animals. Then if it kills the cancers before it
kills the animals, and shrinks the tumours, you
consider you have an active agent. You then put it
into people, and go through the 3 phases the FDA
prescribes for this, and basically if you can shrink
the tumour 50% or more for 28 days you have got the
FDA's definition of an active drug. That is called a
response rate, so you have a response.. Quite a bit
[different from a cure] because when you look to see
if there is any life prolongation from taking this
treatment what you find is all kinds of hocus pocus
and song and dance about the disease free survival,
and this and that. In the end there is no proof that
chemotherapy in the vast majority of cases actually
extends life, and this is the GREAT LIE about
chemotherapy, that somehow there is a correlation
between shrinking a tumour and extending the life of
the patient. [Or that there is a correlation between
looking at a cancer cell in a test tube and the tumour
in someone's body.] What happens as you grow those
cells in cell lines they become very weird. Hundreds
and hundreds of generations later they don't even look
like even normal human cancer cells. They are things
that grow under glass, immortal cells, unlike ...
normal cancer cells. So much cancer research is very
questionable because it is based on this cell line
research.
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In April 2002, Jon Barron, an
alternative health adviser, gave a talk on cancer that
many people in the health industry are now calling the
"definitive explanation of the disease" in the world
today.
Cancer, The Big Lie -- 1:03 hour
http://www.jonbarron.org/alternative-cancer/natural-health-newsletter-disease-prevention
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More recently, from the chief medical
officer of the American Cancer Society, we have this
perspective:
------------------------
Cancer Doc Brawley, Chief Medical
Officer for the American Cancer Society, Says the
U.S. Health Care System Is Sick
Journalists make for a pretty tough
crowd.
But Dr. Otis Brawley fired up hundreds
of them at the annual meeting of Association of
Health Care Journalists over the weekend with a
no-holds-barred critique of the U.S. health system.
Brawley has a book out, How We Do
Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in
America, that makes his case in full. But in
a sometimes dizzying speech in Atlanta, Brawley
ripped the health establishment from top to bottom.
It was bracing stuff.
The group has just posted this video
about the event.
Otis Brawley, M.D., chief medical and
scientific officer, American Cancer Society, was the
keynote speaker at the annual conference of the
Association of Health Care Journalists. -- 56
minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ho_LMBiHVg&feature=player_embedded
To quickly summarize: To avoid cancer
(and heart disease and diabetes), diet and exercise
will prevent a high percentage. But it would break the
moneymaking machine of the healthcare industry, so
doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health
insurance companies, and even ignorant patients
conspire to give expensive, unneeded, and sometimes
unproven therapies rather than recommend lifestyle
changes especially in diet and exercise. It will
eventually break the economy of the US which will
collapse within 10 to 15 years.
-----------------------------------------
To investigate this with the latest data
estimates for 2012, call on the CIA. They report that
Monaco is ranked number 1 with a life expectancy of
almost 90 years. Japan is ranked number 3 at almost 84
years. Is the US number 2, or a little lower, say 5? .
. . Or how about number 50 following Portugal?
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html
Are we improving for the next
generation? How does the infant mortality rate compare
with that of other countries? Japan is number 2. And
we are 13 countries below Portugal (and 10 below Cuba)
at 49.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate
And obesity is rapidly getting worse.
================================================
Does alternative medicine make money
from various pills and supplements, and sometimes
sells snake oil? Of course it does. Does the medical
profession always have a higher standard of integrity
about this?
Doctor are often more concerned with
power and control. Pharmaceutical companies, our LDDs
(legal drug dealers), are a good example of monopoly
capitalists who try to eliminate competition,
influence government (consider how the Bush
Administration FDA ignored warnings about Vioxx), and
maximize profits.
Vioxx was finally recalled in September
of 2004. Whistleblower Dr. David Graham, in testimony
before the US Senate, estimated 88,000 to 139,000
Americans experienced heart attacks as a side effect
from the drug, and 30 to 40 percent of these died.
That would be an estimated 27,000 to 55,000
preventable deaths attributed to Vioxx. Vioxx at its
peak was being taken by 20 million Americans. In 2003
sales of Vioxx totaled about $2.5 billion.
I see that my locally advanced BCC
(basal cell carcinoma) now has a new drug for it.
Commentary in the NY Times said the FDA was pressured
to approve the new drug.
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/f-d-a-approves-drug-for-an-advanced-skin-cancer/
The one trial showed that people with
two variations, metastasized or locally advanced
forms, who took the drug got 30% and 43% benefits of
reduction of tumor size, and perhaps even elimination
of the tumor for a few in the second category. That
means 70% and 57% got nothing but possible side
effects. Take a pill a day for 10 months and pay
$75,000. If one spends 1% of that amount ($750) on
health food supplements and gets some benefits, even
if only the placebo effect, maybe one will do just as
well without the side-effects. Perhaps that is why
they didn't have a control group in this trial of just
96 patients. The American Cancer Society reports:
"Even though placebos are not active medicines, they
seem to have an effect in about 1 out of 3 patients."
That would be true whether the medicine was
Alternative or Mainstream. In other words, the
metastasized BCC group who got 30% benefits got less
than 33% expected from placebos. Perhaps it was from
the drug's side effects. Yet, perhaps it was a
"bargain."
Even doctors are now are now protesting to Big Pharma
about high costs of cancer drugs. Here is an
example published in Blood, the journal of the
American Society of Hematology, and reported in Yahoo
Health news:
With some new, potentially lifesaving cancer drugs
costing up to $138,000 a year, about 120 leading
cancer specialists have joined forces in an unusual
protest aimed at getting pharmaceutical companies to
cut prices.
Charging high prices for drugs cancer patients need to
survive is like “profiteering” from a natural disaster
by jacking up prices for food and other necessities,
leading cancer doctors and researchers from around the
world contend in a new paper published in Blood, the
journal of the American Society of Hematology.
Of 12 new cancer drugs that received FDA approval last
year, 11 of them cost in excess of $100,000 a
year—prices that the specialists attack as
“astronomical,” “unsustainable,” and maybe even
immoral. What’s more, only three of these drugs were
found to improve patient survival rates and of these,
two only increased it by less than two months,
according to the Washington Post.
“Advocating for lower drug prices is a necessity to
save the lives of patients,” say the specialists who
wrote the paper, who specialize in chronic myelogenous
leukemia (CML), but emphasize that sky-high drug costs
affect patients with many types of cancer.
Cancer Doctors Protest 'Astronomical' Drug Costs
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/cancer-doctors-protest-astronomical-drug-costs
Here is an article by Jon Barron.
Medicine is Less Scientific than You
Think
http://www.jonbarron.org/baseline-health-program/2009-08-17.php
He points out that close to $1.5
trillion dollars is spent every ten years on
treatments that are out-and-out discredited, highly
questionable, marginal, or in some cases, downright
dangerous. And we've only touched the tip of the
iceberg.
Considering mortality rates from various
causes in the US, we now find iatrogenic disease comes
in third after heart disease and cancer.
Definition of iatrogenesis: inadvertent and
preventable induction of disease or complications by
the medical treatment or procedures of a physician or
surgeon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis
We learn about heart disease and cancer
from the medical establishment in the media, but what
about iatrogenesis? An analysis in JAMA (Lazarou, J.,
et al., 1998) indicates that deaths from drug
reactions, patients given wrong drugs, drugs at the
wrong dosage, or in the wrong combination, or deaths
mistakenly (or deliberately) attributed to other
causes; and combine that with deaths from
misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment, secondary
infections in hospitals, and physician error, and now
in the past 15 years this rate has been accelerating,
then arguably we may conclude that iatrogenesis has
surpassed both cancer and heart disease as the leading
cause of death in the US. Is this merely acceptable
collateral damage in the war on disease?
It has been shown that the explosion of
antidepressants has been influenced by marketing
strategies. Sales representatives would point out to
doctors (whom they give lots of samples and other
favors) how certain symptoms in some patients could be
indicative of depression and imply that it would be
negligent for a doctor not to prescribe
antidepressants. That is compounded by the ads these
companies run in the media trying to get people to
pressure their doctors to try these drugs. These
combined pressures work and the LDDs sell lots of
dope, needed or not. If that makes you a little
depressed, the LDDs would probably say that proves
their point -- you need their product.
A recent article found in Google News
indicates a similar thing has happened with
anti-psychotic drugs.
How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on
anti-psychotic drugs.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html
Within this article is this video that
includes two Harvard medical researchers who try to
justify their drug company profits:
People and Power: Drug Money -- 24
minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwdsYVHjGA
They are just two of many doctors who
get kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industries to
push their products.
Of course, it's not limited to LDDs. The
medical establishment is a big cash cow in the US.
Prevention of disease would counter the need for
various expensive operations, medicines, and
treatments. And that would reduce profits to the
providers.
Consider Bill Clinton who underwent
quadruple bypass surgery in 2004 and in 2010 needed
another heart procedure: an angioplasty of two stents
to open one of the veins from his bypass surgery.
These procedures do not cure anything. They are
stop-gap procedures that get rid of symptoms -- for a
while.
He met Dr. Dean Ornish who helped him go
onto a healthy diet. President Clinton now considers
himself a vegan. He's dropped 24 pounds, and he says
he's healthier than ever.
But some hospitals make hundreds of
millions of dollars a year providing bypass and
angioplasty surgeries. They are not going to give up
all this profit by focusing on healthy diets and
exercise to prevent heart disease, and thus eliminate
the need for these procedures.
I pointed out to my eye surgeon how the
beef and dairy industries greatly influence the
running of the single nutrition course that is typical
of most medical schools. He responded that he didn't
even receive that much schooling on nutrition. Yet it
is often MD's who report nutritional studies in the
mainstream press -- usually as naysayers.
We are dying of diseases of affluence
that could be greatly reduced by better diet, more
exercise, stress reduction, occasional supplements,
and certain alternative therapies. But financial
interests and ill-informed doctors often don't promote
prevention.
But there is hope since some doctors are becoming
aware of the need to prevent disease, not just
treat it after it occurs. In New Zealand is a TV
program that comes on every Wednesday night on the
main news program station: Is Modern Medicine
Killing You?
It is excellent. It showed how a doctor should
be a health coach. The doctor ran various tests
on her patient. The patient, perhaps about age
40, had reactions to certain medicines that the doctor
took her off. Blood tests showed the patient
lacked certain nutrients. The doctor had her
take supplements. The doctor found that the
patient was eating too much sugar and junk food, and
not exercising. The doctor suggested dietary
changes and a weekly exercise routine.
I did a search and came up with the website to watch
episodes of Is Modern Medicine Killing You?
http://tvnz.co.nz/is-modern-medicine-killing-you/index-group-5066734
But it seems this program is not available in the
US. It would probably be too controversial for
Mainstream Medicine here to accept at this time.
It is not easy to say when to follow mainstream
medicine and when to try alternatives, as this doctor
admits in this article.
Patient Angst: When You Just Have To Say
‘No’ To The Doctor
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2012/08/patient-angst-when-you-just-have-to-say-no-to-the-doctor
For more on alternative medicine please
see
Alternative
Medicine for Cancer and Other Diseases
----------------------------------------
Postscript:
There is a potential, sad irony to the
medical establishment's reaction against supplements
and herbal remedies. It involves the money trail. If
the world economy declines into a state where many
people can no longer afford medical insurance, and
governments cannot adequately provide it, people will
seek out alternative medicine as an affordable
alternative. As people flock toward alternative
supplements and herbs, the medical establishment will
step in to take legal and economic control. Doctors
will want to require prescriptions for these
"medicinal supplements" and Big Pharma will want to
manufacture them for big profits. (This is already
happening in Europe.) And perhaps even the "medicinal"
dandelions growing in your backyard will become
legally controlled, somewhat like growing marijuana
and psilocybin mushrooms.
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