The Cancer Establishment, The Cancer Industry, Cancer, Inc.

from http://themsmfoundation.org/index.htm (and thanks to Hveragerthi for pointing this article out)

The Cancer Establishment, The Cancer Industry, Cancer, Inc.

An important goal of this foundation is to illuminate the dark fact that most of what you have heard over your lifetime about cancer treatments is not the truth. At the very least, you have received an incomplete picture. If you believe the propaganda you have been fed and you develop cancer, it can cost you your life. Those of you old enough to remember and those who have heard of the pre-world war two years and the Nazi Propaganda Campaign will remember their famous saying: "Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it", Adolph Hitler. In the United States, economic interests masquerade as therapeutic regimens and scientific concern. Their goal is to own and completely control a disease-cancer-as if it were a commodity, and to quash competition (meaning alternative approaches) , so as to maintain a marketplace monopoly. 

Money leads politics by the nose. The financial interests of drug companies, conventional cancer doctors, hospitals, HMOs, and others in what is known as the Cancer Establishment, have eclipsed the integrity of the Hippocratic Oath, money and politics have proclaimed conventional approaches as scientifically validated and therefore mandated by law. The terrible flaw in this convenient financial setup is that the profits that flow to the cancer establishment are derived from human lives lost to cancer because successful alternative approaches are outlawed or unreported.

To the cancer establishment, a cancer patient is a profit center. The actual clinical and scientific evidence does not support the claims of the cancer industry. Conventional cancer treatments are in place as the law of the land because they pay, not because they heal the best. Decades of the politics-of-cancer-as-usual have kept you from knowing this and will continue to do so unless you wake up to their reality.

Many different promising approaches to curing cancer now exist, urgently in need of further research to bring out their full potential. Yet many of these approaches and their practitioners have been persecuted, harassed, straitjacketed, or driven out of the country by a medical establishment that puts profit before people and cares mainly about preserving its business monopoly. Dr. Robert C. Atkins, well-known nutrition author and an advocate of complementary medicine, puts the matter succinctly when he says, "There have been many cancer cures, and all have been ruthlessly and systematically suppressed with a Gestapo-like thoroughness by the cancer establishment. The cancer establishment is the not-too-shadowy association of the American Cancer Society (ACS), the leading cancer hospitals, the National Cancer Institute, and the FDA." He adds," The shadowy part is the fact that these respected institutions are very much dominated by members and friends of members of the pharmaceutical industry, which profits so incredibly much from our profession-wide obsession with chemotherapy". A lot of people simply can’t believe that the deliberate suppression of lifesaving, valid therapies-especially cancer therapies-is possible in modern America. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong.

The cancer establishment has a fifty-year history of corruption, incompetence, and deliberate suppression of cancer therapies that actually work. This includes the rigging of clinical trials at major institutions in order to discredit nontoxic, natural therapies (as Barry Lynes has documented in his invaluable book The Healing Of Cancer). Even distinguished medical doctors who " play by the rules " of modern science-publishing their results and making their alternative methods available for inspection-are condemned by the cancer establishment because these methods, if widely adopted would directly compete with the money-intensive modalities of toxic chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, invasive treatments that often do more harm than good.

Today, treating cancer is a megabillion –dollar industry. Every thirty seconds, another American is diagnosed with the disease. Half a million Americans die of cancer annually, yet there are even more people making a living off cancer than there are people dying of it-and many of them are making a very good living indeed. Just getting a new anticancer drug approved takes ten to twelve years and $l20 million. This process in itself excludes many promising alternatives from ever being tested. Cancer patients typically spend $30,000 to $50,000 on toxic, often devastating therapy and get very little for their money. Cancer is the single most lucrative segment of the medical industry, which eats up a fat chunk of the Gross National Product. 

Given the high stakes, what are the chances the medical-pharmaceutical complex would welcome an innovative outsider who came up with a safe, nontoxic, inexpensive cancer cure-a diet, an herbal compound, a bioelectric energy, or a naturally occurring bodily chemical? Practically nil. As Barry Lynes bluntly states, " The American Cancer Society is not interested in a cure, it would go out of business." 

Unlike so many other countries, the United States supports only one kind of medicine. Because of this, Americans have been denied many vital aspects of the science and art of healing. "Your family doctor is no longer free to choose the treatment he or she feels is best for you, but must follow the dictates established by physicians whose motives and alliances are such that their decisions may not be in your best interests," says Alan Levin, M.D. Patients most fundamental right-medical freedom of choice-has been lost in this country. The medical monopoly’s right to make money comes before your right to decide-in consultation with your doctor-which cancer therapy would be best for your particular condition. The dilemma faced by the cancer patient is movingly illustrated by the following letter. The author is a psychologist.

My wife was diagnosed as having terminal ovarian cancer five years ago. She is alive, well, and healthy because of non-approved and unconventional cancer treatment. I am writing this as a letter of protest and in an attempt to educate you and possibly save your life or that of your wife or child. I am not a crazy fanatic, but I am a 48 year-old man who, five years ago, had to decide what to do in order to try and save my wife’s life. We investigated and researched our options and made an informed and intelligent decision to seek something other than what was offered by traditional medicine in this country.

I am angry, frustrated, and mad as hell that I have had to take my wife out of this country, had to struggle with my health insurance company because her treatment was "not approved", and had to struggle to obtain her medications because they are not "not approved" and subject to confiscation. It has been a battle to provide her with alternative cancer treatment. I now know there is a financial war going on, and the victims are the millions of people who have been denied alternative cancer treatments because the AMA or FDA or someone has decided that we can only undergo an approved treatment….There are no rights to life or liberty in this country when it comes to freedom of choice in medicine. There is only coercion and subversion and greed-and people dying. We are the financial prisoners of the AMA and FDA, and they are killing us in the name of approved treatment. My wife was almost a victim; and if you allow this to continue, then one day you will become a victim, too. Please help to do something to bring truth, sanity, and morality back to health care in America.

Only the rich or the well-off middle class person can take advantage of many of the effective alternative cancer therapies by going out of the country-or else by seeking an American alternative practitioner, who is not likely to be covered by medical insurance. This is highly undemocratic and unfair. " Nothing could be more obscene than the spectacle of dying Americans denied freedom of choice in therapy having to go underground, go abroad, or do without," says Michael Culbert of the Committee For Freedom Of Choice In Medicine. The vicious system, which on the one hand says, We cannot cure you,’ and on the other, ‘But don’t try some unproven remedy,’ must come to an end. It is blatantly immoral.

What Americans call alternative medicine is simply part of the legal medical system in many European countries. For instance, in England, Germany, and Switzerland-countries with high quality medical care-doctors and therapists who use non-drug approaches to healing are practicing freely in lively competition with conventional doctors. "To deny someone freedom to seek a therapy which they believe would save their life is a denial of every moral principle," declares Frank Wiewel of People Against Cancer, based in Otho, Iowa. He adds," The United States government, in suppressing alternative cancer therapies, is in direct violation of the international Helsinki Accords to which this country is signatory." The 1964 Helsinki Declaration, approved by the United States Congress, stipulates that" the doctor must be free to use a new therapeutic measure, if in his judgment it offers hope of saving life, reestablishing health or alleviating suffering."

Chemotherapy at most prevents "perhaps 2 or 3 percent" of the nearly half-a-million cancer deaths per year, as Dr. John Cairns of the Harvard School of Public Health documented in an issue of Scientific American. If this fact were widely publicized, the cancer treatment centers, commonly know as "Chemo Mills", would close down tomorrow and the public would loudly demand both the freedom to use alternative therapies as well as massive funding to research nontoxic approaches. Prominent American cancer specialist Albert Braverman , M.D., called for " scaling back the whole chemotherapeutic enterprise." In the April 13,1991 issue of The Lancet, he says,"Chemotherapy should be prescribed only when there is a reasonable prospect either of cure or of benefit in quantity and quality of life. Our oncology trainees should be taught that chemotherapy is not part of the management of every cancer patient; for many or most patients, medical intervention should be confined to symptom management and enrolment in a hospice programme."

Chemotherapy is incapable of extending in any appreciable way the lives of patients afflicted with the most common cancers-and even the palliative effect of these toxic drugs, which supposedly improve the quality of life, " rests on scientifically shaky ground." That was the conclusion of West German cancer biostatistician Ulrich Abel, Ph.D, in the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on cancer chemotherapy. In his 1990 book, Dr. Abel wrote." There is no evidence for the vast majority of cancers that treatment with these drugs exerts any positive influence on survival or quality of life in patients with advanced disease." The advanced cancers to which Dr. Abel is referring are those malignancies responsible for over 80 percent of the cancer deaths in the Western industrial countries." Among others, they include nearly all malignant tumors of trachea, bronchus, lung, stomach, colon, rectum, esophagus, breast, bladder, pancreas, ovary, cervix and corpus uteri, head and neck, and liver….Tumors are called advances if they are recurrent, disseminated, or not radically resectable." Unfortunately, things have not changed much since this study thirteen years ago.

Chemotherapy does shrink tumors, at least initially, in many patients. Unfortunately, this partial or complete "reduction of tumor mass does not prolong expected survival," Dr. Abel found, because the cancer usually returns, often more aggressively than before. Only in small-cell lung cancer is there any "good direct evidence of a survival improvement by chemotherapy" a whopping three months! Otherwise, for the common killer cancers, chemotherapy remains a blind alley. Dr. Abel polled hundreds of cancer doctors while investigating the world medical literature to produce his study. Indeed, he learned that many oncologists would not take chemotherapy themselves if they had cancer. Der Spiegel, gave Dr. Abel’s important research extensive, mostly favorable coverage. But it was almost completely suppressed in the United States, where the media, manipulated by vested interests, maintains a virtual blackout about the true nature of the abortive "war on cancer." Calling chemotherapy "another unproven cancer remedy," Alan Gaby, M.D., medical editor of the Townsend Letters For Doctors, writes, Until cancer researchers start answering the important questions, we should all refuse to contribute to the American Cancer Society and other bastions of misinformation. And don’t forget to explain to the little old lady standing out in the cold in front of the drugstore collecting money for cancer research, exactly why you refuse to contribute.

The American Cancer Society lobbies vigorously to suppress new ideas and promising new approaches to treating cancer. It instigates government persecution and harassment of independent researchers and imposes its narrow views on government-funded research, all the while soaking the public for money through its deceptive public relations image as the nation’s vanguard cancer fighter. Founded on May 22nd 19l3 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his business associates at the Harvard Club in New York City, the American Cancer Society (ACS) collects around $400 million a year from the unenlightened American public, then spends less than 30 percent of this huge cash hoard on research. No major breakthrough in treating cancer has ever resulted from an ACS grant. In 1988, the ACS spent a mere 26 percent of its $336 million income on research. Most of its money goes into fat salaries and other non-research expenses-land, buildings, and bank accounts (its "fund balance" in 1988 was $426 million). Later on in this website more recent figures will be available. The ACS’s "failure to dedicate the major portion of (its) income" to research " borders on dishonesty. It also fits perfectly with the highly politicized agendas of today’s health charities"," writes Dr. James Bennett, an economist at George Mason University, in his expose' on health charities that rip off gullible Americans.

"In other words", concludes journalist Peter Barry Chowka in a 1978 probe, ACS is hoarding and investing for profit many millions of dollars contributed by the public to fight cancer, while the Society claims that vital research is going begging for funds. Most people, notes Barry Lynes, are surprised to learn that "the ACS does not meet the standards of the National Information Bureau, the charity watchdog. How could they? Most of their money goes into salaries, public relations campaigns, publications which attack legitimate if unorthodox therapies, and lobbying federal officials in Washington. The ACS has abandoned its long-standing prohibition against accepting taxpayer support. By campaigning to raise state cigarette taxes and lobbying to earmark the new revenues itself, it has found a way to revive its sagging financial fortunes. By accepting tax money, the ACS, is undermining the rationale for its own existence-indeed, the rationale for all charities; they do what neither the government nor the profit-making sector can or will do."

Two-time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling summed up the situation well when he said, "Everyone should know that the ‘ war on cancer ‘ is largely a fraud, and that the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are derelict in their duties to the people who support them". According to Barry Lynes, "At a minimum, the American Cancer Society…should be investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for fraud, false advertising, conspiracy and a variety of other anti-trust, monopolistic crimes". Furthermore the ACS’s Unproven Methods list is a self-serving blacklist. This unscientific compendium is used to smear effective or promising alternative cancer therapies as " quackery". How ironic that a vice president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center admitted to Dr. Ralph Moss, author of the "Cancer Industry", that the blacklist was " where they got all their best ideas ".