Is the US government intentionally supressing a cancer cure?
by Nathan Natas 52 Replies latest jw friends
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bohm
what i feared:
Comment and Opinion
Someone wrote to me recently and, as part of convincing me that I am "full of shit", he mentioned the "72 FDA-approved clinical trials" being conducted by the Burzynski Research Institute into treatment for terminal cancer. The Institute seems to be investigating the same treatment in all 72 trials based on a theory that all cancers are the same thing and all can be treated by the same medications.
The Burzynski trials are often offered by supporters of "alternative medicine" as examples of the imminent acceptance of the theories underlying the trials. That is, the fact that trials are being done is offered as some form of proof that the medical establishment accepts the principles on which the trials are based. This is nonsense. The FDA really doesn't care about clinical trials as long as certain ethical and legal requirements are met - you can't purposely harm people and there has to be a degree of informed consent. Those hated pharmaceutical companies are conducting thousands of clinical trials at any one time, but the proponents of quackery rarely suggest that this confirms the validity of science-based medicine.
A brief examination of the 72 trials suggests that there is really one trial, repeated 71 times for different cancer locations. (I did not say "types of cancer" because it seems to me that Dr Burzynski believes that there is only one form of cancer but it shows up in different places.) The method of creating a new trial is to pull the documentation for one into a word processor and change every occurrence of, e.g., "breast" to "adenoid" or "epiglottis".
I looked at one of these trials in conjunction with somebody who is a specialist in the area. The particular trial was "Patients With Carcinoma Of The Uterine Cervix And/Or Vulva" (see Note 2 below), and the person I spoke to was someone who has been working in the area of the detection of cancer of the cervix for the past 20 years (and had, in that time, never come across the word "antineoplaston"). He is an international speaker on the subject and is in the process of producing a book to be used in the training of laboratory technicians examining pap smears. Some things we observed in this particular trial were:
- Subjects had to be dying of cancer and have abandoned conventional treatment. People that were too sick, however, that is those who may die in the next two months, were not eligible.
- Anybody who got worse rather than getting better on the treatment could be removed from the study thus ensuring that only favourable results were counted. People who do not improve are counted as successes.
- Improvement would be essentially self-reported.
- Bizarrely, in the middle of the document it starts talking about cancer of the ovary (word processor find-and-replace failure?). While the ovaries are located somewhere near the cervix one would hope that a competent medical investigator would be aware that they are different things.
Another peculiar aspect of the Burzynski trials is that people have to pay to be experimental subjects and the amounts of money are not insignificant. I recently heard of a young boy whose parents who were trying to raise $14,000 just to get him into the program and were expected to find $4,000 a month to keep him there and I know of another case where parents were trying to raise $125,000 so that their young daughter with a brain tumour could receive "experimental treatment". (See Note 1 below.) Normally, clinical trials are paid for by the person or organisation producing whatever it is to be tested.
It seems that Dr Burzynski cannot legally offer antineoplastons as a cure (or even a treatment) for cancer, but he can offer them to people as part of clinical trials. After the number of trials that have been conducted, and the number of years that the research has been going on, and the number of dollars that must have been collected over the time, it is surprising that the medical literature is not full of success stories and the intensive care wards empty of cancer patients. Unless antineoplastons don't cure cancer and the continuation of patient-funded clinical trials is just a scam.Dr Burzynski is very welcome to enter the Millenium Project's Cancer 100 Challenge, and nobody would be more pleased than I to see him nominated for a Nobel Prize. Only if he can cure cancer, of course.
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/burzynski.htm -
Mary
Let's see.....how many billions of dollars has the American Cancer Society and the Canadian Cancer Society collected over the last 50 years (supposedly) looking for a cure for cancer? Yet the standard treatment has not changed: chemo and radiation---two drugs which themselves, cause cancer.
The pharmaceutical industry makes a killing from dispensing these two drugs, so I don't imagine they're in any big rush to have something simple cure cancer. The only area where progress has been made is with the diagnosis of the disease. It's being detected much earlier now, so that's probably where the survival rate increase is coming from.
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recovering
I am in the medical proffesion. Trust me if there was a proven cure it would be heralded rather quickly. here is my rational;
1 The greed of big pharm has no bounds, They would stand to make a fortune on a recognized cure. Remember many many of these big pharm companies are located outside the US(where he US government and the FDA have no say)
2 The biggest spender on treatments for cancer (medicaid, medicare) is the US government. It would save them so much money (money that they don't have) That they would be pushing the treatment even if it had a 50% success rate)
Please be careful about supposed cures for cancer. The evedenc they use to support their claims is usually antidotal, and never peer reviewed. I would need to see a peer reviewed scientific study to support any such treatment. Peer reviewed studies are scientific studies where results of treatments must be duplicated in order to be accepted. Do not forget the Laetril hoax in the 70's
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SixofNine
The pharmaceutical industry makes a killing from dispensing these two drugs, so I don't imagine they're in any big rush to have something simple cure cancer.
They've also save a lot of lives with those two therapies. Also, does it not occur to you that there is competition between pharmaceutical companies?
The only area where progress has been made is with the diagnosis of the disease.
This is not true. Why did you say it?
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recovering
exactly SixofNine that was a false statement. I am suffering from cancer myself right now as some of you know and if it was not for the medical advances made in the last 20 years I would have very little chance of surviving.
People suffering from some of the most common forms of cancer are twice as likely to survive for at least 10 years, compared with patients diagnosed in the early 1970s, research showed today.
Breast, bowel and prostate cancer survival rates have shot up, as have those for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and leukaemia. The study, for Cancer Research UK, compared data on 10-year survival rates of patients diagnosed with cancer in 1971-72 with the expected survival rates of those diagnosed in 2007. On average it found that 45.2% of cancer patients are now expected to survive at least 10 years, compared with 23.7% in the 1970s.
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botchtowersociety
Is the US government intentionally supressing a cancer cure?
No it is not. I am a cancer survivor, and was cured by radiation therapy. Is that not a cure? In addition to our current oncology arsenal, I can tell you there are many new therapies in clinical trials, right now, using many different mechanisms of action.
Cancer is not a single disease, it is many different kinds of similar diseases.
Cancer cells evolve rapidly, so they are highly adaptive. This makes a cure difficult. When the mechanism that Darwin discovered is fighting against you, it is a tough place to be.
There is no simple cure.
Let's see.....how many billions of dollars has the American Cancer Society and the Canadian Cancer Society collected over the last 50 years (supposedly) looking for a cure for cancer? Yet the standard treatment has not changed: chemo and radiation---two drugs which themselves, cause cancer.
This is not true. The standard treatment has changed considerably. Today we have marketed monoclonal antibodies, and various kinds of molecular inhibitors. All of these therapeutic techniques are far more targeted than traditional chemo and radiation therapy. Right now there are also immune system therapies like Provenge, and also selective VEGF inhibitors. This is just the beginning of what is coming to market in the next few years, if the FDA doesn't prove to be too great a hindrance.
There are a couple of small companies out there that are taking the antibody therapy concept one step further. They have developed a molecular linker technology where they take an engineered antibody and attach a powerful chemo drug. Unlike traditional chemo compounds, these are highly targeted conjugates. They selectively attach only to molecular receptors that are highly expressed in cancers. Once the antibody attaches to a cancer cell, it is pulled inside. Once inside, the cell's own machinery breaks the link between the antibody and the toxin, The toxin then kills the cancer cell. Traditional chemo can be likened to firing a machine gun into a crowd to kill one bad guy. These new therapies are like having a sniper than can kill the bad guy, while sparing the innocent.
There is a simple sugar compound discovered by a Russian scientist (Order of Lenin winner) that is currently in clinical trials in the US. It makes cancer cells more visible to the immune system, so that it can attack it.
Healthy cells have what is called a "guardian angel gene", that maintains genetic stability and induces cell death in the event of damage to the DNA. Nearly all cancer cells have this mechanism inhibited or shut off. There is a compound entering clinical trials that will restore the activity of this mechanism in cancers, which will reduce the rate of mutation, and also restore the cell's ability to undergo apoptotic death.
There is a novel small molecule VEGF/MET inhibitor being trialed in Canada right now as well. Early results are very promising in late stage patients with solid tumor metastases.
Also, there is now an inexpensive compound on the market that I believe, if used prophylactically, will drastically reduce the rate of incidence of new cancers, while, at the same time, protecting the brain from alzheimers, healing thyroid disease, lowering high levels of CRP along with the attendant cardiovascular benefits, reducing arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's and many other things. It may even restore some cognmitive function in autism. I know it sounds amazing, but it seems to strike at the root of what causes these things when we age: a runaway inflammatory response.
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sir82
Also, does it not occur to you that there is competition between pharmaceutical companies?
Exactly. A "cure for cancer" would produce trillions of dollars of profit for whatever company developed it.
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bohm
i think its strange that everyone question big pharmas economical motives, but clearly this doctor has very heavy economical interest in these trials to, given the patients pay for them.
plus university labs perform research to.
he has a good idea, yes, but i am very far from convinced it work. 20 odd people in a non-double blind study with questionable protecols is NOT convincing.
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botchtowersociety
The greed of big pharm has no bounds
Yet the next generation big cures are not coming from big pharm. They are coming from small biotechnology firms. Big pharm has become bureaucratic and has lost the ability to innovate. Many of the big companies are drastically slashing research and development, as well as outsourcing testing to contract research organizations. Big pharma is facing a patent cliff, where their most profitable compounds will be losing patent protections and will become generic status.
The only way big pharm will survive is by either licensing/co-developing with the small biotechs, or by buying them up outright.