Cancer Research Worthless? (page 4)

WTWizard

I have seen this crap going on since the 1950s. All they have succeeded in doing is improving cancer screening, meaning you are going to be diagnosed sooner and get on chemo sooner. And it does little good, except to make cancer survival look better since you survive longer based on when first diagnosed.

For instance, suppose you get cancer in 2000 and it is the one that will not self-cure. Under older diagnostics, you might be diagnosed in 2014 with 2 years left to live. Despite treatment, you die in 2016 after 2 years. Under newer screenings, you are diagnosed in 2002 and get chemo. The chemo takes out that cancer, and in 2005 or 2006 you get another cancer because your immune system was trashed. The second cancer takes you out in 2008, or 6 years after the initial diagnosis but still some 8 years before you would have died from the first cancer. Have they extended your life by 4 years, or shortened it by 8?

And cancer is hardly the only disease that fake research and charities are common with. Juvenile diabetes is another major one. As long as I remember, there have been fund-raisers to cure this disease. And all they do is support research to tweak treatment so patients think they are getting better treatment. Perhaps better tests for blood sugar, better means of delivering medication. But no cure. If they were to cure diabetes, it would put a terminus in next year's walk and they would get zilch from that point on in fund drives. Besides, those diabetes sneakers and sales drives (which have nothing to do with the main business) would disappear, and businesses would have to actually start using core performance to rank employees instead of how much they support these medical "research(??)" scams.

JeffT

All they have succeeded in doing is improving cancer screening,

Completely false, and absolutely ignorant.

besty

Completely false, and absolutely ignorant.

What did you expect, given the subject of the thread?

The upside is the opportunity for cantleave and others to post something useful.

metatron

And the strawmen keep marching along.....

metatron

Teva won't say why they discontinued making Vermox (mebendazole) in the US, an inexpensive anti-parasite drug.

http://www.rexresearch.com/mebendazole/mebendazole.htm

I wonder why? Especially before any large scale tests on humans with cancer were done?

metatron

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10551319

If you get the full download of the above, you might not want to look at the tumor laden rats on a full stomach.

The effects of Wakame seaweed were so profound, I wonder why this fell into obscurity?

metatron

talesin

I knew a lady with breast cancer who thought like Metatron and Tal.
She's dead of course.

What a moronic comment.

Oh well, I guess you have a problem with reading comprehension - I didn't say chemio, radiation and surgery should NOT be used.

I just said Big Pharma is CORRUPT.

DUH!

JeffT

I'm about to hit the road here's a homework assignment for those who take this article seriously:

Find the 53 articles and a detailed description of what was wrong with them and/or what the attempts to duplicate produced and we can talk.

cognisonance

I'd like to see the original article, I suspect it doesn't say what this article says it says.

I'm about to hit the road here's a homework assignment for those who take this article seriously:

Find the 53 articles and a detailed description of what was wrong with them and/or what the attempts to duplicate produced and we can talk.

Jeff,

Here is the original article published in Nature:

Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research

The problem with finding those 53 articles and especially which ones could not be independently duplicated is made painfully salient by an editorial clarification to that article:

In their Comment article 'Raise standards for preclinical cancer research', C. Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis (Nature483, 531 – 533 ; 2012) refer to scientists at Amgen who were able to reproduce findings in only 11 % of 53 published papers. Several correspondents have asked for details of these studies, which were not provided in the article.
The Amgen scientists approached the papers' original authors to discuss findings and sometimes borrowed materials to repeat the experiments. In some cases, those authors required them to sign an agreement that they would not disclose their findings about specific papers. Begley and Ellis were therefore not free to identify the irreproducible papers — a fact that the Comment should have mentioned.
Nature, like most journals, requires authors of research papers to make their data available on request. In this less formal Comment, we chose not to enforce this requirement so that Begley and Ellis could abide by the legal agreements.
The scientists at Amgen could not have implemented their study had they reserved the right to reveal the outcome for individual papers. The Comment highlights important systemic problems in preclinical cancer research, which we felt appropriate to communicate to our readers, even though the authors could not disclose the studies in question.

soontobe

Find the 53 articles and a detailed description of what was wrong with them and/or what the attempts to duplicate produced and we can talk.

JeffT, not to lend credence to the OP's thesis, but a lot of crap has made it past peer review the past several years.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/Opinion--Scientific-Peer-Review-in-Crisis/

Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research

Yes, that's a good one too.

Cancer Research Worthless?

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