The War on Cancer, New Drugs: Health Blog
Over the last few weeks there have been back-to-back announcements that President Bush's spokesman and the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards are battling recurrences of cancer. It is not my wish to talk about their personal struggles or their personal choices on how they deal with the disease other than to wish the two of them and their families the best of possible outcomes.
That said, I do feel a need to respond to the ever growing number of editorial writers and bloggers who are, based on these stories, calling for a renewed war on cancer so that we can find new drugs and new forms of chemotherapy that rid us of this horrible disease. I have several problems with this.
- First of all, none of the drugs, chemotherapy treatments, radiation, or surgery used actually deal with the cause of the cancer – merely with one place it manifests. Or to put it in terms I’ve used before: “no one gets cancer because they are suffering from a chemotherapy deficiency.” Think about that for a moment. Once you understand the concept, you can no longer express surprise that cancer returns at a later date if you opt for any of these treatments. After all, you never did anything to get rid of the underlying cause. It’s still there, just waiting for another chance to reemerge.
- Chemotherapy drugs are known carcinogens. If you use a chemotherapy drug to get rid of a cancer, why would you be surprised that you might find another cancer down the road?
- Everybody, every single day of their lives, produces cancer cells as part of the normal metabolic process. You can never stop that. By definition, then, a war on cancer is unwinnable. It’s the same thing as declaring war on your own body!
- Does that mean we should give up? Not at all. Cancer is fundamentally a disease of the immune system. A properly functioning immune system can identify each and every one of those aberrant cells and eliminate them from the body – provided the immune system is strong enough and provided we’re not ingesting so many cancer promoting toxins that we overload our immune system’s capacity to handle them.
The future in cancer research lies not in a renewed war, but on working with the body. Immunotherapy treatments that work to enhance the body’s natural defenses and that are now in experimental use are a good start. But why not just enhance what the body does naturally to prevent the cancer from appearing (or returning, as the case my be) in the first place?
Comments
I cannot help but think about the previous war on cancer campaign which spent billions trying to pin the cause of cancer on viruses. It was a resounding failure. Even with all the money spent and the decade or so of research failing to make the correlation that cancer is caused by a virus, now 25 or so years later the HPV vaccine has come out. I believe that the pharmaceutical industry thinks that enough time has passed where the former war on cancer research would no longer be considered valid by the mainstream public. It will take decades to prove the ineffectiveness of the HPV vaccine. This call for a new war on cancer might be a great lobbying ploy by big pharma trying to set the stage for a comeback of the virus = cancer theory in order to reap its benefits. What more proof does one need to indicate that viruses don’t cause cancer other than the billions of dollars wasted over more than a decade not being able to do so?
History will look back at us and wonder how we have allowed the worst era of medicine in the history of the world to occur for the sake of some stock prices.
Will
Thanks to you for your concept "CANCER IS FUNDAMENTALLY A DISEASE OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM" No more no less. Congratulations and thanks a lot for your newsletters.
L.Marino.