The Cancer Racket
by Gavin Phillips
(Originally published in the February/March issue of “Clamor” magazine under the title “Can You Trust Your Doctor?”)
“Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud…” – Linus Pauling Ph.D. (1901-1994) Two times Nobel Prize winner.
By the time that you have finished reading this article, eleven Americans will have died from cancer. This year, about 1.2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and some 560,000 will die from it. The rates have doubled in less than forty years. In 1971 President Nixon declared the famous “war on cancer”. Thirty years and some thirty billion research dollars later we are still being prescribed the same three failing treatments; surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Why?
Three Case Studies
My answer begins with a synopsis of three alternative treatments that have been suppressed for decades by orthodox medicine. First, I must stress that none of these treatments is a guaranteed cancer cure. Some work better with one person than another, depending on the type of cancer. A vitally important role is one of a strict nutritional diet.
Royal Raymond Rife
The first story is about the Rife radio frequency machine. Royal Raymond Rife was born 1888, in
It took Rife about twelve years, between 1920-1932, to isolate the cancer microbe. He named it the BX virus. Rife began subjecting the cancer microbe to different radio frequencies to see if it was affected by them. After experimenting for thousands of hours, Rife discovered what he called the “Mortal Oscillatory Rate” of the cancer microbe. Simply, the exact frequency that killed it. Rife successfully cured cancer in over 400 experimental animals before testing was ready for humans.
Dr. Millbank Johnson, a close friend of Rife’s, setup the Special Medical Research Committee to witness what transpired at this first clinic. In the summer of 1934, sixteen terminally ill cancer patients were given three minutes of the frequency every day. They soon learned that this was too much because the human body needed more time to dispose of the dead toxins. They were given three minutes every third day. Fourteen of the supposedly terminally ill patients were clear of cancer and healthy when the clinic closed after three months. The other two patients were pronounced cured one month after the clinic closed. There were very minimal, if any, short term side effects.
Rife wrote in 1953; “16 cases were treated at the clinic for many types of malignancy. After 3 months, 14 of these so-called hopeless cases were signed off as clinically cured by the staff of five medical doctors and Dr. Alvin G. Foord, M.D. Pathologist for the group.”
In 1937 Rife and some colleagues established a company called Beam Ray. They manufactured fourteen Frequency Instruments. Dr. James Couche, who was present at the clinic, used one of Rife’s machines with great success for 22 years. The most powerful man in medicine at this time was Dr. Morris Fishbein. He was chief editor of the American Medical Associations (AMA) Journal. Fishbein had failed anatomy and never treated a patient in his life. His only motivation was money and power. He decided which drugs were to be sold to the public based solely on the drug manufacturers willingness to pay the advertising rates that he set. Fishbein heard about Rife’s frequency machine and wanted to buy a share. The offer was refused. He then offered Phil Hoyland, an investor, legal assistance to enable him to steal the company from Rife and the other investors. A lawsuit ensued.
The trial of 1939 put an end to any proper scientific investigation of the Frequency Instrument. The trial was the undoing of Rife. Not used to being savagely attacked in open court he crumbled under the pressure. Although he won the case, he turned to alcohol and became an alcoholic. Fishbein used his pervasive power within the AMA to thwart further investigation of Rife’s work. Dr. Millbank Johnson died in 1944. In 1950 Rife joined up with John Crane who was an electrical engineer. They worked together for ten years building more advanced frequency machines. But in 1960 the AMA closed them down. Crane was imprisoned for three years and a month, even though fourteen patients testified as to the effectiveness of the machine. Rife died in 1971.
Amygdalin/Laetrile
In 1952 Dr. Ernst Krebs from
The best way for Krebs to prove his theory would be to have thousands of people eat a diet very high in amygdalin and monitor them. An enormously costly exercise to say the least. Fortunately for Krebs, the experiment had already been carried out. Nestled between W. Pakistan,
Only in recent years have the first few Hunza cancer cases been reported. That is due to a narrow road being carved in the mountain and food from the “civilized” world is reaching Hunza. In the 1970s the FDA mounted a widespread and erroneous media campaign alleging that amygdalin is toxic and dangerous because it contains cyanide. Yes, it does, in minute quantities. If you eat the seeds from a hundred apples in a day you risk serious side effects, possibly death. If you eat enormous amounts of anything you run serious health risks. Aspirin is twenty times more toxic than the same amount of amygdalin.
Orthodox medicine says that Laetrile (a purified form of amygdalin developed by Dr. Krebs) was thoroughly tested and found to be worthless. The longest and most famous Laetrile tests ever performed were run for nearly five years at
“…Laetrile was found to possess neither preventative, nor tumor-regressent, nor anti-metastatic, nor curative anticancer activity.”
So that is it then, right? It does not get more adamant than that, we can close the book on Laetrile. Unfortunately for the officials at Sloan-Kettering there was an unforeseen problem. When a journalist asked Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura; “Do you stick by your belief that Laetrile stops the spread of cancer”? He replied, “I stick.” Those two words were a major embarrassment to the accumulated demigods on the dais. The reason being is that Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura was the preeminent cancer researcher in
“Why are they so much against it”? Sugiura answered “I don’t know. Maybe the medical profession doesn’t like it because they are making too much money.”
Sugiura had to be proven wrong. But other researchers had obtained essentially the same positive results. Dr. Lloyd Schloen a biochemist at Sloan-Kettering had included proteolytic enzymes to his injections and reported 100% cure rate among his albino mice. This data had to be buried. They then changed the protocols of the tests and amounts of Laetrile to make certain that they failed. Not surprisingly, they failed, and that is what they reported.
Sloan-Kettering’s motives were clearly revealed in the minutes of a meeting that top officials held on July 2, 1974. The discussions were private and candid. The fact that numerous Sloan-Kettering officials were convinced of the effectiveness of amygdalin is obvious, they just were not sure as to the degree of its effectiveness. But they were not interested in further testing of this natural product. The minutes read; “…Sloan-Kettering is not enthusiastic about studying amygdalin [Laetrile] but would like to study CN (cyanide)-releasing drugs.”
Sloan-Kettering wanted a man-made patentable chemical to mimic the qualities found in amygdalin, because that is where the money is. If a very effective cancer treatment or cure was found in the lowly apricot seed, it would spell economic disaster for the cancer industry.
The Hoxsey Remedies
Harry Hoxsey, born 1901, was an ex-coalminer with an 8th grade education. From the 1920s to the 1950s Harry Hoxsey and his natural remedies would wage the fiercest battle with conventional medicine this country has ever seen. The remedies were handed down by Harry’s great grandfather, John Hoxsey. John, a veterinarian, had observed a horse he owned heal itself of cancer by eating certain herbs in his pasture. John used the herbs to heal other animals of cancer.
Over the years other natural products were added and the remedy was tried on humans. The Hoxsey treatment comprised of two components. A herbal tonic which cleansed the body and boosted the immune system and an external paste for tumors outside the body. Harry opened his first clinic in
Dallas District Attorney, Al Templeton, detested Hoxsey and arrested him an unprecedented one hundred times in two years. Hoxsey would bail himself out within a day or two because Templeton could never persuade any of Harry’s patients to testify against him. Templeton vowed to put Hoxsey away for good, until his own brother secretly used the Hoxsey therapy. His cancer disappeared and Templeton gave Hoxsey the credit. In a startling about face, Al Templeton became Hoxsey’s lawyer and one of his greatest advocates. In 1939, Esquire magazine writer James Wakefield Burke was asked to write a piece on Hoxsey and expose him as a quack. James recalls; “I came to
James wrote an article entitled, “The Quack That Cured Cancer,” but Esquire did not publish it. The late Mildred Nelson treated people with the Hoxsey method for some fifty years, but initially she also thought Hoxsey was a fraud. Mildred’s mother, Della, had contracted uterine cancer and orthodox medicine had given up on her. Mildred’s mother and father wanted to try the Hoxsey treatment. Mildred recalls trying to talk them out of it;
“…I thought well, I’ll talk mum out of it you know…they didn’t budge. So I thought, well, I’ll go down there and see what’s going on, then I can get them out of it.”
“I called Harry and asked him if he still needed a nurse, “I sure do, be here in the morning.” …By the end of a year I began to realize, gee this does help, mum had gotten better and to this day is alive and sassy as can be.”
Mildred Nelson and James Burke had done something the National Cancer Institute has never done; investigate Hoxsey and his treatments first hand. They found him to be a caring and effective healer who was not profiting from cancer patients. Harry had swore on his fathers death bed that everyone would have access to the remedy, regardless of their ability to pay. As Harry said; “I don’t have to do this kind of work, I’ve got more oil wells than a lot of men call themselves big producers…Any man that would traffic on sick, dying, limp the lame or the blind caused from cancer is the worst scoundrel on earth.”
Still, the Hoxsey treatment does not work for everybody. Ironically, Hoxsey himself contracted prostate cancer, but had to resort to surgery when his remedies did not work for him. It was not long before the infamous Morris Fishbein of the AMA heard about the Hoxsey treatment and wanted to buy sole rights to it, with some other AMA doctors. Hoxsey would only agree if it stated in the contract that everyone would have access to the treatments, not just a wealthy few. Fishbein refused and so began a 25-year battle, fought in the media, between Fishbein and Hoxsey.
The mudslinging culminated in a lawsuit brought by Hoxsey against Fishbein. Much to everyone’s amazement, Hoxsey won the case. Even so, in the late 1950’s the FDA closed down all of Hoxsey’s clinics. Mildred Nelson took the treatment to
Mainstream Medicine vs. Alternative Treatments
So, what does mainstream medicine say about alternative cancer treatments in general? The Pavlovian response is a rather supercilious, “They rely on anecdotal evidence which is not scientific.”
Scientists attempt to sweep all patient testimony, verified by a doctor or not, into the realms of myth and legend. They tell us that in order to test the efficacy of a cancer treatment it must be subjected to the rigor of countless double blind studies, clinical trials and peer review groups. In theory this sounds fine, but in practice several flaws become apparent. In fifty years of cancer research and umpteen experiments, no headway has been made in finding an effective treatment or cure for the deadliest cancers. The incidence of cancer is continually on the rise.
Another point is that these supposed exacting scientific drug trials are in fact nothing of the sort. Clinical oncologists have an obvious vested interest in producing positive results from cancer drug trials. Controlled clinical trials are appropriately named because it is the scientist who controls the outcome. Scientists are under enormous pressure by the pharmaceutical companies to produce the “right” results. There are obvious cases of outright fraud as you will see in the Tamoxifen trials (also see May 16, 1999 New York Times article). There is also intentional and unintentional bias such as not following the protocols of the experiment, burying negative results, patient selection and statistical interpretation.
I see another factor here that has far more to do with human nature than science. By trying to exclude first person testimony, scientists try to control the path to truth. Only they have access to more exacting truths through their complex procedures and mounds of statistics. Nonsense, scientists have not copyrighted truth. They are fallible men and woman who have fallen for some ages old human pitfalls; extreme arrogance and the craving for more power. I will take the word of a relative or friend who has cancer and no ax to grind, over these scientists with all their personnel and political interests to serve.
The Establishment
Now I turn my attention to the cancer establishment. The agencies involved are the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the American Medical Association. These agencies have a long history of endemic corruption and conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. I will begin with the cancer establishments three primary treatments; surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
Surgery has been around for centuries and is the most successful. Surgery is most effective against localized tumors, a small percentage of cancer patients. If the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, it is far less successful. If during surgery only one cancer cell reenters the blood stream, cancer often starts again. How many times have cancer sufferers heard the words, “we got it all”, only to find a few months later that it has returned.
Chemotherapy drugs were derived from the mustard gas experiments during World War I and World War II. They were heavily promoted in the early 1950s by Cornelius Rhoads, head of the newly formed
Alan C. Nixon Ph.D., past president of the American Chemical Society writes, “As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.”
Chemotherapy has had good results with a few rare cancers, about five percent of cancer patients yearly. But according to author Ralph Moss, the drugs were given to at least 700,000 people in 1991. It is alarming to note that very few doctors would take their own medicine if they contracted cancer. In one survey of 118 doctors, 79 responded. Fifty-eight (73 percent) said they would never take any chemotherapy due to its high toxicity and ineffectiveness. The pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune though. Chemotherapy drug sales were 3.1 billion in 1989, by 1995 they had almost tripled to 8.6 billion. Predicted sales in 1999 were 13.7 billion.
The final option, radiation treatment, has similar side effects to chemotherapy. Its effectiveness is difficult to judge due to the fact that it is most often given to patients after surgery. It may have some use against a few rare cancers, but is given to hundreds of thousands. There is a multibillion-dollar investment in radiation equipment throughout
Another grubby secret of the cancer establishment is their definition of the word “cured.” According to them you are “cured” if you remain cancer free for five years. If the cancer returns in six or eight years, then that becomes a new case to be “cured” all over again. This brings about the absurd situation of some people being “cured” two or three times in a twenty-year period. The fact is of course that they were never cured at all, just sent into lengthy remissions. But it is a convenient way for the cancer establishment to artificially inflate their success rates.
The National Cancer Institute
The NCI was established in 1937 and was supposed to find a cancer cure or effective treatment. In over sixty years there have been some small successes with rarer cancers and some technological advances. But for most cancer patients the chances of surviving have not changed since the 1950s.
It would be great if the NCI was even half as good at controlling cancer as their public relations department is at pronouncing its imminent demise. Over the years there have been dozens of headline smashing “miracle” drugs which invariably failed to perform anywhere close to the hyperbole. In the mid 1960s Dr. Lawrence Burton produced a very promising treatment called Immuno-Augmentative Therapy. The treatment boosted the patient’s immune system. He moved the treatment to the
Dr. John Beaty sent twenty advanced cancer patients to
In 1985 the newspapers carried the story that
Dr. Alan Levin of the
In 1988 DeVita left NCI for a 400,000 a year position with Sloan-Kettering in
Tamoxifen received enormous media exposure thanks to the NCI. They stated that in clinical trials it had a success rate of preventing cancer in 45 percent of the woman who took part in the trials. But two smaller trials of Tamoxifen in
Another little known fact is that many drugs developed by the NCI, at taxpayer expense, are then handed over to pharmaceutical companies who reap the massive profits. A good example of this is the anticancer drug Taxol which was approved in 1992. The NCI had spent a fortune on clinical trials and developing the drugs’ manufacturing process. They then gave exclusive rights to Bristol-Myers Squibb who charge us $4.87 per milligram, twenty times what it costs to make.
The American Cancer Society
Formed in 1913, the ACS was reorganized in 1944. The new leadership comprised of Albert Lasker, an advertising tycoon and Elmer Bobst, president of two drug companies. Albert Lasker’s wife, Mary, ran the ACS for thirty some years. Mary was only interested in researching profit motivated patentable drugs. The big payoff for Mary came in December 1971, when President Nixon signed into law the “war on cancer.” During the decade of the 1970s Mary Lasker and prominent private cancer research hospitals such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering ruled the national cancer program.
The ACS has a committee to identify any doctor prescribing treatments that are not endorsed by them.
For years, the ACS’s Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management and the AMA’s Committee on Quackery (disbanded 1974) collaborated in persecuting anyone threatening the status quo. According to journalist Ruth Rosenbaum, they “form a network of vigilantes prepared to pounce on anyone who promotes a cancer therapy that runs against their substantial prejudices and profits.” Samuel Epstein writes about the ACS’s Committee on Unproven Methods of CancerManagement; “Periodically, the committee updates it’s statements on “unproven methods”…Once a clinician or oncologist becomes associated with “unproven methods”, he or she is blackballed by the cancer establishment. Funding for the accused “quack” becomes inaccessible, followed by systematic harassment.” What happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars the ACS collects every year? In September 1990, a study by Dr. James T. Bennett of
In January 1995 “The Phoenix New Times” wrote a lengthy investigative article about the
The ACS is famous for making highly exaggerated and misleading statements. On March 15, 1987, the ACS officially announced, “Caught early enough, breast cancer has cure rates approaching 100 percent.” There is no such thing as a cure for breast cancer, only survival rates. As Dr. Dean Burk said, “They (ACS) lie like scoundrels.”
The ACS and NCI have been intertwined since the 1950s. About half of the ACS board is comprised of oncologists, radiologists, clinicians and others with a vested interest in traditional cancer research. Key ACS and NCI officials often sit on each others committees. ACS board members and their colleagues receive grants from one or both institutions. This old boys network maintains the status quo and guarantees that the vast majority of funding stays within orthodox medicine.
The Federal Drug Administration
In 1970, former FDA commissioner Dr. Herbert Ley said, “The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day.”
In 1974 eleven FDA scientists testified in the Senate “…That they were harassed by agency officials…Whenever they recommended against approval of marketing some new drug.”
The FDA’s generic drug scandal hit the news in 1989. Several FDA reviewers were accepting bribes from some drug companies to speed their drugs through the process and derail those submitted by competing companies. According to a Tuft’s University study released in 1990, it now takes 12 years and costs 231 million dollars to research, test and obtain approval for a new drug. Because of the FDA’s glacially slow and inept bureaucracy, many potentially useful drugs cannot be brought to market due to the excessive cost and time involved.
A battle being fought now epitomizes how far the FDA will go in order to protect the drug companies profits. For over a year Jim and Donna Navarro have fought the FDA for the right to give their five year old son, Thomas, an alternative treatment. Thomas suffers with Medulloblastoma, a type of malignant brain cancer. After surgery, chemotherapy was recommended. Jim and Donna asked what the side effects were.
“…Fluid on the middle ear, hearing loss, memory loss, hyperthyroidism, spinal growth deficit…” The list went on. Worse, permanent retardation. Jim and Donna researched their son’s cancer for thousands of hours. They found Dr. Burzynski’s treatment (antineoplastons) in
The FDA has been persecuting Dr. Burzynski for over 15 years. They refuse to allow Burzynski to treat Thomas until he has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment first. Jim and Donna pleaded with the FDA commissioner Jane Henney, her superior Donna Shalala and several politicians, all to no avail. The FDA would rather see Thomas Navarro dead than taking the medicine of his parents choice. The FDA’s motives are explicitly clear. Prominent FDA officials protect the pharmaceutical company’s profit margins and are later rewarded with lucrative positions within those same companies. As Burzynski says; “The past commissioner of the FDA-now he is an official of one of the large pharmaceutical companies, with a salary of 2 million a year.”
If the FDA allow Thomas Navarro access to Burzynski’s treatment they open the door to other people demanding the same option. Very soon people will want the right to choose any alternative treatment. That is a road the FDA definitely does not want to go down.
The American Medical Association
The AMA is responsible for licensing of all Doctors in
Since Morris Fishbein’s day the AMA has relied on the revenue received from drug manufacturers to advertise in their various medical journals.
On February 6, 1973, two former chairman and 1 vice chair of the AMA’s council on drugs testified before Congress and said that the AMA was, “…A captive of and beholden to the pharmaceutical industry.” In 1987 the AMA was found guilty of conspiring for 20 years to destroy the profession of chiropractitioners.
The War On Cancer
The supposed “war on cancer” is little more than a grand illusion conjured up by the cancer establishments propaganda gurus. The formula is eons old. Repeatedly chisel your message into peoples psyches; “cancer breakthrough”, “scientists say they are “…Turning the tide on cancer.” We become unwitting human satellites, bouncing the deception from one person to another.
There never was a determined, no holds-barred war on cancer. There is a fanatical and hate-filled war being waged against the few courageous doctors and innovative healers who prescribe natural treatments. There is a war of protectionism. Protecting the status quo, protecting the grant money trough, and above all, protecting the pharmaceutical cartels’ monopoly. There have been at least a dozen very encouraging cancer treatments in the last seventy years. The Rife frequency machine, Laetrile, Hoxsey, Antineoplastons, Coley’s Toxins, Glyoxylide, Hydrazine Sulfate, Krebiozen, Immuno-Augmentative Therapy, Dr. Max Gerson’s Diet, to name a few. They all have two things in common. The people advocating the therapy are branded charlatans or quacks and the treatment is denounced as worthless by scientists who have been selling us out for generations.
A radical change in cancer research is needed. The natural, nutritional and other innovative approaches should be studied and made available to cancer patients immediately. Most important, we must have medical freedom of choice. For us to achieve those changes, we have to overcome a far tougher opponent than cancer. A battle Royal against the $110 billion a year cancer industry. Ultimately, our greatest enemy is apathy.
To succeed, we will need people willing to step up to the plate and speak out, undeterred by being labeled politically incorrect. People with plenty of good old fashioned guts, character and an iron will to see it through until the job is done. We will prevail. It’s inevitable. Because when good woman and men put their minds to something, the mightiest walls of oppression can and will be shattered.
References for this article can be found at http://www.cancerinform.org/refs1.html