Pestilence, war, famine, death and cancer.
The Five Horsemen of the modern Apocalypse.
Five of the most terrifying words in any language known to civilized societies.
Of those five harbingers of doom the last one, cancer, is also, according to the National Institutes of Health, a $228 billion-a-year industry with 2008 bottomline contributions ranging from $90 billion to doctors, hospitals and drug companies to $1.1 billion to the American Cancer Society.
Given that huge investment and cancer’s double-digit growth rate since the beginning of the century, it seems only reasonable to look at the Cancer Industry’s report card. To ask, in other words, Big Cancer’s executives, fund raisers and political lobbyists how we’re doing.
The answer, sad to say, is “not very well.”
Though both the incidence of new cancers and cancer death rates decreased slightly in the early years of the 21st Century, due primarily to increased public awareness of the necessity of early and regular testing for mammary, prostate and other common cancers, cancer rates are once again on the rise.
Official American Cancer Society projections for 2008, for example, were 1,437,180 new cancer cases and 565,650 deaths directly attributed to cancer. For 2010, the ACS projections increased to 1,529,560 and 569,490 – a negligible increase in deaths, but a whopping 7 percent hike in new cases.
What’s going on here? With the use of both smoking and chewing tobacco at an all-time low, with air quality in most urban areas including the L.A. Basin better now than it was four decades ago, with cancer warnings plastered on everything from electrical extension cords to gas pumps, why is the cancer rate going up?
Some people blame the economy. Unemployment, foreclosure threats, credit crunches and loss of even basic insurance coverage are major stressors, they say, and more stress invariable translates into more cases of cancer. Frankly, that’s a hard argument to contest. Whether stress actually causes cancer or whether it simply reduces the body’s ability to resist it is still unknown, but the link between the two afflictions has been indelibly established.
But there’s a second question, why is the cancer death rate still as high as it is? Percentage wise it has dropped slightly, but not nearly as much as one might expect in this age of early diagnosis, $5,000 a dose “miracle” drugs and precision radiation targeting.
Many believe the Cancer Industry itself, living large on its nearly $300 billion carcinoma-based annual earnings has a big, fat vested interest in ensuring that a.) a true cancer cure is never developed and b.) that whatever partial cures are available require prolonged, repeated and ruinously expensive courses of treatment.
Proponents of this view point out that scores of Big C lobbyists, many of them former congressmen or congressional staffers, spent millions of dollars annually to ensure an unfair hearing – and frequent legal harassment and persecution – for anyone trying to develop a cure outside the cancer establishment.
Had the drug companies and the American Medical Association been as hardcore greedy, heartless and politically powerful in the late 1940s and early 1950s as they are today, these people say, polio would still be Public Health Enemy #1 and iron lung manufacturing would still be a growth industry.
Thankfully, the times were different then. The world in the aftermath of World War II was, perhaps, a kinder, gentler place from one brief moment. Equally, or perhaps more importantly, the March of Dimes, the major “foundation” in the polio industry, was as attitudinally different from the American Cancer Society as day is from night.
Where the ACS has historically belittled, harassed, intimidated and attempted to arrange jail sentences for virtually every independent researcher who has produced evidence of a cancer cure, the March of Dimes supported out-of-the-box thinking in general and helped fund the research of a maverick named Jonas Salk in particular.
Then again, the March of Dimes was given its mission by its politically well-connected founder, who also happened to be the world’s most famous polio victim and the president who had guided the United States safely through 13 years of Depression and war. The American Cancer Society, on the other hand, founded by a group of affluent businessmen and doctors in 1913 as the American Society for the Control of Cancer, has been engaged in defending the cancer establishment for virtually all of its 97 years.
As evidence, consider the case of Dr. Royal Rife, who isolated a cancer-causing virus in the 1920s and spent the next several decades building and perfecting an oscillating light and radio wave therapy device that killed the virus in tumors without injuring any adjacent tissue.
In the early days, before Rife and his work became well known, many traditional medical researchers were more than anxious to collaborate with him and test his inventions. Highly successful clinical trials on cancer patients, many of them terminal, were conducted and reported on by such ultra-conservative bastions of research as the University of Southern California and the Northwestern Medical School.
Dr. Royal Raymond Rife Discusses His Work, Circa 1950
By late 1931 Rife and his supporters were in deep trouble, though they did not yet know it. In December of that year more than 40 prominent doctors and research scientists from around the country, including about 10 who had participated in USC’s successful trials of the Rife system, gathered to honor Rife at a banquet where he was extolled for his “battle to end disease.”
Such praise for someone with a promising cancer cure, especially coming from respected members of the scientific community, was, according to some historians, too much for the drug industry and its lackeys at the American Society for the Control of Cancer. They struck, their critics charge, and they struck hard.
Doors to research labs like those at USC were suddenly closed in Rife’s face. Local and federal law-enforcement officers raided doctors’ offices seizing Rife devices and the records of patients who had been treated with them, researchers whose tests supported Rife died under mysterious circumstances, Rife’s laboratories were destroyed by arsonists.
Dr. Rife was, of course, just one of the many scientists whose attempt to develop an alternative treatment for cancer has been thwarted by Big Cancer. Would all of these alternatives have proven to be effective had their inventors been left alone? Obviously not. Most of them would have turned out to be totally useless, exactly like 90 percent of the treatments developed by the Cancer Industry over the last century. But a few, like the Rife machine, might have grown up to be a true terminator for both cancer and other so-far incurable virus-based killers such as AIDS.
There are, the film noir cliché goes, “eight million stories in the naked city.” And almost as many in the annals of the public interest suffering at the grasping hands of the pharmaceutical and medical special interests.
For information on books about the work of Dr. Royal Rife, the current use of “energy medicine” in the treatment of cancer and the legal rights of cancer patients, please click here.
Good work, thanks.