If big pharma suppresses effective but unprofitable cancer cures...

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Sat Dec 7, 2013, 08:12 PM - Edit history (1)

As with most things, it is useful to examine the proposition in terms of what the world would look like if it were true.

Why would everyone suppress/ignore these cures? Most of the first-world has state-funded health care. What prevents them from employing these dirt cheap cures and saving themselves untold billions while having vastly higher cure rates than elsewhere? Surely the government of Germany would be happy to cure everybody's cancer for peanuts and spend the leftover money expanding Oktoberfest into November, or something.

It strikes me that all the un-profitable but highly effective cancer cures I have read about every dman week for the last 40 years were not, in actuality, effective cancer cures at all. (And for "suppressed" treatements they sure seem to get a lot of press...)

What would the world look like if hazelnuts and aspirin (hypotheticaly) are a miracle cancer cure? Would it really find no application simply because big pharma didn't feel like pursuing it?

Why is big pharma unable to keep reports on cheap fake medicine (all competing with big pharma) from being on the morning news shows every damn day?

The supressed cancer cures mythology shares the safe fatal defects as the "water engine" mythology, of a car that runs on water suppressed by the oil companies. It presumes that a simple, cheap and utterly world-changing technology exists that can be suppressed. If any of these magical cheap cures worked they would be impossible to suppress because they would be discovered over and over and over.

It is certainly true that profit distorts pharmacological research. No way around that. But is the distortion in the specific area of cancer treatments so great and so universal that all researchers are in on it?

Since the greatest funder of cancer research in the world is the US government, through NIH... are all the doctors involved with NIH willing to suppress cancer cures for money? Were none of these people attracted to their field by a desire to cure cancer?

I hypothesize that most people in cancer research would like, very much, to win the Nobel Prize and be the Jonas Salk of Cancer. Really. They would.

[roseBudd]

1. Conspiracy theory is a cottage industry

And woo regarding health has obvious supplements selling motives

Show me the words "suppress natural cures" and I will show you lots of advertising and supplements for sale.

Pharma can't prevent research papers from being published

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=shark+cartilage

Edited to add, if you understand cancer, as too much cell division, it becomes less suspicious, that their is no cure that has been suppressed because it wasn't a money maker.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

[longship]

4. Plus, cancer is not a single disease.

There is no monolithic cure for cancer anymore than there is a single cure for disease. Cancer can be treated and some treatments for some cancers are more effective than others. Some are notably resistant to any and all interventions.

If one does not understand this, one could conceivably fall into the hands of cancer quacks, who are more than willing to take people who have little hope in the face of a Big C diagnosis amongst their loved ones.

The answer is Science Based Medicine which has transparency and accountability.

Or, you could choose abject quackery like Hulda Clark or the unethical quack in TX, Stanislaw Burzynski.

[sharp_stick]

2. If Big Pharma

were suppressing a cancer cure I kind of doubt our old CSO would have died of pancreatic cancer four years ago. As someone doing cancer research for the last 12 years I've had to answer this exact question from a lot of people.

One of the reasons people think this is possible is that they don't understand cancer. I try to get to them by explaining that cancer isn't a single disease it's hundreds of diseases. Each cancer type is different and so are the people that get them.

[X_Digger]

3. Yeah, I wanted to chuck my coffee mug at the screen when I read those moronic comments, too.

It takes a special kind of stupid to believe that there's a cure for cancer that's being suppressed by 'big pharma'.

[Trillo]

5. You mean treatments like low-cost euthanasia? (Like a veterinarian might give your dying pet)

Not trying to be snarky, though I know that's how it could read. I'm sure there are a lot of people that can't afford the copays for "approved" treatments of whatever typically terminal disease, so when the pain or discomfort gets too bad, you choose to end life inexpensively instead of bankrupting your remaining family members. This was possible with laudanum, though the vomiting might get you before you reached a fatal overdose. At least the pain was deadened, and you could self-dose as required, nor did you need to pay for more doctors visits once you'd decided such medicine could do no more for you.

[Th1onein]

6. Your premise is missing a few facts.....

First, you are talking about multi-national companies. Pharmaceutical companies are often very, very large, and in many, many countries. We know for a fact that they are very good at impacting legislation which controls which drugs make it to market here in the US; why wouldn't that be true everywhere? It is, in fact.

Second, there are much more efficacious treatments in other countries, for many types of cancers, and even cures, for some types of cancers, that are not available in the US.

Finally, money is money the world over. The "conventional" methods of treating cancer are very lucrative; and those that control the pharmas control the research. Like it or not, that is the way that it is.

I am of the opinion that, although cancers are different, depending on the cell type, and patients are surely different, cancer cells do have something in common: They produce their ATP through the cytoplasmic production of ATP via the process of glycolysis, instead of the mitochondrial production of ATP through the process of oxidative phosphorylation. Most oncologists know this; it's called the Warburg effect. This information is finally being utilized to kill cancer cells, using compounds such as 3-bromopyruvate.

On edit: You might have read this article, regarding Sweden endorsing the low carb/high fat diet for optimal health. Remember Robert Atkins? Remember how his diet and he were villified? Turns out he was right, all along. What was happening, though? Was it a Conspiracy against him? No, but it was a SYSTEMIC problem. The system is set up to benefit certain actors, and Atkins' and his diet pulled the carpet out from under them. They fought this diet for decades, but the science underlying it was solid, and Atkins was proved to be correct.