Cancer Business and its lucrative Industry

Conventional cancer treatment is big money. You have to understand that cancer is 1/9th of the overall health budget in the United States. We are talking about well over a million [new cancer] cases a year, not counting skin cancer which probably equals that. About 630,000 people die every year of cancer in the US, and it really is an epidemic disease. We have got a tremendous industry, or “cancer business”.

Every one of those people who is getting cancer and dying of it is going to be treated and these treatments are extremely expensive. Chemo is tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bone marrow transplantation which is basically another way of giving chemotherapy, or radiation can run to about 150,000 dollars per person, and is almost never effective. It kills about 25%. Why carry on doing it ? Because of the money, which is tremendous. If you look at the board of directors of MSK [Memorial Sloane Kettering] you will find that the drug industry has a dominant position on that board. One company in particular, Bristol Myers, which produces between 40-50 % of all the chemotherapy in the world and they have top positions at MSK hospital. [Doesn't that constitute a serious conflict of interest ?] They are selling their own drugs to that particular hospital but they have written into the by-laws of the center that it does not constitute a conflict of interest to sell their company drugs to the center. They get around it by not taking a salary. They are not paid, they are volunteers. Look what happens. You have a man like Benno Schmidt, who was first head of the president's cancer panel under Nixon, then becomes head of MSK. He then, goes on using the knowledge he gained at MSK to set up his own drug company to make tens of millions of dollars. [Another revolving door]. You bet, and a big one. We have had 50 years of American Cancer Society (ACS) brainwashing on the question of cancer, so most people out there believe we are making progress in the war on cancer. We are not, we are losing the war. [Dr. Ralph Moss on Chemotherapy, Laetrile, Coley's Toxins, Burzynski, & Cancer Politics, Laura Lee radio show, 1994]

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Oncology is one of the most expensive and most profitable fields of medicine [Stephan Seeßle, MD]

We have a multi-billion dollar industry that is killing people, right and left, just for financial gain. Their idea of doing research is to see whether two doses of this poison is better than three doses of that poison. [Glenn A. Warner, MD, former head of the immunotherapy department of the Tumor Institute under Orliss Wildermuth, MD]

To the cancer establishment, a cancer patient is a profit center. The actual clinical and scientific evidence does not support the claims of the cancer industry. Conventional cancer treatments are in place as the law of the land because they pay, not heal, the best. Decades of the politics-of-cancer-as-usual have kept you from knowing this, and will continue to do so unless you wake up to this reality. [John Diamond, MD & Lee Cowden MD]

My mother died of ovarian cancer and it had cost my father his entire lifetime of earning. The medical industry took every last dime, drove him into bankruptcy, and provided no positive results whatsoever for my mother over nearly 2 years. In economics, you supposedly exchange your valuable (money) for another valuable (results). No results means you don't pay or you get your money back. Not in modern medicine. [Peter Parker in his Amazon.com review of the book Cancer: Curing the Incurable Without Surgery, Chemotherapy, or Radiation, by William Donald Kelley]

Chemotherapy is an incredibly lucrative business for doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies… The medical establishment wants everyone to follow the same exact protocol. They don’t want to see the chemotherapy industry go under, and that’s the number one obstacle to any progress in oncology. [Dr Warner, M.D]

The amount of cytotoxic drugs sold by the pharmaceutical companies has grown from $3 billion in 1989 to over $13 billion in 1998. These figures are chemotherapy drugs sales only, not taking into account professional or hospital fees associated with treatment. Cancer's share of the total US health budget is calculated at 9.8% according to the AHCPR (Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) 1994 figures 9.8% of 1 trillion dollars : that means the cancer industry is turning over about $98 billion per year. More people living off cancer than ever died from it. [Tim O'Shea in TO THE CANCER PATIENT]

THE EPIDEMIC OF UNNECESSARY MASTECTOMY : HOW NOT TO BE A VICTIM ?
We are living in the age of health scare campaigns. This is because we have in the U.S. a massive profit-oriented industry involving doctors, hospitals, HMOs, clinics, laboratories, biotechnology companies, researchers, and laboratories. All of these enterprises are nourished by health scares. For years, one of the common money-makers for surgery done to women was hysterectomy. Unfortunately for the promoters of this type of mutilation, the excessive enthusiasm among doctors for it has come to be exposed. For e.g., it was reported by the Journal of the American Medical Association (May 12, 1993) that only 58% of a group of 642 hysterectomy cases could be justified as appropriate. It has become expedient for medical profiteers to develop new markets, and mastectomy has been emerging as the current favored gold mine.

A study reported by Reuters (11/28/00) found that 53% of the mastectomies done on a group of 142 women were unnecessary. This group could have been effectively treated with lumpectomy, but the slash-and-burn surgeons found it more profitable to mutilate them. Mastectomies create opportunities for their colleagues in the cosmetic breast reconstruction business. [Michael Phillip Wright]

Mastectomies Generate Income For Plastic Surgeons
”Oncologists continue to recommend mastectomies as a treatment for breast cancer because it fattens the bank book of the plastic surgeons who make millions of dollars from breast reconstructions.

Here's how it goes :
A woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Her oncologist recommends mastectomy. She is referred to a plastic surgeon who says that her breast(s) can be reconstructed with breast implants or a "natural" tissue flap. The woman has the mastectomy and reconstruction and is left disabled, while the oncologist and plastic surgeon laugh all the way to the bank with the woman's insurance money. These dark, dirty deeds are still being done by the medical community” [Pam Young http://askwaltstollmd.com/wwwboard/messages/120088.shtml]

It is startling to discover what chemotherapy drugs are made from. The first ones were made from mustard gas exactly like the weapons that killed so many soldiers in WW I, eventually outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. In the 1930s, Memorial Sloan-Kettering quietly began to treat breast cancer with these mustard gas derivatives. No one was cured. Most of the medical profession at that time regarded such "treatment" of malignant disease as charlatanism. Nitrogen mustard chemotherapy trials were conducted at Yale around 1943. 160 patients were treated. No one was cured. The beginning of the hype that promised to cure all cancer by means of chemo drugs, came as an offshoot of the postwar excitement with the success of antibiotics and the sulfa drugs. Caught up in the heady atmosphere of visions of money and power in vanquishing cancer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering began to make extravagant claims that to this day have never been realized. Some 400,000 "cytotoxins" were tested by Sloan-Kettering and the National Cancer Institute. The criteria in order to be tested were: will the toxin kill some of the tumor cells before it kills the patient. That's it! Many were brand new synthetic compounds. But thousands of others were existing poisons which were simply refined. Finally about 50 drugs made the cut, and are the basis of today's chemotherapy medicine cabinet. One of these 50 is a sheep-deworming agent known as Levamisole. With no major clinical trial ever showing significant increased long term survival with Levamisole, it is still a standard chemotherapy agent even today! The weirdness is, Levamisole was included for its "immune system modulation" properties. However, its major toxicities include :
- decreased white cell count - flu symptoms - nausea - abdominal cramps - dizziness

Why so much use of chemotherapy if it does so little good ? Well for one thing, drug companies provide huge economic incentives. In 1990, $3.53 billion was spent on chemotherapy. By 1994 that figure had more than doubled to $7.51 billion. This relentless increase in chemotherapy use was accompanied by a relentless increase in cancer deaths. [”Chemotherapy Report”]

When Fred Wortman of Albany, Georgia, developed an inoperable malignancy of the intestine, he faced the prospect of long treatments with x radiation "therapy". "The doctors," Mr. Wortman said, "refused to operate when they discovered the condition of my bank balance." Being a wide reader, he remembered a simple remedy for cancer that was given in a book by a 'Mrs. Brandt', and looked it up. It was rather involved and cumbersome to follow, so he reduced it to its essentials, took the "cure" and was completely cancerfree within a month. [From The Grape Cancer Cure]

I think we can take for granted that there cannot be true honesty from providers of conventional cancer treatment. After all, how many would accept these treatments if they had all the facts ? I think we can take for granted that there cannot be true honesty from providers of conventional cancer treatment. After all, how many would accept these treatments if they had all the facts ? [L. P. who after experiencing the shock, trauma & disfigurement resulting from “quackery at its cruelest” considers conventional cancer treatment an “evil industry”]