CANCER: A MEDICAL INDUSTRY IN WILLFUL DENIAL

by Phillip Day

I have stud­ied can­cer for 25 years, given count­less lec­tures on the sub­ject, writ­ten books, made films, spo­ken to some of the most suc­cess­ful can­cer doc­tors in the busi­ness, and actu­ally there really is some good news about can­cer, though you would be for­given for think­ing oth­er­wise with all the tall tales appear­ing in the press recently.

The bad news we all know about. Britain leads the indus­tri­alised world in its fail­ure to halt the dis­ease. The Gen­eral Med­ical Coun­cil likes to attack doc­tors using safe, alter­na­tive means to cure the prob­lem. More peo­ple will die of can­cer next year than in pre­vi­ous years – more peo­ple will con­tract it too.

The UK, or what’s left of it, has the worst can­cer sur­vival rates of any West­ern indus­tri­alised nation1 – frankly not sur­pris­ing in a coun­try whose cit­i­zens have taken to yank­ing out their own teeth with pli­ers brought at Home­base because they can’t afford the dentist.

Into this woe­ful mix you can toss all those upbeat char­ity reports: ‘The war on can­cer is being won, just give us another £170 mil­lion’ when the war on can­cer is being delib­er­ately lost. Oh, and those 80% of women sur­viv­ing breast can­cer? They really aren’t. In des­per­a­tion to main­tain cred­i­bil­ity and show progress for the big bucks spent, Big Can­cer has rede­fined the words ‘sur­vive’ and ‘cure’ to mean only five years after ini­tial treatment.

In the real world and not Bub­ble­land, ‘sur­viv­ing can­cer’ is not liv­ing another five years pumped full of chem­i­cal war­fare agents, it’s dying in your own bed at the grand old age of 91 from some­thing other than can­cer – yank­ing your own teeth out with pli­ers bought at Home­base, for instance. And in the real world and not Bub­ble­land, can­cer is still killing your fam­ily and mine and all the ‘experts’, pink rib­bons and £$bil­lions in the world don’t seem to be mak­ing a hoot’s worth of dif­fer­ence. And why exactly is that? Because wars are only prof­itable while you are fight­ing them, not when you’ve won them.

That’s right. Wel­come to the not-so-enchanted for­est of bale­ful sci­en­tific endeav­our. Can­cer is a $200 billion-a-year indus­try. There are more peo­ple today mak­ing a liv­ing out of can­cer than are dying from it. ‘From an eco­nomic point of view alone,’ one pro­fes­sor con­fided in me, ‘why would any­one ever wish to cure can­cer? Mil­lions would have to re-train.’

Hard to believe, but just as count­less mil­lions are wasted dig­ging up the same old piece of road year after year, point­less can­cer grants are renewed so researchers can con­tinue to fol­low W Deutscher’s wrong course with the max­i­mum of pre­ci­sion. We’ve seen the same tem­plate used with Health and Safety, ‘Cli­mate Change’, Foot and Mouth, the HIV epi­demic that wasn’t, the annual flu pan­demic which never turns up, SARS, CJD, swine flu, and that other shin­ing bea­con of med­ical idiocy, psychiatry.

In Britain, it’s busi­ness as usual with the National Hor­ror Ser­vice and ‘inde­pen­dent’ can­cer char­i­ties all vying to scare the pants off you so you’ll cough up more dough. In the US, the FDA employ tac­tics that would spur envy from Rein­hard Hey­drich him­self, while the Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety remains the world’s wealth­i­est non-profit organ­i­sa­tion, which even makes polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. All ver