Cancer isn’t just the disease of a generation, it’s been the disease of a century.
While cancer charities have been popping up like mushrooms, the money that’s going into cancer research isn’t exactly well spent.
Reuters reports that the white house contributes roughly 4.3$ billion toward cancer research yearly and “stand up to cancer” charity parties can raise up to 100$ million in one night alone (1).
Despite all the well-funded new studies and drugs trials, over 1.5 million Americans develop cancer each year and nearly 600,000 die from the disease yearly (2).
The Hospital Business
The world as we know it today is run by several mega-corporations that have a say in everything from what we eat, to what we learn, and even how we are cared for in the medical system.
It’s no secret that American hospitals are run like businesses. In fact, a report published in Health Affairs pointed out that “$1 of every $4 of U.S. hospital spending goes to bureaucracy rather than patient care.” (3)
They’re also notorious for overcharging patients, cost discrepancies between hospitals, and purposely keeping patients in the dark about the cost of care.
Since the government doesn’t subsidize most hospitals, businesses like pharmaceutical companies swoop in and fill the void. Because of this, profit is prioritized over patients.
In most cases, hospitals actually make more off the patients who stay sick than the ones who recover.
Where Cancer Comes In
Cancer is a multi-billion dollar business, and so is cancer research.
As Linus Pauling, Ph.D. and two-time Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, explains “most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.” (4)
He isn’t alone is denouncing the system. Dr. John Bailer, a 20-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute and former editor of the organization’s journal, publicly stated: “My overall assessment is that the national cancer program must be judged a qualified failure. Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a total failure.” (5)
While your oncologist may tell you otherwise, many medical professions and specialist have denouced chemotherapy and cancer research as a whole. Since most doctors enter the medical field to help others, many begin to question the medical system after seeing patients needlessly suffer.
Just watch the documentary below to see experts discuss their thoughts on the current system.
Pharmaceutical Monopoly: Med School
Medical school prepares doctors for the scenarios they may encounter in the operating room, but it also sells them on a particular brand of medical interventions. A large part of these interventions, if not all of them, involve pharmaceuticals.
In the Documentary The Truth About Cancer, Dr. Jonathan V. Wright, M.D. Medical Director describes his experience: “We got, hours and hours and hours on how to use, basically patented medicines, which as you know, are what usually goes on a prescription pad as a molecule that can be patented which means that it’s not found in nature….And that’s what we get educated in.”
Dr. Gary F. Gordon also pitches in: “The doctor is brainwashed when he/she gets out of medical school because the medical school has too much subsidization of the professors who are being paid by the drug company, so the professor never teachers any student in medical school, why don’t you try vitamin C, they’re going to tell them the latest drug.”
Try as they may to cure disease and illness, the mistakes made by these pharmaceutical-trained doctors is now the third leading cause of death in the US (6).
Where Did We Go Wrong?
Believe it or not, American medical school used to focus on plant-based medicine and traditional healing.
Medical school took a turn for worse nearly a hundred years ago, when the Carnegie and Rockefeller (two of five greatest American businessmen of all time) altered the curriculum by funding drug-based research and turning it into the primary focus of health care.
The American Medical association still relies on lobbying congress and publishing bias research to prioritize pharmaceuticals. It also heavily criticizes alternative health treatments and prevention-based medicine by funding research that contradicts their efficacy and value.
As Arnold Seymour Relman, Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal, so eloquently said: “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” (7)
Nearly ten years ago, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine, estimated that most of all funded research reaches a false conclusion. You can read her article entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” here.
More recently, Dr. Richard Horton, current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, stated that half of all the published literature could be false (8).
While modern medicine has dramatically increased the survival and comfort of patients worldwide, it isn’t without its problems. Many aspects of this practice are incredibly useful and essential, like surgery, physiotherapy, and long-term care, but other aspects, like pharmaceuticals and symptom-based treatment, still have a long way to go. And as long as pharmaceutical companies have a say in what doctors learn and how they treat their patients, these necessary changes are a long way away.