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- Attacks Alternative Medicine Therapies
- “There
go our profits”
For years the American
Cancer Society demonstrated its allegiance to the multibillion-dollar cancer
drug industry by aggressively attacking
potential competitors through its "Committee on Unproven Methods
of Cancer Management," created to "review" unorthodox
or alternative therapies. This committee, staffed by "volunteer
health care professionals," invariably promoted mainstream,
expensive, and arguably toxic drugs patented by major pharmaceutical
companies, and opposed alternative or "unproven" therapies,
which are generally cheap, non-patentable, and minimally toxic. As
with Senator Joseph McCarthy's blacklist of suspected communists,
once a clinician or oncologist was associated with "unproven
methods," harassment and blackballing often followed, and
funding would dry up. This witch hunt against alternative practitioners
was
in striking contrast to the Society's uncritical endorsement
of conventional toxic chemotherapy, despite increasing concern
that
chemotherapy
may not significantly improve survival rates for most cancers.
After an extensive review of clinical oncology studies, for example,
Dr.
Ulrich Abel of the Institute of Epidemiology and Biometry at
the University of Heidelberg, Germany, concluded that for most
patients
chemotherapy functions as little more than a placebo, with an
attendant decline in quality of life from the toxic treatment.
Over the past twenty years cancer patients
have become increasingly frustrated—but also increasingly organized. Disillusioned with
the cancer establishment's definition of "progress" and "prevention" and
fed up with the toxic side effects of conventional treatments, grassroots
cancer activists convinced forty members of Congress to investigate
the efficacy of alternative therapies. Congress enlisted the Office
of Technology Assessment (OTA), a congressional think tank, to do
the job. In 1990, OTA identified some 200 promising studies on alternative
treatments, and concluded that NCI had "a mandated responsibility
to pursue this information and facilitate examination of widely
used 'unconventional cancer treatments' for therapeutic potential."
Yet mainstream cancer organization have
not followed the OTA's recommendations. For example, in the January
1991 issue of
its Cancer Journal for
Clinicians, the American Cancer Society dismissed the Hoxsey
therapy, a nontoxic combination of herb extracts developed
in the 1940s
by populist Harry Hoxsey, as a "worthless tonic for cancer." However,
a detailed critique of Hoxsey's treatment by Dr. Patricia Spain Ward,
a leading contributor to the OTA report, concluded just the opposite: "More
recent literature leaves no doubt that Hoxsey's formula does indeed
contain many plant substances of marked therapeutic activity." In
his recently published book, When Healing Becomes a Crime, Kenny
Ausubel chronicles the cancer establishment's unbridled—and
scientifically unsubstantiated—attacks against the
Hoxsey treatment and other promising new therapies, without
even bothering
to investigate
their effectiveness.
This is not the first time that American
Cancer Society claims of quackery have been called into
question or discredited.
A growing
number of other innovative therapies originally attacked
by the American Cancer Society are gaining acceptance.
These include
hyperthemia,
Tumor Necrosis Factor, (originally called Coleys' Toxin),
hydrazine sulfate, and Burzynski's antineoplastons. Well
over 100 promising
alternative nonpatented and nontoxic therapies have already
been
identified. Clearly, such treatments merit clinical testing
and evaluation, with ACS and NCI funds, using similar statistical
techniques and
criteria as those established for conventional chemotherapy.
Bypassing the blithely unresponsive NCI
and ACS, the National Institutes of Health created its own agency,
the Office
of Alternative Medicine
(OAM), in 1992 to study unconventional approaches to
treatment. In 1998, eight years after the OTA's report, Congress
upgraded
the OAM
to an independent institute, The National Center for
Complementary Alternative Medicine. Soon thereafter, the American
Cancer
Society begrudgingly abandoned its decades-long crusade
against "quackery."
Excerpted from “The
High Stakes of Cancer Prevention” by Samuel Epstein
and Liza Gross, Tikkun Magazine, Nov/Dec 2000 www.Tikkun.org
CONTACT:
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
Cancer Prevention Coalition
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Public Health
2121 W. Taylor St., MC 922
Chicago, IL 60612
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