There never has been long-term money in a cure for anything. There is a pile and a half of money in generating hope and prolonging the disease and eventually killing off the subject patient, by which time there is 'research' to be done and a slew of other patients to mine for cash. Rinse and repeat to infinity.

This should not surprise anyone.

I have often wondered about cutting people open and removing cancer. Granted it works much of the time but in the case of my mother (d. 1974) and my sibling, it seems once they were cut open that invited the cancer to grow new colonies elsewhere in the body.

No surprise here.

Susan: While it's possible (and documented), it's more likely that it was already in process of spreading when they did the surgery.

My close friend died in 2010 from cancer. His cancer actually grew during chemo, so this isn't a surprise to me.

My best friends son (23) is going through a terrible bout of cancer now. He was always short for his age and developed problems over a year ago. Cancer on his spine. They did a 22 hour operation where they laid him on his back, cut him open from his ribs to his privates....took his guts out and scraped his spine removing a bunch of nerves, put his guts back in stapled him shut let him heal for 48 hours then went in again, this time putting him on his stomach for an 17 hour operation, scraping more **** off of his spine and cutting out some nerves.... he's now 2" shorter, can not get an erection, can not walk, has catheters...etc.... and has been having chemo done for the last 5 months. We're trying to keep his spirits up but we can all see that he is losing his will to live. Don't know where to go from here...tryin' to keep my buddy from going off the deep end.....

Tank, +1. Same friend, and he'd be royally*****ed at reading this even if he never needed that kind of treatment.

"Dr. Terry Wahls learned how to properly fuel her body. Using the lessons she learned at the subcellular level, she used diet to cure her MS and get out of her wheelchair." Basically eat 3 plates of vegetables per day and no crap (no milk, coffee, sugar).

This doesn't surprise me. Most of my early career was spent in pharma. I left more than 15 years ago. I now make and design products used by pharma for analysis.

It's all a racket and there is no money in "finding a cure". The money is made in 'managing a disease.'

I can even tell you of tests performed on subjects where the ACTUAL dosage and purity of the drug administered was unknown! I refused to sign any documents after the fact (testing had been going on for 2 years)and left in less than 6 months. 1 year later the chief medical officer (physician) resigned the day before a FDA audit. Many 'unexplained' deaths had occurred during those drug trials. They were always making excuses. The company folded.

What really bothered me is the number for foreign PhDs that work for pharma under a work visa that can barely speak English. I often questioned their actual credentials to even be doing such work. It was obvious they didn't have a clue (or didn't care) at times.

On the other side - I've been part of firms that were responsible especially for drugs to combat Parksinson's Disease.

Agencies as the NCI are a joke. They once paid $22.00 per capsule for material that cost less than $0.12/capsule to manufacture and analyze. Its all about funneling monies to cronies.

Then we have the problem of FDA reviewers leaving the FDA and actually going to work for companies whose drug submissions they had been assigned to review. Its totally corrupt.

Today all you need to show is efficacy better than a placebo. Many decades ago it had to be that better efficacy or safety had to be proven against a pre-existing treatment.

Look at the treatments for Osteoporosis. The one advertised by Sally Fields on TV as the worst efficacy of any at the time.

Rand Paul attempted to chip away at the FDA's abusive powers a bit in May. His amendment was ultimately stricken from the bill that passed.

Ron Paul has introduced legislation to free up access to experimental therapies for terminal patients under compassionate use. It has been referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee. Only two co-sponsors. Probably going nowhere.

http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=c....

The compassionate use legislation would put the decision to make a last ditch effort with a promising therapy back to the patient and the physician. The patient would sign an informed consent statement that would essentially absolve the manufacturer of liability. Insurance plans including Medicare and Medicaid do not reimburse for nonapproved treatments and the patients would not be study subjects, so anyone seeking and receiving such therapy would need to pay out of pocket.

This could take quite a bit of power from the FDA, so don't expect this bill to go anywhere except away.

Is this really such a surprise? When I had cancer, the doctors were very clear with me about this. I was very fortunate and did not need chemo or radiation. I had thyroid cancer and I could have elected to have radioiodine ablation therapy as a "just in case" measure. I had a slightly more unusual form of thyroid cancer that radiation doesn't really do much to kill. I chose not to have the radioiodine ablation because it would significantly increase my risk of breast cancer later in life. (I was 18 at the time.)

Some doctors I have had in the past did not agree with my decision. One of them even wanted me to have the ablation 10 years after the fact, just in case. I fired him. Fortunately, the surgeon & endocrinologist that originally treated me supported my choice 100%. It's been almost 21 years, and no recurrence yet.

It sucks, but cancer still sucks and is a real devil to manage. Chemo has known side effects, even if this wasn't previously one of them, but it CAN save lives, and has saved many, or at the least extended them. In other cases it's done nothing but harm. It is still a valuable tool.

Isn't this what happened to Robin Roberts?

Fitz22, I'm very impressed with Dr. Wahl's story. It all makes a lot of sense. However, if you look at the frame of the video displayed in your post, her wheelchair is right there. She apparently was not to the point of being free enough from that wheelchair to be able to walking into the room and onto the stage with the confidence that she could make her presentation and get off the stage with any strength to spare.

Vernonb, 100% agree with your concern about the research and the researchers. One of the gastroenterology labs at M.D. Anderson in Houston was populated by contract Chinese researchers doing 1-2 year stints in Houston who conducted their business in Mandarin. The Chinese are notorious for stealing proprietary information. So one has to ask if this research was a method of funneling money to elites in China or a way of funneling research data to China so that products could be patented and commercialized there. Were these jobs reserved for relatives of usefully positioned Chinese officials? It never made much clear sense to me.

Poodlelover wrote..

Chemo has known side effects, even if this wasn't previously one of them, but it CAN save lives, and has saved many, or at the least extended them. In other cases it's done nothing but harm. It is still a valuable tool.

Without saying how many it's harmed vs helped, you can't say it's a valuable tool.

Maybe you have some data to share with us that would defend your claim, but please, don't just repeat mantras.

I would not be shocked if documents from 30 years ago came out showing that they knew this back then. The crap they got people believing is just ...well, unbelievable. They got all the women giving themselves cancer from the mammograms. They got just about the entire population frying their brains with cell phones and wifi. The list goes on and on. But what really gets me is how things like vitamin C and D have been relegated to crackpot cure category. When the real unbiased medical data shows that intravenous vitamin C therapy is a better cancer cure than chemo. And then people will say that there is no global eugenics conspiracy?! Ha. The head in the sand ignorance is astounding. How many people have to die for it to sink in? By the looks of it, at least 30%...

I listened to this show back in June which discussed link between Statins and Diabetes. http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-0....

Yep, Big Pharma can kill you.

My father died of cancer when he was 55...he was a smoker and a drinker big time, so it was largely brought on by the choices he made.

He was never more sick and miserable as the brief time he was on chemotherapy. The doctors never did a damn thing for him besides make him sicker. If I ever get it I will go the holistic route, you can keep your poison Big Rx.

Cancer is BIG BUSINESS. Why would they make medicine to cure it? Way to much profit in cancer.

Az,

Maybe the wheelchair was there to reinforce her point.

And perhaps it motivates her to continue with her new diet.

we all get cancer everyday.

mutant or abnormally growing cells have the ability to selectively kill themselves (called apoptosis) and the immune system is also responsible for killing off abnormal cells. thus, the cancers do not develop into distinct disease states and need no treatment to resolve on their own.

these normal and healthy processes depend on good nutrition and statistically, they depend on being able to heal damage at a rate faster than it occurs due to poisons, radiation, free radical and other factors.

if surgery is a precision rifle, chemotherapy is a shotgun. it's role is primarily to kill individual cells that metastisize to other parts of the body and at the cellular level.

once a tumor grows and organizes to the systemic level where it has it's own blood supply, a tough protein coat to avoid the immune system and starts to press on other body tissues and kill them, it is very difficult to kill with chemotherapy. similarly, if the cancer affects an organ like the pancreas or liver that is essential to life and to regulating the immune system, the game is much more complicated and the clock is ticking much faster.

i believe that chemotherapy does have value in many cases but should be used appropriately. and bad drugs with side effects more dangerous than the disease they are meant to treat should be weeded out of the market as soon as they are discovered.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of lymphoma (I was with her when the dr. said those words) and soon after had her first chemo treatment, which nearly killed her. She spent 3 weeks in the hospital and several months at her daughter's home recovering.

She refused further chemo and lived independently another five years with the "aggressive" cancer, eventually dying of other causes.

"Without saying how many it's harmed vs helped, you can't say it's a valuable tool.

Maybe you have some data to share with us that would defend your claim, but please, don't just repeat mantras."

Do you have data on the efficacy of a cast to set a broken leg?

Google "effectiveness chemotherapy". Unfortunately, a great many links will send you to chemtrail-like sites, but if you ignore the noise you find that chemotherapy is highly effective with some cancers (Hodgkins, Testicular) and limited for others (unfortunately the big number-killing ones):

http://media.mercola.com/imageserver/pub....

Big Pharma may make money treating, not curing, but there is no great conspiracy around of disease curing drugs discovered and locked in a room somewhere.

Medicine has a long way to progress, but if I ever get cancer I'm going to follow the advice of as many doctors as I can get my hands on, not stocking up on a pallet of berry oxidizer drinks I grabbed from Whole Foods.

Azusgm, Yes, and she seemed a bit wobbly on her feet at one point. But her situation appears to be much better -- and veggies don't have side effects. Gary Young of youngliving.com was supposedly paralyzed from the waist down when a tree fell on his head while logging. He got depressed in the wheelchair and stopped eating. Then he started feeling better and wondered why. It took years, but now he walks, is pain free, lifts weights, and, of all things, went jousting. He looked into the 3 cultures that had disease free longevity. The common denominators were: isolation from modern diets, relatively large amounts of vitamin C, glacial till drinking water, and fasting a month or so in late Winter since they literally ran out of food.

Garbage In, Garbage Out is getting pretty obvious nowadays.

I thought the surprise was not that chemo can lead to more cancer later on (if you survive the first bout with it) but that some chemo can cause the cancer it is being used to treat, to get worse.

I interviewed to work in a childrens cancer unit once and even then the nurses admitted, cure was not real but extending life is the goal. A kid can get a cancer, get chemo, live a few years and get a new cancer that the chemo was known to most likely be the cause of. But those extra years were the goal.