Web healingdaily.com

Do you have children? Help them do better in school! Visit my other site gameboylearning.com!

Why aren't non-harmful cancer therapies approved ?

There are hundreds of reasons.

• Because it is difficult to study them properly. The main criticism that the medical establishment has of alternative cancer treatments is a lack of traditional scientific testing and documentation. One reason for the absence of mainstream research on alternative cancer treatments is that the funding institutions that provide the $$ for cancer research do not support research into alternative cancer therapies. More on the politic$ of cancer here.

• This situation creates a double bind for alternative therapies: they are criticized for not having adequate research to document their effectiveness, yet funding is not made available for such studies.

• Cancer, like heart disease, is a multidimensional disease. It is nearly impossible to study the effects of diet, therapeutic agents, and other influences in the traditional research framework. Investigating several variables calls for dozens of experiments and would require impossible amounts of research funding.

• The traditional experimental approach calls for checking one substance at a time, and this approach leads to a search for a "magic bullet" that would be the cure for cancer. However, the very nature of this traditional research methodology ignores the multidimensional nature of the disease. What is needed is new ways to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative cancer therapies.

• The reason for the lack of research into alternative cancer therapies is that many of those therapies are offered as part of an integrated program. For example, the National Cancer Institute's laetrile (Vitamin B-17) study produced negative results. However, proponents of laetrile point out that the NCI study ignored diet, nutritional supplements, and other substances that are synergistically involved in producing laetrile's beneficial effects.

• It is impossible to design a double-blind study to find out whether combinations of those different elements: dental cleanup, house/office cleanup, colon cleanse, kidney cleanse, liver/gallbladder cleanse, "detoxification diet", dietary supplements, exercise, meditation, massage, acupuncture, oxygen therapy, Essiac, love, support, etc, really cures cancer because double-blind studies are designed only to determine whether one or few therapies work. But you can compare the results of the multidimensional therapies with therapies offered by medical establishment and it is clear which therapy is more effective.

• Natural therapies are often individually suited for every single patient. However many patients you have, that's how many therapies you got. Just like the cancer diet. You have as many individual diets as you have individuals. They can not be evaluated as one single therapy.

• Natural therapies are holistic therapies, dealing and working with body, mind, spirit, and environment. We still do not have a science to evaluate this. In other words, most natural programs for curing cancer can not be proven effective by the same means as conventional therapies. Breaking programs in separate pieces and evaluating every single piece individually rarely yields positive results.

• Normal FDA approval for a new cancer drug takes about 10 years and cost up to $250 million. Many drugs are well researched and marketed in other countries, but remain unapproved by the FDA in the U.S. This is especially true for a number of the alternative cancer therapies.

• Most importantly, drug companies, which fund many of the studies for new drugs, have little interest in pursuing alternative cancer treatments, since they are generally inexpensive and cannot be PATENTED. Drug companies are in the business of making money with a drug that can be patented. You can not patent anything that exists in nature. You cannot patent sprouts or wheatgrass juice. There is no money to be made from spending millions of dollars on research to show that vitamin C helps to fight cancer, since anyone can buy the substance at the corner drugstore.

You can find out more about how public relations firms shape and manipulate the public's beliefs on the "Why you believe what you believe" page.

© 2002 by Marc Leduc