Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel? Today, 25 years and $1 trillion after the "War on Cancer" began, the situation facing most people with cancer is bleak. This explains why so many Americans are turning to innovative nontoxic alternative therapies (nutrition, herbs, shark cartilage, vaccines) for hope - to complement or replace conventional surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. In the past, these alternatives - no matter how promising - have gotten short shrift. In this white paper, we will investigate the background of this story, and explore several leading alternative therapies for cancer.
It was a particularly brilliant, late-afternoon, Baja California sun that highlighted a dozen American cancer patients slowly making their way on foot toward the U.S. Customs inspection station just across the border from San Diego. The diverse group of medical pilgrims had spent the day at a leading Tijuana clinic that mainly serves people from the U.S. who are interested in alternative, nontoxic herbal therapies. The American patients, most of them conspicuously weak, ill, and unable to walk very far, would normally have been allowed to remain in the minivan for the perfunctory customs check at the international border that was the midway point in their journey from the Mexican clinic back to their motel in the U.S. only a few miles away.
But on this day, a uniformed and armed U.S. official instead chose to go by the book. He insisted that all visitors returning from Mexico, no matter how sick, get out of the van and physically walk through the customs station (where only two questions are usually asked: "Are you a citizen of the U.S.?" and "Are you bringing back anything from Mexico?") before being allowed to continue their trip.
One of the American patients, a tiny, frail, elderly woman, was obviously too weak to walk. All at once, without any prompting or comment, the woman's powerfully-built, twenty-something son who was traveling with her picked his mother up in both of his arms, joined the line of slow-moving cancer patients, and gently carried his mother - limp, head dangling, eyes half open - the several hundred yards from the minivan to the U.S. customs building for the brief interview and back to the van for the continuation of the journey northward.
The powerful collection of images - denoting terminal illness, frustration, and despair - but also intense determination and an indefatigable fighting spirit - from the front lines of what is known as the "war on cancer." It is emblematic of the complex, and often conflicting, issues that continue to challenge people diagnosed with this terrible disease.
The underlying situation that prompted the woman with cancer and so many other Americans to seek answers in alternative treatments widely available south of the border (but generally illegal or difficult to find here at home) remains largely unchanged. Public opinion polls continue to find that Americans fear cancer more than any other illness, notwithstanding the AIDS epidemic. This concern is not unjustified: Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., and by the end of this decade it is expected to become the primary cause of death. By the year 2000, cancer treatment will be the single most widely practiced medical specialty. This year, over one million Americans will learn that they have cancer, and over 600,000 will die. The most significant bottom line is that the rates at which Americans get and die from cancer, regularly adjusted for demographic changes including the aging of the population, are rising every year.
Recent studies in the scientific literature have identified the official cancer war as a "qualified failure" (for example, the New England Journal of Medicine, May 8, 1986). According to John Cairns, M.D. (Scientific American, November, 1985), chemotherapy drugs, the leading conventional therapy for cancer, help no more than five percent of patients who receive them (while over fifty percent of cancer patients are treated with drugs). A similar conclusion reached in 1989 by the distinguished German epidemiologist Dr. Ulrich Abel - that for 80 percent of patients treated with chemotherapy, the treatment simply has no effect - was major news in Western Europe. Regarding the unchecked epidemic of breast cancer in women, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (February 6, 1993) acknowledged the "failures of primary [conventional breast cancer] therapy" and the "static overall mortality from [cancer] of the breast," and pondered editorially, "Have we lost our way?" The Lancet suggested that the time has arrived "to challenge dogma and redirect research efforts along more fruitful lines."
In the face of these and many other officially reported limitations of the orthodox cancer war, it is not a surprise that people diagnosed with cancer are turning increasingly to alternative therapies. Testifying at an unprecedented U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on alternative medicine on June 24, 1993, David Eisenberg, M.D., an internist, Harvard University instructor, and collaborator with Bill Moyers on the popular 1993 PBS series and best-selling book "Healing and the Mind", noted ". . .research indicates that a high percentage of individuals suffering from . . .cancer use alternative therapies." In January, 1993, Eisenberg and his Harvard colleagues published a seminal study in the New England Journal of Medicine which concluded that one in three adult Americans is currently using some form of alternative medicine - including acupuncture, botanical or herbal medicine, chiropractic, clinical nutrition, homeopathy, Naturopathic medicine, high-dose vitamin therapy, and a variety of other methods - for the prevention and treatment of conditions both serious and minor. In terms of cancer, with over one million Americans diagnosed annually with malignancies and several million more undergoing treatment at any one time, a "high percentage" of people using medical alternatives translates to a very considerable number.
Contributing to the growing popularity of alternative therapies are questions about the safety of the environment and conventional medicine's commitment to encourage truly effective prevention. Hardly a day seems to pass without an account in the media about something newly reported to be a suspected cancer cause. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, it has been known conclusively for several decades that 80-90 percent of human cancers are associated with factors in the environment, including toxins in the air, water, and food; carcinogens in the workplace; and dietary imbalances, cigarette smoking, and other personal lifestyle choices. In the view of John Bailar, III, M.D., respected biostatistician and former editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, "If we are to effectively prevent cancer, we will have to change our diets and our smoking habits; we're also going to have to clean up our environment, change industrial processes, and do any number of things that will be difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and intrusive."
Such strategies, while unquestionably difficult to implement, ultimately would seem to offer the best hope for overcoming cancer, and many other degenerative diseases, as well. As John Knowles, M.D., then president of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote in 1977, "The health of human beings is determined by their behavior, their food, and the nature of their environment." He went on to observe that orthodox medical interventions "have made only small contributions to the reduction of the death rate during the past 100 years" - a mere ten percent, he estimated. Or as John Cairns, M.D., professor of microbiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted in 1986, "It's a mistake to think that the war on cancer can be won with treatment."
John Bailar suggested one of the challenges to implementing a serious prevention strategy when he wrote in 1990: "A change [to prevention] at the National Cancer Institute would mean a massive disruption in ideas and momentum in the research community, and in the businesses that support that research community."
Seen in its most basic light, preventing disease is not as economically, or professionally, rewarding as treating disease, the effectiveness of the treatments notwithstanding. Historically, medical orthodoxy has tended to approach prevention in terms of medical intervention. Typically, prevention is equated with early detection (mammography screening for breast cancer) or drug treatment ("chemoprevention" - like giving women who are without any symptoms a powerful drug, tamoxifen, in hopes it will "prevent" breast cancer). "Prevention" has also been defined recently as performing double mastectomies on women who do not have cancer but who supposedly may be at heightened risk of someday developing the disease. True prevention (eliminating cancer causes from the environment and/or informing people of effective personal preventive options like eating an anticancer diet) typically takes a backseat.
In contrast to expensive, invasive, high-tech conventional medicine stand several non-toxic alternatives - more popular than ever, and representing an entirely different paradigm or system of healing.
Alternative medicine is often referred to as holistic: treating the whole person and not simply his/her disease. As turn-of-the-century physician William Osler stated, "It is more important to know what kind of person has the disease than what kind of disease the person has."
It is possible that we are approaching a defining moment, or turning point, for alternative medicine as a whole, and for unconventional cancer therapies in particular. Alternative cancer treatments - from vitamins A and C to "Zen" macrobiotics - have long been inextricably linked with - indeed, have often comprised the leading edge of - the broader field of alternative, non-toxic healing.
For every alternative cancer therapy that one hears about (like laetrile, macrobiotic diets, vitamin C, creative visualization), there may be ten or twenty equally, or more, promising ones in clinical use or being researched and tested (albeit usually quietly and outside of conventional institutions). They range from primary treatments that may be classically traditional or highly innovative to complementary approaches that can be used along with, and without directly challenging, conventional methods of treating cancer (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy). Significantly, alternative cancer treatments, often routinely lumped together and dismissed out of hand as quackery, currently comprise the only real alternatives to the standard orthodox treatments that - despite their limitations - have completely dominated the field of oncology (cancer treatment) since World War II. Occasionally, aspects of these non-toxic alternatives, such as limited dietary guidelines or stress management, are accepted grudgingly by the mainstream.
For decades, momentum has been building to reposition many of the most credible alternative therapies away from the shadowy, underground fringes that they have often inhabited to their more appropriate places alongside of - or even within - the huge conventional medical Establishment. The accumulation of positive clinical data, impressive quality of innovative research, and, most importantly, the public's increasing utilization of alternative therapies all suggest that this evolution is now inexorable.
But serious obstacles may yet block the path to what many people feel is a well-deserved alternative health Renaissance. In the view of leading proponents of objective inquiries into alternative medicine, the enemies of clinical alternatives - so-called "Medical McCarthyites" equipped with blacklists and other tools of repression - remain powerful players in medical/political policymaking circles. Moreover, the accelerating realignment of the nation's entire health care delivery system, with historically anti-alternative forces like HMOs, the insurance industry, and government regulators poised to exert greater influence, heralds an uncertain future for the broad-based landscape of alternative healing.
An exploration of the cancer quagmire, the most promising non-toxic alternatives, and recent developments in the science and politics of medicine may help to shed light on the future of alternative healing overall: Is it "21st century medicine" as its proponents insist, or an approach mired in the past and increasingly incompatible with our high-tech medical future?
The "War on Cancer" was officially declared by the medical Establishment and the Federal Government in 1971, and enthusiastically signed into law by President Richard Nixon. In its twenty-fifth year now, it has in reality become a "medical Vietnam" - a no-win war-without-end that is a consistently profitable part of a defacto domestic "permanent war economy" - the medical-industrial complex - the fortunes of which, as in the Vietnam war itself, are tied to the perpetuation of a tragic and largely unnecessary conflict. The strategy of the cancer war presents a stark case history of the politics and economics, as well as the failure, of modern medicine.
Since 1971, over one trillion dollars has been spent on conventional cancer research and treatment. The current cost is at least $110 billion a year - over ten percent (10%) of all U.S. medical expenditures, and two percent (2%) of the entire Gross National Product. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - these unprecedented costs, the cancer Establishment remains largely closed to most truly independent, innovative ideas. In the view of journalist Robert Houston, the war on cancer has become a "war on answers." Patrick McGrady, Jr., a science writer and founder of CANHELP (a clearinghouse for information on leading edge cancer treatments), puts it more succinctly: "Whoever comes up with a cure for cancer," he told me recently, "will be judged guilty of malpractice - because the definition of 'malpractice' today is 'operating outside the mainstream.' And for sure, whoever cures cancer is going to come from far outside of the mainstream."
Supporting McGrady is substantial evidence of an entrenched, reactionary resistance to exploring and integrating independent, innovative ideas that might well offer effective solutions to the cancer problem. This resistance includes the distribution of blacklists, continued official rejection of innovative research proposals, SWAT-team style raids on the offices of alternative cancer specialists, prosecutions of progressive clinicians and researchers, and numerous other appalling harassments more typical of a dictatorship than a free society.
One ironic victim of this "medical McCarthyism" is Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D. Burzynski is one of the leading contemporary pioneers in the field of nontoxic cancer therapy. His therapeutic discoveries are interesting, and his personal story is fascinating and instructive. Burzynski's work was reported on positively on the probing network television investigative series 20/20 (ABC-TV, October 22, 1981) and Street Stories (CBS-TV, July 23, 1993), and more recently, ABC-TV's Nightline and CBS This Morning (April and March, 1995, respectively).
One of the youngest and brightest M.D.-Ph.D.s in his native Poland, Burzynski left home in 1970 in search of personal and professional freedom in the non-communist West. What he found instead in the U.S., he has said, was a situation reminiscent of the authoritarian one-party state he had left behind - a scientific system in America that was run like a Communist politburo, where true innovation and independent discovery were frowned on and where pioneering thinkers were relegated to a "medical gulag."
Through the mid-1970s, Burzynski was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The research projects he worked on received funding from traditional sources including the federal government. Burzynski's decision in 1977 to leave Baylor and start up his own small research and treatment facility where he and his colleagues could pursue their myriad ideas and discoveries and treat late-stage cancer patients free of bureaucratic rigidity and interference, however, did not sit well with the medical powers that be.
Before he left Baylor but especially after he began working independently, Burzynski and his associates published numerous scientific papers on antineoplastons - his term for the non-toxic urinary peptides that he discovered and that form the basis of his novel approach to treating cancer. Burzynski followed the accepted practice of publishing scientific papers on his discoveries, which he initially tested in laboratory tissue cultures and later in animals and humans.
Typical of Burzynski's extraordinary results were the outcomes for early groups of advanced cancer patients treated with antineoplastons: 60 percent enjoyed objective remission, 47 percent experienced complete remission, and 20 percent survived for over five years without cancer. These and other results are far superior to anything reported then or now for standard cancer treatments. (For example, in 1985 interleukin-2 was heavily promoted by orthodoxy, supposedly as a highly promising new treatment after a single study showed it to have been associated with a complete remission from cancer in only one patient out of twenty-four treated - a positive response rate of only four percent!)
By choosing to work independently, on his own, outside of a mainstream institutional setting, Burzynski ran up against the closed mindsets and vested interests that dominate orthodox cancer research and treatment. In 1983, the influential American Cancer Society (ACS), without actually testing Burzynski's therapy or even visiting his facility, added Burzynski's antineoplastons to its list of "unproved" or "questionable" methods - a kind of blacklisting that typically represents the first step in official marginalization. In the view of journalist Houston and other independent observers, it is highly unlikely that a scientist whose name appears on this list can ever succeed in gaining official funding or recognition of any kind. "It's like trying to get out of hell," Houston quips.
For twenty-five years, Patrick McGrady, Sr., was science editor of the influential American Cancer Society, and its principal "spin doctor" in the media. It is interesting to recall McGrady's words to me in a 1978 interview, in light of the ACS's later condemnation of Burzynski. "Nobody in the science and medical departments [at the ACS]," McGrady said, "is capable of doing real science. They are wonderful pros who know how to raise money. They don't know how to prevent cancer or cure patients; instead, they close the door on innovative ideas."
On July 17, 1985, with the cancer society actively denigrating him, Burzynski's institute in Houston was raided by agents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and at least one armed federal marshal. Citing what journalist Houston, who has studied this case in detail, calls "a vague warrant that allowed search for unspecified 'violations,'" the raiders seized Burzynski's office file cabinets containing all of his scientific, medical, financial, and personal records - including the private, confidential medical records of all of his patients. (Also searched were Burzynski's office's trash cans and his personal briefcase.) The continued difficulty in gaining access to over 200,000 of his own medical files has seriously impaired Burzynski's ability to treat many of his patients.
To this date, over ten years later, no federal charges against Burzynski arising from the 1985 raid have ever been filed. Still, the FDA inexplicably continues to hold onto the doctor's records. In addition, Burzynski is currently awaiting the results of a series of investigations in Texas, the culmination of years of official local harassment, in which his license to practice medicine has been challenged by state officials. Meanwhile, largely because of intense public interest in antineoplastons, the FDA announced in 1989, six years after Burzynski first applied, that it had finally approved an investigational new drug application (IND), the first bureaucratic step that would allow Burzynski's antineoplastons to be studied in a small human clinical trial. Six years later, a representative of Burzynski said that she is "guardedly optimistic" that the 1989 IND, and three more recent ones, will ultimately go forward. As of this writing, however, none of the clinical tests of antineoplastons has actually begun.
Opponents of alternative cancer therapies insist that most proponents lack the requisite training, experience, and credentials to play an active role in the field. In its influential publication Unproven Methods of Cancer Management, for example, the ACS claims that only a "few" such proponents have M.D. or Ph.D degrees, and that many have suspicious "multiple unusual degrees." An examination of the ACS's current list of "unproven" or "questionable" methods, however, reveals that, like Dr. Burzynski, a majority of proponents - in fact, a whooping 77 percent - have valid medical degrees or doctorates in relevant scientific disciplines, many of them obtained with distinction from leading academic institutions.
On March 24, 1995, just hours after Burzynski appeared on CBS This Morning with three of his patients who are in remission, federal authorities raided his clinic. According to a copyrighted account at the Burzynski Research Institute (BRI) Internet World Wide Web site, "Seven federal agents herded employees into a room and kept them there until they filled out forms with personal information. They then spent seven hours rifling file cabinets and drawers, leaving with boxes full of patient records and other documents.
"Shortly thereafter the FDA began serving clinic employees with subpoenas 'commanding' them to testify before a Federal Grand Jury investigating Burzynski. Federal prosecutors representing the FDA [subsequently] subpoenaed three patients and eleven employees, including Burzynski. In addition, prosecutors have ordered him to turn over tens of thousands of pages of documents, including more patient records and diagnostic films."
On November 20, 1995, three days after FDA Commissioner David Kessler appeared before a congressional subcommittee to face intensive questioning about his agency’s behavior against Burzynski, the Houston U.S. Attorney’s office announced a 75-count indictment of Burzynski.
According to BRI, "Most of the counts are for giving the drugs [antineoplastons] to patients or patients’ friends or family in Texas, who subsequently took the drugs out of state. What happened is that for twelve years the FDA has been desperately looking for evidence that Burzynski shipped the drugs out of state, and for twelve years they have failed to do so.
"Suddenly - finding themselves under attack and desperate for an indictment of any sort - they concocted the theory that giving the drugs to patients who take it out of state constitutes interstate commerce of an unapproved drug.
"This is of course ridiculous. The clinic has been giving the drugs to out-of-state patients since 1983. The FDA and [U.S. Justice Department] have known about it since 1985 at the latest, when they seized all patient records and conducted a long grand-jury investigation. Why wasn’t it a crime then? Why does it suddenly become a crime now, when the FDA is in desperate need of an indictment for political purposes?
"Why didn’t they write a letter in 1985 telling us to stop giving the drug to patients who live out of state? Why didn’t they go to court and get a judge’s order?"
Although an earlier action by Texas state medical authorities against Burzynski was thrown out, the Texas State Board of Medical examiners appealed the decision to the Third District Court of Appeals. In early February 1996 the appellate court ruled against Burzynski. According to an article in the Internet newsgroup misc.health.alternative, "The [appeals court] upheld the license suspension conditions imposed on Burzynski by that state's Medical Board, which had been overturned by the district court.
"District Judge Sam Lake has also disallowed Burzynski to dispense antineoplastons to out of state patients - since 250 of the 280 patients that the clinic now treats are from out of state, the clinic might close."
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