Thanks for the reference. I appreciate it and stand corrected on that point. I’ll stand with my more general point, that one cannot disconfirm an idea by declaring that there is “no evidence” - of the sort that would be unlikely to exist because of costs or other constraints. My point, as I made clear, has nothing to do with Burzynski, but only with the logic of an anti-Burzynski argument.
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There is no need to imagine “a vast conspiracy of big companies keeping natural cures from a sick public.” All of our institutions work hand in hand. Under capitalism, corporate firms exist to make a profit for their shareholders. Pharma is profitable. Pharma markets to doctors, and also engages a large proportion of them in their marketing efforts. Our insurance institution, also governed by capitalist norms, pays for pharma treatments. Docs can hardly afford the time (or frustration) in mentoring patients in healthy life styles. That “sick public” you joke about includes all of those folks with obesity, cardiac disease, joint diseases, cancers, and diabetes II, all treated at great profit by pharma-medicine. Are you gong to pull that “no evidence” trick about the impact of unhealthy lifestyles on these diseases? No, I thought not. The “natural cures” you joke about including walking and eating a healthy and balanced diet. Who, exactly, will make out in capitalist medicine from getting people up and walking, or eating sensibly? And let’s see, do you deny that pharma pays for much of the pharma research and controls the results and has final say on what the researchers can publish? So I say that this joke about that “vast conspiracy of big companies keeping natural cures from a sick public” is nothing but a cheap mind game, friend.
There are heaps upon heaps of research and papers saying that exercise and eating sensibly are good for you and will prevent or reduce the impact of a whole bunch of diseases - and they’re even known as “lifestyle diseases”. Doctors know and mention this, and it’s common filler in mass media.
So tell me again how this is being kept down by the pharma industry?
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Your point does fall apart in that diet and exercise are almost universally recommended by doctors. I would be hard pressed to find one that didn’t make recommendations (I personally have always gotten at least some mention of it, more so when I was heavier, but even when I was at a healthy weight my doctor wanted to make sure I was getting decent exercise.)
Sure, those drugs are recommended and prescribed in situations where there is immediate danger - if your cholesterol is so high it’s dangerous for instance, you would get a prescription for something to manage it…along with advice on how to ensure that better eating and exercise are part of your life.
The problem with diet and exercise is that they take a while to impact you positively, whereas drugs can take effect immediately, so diet and exercise are a long-term plan. Can you provide any evidence that anything other than what me and dnebdal have mentioned is happening?
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Believe it or not, most doctors and researchers who enter the field of oncology do so because they want to help people who have cancer. More than a few of them have dreamt of “curing” cancer. Hell, countless executives in “Big Pharma” corporations have either had cancer themselves or watched a loved one die from it.
Do you really believe that of all those individuals only Dr. Burzynski cares enough about cancer patients to investigate a promising new treatment?
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Rawr - capitalism bad!
If you think drug companies are keeping drugs that work under wraps, or simply not working on find a cure, you’re being silly. The prestige and recognition alone would be worth something ground breaking like a cancer cure.
In all fairness, I don’t think that’s the point he was making. It sounds like he was mostly being picky about the specifics of the argument.
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Thanks, you are correct. I do not support him. Or any of the other quick cancer cure artists either. It is so easy to slip from “I am not a big fan of big pharma” to “I am a big fan of anyone who opposes big pharma”. I am not.
The success rate in the cancer cure biz is near zero. We have made huge strides in cardiac disease but almost nothing in cancer. The war against cancer is mis-conceived. Cancer is a complex set of diseases that arise from a complex web of causal factors. Many, maybe most, of these are tied up with environment and lifestyle. Even those with genetic predispositions need additional stresses to trigger cancer as a disease entity. Those who express cancers with certain genetically determined traits have something akin to a death sentence. Those with other cancers can sometimes be successfully treated. Almost all would have been healthier and even cancer free with better environmental and lifestyle factors. If anyone in the cancer field today believes that they have treatments that significantly affect morbidity and mortality of the aggressive cancers, they are hopelessly out of touch with research. Many of the existing treatments themselves generate additional cancers or cause existing ones to metasticise. If anyone is guilty of causing ‘false hope’ in cancer patients, it is pharma.
That’s why reputable oncologists don’t claim to sell cancer “cures.” There are cancer treatments that can dramatically increase a patient’s odds of longer-term survival, but anyone who claims to have a “cure” for such a complex set of diseases is selling snake oil.
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This just came out. I’m not a scientist, so maybe you could interpret this. Reading it as a layman, it seems like good news for Burzynski.
Burzynski Clinic Presents Over Five Years Survival Data From Phase II Trials of ANP for Inoperable Brain Tumors at the Congress
https://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=21535&Section=Disease
All that article says is that the Burzynski Clinic made a presentation about their non-peer-reviewed, as-yet-unsubtantiated claims to a bunch of people in Beijing. And let’s not leave out this little detail:
Source: Burzynski Clinic
So that was really just a pro-Buyzynski press release.
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Hey, how about that, another username, created just hours ago, with good news about Burzynski’s promising cancer treatment!
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Ignoring all the other obvious faults in your comment that people here have pointed out, if I am not to believe research conducted by the National Cancer Institute (which is actually part of the Department of Health and Human Services, a government agency, and not exactly “big pharma”) then whose studies am I supposed to believe?
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We are not playing semantic games here. Or at least I am not. The average extension of life in the last several decades is about seven years. Cancer survival accounts for only a miniscule part of this. Most cancer treatments do not significantly reduce morbidity or mortality. Many of them accelerate metastasis. The net gain has been very very small.
The best defense against dying from cancer is, by far, living in a relatively good environment and enjoying a healthy lifestyle. The best medical treatments for cancer, if caught early, are surgical, not pharmacological.
…Publicised through “Business-Wire”, a kind of press bureau that will take your money and tout your press release. What we used to call an “advertising agency”.
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Edit: I have no idea how to quote.
Uh, can you cite some sources on this? My understanding is that while we hven’t come close to a cure for cancer, survival rates are higher than they’ve ever been, and that matches the data I found while looking.
This shows a fairly significant increase in lifespan for cancer patients - can you provide evidence that shows otherwise?
another edit: This paper reports the following in it’s summary as well:
I am honestly interested to know otherwise and would like to hear more about this, because the above matches what I currently know and a well-sourced article to the opposite would be great to read through.
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By saying “cancers do remiss on their own” I assume you are referring to the concept of “spontaneous remission.” Conventional oncology is always referring to the importance of evidenced-based medicine in the form of clinical trials. As a cancer patient who had exhausted all forms of aggressive conventional therapy from '94-'97 only to be told that nothing more could be done for me, I did not think about the supposed importance of FDA approvals.
Not only did I reach complete cancer free status after 17 months of ANP therapy but I have both remained cancer free and not had a secondary cancer caused by the aggressive toxic therapies that I underwent. I am well beyond spontaneous remission at this point.
David Emerson
PeopleBeatingCancer.org
Is your specific claim that your specific case does not meet the criteria for spontaneous remission? My understanding is that spontaneous remission does not require it to re-occur at a later date or anything of that nature.
