DailyDirt: Imagine There's No Cancer...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In 2015, an estimated 1.6 million patients were diagnosed with cancer and over half a million died from it. We've previously pointed out some cancer research that could lead to promising new treatments, and it looks like we're making significant progress in the fight against the many forms of this deadly disease. Using the body's own immune system to fight cancer is a growing strategy that seems to be working. Check out a few of these minor successes. After you've finished checking out those links, take 10% off any $50+ order from our Daily Deals using the promo code DAILYDIRT.
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Filed Under: biotech, cancer, cancer research, dna, drugs, health, imlygic, immunotherapy, jimmy carter, keytruda, medicine, pharmaceuticals, treatment, tumor


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  1. icon
    Nicolas (profile), 30 Dec 2015 @ 5:24pm

    Same old, same old

    For many decades we're heard of the exciting new cancer treatments in the pipeline. There is scant evidence that the new prospects will be better than the old failures. It's damned ridiculous to use the single example of Jimmy Carter as a relevant example. There have always been atypical spontaneous remissions; and for all we know Carter's cancer will reappear next month. Some skepticism is in order.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Dec 2015 @ 7:11pm

    Do cancers get cancer?

    Do those delicious sea-dwellers get cancer?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Aaron Walkhouse (profile), 30 Dec 2015 @ 7:12pm

    Cancer is Big Business and the shareholders don't plan
    to go out of business within their lifetimes
    .   ;]

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Dec 2015 @ 2:09am

    Seems like every tenth person I know of is getting cancer as of late. Kind of odd to me to be honest.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    dar, 31 Dec 2015 @ 5:15am

    Re: big biz

    -this pretty well sums it up:
    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/08/joseph-mercola/theres-no-cancer-cure/

    Why Medicine Won’t Allow Cancer to Be Cured
    By Joseph Mercola

    Imagine a commercial plane crashed and there were some fatalities involved. You can be sure that would make the headline of every major newspaper. Well, we have the equivalent of 8-10 planes crashing
    EVERY DAY with everyone on board dying from cancer.

    Nearly two million Americans are diagnosed with cancer every year—one person out of three will be hit with a cancer diagnosis at some time in their lives, in spite of the massive technological advances over the past half-century.

    Western medicine is no closer to finding a “cancer cure,” while cancer has grown into a worldwide epidemic of staggering proportions. The statistics speak for themselves:
    In the early 1900s, one in 20 people developed cancer
    In the 1940s, one in 16 people developed cancer
    In the 1970s, it was one in 10
    Today, it’s one in three!
    According to the CDC, about 1,660,290 (1.66 million) new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 20131. If overall death rates are falling, why are incidence rates still on the rise? The answer is simple: the 40-year “war on cancer” has been a farce.

    The cancer epidemic is a dream for Big Pharma, and their campaigns to silence cancer cures have been fierce, which is a tale well told in the documentary film featured above, Cancer: Forbidden Cures.

    The Cancer Machine

    Please understand that cancer is big business. The cancer industry is spending virtually nothing of its multi-billion dollar resources on effective prevention strategies, such as dietary guidelines, exercise and obesity education. Instead, it pours its money into treating cancer, not preventing or curing it.

    Why would they shoot their cash cow? If they can keep the well-oiled Cancer Machine running, they will continue to make massive profits on chemotherapy drugs, radiotherapy, diagnostic procedures and surgeries.

    The typical cancer patient spends $50,000 fighting the disease. Chemotherapy drugs are among the most expensive of all treatments, many ranging from $3,000 to $7,000 for a one-month supply.

    If the cancer industry allows a cure, then their patient base goes away. It makes more sense to keep a steady stream of cancer patients alive, but sick and coming back for more. How did this societal monster come about?
    The featured documentary is enormously informative. It details how the pharmaceutical industry partnered with the American Medical Association (AMA) in an ingenious plan to overtake the medical system in four swift, easy steps, back in the early 1900s. In a nutshell, it went something like this:

    International bankers that own the drug and chemical companies gained control over the medical education system over 100 years ago.
    They gave grants to the AMA and leading medical schools in exchange for seats on their board and the ability to control policy.
    Finally, they cleverly engineered their control of virtually every federal regulatory agency relating to the practice of medicine.
    ‘Don’t You DARE Cure Anyone!’

    In spite of the enormous amounts of money funneled into cancer research today, two out of three cancer patients will be dead within five years after receiving all or part of the standard cancer treatment trinity—surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. This is not too surprising when you consider that two of the three are carcinogenic themselves! One study estimated that chemotherapy benefits about one of every 20 people receiving it.

    Over the last hundred years, a number of natural cancer treatments have been developed and used successfully to treat patients in the US and other countries.
    All have been vehemently discounted, silenced, and pushed under the rug by the medical monopoly, with physicians and researchers attacked, smeared, sent to prison, and professionally ruined for daring to defy the medical establishment.

    To this day, with respect to credibility in medicine, “quack” is synonymous with “competition.”
    In order to protect the medical monopoly,
    any viable natural treatment
    is met with massive opposition by the pharmaceutical and medical industries.
    Drug companies have no interest in natural agents that they cannot patent, because they interfere with their revenue stream.
    They will go—and have gone—to extreme measures to prevent the truth about effective natural treatments (competitive threats) from reaching the public.

    The FDA is now, thanks to PDUFA, primarily funded by the drug companies and is complicit in this process. They restrict competition in the guise of protecting the public, when the reality is they are protecting the profits of the drug companies...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Dec 2015 @ 7:11am

    Fasting...

    There is some research that fasting is proving to be a great anti-cancer treatment.

    But who am I kidding, in this age of pill popping people can't be bothered with that! Just give me a pill doc, I am a slave to the system already!

    The body will heal itself if we supply it with the proper nutrition and if we avoid over stuffing the system with extra or bad calories burdening the system with the extra management overhead!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 31 Dec 2015 @ 8:14am

    There will never be a "the cure for cancer" for one simple reason: there is no such thing as "the cancer" to be cured. There are over 100 distinct types of cells in your body, and each one has its own individual way of going haywire. (Some have more than one!) Each one is its own distinct disease, and needs to be treated in its own way.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. icon
    hoare (profile), 31 Dec 2015 @ 9:54am

    saw this on TV 2 nights ago....

    http://www.factbuckscounty.org/revolutionary-treatment-uses-hiv-to-reprogram-cells-into-fight ing-cancer/

    The treatment] had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment ... used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

    http://keranews.org/post/how-doctors-are-using-hiv-fight-cancer

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 31 Dec 2015 @ 11:57am

    Re:

    This is not actually new: https://xkcd.com/938/

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. icon
    JoeCool (profile), 31 Dec 2015 @ 12:27pm

    Re:

    It's the same thing with "THE flu" or "the COMMON cold" - they both have hundreds of varieties that are all completely different other than giving similar symptoms. People who claim that the medical industry isn't trying to cure cancer are just deluded. There is no way to "cure cancer" without specifying exactly which of the hundreds of cancers you mean. Other than the general definition of growing out of control, nearly every cancer is different.

    That's where the promise of genetic engineering is working toward - a cheap and quick way to identify and target very specific targets, like one kind of cancer, or one kind of flu virus. Eventually, the hope is you go to the doctor who does a genetic test of the flu or cancer, programs the machine, and you get a medicine tailored to that specific problem.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Dec 2015 @ 1:46pm

    Imagine there's no Facebook...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Dec 2015 @ 9:11pm

    Hard sell for marketers

    "Wouldn't it be great to give your cancer herpes?"

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 Jan 2016 @ 8:13am

    US only

    "an estimated 1.6 million patients were diagnosed with cancer" In the US?

    On a related note, could you make your Techdirt deals available worldwide?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. icon
    Nicolas (profile), 1 Jan 2016 @ 8:24am

    Re: US only

    So, what is your point? Cancer is a common disease? How original.

    Cancer Statistics Report: Deaths Down 20% in 2 Decades
    http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/cancer-statistics-report-deaths-down-20-percent-in-2-decade s

    link to this | view in thread ]

  15. icon
    Nicolas (profile), 1 Jan 2016 @ 8:25am

    Re: Re: big biz

    A very dumb conspiracy theory. Up there with oil companies conspire to prevent the development of electric cars.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  16. identicon
    Jose_X, 4 Jan 2016 @ 7:16pm

    Re: Re: big biz

    You may want to look up Mercola's articles on vitamin d or the interviews with Carole Baggerly.

    I don't think I have had cancer, but vit d has been super helpful to me for other problems i had a couple years back [eliminate: pains in chest -- heart/lung area primarily; problems breathing at night; head pains when falling asleep lying flat; heartbeat skipping; horrible feelings overall after eating lots of cheese before going to bed (fat absorbs vit d from blood); frequent night time bathroom trips; .. and some others.]

    low vit d is a silent killer since there are many diverse symptoms possible and harm to body coming from unexpected places (eg, careful with colonoscopies because of stress to internal organs that vitamin d with calcium help keep bound tightly.. and one of problems with cancer is cells break off from tissue).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  17. identicon
    Jose_X, 4 Jan 2016 @ 7:24pm

    Re: Fasting...

    Onions and other veggies appear to help lower cancer rates in part by cutting off the food to cancer from us over-stuffing, but a bigger anti-cancer aid to modern society might be vitamin d supplements since people nowadays hardly get noon-time sunlight unless they are blocking vit d production by overusing sunblock lotion or being behind windows (outdoor workers 3x less likely to get cancer).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  18. identicon
    Jose_X, 4 Jan 2016 @ 8:07pm

    Re: Re: Fasting...

    clarifications:

    Not all parts of the world get uvb. Those that get less (away from equator.. and in winter) have higher rates of all cancers.

    The study of 3x is for melanoma. In general outdoor workers get the safer skin cancers earlier in life and more frequently (but it's the people with less vitamin d, mostly indoor workers, that tend to get the melanomas).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  19. icon
    Nicolas (profile), 4 Jan 2016 @ 10:34pm

    Re: Re: Re: big biz

    Mercola is a quack.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  20. icon
    Nicolas (profile), 4 Jan 2016 @ 10:48pm

    Re: Re: Re: Fasting...

    Doesn't it strike you as odd that humans may have never adapted to limited sunshine over many millennia? How could it be that for much of the year where most people live it would be impossible to get enough vitamin D without pills? That would be a might peculiar adaptation.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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