cogreslab said:
I suspect Rolfe is a part of that huge industry, whose ultimate aim is profit not curative treatment, and this is why he is using every means he can to suppress and denigrate these new and proven interventions. Take another look at the BJC clinical trial of last autumn, Rolfe. It spells the deathknell for the ineffective chemotherapeutic approaches of present treatments.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Prester John has pointed out that the results of the trials Roger refers to are perfectly compatible with the accepted model of cancer pathogenesis, and this is the interpretation chosen by the authors - so Roger is out on a limb even there. Now I don't actually think there's anything hugely promising there, but suppose there is? Suppose this is the great breakthrough we've all been waiting for, snuck up on the inside while we weren't looking?
Even if it only offers an improvement in the management of colo-rectal cancer, well, whoopee! You see, I have a cousin who has/had that. He was successfully treated 7 years ago by the "poison, cut and burn" cancer industry, and is currently very well and apparently cancer-free. However, there's always a degree of concern in these cases, and relapses do occur. It would be
great if there was something further to offer my cousin if that were to happen.
This is where Roger's logic falls down completely. All these doctors and vets and pharmacologists he blithely assumes are part of this evil cover-up conspiracy to suppress alleged wonder-cures for personal gain have relatives and friends and pets, and these relatives and friends and pets get cancer just the same as everybody else. Gosh, even the evil cover-up conspiracy people get cancer just like everybody else. So nobody has ever cracked, and broken with the party line, they just stand by and see their loved ones suffer and die, even suffer and die themselves, rather than reveal the truth?
Not even the ones who have no personal gain from selling chemotherapeutic drugs, for example the harrassed GPs paid from the public purse who simply want to get their workload under a bit more control and would be in a much happier state if they could cure all their cancer patients and get them out of the way. None of the bright-eyed youngsters who began medical courses saying they "wanted to help people" -
all of them seduced to the conspiracy while they were training? Even the ones who are so altruistic they go off to Africa for a pittance on medical missions, even these ones hold the line?
Yeah, likely.
It's the same pathetic nonsense we see with the homoeopaths. I remember Wim, while I was trying to persuade that idiot Alphonse to get proper treatment for her thyrotoxic cat, sneering that I was only trying to protect my business, I was scared of homoeopathy because "it's effective and safe". And of course Wim wasn't trying to protect his interests? And Roger has nothing to sell? (This one is particularly silly, as only vets are
allowed to treat animals. So if it were to be discovered that homoeopathy, or magnets, or quinones, are the most effective treatment, all that would happen is that the veterinary profession would switch to these. Big if!)
These guys simply don't understand how medicine works. It's always on the move. Treatments are discovered, used, and then superseded by something better or safer. Happens all the time. Fifty years ago there were hospital wards full of people having gastrectomies for peptic ulcers. Then the proton pump inhibitors were discovered, and these wards emptied. Did we see a bunch of surgeons on the dole? Nope, even if the ones who'd got particularly slick at that particular piece of carving were a bit miffed, they just got on with all the appendices and the gall bladders and so on.
The drug companies then made a buck or two from Zantac and Tagamet, no doubt. But who did the squeaking when Warren and Mitchell turned up? The gastroenterology mafia, who were simply offended that these outsiders were trying to tell them their job. I do suspect that Big Pharma helped a little in the delay, because the whole Helicobacter thing was accepted just at the time Zantac went out of patent, but there was no way they were going to be able to suppress the truth for more than a year or two, tops.
Were there then loads of gastroenterologists on the dole? Course not, they were just writing prescriptions for antibiotics instead of Zantac. And was Big Pharma damaged? Nope, Zantac moved into OTC sales for gastric reflux, and Rouser got started on it (so of course they're quaking in their shoes!) And even though the antibiotics were all way out of patent already, they started advertising them as "proven efficacy against
Helicobacter pylori", and carried blithely on.
All drug companies have a spread of products, they don't rely on one single thing. And they know the market is dynamic. They can't defend yesterday's best-seller against tomorrow's better approach. They just keep ahead, looking for that better approach. Like, if you're making VHS VCRs, and you see recordable DVD coming, what do you do? Diversify into recordable DVD of course!
Oh, but this one is really terrible! They can't patent these quinones! Maybe someone will correct me on this, but I'm not so sure. If you are the first to demonstrate a completely novel application for an old preparation, and get it licensed for that indication, I think maybe you can. But even if you can't, so what? Chemotherapeutic agents are hardly the biggest profit generators in the pharmacologist's armoury. If they were replaced by a generic mass-produced product, really, not a lot would happen.
(If you want to start a real rant, consider that most research dollars are spent either trying to get a marginally better "me too" version of something popular, or looking for the mass-sales holy grail of the cure for baldness or obesity or impotence. While thousands of people die of malaria every day. But that's not the fault of the drug companies, it's a flaw in the capitalist system itself.)
And what about the rest of the "cancer industry"? Roger lives in Wales. Does he seriously think that the country is so well-supplied with doctors and nurses that there'll be massive redundancies if the oncology units are shut? Yeah, just like there were all these massive redundancies when all the tuberculosis sanatoriums were closed when strepromycin was discovered, after many years of the TB specialists covering up this income-threatening discovery - except, oops, that didn't happen.
We're so bloody short of doctors and nurses, especially with more women doctors wanting to work part-time, and the working time directive making rotas impossible without employing many more doctors we somehow neglected to train, I just can't imagine anyone even remotely in touch with the real world thinking any trained healthcare professional could ever in a thouseand years be afraid for his or her job.
Except Roger isn't really in touch with reality, is he? Not even with the laws of physics.
Has he no concept of the universal cheer of sheer happiness that would arise from the entire medical profession if you told them tomorrow that cancer could be easliy licked by a cheap and plentiful drug? No, I don't suppose he does. Because he judges everyone by his own standards, interested in nothing but selling his gew-gaws, and the hell with the science.
And how would the veterinary profession be affected by this New Jerusalem? Pretty well, I think.
At the moment there is no "cancer industry" at all in the veterinary profession. Some surgery is done, especially for mammary and skin neoplasms, and chemotherapy for selected conditions such as leukaemia or multiple myeloma where we know we can extend good-quality life. But the emphasis is on good-quality, and nobody with any ethics tries to put an animal through what people are prepared to suffer in search of a cure or long-term remission. They don't understand, and it wouldn't be fair. Often the solution to cancer is, sadly, the euthatal bottle.
So if we had a real cure? Wow! What a great addition to our product range! Never mind that the actual drug might be cheap, so are lots of things. It's the whole patient-care thing, the consultations, the diagnostic tests - if there's a real prospect of a good outcome, it will be great business for everyone.
Yes, for me too. Running a diagnostic laboratory, I often have these rather sad conversations where we decide there's not really any point in spending more of the client's money trying to put a label on the inevitably fatal. If we know we're not going to be able to treat it, whatever the results, well, we'll often advise calling a halt. But if we can treat it? Whoopee! We're really justified in going right down the line, diagnosis-wise.
I wish any of this was even slightly likely. Unfortunately I don't think it is, not this decade, probably not next. It will happen eventually, probably gradually as a result of relatively small, incremental advances. And the medical and pharmaceutical professions will welcome it, just the way any other human being with normal ethics and emotions will welcome it, and adapt to the new way of doing things as they have been doing for centuries.
This should all be perfectly obvious. To think otherwise, Roger's mind must be a pretty horrible place. I'm glad I don't have to live in a place like that.
Rolfe.
What??? 
