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Oh
yes? And who's 'they'?
Steven Ransom
"Vitamin C Cancer Fear. High doses of Vitamin C could
increase the risk of cancer, scientists warn today ... ."
So begins the 15th June 2001 UK Daily Mail front-page report,
outlining the work of Dr Ian Blair, resident researcher
at the University of Pennsylvania Pharmacology Unit. The
Mail headline appears to be in direct conflict with Dr Blair's
own statement:
"Absolutely, for God's sake, don't
say Vitamin C causes cancer." (Yahoo News, Thursday
June 14th, 2001) But of course, The Mail and others have
shamelessly done exactly that. To the less discerning reader,
the story raises worrisome questions as to the wisdom of
high-level Vitamin C supplementation. If these worldwide
headlines have served any useful purpose at all, it has
been to confirm the moral/intellectual void currently reigning
in today's mass media 'news' departments.
At a more fundamental level, why is Dr Blair conducting
tests on the efficacy of Vitamin C at all? We are about
to discover that certain parties have a very definite interest
in casting aspersions upon Vitamin C. Yet again, we are
being taught what to think about a certain subject, but
not how. To our knowledge, the information you are about
to read has not been included in any of the latest, and
now worldwide 'Vitamin C Cancer Scare' headlines generated
by Dr Blair's findings.
A Golden Rule
Dr Blair postulates that high consumption
of Vitamin C (a most beneficial adjunct in non-toxic cancer
recovery treatment) might actually cause human tissue degeneration,
which in turn could lead to a heightened risk of contracting
cancer.
And it is
here that we arrive at our first golden rule:
when it comes to assessing the veracity of any scientific
claim, we must always read between the lines - we must search
for what the report does not say. We must especially be
on the look-out for that hoary old chestnut, otherwise known
as vested interests. A University of Manchester research
methodology handbook contains the following valuable advice:
"Science and research must be studied in the context
of all the interested parties involved. The questions centre
on determining the relative weight of the various allies
in the 'fact-creating' process - e.g. funding bodies, businesses,
departments of state, professions and other scientists.
In analysing scientific debates, one
should always ask what social, institutional, political
and philosophical interests lie behind often apparently
'neutral' and 'technical' knowledge claims." (University
of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST)
research methodology course handout, 1994) (emphasis mine)
On the matter of the 'fact creation' process, renowned author
John Le Carre recently stated:
"Big Pharma [the industry in general] is engaged in
the deliberate seduction
of the medical profession, country by country,
worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring
and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a
few years' time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its
present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard
to find." (The Nation, New York, Interview with John
Le Carre, 9th April 2001)
Bought?
With the above in mind, lets put Dr
Blair's University of Pennsylvania under the spotlight and
see what encouragement Dr Blair might have had in taking
his extraordinary position and apparently misquoted position
against Vitamin C.
We must
ask the following questions:
what Big Pharma influences might there be supporting the
University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center (UPCC) and its
mother ship, the University of Pennsylvania Health Service?
What is the relative weight of the funding bodies? If industry
sponsorship is taking place, are UPHS personnel free to
exercise unbiased critical thinking? Or are there grounds
to suspect that UPHS been 'bought' - that somewhere along
the line, vested interests have 'purchased academic judgment'?
Before tackling the Vitamin C issue itself, the following
UPHS general statistics are very revealing.
Certain
Alliances
In May 2000, Dr Ian Blair's employers
at UPCC received a $26 million, five year Core Grant from
the National Cancer Institute (NCI) - the largest and most
influential conventional cancer treatment institution in
the world. In fact, UPCC has been continuously funded by
the NCI Core Grant mechanism since the grant was created
by the National Cancer Act in the early 1970's.
Currently,
UPCC is awash with more than $100 million in cancer research
funding:
$37 million is from the National Cancer
Institute; $43 million from closely affiliated organisations,
such as the National Institutes of Health, the organisation
which actually funded Dr Blair's Vitamin C research; another
$12 million from foundational support such as the American
Cancer Society and the Leukaemia Society; and between $8
and $10 million from various pharmaceutical companies. Earlier,
in June of 1999, UPCC received a $4.5 million gift from
the William H. Gates Foundation to research conventional
treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Aside from the Bill and Melinda Gates connection, OncoLink,
the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center, [28] is sponsored
very generously by the following corporations: Amgen, the
world's largest independent biotechnology company; Aventis,
Ortho Biotech, Inc., Varian, Inc., Janssen Pharmaceutica,
AstraZeneca, Pharmacia Upjohn and Pfizer. These corporations
are very big indeed, and their names represent no mean sponsorship
committee.
More
Alliances
In March 2001, UPHS announced a strategic
alliance with Siemens Medical Systems, Inc. Under the terms
of the purchasing agreement, UPHS will make an initial discounted
purchase of cardiology, radiology and radiation oncology
equipment from Siemens, who will also service and maintain
the biomedical equipment already in place at designated
UPHS sites over the life of the agreement.
In the year 2000, Siemens Medical Solutions,
based in Iselin, New Jersey, reported new orders of $5.65
billion, sales of $5.44 billion and employs 27,000 worldwide.
"This is the kind of alliance that will be critical
in our continuing financial recovery and to assure our position
as a leading national health system," said Robert D.
Martin, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of UPHS.
A good relationship with Siemens may well be critical to
UPHS' financial recovery, but does this kind of dependent
alliance foster the aforementioned necessary climate for
critical thinking? What if there are privately held UPHS
reservations over the Siemens equipment, methodology or
ethos? Who will break rank first? Will anyone? What kind
of commercially gagged framework are the UPHS staff now
locked into with Siemens?
Yet More
Corporate Alliances
On April 26, 2001, UPCC announced a
business partnership with Integral PET Associates, the nation's
leading operator of fixed-site Positron Emission Tomography
(PET) cancer scanners. A patient receiving a PET scan today
is injected with a radiopharmaceutical, such as flurodeoxyglucose
(FDG), about 45 minutes before the scan, which takes about
two hours.
The radiopharmaceutical tracer emits
signals which are then picked up by the PET scanner. A computer
reassembles the signals into recognisable images to determine
if a cancer has spread, if a particular treatment is effective,
or if a patient is disease-free. IPA will now be seeking
to supply major hospitals throughout Pennsylvania with this
very expensive equipment. Installing and operating a PET
scanner typically costs around $1,600,000 in up-front capital
costs, plus an additional $800,000 in yearly staff and operational
costs.
A short visit to the UPHS website at www.med.upenn.edu will
not only confirm all of the above information, but will
also confirm that these alliances represent only a small
percentage of the long-standing conventional 'friendships'
UPHS has fostered with Big Pharma over the years. Given
the strictly conventional source of sponsorship monies received
at UPHS, what chance will the following statements have
of being 'allowed' to feature on the UPHS cancer information
page?
"If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard
cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from
such centres have a chance." Professor Charles Mathe,
French cancer specialist
"...as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible
to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that
chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good."
- Alan C Nixon, PhD, former president of the American Chemical
Society
"Doctors are too busy to dig into the statistics of
cancer treatments, they assume that what they are taught
at school or what is demonstrated in the pages of briefing
journals is the best treatment. They cannot afford to suspect
that these treatments are only the best for the pharmaceutical
companies that influence their 'institutions of higher learning'."
Paul Winter, The Cancell Home Page.
"To the cancer establishment, a cancer patient is a
profit center. The actual clinical and scientific evidence
does not support the claims of the cancer industry. Conventional
cancer treatments are in place as the law of the land because
they pay, not heal, the best. Decades of the politics-of-cancer-as-usual
have kept you from knowing this, and will continue to do
so unless you wake up to this reality." - Lee Cowden
MD
"Almost every patient treated with IL2 (a current conventional
cancer treatment) suffered fever, malaise, nausea or vomiting,
diarrhoea, sharp drops in blood pressure, skin rashes, breathing
difficulties, liver abnormalities and irregularities in
blood chemistry. Rosenberg himself details a number of horrifying
case histories, and one in particular where the administration
of IL2 had precipitated amongst other things, vomiting,
swollen joints, lung fluid and 'vascular leak syndrome'
where blood would ooze through the vessel walls and collect
under the skin." Steven Rosenberg, The Transformed
Cell, 1992. (IL2 is still used today.)
"Dr Linus Pauling, often known as the 'Father of Vitamin
C' and twice awarded the Nobel Prize, declared that large
intakes of up to 10g of the vitamin each day aids anti-cancer
activity within the body. Pauling was largely derided for
making these declarations, but today, large doses of Vitamin
C are used by many practitioners for cancer patients in
nutritional therapy, who believe Pauling was right and that
the popular nutrient is indispensable to the body in its
fight to regain health from cancer." Phillip Day, Cancer,
Why We're Still Dying to Know The Truth, Credence Publications,
2001.
"Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians
mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your
own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to
work for a better world." Linus Pauling http://www.cforyourself.com
The above remarks are representative of a vast library of
well-sourced contrary information which sensibly questions
the validity and efficacy of conventional cancer treatments
based on a huge amount of clinical research and data. Naturally,
with all these expensive and patented treatments available
to fight cancer, the cancer rates should be going down.
They are not. They are increasing.
Staggering
Amounts
UPHS is totally locked into the conventional
cancer framework - a framework which today, rightly stands
accused of achieving no measurable success at all in its
approach to the treatment of cancer, immense success in
causing widespread, unnecessary death through its application
of lethal and highly toxic pharma-radiation treatments,
and even greater success in rewarding itself absolutely
staggering amounts of money in the whole grisly process.
That these cancer corporations have become incredibly wealthy
through their 'chemo 'til we drop' approach is a fact which
Messrs Siemens, Zeneca, Upjohn, Glaxo, Rhone Poulenc cannot
deny.
Common
Sense
Pauling was right. We have been seriously
misled. Taking the Siemens $multi-million technology as
an example, it may well detect certain forms of cancer,
but upon detecting it, what then happens? Quite simply,
a bewildered, obedient, grateful and unsuspecting cancer
sufferer is immediately directed towards the door marked
'iatrogenic (doctor-induced) illness and probable death.'
Closer examination of today's orthodox
cancer treatments clearly reveals that the conventional
path is fraught with toxic danger. But the CEO of UPHS has
made it quite clear that 'the Siemens alliance [one of so
many] is critical to the financial security of UPHS'.
This is why we will hear no publicly dissenting voices from
UPHS as to the horrific realities associated with 20th and
21st Century conventional cancer treatments. The corporate
big boys' riches must continue to flow ... . and a handsome
proportion of it into the coffers of the very dependent
UPHS, of course, 'to assist in their financial recovery'.
So Why the
Slur on Vitamin C?
As has already been stated, conventional
cancer treatment represents a $multi-billion a
year industry. These vast profits are fiercely protected
by the industry giants. But their treatments in no way address
the underlying causes of cancer. Cancer is a nutritional/toxic/environmental
condition, which, in a great number of instances, can be
successfully reversed through the application of a sound
nutritional approach and common-sense lifestyle changes.
Linus Pauling, dubbed the father of Vitamin C, sensibly
promoted the benefits of consuming high doses Vitamin C
in the prevention of and battle against cancer.
Half-Truths
and Lies
So why aren't we hearing about these
natural treatment successes? Why aren't they being heralded
across the world? The answer is money. Despite the multitudinous
successes in cancer regression through nutrition, and through
extensive application of vital elements such as Vitamin
C, Vitamin B17, pancreatic enzymes and other co-factors,
Big Pharma is doing all it can to silence these success
stories. To have it become widely known that cancer can
be successfully treated without toxic and profitable pharmaceuticals
would be catastrophic for its business.
Who would continue to purchase these
products? What would the Siemens, Glaxo and Upjohn shareholders
have to say about that? To their shame, vested interests
are keeping well-proven, non-toxic cancer treatments from
the public domain. This is why, under 'cancer treatments'
the UPHS website says this of vitamin B17: http://cancer.med.upenn.edu/pdq_html/6/engl/600093.html
"Several patients displayed symptoms
of cyanide poisoning, including muscle weakness and impaired
reflexes, or had life-threatening levels of cyanide in their
blood. (Laetrile can release cyanide, which is a highly
toxic chemical.) The researchers concluded that Laetrile
is not effective as a cancer treatment and is harmful in
some cases."
But now read this contrary
extract from a radio talk show, featured in Phillip Day's
Cancer, Why We Are Still Dying To Know The Truth:
Radio host Laurie Lee:
"So this is verified, that laetrile [B17] can have
this positive effect?"
Dr Ralph
Moss: "We were finding
this and yet, we in Public Affairs were told to issue statements
to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically."
At the time, Ralph Moss was former Assistant Director of
Public Relations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, NY, a leading
American conventional cancer research facility.
Of course Laetrile, or Vitamin B17, is not approved by the
FDA, but not because it isn't beneficial - it is, as the
links provided at the bottom of this report will demonstrate.
No, Vitamin B17 has not been approved by the FDA simply
because the FDA have been leaned on. That's the way it goes
in the self-preserving, self-serving, conventional cancer
business.
To put it bluntly, biddable FDA officials
are only a phone call and a golfing lunch away from the
NCI and the NIH. A classic example of these conflicts of
interests and double standards can be appreciated when one
learns that sodium fluoride is also not approved by the
FDA due to its toxicity, and yet drug giant Proctor and
Gamble and others can market the stuff in their toothpastes
with complete impunity.
The UPHS statement on Laetrile is a fabrication. Such is
the wealth of evidence overturning the conventional stance
on Laetrile and Vitamin C, that one can only assume the
UPHS statement falls into the following category:
False Scientific
Research 'Endangering the Public', Independent
News, 13.12. 2000 Doctors are fabricating
research results to win grants and advance their careers,
but the medical establishment is failing to protect the
public from the menace of these scientific frauds, a committee
of medical editors said yesterday. Eighty cases of fraudulent
research have been detected in the past four years, and
30 have been investigated in the past year. In some cases,
institutions have covered up wrongdoing to protect reputations ... .
The
Nub of It
In an effort to subvert this mass-awakening
to the horrors of conventional cancer treatments, a devious
attack on all genuinely beneficial, natural (and therefore
un-patentable) anti-cancer products is now being waged by
a rather worried conventional cancer establishment The ever-so-gentle
slur on our most vital of vitamins, namely Vitamin C, will
soon be extended to a wide range of essential minerals and
vitamins.
This is just the beginning of the subtle,
but concerted attack. The latest conventional legislation
surrounding the codifying and banning of efficacious natural
treatments is being instituted, purely because there is
no money in these natural treatments for Big Pharma. It
is profit before human health, but couched in respectable-looking,
'sciency' reports. And this veneer of respectability is
fooling the unsuspecting minions lower down the UPHS research
chain it seems.
Naive
The two UPHS officials I spoke to regarding
Dr Blair's Vitamin C report were extremely pleasant, open
and helpful and displayed no intention to supply misleading
information. But both persons were entirely locked into
their superiors' way of thinking. Media Relations officer
Olivia Fermano was curious as to my interest into who funded
the Vitamin C report. When I pointed out that if Dr Blair's
funding could be traced to a pharmaceutical company producing
conventional cancer treatments, then the results would have
to be very seriously questioned, Ms Fermano was genuinely
supportive.
"My goodness! That is a good question.
I will be right back to you." Her word-for-word courteous
reply, some two minutes later was as follows: "You
had me genuinely worried for a few minutes there, sir. But
I am pleased to tell you that our funding came directly
from the National Institutes for Health itself. I am so
relieved."
Ho Hum.
Similarly, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, chair of UPHS Centre for
Cancer Pharmacy Department stated: "The evidence supporting
Vitamin C as a useful adjunct in cancer treatment ranges
from scant to non-existent. Linus Pauling's work was framed
around a tenuous hypothesis only."
Whilst the courtesy displayed by Ms Fermano and Dr Fitzgerald
is commendable, their naivety is the result of them both
working in a commercially cocooned workplace, purposefully
insulated from the many success stories attributed to non-toxic,
metabolic cancer treatments, and from the amazing health
benefits accrued from consuming a lot more Vitamin C than
the FDA's recommended daily intake of a miserable 60 mg
- barely enough to keep one out of rags and scurvy.
Long live Vitamin C and let's have even more of it! For
a more in-depth study of the conventional cancer industry,
and of the very good news concerning alternative cancer
treatments, readers are encouraged to visit www.credence.org
and take the cancer tour.
Steven Ransom
www.whatareweswallowing.com
and from
July 2001 Campaign for Truth in Medicine at
www.campaignfortruth.com
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