The impact of medical censorship on patient care: Part 3

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Nov, 2004  by Marcus A. Cohen

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The word "Unproven" as used by the ACS is a highly and unjustifiedly
weighted word ... I would submit that no less than six, at the very
least, of the ACS's "Unproven Methods" would be worthy of immediate
scientific investigation by the NCI on a basis of nontoxic but potential
efficacy ... I am aware of many more methods and compounds already being
investigated by individual investigators or small institutes whose
efforts are literally dying on the vine for lack of due support that now
goes to greatly more expensive but far less immediately promising
priorities under the present NCI program.
--Dean Burk, Head Cytochemistry Section, NCI, in an open letter to Dr.
Frank J. Rauscher, Jr., Director, NCI, April 20, 1973: Published in
Cancer Control Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1973.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This is the third column about censorship in medicine. The first on bias and other defects in peer review, the second on dogmatic elements in clinical practice, appeared in the Aug./Sept. and October issues. These factors can impede dissemination of information about novel or minority approaches to care. Patients unable to respond to conventional therapy are the group most disadvantaged by restricted circulation of such information.

Here the focus is on the American Cancer Society because of a blacklist it has compiled of methods for controlling cancer that the ACS considers dubious. The Society periodically updates the list to warn cancer specialists and the public that claims of effectiveness for these methods are not substantiated by evidence the ACS accepts.

In March/April 2004, CA-A Cancer Journal for Clinicians ran an article titled "Alternative Cancer Cures: 'Unproven' or 'Disproven'?" Andrew Vickers, PhD, was the author. The ACS publishes this journal, and Vickers is an Assisting Attending Research Methodologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The terse abstract stated in part: "Alternative cancer cures have often been described as 'unproven,' suggesting that appropriate clinical trials have not been conducted and that the therapeutic value of the treatment is unknown. Contrary to much popular and scientific writing, many alternative cancer treatments have been investigated in good quality clinical trials, and they have been shown to be ineffective ... The label 'unproven' is inappropriate for such therapies; it is time to assert that many alternative cancer therapies have been 'disproven'."

Two years after the federal government declared war on cancer in 1971, Dr. Dean Burk, a high-ranking NCI insider, raked the NCI for its "widespread but scientifically unjustified scorn of searches for truly nontoxic efficacious anticancer compounds, as distinguished from merely less toxic, more efficacious, anticancer compounds." (1) The ACS has included a number of these "truly nontoxic" alternatives to conventional cancer treatment on its list.

Illustrating the scornful attitude toward nontoxic compounds outside the NCI, Burk pointed to the ACS list: "An excellent and well known example of this open scorn," he wrote, "is to be found in the booklet issued from time to time by the American Cancer Society under the title of 'Unproven Methods of Cancer Treatment,' but unsupported by little evidence beyond the oftrepeated refrain, 'After careful study of the literature and other information available to it, the American Cancer Society has found no evidence that treatment ... results in any objective benefit in ... human cancer,' a statement close to zero scientific worth, however much sheer propaganda value." (1)

Recently, the ACS retitled its list "Complementary and Alternative Methods." Vickers wrote as a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, but the ACS saw fit to carry his views in one of its publications, inviting scrutiny of the evidence Vickers cites.

The ACS list of approaches it deems worthless, even dangerous, is another side of the Society's self-appointed mission--to help set priorities in research and policy on treatment in the fight against cancer.

Basic Reading on the American Cancer Society

Townsend readers interested in the American Cancer Society's influence on the flow of information about research and treatment should start by consulting The Cancer Industry by Ralph W. Moss (2) and The Dread Disease by James T. Patterson. (3) Moss published The Cancer Industry (originally The Cancer Syndrome) in 1980, revising and updating it through the 1990s. In the preface to the first revised edition (1991) he categorized his book as "an analysis of selected cases, not a definitive history or survey of the field." Then he expanded its scope, saying it was "an expose of everything that was wrong with the 'war on cancer.'" And he sounded a personal note in accounting for the book's inspiration:

"I wrote it just after being fired by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where I was assistant director of public affairs, for my opposition to their coverup of positive data on laetrile. I had 'failed to carry out my most basic responsibilities' in other words, to collaborate in falsifying evidence. In a sense ... the book was not only an expose ... but my own apologia."