Remember the western movie scene — the debonair dressed pitchman rides into a small frontier town in a wagon whose canvas sides are emblazoned with Dr. Arturo Pedic’s Acme Elixir. He sets up a stage, draws a crowd, and delivers the pitch.
Yessireeebob! My specially formulated Acme Elixir is a sure-fired medicament for any illness. One bottle of this miracle wonder is guaranteed to cure any malady. It is an antidote for ablepsy, ague, apoplexy, barrel fever, biliousness, dropsy, camp fever, consumption, french pox, grip, and even bronze john fever. Step right up folks. Ten dollars buys this marvel medicine!
According to an American Society of Clinical Oncology opinion survey, almost 40-percent of Americans believe alternative remedies alone can cure cancer — that’s right 40-percent believe in Acme Elixir! Oh my, we’ve been teleported right back to 1870 era medical idiocy! Our collective faith in evidenced based cancer treatment has taken a severe hit.
Why? I see a parallel to the campaign against childhood vaccines. In 1998, a fraudulent research paper published in The Lancet asserted combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. Innumerable scientific studies proved vaccines harmless, but blaming autism on vaccines was a sensational and compelling newsworthy story, and I remember the stories!
The internet allows the easy creation of a sensational and compelling newsworthy event — a cancer cure. Webpages abound with astonishing survival stories from treatment by this, that, or the other alternative medicine thing. One common thread: all promise a sure cure for cancer. These are very believable presentations with videos offering jaw-dropping testimony bolstered by pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo. The internet today functions like the 1870 era snake-oil salesman!
When diagnosed with lung cancer, one has but three choices: do nothing, alternative methods, or evidence based methods. Do nothing costs nothing and may work because cancer sometimes stops metastasizing without treatment. Alternative and evidenced based methods cost you money. Evidence based methods have another seemingly unrecognized advantage: outcomes are repeatable. Surgery, targeted therapy, precision radiation or immunotherapy works the same way for a very, very large number of people. Funny how hard it is to rundown actual results for large numbers of people treated with sure cure Acme Elixir.
Stay the course.
I'm in the middle of my quarterly scan appointments. While I was waiting for my blood draw yesterday, I noticed a couple that was apparently new to the oncology clinic. The wife is the patient and, when she was called into the lab, her husband got up to walk with her and she told him she was fine, just going for a blood draw. I looked at his face and saw fear and I just wanted to give him a hug. This is the part I hate the most - when we look into our loved ones' eyes and see their fear. I just want to fix everything and I can't; we have so little control over this part of our lives. I have no idea why she was there or what her diagnosis is, but I definitely said a prayer for them last night.
“Drug-related deaths have grown to be a major US public health problem over the last two decades. Between 2006 and 2015 there were more than 515,000 deaths from drug overdoses.…” This from a March 26 article in Science Magazine. The death rate averages 5,722 per year over the cited period. Further, “the drug epidemic is a pressing concern among policymakers.” This concern translates to a $865 million research budget for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This budget funds $151,117 per individual drug-related death.
This year, 163,199 Americans are projected to die from lung cancer. The National Institute of Health Lung Cancer research budget for 2018 is $282 million. This level of research amounts to only $1,727 per individual death.
Lung cancer kills 28 times more people per year than drug addition, but the drug addiction research budget is 87 times larger then lung cancer’s on a per-death basis. Clearly, our public health policy makers fail to understand the meaning of the word major. The major and largely unaddressed US public health problem is death from lung cancer.
Stay the course.
The modern world is full of scams, lies, untruths, and junk science. Indeed, for a lung cancer survivor or caregiver, finding truth about lung cancer in our Internet world of mis-information is extremely difficult. How do we know what to believe? Perhaps you've heard of Belle Gibson, the health food purveyor and wellness guru, who spent years convincing us she had a cure for cancer. Don't know the story? Read it here. How did we buy into Gibson's claims? How do we avoid another scam trap? Here is my list for sniffing out a phony lung cancer cure scam.
1. Ignore anyone who broadcast-messages a cure for cancer. No one discovering a cure to cancer will announce it on a daytime TV show, or a TV infomercial. The person discussing the "cure" will more likely act and talk like a nerdy scientist rather than a TV or movie personality. The announcement language will be hyper-technical, interspersed with statistical terms comparing this to that under a given circumstance. The announcement could be televised but the audience will be filled with scientists and physicians. But before the telecast, there will be a series of journal articles discussing and critiquing the findings. The announcement will likely follow the form and tenor of the CERN Higgs Boson "god particle" discovery. Watch that coverage and mentally compare it to an episode of The Chew. If you don't hear words like "the combined difference of five standard deviations", you are listening to a hoax.
2. The cure announcement won't be a sales pitch. Think of the biggest news event you've ever seen, say the announcement of 9-11. Discovery of a cure to cancer will be bigger -- much, much bigger! It will be a world-wide-headline-news story and will be announced by a government. Following the announcement, there won't be a 1-800 number or world wide web address to buy the cure! It won't be a pharmaceutical company announcement. Yes, new drugs showing progression free survival improvement are announced in pharmaceutical company news releases, but these are clinical trial results for a new therapy, not a "cure" announcement. And recall what a new lung cancer treatment drug commercial looks and sounds like. There are all these legal disclaimers, side-effect disclosures, and restrictions on taking the drug. A lung cancer or any cancer cure won't be a commercial advertisement of a drug or treatment. It will be a celebration and the biggest news event of your lifetime!
3. Be very wary of a dietary supplement touted as a cure. Cancer is a disease of the human genome. Each of us has the genetic predisposition to have every kind and type of cancer ever discovered. Science understands the genetic nature of the disease and a changes in diet or taking a dietary supplement does not change or effect our genetic make-up. A change in diet to lose weight, avoid diabetes, or improve cardiovascular health is a good thing, but no one claims taking a dietary supplement or a change in diet cures diabetes, heart disease or cancer, except scam artists. A healthy diet has many benefits; curing cancer is not one of them.
4. Self-promoters touting heroic cancer survival stories are scammers. If you want to read and believe heroic survival stories, they are in forums such as this one. Our survival stories sell hope; they don't sell product. No one here is seeking fame for surviving lung cancer. Certainly, no one here is getting rich surviving this awful disease. Real lung cancer patients know that cancer sucks, treatment sucks, scans suck, the whole process sucks. No one here sits for a TV interview claiming to beat lung cancer by taking this, that or the other thing. While the first rule to being successful in sales is to sell yourself, we are not selling anything.
5. Social media promotion is a scam in the making. Who is going to offer a product or treatment that cures cancer on social media -- a scam artist! Social media likes and shares are not scientific peer reviews. The Super Bowl Justin Timberlake selfie boy achieved overnight fame, but for what? Perhaps he could use that fame to sell tee shirts, but a lung cancer cure? Seriously? And be wary of news outlets who publicize these miracle cure announcements. TV and newspapers sell scam promoters also. They publicize sensationalism so a 30 second report on your 5 o'clock news of a wellness guru who discovered a cancer cure is what -- a scam! Do you know of TV reporters with a PhDs in Microbiology or Pharmacology? Where do they get the competency to evaluate scientific claims? Here's the point; they don't care about scientific authenticity; they want to generate sensationalism. Media sensationalism sells media, not cancer cures. Social media clicks sell social media, not cancer treatments.
Lung cancer is a horrible disease. Sadly, there are horrible people in this world who take advantage of our misfortune to rob us of time and money. Only our vigilance and common sense can protect us. Remember, there is no such thing as a cancer cure, yet! When one is announced, the world will know and celebrate.
Stay the course.
