Despite the public's support and growing interest in nontoxic, noninvasive alternative approaches, the medical establishment has waged a fierce campaign against such therapies, labeling them quackery. Treatment centers have been padlocked. Doctors who prescribe nutrition or herbs have been thrown in jail. Responsible, caring physicians who verbally support or practice alternative therapies have been fired, demoted, or ostracized or have had their medical licenses revoked. While official medicine suppresses or thwarts promising alternatives, it pours billions of dollars into narrow research supporting chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery as the major weapons in the "war on cancer." That war has been a total failure in slowing the death rate. The overall age-adjusted cancer death rate has risen by 5 percent since the war against cancer began.

"Everyone should know that the 'war on cancer' is largely a fraud," wrote Dr. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner. Another Nobel winner, Dr. James Watson, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix, put the matter more bluntly. Watson served for two years on the National Cancer Advisory Board. Asked in 1975 what he thought of the National Cancer Program, he promptly replied, "It's a bunch of shit."6 Death rates for the most common cancers-cancers of the lung, colon, breast, prostate, pancreas, and ovary-have either stayed the same or increased during the past fifty years. As noted in the September 22, 1986, issue of Business Week, "Surgery, radiation, and highly toxic drugs all tend to fail for a stunningly simple reason: a tumor the size of your thumb has one billion malignant cells in it. Even if a treatment gets 99.9% of them, a million remain to take root all over again."

You may live longer by having no conventional treatment at all. That was the conclusion of the late Dr. Hardin Jones, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley. After carefully analyzing the cancer survival statistics for twenty-five years, Jones told an American Cancer Society meeting in 1969 that untreated patients do not die sooner than patients receiving orthodox treatment-and in many cases they live longer.7 Three studies by other researchers support this negative assessment, which has never been refuted.

Myths Surrounding Alternative Cancer Therapies
Many myths and misconceptions surround alternative cancer therapies. What follows is an attempt to clarify the most common.

Myth #1: All alternative cancer therapies are worthless.

This is the official position of the $80 billion-a-year "cancer industry," which has a vested stake in the orthodox therapies. But the facts tell a very different story. Patients with advanced, metastasized cancers, given up as medically incurable by their conventional doctors, have reversed their illnesses using alternative therapies and are today completely cancer-free. Many more patients on nontoxic therapies have at least been able to keep their cancers under control and lead active, productive lives. Some alternative physicians have amassed clinical evidence, including studies and carefully documented case histories, to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of their methods. This evidence is routinely rejected by the medical orthodoxy on the grounds that it does not meet certain criteria, such as double-blind controlled trials (in which half the patients do not receive the treatment in question).