Allied with the AMA are the government's National Cancer Institute (NCI), with its $1.5 billion annual budget, the private American Cancer Society (ACS), pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, hospitals and medical schools. The insurance companies provide third party reimbursements to doctors, making up 70 per cent of doctors' incomes. This group of interlocking and vested interests has been dubbed the "cancer industry" or "Cancer Inc."
The NCI distributes hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in research grants and, together with the ACS, sets dominant trends in research. Incredibly, 90 per cent of the members of the NCI's peer review committee get NCI money for their own research, while 70 per cent of the ACS's research budget goes to individuals or institutions with which ACS board members are affiliated. "In any other part of government, it would be a corrupt practice for the persons giving out the money and the persons getting it to be the same people," said Irwin Bross, former director of biostatistics at Rosewell Park Memorial Institute, the nation's oldest cancer research hospital.
Examples of Suppressed Alternative Treatments
Burton. Dr Lawrence Burton's Immuno-Augmentative Therapy (IAT) consists of injections of four blood proteins that augment immune system functioning and shrink tumours. Burton, former senior oncologist at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, astonished the medical world in 1966 when he and a colleague injected cancerous mice with a serum, causing the tumours to shrink by half in just 45 minutes. Ninety minutes later, the tumours had practically vanished. This unprecedented demonstration, made under ACS auspices in the presence of 70 scientists and 200 science writers, generated front page headlines in major newspapers around the world. Burton repeated the demonstration months later before an audience of cancer specialists at the New York Academy of Medicine, this time in a controlled experiment, with comparable results.
Burton opened a cancer clinic in Great Neck, NY in 1974, and treated many patients who reportedly experienced dramatic tumour shrinkage or remissions. Dr John Beaty of Greenwich, Connecticut, who sent 20 advanced cancer patients to Burton, reported tumours regressing in 50 per cent. Despite these results, Food and Drug Administration harassment forced Burton to close his clinic in 1977 and open one in the Bahamas.
In 1985, US health officials of the NCI and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fraudulently accused Burton's Bahamian clinic of spreading AIDS contaminated serum to patients returning to the US. Under American pressure, the Bahamian Ministry shut down the clinic. It was only reopened after lawsuits were filed against NCI and CDC, and after Burton's patients appealed to members of the US Congress, including distinguished cancer surgeon Dr. Philip Kunderman (former chief of thoracic surgery, Roosevelt Hospital, NY), who stated that his own cancer was successfully controlled on IAT. One of the most promising cancer treatments today is tumour necrosis factor (TNF) a blood substance said to cause rapid tumour shrinkage. TNF was created directly out of Burton's original research, in the opinion of a number of observers.
Burzynski. Former professor at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, Dr Stanislaw Burzynski, a polish emigre physician (at 25, one of the youngest men in Europe ever to obtain both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees), developed a cancer treatment using harmless peptides which occur naturally in humans. His research points to a severe shortage of these substances, called antineoplastons, in cancer patients. In reintroducing the peptides into patients' bloodstream either intravenously, or orally with capsules he found that they experienced tumour shrinkage or complete remission.