- Capitalism, Cancer and Intellectual Corruption; Curing the One
Cures the Others
by Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota - Axis of Logic-
- OpEdNews.Com
Thirty years ago, Richard Nixon declared "War on Cancer"
in America. The problem, of course, inherent in declaring war on a
problem, is that approaches typically end up being more brutish than
intelligent. >From 1970 to 2000, a brutish war on cancer has
increased the 5 year survival rate for cancer from about 50% to 64%
(Roland Jones, "War on cancer also battles high costs, MSNBC,
June 1, 2004). But even as more and more cancer victims are able to
survive therapy and their disease for 5 years following diagnosis,
fewer and fewer oncologists are willing to say that anyone has been
"cured" of anything (Marilynn Marchione, "When 'cure'
is a four-letter word." Associated Press, September 19, 2004).
A proper definition of "cure" would require the elimination
of disease such that the victim be able to return to his previous life
without further concern. This is the kind of cure which became
possible for infectious diseases during the 1930s with the emergence
of sulfa drugs and the 1940s with the emergence of antibiotics.
Thherapuetic agents, for the first time, dealt directly with causal
agents, i.e., pathogenic microorganisms, such that disease was
terminated at its cellular level source.
Direct assaults on causal agents were termed "magic bullet"
approaches and, while they were not magic, they were curative -
precisely because they were built on knowledge of causation and they
were directed at the causes of disease. With the human cancers, we
have not yet attained this refined state of knowledge and practice.
During the 1940s, the neoplastic diseases began to overtake the
infectious diseases as causes of death. The human cancers, for
example, consist of over 120 clinically-distinct diseases involving
the aberrant behavior of bodily cells such that they multiply, invade
neighboring tissues and metastasize to other organs, ultimately
causing death by corrupting the function of vital organs.
The most obvious and simplistic empirical approach to dealing with
malignant disease was to surgically excise the malignant lesion, and
cancer surgeons quickly recognized that their chances of success were
a function of the stage of disease at diagnosis. From the beginning,
emphasis was placed on approaches to early diagnosis. The 1950s
brought the clinical emergence of radiation therapy and chemotherapy,
the former burning cancer cells with focused ionizing radiation and
the latter poisoning cancer cells with non-specific cellular poisons.
All of these early approaches to cancer therapy were based on the
assumption that cancer cells are the cause of disease and that therapy
designed to eliminate or kill malignant cells might achieve a cure.
This is where national approaches to controlling the human cancers
went astray, right from the start. Current approaches are now more or
less locked into that assumption by the "growth industry" in
diagnostics and therapeutics that has been built upon it.
Cancer cells are NOT causes of disease. They are, to be sure, the
primary cellular level symptoms of cancer. By the early 1960s, it was
clear that the majority of human cancers were caused by environmental
exposures to chemical mutagens. Accordingly, about 90% of human
cancers occur in epithelial tissues (e.g., lung, gastrointestinal
tract, skin) that serve as a boundary between the human internal
environment and the external environment.
The environmental mutagens that cause the human cancers do not
necessarily remain present in affected tissues. Rather, they leave
behind the mutational damage which ultimately resides beneath aberrant
cellular behavior. In other words, the causes of neoplastic disease
are mutagens and the causes of disease symptomatology are
mutation-induced defects in regulatory sequences of the cellular
genome. These larger conclusions are derived from the larger
viewpoints of the Mutation Theory of Neoplastic Disease as formalized
in the early 1980s.
There is simply no historical precedent for therapies aimed at
symptoms to be curative. Accordingly, current cancer therapies are
palliative and usually debilitating (i.e., an individual postponement
of the inevitable at the expense of the victim's quality of life).
This limitation was recognized by the 1970s. The very notion of a
cancer "cure" (in the absence of a cure) required that the
concept of "cure" be redefined as survival for 5 years
post-diagnosis. This definition allowed cancer therapists to speak of
"cures" in the face of recurrences and newly emergent
lesions in mutagen-exposed tissues.
Shortcomings in current national approaches to cancer therapy are the
result of two interrelated factors:
First is the overt avoidance of larger theoretical frameworks that
embrace the entire natural history of disease (within which priorities
and approaches can be intelligently established). Like everything
philosophical, capitalism has no need for medical theory. Political
correctness requires soft analyses and conclusions that do not
threaten the logic beneath current market-driven approaches.
Second is the influence of a profit-driven marketplace on priorities
and approaches in cancer research and therapy. The profits to be made
in the "war on cancer," are largely derived, of course, from
diagnostic and therapeutic medicine. As a result, marketplace
influences have created a national cancer policy that places very
little emphasis on the study of cancer causation, knowledge of which
is central to both efficacious prevention and curative therapy.
With genomic mutations as the causes of cancer symptomatology, the
only thoughtful and useful approaches to curative cancer therapy are
to be found in gene therapy and efforts to repair specific genomic
damage or efforts to selectively eliminate cells bearing specific
genomic damage. Gene therapy aimed directly at causal genomic
mutations has been termed "DNA silencing" and it involves
approaches designed to specifically shut down mutant genes in
malignant cells such that malignant lesions would simply be
reabsorbed.
The potential of gene therapy to provide real cures far overshadows
that of palliative radiation therapy and chemotherapy, both of which
are more akin to the 19th century therapeutic employment of leeches to
treat disparate and unrelated diseases. The bulk of current
chemotherapeutic "research" involves trial and error
combinations of agents aimed at the symptoms of disease. Within the
larger viewpoints of mutation theory, these approaches do not even
constitute research, even though it is a way to keep clinicians busy
and the money coming in.
Under an increasingly capitalistic dominion, it has become
increasingly clear that "the rich are paying what amounts to
bribes to make sure that they are at the head of the line when it
comes to getting health care." It is also increasingly clear that
"the poor are basically being told to get lost" (Arthur
Caplan, "Good health care: for rich people only?" NewsDay,
June 30, 2004). While the practice of exclusionary medicine is a
social tragedy in and of itself, it is even a tragedy for the rich
under capitalism. Insofar as quality medical care is being reserved
for the rich alone, the rich are truly not getting very much for their
money.
In moving toward curative therapy for the human cancers, all emphasis
needs to be placed on identifying the causes of disease (environmental
mutagens) as related to cancer prevention and on the causes of disease
symptomatology (mutational genomic defects) as related to curative
cancer therapy. National cancer policy needs to be re-established
within the larger frameworks of the Mutation Theory of Neoplastic
Disease.
The American medical community has granted the marketplace dominion
over medical priorities and approaches, something that would have been
unconscionable a half century ago. Moving toward an intelligent
national cancer policy is simply out of the question under marketplace
dominion. The marketplace is driven, not by human rights and human
needs, but by the profit motive. By abiding marketplace dominion,
clinicians have seen their annual incomes rise into the realm of
"haves and have mores" but this has been accompanied by a
paranoid willingness to leave crises in both medical research and
medical ethics go unchallenged in the interest of maintaining personal
comfort and fiscal security and, in doing so, maintaining a status quo
profoundly lacking in science and democracy.
The study of cancer causation by environmental mutagens has always
posed a threat to marketplace "freedom" (license),
especially in those industries involved in the creation and
distribution of biologically-foreign chemicals. At the same time, the
larger frameworks of Mutation Theory have always posed a threat to
current cancer research and practice by exposing its approaches as
being generally irrelevant to curative cancer therapy, palliative
therapy being restricted in efficiency and efficacy by the very nature
of the cancer problem. In other words, the values of the marketplace
have consistently checked the values of medical science, philosophy
and ethics.
When the definition and derivation of national cancer policy is
removed from marketplace influences and returned to the medical
sciences, and when that national cancer policy is based upon an
internally-consistent view of the cancer problem as a whole, we will
be finally getting it right. Getting it right will require the
elimination of those influences that have made it wrong.
We need to place, as a nation, a much greater national emphasis on the
study of cancer causation and approaches to defect-specific gene
therapy. Doing so promises that, in perhaps a decade's time,
departments of radiation therapy and chemotherapy will become nothing
but nasty remembrances of the past.
------------------------
Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the shadow of Mount Rushmore in the Black
Hills of South Dakota. He was trained in McArdle Laboratories for
Cancer Research and was a faculty member in the Department of Human
Oncology at the University of Wisconsin Medical School for nearly a
decade. His website can be explored at www.jeffersonseyes.com and he
can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com.
read more of his articles at Dr.
Gerry Lower Archives
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