One must appreciate that the stakes are very high because over $200 billion per year in pharmaceutical profits are at risk. That figure does not include other profit potentials: • Hospital equipment (mammogram machines, radiotherapy equipment, MRI and CT scanners and high-tech surgical suites) • Support drugs • Other ancillary equipment used in traditional cancer treatment If alternative treatments were shown to work better than traditional treatments, the economic impact would be enormous. Those outside of medicine are not aware of the intense infighting between medical center professors, private practioners and specialists that is the daily fair of the medical community. Yet, you can bring all these personalities together on two issues — vaccines and cancer. The oldest club among physicians is the cancer specialist. Orthodox physicians feel they own cancer treatment, and no one else is allowed in the clubhouse. Physicians closed ranks about the time that medicine began to consider itself as part of the pure and applied sciences and not as an art. But what really sticks in their craw is for someone outside the club to try to break in as if patients belong to the doctor. Again, there is a great deal of professional infighting among specialists. Plastic surgeons, for example, hate it when ENT doctors start doing reconstructive surgery such as facelifts. Neurosurgeons do not like orthopedic surgeons doing back surgery. It is not that most physicians are really evil and want patients to suffer needlessly, it is that they are so intensely brainwashed in medical school and residency training that they instinctively react against anything not within the bounds of their training. It is almost a reflex. They are also so busy that most do not take the time to really analyze what they believe in any detail. I think that in its quest to become the epitome of scientific medicine (now called evidence-based medicine), the medical profession has lost sight of it original goal — that is, to heal and relieve suffering. Today, with our obsession with science and the “scientific method,” we have deviated severely from this goal. This is why the medical elite have coined the term evidence-based medicine, to let the world know that the new medicine is based solely on science. In the past, the great doctors, such as William Osler, recognized that medicine should entail not just cold, hard science but a large degree of the humanistic arts. The great men of medicine knew that doctors who were compassionate and who spent time with their patients had better outcomes than those who were stern and filled with cold hard “facts.” Since the time of Hippocrates it was known that God had placed within man the ability to heal. Benjamin Franklin expressed this when he said, “God heals and the doctor takes the fee.” Another of my favorites is “The efficient physician is the man who successfully amuses his patients while God effects a cure.” This is not to say that we have not benefited enormously from scientific discoveries and modern medicine. Tremendous strides have been made, primarily in acute medical conditions. Our science has also taught us a great deal about how the body functions in both health and disease. Yet, it is the chronic conditions, such as cancer, that have been most resistant to traditional treatments and have benefited the most from alternative treatments. There are two ways to look at the healing arts: 1. One, the way of the orthodox physician, in which one studies the science first, develops a medication or procedure to specifically address what the science has found, and sees if it works. The problem with this method is that the suffering and dying patients must wait until all the stringent criteria of the scientific method are met before they can benefit. This can take decades or even a lifetime. 2. Two, discover things that relieve suffering and prevent death, use them, and then figure out later why they worked. The advantage here is that the patients get the benefits of the treatment now and not some time in the distant future. Take for example the old folk remedy for dropsy (heart failure) called hawthorn. The folk doctors swore by it, and many people were relieved of their heart failure and saved from a life of misery and early death. They had no idea why it worked, but it worked. Most of the reasons given for these remedies working were quite inventive and entertaining as folk tales. The scientific doctors scoffed—it was all a lot of nonsense. Over the years researchers began to look at a lot of these folk remedies and found that many contained complex chemicals that could indeed cure and reduce the effects of various diseases. For example, they found that hawthorn contains beneficial proanthocyanidins, a number of flavonoids, and catechins. These all have significant health benefits, including strengthening heart muscle contractions, reducing free radicals and lipid peroxidation, and dilating the small arteries, thus lowering elevated blood pressure. In fact the American Heart Association now endorses hawthorn as beneficial for heart failure and for treating hypertension. It has also been found to protect the brain. It would have taken a multitude of years for the orthodox medical method to analyze the plant to see what it contains and if the ingredients had any beneficial effects. How many people would have died of heart failure and hypertension-related complications? That is a pretty big price to pay to keep scientists happy. Yet that is exactly what modern medicine is saying. Until science is satisfied, people must suffer and die. That is not to say that we should not test for safety of these products first, because, of course, safety is paramount. Purity, bioavailability and synergistic and additive effects are all important to know and science can answer many of these questions. One of the first responses of orthodox physicians when a natural practioners makes a claim of benefit is that it was a placebo effect. And sometimes this is true. But if a patient has had a malady for 10 years and has seen every expert in the medical profession without any relief, despite spending thousands of dollars on medicines, tests and procedures, and being frustrated, the patient then goes to a natural practitioner who prescribes natural herbs, vitamins, and minerals along with some spiritual exercises to do, and the patient becomes free of pain, who complains? Incredibly, the orthodox doctor. This leaves the patient bewildered; after all, it was the orthodox doctor who gave up on the patient in the first place. The patient is better either because of a presently unknown mechanism of action from the treatment, a placebo effect, or the treatment has spurred the patient to use innate healing mechanisms. In the final analysis, the patient is better, and happy and grateful to the natural doctor. But wasn’t the objective of medicine fulfilled? Wasn’t the patient’s suffering relieved? Who was really injured, and in whose interest does the orthodox doctor file a complaint to the local medical society or the FDA to have the natural doctor arrested? It appears the injured party is the orthodox doctor who has lost the patient to someone outside of the club. I cite the case of Dr. Stan Burzynski, who developed a series of amazing anticancer compounds called antineoplastons. He was indicted by the FDA for violating one of their rules on treating cancer. During his trial, under oath, a number of worldfamous experts testified that his results with a very deadly brainstem tumor affecting small children were incredibly effective. The FDA prosecutor told the doctor that he was not contesting the fact that Dr. Burzynski’s treatment was saving these children’s lives, just that a sacrosanct federal rule was broken. The government, in essence, was demanding that he let the children die rather than offend orthodox cancer treatments that had already failed these children. The good doctor won the case and is continuing to save the lives of many children.