Cancer will always be with us, according to more recent research

[Mr.Savage]

Also, and this is the interesting one, the FDA actually interviewed a bunch of people who claimed they had been cured of cancer by Hoxsey (three or four-hundred I believe). Turns out a lot of them never had cancer to begin with. He completely misdiagnosed them. Some of the ones who had been cured had been successfully treated for cancer *before* they even went to Hoxsey's clinics. People who actually went to him first, and had active cancer at the time were either dead, or still alive with cancer. The FDA never found a single case of anyone actually being cured by him.

See, now I know you didn't actually watch that Hoxsey documentary.

Hoxsey never administered treatment himself, he always staffed his clinics with several maverick doctors and many nurses to run the facility. And every patient was biopsied before being admitted.

So how about the Canadians? Because a group from the University of British-Columbia actually went to Hoxsey's clinic in Mexico to check the records of 71 Canadian citizens who'd been treated by him. They found that:

For over one-half of the [cancer] patients from British Columbia, the result [of treatment with the Hoxsey method] has been either death or progression of the disease. In nearly one-quarter there was no proof that the patient ever had cancer. Nearly one in ten of the patients had curative treatment before going to the Hoxsey Clinic. In only one case, an external cancer, was there any evidence at all that the Hoxsey treatment had an effect on the disease; in that case, better results could have been obtained by orthodox means.

The ONE patient of Hoxsey's they found that *might* have been cured by his methods (a patient with skin cancer) had been physically disfigured by his treatment, in a way that could have been avoided had they sought out traditional surgical treatment.

So, does this mean that it isn't just a conspiracy of American medical interests, but now the Canadians are propping this up too for what I'm sure are nefarious reasons?

Now you're intentionally twisting my words. I said that there hasn't been a single peer-reviewed piece of research to show that it's anything besides quackery. That doesn't mean that it's never been tested in the last 60 years. It has been tested, by multiple medical and anti-cancer organizations. It has even been tested on lab mice, and they found *no* difference in tumor growth between the untreated control mice and those given Hoxsey's treatment.

You think I haven't read what Wikipedia has to say about Hoxsey? Honestly? If you follow the footnote reference, you are redirected to a pretty famous site called Quackwatch, run by Stephen Barret, MD. This guy even thinks Vitamins are quackery.

Then again, I'm sure that'll just be proof of a government conspiracy to you.

The only thing you've proven to me is that you haven't taken the time to actually watch the Hoxsey documentary.

Seriously, rcs, watch that documentary, then come back here and point specifically to any inconsistencies you find, and whether or not Hoxsey was just trying to take people on the ride of their lives.

At least compare the content in the documentary with Wikipedia, and see if the latter doesn't come off as just a tad biased.


If you aren't willing to at least do that, then we've really reached an impasse.

 

[Mr.Savage]

Obviously Hoxsey is just a good guy who does this all for free, out of the goodness of his heart. Meanwhile everyone in a cancer charity or "Big Pharma" is a profiteering devil peddling bullshit. Everyone is either a dupe, or part of the con.

Same goes for you, watch that documentary and see for yourself what went down. It's a pretty unbiased look at what Hoxsey was doing.

See his avatar? It's from a fun comedy. Those glasses let him see the aliens in our midst, controlling us. Some people take that shit pretty seriously, and you just have to leave them to it.

Don't know what comedy you are referring to.

My avatar is a scene from the 3rd Season of Miami Vice titled "When Irish Eyes are Crying".

 

[vallorn]

Didn't we have a spate of "Capitalism is killing innovation" and other "Big business conspiracy" threads recently? I fail to see how this is overmuch different to those.

Fine, I'll explain a few things;
-What is cancer? It's a rapidly growing cell growth inside the body caused by mutations in cell division. This growth then forms tumors. The mutations can be caused by mutagen chemicals, viruses, errors in cell replication, or radiation. Because of the prevalence of mutations through the sheer power of statistics we actually have innumerable cancer cells in our bodies right now, however, this state of affairs is kept in check by our immune system, when either our immune system is drastically weakened or the cancer cells manage to hide from the immune system that is when we actually get what we call Cancer.

-How do we cure it? Currently, we work on killing the cancer cells through administrations of chemicals that attack rapidly dividing cells (like cancer) surgically removing larger tumors, or killing the cancer cells through radiotherapy. Essentially, we focus on killing the cancer cells to the point where humans can live with it symptom free.

Now, considering we are apparently talking about Hoxsey, I did some research into studies on this treatment method:
This one did basic tests on lab mice and found that it had no effect. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.40.1.51/abstract;jsessionid=95998F026DE1748984FA7C194DF5EDBB.f04t04]
and there are others out there as well but they are mostly only listed on third party sites unfortunately and I prefer to source my papers directly..

Furthermore, the image of the single patient on the last page is meaningless, it's the evidence equivalent of having a 100 year old granny stand up and say she's smoked all her life and never gotten sick so cigarettes are fine. It's anecdotal evidence and because humans are so different it can be safely discarded as being of any value.

Moving back to the Hoxsey formula itself, good god it's a mess, I know my herbs and a lot of those can be very, very bad, red clover for example is a phytoestrogen which would react very badly with people who have estrogen sensitive tumors (usually women with breast tumors). The other herbs can be easy to overdose on such as licorice or Pokeweed, and that's leaving out the problems that come with high Iodine intakes.
The cream applied also would be highly damaging, the ingredient Bloodwort in it produces alkaloids for example, and I would not want anyone smearing a mixture of antimony, zinc and sulfur onto my flesh (Not to mention the arsenic content).

Finally, when it comes down to this, saying that Hoxsey's method works but there's a conspiracy against it being publicized doesn't exempt it from the burden of proof, in fact, evidence for the conspiracy must also be provided as well. This is to prevent people from writing about ESP, aliens, Atlantis, etc then claiming there's a conspiracy of silence to keep the wool over peoples eyes. Yes these are absurd things but I am merely making my point that with the lack of evidence and claims of conspiracy, Hoxsey's method is quite close to their credibility.

 

[Leon Royce]

It's ironic that shamanic healers have been able to remove cancer from people using psychedelic plants like Ayahuasca, psylociben mushrooms etc... for millennia, and yet here we are, still trying to find a magic synthetic molecule that we can pop and forget.

So much needless complexity, all because of this myth we have that no culture or civilization before the late 1800's anywhere knew anything about the body and medicine, ever...

It is actually we who know little about the body, specifically the link between emotion, trauma, consciousness and the physical manifestation of illness.

 

[rcs619]

If I get this correctly, that pharmatuical companies will kill the idea since it will cut their profits, maybe with other diseases that could be true, but cancer?

Pretty much everybody will get cancer if they live long enough, so any company will try to find some matter of cure just for its execs health, even if it might cut their profits (and even then, if a different company DOES find a cure they are double fucked, with no patent or customers).

That's the thing. Cancer isn't a virus or bacteria, we can't make it extinct. It is a natural result of the processes that drive our cells. If you have a cure for cancer, you'll always have a market because even if we make most other diseases extinct, cancer is always going to be something we'll have to deal with.

-SNIP-

Love everything you just said. Keep it up

Like I said in my other posts, the *one* person they found (in this case people from the University of British-Columbia) *might* have been cured by Hoxsey's methods (this person had some sort of skin cancer apparently), out of 70 other Canadian citizens who had been treated in his clinics, wound up being more disfigured by his treatment than they would have been if they'd have just gone with a more typical surgical treatment.

Also the FDA interviewed like 400 people who claimed to be cured by his method, and a lot of them never even had cancer to begin with. They were completely and totally misdiagnosed.

It's ironic that shamanic healers have been able to remove cancer from people using psychedelic plants like Ayahuasca, psylociben mushrooms etc... for millennia, and yet here we are, still trying to find a magic synthetic molecule that we can pop and forget.

So much needless complexity, all because of this myth we have that no culture or civilization before the late 1800's anywhere knew anything about the body and medicine, ever...

It is actually we who know little about the body, specifically the link between emotion, trauma, consciousness and the physical manifestation of illness.

You do realize that scientists actually go and test folk medicine, right? There are scientific groups and medical organizations who specifically go to indigenous cultures to look at their medicine and see if it actually has any merit to it. It isn't like they just ignore folk medicine. Some of it does actually have something to it, even if they never knew *why* it helped. Science never just went "lol primitives" and moved on. Do you know how much money and fame is waiting for someone who is able to prove something like that? Believe me, people are looking.

I really fail to see how psychotropics would help with cancer in any meaningful way besides making the patient so high that they don't care about it any more. Maybe if it's brain cancer it could burn out brain cells, but at that point you're resorting to scorched-earth tactics anyway, just go with chemo.

The thing about cancer, and why a lot of folk medicines traditionally have not fared well with it, is that cancer is tenacious. As tenacious as your normal cells. Rubbing a salve on it may make it feel better, it may even kill some of the surface cells, but that doesn't actually do anything to stop the cancer itself. You can't "fix" cancer cells either. They're already corrupted, and they are constantly reproducing. You either have to destroy them all, down to the last cell, or you have to damage them at a genetic level to such a degree that they become unable to reproduce, or you have to cut them out.

Anything else, and you just make someone better for as long as it takes for the cancer cells to repopulate. And all the while there's the risk that they get picked up and spread to other places in the body.

 

[DefunctTheory]

It's ironic that shamanic healers have been able to remove cancer from people using psychedelic plants like Ayahuasca, psylociben mushrooms etc... for millennia, and yet here we are, still trying to find a magic synthetic molecule that we can pop and forget.

So much needless complexity, all because of this myth we have that no culture or civilization before the late 1800's anywhere knew anything about the body and medicine, ever...

It is actually we who know little about the body, specifically the link between emotion, trauma, consciousness and the physical manifestation of illness.

Magic. Just say it. We know little about magic.

Which, I suppose, is true. We know about as much about magic as we do the tooth fairy.

Which isn't a lot.

When did this turn into a thread about your belief in magic?

Right around the moment he said polio could be cured by megadoses of vitamin C, I believe.

 

[Yopaz]

Isn't cancer an unregulated growth of cells? You can't really cure that (as in never have it happen), you can only prevent it.

And yeah, there are so many things that profit from cancer that it is unlikely that we will ever see any amazing preventative measures, within our lifetime at least.

I am a little more optimistic though.

Depends on the cancer really. You can cure it as in get rid of it permanently in some cases. The biggest success story in specialized cancer treatment is on the BCR-ABL mutation or Philadelphia chromosome. Lots of cancer research try to emulate the principles behind that as it has a realatively high rate of patients being cured. There is no way of preventing cancer from arising however. Cells need to divide and mistakes are made all the time.

-Snip-

May I ask what background you have? I am asking because your post was very well written and really gave a great introduction to what cancer is.

OT: Whenever I see the phrase "curing cancer" I already find that to convey a fundamental misunderstanding. Cancer is not a single disease. It's kinda like saying that we're going to cure bacterial infections. As I stated earlier in this post there are a few breakthroughs, Gleevec (or imatinib)is the biggest one. It's a tumor cell specific drug used in treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia. It's a very effective drug, but the disease we treat with it isn't that common. If we could develop anything as effective for other types of mutations leading to cancer we would. Emerging options lie in new delivery methods that allow us to target tumor cells exclusively, but that's tough.
(Source from Nature if anyone is interested: http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gleevec-the-breakthrough-in-cancer-treatment-565 )

There hasn't been a single peer-reviewed piece of research about any of this stuff, why? If it is all just a load of shit, then how easy would it be to prove under scientific evaluation?

There hasn't been a single peer-reviewed article that shows this working. That's not the same as saying there hasn't been any studies. There's also a lot of research being spent on testing alternative medicine. Very little of it has been published with a positive physiological effect outside of specialist papers.

There are however reasons why this isn't tested as much as it might have been. If a few studies show it to be unsuccessful the ethics committee will not allow you to take patients of medicines that have been shown to have some effect (regardless how little) to put them on something proven ineffective. That's why placebo controlled trials are supposed to be used only when there is no known treatment. Don't believe me?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1585205
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22957409
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22957409
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8364770
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.40.1.51/epdf (this one is more specific while the first four are general)
I can easily locate several peer-reviewed articles. You claim that these treatments aren't used because there's no money in it. This is false. Patients have spent billions of dollars on these treatments worldwide and continue to do so even today. Alternative medicine isn't free, neither is conventional medicine. There's money to be had in both so if you're going to condemn medical science over a matter of money you should do the same many times over on alternative medicine because conventional medicine has had to go through several trials and show documentation before they give it to patients while alternative medicine only has to make their claims vague enough to not promise too much or risk being sued for fraud.

 

[P. K. Qu'est Que Ce]

It's ironic that shamanic healers have been able to remove cancer from people using psychedelic plants like Ayahuasca, psylociben mushrooms etc... for millennia, and yet here we are, still trying to find a magic synthetic molecule that we can pop and forget.

So much needless complexity, all because of this myth we have that no culture or civilization before the late 1800's anywhere knew anything about the body and medicine, ever...

It is actually we who know little about the body, specifically the link between emotion, trauma, consciousness and the physical manifestation of illness.

Magic. Just say it. We know little about magic.

Which, I suppose, is true. We know about as much about magic as we do the tooth fairy.

Which isn't a lot.

When did this turn into a thread about your belief in magic?

Right around the moment he said polio could be cured by megadoses of vitamin C, I believe.

At least it's a huge warning sign that we can all just step around, to move on with our lives. You don't debate crazy with crazy, and those claims are absolutely crazy. I tend to associate them with certain kinds of elements, in the same way that you see a lot of bipolar people in extreme meditation practices (Kundalini for example, or transcendental meditation), Reiki, or the Schizophrenic relationship to Icke-type conspiracies, or Orgone and Chemtrail conspiracies. Some delusional illnesses and some delusional belief systems seem to naturally coexist.

It's all on a complex intersecting spectrum of "Infinite Wonder", "Special Powers", and good old fashioned Paranoia. The mix of each tends to determine whether you get a wide-eyed wonderer who tragically dies from a curable disease, or a raving paranoid who thinks that "Big Pharma" has the alien cure for cancer in Area 51.

 

[vallorn]

It's ironic that shamanic healers have been able to remove cancer from people using psychedelic plants like Ayahuasca, psylociben mushrooms etc... for millennia, and yet here we are, still trying to find a magic synthetic molecule that we can pop and forget.

So much needless complexity, all because of this myth we have that no culture or civilization before the late 1800's anywhere knew anything about the body and medicine, ever...

It is actually we who know little about the body, specifically the link between emotion, trauma, consciousness and the physical manifestation of illness.

The link between emotion, trauma, and illness is actually somewhat well understood. No idea why you brought a word like consciousness into there but I'll endeavor to explain.


It's all to do with stress actually, when we are put under certain high intensity situations our bodies produce specific chemicals that are often called "stress hormones", these are Adrenaline, Cortisol, and Norepinephrine. These tie into the Fight or Flight response, boosting our body temporarily to cope with situations such as a lion attack or having to swerve on a road to avoid a drunk driver.

Adrenaline works by boosting heart rate and has other effects, however it is mostly short lived, we get surges of it that are then metabolised back into the body.

Norepinephrine on the other hand causes a change in blood flow, pulling blood away from areas like the skin to the brain and muscles to make you more alert, once again making you ready to fight or run from the lion. Norepinephrine is somewhat slower at being user up by the body however, and it can take hours to days to return to a regular resting state after a stressful incident.

Finally, Cortisol is different, it doesn't affect the blood flow like the previous hormones, it instead changes your blood's makeup, boosting the amount of sugars in the blood for example.

The issue is mostly down to Cortisol when it comes to long term stress. If we are subjected to long term periods of stress Cortisol builds up in our systems and gives rise to problems like a suppressed immune system (leading to illness), acne, obesity, and mental issues such as anxiety, depression, it even interferes with learning and memory.

Now, we also know that highly intense emotional situations cause stress, and trauma (mental) causes these releases as well, physical trauma on the other hand causes the release of other chemicals into the body to try and deal with it, overabundance of these is one factor that contributes to the phenomenon known as 'shock'.

Sooo. Yeah, emotions and trauma can cause stress, stress then contributes towards illness through suppressed immune systems and can affect our brains adversely.

If I get this correctly, that pharmatuical companies will kill the idea since it will cut their profits, maybe with other diseases that could be true, but cancer?

Pretty much everybody will get cancer if they live long enough, so any company will try to find some matter of cure just for its execs health, even if it might cut their profits (and even then, if a different company DOES find a cure they are double fucked, with no patent or customers).

That's the thing. Cancer isn't a virus or bacteria, we can't make it extinct. It is a natural result of the processes that drive our cells. If you have a cure for cancer, you'll always have a market because even if we make most other diseases extinct, cancer is always going to be something we'll have to deal with.

I forgot to make that point so thanks, there's a million causes for replication errors in our cells from replication errors to the low level background radiation that is emitted from the rocks, sky, and everything else, to viruses infecting cells with their RNA, to chemicals that directly damage our cell's DNA. Cancer is always going to be around in one form or another simply because our bodies are imperfect and when a cell develops a glitch in cell replication those imperfections can cause cancer.

So yeah, to mirror your point, we're never going to eradicate cancer just because of its nature, the best we can do is learn to treat it effectively and detect it in its early stages before it metastasizes and spreads round the body.

-SNIP-

Love everything you just said. Keep it up

Like I said in my other posts, the *one* person they found (in this case people from the University of British-Columbia) *might* have been cured by Hoxsey's methods (this person had some sort of skin cancer apparently), out of 70 other Canadian citizens who had been treated in his clinics, wound up being more disfigured by his treatment than they would have been if they'd have just gone with a more typical surgical treatment.

Also the FDA interviewed like 400 people who claimed to be cured by his method, and a lot of them never even had cancer to begin with. They were completely and totally misdiagnosed.

Thank you, I shall!

And yeah, judging by the ingredients in his topical cream, disfigurement of the affected region makes a lot of sense, deep scaring would likely take place as well as the effects of applying elements like arsenic to a region of the body that has extremely high blood flow through it (like a tumor).

 

[renegade7]

-Snip-

May I ask what background you have? I am asking because your post was very well written and really gave a great introduction to what cancer is.

Thanks!

My background is not actually medical. I'm in graduate school working towards a PhD in high-energy and plasma physics. But my undergrad degrees were physics and biochemistry, so I had some exposure to cell biology. That also came with the requisite "science in society" courses, which is basically academic-speak for "Identifying pseudoscience". I'm also currently an organizer for my college's student skeptic society, so I actually have some involvement in pro-skeptic activism (mostly just chasing down students who sell phony "study drugs", but there is some bigger advocacy stuff).

 

[K12]

I hope people start to understand a bit better that "finding THE cure for cancer" is unreasonable and doesn't fit with what cancer researchers are doing.

We might get to a point where we have good vaccines, treatments and screenings for cancer but we'll never eradicate it because a)Cancer isn't a single thing. It's an umbrella term for several similar conditions (lymphoma, leukemia, melanoma etc.) and b)Cancer isn't transmitted, it arises individually in each patient.

The idea that cancer isn't being eradicated because "Big Pharma" are keeping it under wraps is silly. Your making the same basic mistake that most grand conspiracy theories make and treated a very large group of people as if they have one collective mind and one collective set of interests. Big Pharma is made of loads of competing companies and executives and somehow nobody whistle-blows and no one tries to get a leg up on the competition. Do you have any idea how much money a cancer eradicating treatment could make?

This is also kind of disrespectful to the genuine cases of Big Pharma misallocating money. Most major pharmaceuticals spend more more on marketing than research and they neglect some diseases because they're best treatment are unpatentable or their victims are all in the third world (I'd read Ben Goldacre's "Bad Pharma" for more info from someone who is critical of medical companies without being a quack)

 

[P. K. Qu'est Que Ce]

-Snip-

May I ask what background you have? I am asking because your post was very well written and really gave a great introduction to what cancer is.

Thanks!

My background is not actually medical. I'm in graduate school working towards a PhD in high-energy and plasma physics. But my undergrad degrees were physics and biochemistry, so I had some exposure to cell biology. That also came with the requisite "science in society" courses, which is basically academic-speak for "Identifying pseudoscience". I'm also currently an organizer for my college's student skeptic society, so I actually have some involvement in pro-skeptic activism (mostly just chasing down students who sell phony "study drugs", but there is some bigger advocacy stuff).

This is totally off topic, but is there any chance that you'd be able to explain to a simple fellow like myself what a "Superthermal" effect would be in relation to a laser?

 

[rcs619]

If I get this correctly, that pharmatuical companies will kill the idea since it will cut their profits, maybe with other diseases that could be true, but cancer?

Pretty much everybody will get cancer if they live long enough, so any company will try to find some matter of cure just for its execs health, even if it might cut their profits (and even then, if a different company DOES find a cure they are double fucked, with no patent or customers).

That's the thing. Cancer isn't a virus or bacteria, we can't make it extinct. It is a natural result of the processes that drive our cells. If you have a cure for cancer, you'll always have a market because even if we make most other diseases extinct, cancer is always going to be something we'll have to deal with.

When I think of the cure I think more of a system to murder the shit out of cancer cells with, for excample, nano machines. Of course eradicating the malady itself is impossible but preventing it's progress without repearting treatments can be count as a cure.

That's fair. I don't personally think we'll get to proper nanomachines within a few centuries (there's just such a hurdle in programming and *powering* something tht small) but nanomachines would be the ideal solution.

That's why I'm a big proponent of research into using engineered viruses in medicine. Viruses are, functionally, naturally-occurring nanomachines, and about the closest we're going to be able to get to such a thing for quite a while. You'd never have as fine a level of control as you would with proper nanomachines, but you could still (theoretically) engineer viruses to do all sorts of useful things.

Targeted, specifically-engineered agents. That would also be useful in fighting the superbugs that improper antibiotic use has started to create.

 

[renegade7]

-Snip-

May I ask what background you have? I am asking because your post was very well written and really gave a great introduction to what cancer is.

Thanks!

My background is not actually medical. I'm in graduate school working towards a PhD in high-energy and plasma physics. But my undergrad degrees were physics and biochemistry, so I had some exposure to cell biology. That also came with the requisite "science in society" courses, which is basically academic-speak for "Identifying pseudoscience". I'm also currently an organizer for my college's student skeptic society, so I actually have some involvement in pro-skeptic activism (mostly just chasing down students who sell phony "study drugs", but there is some bigger advocacy stuff).

This is totally off topic, but is there any chance that you'd be able to explain to a simple fellow like myself what a "Superthermal" effect would be in relation to a laser?

So the first law of thermodynamics is "Total energy = heat added + work done", or U = Q + W (sometimes U = Q - W, Q + W means W represents "work done on the system", Q - W means "work done by the system"). Heat energy refers to the kinetic energy of the atoms in the system (the energy that makes them move around, more heat means faster atoms), work refers to energy gained or lost by all other sources.

"Superthermal" means that a system has energy that is not due to heat energy. In regards to a laser, I assume that refers to energy stored in the laser medium that is not due to the kinetic energy of the atoms in the medium. So for instance, if you're using a gas laser and some of the atoms or molecules ionize (become charged), they're storing energy that didn't come from the heat energy of the particles in the gas. Since atoms and molecules only store energy in discrete quantities, the energy distribution among all of the particles in the medium is going to be made inhomogeneous. Since a laser works by raising the energy level of the atoms in its medium to an excited state so that they all discharge at the same time, this will make the pulses of the output longer, meaning a lower-quality laser that is harder to control at higher pulse frequencies. The picture (I apologize for my horribleness at using Paint) hopefully explains what this would cause more clearly, ideally you'd want all four of the atoms to reach the excited state at the same time.

Spoiler

Hope that helps

 

[Mr.Savage]

That's the thing. Cancer isn't a virus or bacteria, we can't make it extinct. It is a natural result of the processes that drive our cells. If you have a cure for cancer, you'll always have a market because even if we make most other diseases extinct, cancer is always going to be something we'll have to deal with.

This is probably my favorite piece of new research, published in March, 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25625193

The only piece of the puzzle they haven't run across yet is the cause for mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer cells.


That brings us full circle, and right back to what Royal Rife and other researchers have repeatedly observed; that a micro organism can be detected in neoplastic tissue under extremely high magnification.

Usually this requires the use of an electron microscope, which has the disadvantage of killing any live specimen to be examined due to vacuum conditions and electron bombardment of the sample, which kill it. Because of the lack of specimen motility, it has classicly gone unnoticed that a motile organism can be separated from neoplastic tissue.

Rife designed and built his own microscope which remains unique to this day (see my post on the other page for reference) in that it permitted him a magnification of up to 60,000 times, without a drop in resolution (known to the field as spherical aberration).

He built 5 such microscopes, and used them to image what he named "Bacillus X", a micro organism which he detected in every piece of neoplastic tissue he ever examined.

Rife proved this theory by grinding up a portion of human breast tumor in distilled water, after which the liquefied tumor material was pulled through a very fine filter made of unglazed ceramic. So fine was the porosity of the filter, the tissue would be left behind, and under vacuum, the distilled water which contained the micro organism would be drawn through.

He then took this distilled water, filled with the microbe extracted from the human breast mass, and injected it into the mammary gland of mice, guinea pigs and albino rats.

Every time he did this, a malignant tumor would form in the lab animal. He would then surgically resection the tumor from the lab animal, and repeat the above procedure. This was done a total of 104 times in his lab.

 

[rcs619]

This is probably my favorite piece of new research, published in March, 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25625193

So I will say that going after the mitochondria of cancer cells is an interesting idea for how to stop them. However, the broadness of the language in their abstract worries me a bit. When you try to take an issue as diverse and nuanced as cancer and boil it down to broad generalities, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. My suspicion is that they are doing a bit of over-hype to try and secure funding for further research.

Antibiotics likely wouldn't be the ideal final product to treat cancer with either. They may not damage the patient's cells, but they're going to do a number on their internal ecosystem and potentially create antibiotic resistant bugs that will need to be treated later (considering that a decent number of cancer patients already have compromised immune systems, that second part would be especially worrying). Ideally you'd want something that would target the mitochondria directly and specifically, and you'd need to make damn sure it only went after the right cells. Still though, interesting idea. Always good to look at new angles of attack.

The only piece of the puzzle they haven't run across yet is the cause for mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer cells.

Radiation, environmental carcinogens, straight-up screw-ups during the normal DNA replication process, and some pathogens (HPV comes to mind) have been linked to certain types of cancer as well.

It doesn't necessarily need to be an issue with the mitochondrial DNA either (which is actually a separate and distinct thing from the rest of your cell's genome), it could be an error on the cell's side that hijacks otherwise healthy mitochondria. Either way, mitochondria are going to be important to cancer cells, since the primary defining factor of a cancer cell is explosive, uncontrolled growth.

That brings us full circle, and right back to what Royal Rife and other researchers have repeatedly observed; that a micro organism can be detected in neoplastic tissue under extremely high magnification.

-----

He built 5 such microscopes, and used them to image what he named "Bacillus X", a micro organism which he detected in every piece of neoplastic tissue he ever examined.

See, now you're claiming that there is some as of yet unknown microbe (which a lot of sites related to Rife can't seem to decide if it's a bacteria or a virus) that is some sort of universal cause of cancer. You've just lost me.

Also, I feel like I should point out that we can image bacteria under an electron microscope just fine. The fact that they die in the process doesn't actually matter. Cancerous cells have also been looked at extensively under electron microscopes. Hell, we've imaged a lot of viruses under electron microscopes (which are *much* smaller than any bacteria). Do you see how unbelievable it is that thousands of scientists, from dozens of different countries, under the jurisdiction of both government and private interests would not have caught this "bacillus X" within the last 60 years?

Rife proved this theory by grinding up a portion of human breast tumor in distilled water, after which the liquefied tumor material was pulled through a very fine filter made of unglazed ceramic. So fine was the porosity of the filter, the tissue would be left behind, and under vacuum, the distilled water which contained the micro organism would be drawn through.

He then took this distilled water, filled with the microbe extracted from the human breast mass, and injected it into the mammary gland of mice, guinea pigs and albino rats.

Every time he did this, a malignant tumor would form in the lab animal. He would then surgically resection the tumor from the lab animal, and repeat the above procedure. This was done a total of 104 times in his lab.

In his lab. Using his microscopes. Singular results mean next to nothing in science. Show me peer-reviewed articles of other scientists not affiliated with Rife (or better yet, skeptical of Rife) that have independently verified his claims.

If you want to believe that there's some kind of magic-bullet to killing a universal cause of cancer, and that this has been suppressed for the better part of 60 years, across multiple nations, not just by governmental entities but also independent organizations and University research groups as well... well, once again that is your right.

It does, however, fit every classical definition of a conspiracy theory (reducing a complex issue down to a simple solution, and then having that solution be hidden through the actions of a gigantic cabal for decades), and that it sounds fairly ridiculous when put under the tiniest degree of scrutiny.

 

[Mr.Savage]

A lot of Big Phrama work is centred round re-fining drugs to produce them more efficiently and create more efficient drugs with less side effects.

Creating an anti-cancer drug would be a whole new area of work to refine it's production process and reduce side effects.

I appreciate this point of view, but answer me this: would Big Pharma embrace a superior cancer treatment that did not take the form of a pharmaceutical?

What frustrates me is the forgone conclusion that yet another expensive drug is the only way; which suggests an obligated hostility toward anything that does not strictly rely on a chemical mechanism to achieve the desired result.

I know it is very easy to dismiss such a thought process as fancifully ignorant, but I'm not new to this field of study.

There is a consensus among the rational set that a more effective treatment of cancer must, of necessity, be expensive to discover and expensive to produce. After all, look at how many billions have been spent just to get us were we are today.

So when something is proposed which doesn't fit that model, it is unceremoniously denounced, and its originator chastised for suggesting it.


In the original post, I linked to a news segment about DMSO, a substance whose clinical usefulness and safety has been very well documented both in and out of the laboratory, yet it remains out of reach to physicians for anything except the treatment of interstitial cystitis, a condition for which DMSO is the only effective modality.

The reasoning for this is openly admitted by both the regulatory agencies and Big Pharma; the former insists it would be a regulatory nightmare, the latter indicates that, being a completely natural substance and therefore unable to be patented, there's no money to be recovered from the approval process, as it is well known that DMSO is a byproduct of paper manufacturing, and therefore cheap to produce. This eliminates the justification of a high markup to recoup costs.

It remains unapproved for use in humans, despite an embarrassing amount of evidence and testimony that it is both safe and effective in the alleviation of many different ailments.



Given this and other such cases, I struggle with the idea that these entities are entirely benign.