So begins the 15th June 2001 UK Daily Mail front-page report, outlining the work of Dr Ian Blair, resident researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Pharmacology Unit. The Mail headline appears to be in direct conflict with Dr Blair’s own statement: “Absolutely, for God's sake, don't say Vitamin C causes cancer.” (Yahoo News, Thursday June 14th, 2001) But of course, The Mail and others have shamelessly done exactly that. To the less discerning reader, the story raises worrisome questions as to the wisdom of high-level Vitamin C supplementation. If these world-wide headlines have served any useful purpose at all, it has been to confirm the moral/intellectual void currently reigning in today’s mass media ‘news’ departments.
At a more fundamental level, why is Dr Blair conducting tests on the efficacy of Vitamin C at all? We are about to discover that certain parties have a very definite interest in casting aspersions upon Vitamin C. Yet again, we are being taught what to think about a certain subject, but not how. To our knowledge, the information you are about to read has not been included in any of the latest, and now world-wide ‘Vitamin C Cancer Scare’ headlines generated by Dr Blair’s findings.
A GOLDEN RULE
Dr Blair postulates that high consumption of Vitamin C (a most beneficial adjunct in non-toxic cancer recovery treatment) might actually cause human tissue degeneration, which in turn could lead to a heightened risk of contracting cancer. And it is here that we arrive at our first golden rule: when it comes to assessing the veracity of any scientific claim, we must always read between the lines – we must search for what the report does not say. We must especially be on the look-out for that hoary old chestnut, otherwise known as vested interests. A University of Manchester research methodology handbook contains the following valuable advice:
“Science and research must be studied in the context of all the interested parties involved. The questions centre on determining the relative weight of the various allies in the ‘fact-creating’ process - e.g. funding bodies, businesses, departments of state, professions and other scientists. In analysing scientific debates, one should always ask what social, institutional, political and philosophical interests lie behind often apparently ‘neutral’ and ‘technical’ knowledge claims.” (University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) research methodology course handout, 1994) (emphasis mine)
On the matter of the ‘fact creation’ process, renowned author John Le Carre recently stated:
"Big Pharma [the industry in general] is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by country, world-wide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgement to a point where, in a few years' time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find." (The Nation, New York, Interview with John Le Carre, 9th April 2001)
BOUGHT?
With the above in mind, lets put Dr Blair’s University of Pennsylvania under the spotlight and see what encouragement Dr Blair might have had in taking his extraordinary position and apparently misquoted position against Vitamin C. We must ask the following questions: what Big Pharma influences might there be supporting the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center (UPCC) and its mother ship, the University of Pennsylvania Health Service? What is the relative weight of the funding bodies? If industry sponsorship is taking place, are UPHS personnel free to exercise unbiased critical thinking? Or are there grounds to suspect that UPHS been ‘bought’ - that somewhere along the line, vested interests have ‘purchased academic judgement’?
Before tackling the Vitamin C issue itself, the following UPHS general statistics are very revealing.
CERTAIN ALLIANCES
In May 2000, Dr Ian Blair’s employers at UPCC received a $26 million, five year Core Grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) - the largest and most influential conventional cancer treatment institution in the world. In fact, UPCC has been continuously funded by the NCI Core Grant mechanism since the grant was created by the National Cancer Act in the early 1970’s. Currently, UPCC is awash with more than $100 million in cancer research funding: $37 million is from the National Cancer Institute; $43 million from closely affiliated organisations, such as the National Institutes of Health, the organisation which actually funded Dr Blair’s Vitamin C research; another $12 million from foundational support such as the American Cancer Society and the Leukaemia Society; and between $8 and $10 million from various pharmaceutical companies. Earlier, in June of 1999, UPCC received a $4.5 million gift from the William H. Gates Foundation to research conventional treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Aside from the Bill and Melinda Gates connection, OncoLink, the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center, is sponsored very generously by the following corporations: Amgen, the world's largest independent biotechnology company; Aventis, Ortho Biotech, Inc., Varian, Inc., Janssen Pharmaceutica, AstraZeneca, Pharmacia Upjohn and Pfizer. These corporations are very big indeed, and their names represent no mean sponsorship committee.
MORE ALLIANCES
In March 2001, UPHS announced a strategic alliance with Siemens Medical Systems, Inc. Under the terms of the purchasing agreement, UPHS will make an initial discounted purchase of cardiology, radiology and radiation oncology equipment from Siemens, who will also service and maintain the biomedical equipment already in place at designated UPHS sites over the life of the agreement. In the year 2000, Siemens Medical Solutions, based in Iselin, New Jersey, reported new orders of $5.65 billion, sales of $5.44 billion and employs 27,000 world-wide. "This is the kind of alliance that will be critical in our continuing financial recovery and to assure our position as a leading national health system," said Robert D. Martin, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of UPHS.
A good relationship with Siemens may well be critical to UPHS’ financial recovery, but does this kind of dependent alliance foster the aforementioned necessary climate for critical thinking? What if there are privately held UPHS reservations over the Siemens equipment, methodology or ethos? Who will break rank first? Will anyone? What kind of commercially gagged framework are the UPHS staff now locked into with Siemens?
YET MORE CORPORATE ALLIANCES
On April 26, 2001, UPCC announced a business partnership with Integral PET Associates, the nation's leading operator of fixed-site Positron Emission Tomography (PET) cancer scanners. A patient receiving a PET scan today is injected with a radiopharmaceutical, such as flurodeoxyglucose (FDG), about 45 minutes before the scan, which takes about two hours. The radiopharmaceutical tracer emits signals which are then picked up by the PET scanner. A computer reassembles the signals into recognisable images to determine if a cancer has spread, if a particular treatment is effective, or if a patient is disease-free. IPA will now be seeking to supply major hospitals throughout Pennsylvania with this very expensive equipment. Installing and operating a PET scanner typically costs around $1,600,000 in up-front capital costs, plus an additional $800,000 in yearly staff and operational costs.
A short visit to the UPHS website at www.med.upenn.edu will not only confirm all of the above information, but
will also confirm that these alliances represent only a small percentage of the long-standing conventional ‘friendships’ UPHS has fostered with Big Pharma over the years. Given the strictly conventional source of sponsorship monies received at UPHS, what chance will the following statements have of being ‘allowed’ to feature on the UPHS cancer information page?
“If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.” Professor Charles Mathe, French cancer specialist
“...as a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good." - Alan C Nixon, PhD, former president of the American Chemical Society.
“Doctors are too busy to dig into the statistics of cancer treatments, they assume that what they are taught at school or what is demonstrated in the pages of briefing journals is the best treatment. They cannot afford to suspect that these treatments are only the best for the pharmaceutical companies that influence their ‘institutions of higher learning’.” Paul Winter, The Cancell Home Page.
“To the cancer establishment, a cancer patient is a profit center. The actual clinical and scientific evidence does not support the claims of the cancer industry. Conventional cancer treatments are in place as the law of the land because they pay, not heal, the best. Decades of the politics-of-cancer-as-usual have kept you from knowing this, and will continue to do so unless you wake up to this reality.” - Lee Cowden MD
“Almost every patient treated with IL2 (a current conventional cancer treatment) suffered fever, malaise, nausea or vomiting, diarrhoea, sharp drops in blood pressure, skin rashes, breathing difficulties, liver abnormalities and irregularities in blood chemistry. Rosenberg himself details a number of horrifying case histories, and one in particular where the administration of IL2 had precipitated amongst other things, vomiting, swollen joints, lung fluid and ‘vascular leak syndrome’ where blood would ooze through the vessel walls and collect under the skin.” Steven Rosenberg, The Transformed Cell, 1992. (IL2 is still used today.)
“Dr Linus Pauling, often known as the ‘Father of Vitamin C’ and twice awarded the Nobel Prize, declared that large intakes of up to 10g of the vitamin each day aids anti-cancer activity within the body. Pauling was largely derided for making these declarations, but today, large doses of Vitamin C are used by many practitioners for cancer patients in nutritional therapy, who believe Pauling was right and that the popular nutrient is indispensable to the body in its fight to regain health from cancer.” Phillip Day, Cancer, Why We’re Still Dying to Know The Truth, Credence Publications, 2001.
“Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.” Linus Pauling http://www.cforyourself.com
The above remarks are representative of a vast library of well-sourced contrary information which sensibly questions the validity and efficacy of conventional cancer treatments based on a huge amount of clinical research and data. Naturally, with all these expensive and patented treatments available to fight cancer, the cancer rates should be going down. They are not. They are increasing.
STAGGERING AMOUNTS
UPHS is totally locked into the conventional cancer framework - a framework which today, rightly stands accused of achieving no measurable success at all in its approach to the treatment of cancer, immense success in causing widespread, unnecessary death through its application of lethal and highly toxic pharma-radiation treatments, and even greater success in rewarding itself absolutely staggering amounts of money in the whole grisly process. That these cancer corporations have become incredibly wealthy through their ‘chemo ’til we drop’ approach is a fact which Messrs Siemens, Zeneca, Upjohn, Glaxo, Rhone Poulenc cannot deny.
COMMON SENSE
Pauling was right. We have been seriously misled. Taking the Siemens $multi-million technology as an example, it may well detect certain forms of cancer, but upon detecting it, what then happens? Quite simply, a bewildered, obedient, grateful and unsuspecting cancer sufferer is immediately directed towards the door marked ‘iatrogenic (doctor-induced) illness and probable death.’ Closer examination of today's orthodox cancer treatments clearly reveals that the conventional path is fraught with toxic danger. But the CEO of UPHS has made it quite clear that ‘the Siemens alliance [one of so many] is critical to the financial security of UPHS’.
This is why we will hear no publicly dissenting voices from UPHS as to the horrific realities associated with 20th and 21st Century conventional cancer treatments. The corporate big boys’ riches must continue to flow…. and a handsome proportion of it into the coffers of the very dependent UPHS, of course, ‘to assist in their financial recovery’.
SO WHY THE SLUR ON VITAMIN C?
As has already been stated, conventional cancer treatment represents a $multi-billion a year industry. These vast profits are fiercely protected by the industry giants. But their treatments in no way address the underlying causes of cancer. Cancer is a nutritional/toxic/environmental condition, which, in a great number of instances, can be successfully reversed through the application of a sound nutritional approach and common-sense lifestyle changes. Linus Pauling, dubbed the father of Vitamin C, sensibly promoted the benefits of consuming high doses Vitamin C in the prevention of and battle against cancer.
HALF-TRUTHS AND LIES
So why aren’t we hearing about these natural treatment successes? Why aren’t they being heralded across the world? The answer is money. Despite the multitudinous successes in cancer regression through nutrition, and through extensive application of vital elements such as Vitamin C, Vitamin B17, pancreatic enzymes and other co-factors, Big Pharma is doing all it can to silence these success stories. To have it become widely known that cancer can be successfully treated without toxic and profitable pharmaceuticals would be catastrophic for its business. Who would continue to purchase these products? What would the Siemens, Glaxo and Upjohn shareholders have to say about that? To their shame, vested interests are keeping well-proven, non-toxic cancer treatments from the public domain. This is why, under ‘cancer treatments’ the UPHS website says this of vitamin B17: http://www.upenn.edu
“Several patients displayed symptoms of cyanide poisoning, including muscle weakness and impaired reflexes, or had life-threatening levels of cyanide in their blood. (Laetrile can release cyanide, which is a highly toxic chemical.) The researchers concluded that Laetrile is not effective as a cancer treatment and is harmful in some cases.”
But now read this contrary extract from a radio talk show, featured in Phillip Day’s Cancer, Why We Are Still Dying To Know The Truth:
Radio host Laurie Lee: “So this is verified, that laetrile [B17] can have this positive effect?”
Dr Ralph Moss: “We were finding this and yet, we in Public Affairs were told to issue statements to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically.”
At the time, Ralph Moss was former Assistant Director of Public Relations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, NY, a leading American conventional cancer research facility.
Of course Laetrile, or Vitamin B17, is not approved by the FDA, but not because it isn’t beneficial – it is, as the links provided at the bottom of this report will demonstrate. No, Vitamin B17 has not been approved by the FDA simply because the FDA have been leaned on. That’s the way it goes in the self-preserving, self-serving, conventional cancer business. To put it bluntly, biddable FDA officials are only a phone call and a golfing lunch away from the NCI and the NIH. A classic example of these conflicts of interests and double standards can be appreciated when one learns that sodium fluoride is also not approved by the FDA due to its toxicity, and yet drug giant Proctor and Gamble and others can market the stuff in their toothpastes with complete impunity.
The UPHS statement on Laetrile is a fabrication. Such is the wealth of evidence overturning the conventional stance on Laetrile and Vitamin C, that one can only assume the UPHS statement falls into the following category:
FALSE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ‘ENDANGERING THE PUBLIC’, Independent News, 13.12. 2000 Doctors are fabricating research results to win grants and advance their careers, but the medical establishment is failing to protect the public from the menace of these scientific frauds, a committee of medical editors said yesterday. Eighty cases of fraudulent research have been detected in the past four years, and 30 have been investigated in the past year. In some cases, institutions have covered up wrongdoing to protect reputations….
THE NUB OF IT
In an effort to subvert this mass-awakening to the horrors of conventional cancer treatments, a devious attack on all genuinely beneficial, natural (and therefore un-patentable) anti-cancer products is now being waged by a rather worried conventional cancer establishment The ever-so-gentle slur on our most vital of vitamins, namely Vitamin C, will soon be extended to a wide range of essential minerals and vitamins. This is just the beginning of the subtle, but concerted attack. The latest conventional legislation surrounding the codifying and banning of efficacious natural treatments is being instituted, purely because there is no money in these natural treatments for Big Pharma. It is profit before human health, but couched in respectable-looking, ‘sciency’ reports. And this veneer of respectability is fooling the unsuspecting minions lower down the UPHS research chain it seems.
NAÏVE
The two UPHS officials I spoke to regarding Dr Blair’s Vitamin C report were extremely pleasant, open and helpful and displayed no intention to supply misleading information. But both persons were entirely locked into their superiors’ way of thinking. Media Relations officer Olivia Fermano was curious as to my interest into who funded the Vitamin C report. When I pointed out that if Dr Blair’s funding could be traced to a pharmaceutical company producing conventional cancer treatments, then the results would have to be very seriously questioned, Ms Fermano was genuinely supportive. “My goodness! That is a good question. I will be right back to you.” Her word-for-word courteous reply, some two minutes later was as follows: “You had me genuinely worried for a few minutes there, sir. But I am pleased to tell you that our funding came directly from the National Institutes for Health itself. I am so relieved.”
Ho Hum.
Similarly, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, chair of UPHS Centre for Cancer Pharmacy Department stated:
“The evidence supporting Vitamin C as a useful adjunct in cancer treatment ranges from scant to non-existent. Linus Pauling’s work was framed around a tenuous hypothesis only.”
Whilst the courtesy displayed by Ms Fermano and Dr Fitzgerald is commendable, their naivety is the result of them both working in a commercially cocooned workplace, purposefully insulated from the many success stories attributed to non-toxic, metabolic cancer treatments, and from the amazing health benefits accrued from consuming a lot more Vitamin C than the FDA’s recommended daily intake of a miserable 60 mg – barely enough to keep one out of rags and scurvy.
Long live Vitamin C and let’s have even more of it! For a more in-depth study of the conventional cancer industry, and of the very good news concerning alternative cancer treatments, readers are encouraged to visit www.credence.org and take the cancer tour.
Steven Ransom
