Don’t believe those ads
Submitted by http://kattlovecancerblog.blogspot.com/
Recently, the FDA sent warning letters to a bunch of companies selling “cancer cures”, telling them to stop.
The products contain ingredients such as bloodroot, shark cartilage, coral calcium, cesium, ellagic acid, Cat’s Claw, an herbal tea called Essiac, and mushroom varieties such as Agaricus Blazeii, Shitake, Maitake, and Reishi. Some of the fraudulent claims were:
* “Treats all forms of cancer”
* “Causes cancer cells to commit suicide!”
* “80% more effective than the world’s number one cancer drug”
* “Skin cancers disappear”
* “Target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone”
* “Shrinks malignant tumors”
* “Avoid painful surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or other conventional treatments”
All nonsense. None of these products have ever been proven to help save anyone’s life from cancer.
I became convinced of the pure financial greed of people selling these products over 40 years ago. Then I was helping care for a patient with a less common form of lung cancer called small cell carcinoma. This form of lung cancer is usually fatal, but will temporarily shrink with chemotherapy much faster than the garden variety lung cancers we usually see.
But, he wanted none of our treatment and fled from L.A. where I was working, to a clinic in Mexico, where the drug Laetrile was standard therapy – or so I thought. Several months later, he reappeared and his chest x-ray showed the tumor had nearly disappeared. Wow, we thought. So several of my colleagues went to the clinic to find out what he was given. Chemotherapy. The Mexican doctors realized he had a treatable condition and followed their best ethical judgment and gave the man appropriate treatment. They knew the other stuff was worthless.
Still, every so often I would lose a patient to a Mexican clinic for Laetrile therapy. Most of these were patients who were getting worse in spite of conventional therapy and were desperate. I couldn’t blame them. Laetrile held out hope because it hadn’t failed them yet – but it would.
Then in the early 80’s, patients stopped heading for Mexico. Why? A clinical trial was performed by U.S. researchers and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the world’s most prestigious medical journal. The trial showed that Laetrile did not help any patients and may have harmed some because the drug contains industrial strength amounts of cyanide.
So before answering one of the ads for a cancer cure, ask whether anyone has shown the stuff really helps and what is in these potions. Do they contain any harmful chemicals? The sellers won’t know. They are only interested in your credit card number.
