Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here, you've probably heard this fringe theory before, perhaps even from a generally reliable source. A cure for cancer exists, but pharmaceutical companies and perhaps even government health agencies and cancer charities are suppressing it because they make so much money from treating the disease or fundraising for it.
In other words, there's a secret cabal of pharma exects, scientific researchers and cancer nonprofits that are letting more than eight million people die every year worldwide so they can line their own pockets with cancer money. Such a plot, if true, would be nothing short of medical genocide. We spoke via email with Ted Ganceler, the Strategic director for Pathology Research with the American Cancer Society, where he serves as the editor of c A, a cancer journal for clinicians.
Canceler had heard the hitting cure story so many times that he went out in conducted a survey in two thousand two about the most common misconceptions about cancer. In it, he asked nearly a thousand Americans if they believed that there was a conspiracy to hide a cancer cure of respondents believed the myths, and another fourteen percent were uncertain. Canceler said the result was even more shocking than I expected.
The secret cancer cure is a typical conspiracy theory, although its popularity is caused partly by ignorance, misunderstanding, and mistrust of science. Psychological research indicates that inventing and spreading conspiracy theories is a way for some people to cope with feelings of vulnerability. Cancer is scary, and few of our
lives have been untouched by its devastating reach. But just because the medical establishment hasn't yet found a blockbuster cure for all cancer doesn't mean that they're hiding it from us. As Cancer Research UK wrote in a post addressing ten persistent cancer myths, if Big Pharma indeed had its hands on a cure, even one based on generic drugs or cheap alternatives, it could figure out a way to package the molecules into a patentable therapy that would still make
them loads of money. People pay thousands of dollars for cancer treatments currently, wouldn't they pay even more for cure if it did exist. Then there's the raw fact that pharmaceutical executives researchers and government officials and their families are not themselves immune to cancer, Againstler said, can any conspiracy be so complete that oncologists and even world leaders would be willing to die of cancer in order to protect
this alleged secret. But perhaps the most compelling reason why the hidden cure theory is false is that there simply could never be one single cure for cancer, because cancer is not one single thing. Under the umbrella of cancer are hundreds of related diseases that vary substantially in their causes and underlying mechanisms, and even the same type of cancer can evolve in unique ways among individuals, requiring different
treatment regimens for different patients. The reality is that there are some cancers, when caught early, that now have long term survival rates of seventy percent er higher, notes Canceler. These include breast cancer, prostate cancer, urinary bladder cancer, and melanoma of the skin, though Ganceler added, unfortunately, some kinds of cancer are very resistant to all of the treatments
that have been studied so far. While the hidden care conspiracy is absolutely false, it's worth asking if the current approaches for funding cancer research and drug development are the best ways to find effective and affordable cures for both common and rare forms of cancer. The budget of the National Cancer Institute, for example, a leading funder of scientific and medical research in the United States, was five point
six nine billion dollars. Even though the dollar amount earmarked for the n c I goes up slightly each year, its true value with inflation has gone down consistently since two thousand three. The n c I usually partners with pharmaceutical companies or universities to conduct clinical trials. The U s National Institutes of Health also set aside nearly six billion dollars in its twenty seventeen budget for cancer research, with additional funds invested in specific categories like cancer genomics,
breast cancer, cervical cancer, and childhood leukemia. But those public investments are chump change compared to private pharmacutical companies, which are funneling and estimated fifty billion dollars annually in two
cancer drug research and development. The imbalance between private and public funding of cancer research has led some critics to argue that big pharma is actually slowing the search for a cancer cure by focusing so much money on developing patentable single drug treatments rather than testing combination therapies or exploring the repurposing of existing, cheaper generic drugs, like, for example, aspirin, a one hundred year old medication that sells for pennies
a pill, is now the subject of clinical trials to confirm observational data that breast cancer survivors who take daily aspirin are fifty percent less likely to relapse and die from the disease. We also spoke with Eugene Brown, a scientific advisor for Global Cures, a nonprofit organization that helps cancer patients find evidence based therapies that are outside of
the typical standard of care. Those include the use of supplements or generic medications that have shown promise in speeding, recovering, or alleviating side effects of chemotherapy and radiation. Global Cures also advocates for research that repurposes existing drugs and FDA approved compounds not originally created for cancer treatment, an approach that's often ignored by for profit pharmaceutical companies and underfunded
by government agencies. Brown disagrees that big pharma is the biggest problem preventing us from finding cancer cures, and says that expecting pharmaceutical companies to invest in drug repurposing is equivalent to forcing a square peg through around whole. He said there should be more collaboration where government and public institutions and charitable organizations see this as an important goal, and in fact big pharma can be incorporated into the
whole scheme. He notes that a repurpose drug would need a clinical trial in order to be prescribed for cancer, and a pharmaceutical company could provide that either free of charge or a cost as a gesture of goodwill. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics on the fringe, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.