Ralph Moss is the former assistant director of Public Affairs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Presently, he is advisor to the Office of Alternative Medicine, and co-chair of the panel on Pharmacological and Biological Treatments at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md. He is the founding editor of The Cancer Chronicles newsletter, and author of seven books, including The Cancer Industry, Free Radical, A Real Choice, and the award-winning PBS documentary The Cancer War.

THE CANCER INDUSTRY

In 1974, I was hired by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the world's largest private cancer center. Shortly after I was hired, I visited one of their scientists, Kanematsu Sugiura who was researching amygdalin, which is another name for laetrile. Although he had been getting positive results using laetrile in the treatment of cancer, we in public affairs were handing out a brochure to the public saying that laetrile was a quack remedy, and that we had no evidence that it was effective even though Dr. Sugiura had found that laetrile stopped or slowed the growth of small tumours and dramatically decreased the spread of cancer from the breast to the lungs in laboratory mice. So I was really amazed by this and continued to investigate it. To make a long story short, after 3 1/2 years, the more positive Dr. Sugiura's results, the more negative were the statements we were being asked to give out in public affairs, until in 1976, we were instructed to give out a statement saying that we had found laetrile negative in all animal systems that we had tested. It was an outright lie and I refused to do this and eventually in 1977, stood up at a press conference, made these charges, and was fired on the next day. The reason for this is economic. There are powerful vested interests in chemotherapy and other cancer treatments that would be tremendously disturbed by the introduction of non-toxic treatments for cancer into the market. The drug industry dominates the board of directors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The scientists and doctors are employees of this pharmaceutically dominated board, take orders from them, and have to keep in line with what is happening in the mainstream of medicine.

Since then, I have investigated the entire field of non-toxic alternative treatments for cancer and have extended my investigation from laetrile to the eight methods which I wrote about in some detail in my book The Cancer Industry. This year I brought out another book, A Cancer Therapy: An Independent Consumer's Guide to Non-toxic Treatment and Prevention. The Cancer Industry explains to the public, to our medical and scientific profession and especially our legislators, why this is happening, what the problem is, and suggests some ways of dealing with it. A Cancer Therapy describes a useful program for the prevention and treatment of cancer. It also illustrates that non-toxic treatments for cancer and preventatives for cancer are actually well documented in the scientific literature. There are 102 methods of treating cancer in this book. 96 of them are fully documented with reference to the peer reviewed medical literature. So when the charge is made that this is quackery, and that these treatments are undocumented, unproven, and questionable, all I can say is that these methods seem to me to be the documented methods. The so-called proven methods of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy more often than not, seem to me to be the unproven methods, the undocumented methods, methods that are really put across to the public in many cases by deception and slight of hand in their evaluation. Many of the conventional treatments are not documented or proven treatments, whereas there is some documentation for most of the alternative methods, although of course, we would like to have a lot more evidence for all of them, and that's in the process of happening.

THE OFFICE OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE at NIH

In the last three years, amazing things have happened in the United States in the evaluation of alternative treatments for disease, and in looking at disease in terms of health and prevention. Through a labourious but very exciting process, we have now managed to get the National Institute of Health, which is the paymaster for our 10 billion dollar medical enterprise and the guardian of the high standards of rigorous research, to institute an Office of Alternative Medicine at our NIH in Bethesda, Md. It is still a very small project, only two million dollars out of eight billion dollars given to the overall NIH. However, as advisor, I have some say about which therapies will be evaluated by our government to determine their efficacy against cancer and other diseases. The first four treatments we will be testing are the anti-neoplaston treatment of Stanislaw Burzynski, shark cartilage, the Emmanuel Revici method using lipids and selenium, and bee pollen and its effects on allergies.

VITAMINS AND MINERALS:

Many of the alternative treatments and preventatives for cancer are things that you've heard about. These are vitamins and minerals, and the most important ones are vitamins A, C and E, and the mineral selenium. These are anti-oxidants. They are free-radical scavengers, and demonstrate a power against the formation of cancer and probably in the treatment of cancer as well. They are non-toxic. Vitamin A is non-toxic in the beta-carotene form. Vitamin C has been proposed by Linus Pauling in megadoses ranging up to 20, 30 or even 40 grams of C in the treatment of cancer. Of course, there has been a lot of criticism of his work with vitamin C such as the studies done at the Mayo Clinic, but there are flaws in those studies. There are reasons to doubt the validity or even the honesty of the Mayo Clinic studies, but we won't go into that here.

HERBS:

There are herbs used in the treatment of cancer that seem to show particular efficacy in both prevention and treatment, and these are referred to in my book, as well as resources for obtaining them. For instance, there is aloe, astragalus, ayurveda, chaparral, Chinese herbs, Essiac, garlic, ginseng, green tea, Hoxsey treatment, Kampo, Pau d'Arco, and spices like turmeric. Astragalus is a very exciting herb. It is a relative of the pea plant and has shown to be effective in treating cancer.

Here in Canada, of course, there is a world famous treatment for cancer, Essiac. When I come to Canada, there are always two or three people who come to me with very convincing stories about how they were cured of cancer with Essiac. Essiac is very interesting. It was first advocated by a nurse here in Ontario named Rene Caisse. Essiac is Caisse spelled backwards. She got it from a woman who claimed she had been cured of breast cancer with this mixture by a native American Indian healer. So Rene Caisse then began using this treatment in Bracebridge, Ontario. It was a secret remedy, and it's only been in fairly recent time that the formula has come out publicly and there are now a number of competing products on the market, each of them claiming to be the real Essiac. One of the herbs in this formula was burdock. Burdock is a very interesting herb. It's available in most health food stores and it's a root. It's that nasty plant in the fields that has cockleburs which stick to your clothing. Burdock for a common weed has some remarkable medical properties. It's eaten in Japan where it's called gobo and it's quite tasty. It has a sort of turnip-like flavour. It is favoured in the macrobiotic diet which I also speak about in the Cancer Therapy book, and in Japan they did research on this and found that it had very significant biological activity in terms of stopping the mutations that are caused by different substances. Substances that stop mutations, generally speaking, stop cancer. It also has immune stimulating properties. Things which stimulate the white blood cells of the body generally are anti-cancer substances as well, so we have good reason to believe that this is an anti-cancer agent as well as an anti-mutations agent. This is very important because after all, we start with the supposition that a secret remedy by a non-physician, derived from an American Indian witch doctor would be a worthless substance. This is how most people think, and it's certainly how the medical community thinks. Yet, when doctors in Japan who had no knowledge of Essiac had found this substance to be effective, it makes you think that maybe there was empirically some value to this substance. We have another herbal remedy in the U.S. (actually today it's available in Mexico) called the Hoxsey treatment, and it's a similar story. Hoxsey got his formula from his father, who got it by watching a horse cure itself of cancer by eating different plants in the fields, which is not as absurd an idea as it sounds. In 1950, the Food and Drug Administration forced Harry Hoxsey to divulge his formula, and lo and behold, one of the ten items in his formula was burdock.

IMMUNOLOGICAL TREATMENTS:

There are a great many immunological treatments for cancer that are generally not publicized because a lot of them rely on individualizing either a vaccine or a treatment for the person's own body, and medicine, like everything else in our society, is a mass produced product. Some of these treatments are in my book. Let me give you a couple of astounding stories about immunological treatments. The first one is my favourite and that is Coley's toxins. Coley was the chief of bone surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in the 1890s. He had a patient who recovered from cancer after he had come down from a high fever which had been caused by a toxin. Coley started to treat people with the toxin which was a by-product of a bacteria and not infectious. He received tremendous results with this. There would be mass hysteria if people really understood the scope of this treatment and the fact that it is not available in North America at this time. There are people who claim to be doing it but I can't vouch for the accuracy of their product. I do know that a thousand people were treated with this at Sloan-Kettering, or under their leadership in the early years of this century and successfully treated people were being cured of cancer 100 years ago, people with the same disease who are not being cured today. It's a long story which I have described in The Cancer Industry. If you understand that case you really understand just about all there is that you need to know about the politics and the biology of cancer. Another immunological treatment is the New Castle Disease virus. This is available, as far as I know, only in Hungary. It's developer lives in the United States but he is not able to give this treatment because of FDA requirements. It's non-pathogenic, and it will interfere with a cancer virus, or other cancer causing agents.

714X:

714X is a treatment that was developed by Gaston Naessens, who lives in Sherbrooke, Quebec. It is a mixture of camphor and nitrogen which is injected directly into the lymph system. Naessens claims that cancer cells are nitrogen starved and that camphor helps deliver this nitrogen to them through the lymph system. It is purported to be a treatment for cancer, AIDS and other diseases. That treatment is found in the less documented section of my book because there really is no proof offered of either the effectiveness of this treatment or the truth of his theory about cancer. He proposes that cancer arises from a kind of organism called the somatid which normally has a short life-cycle, but in cancer and other diseases goes into a very long complicated life cycle. In Christopher Bird's book, The Life and Trials of Gaston Naessens, there are some very compelling anecdotal stories about people who seem to have been cured or benefitted from this treatment.

HYDRAZINE SULFATE:

Hydrazine sulfate is a common industrial chemical which was first proposed as a cancer treatment in the early 1970s by Joseph Gold, M.D. of the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute. He suggested that by cutting off a tumour's supply of new glucose in the liver, the drug could help starve the tumour. This in turn would stop cancer from preferentially depleting the body's energy and put an end to cachexia, the terrible wasting process that appears in the final stages of the disease. It is not necessarily a cure for advanced cancer, but it's extremely important for cachexia which is a very big cause of death in cancer patients.

SHARK CARTILAGE:

Scientists have discovered that shark's cartilage fights cancer by interfering with the tumour's ability to create a network of new blood vessels. Tumours, like normal tissue, need blood to provide nutrients and oxygen and to get rid of toxic wastes. Cut off a tumour's blood supply and you can cut off its growth. I have heard amazing anecdotal stories about shark cartilage including its use in the treatment of arthritis. A lot of people are undermedicating with it. They are taking the dosage that is recommended on some of the bottles and this will not give an anti-cancer effect.

ANTINEOPLASTONS:

Stanislaw Burzynski discovered antineoplastons in 1967 while a graduate student in Poland. Antineoplastons are found in normal blood and urine, but appear to be deficient in cancer patients. This is an anti-tumour agent that is non-toxic and seems to make malignant cancer cells revert to normal. I'm not a medical doctor, and I don't give medical advice, but from my examination of the field as a whole, the best therapy that I know of and number 1 on our list for evaluation is the antineoplaston therapy of Stanislaw Berzynski in Houston, Texas. That doesn't mean that it's going to work in all cases. You will have to call the Berzynski clinic and ask them if they have had any results with a particular type of cancer. Berzynski's treatment is very effective for brain cancer and has had astounding successes in cases of lymphoma.

In addition to using any of these treatments, you have to change your lifestyle which has allowed the cancer to develop in the first place. That means the water, the food, the work place, the lighting, anything that you can think of that should be purified and made as natural and organic as possible, because then you will be removing all the burdens from the body. Psychological factors are also very important.