I Have These Conversations

Every once in awhile I find myself in a conversation about cancer with someone who, upon learning my diagnosis, holds forth on the elaborate big pharma conspiracy to hide the cure for cancer so that we'll all have to keep paying for expensive treatments that only make us sicker. I'm told, for instance, that studies on intravenous use of Vitamin C to cure cancer have been suppressed (they haven't been; I've read them) because they prove that this simple technique cures cancer (it doesn't) and would put big pharma out of business (it won't). Oh, and it's not just big pharma, I'm told, that is part of the conspiracy to keep the cure away from patsies like us desperate cancer patients who show up for clinical trials, scans, chemo, radiation, targeted treatments, immuno-therapies, and surgeries. In fact, as my would-be enlightener will point out, the entire medical establishment aims at keeping us all sick unto death for the sake of profit.

And I get it. Greed is ever-present, and no industry chugging along in a capitalist culture is immune from tendencies toward profiteering. (Which is why, by the way, we might want to give more scrutiny to the fact that we encourage for-profit models in areas like health care, elder care, day care, education, and other efforts on behalf of the greater good, but that is another argument for another day.) Yes, there have been plenty of scandals involving the pharmaceutical industry, and yes, many hospitals, clinics, and ERs are full of repeat customers because treatments have poor outcomes due to myriad failures in the way we, as a culture, practice medicine and view wellness. Bureaucracy, over-regulation, under-regulation, terrible communication, and outright incompetence seem to prevail and offer us good reasons to distrust the health care industry. The inequities built into our health care system alone make it a scandal, and ethical questions about clinical trials and treatment development abound.

But working both inside and outside that entirely dysfuntional machine are some pretty dedicated cancer researchers who, if they could find a panacea for all cancer, would gladly wash out their petri dishes and turn their time and talents to other useful things. So here's what I have to say to the tipsy party guest who regaled me with his cancer-cure conspiracy theories a few nights ago. Read the actual medical literature. Go to a few cancer conferences like those sponsored by ASCO  or to patient summits like those offered by The Lungevity Foundation. Talk to some researchers. Talk to more patients like me who participate in clinical trials. See what research projects non-profit foundations are funding. Visit a patient advocacy site like The ROS1ders. Cruise the listings on ClinicalTrials.gov hoping for a miracle cure. Learn that "cancer" isn't one thing, that its cure will never be found in one silver bullet or in prevention-only strategies, but rather in each data point collected, each pattern detected, each genetic code cracked.  Cancer research is a molecular, genetics, big data long game now. And if you, dear reader, know someone spouting ill-informed notions about the Great Cancer Cure Conspiracy, suggest that what that person is doing, rather than enlightening anyone, is diminishing the existing and ongoing research that really is curing cancer, one clinical trial and one patient at a time.