Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => That CAN'T be true! => Topic started by: profound on 06/10/2017 08:13:22
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A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
The question is how do these snake oil drugs and quack treatments get approved in the first place?
Who approves them and why?
What are the names of these people and who do they really work for and what kickbacks do they get?
Are the people who approve theses snake oil quack treatments get kickbacks from the companies making them?
https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/many-new-cancer-drugs-show-no-clear-benefit-argues-review/
"Over half of new cancer drugs 'show no benefits' for survival or wellbeing," The Guardian reports. That was the finding of a study looking at the evidence supporting new cancer drugs approved between 2009 and 2013 by the European Medicine Agency (EMA).
The study found only half of drug approvals had clear evidence showing they either prolonged people's lives, or improved their quality of life. That's not the same as saying these drugs would not help anyone. But research presented at the time of the drugs' approval, and gathered in the three to eight following years, did not show that they worked better than existing treatments in terms of prolonging or improving quality of life.
The study raises questions ....''
Links to the headlines
Over half of new cancer drugs 'show no benefits' for survival or wellbeing
The Guardian, October 5 2017
Majority of recent cancer drugs approved for use in UK show no survival benefits, study finds
The Daily Telegraph, October 5 2017
The costly cancer drugs that DON'T help patients: More than half of treatments do nothing to improve or extend their lives
Mail Online, October 5 2017
Cancer patients given new drugs that won’t help them
The Times (subscription required), October 5 2017
Links to the science
Davis C, Naci H, Gurpinar E, et al. Availability of evidence of benefits on overall survival and quality of life of cancer drugs approved by European Medicines Agency: retrospective cohort study of drug approvals 2009-13The BMJ. Published online October 4 2017
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A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
That is not what the report actually says. Did you read it?
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A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
That is not what the report actually says. Did you read it?
I just did.
I think @profound original post is accurate and raising interesting questions.
The question is how do these snake oil drugs and quack treatments get approved in the first place?
Cancer research is a big business.
cancer research may be financed by global corporations aiming to replace cancer prevention with cancer
treatment.
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A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
That is not what the report actually says. Did you read it?
I just did.
I think @profound original post is accurate and raising interesting questions.
Then you have made the same mistake in not reading it properly. There is a big difference between saying that some new treatments are no more effective than existing ones and saying that most cancer drugs are snake oil and do harm. The report contains none of the false reporting and hysteria of the latter statement.
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Then you have made the same mistake in not reading it properly. There is a big difference between saying that some new treatments are no more effective than existing ones and saying that most cancer drugs are snake oil and do harm. The report contains none of the false reporting and hysteria of the latter statement.
Regardless of the conclusions of this article, cancer research is snake oil because cancer is generally not curable.
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I wonder how long it will be until somebody says "Big Pharma" in this thread (other than this post, I mean).
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Then you have made the same mistake in not reading it properly. There is a big difference between saying that some new treatments are no more effective than existing ones and saying that most cancer drugs are snake oil and do harm. The report contains none of the false reporting and hysteria of the latter statement.
Regardless of the conclusions of this article, cancer research is snake oil because cancer is generally not curable.
It is sufficiently often curable to mean that your claim is just wrong.
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It is sufficiently often curable to mean that your claim is just wrong.
I don't think there's enough cancer survivors in this forum to support your assertion.
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I wonder how long it will be until somebody says "Big Pharma" in this thread (other than this post, I mean).
Ok, I will.
Regardless of the conclusions of this article
So, one moment you say the article proclaims the truth, the next you distance yourself from its real conclusions.
I have no doubt that in the pursuit of profit large corporations are not always honest about the results of research. In this I don't just mean 'Big Pharma' but, tobacco industry, food industry, sports drinks companies, bottled water companies, Big Supplements industry, alternative medicine industry, etc. However, in trying to determine the evidence based facts it is of no help to anyone's case to blatantly misquote a very clear and helpful piece of research.
It is sufficiently often curable to mean that your claim is just wrong.
I don't think there's enough cancer survivors in this forum to support your assertion.
No, but we all know many people who have survived.
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There is a big difference between saying that some new treatments are no more effective than existing ones and saying that most cancer drugs are snake oil and do harm. The report contains none of the false reporting and hysteria of the latter statement.
Precisely.
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Regardless of the conclusions of this article, cancer research is snake oil because cancer is generally not curable.
If cancer drugs were all just "snake oil".... none of them would elicit improvement.... such a notion is unequivocally false.
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I wonder how long it will be until somebody says "Big Pharma" in this thread (other than this post, I mean).
Ok, I will.
Regardless of the conclusions of this article
So, one moment you say the article proclaims the truth, the next you distance yourself from its real conclusions.
I have no doubt that in the pursuit of profit large corporations are not always honest about the results of research. In this I don't just mean 'Big Pharma' but, tobacco industry, food industry, sports drinks companies, bottled water companies, Big Supplements industry, alternative medicine industry, etc. However, in trying to determine the evidence based facts it is of no help to anyone's case to blatantly misquote a very clear and helpful piece of research.
It is sufficiently often curable to mean that your claim is just wrong.
I don't think there's enough cancer survivors in this forum to support your assertion.
No, but we all know many people who have survived.
You seem to be excusing the fraud of Big Pharma by drawing attention to other industries.
Do you work for them? Are you a 'consultant' for them? Do you get rewards and kickbacks for your 'loyalty'.
Yet this isn't about big pharma making drugs... it's about them creating absolute frauds and calling them drugs, and yes, that's evil because those can take away a persons chance to use an effective drug. I get it... some people are so damn scared of death they'll try anything to stay alive, even if what they try is 100% guaranteed to fail. It's a company preying on that survival instinct by offering absolutely useless "treatments" that should rile everyone... except maybe the sadists and psychopaths.
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A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
That is not what the report actually says. Did you read it?
I just did.
I think @profound original post is accurate and raising interesting questions.
Then you have made the same mistake in not reading it properly. There is a big difference between saying that some new treatments are no more effective than existing ones and saying that most cancer drugs are snake oil and do harm. The report contains none of the false reporting and hysteria of the latter statement.
The study shows that cancer drugs are largely very expensive Snake Oil and Quack treatments marketed to ignorant doctors who often get kickbacks.The harm that is done is explained below.
The summary is below:-
Conclusion
Among 68 cancer drug indications approved by the EMA in the period 2009-13, and with a median of 5.4 years’ follow-up, only 35 (51%) were associated with significant improvement in survival or quality of life over alternative treatment options, placebo, or as add on treatment. For 33 (49%), uncertainty remains over whether the drugs extend survival or improve quality of life. Of the 23 drugs with a survival benefit that could be scored with the validated ESMO-MCBS tool, only 11 (48%) were judged to offer a clinically meaningful benefit.
Most new oncology drugs authorised by the EMA in 2009-13 came onto the market without clear evidence that they improved the quality or quantity of patients’ lives, and, when survival gains over available treatment alternatives were shown, they were not always clinically meaningful. Little new information to guide patients, their treating clinicians, or decisions about whether or not to pay for treatments was generated in the postmarketing period. This situation has negative implications for patients and public health.1993 When expensive drugs that lack clinically meaningful benefits are approved and paid for within publicly funded healthcare systems, individual patients can be harmed, important societal resources wasted, and the delivery of equitable and affordable care undermined.
http://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j4530
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Regardless of the conclusions of this article, cancer research is snake oil because cancer is generally not curable.
If cancer drugs were all just "snake oil".... none of them would elicit improvement.... such a notion is unequivocally false.
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You don't know that as well as you might think - that's what the "evidence based medicine" thing is partly about.
In an area that is as loaded with emotions as medicine is (combined with a "slight" tendency of doctors to have huge egos) confirmation bias and other errors of perception run amok.
Not to mention the muddy data/results/experiences you get because of the placebo effect and the reward of billions in profit.
No wonder that, for centuries (if not millenia) even well-meaning doctors kept on killing their patients with their treatments.
Just as an example if you work for a few years on some drug and it shows only 3% efficacy what will you do?
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If cancer drugs were all just "snake oil".... none of them would elicit improvement.... such a notion is unequivocally false.
Here's what Dr. Allen Levin had to say about chemotherapy:
Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.
— Allen Levin, MD UCSF, The Healing of Cancer
https://www.cancertutor.com/deathbydoctoring1/
And since chemotherapy long-term failure rate is 97% positive, I would not call this outcome a "clinical improvement".
Source: http://drfarrahcancercenter.com/chemos-97-long-term-failure-rate/
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If cancer drugs were all just "snake oil".... none of them would elicit improvement.... such a notion is unequivocally false.
Here's what Dr. Allen Levin had to say about chemotherapy:
Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.
— Allen Levin, MD UCSF, The Healing of Cancer
https://www.cancertutor.com/deathbydoctoring1/
And since chemotherapy long-term failure rate is 97% positive, I would not call this outcome a "clinical improvement".
Source: http://drfarrahcancercenter.com/chemos-97-long-term-failure-rate/
Yes you are correct.If these medications actually worked you would not get the below:-
In males, there were around 86,500 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. In females, there were around 76,900 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. Every four minutes someone in the UK dies from cancer. Lung, bowel, breast and prostate cancers together accounted for almost half (46%) of all cancer deaths in the UK in 2014.
A few people die in some terrorist attack and everyone gets there knickers in a twist and peeing in their pants.The corporate controlled media instigating people to accept more curtailment on civil liberties using the national security scare tactic.
As I said before terrorism is the LEAST cause of death yet gets the MOST media coverage.Heart disease and Cancers are the BIGGEST causes of deaths yet get the LEAST media coverage.
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If cancer drugs were all just "snake oil".... none of them would elicit improvement.... such a notion is unequivocally false.
You don't know that as well as you might think
lol.... My statement was 100% factual - hence the reason why nobody will be able to provide any evidence to refute it.
Unless of course you plan on attempting to convince us that all cancer drugs are failures.
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In an area that is as loaded with emotions as medicine is (combined with a "slight" tendency of doctors to have huge egos) confirmation bias and other errors of perception run amok.
I don't understand gibberish. What does this have to do with the false implication that all cancer drugs are "snake oil"?
Not to mention the muddy data/results/experiences you get because of the placebo effect and the reward of billions in profit.
There is a control for that. It's called double-blinded/placebo-controlled research.
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If these medications actually worked you would not get the below:-
In males, there were around 86,500 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. In females, there were around 76,900 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. Every four minutes someone in the UK dies from cancer.
So you're determining the effectiveness of cancer drugs from cancer death rates? Oh boy.
*News Flash*
When people die from cancer.... it doesn't mean the drugs they were taking, failed to elicit improvement.
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since chemotherapy long-term failure rate is 97% positive, I would not call this outcome a "clinical improvement".
Unless your contention is that chemotherapy failure-rates represent the "clinical improvement" from cancer drugs that I referred to.... then your statement means little in the context of this discussion.
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As I said before terrorism is the LEAST cause of death yet gets the MOST media coverage.
Umm.... that would be due to the fact that world-wide terrorism isn't a natural cause of death.
Heart disease and Cancers are the BIGGEST causes of deaths yet get the LEAST media coverage.
So you are now proposing the notion that the news media should just skip over the terrorist-inflicted mass murders of innocent people.... and focus their attention on death rates from heart disease and cancer.
Oh my.
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You seem to be excusing the fraud of Big Pharma by drawing attention to other industries.
Do you work for them? Are you a 'consultant' for them? Do you get rewards and kickbacks for your 'loyalty'.
This appears to be a common response from you when you have nothing of substance to add.
Nothing I said excuses anything.
Yet this isn't about big pharma making drugs... it's about them creating absolute frauds and calling them drugs,
No, its about you either not understanding what was written in the report or deliberately misinterpreting it.
A report today confirms that most cancer drugs are actually Snake Oil and are quack treatments and don't do anything at all, apart from making the patient suffer from the hideous side effects and apart from making vast amount of money for the companies that make them.
That is not what the report actually says. Even your own quote proves that:
"Among 68 cancer drug indications approved by the EMA in the period 2009-13, and with a median of 5.4 years’ follow-up, only 35 (51%) were associated with significant improvement in survival or quality of life over alternative treatment options, placebo, or as add on treatment. For 33 (49%), uncertainty remains over whether the drugs extend survival or improve quality of life. Of the 23 drugs with a survival benefit that could be scored with the validated ESMO-MCBS tool, only 11 (48%) were judged to offer a clinically meaningful benefit."
The fact that 51% of new approvals were associated with significant improvement does not mean most cancer drugs are snake oil.
This says nothing about the effectiveness of existing treatments.
To understand why the remaining 49% were approved you would need to look at the original approvals. For example, in the uk NICE will approve treatments which offer no survival advantage over existing treatments if they reduce side effects for a group of patients.
Overall the report is useful and should prompt some serious and intelligent discussion. However, branding cancer treatments as snake oil or quack medicines does nothing to further adult discussion and is not supported by the article, as you claim it is.
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If these medications actually worked you would not get the below:-
In males, there were around 86,500 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. In females, there were around 76,900 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. Every four minutes someone in the UK dies from cancer.
So you're determining the effectiveness of cancer drugs from cancer death rates? Oh boy.
*News Flash*
When people die from cancer.... it doesn't mean the drugs they were taking, failed to elicit improvement.
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Well their dead ,Jim
Improved but still dead.
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As I said before terrorism is the LEAST cause of death yet gets the MOST media coverage.
Umm.... that would be due to the fact that world-wide terrorism isn't a natural cause of death.
Are car accidents natural?
Are the 100 annual crime deaths in London natural?
Is slipping on a banana peel and dying natural?
Are prescription drug side effects deaths natural?
Well?
Heart disease and Cancers are the BIGGEST causes of deaths yet get the LEAST media coverage.
So you are now proposing the notion that the news media should just skip over the terrorist-inflicted mass murders of innocent people.... and focus their attention on death rates from heart disease and cancer.
Oh my.
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I never said skip it.Just give it 1 or 2 minutes.Extended coverage incites more terrorism and generates more terrorist attacks,hence killing more people as a research study showed.
Yes.
Yes they should report it just like any other News.Not devote 20 minutes from a 30 minute news bulletin going on and on and on about it by the media with their fake concern while making money out of it.
All that footage gets traded around and used to generate money.
How many of the victims came back to life because of EXTENDED media coverage?
Could you name them?
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Well their dead ,Jim
Improved but still dead.
Yeah, well if you're searching for a drug that prevents death.... let us know when you find it.
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If these medications actually worked you would not get the below:-
In males, there were around 86,500 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. In females, there were around 76,900 cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. Every four minutes someone in the UK dies from cancer.
So you're determining the effectiveness of cancer drugs from cancer death rates? Oh boy.
*News Flash*
When people die from cancer.... it doesn't mean the drugs they were taking, failed to elicit improvement.
~
Well their dead ,Jim
Improved but still dead.
In the long run, we are all dead.
The point of medicine is, broadly, to postpone death.
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The point of medicine is, broadly, to postpone death.
That is because medicine is driven by globalization. In a perfect world, medicine would be free and would effectively cure actual physiological diseases. Globalization may even promote cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299207/
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The point of medicine is, broadly, to postpone death.
That is because medicine is driven by globalization. In a perfect world, medicine would be free and would effectively cure actual physiological diseases. Globalization may even promote cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299207/
No
Before globalization, the point of medicine was, broadly, to postpone death.
It still is.
Globalization has not changed that.
We don't live in a perfect world; we do not know how to cure all diseases (please don't start some conspiracy sh1t about that).
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Globalization may even promote cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299207/
The problem with this way of thinking is that you can lay many of the worlds ills against many factors without identifying the root cause and hence tackling the problem. Eg, in the paper you quote, the root cause is substance abuse - tobacco and alcohol. You could by the same logic blame globalisation for the Irish potato famine rather than reliance on monoculture.
Similarly you might single out exploration, eg discovery of the americas, rather than globalisation as promoting cancer.
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It's interesting to look at this question from the other end- as it were.
Why are so many "snake-oil" remedies sold as cancer cures?
I don't get spam emails telling me how to cure a broken leg or a bacterial infection.
They concentrate their attempts to extract money from one of two groups, the "worried well" and those who are desperate.
Cancer can tick both boxes.
They will sell you snake oil that prevents cancer and another that "cures" it if you get it.
Neither works.
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Globalization may even promote cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299207/
The problem with this way of thinking is that you can lay many of the worlds ills against many factors without identifying the root cause and hence tackling the problem. Eg, in the paper you quote, the root cause is substance abuse - tobacco and alcohol. You could by the same logic blame globalisation for the Irish potato famine rather than reliance on monoculture.
Similarly you might single out exploration, eg discovery of the americas, rather than globalisation as promoting cancer.
Federal authorities arrested the billionaire founder and owner of Insys Therapeutics Thursday on charges of bribing doctors and pain clinics into prescribing the company’s fentanyl product to their patients,” reports the Daily Caller News Foundation, one of the best sources of real journalism in America today.
Addictive drugs that include opioids, we now know, are claiming over 64,000 lives a year in the United States alone.
From the DCNF:
The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged John Kapoor, 74, and seven other current and former executives at the pharmaceutical company with racketeering for a leading a national conspiracy through bribery and fraud to coerce the illegal distribution of the company’s fentanyl spray, which is intended for use as a pain killer by cancer patients. The company’s stock prices fell more than 20 percent following the arrests, according to the New York Post.
More than 20,000 Americans died of synthetic opioid overdoses last year, and millions are addicted to opioids. And yet some medical professionals would rather take advantage of the addicts than try to help them...
NEVER TRUST A DOCTOR.THEY ARE ON THE TAKE.