Ralph Moss on Chemotherapy, Laetrile,
Coley's Toxins, Burzynski, & Cancer Politics
Laura Lee radio show, 1994
LL: The medical establishment keeps telling us that there are only 3
ways to treat cancer -- chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Many people
disagree and among them is Dr Ralph Moss, author of a new book, Cancer Therapy.
Dr Moss, can we have a bit of background and why you became interested and
decided to devote your practice and research to cancer?
RM: Twenty years ago I was hired at Memorial Sloane Kettering (MSK)
cancer centre in New York as the science writer, later promoted to assistant
director of public affairs. Shortly after I went to work there I went to visit
an elderly Japanese scientist, Kanematsu Sugiura, who astonished me when he told
me he was working on Laetrile (B17), at the time it was the most controversial
thing in cancer, reputed to be a cure for cancer. We in public affairs were
giving out statements that Laetrile was worthless, it was quackery, and people
should not abandon proven therapies. I was astonished that our most
distinguished scientist would be bothering with something like this, and I said
why are you doing this if it does not work. He took down lab books and showed me
that in fact Laetrile is dramatically effective in stopping the spread of
cancer. The animals were genetically programmed to get breast cancer and about
80 - 90% of them normally get spread of the cancer from the breast to the lungs
which is a common route in humans, also for how people die of breast cancer, and
instead when they gave the animals Laetrile by injection only 10-20% of them got
lung metasteses. And these facts were verified by many people, including the
pathology department.
LL: So this is verified, that Laetrile can have this positive effect?
RM: We were finding this and yet we in public affairs were told to
issue statements to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically,
and as the years went by I got more rapped up in this thing and 3 years later I
said all this in my own press conference, and was fired the next day, "for
failing to carry out his most basic job responsibility" -- ie to lie to the
public what goes on in cancer research
LL: How can these people justify this in their own minds?
RM: Basically the attitude was best expressed by Lewis Thomas, the
president of the centre, who told my boss, as he would not see me, "I am
not going to die on the barricades for Laetrile. It is not a cure, it is only a
palliative, (meaning it relieves pain and stops the spread of cancer), if it
were a cure it might be a different story, but I am not going to give up my
career, to die on the barricades". That's how they justified it in their
own minds. I could not do that, nor could Dr Sugiura, who never renounced the
results of his own studies, despite the fact they put enormous pressure on him
to do so.
LL: Are we practicing science here, or medicine, or politics?
RM: Politics. Political science as we say!
LL: You were mentioning that patients hear cure rate when something
very different is being talked about. And we can go into the poor statistics for
the standard modalities. They are not that effective, which is why everyone is
looking for an alternative.
RM: When I was at MSK a lot of very weird things started to happen to
me, there was this cognitive distance between what I was told, and was writing
about treatment, especially chemotherapy, and what I was seeing with my own
eyes. One time I heard the head of the intensive care unit give a talk in which
he bragged about how he had one of the lowest mortality rates in his unit. I
went out to lunch with him, where he became a bit inebriated, and told me how he
managed to get those statistics -- by wheeling the dying patients out into the
corridor where they died and didn't sully our departments record.
LL: Lets skew those statistics any way that looks good to us.
RM: Another time I went to interview a breast surgeon, and he had a
lamp in the shape of a women's breast on his desk. I couldn't even get out a
single interview question I was so astounded by this insensivity, and here women
were flocking in to have their breasts removed by this guy, and I thought...I
didn't have any idea what was wrong but it was that twilight zone of knowing,
feeling that something was definitely wrong but not knowing what it was. It was
only when I had the enforced leisure from being fired that I was able to really
look into it.
LL: It is interesting how many establishment doctors start out, in
many cases to disprove the efficacy of alternative therapies and become
advocates of alternative therapies. I don't hear many stories of the other way
round.
RM: No, it is not likely. So, I started to look into the whole
question of chemotherapy in particular, that is the cutting edge of orthodox
treatment and I have now completed a report -- Chemotherapy, How, When, and Why.
With emphasis on the why. Although we do give some information for those who are
taking chemotherapy on what they can take to decrease the side effects.
Basically it is a very critical and comprehensive look, for we deal with about
60 different types of cancer, and all of the FDA approved anti cancer drugs. The
bottom line is for a few kinds of cancer chemo is a life extending procedure --
Hodgkin's disease, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, Testicular cancer, and
Choriocarcinoma. Testicular cancer has yielded to platinum containing drugs.
LL: It probably makes you impotent
RM: It does more than that. It is extremely damaging to the body, but
it does lead to a very extended life for people with this problem. An
interesting thing is that platinum is the old homoeopathic drug for problems of
the testicles or the ovaries, and Hahnemann proved that on himself 180 years
ago, but Allopathic medicine takes this basic idea, without giving credit of
course, ups the dose by the billions because they can't conceive of small doses
having significant biological effect, and consequently put in massive amounts of
homoeopathic medicines and cause tremendous toxicity and other problems, second
cancers down the road and so forth.
Outside those 4 or 5 treatments for which chemotherapy is effective there are
a few where there is very moderate effectiveness in terms of life extension --
lung cancer and ovarian cancer with a possibility of colon cancer.
LL: When you look at the statistics chemotherapy is a standard
treatment for all types of cancer generally speaking.
RM: Yes, it has become.
LL: However, when you really look at the statistics, you were saying,
only a few respond.
RM: Yes, 2-4%.
LL: How in the world, Dr Moss, can it be considered a standard cure,
when it works for 2-4, and very specific ones?
RM: We are dealing with an industry. It is not supported by the facts.
The way that it is done is this. The drugs are tested in test tubes, and they
look for things that will kill cells. After you have found something that kills
cells, cancer cells, cell lines which are very abnormal non-typical sort of
growths, maybe a new life form almost, then you put it into animals. Then if it
kills the cancers before it kills the animals, and shrinks the tumours, you
consider you have an active agent. You then put it into people, and go through
the 3 phases the FDA prescribes for this, and basically if you can shrink the
tumour 50% or more for 28 days you have got the FDA's definition of an active
drug. That is called a response rate, so you have a response..
LL: Different from a cure?
RM: Quite a bit because when you look to see if there is any life
prolongation from taking this treatment what you find is all kinds of hocus
pocus and song and dance about the disease free survival, and this and that. In
the end there is no proof that chemotherapy in the vast majority of cases
actually extends life, and this is the GREAT LIE about chemotherapy, that
somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumour and extending the life
of the patient.
LL: Or that there is a correlation between looking at a cancer cell in
a test tube and the tumour in someone's body.
RM: Absolutely. What happens as you grow those cells in cell lines
they become very weird. Hundreds and hundreds of generations later they don't
even look like even normal human cancer cells. They are things that grow under
glass, immortal cells, unlike normal body cells or normal cancer cells. So much
cancer research is very questionable because it is based on this cell line
research.
LL: Politics it seems is the word you must understand in order to
understand what is going on. It is not science, it is not medicine, it is
politics..
RM: And big money You have to understand that cancer is 1/9th of the
overall health budget in the United States. The last figures I have seen from
the American Cancer Society of money spent on cancer indirectly or directly at
107 Billion dollars.
LL: AIDS is a 4 billion dollar...
RM: Research, but you can't come compare AIDS to cancer. Cancer we are
talking about well over a million cases a year, not counting skin cancer which
probably equals that.
LL: One million new cases discounting skin cancer?
RM: Right. About 630,000 people die every year of cancer in the US,
and it really is an epidemic disease. We have got a tremendous industry. Every
one of those people who is getting cancer and dying of it is going to be
treated, and these treatments are extremely expensive. Chemo is tens of
thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bone marrow
transplantation which is basically another way of giving chemotherapy or
radiation can run to about 150,000 dollars per person, and is almost never
effective. It kills about 25%..
LL: Why carry on doing it?
RM: Because of the money, which is tremendous. If you look at the
board of directors of MSK you will find that the drug industry has a dominant
position on that board. One company in particular, Bristol Myers, which produces
between 40-50% of all the chemotherapy in the world, and they have top positions
at MSK hospital.
LL: Doesn't that constitute a serious conflict of interest?
RM: They are selling their own drugs to that particular hospital but
they have written into the by-laws of the centre that it does not constitute a
conflict of interest to sell their company drugs to the centre. They get around
it by not taking a salary. They are not paid, they are volunteers. Look what
happens. You have a man like Benno Schmidt, who was first head of the
president's cancer panel under Nixon, then becomes head of MSK. He then goes on
using the knowledge he gained at MSK to set up his own drug company to make tens
of millions of dollars.
LL: Another revolving door.
RM: You bet, and a big one.
We have had 50 years of American Cancer Society (ACS) brainwashing on the
question of cancer, so most people out there believe we are making progress in
the war on cancer. We are not, we are losing the war. The statistics...
LL: 1.7% increase in terms of success rate a year, its nothing
RM: By the time we get to the 24 century we might have effective
treatments, Star Trek will be long gone by that time. It is not working, yet we
have had this infrastructure, the cancer establishment, imposed over this
country for the last 50 years. It is a fund raising machine. The ACS takes in
400 million dollars a year. What are they doing with it? Where are the
treatments? Where are the cures? Where is the good research? They are way way
way out, far, drifting out to sea in terms of anything approaching human cancer.
We have to re-orientate ourselves around the actual patient in front of you. The
only thing that matters in cancer or any other disease.
Instead we have this very abstract, academic, cruel, inhuman system which is
now going to be forced down our throats by government decree.
LL: I am told the tobacco industry tries to influence the boards of
directors of some of these cancer hospitals.
RM: At MSK in New York we had two top executives of Philip Morris and
one of Nabisco on the board. You will not find much research being done on
tobacco at MSK. They are not interested in tobacco, that is old hat, they are
interested in P53 and other kind of weird genes that they find in their petri
dishes. At the Tish hospital at NYU (New York University), named after the Tish
family that is are chairman of the board. They own the Laura lard [sic] tobacco
company, so they giveth and taketh away. They are going to give you cancer and
then they will "cure" you of cancer, although they can't cure you.
They will give you 3 months extra survival with vicious chemotherapy and call
that a cure.
LL: I'd rather die gracefully in my sleep.
RM: You bet. You better not smoke and then most of the lung cancer
won't happen, but that is one example of how the tobacco industry has
infiltrated the medical establishment. The bigger thing is the industrial
interests. If you look at the board of MSK you will find the who's who of the
petro-chemical industry. Why are they there? Again, very little research is done
on the effect of chemicals in causing cancer. We know that is probably one of
the main things that causes cancer -- petro-chemical pollution. But that is
denied. Of course it's denied, because the people who are paying the bill and
directing cancer research have a vested interest in keeping the scientists away
from that area, and keeping them focused on DRUG cures, things that can be
patented, marketed and so forth, and the FDA is in total collusion in this. They
have set up a system where it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a
new drug in the US. Well, right there you know you are dealing with a monopoly
situation.
LL: You can't be a small company and afford those research bills.
RM: You can't get in. It is a poker game where the ante is a 100
million dollars.
LL: Don't we have anti-trust laws?
RM: We are supposed to, and I have gone to people in the anti-trust
division of the justice department. Their attitude is show us the smoking gun,
in other words we want to see the conspiracy. Well I don't have access to the
yachts off shore..
LL: You can see it. You have big business looking at cancer as a
potential growth industry.
RM: You can come up with any results you want. You can buy the
scientists to do that research. There are hired hands out there to attack any
non-toxic treatment that you want to attack, and come up with some phoney
results, give people synthetic vitamins with carcinogens, and that proves that
vitamins cause cancer instead of curing cancer. You name it. If you have got the
money you can buy the minority of scientists who are corrupt, but they are out
there.
Basically most people know how the data on the breast cancer study at the
National Cancer Institute was fudged. The question of wether lumpectomy was as
good as mastectomy is now in somewhat doubt, because of the fake data that was
submitted to the national surgical adjuvent and bowel project run out of the
University of Pittsburg. This kind of corruption and fakery, and abuse of the
public has been going on as long as the war on cancer has been going on. The
fact is that all of the studies that have been supervised by the National Cancer
Institute should now be re-examined by congressional committees to see wether or
not there is real corruption in all of them.
LL: If there was an even playing field some of the alternative
therapies would shine.
RM: The Japanese are not afraid to look at things that are non-toxic.
Here we will look at natural things as long as they are more toxic than
chemotherapy. We don't want any competition. It would be unfair competition to
have a less toxic drug than chemotherapy because everyone would then flock to
the less toxic drug.
LL: What is really sick is the industry leaders value their bottom
line more than the well being and life of people.
RM: Yes, because we have set up a situation where it costs hundreds of
millions of dollars for a new drug. Once you have got a situation like that you
have got to have a patent on the drug.
LL: We know that natural substances cannot be patented.
RM: If you want to change it, you change the law that establishes the
need for double blind clinical studies in drugs. You eliminate the efficacy
clause from the Harris amendment to the food and drug act, which Harris himself
didn't even want. This was imposed by the FDA and the drug industry. This upped
the ante and made a regulatory barrier. Now instead of it taking 1 million
dollars to establish the safety of a drug, you now need 300 million dollars. So
none of the small inventors, or the people with good ideas can ever hope to
possibly hope to get their drugs approved. They put you in administrative limbo
where the best you ever hope to get is this backburner simmering kind of thing,
and I know of a number of good scientists who have got IND's (Investigative New
Drug Applications) to test drugs, but when you try to market the drug they will
put you out of business, and Dr. Burzynski is the prime example. Brilliant
scientist, wonderful results in cancer, validated by the NCI, and yet he is on
the verge of federal indictment.
RM: If there is one thing you should pick up from this show tonight
it's this: If you ever get into a situation where a doctor recommends
chemotherapy to you or your family, ask to see the studies that the chemotherapy
actually extends the life of the patient.
LL: With chemo you may be shortening your life, certainly be under
discomfort, certainly incurring huge costs. It can bankrupt you or your family.
You have a right to know
RM: What are the actual toxicity? Go to a library to get a physicians
desk reference, or my chemotherapy report. I am continuously amazed. I was doing
some research due to my consultations on AM L-- a type of Leukemia, and the
treatment is so intense and toxic that in the older group that this particular
patient fell into, 40% die from the toxicity of the treatment.
LL: 40% would have lived longer if they hadn't had the treatment.
RM: And the cure rate is miniscule, under 10%. It is terrible odds. In
Las Vagas you wouldn't gamble with those odds unless you were crazy. The doctors
fudge the statistics. They are confounding and confusing different issues, the
response rate, the cure rate, the one year survival rate and so forth. Many
doctors don't know any better. They are afraid. The widest prairies have
electric fences and they are afraid to wander too close to the edge of their own
field to find out what is on the other side because they know from the example
of Dr. Jonathen Wright or Burzynski that if you stray too far from the herd you
are liable to bump into one of those electric fences. So there is a kind of self
censorship. I have seen this a hundred times. You talk to oncologists and
doctors, and they are individually open-minded and interested but as an
aggregate they will not move until their leadership moves because that is a very
dangerous thing for an oncologist to do. They would stand out too much, and they
can't afford to do that as they all depend on referrals from everyone else. So
the minute you get branded as a "quack" -- it is a conformist world --
and in the professions the peer pressure is what makes for success or failure.
Nobody wants to alienate their peers, so you don't stick your neck out or you
will get your head chopped off.
LL: Lop the tallest poppy. Where does good science happen?
RM: Dr Gavalo in Russia who gets 75% five year survival in most
carcinomas. Unbelievable. CG hormone. Trophoblastic cells. Cancer is similar to
pregnancy. Cancer looks like a pregnancy. Dr Lance...isolate the blocking
factor...analised proteins...anti tumour necrosis factor...blocking factors of
tumour...we dismount immune system when pregnant... remove blocking proteins...3
patients with over 2 pounds of cancer...within 24 hours all dead...on autopsy
they did not have a single cancer cell...all gone in 48 hours...but kidneys
could not handle it...they did not know about detox...the word detox does not
appear in the main textbook on cancer or the main medical textbook...the word in
medicine refers to heroin addicts and getting them off heroin...they do not
conceive that their are such things as toxins created by a tumour...where do
they think it all goes?...it goes straight to the kidney, liver, lungs...Lentz
learned to go slower... surgery can reduce tumour load...this failure is more
exciting than most of the success I read about...it shows you how incredibly
powerful the immune system is...it is not just that people have failing immune
systems...it is primarily that the tumour can evade the immune system...it does
not see the tumour there...if you make it visible it will go in and wipe it
out....the Burton Clinic in the Bahamas does this...Lentz did learn (1986) 2
patients who were terminal are still alive...in 1902 a man, Beard, discovered
cancer is trophoblast, wrong time wrong place............cancer is far too
intelligent to submit to the raid approach of Allopathic medicine
LL: Other research?
RM: Burzynski, only available in Texas. Some results are amazing, for
example in brain cancer. The NCI sent a team, finally, after we were asking them
for 15 years, and validated the cases. I met one of the boys who was treated for
a tumour about the size of pear in his brain. Within one month the tumour was
gone, and it is 3 years down the road, cancer free. He has damage from the
radiation treatment he recieved prior to that, he lost some of his hearing In
non Hodgkinson lymphoma I have a friend who had stage 4, went through chemo,
radiation and bone barrow transplant. He failed the bone marrow transplantation.
More chemotherapy. Read my book and found out about Dr Burzynski, and its 5
years, and he is compleatly free of cancer... an amazing case.....he also took
the whole "chicken soup" of vitamins etc...why is this better than
chemo?...it is very low toxicity
LL: You are talking about not damaged immune systems but how the
immune system was fooled.
RM: Exactly, but you still have to have an immune system. Chemo
decreases it.
LL: And you are going to die when some other germ comes along.
RM: Or another cancer comes along, which happens to about 10% of the
people who survive the chemotherapy, they develop a second cancer, and they will
never cure that one. It is almost impossible to cure.
Another treatment COLEYS TOXINS which is one of the ones that excites me the
most. This is not generally available though I do know of ways to get it in
different forms. It was invented here like many of our alternative treatments
and then they have to go abroad to be used. There is a Coley's hospital in
China. They can get it in China but not here. It was discovered at MSK in 1893
and the results...over a 1,000 people were treated with it. It is basically a
high fever treatment. Some guy rung a radio show I was on, he had a sarcoma that
was operated on, it spread, and his doctor sent him to Dr Coley. He was 13 at
the time and 95 now. This is 82 years. Sarcoma is an incurable disease. A blow
away treatment. In advanced terminal breast cancer they got compleat remissions
in 50% of the cases using this treatment.
LL: This is criminal.
RM: That is not saying what you would get if you used it in
conjunction with surgery, you may get a 100%
LL: It is criminal that these are not incorporated into the standard
procedures.
RM: You bet, it is criminal. I have known about this and lived with it
for 20 years. You know what? THEY know about it at Sloane Kettering. They even
put Coleys picture in their publicity material, as a pioneer of immunology, but
they would never use the treatment themselves. They want to develop DRUGS that
can be spun off like Tumour Necrosis Factor, like these other immunologically
based drug treatments, highly toxic, destructive of the immune system,
incredibly expensive.
LL: It's big business.
RM: Yes, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and the drug industry
pays the piper. Do you know what the MSK president makes?
LL: $400,000?
RM: That's chicken feed. The president of MSK makes 2 million dollars
a year, 2.2 million.
Coleys toxins are bacteria that force the body to fever and kill them and the
cancer as well. Tumours are very poorly vascularised, so you disrupt their
ability to get nutrients and to get rid of wastes by raising the body
temperature.....this is really an effective treatment and it an OUTRAGEOUS crime
of the century that we at MSK were able to cure cancer a 100 years ago that they
can't cure today. This is a fraud being perpetrated on the public....
LL: Why isn't the New York Times writing about this?
RM: The chairman of the board of Bristol Myers, the main company
producing anti-cancer drugs, who also happens to be on the board of MSK, is also
on the board of the New York Times. Everybody's brother in law is an oncologist,
or on the board of somebody else's something or other, so it is a money making
thing for the establishment. A hundred and seven billion, with a B, dollars a
year business, and we are not going to get rid of it easily. The point is use
your vote....
LL: Or your mind
RM: Or your mind, what a novel idea.
LL: Lets work with it (cancer) rather than go out to stamp on it like
a cockroach.
RM: Chemotherapy is machismo practiced to the N'th degree. It is a war
in which you are the battleground, lucky you, I mean you have to treat your body
better than that. The folks that bring you the toxic chemicals that cause the
cancer are then kind enough to bring you toxic chemicals that allegedly.....
LL: We live in interesting times.
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