Seriously, I have heard a number of folks insist that doctors do have a cure for cancer but won’t release it? There’s never any evidence for this, it’s just “everybody knows” it.
Why would people believe this? (I sometimes reply, well, doesn’t it seem strange that doctors and their families die of cancer? You’d think they’d use it on themselves, at least.)
Does anyone have a theory on why this belief appeals so strongly to people? It is possibly a way to fix the blame for a death on a human misdeed, so it won’t seem completely random and unfair?
You pretty much answered your own question. They want to believe that there is a cure and therefore if there is a cure the only reason for not being able to use it is that the doctors are keeping it a secret.
Same thing with people who give up regular treatments for quack methods that promise a cure. They don’t want to give up hope.
This is a well known part of the “crackpot” science areana, and the claims are quite specific. (The issue of course is whether they’re true or not.) I’m familiar with two stories of cancer cures which were declared to be quackery, but which are claimed to actually work. One is the “Rife” device, which if it works, does not function by any kind of known physics. The other is the secret “Hoxsey” cancer cure recipe. Both were supposedly suppressed by Dr. Morris Fishbein. A brief web search found one “alternative health” page which mentions both stories:
I think it’s not a random “belief.” Instead these stories really exist. The question is why people assume that they’re true. If these detailed stories did not exist, then I think people’s beliefs would be quite different.
I think it’s partly a response to the arrogant, condescending attitude taken by some doctors. These kind of stories puncture physician arrogance. Also, if you know something that the medical establish does not know, it makes you superior to doctors, so believing in stories of suppressed discoveries is quite attractive.
COULD they be true? Sure. Once a discovery has been tarred by the “quackery” brush, the research community turns their backs on it and stops taking any reported evidence seriously. History shows many examples of ridiculed discoveries which were vindicated many years later. But the same back-turning happens when an apparent discovery has been given a fair test and found wanting. Yes, just because the experts believe or disbelieve something is no guarantee whether it’s true. But experts are experts for a reason, so even if we don’t trust their decisions entirely, we should put our money on their being right. To find the truth, we’d need a detailed and unbiased history of these particular incidents.
Why do doctors not use these cancer cures themselves? Because doctors think that they are quack medicine and do not work. In the version of the stories I heard, it’s only Morris Fishbein who knows the truth!
I don’t know squat about medicine, but I do know about radio waves, and I can tell you that Rife was full of crap. His machines couldn’t have been generating frequencies high enough to hit the resonance frequency of a virus. For Herpes viruses, which range in size up to 200 nanometers, the resonance frequency would be about 1500 TRILLION Hz. We can’t build oscillators these days that go that high.
Well, actually we can. Only then we call it light. The frequency above would be something high in the ultraviolet range of light. Radio and light are really the same thing - electromagnetic radiation of different frequencies.
At frequencies that high, the wavelength is normally given because the number are easier to handle. Red light comes in around 700nanometers, and blue at about 470nanometers. Since the object to be seen has to be larger than the wavelength of the light used to see it, Rife wouldn’t have been able to see a Herpes virus.
His machines couldn’t generate the frequencies that would have been needed, and couldn’t have seen what he thought he saw with his “Universal Microscope.” Looks like a big pile of doodoo to me.
By, the way. The web site referred to above mentions that viruses are killed when observed under an electron microscope. That surely does happen, and if it were the sure cure that Rife thought it was, you could cure all kinds of diseases by zapping them with an electron ray. You’d sure kill all of the viruses, but the patient would have been toasted and wouldn’t care anymore - which is the same thing that would have happened if Rife’s machine had worked. So many things (cell structures) in the human body are the same size as a virus that you couldn’t possibly toast just the virus without getting something valuable.
Another thing that these conspiracy buffs overlook is that “cancer” is really a wide assortment of disease states and progressions. If and when cancer is cured, it will most likely not be a magic bullet that works equally well on all types. In fact, even now some types of cancer are almost “cured” in that the vast majority of people that get them will survive. These stories would be somewhat more believable if they claimed that there was a breast cancer or lung cancer cure that was being withheld.
As to why people believe them, I think it’s due to people grasping at straws when they’re desperate mixed with a distrust of doctors and authority figures in some people.
As suggested by other posters, many people have a need to believe that there is some sense and order in the universe. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular. Many people can’t bear the idea of a lone crackpot gunman taking out a president.
Conspiracy theories also satisfy a need to blame, scapegoat and heap hate on particular organizations or groups of people. Popoular targets of consiracy theories are Jews, the “military industrial complex”, the media, lawyers, etc.
Don’t forget pharmaceutical companies which is relevant to the OP.
Many of these conspiracy theories have it that a cure may exist but some corporate giant squashes it or gobbles it up and buries it so they can continue to make money. It is much more profitable, from a company standpoint, to sell Drug X that has some beneficial properties but doesn’t cure Condition X for the next 50 years to millions of people than it is to sell Drug Y that cures everybody indside of a year or two.
I’ve heard similar conspiracy theories relating to petroleum companies buying patents to wonderfully efficient engines or engines that don’t use petroleum products so the company can continue to sell vast quantities of oil. Supposedly, when the oil runs out someday, these companies will miraculously come to the rescue with a ‘new’ invention just in time and make scads of money off of that.
Of course, the “Water Engine” makes no sense. Let’s say that oil companies control the car companies, and they won’t allow this hypothetical engine to be built, instead they keep it secret.
But how can you keep the laws of physics secret? What this theory ignores is that there are many countries in the world that have NO oil. Japan, for one. Why would a JAPANESE car company keep this secret? They could crush the competition.
The theory requires that no other company, or group of companies, or non-profit, or university, or government research lab, would be able to duplicate the work. The laws of physics are not secret. If such a thing existed, it could be re-discovered by anyone. And that entity could make huge profits by breaking the cartel.
Same with doctors and cancer. Sure, in the United States, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals can make money. But all over Europe, Canada, Australia, etc, health care is paid for by the government. How does the government of the Netherlands benefit by keeping the cure for cancer secret? All those hospital treatments are paid for with tax money. There is no profit motive.
These conspiracy theories really show an amazing amount of provincialism, an inability to understand that things aren’t exactly the same all over the world, and an inability to understand that although companies might be in the same industry, they still compete against each other.
I personally believe it is the hatred of HMOs that causes this. Within a hospital or health system, you generally have a P & T committee (pharmaceutical and therapeutics) which determine what will be the approved list of drugs that doctors working for the healthcare organization are allowed to prescribe, known as a “formulary”. Generally, where possible, the P&T folks will try to buy multiple drugs from the same supplier to secure better pricing.
Now let’s say they have a choice of cancer treatment meds they can place on the formulary. One works on 90% of all prostate cancer patients and because it’s made by the same drug company as the folks who supply their antibiotics, anti-fungals, etc., they get a discount. Now let’s say you are in the 10% of people who don’t respond to the prostate cancer drug. You do some research on the Internet and find out other prostate cancer drugs exist that your HMO doesn’t have on their formulary, ergo, the “cure” isn’t carried by them. Hence they are evil, keeping you ill unnecessarily, etc. Of course, this logic makes no sense because the HMO would rather you were NEVER sick and just kept paying your premiums because they can’t make as much money when they actually have to spend money to take care of you.
The theory goes that doctors will only create drugs to cure"social" diseases. Therefore we have Rogaine, viagra, and the like. They realize that if they cure cancer the $$$ is gone. But if they treat baldness and impotence the $$$ will roll in.
There are cures for cancer. They are not 100% effective and they don’t work on all types of cancer in every stage of the disese, but there are cures out there.
The reason we have conspiracy theories is a combination of ignorance, gullibility, simplistic views of the world, and a wild imagination.
(highjack!) The above is not quite correct, since it treats biomolecules as conductive antennas, and then assumes that any resonance MUST be associated ONLY with the size of the molecule. To find the error, just look at a similar example: atomic resonance. An atom is about 0.1nM diameter, yet it might resonate at around 600nM wavelength, thousands of times too low a frequency! Why? Because atoms are like LC tuned circuits, not like half-wave dipole antennas.
If there are any closely-spaced electron energy levels in a biomolecule, then that biomolecule has a low frequency resonance. The size of the molecule is irrelevant. To efficiently absorb energy, the molecule doesn’t have to be the size of a half-wavelength, it only has to have a narrow absorbtion band, i.e. a high-Q resonance which causes a large Effective Aperature (EA). Don’t forget, that’s how AM portable radios get away without using a longwire antenna. It’s called “effective aperature of electrically small resonant antennas.”
Could Rife’s stuff have worked? I don’t know, you’d have to try it and see. It’s definitely NOT banned by conventional physics. But if biomolecules happen to have no “LC circuit” resonances at frequencies below 1MHz, then Rife was wrong.
I personally think there’s a cure for tooth decay, as well as a surefire way to prevent it, but dentists don’t want to lose their lucrative practices.
Okay, back to your spat…
And this sort of belief is annoyingly widespread. It can be cars/computer viruses/medicine/engines/lightbulbs… Fighting it is like trying to empty the ocean.
“I personally think there’s a cure for tooth decay, as well as a surefire way to prevent it, but dentists don’t want to lose their lucrative practices.”
You’re joking, right? The discovery and promotion of fluoride by dentists has cost many their lucrative practices. It has been so successful in improving the oral health of Americans that at least two dental schools have closed and dentists have had to find other services to sell besides filling teeth in order to maintain their incomes.
About 20 years ago, didn’t Penthouse magazine run a series of articles called “Medical Genocide” or something like that? From what I remember, a lot of quacks and their treatments were promoted and, of course, legitimate doctors were accused of suppressing promising therapies.
