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.