Lecture To The Cancer Control Society 1995 - Cancer Charities

[Guest guest]

http://www.medicaltruth.com/cancer/unhealthycharities.html

 

 

 

Unhealthy Charities

Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth

by Professor James Bennett.

 

Lecture to the Cancer Control Society 1995.

 

Thanks you ladies and gentlemen it’s a pleasure to be here and to speak to a

group that is truly concerned about cancer, the suffering that it causes, the

economic losses that occur every year as a result of this disease. I wish I

could say that the same description would apply to the American Cancer Society

which is one of the three groups that are analysed in Unhealthy Charities

Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth.

 

Now, one of the things that you would need to understand in order to understand

the motivations of the American Cancer Society is that all of the major health

charities were formed by physicians specifically with an economic interest in

their respective diseases, and the American Cancer Society is no different from

the others in this regard and the Board of that organisation had very heavy

representation from the medical community.

 

Now, I’d like to start off by simply giving you an overview of this organisation

and then talk about why it is impeding, and has for decades, finding the cures

for cancer. By the way, you know the American Cancer Society prefers to think

that you people don’t even exist. That the Cancer Control Society doesn’t exist,

because it regards itself as THE nation’s organisation devoted to cancer, not

one of the. In any event, about every year the American Cancer Society collect

around a third of a billion dollars and the question is where dose this money

go? Well a great deal of it goes to build the wealth of the organisation, at the

same time that there’s tremendous suffering from cancer and there’s tremendous

needs throughout the nation, and by the way, these needs are what are emphasised

repeatedly in their fundraising drives.

 

The American Cancer Society is an enormously wealthy organisation. It could pay

every dime of its bills today and it would have over half a billion dollars in

the bank, it could operate for approximately sixteen months without raising

another dime from the American public. It holds immense wealth in the form of

cash, certificates of deposits, stocks, bonds and particularly land and

buildings. Just as one example, you take a look at its Texas division. You

wonder if it’s a car dealership---it owns fifty-six automobiles. Or whether it’s

a real estate speculation company---it has fourteen parcels of raw land and

seventeen office buildings. How raw land helps us find a cure for cancer or

helps cancer victims is an enigma that I can’t fathom.

 

In addition, the American Cancer Society benefits tremendously the orthodox

medical establishment. It subsidises the orthodox medical establishment

shamelessly. It practices Robin Hood in reverse going door to door relentlessly

dunning donations out of the American public and each year spends more than

thirty million dollars supposedly educating health professionals about cancer.

Now, health professionals are no different from college professors, CPA’s,

attorneys, any other profession that has to stay abreast of its field, except

that health professionals are one of the highest paid, as a group, individuals

in the United States. They can well afford to pay for their own continuing

education, but this simply shows, and give us some idea of what the American

Cancer Society is all about. It’s subsidising the orthodox medical profession.

 

It also does a great deal for its own executives. At the state division, and

there are around fifty seven divisions, as some cities are big enough to have

their own divisions, where the programmes are carried of this organisation about

fifty cents out of every single dollar goes for salaries, fringe benefits and

payroll taxes. You add to that the generous perks such as insurance, travel,

club memberships, expense accounts and you can understand very readily why it is

that there is very little money left over for helping people who are in need. In

some divisions the level of compensation, here in California for example the

highest paid state executive when you throw in the benefits with the job the pay

rivals that of the president of the United States. It’s really a shame. The

Salvation Army, which is truly a charity, its leadership makes about a third

what the head of the ACS California division makes. They claim to be a business

and they need to attract businessmen. Caring and compassion are very rarely used

terms with regard to the American Cancer Society. Helping the poor, again, is a

very low priority. The American Cancer Society is not alone in this. The

American Heart Association spends absolutely nothing on cardiovascular disease

sufferers. The Lung Association sends about one half of one percent of its

revenue helping lung disease suffers. The American Cancer Society spends about

two cents of every dollar that is donated to individual cancer victims. Now, at

the same time, vast sums are spent on so-called public education programmes.

Basically what we have here is fear mongering. Fear –mongering and increasing

the demand for patient services. If you have indigestion, if you sneeze,

whatever happens you run immediately to your doctor. You may have cancer. No

question of that. The question I have for the Cancer Society is as the orthodox

medical profession clearly does not understand the disease how do you educate

the public about the disease that the Cancer Society or the medical profession

itself does not understand.

 

Now, let’s turn to the issue of research. All health charities claim to play a

very major role in the research process. The facts show otherwise. For every one

dollar spent by the Cancer Society on research the American taxpayer through one

of the alphabet agencies of the Federal Government spends about fifteen dollars,

the so-called National Cancer Institute. And there’s a whole list of Federal

Agencies that are involved in cancer research in one form or another. But

interestingly enough the role of the Cancer Society plays in my view is largely

a negative role in the research process. We have already had a discussion by

other speakers of the so-called war on cancer that was begun over twenty years

ago. I like to think of it not as a qualified failure but rather as Napoleon’s

defeat at Waterloo. And part of the problem is the role that the Cancer Society

plays and other health charities in their respective disease in the research

process. They have a stranglehold on research. When the American Cancer Society

gives money for research the people to whom it gives money are not looking for

causes of and cures for cancer. That’s not the purpose of the grant. The Cancer

society gives seed grants, in other words money to their favoured researchers in

order for their researchers to get the real bucks from the Federal Government or

from private pharmaceutical companies. Because of this their favoured

researchers have an inside track. It’s very competitive getting money. They have

an inside track to getting Government and private sector funds and when you

couple that with the concern that the health charities often dominate the

publications in their field by controlling what’s published in the journals and

very much disease researchers are judged by a publish or perish criteria, what

you find is that they control the nation’s research agenda, a research agenda

that has produced extremely disappointing results, at least in the case of

cancer, in the last forty years.

 

Worse, their so-called unproven methods of cancer management has resulted in a

great deal of alternative therapies such as the ones that are discussed here

being very much discouraged and if not persecuted. It’s almost like a

witch-hunt. And what is even more disgusting is how arrogant and hypocritical

these people are. Many of us will remember the campaign waged against Leatrile.

The idea was to make it a laughing stock because Leatrile was made out of peach

or apricot pits or something of the like. Well, when it came time for Taxol to

be introduced, and Taxol, of course, is a drug made from the yew tree, oh, it

was hailed as athe second coming, and the reason was very simple, one of the

in-group of the orthodox establishment developed it. And so we have this kind of

hypocrisy going on.

 

The same is true of nutrition and cancer. Dr Max Gerson in the fifties was

convinced that there were very strong powerful links between nutrition and

disease and was systematically persecuted by the American Cancer Society for

that, driven out of the United States. They even went to the extent of having

the then Senator from Florida, Claude Pepper, hold hearings to discredit the

man. And then we find that in 1989 in Cancer Facts and Figures published by the

American Cancer Society that, heaven forbid, cancer and nutrition and the links

between them is called, and I quote, " this is a new and important area of

research " . They did not have the simple decency to point out that if we hadn’t

hounded the hell out of Dr Gerson forty years ago we might know a tremendous

amount more about this that we do now. And of course many of us also know that

Dr Linus Pauling, a very brilliant biochemist, was never able to get grant

funding to test his theories because of the same kind of mentality.

 

The American Cancer Society, basically, has done a great deal to discourage

alternative approaches to cancer. This is a sad thing and it’s important that

this group, as with other health charities, stops persecuting not only

alternative therapies, but other organisations that develop to fill the needs,

the gaps, that the American Cancer Society is not filling. It’s important that

the American Cancer Society turn away from its current thrust toward lobbying

for Government money to support its coffers and the lifestyle of its executives

and to use the regulatory process of government to discourage alternative

approaches to medicine, and it needs to return to its charitable roots, it needs

to do what it says it does in its fund-raising---helping the needy, the people

who cannot help themselves. These groups can do a great deal of good, they have

an important, vital role to play because only charities can organise volunteers

and the energies of these people but if they don’t redirect their orientation

they’ll do far more harm that good in the process.

 

Professor James Bennett--- author, researcher, eminent scholar, PhD in Economics

at Case Western, he’s testified before both houses of Congress and a variety of

subjects from small business problems to government reform and oversight, on

political lobbying by organisations receiving government funding.

 

Cancer Control Society, 2043 N. Berendo St, LA, CA 90027. Ph: 213 663 7801.

 

 

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