Extreme Medicine Gets Pentagon Push; Human Trials Rushed

Nothing I like more than reading in the fine print on my medicine bottle "Human trials rushed".

On a related note, can someone in the field please explain how throwing an extra $12 million (a pittance, surely) across several promising lines of research can accelerate all the studies so dramatically? If everyone on Earth chips in $1, can we have a cure for cancer by New Years?

The $12 million is just what it takes to push the FDA to allow trials for the people who desperately need it the most. These treatments already exist but are not yet approved for general use. The $12 million is just to fund these trials and track the results. You will find more and more battlefield medicine being performed in trauma centers because pioneering treatments performed out of necessity in the field.

Sad to say but there are promising (read have worked) cures for cancer. It's just that no one can get funding for pursuing them (or trial testing them) because they aren't patentable and therefore are of no use to pharmaceutical companies. It's a catch-22 situation. The medical community will say there are no trials proving the efficacy of "natural" or "alternative" methods besides, chemo, radiation and surgery. Yet if you ask any of them to get involved in the testing they can't get the funding to do so. (Or worse, they don't have any interest in it.)

I speak from second-hand experience. A friend helped a friend who was told to go home to die, because the cancer in her body was "everywhere", as the doctors put it. He told her about a tea using Pau d'Arco. There is quite a bit of information on the web about this. (http://www.paudarco.com/ for starters). At any rate, she prepared and drank this tea -- 1/2 to 1 gallon a day -- and in 3 months had beaten the cancer.

Vitamin C research suffers pretty much the same fate. (Also, poorly designed experiments that don't replicate methods reported to have success -- see Dr. Fred Klenner.) I have had success with "natural" methods of treating myself for pretty serious ailments.

The other reason it's hard to convince people that natural methods work is they seem too simplistic for the modern scientific mind. In a nutshell: 1)We live in a contaminated world, which contaminates the body, 2)Nutrition is very poor because of the modern agricultural system; i.e., most fruits and vegetables are picked green and shipped long distances to stock grocery store bins. Just use common sense. We are all exposed to the same factors that cause or precipitate cancer, and yet not everyone gets cancer. It HAS to do with the status of health of each person. There are many factors, including stress, that contribute to a condition whereby cancer takes hold and thrives.

I know, I know... many hear this and say "It's the same old unscientific saw." Fortunately, this doesn't depend on drug trials before the "pill" is approved and ready to swallow. Improving one's nutrition and trying "natural" remedies, like Pau d'Arco can be tried by any individual. And one other thing to consider: Even though you can find many individual stories on the Internet of how people "cured" their cancer, there is still the argument that it is anecdotal -- a case of 1 success. But I would argue that all medicine relies on the fact that, for the most part, human physiology is consistent from one person to the next. So it's not illogical to assume that what worked for one person may very likely work for others. Even drugs don't show a 100% effectiveness in trials. So be willing to accept that neither will any one "natural" cure work for everyone. One person may be much more disciplined than another at taking the herb, vitamin, or whatever and also more disciplined at cutting out all the junk in their diet. The current epidemic of diabetes in children is due to something. It's almost certainly environmental -- either in our food, air, water or all three.

Many people laugh at this perspective until they've gone through all the standard medical treatments for their illness and come up short. And then find the truths behind this way of looking at disease. The body is the best healer. Giving it what it needs and not burdening it with dealing with all sorts of chemicals and drugs (the liver has to deal with all of this -- ex.: acetaminophen) that get added to food and are in our drinking water, etc., is the best way to avoid sickness.

Sorry for going off so much, but I've gotten pretty tired of orthodox medicine's dogmatic attitude about methods that do work.