Why Cancer Cures Are A Dime A Dozen

Did anyone see the Leslie Stahl piece Sunday nioght after the Master's about a man's homemade garage-workshop cure for cancer? John Kanzius proved that heating tumors tagged with liquid metals like gold nanoparticles can utterly destroy cancer in rats in a heartbeat.

But don't get excited. It's another real cure that will go nowhere.

I recently tried to get the St. Pete Times to write about the long, if not infinite. delay between discovery of a promising cure and human trials. They seem unwilling to touch it. I watched this business about gold nanoparticles and I say to myself, any cure anyone finds better be expensive as hell or the cancer Establishment will shut it down in a heartbeat.

"60 Minutes" is so vacuous sometimes, particularly with respect to the surrounding issues, that I wonder if they are just stupid over there, or what? Four years "to start" human trials - while millions upon millions who would gladly try it die. Human papilloma virus (HPV) was also effective in killing tumors when injected into glial blastomas - but trials are 10 years away. Up in Montreal, the Children's Hospital found a way to cure diabetes overnight by injecting capsicum into the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas and found that insulin started flowing normally within 24 hours. But human studies need $5 million to get started. A British study showed that a person was completely cured within minutes of Alzheimer's after a drug for spinal repair (I forget the name) was injected into the spine. It was taken up to the brain and instantly dissolved the plaque that causes Alzheimer's, and the human patient began functioning normally right away.

You can go on and on, and what it boils down to is that hospitals, doctors, medical schools and insurance companies can't afford cures.

The economic losses due to a simple diabetes cure would be on the order of $18 billion alone. Curing cancer simply and cheaply would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

That's why there are no cures - and it's why patients have no real advocates in Congress or anywhere. Only dedicated physicians who work largely alone and unfunded are making progress, it seems.

Who is the brave and daring dead man who'll take the medical industry on? When will "60 Minutes" get a clue?