Kathleen Deoul couldn’t find any other word than ‘genocide’ when she did research on conventional cancer therapies.
Kathleen Deoul is a woman with a mission. And, as is often the case, her own illness got her launched on it. Her target? The American healthcare system. After gathering an impressive amount of data Deoul gradually came to a conclusion that still surprises her: the US healthcare system is not only bad, it’s corrupt. She goes as far as to use the word ‘genocide’ on the cover of her book. A powerful accusation that she has unfortunately been unable to prove.
Deoul starts out by claiming that 125 million Americans – 45% of the population – are chronically ill. That is a lot of people in a country that spends more on healthcare than any other and yet claims to provide the best medical care in the world. Deoul lists several studies carried out by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), based on which she concludes that ‘Big Medicine’ – which includes excessive medication use, taking the wrong medication, allergic reactions to medication, hospital infections and erroneous procedures – are the third leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease.
Deoul’s primary focus is cancer. She states that $US 45 billion have been spent on research with little or no results to show for it. Every minute another American dies of the disease. Deoul provides insight into where a lot of this money goes: one third of the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute – $US4.1 billion- goes towards non-competitive research. In other words, to giving researchers preferential treatment at the institute regardless of their research results. But the biggest jackpot of all is treatment. In 1999, Americans spent $US104 billion on cancer treatment.
Deoul follows this rather shocking introduction with a chronological overview of all the promising cancer treatments developed over the last century, but not put into production by the pharmaceutical industry. These medicines were apparently so threatening – because they were cheap – that pharmaceutical companies bought up the patents and then did nothing with them. The inventors of the medicines were often paid large sums of money to keep their mouths shut. Deoul cites the example of the tumour specialist and Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Otto Warburg who cleared the way in 1931 for medicines such as caesium and laetrile, both of which function in the anaerobic realm of the cancer cell. They appeared to have a dramatic effect, even in something simple, like raising the level of acidity in tumour cells. Nor did the American medical authorities give a fair chance to Keith Brewer’s discovery of the beneficial effects of caesium and Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplasts*.
Deoul details it all with painful subtlety. It is not as simple as rejecting ‘the umpteenth conspiracy theory’. The book contains too many well-established sources including reports, studies, scientific publications and declarations made under oath. That not only makes the book interesting, but also extremely disturbing.
