Beyond Chemotherapy: A Closer Look at Cancer Treatments - "Cut, Poison, Burn" Documentary Video

This is a 19 May 2024 video.

Explore the contentious landscape of cancer treatment in ‘Cut Poison Burn’, a thought-provoking documentary which delves into the history, controversies and complexities surrounding the fight against cancer. From President Nixon’s declaration of war on cancer to the present day, witness the struggles and triumphs in the battle against this deadly disease.

https://youtu.be/r4SHEzn779A

Transcript excerpt…

Since the war on cancer began in 1971, more than 14,800,000 Americans have died from some form of the disease. Every day, 1,500 die, which translares to 565,000 men, women and children in 2009 alone. More people will die from cancer in this country in the next three years than all the American soldiers who died fighting since the American Revolution, from 1920 to the present time.

We have made little or no progress in the treatment of adult cancers, so a person who gets prostate cancer or breast cancer today will live as long as a person who got it in 1920. No big change. All the radiation therapy that we began using in the 10 and 20s, combination chemotherapy in the 60s, immunotherapy which  began in the 70s, pet scans, MRI scans, you name it. The billions and billions and billions of research dollars we’ve thrown into this whole area of cancer research and treatment with little or no significant progress in the treatment of adult cancers. In the early 1900s, pneumonia was the number one cause of death.

People were terrified of pneumonia because even though some survived, most did not. Now we have cancer as the number one cause of death because we can treat pneumonia successfully with antibiotics and no one’s afraid of pneumonia, but with cancer the treatment we have still leads to an overwhelming majority death rate. Nothing we’ve done in a century has substantially reduced the death rate of various cancers relative to the population density. The medical community is a total failure. The key question remains: Why is there so many different ways to pursue cancer and we still do not know what the right treatment is. So we try lots of things, and anytime human beings try lots of things, many of them are not going to work but some of them willl, providing some successes.