Ignorance is Strength

Let's start by looking at some statements by people in the cancer curing business. All of these people claim to know the cause of cancer and also claim success in treating it.

Lorraine Day
"Cancer is cancer! Whether it is prostate cancer, stomach cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer, lymphoma, melanoma, leukemia (cancer of the blood) or any other type of cancer. ALL cancer is a result of an immune system that is not working properly. Fortunately, ALL cancer responds to rebuilding the immune system by natural methods. The immune system CANNOT be rebuilt with drugs because ALL drugs have side effects that eventually suppress the immune system and damage the body even more."

Stanislaw Burzynski
"Dr. Burzynski first discovered and named antineoplastons in the late 1960s. These drugs are safe and nontoxic, unlike traditional chemotherapeutic agents. Antineoplastons are comprised of compounds that occur naturally in the human body: amino acid derivatives and peptides from proteins and essential amino acids present in the diet of all biologic organisms. Antineoplastons are found in the blood of healthy persons and not in that of patients with cancer. Dr. Burzynski currently is using antineoplastons to treat cancer, HIV infection, and autoimmune diseases in 74 Phase II clinical trials."

Hulda Clark
"For many years we have all believed that cancer is different from other diseases. We believed that cancer behaves like a fire, in that you can't stop it once it has started. Therefore, you have to cut it out or radiate it to death or chemically destroy every cancerous cell in the body since it can never become normal again. NOTHING COULD BE MORE WRONG! And we have believed that cancers of different types such as leukemia or breast cancer have different causes. Wrong again!

"In this book you will see that all cancers are alike. They are all caused by a parasite. A single parasite! It is the human intestinal fluke. And if you kill this intestinal parasite, the cancer stops immediately. The tissue becomes normal again. In order to get cancer, you must have this parasite.

"How can the human intestinal fluke cause cancer? This intestinal parasite typically lives in the intestine where it might do little harm, causing only colitis ... or irritable bowel syndrome, or perhaps nothing at all. But if it invades a different organ, like the uterus or kidneys or liver, it does a great deal of harm. If it establishes itself in the liver, it causes cancer!

"It only establishes itself in the liver in some people. These people have propyl alcohol in their bodies. All cancer patients (100%) have both propyl alcohol and the intestinal fluke in their livers. The solvent propyl alcohol is responsible for letting the fluke establish itself in the liver. In order to get cancer, you must have both the parasite and propyl alcohol in your body."

Sam Chachoua
"This well-known phenomenon relates to the ability of some animals to be totally resistant to diseases that are lethal to others. HIV, for example, will only infect humans with deadly consequences. Most animals tested will reject attempted infection. Why not use an animal's immune response to generate passive vaccines against AIDS?

"Before the pharmaceutical age, doctors used horse sera in the treatment of Rabies, Polio, Small Pox and other plagues. Why not employ the same logic today?

"The ability to raise passive vaccines and Dr. Chachoua's ability to transfer resistance to human cells enables the neutralization of the viral mutation problem with other therapies. The success of this approach has been remarkable, both in the laboratory as well as in humans.

"The study of these miracles of nature where incurable disease magically disappears has led many scientists to conclude that certain infections are capable of destroying cancer tissue (cf. Coley, Didot, Duffy). The relationship between infections and cancer was further expanded upon by investigators such as Scott, Glover and Livingston. Largely ineffective vaccines were developed by these scientists. Dr. Chachoua developed thousands of vaccines and therapeutic products based upon this phenomenon. He was also able to elucidate the real cause and function of cancer. His vaccines include tagging agents capable of attaching themselves to the cancer cells and making them immunologically tempting targets as well as a battery of specific, non-toxic therapies. The shrinkage of large cancer lesions within days and the disappearance of symptoms can be expected and delivered."

I hope that this clears everything up, but I will summarise these findings for you. Dr Day (who is a qualified medical doctor), says that all cancer is caused by a failed immune system and can be cured by praying and consuming extract of barleygreen. Drugs are bad. Dr Burzynski (who is a qualified medical doctor) says that all cancer is associated with an absence of antineoplastons and that replacing these chemicals (a form of drug treatment) will fix the problem. Dr Clark (who has a legitimate PhD in physiology and a Doctor of Naturopathy degree from a correspondence school) says that all cancers are caused by a thumb-sized parasite in the liver and that killing this grub with electricity cures cancer immediately. Dr Chachoua (who is a qualified medical doctor) says that cancer is a result of an unfocussed immune system and that certain drugs can enable the immune system to target cancer cells more effectively.

To the untrained eye, these differing views of cancer and its causes and cures might seem contradictory. In fact, you might even say that they are mutually exclusive, in that they all propose completely different causes and cures for cancer, with no possible overlap. If you were a believer in "alternative medicine", however, you would see no inconsistency at all. As all of these stories have the common property of being opposed to "conventional medicine" (read "medicine"), they can all be correct simultaneously.

Dr Chachoua recently won a court case against Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was awarded $11 million in damages. I will write that out in words - eleven million US dollars. He was awarded this because the hospital's research arm had discontinued contracted research into his techniques. On his web site, Dr Chachoua suggests that his cure has been common knowledge for a long time and that it is a disgrace that this simple answer has not been taken up by conventional medicine. After the court-endorsed theft of money that could have been used for real research, Dr Chachoua created another web site which said that the $11 million was going to be used to do all the research again because all details of it had been lost by the hospital. These statements seemed inconsistent to me - it was going to take $11 million to refind the obvious - but, as I am a simple shill for allopathy, perhaps I just don't understand. (It seems that Dr Chachoua didn't use any of the $11 million to pay for registration of his domain name because the second site now points to a pornography sales outlet. I can understand how looking at dirty pictures could make someone's final days more interesting, but I don't think it's a cure for cancer.)

I found out about Dr Chachoua's windfall when someone posted details of this major victory for "alternative medicine" on an Internet mailing list inhabited by devotees of Hulda Clark. It was received with great pleasure and rejoicing. The person who posted the message had read it on a similar list devoted to the followers of the Burzynski creed, where it had engendered a similar enthusiastic response. The truly amazing thing is that any rational follower of either Burzynski or Clark should consider Chachoua to be an outrageous charlatan because he says quite clearly that their heroes are one hundred percent wrong. I have, in fact, openly challenged the supporters of these different curers to join me in denouncing all the other ones as quacks but the only response I got was to be accused of opposing "alternative medicine". Guilty, Your Honour.

Another thing that all these curers have in common, as well as being alternative, is that they are all being suppressed by the great billion-dollar cancer conspiracy. That's the conspiracy that has doctors and executives of pharmaceutical companies and fund-raising organisations letting members of their families die from cancer because they are forbidden from mentioning the alternatives and therefore threatening their employers' profits. The amazing thing to me is that these people are so suppressed that Lorraine Day can only appear on television weekly, Hulda Clark can only sell a few hundred thousand copies of her books every year (you can only get them through underground outlets like Amazon.com), Burzynski can charge $125,000 to participate in a "clinical trial" (because the authorities allowed him to exploit a loophole in the law which said that a clinical trial was not a "treatment"), and Chachoua can only get $11 million from a court. It seems to be an amazingly ineffective conspiracy.

From the original manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The title of this paper - "Ignorance is Strength" - came from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and is a suitable slogan for the "alternative medicine" movement. The following paragraph contains a possible manifesto for the movement, based on what Orwell wrote.

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Altmed intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Altmed, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately, it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able - and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years - to arrest the course of history."

One day I will write something about similar inconsistencies in the diet business. In the meantime, if I combine a no-fat diet with a no-carbohydrate one, add a touch of no-protein, avoid meat and dairy products, stay away from anything with additives or artificial vitamins and completely eliminate anything with a trace of genetic engineering I will probably lose weight and lower my risk of diabetes. The beauty of it is that I wouldn't have to stay on this regimen for more than a couple of weeks before I saw the effects.

References:

1. The Lorraine Day quote is from her web site at www.drday.com
2. The Burzynski quote is from the Burzynski patient group web site at www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. Dr Burzynski's own web site is at www.cancermed.com, where he is a smart enough not to talk about curing anything, preferring to leave that to the "patient group". There are two advertising sites for the Burzynski clinic at www.cancerbusters.com and www.ouralexander.org. Feel free to be outraged at the way dead and dying children are used in the promotional campaign.
3. The Hulda Clark quote is from her book: "The Cure for All Diseases". That's "The Cure for All Diseases", in case you missed it the first time. The Clark web site is at www.drclark.net, although, like Burzynski, she prefers someone else to run the site and make the claims. You can look here see how Clark reacts to criticism.
4. The Chachoua quote is from his web site which used to be at Nexus Magazine.
5. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. You can