Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering (2014) Reviews

• An Example of the Profit System Corrupting Health Care

  ben-98-1434332014-09-04

  This movie hits home since my dad died of cancer when I was 13 and it upsets me tremendously to think that our overall health care system has been corrupted due to the profit system. The Hippocratic oath seems to be more focused on maintaining the status quo of profit versus curing medical problems. ** Movie Review ** An insider's account from the 70's at a well known NYC cancer research hospital exposing the truth (using the hospital's own records) behind how the profit system has corrupted the search for finding a "cure" for cancer. A promising treatment was swept under the rug and the scientist who found it (co-founder of chemotherapy) was forced to lie about his treatment. The treatment was not the "cure", but it worked remarkably well and very cheap. The problem was it was "very cheap". Even though the movie is centered around 1 character and it's almost entirely a narrative, the topic and the evidence is so damning, it's exciting. It's a knock-out punch guilty as charged for the hospital. Definitely recommended to all.

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• Great exposure of "science" err money based medicine

  NikephorosPhokas2015-10-22

  In the 1970s according to a Newsweek piece cited by Ralph W. Moss Phd(in classics) an ex-insider and whistle blower at Sloan Kettering, 1/10th of American cancer patients were going to Mexico to receive laetrile(or amygdalin or vitamin b17) and 1/5th of terminal American cancer patients. This created enormous pressure for the criminal cancer establishment to look into laetrile after many letters sent to the American government. Eventually at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, a man who researched cancer for over 60 years who was dedicated to honest research began investigating laetrile. Suguira when experimenting with mice found that laetrile was able to arrest tumor development for a period. It would resume, but what it had lasting effects on preventing tumor metastasis. The problem was and is that laetrile is derived from the seeds of fruits, so there is no profit motive for pushing it as a mainline treatment, since no "science based medicine" corporation can really patent it. For a time one of the heads of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Gary Old, pushed for laetrile. But they had meetings with heads of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and National Cancer Institute and eventually. As a result Sloan Kettering covered up the positive results after these meetings. However, there was ABC news footage reproduced in the documentary where Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, went against the organization and defended his research and said that the studies produced by Sloan Kettering to bury laetrile appeared tampered. Sugiura's positive results were buried as a segment in a study and paper written expressly by other Kettering researchers that was meant to tank laetrile. Ralph W. Moss who worked in public relations and as writer for Sloan Kettering, didn't want it to remain buried since it was so promising, so he started a dissident publication and organization within Sloan Kettering to publicize Suguira's results called a Second Opinion. If it were not for a Second Opinion, this scandal would have been buried. Eventually the National Cancer Institute conducted a review of the patient data of alternative doctors using laetrile(covered in bonus material): Special Report on Laetrile: The NCI Laetrile Review — Results of the National Cancer Institute's Retrospective Laetrile Analysis N Engl J Med 1978; 299:549-552 Of the 22 laetrile exclusive patients who didn't take deadly chemotherapy: 2 had a complete remission = 9%, 4 had a partial one = 18%, 9 had their cancer stabilize = 41%, 7 had their cancer progress = 32%. Later the National Cancer Institute also recruited Dr. Charles Moertel of the Mayo Clinic a notorious quack buster type to do a study of laetrile in the New England Journal of Medicine. In his selection criteria he used late stage cancer patients when laetrile is only really effective in suppressing tumors and keeping them from metastasizing when they are small. After there is metastasis I am not so sure it is effective. When Big Pharma and the biomedical industry want something buried they find greedy people, careerists and people of low character to conduct studies to protect their profit margins and give something to cite about "quackery". Even today if you examine the web though you will be flooded by negative "science based results" against laetrile, because more people live from cancer, than die from it. Let us look at chemotherapy which all the science based medicine and quack buster types defend as one of the only treatments besides radiation and surgery: Chemotherapy is only effective in 2-3% of cases: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849 "RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA." Only recently have serious researchers in Germany started looking into laetrile again thanks to the "quackbusters" defending "science based medicine" to line their pockets with other people's blood and dead relatives.(See the two studies by Makarević, et al., on amygdalin published in 2014.) And those are"in vitro" studies, human trials are probably very far off, despite how mainstream treatments are wholly inadequate in treating most types of cancer. Using leaked internal documents and the insider testimony of Ralph Moss this documentary exposes the shenanigans of mainstream cancer research much of which has the express purpose of protecting the ineffective treatments they can patent against more effective treatments that they want to make illegal and force patients to travel abroad to receive. A dilemma I face as my dad has stage IV colorectal cancer for which conventional treatment offers nothing but more pain, more negative symptoms from the actual treatment and a worse quality of life. (Note: I watched most of bonus material before writing this review and it is not based on just the main feature, this review covers the bonus material as well.)

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• Another Attempt to Resurrect the Laetrile "Snake Oil"

  j-a-lind2015-12-04

  Contains potential spoiler . . . or what someone might claim is a spoiler. This film is the third documentary of Eric Merola, whose first two were "Burzynski" in 2010, followed by "Burzynski: Cancer is Serious Business, Part II" in 2013. Both of those are about Stanislaw Burzynski and the Burzynski Clinic in Huston, TX, which as been conducting "antineoplaston" clinical trials for cancer treatment for decades (approx 60 trials) for which the results have never been fully published or peer reviewed. Nor can anyone else replicate Burzynski's alleged results. Burzynski uses the Phase I and II trials to get around FDA regulations and use the drugs on patients. I mention Merola's first two films as this film, his third one, is cut from the same cloth as his first two. It touts garbage pseudo- science and time-worn conspiracy theory claims of FDA protecting Big Pharma and medical oncology industry profits. In reality they're after lining their own pockets with millions selling laetrile and amygdalin and false hope to cancer patients, some of whom are terminal and grasping at straws no matter what the cost. Laetrile and its related amygdalin were debunked nearly 40 years ago as having ZERO effect in preventing, curing or stopping cancer. Yet we now have Ralph W. Moss, the science writer who first claimed laetrile could cure cancer in the mid- 1970's based on only partially completed research in progress at Sloan-Kettering. He's trying to resurrect laetrile and amygdalin again, after Sloan-Kettering concluded its study as being indistinguishable from a placebo in treating cancer. Countless other studies since then have confirmed this. The movie's preview video contains an outright lie claiming laetrile (and amygdalin) are harmless. They're toxic, very toxic, and potentially lethal. Both release hydrogen cyanide in the small intestine as enzymes naturally found there chemically break down both of these drugs. This is not opinion or supposition, it's indisputably proved scientific cause and effect fact, and the exact chemical mechanism that does this has been well understood for many years now. In high enough doses, or in the presence of the wrong foods, or in combination with the wrong drugs which enhance the cyanide production, it's lethal, and there have been numerous deaths from it. If laetrile or amygdalin had any measurable efficacy, the Big Pharma they would have you believe is trying prevent its use would be doing everything they could to manufacture and sell it, along with all the other chemotherapy drugs they currently make and sell. There is NO conspiracy. It's sad . . . extremely sad . . . that movies like this are made under the guise of being documentaries giving false hope to people facing a lethal disease. In reality they're infomercials touting cancer treatments that have not been shown to have any efficacy in treating cancer, and are potentially very, very harmful. It's laden with misinformation and disinformation.

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