It is a war America’s been losing since the early 1970s.
Declared by President Nixon, centrally directed by the federal government, funded by billions of taxpayers’ dollars, it has, according to The New Yorker, “turned out to be profoundly misconceived – both in rhetoric and execution.”
The war on drugs? Good guess.
But the federally funded fiasco The New Yorker is talking about this week in “The Thirty Years’ War” is the war on cancer, what the magazine says is “the most ambitious health initiative ever undertaken by a country on behalf of its citizens.”
Headlines of hopeful breakthroughs in the cancer war appear all the time. The latest dispatch was on Time’s cover last week: Revolutionary new pills that target only diseased cells. Unfortunately, by the time you finish Jerome Groopman’s piece in The New Yorker on the origins and strategies of the war on cancer, you’ll agree with him that we – i.e., the political and medical people who’ve spearheaded, planned and prosecuted the war – have been fighting cancer the wrong way.
Not only have we relied too heavily on surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, say Groopman and the experts he talks to, we have treated cancer as a single foe (which it isn’t) and put too much hope in “miracle” drugs like interferon that rarely worked miracles.
We also have made big mistakes (our early research was built on the false premise that most cancer was caused by retroviruses). And, most stupidly, we’ve put too much political and medical power and money in the hands of a self-interested cancer research establishment/bureaucracy/lobby.
That a government war on anything – drugs, cancer, poverty, illiteracy, hunger, whatever – has failed will be a surprise only to The New Yorker’s hard-core liberal readers, who continue to exhibit a touching but pathetic belief in the efficacy of top-down, politically-driven processes.
But Groopman’s experts say it’s time to call off the $110 billion war against cancer not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones.
They say it’s high time to free up cancer research so that the kind of serendipitous medical discoveries that have often proved valuable in fighting other diseases are possible. As Groopman says, it is “the uncertainty inherent in scientific discovery” that is the best hope for winning the cancer war, which still claims 1,500 Americans a day.
An article in another left-liberal magazine, the Jewish bimonthly Tikkun, buttresses the New Yorker’s uncharacteristically-libertarian call for what amounts to a more open, decentralized and depoliticized war against cancer.
“When Healing Becomes a Crime” shows how “organized medicine” has enriched itself by using political power to carry on a 100-year “medical civil war” against unorthodox but often promising alternative cancer treatments and their practitioners.
Alternatives to the officially-sanctioned but often deadly therapies – surgery, radiation and chemotherapy – have become extremely popular, partly because they are cheaper and partly because they often seem to work.
Kenny Ausubel argues that alternative therapies, some of which may work well, should be medically tested by organized medicine, not “politically railroaded.” The greatest social issue today, he says, is “the sovereignty of the patient.” Cancer patients, in other words, deserve what allegedly free people never get enough of – as much choice as possible.
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WND Staff