Adam’s Journal
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist. But others have shared with me a belief that a cure for cancer actually exists; it is just being kept from us by big pharma so that they can make money on cancer treatments. What do you think?
Dr. Scofield Prescribes
I could tell you the truth, but then I’d have to kill you.
In all seriousness, I have heard this same rumor. And I can say with the utmost certainty that it isn’t true. I’ll give you three reasons why.
First, cancer is not a single disease. Rather, there are more than 100 distinct forms of cancer. While they all share certain characteristics – each involves the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells – each form of cancer is unique.
So, there can be no single cure. There is no one thing that drives all of these forms of the disease; every cancer has different causes. And for the vast majority of cancers, those causes are proving to be legion, driven by both genes and environmental factors.
For example, a 2023 study linked 187 different genes to prostate cancer. Research has also tied the disease to age and diet, and sedentary lifestyle and other factors have also been associated with more aggressive forms of prostate cancer. It boggles the mind to imagine that a single intervention could extinguish every case of prostate cancer – let alone all of the other forms of cancer, each with varied and similarly complicated roots.
Second, if somehow there was a cure, big pharma would make trillions of dollars selling it, not hiding it. Gene therapy cures for rare diseases now routinely come with price tags in the millions of dollars. In America alone, more than 100 million of us will get cancer in our lifetimes. You’d need to add a few columns to the spreadsheet just to project revenues from such a drug.
Sure, they’d lose some (lesser) revenues when current treatments were no longer necessary. But any losses would be offset not only by sales of a new cure, but also by sales of drugs for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and every other medication needed by people who no longer died of cancer.
Finally, admit it or not, we scientists have egos. And when it comes to the all-time greats, the list would read something like Archimedes, Euclid, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein – and you, the person who cured cancer.
No one could, or would, turn down the chance to join those ranks.
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Dr. Hal Scofield is a physician-scientist at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and he also serves as Associate Chief of Staff for Research at the Oklahoma City VA Medical Center. Adam Cohen is OMRF’s senior vice president and general counsel. Send your health questions to contact@omrf.org.
