I read some discussions on this and some theories make sense, that is: the pharmaceutical industry and other big companies that rely on cancer patients to make big bucks don't want the war to be won. Think about how much money have they made just from cancer-related treatments and diagnosis alone. Before I read these I had always wondered why we have found cures to so many other diseases that once were almost 100% fatal to humans, but the cure to cancer is still nowhere in sight. Your thoughts?

I don't know if that's true, but I don't like that the drugs are so expensive...When I went through chemo last summer...for each of the 6 rounds, the drugs cost $24,000.00.  I also go for Herceptin treatments every three weeks, and that drug cost almost $16,000.00 each treatment.  When I had the chemo I was on three anti-naseau drugs.  Just the one drug which was a total of 3 pills cost $400.00.  Thankfully I have insurance and my copayment was only $50.  Each round of chemo my copayments for the prescriptions I needed to fill was over $150.00.  I don't know how anyone without insurance handles these kinds of costs.

You chose for best answer the only response that had absolutely nothing to say about the question you asked? Any of us could have griped about the very high cost of the various drugs we have received.                          
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Cancer is hundreds of different diseases and disease processes. Major victories against certain types of cancer are being won every day, week and year.



Many cancers that were previously 100% fatal are now treatable and sometimes curable with stem cell transplants, gene therapy and a host of new drugs that have recently been made available.



For example the drug Gleevec has turned chronic leukemia, a common adult cancer that was eventually fatal, into a manageable disease rather than a fatal one. There are many more examples of similar victories. Lance Armstrong is doing pretty good considering he had tumors in his brain, lungs and groin yet today is cancer free.



The idea that the pharmaceutical industry is keeping any cancer cures secret in order to make money sounds good for an episode of the X-files but in real life there are no secret cancer cures. Science is making progress all the time but there are many cancers to fight and cancer is a very wily foe.

I disagree!  Many new advancements have helped PREVENT cancer.

My wife had colon cancer  about 6---7 years ago. She mentioned to her surgeon that my father had colon cancer.So, the surgeon starts busting my tail to get a colonoscope. To make rthe wife happy, I agree.

  He removes 7 polyps, of which 4 are pre-cancerous. As a result, I cannot be cured of cancer, because I never  developed it!

  Prevention is the best cure.   Between PSA's, colonoscopes, pap smears, breast exams,  a lot of cancers are stopped before they develop cancer.  Following a colonoscopy, I'd rather be told "  See you next year" than be told " we have to talk...........!"

I think that most of these theories are made by people who are looking for someone to blame.



DO you really think a cure would end their profits?  NO!!  Like they would charge the same amount for a cure!!  No.  A cure would be the most expensive treatment or med you have ever seen.  Most people wont be able to afford it and will be left still getting todays treatments.  Yes, pharmacuticals are greedy, but you have to think like a greedy person when looking at this, not like a person looking for someone or something to blame.  They know treatments are getting better, no one is gonna withhold a cure, but at the same time, they arent gonna let themselves go out of business.  So they jack thr prices up.  I mean, if it was a promised cure, wouldnt you pay more for it than you would something that had lil chances of helping?  If someone told you would die tomarrow unless you came up with a million dollars, wouldnt you atleast try to come up with the money?

The problem with finding a cure is that cancer is not a single disease, it's an umbrella term for over 200 different diseases. The difficulty with finding a cure is that different cancers are caused by different things, so no one strategy can prevent them They all respond to different treatments so no one treatment can cure them, so there isn't a magic bullet that cures all cancers and there never will be.



But quite a few cancers CAN already be cured: seven out of ten children are cured of cancer; testicular cancer, Hodgkin's disease, and many cases of leukaemia can all be cured in adults with chemotherapy, most skin cancers are cured with surgery and many cases of thyroid cancer and cancer of the larynx  are cured with radiotherapy.



Many other types of cancer are also cured if they are found early enough - 75% of breast cancers found at stage one for example.



The suggestion that there's too much money being made from cancer for researchers to bother finding a cure is nonsense, as is any suggestion that a cure exists but is kept secret for reasons of profit. The cancer cure conspiracy theory is a sort of game played by people who've never had or been close to cancer.



Any drug company discovering a cure would make far more money than they can have dreamed of making up till now – fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams.



Doctors, scientists, researchers etc and their families develop cancer at the same rate as the rest of the population; they would be watching their relatives die and dying themselves rather than cooperating to find cures or revealing a 'secret' one



Most unlikely of all, if there were a secret cure, every medical professional in the whole world would have agreed to keep existence of a cure secret. Every single one. One blabbermouth, one disgruntled researcher or sacked nurse and the whole conspiracy’s blown. Newspapers and other media wouldn't have got a sniff of it. Likely? -and is it likely that these people, who went into medicine to help people, would be conspiring to kill them? If they wanted to make a fortune, medicine was a very poor choice of career.



I live in the UK. Our health care, including our cancer treatments, are paid for by the state. Cancer treatments cost the government billions, yet our treatments are the same as in the US, whence most of these conspiracy theories originate. If there were cheaper, once-and -for-all cures, BELIEVE ME the government would be paying for them rather than expensive conventional treatments. As it is I may be back at any time for more expensive treatment. And our doctors are salaried - if the cancer rate doubled, they wouldn't make one extra penny.



No secret cure then, and no letup in the search for cures and more effective treatments. There is much dedicated - and underfunded - hard work going on to find cures and effective treatments.

I believe Quijibor said it best.  There are victories in the fight against cancer every day, week and year.  There are also some sad defeats.  What he says is true.  Please remember that cancer is dynamic, meaning that it is something that changes.  It adapts, evolves and mutates becoming one of the worst kind of enemies.  Since it is a part of our own system, it has learned to evade most attacks by the immune system.  In one simple word, cancer is alive...yes alive.  Remember it is simply tissue that has lost its natural checks and balances.  For this reason and many more it is so incredibly difficult to treat.  Another common reason is the simple fact that as mentioned before it is a human tissue (eukaryotic cells).  Let me give you some examples to clarify.  When we use antibiotics to kill bacteria the side effects tend to be on the lighter side.  One of the most common side effect is GI upset/nausea.  Some of these effects can verge on being extremely toxic such as with the aminoglycosides (Ex:  Gentamycin, Neomycin etc).  This antibiotic class/family can cause severe nephrological (kidney) and vestibular/cochlear (inner/middle ear damage) leading to renal failure or deafness/vertigo.  But the question you should be asking yourself right now is, why are antibiotic medications usually pretty safe.  Well bacteria are a completely different kind of cell (prokrariotic VS eukaryote).  They have different structures that antibiotics attack and for the most part leave our eukaryotic cells alone.  This translates into fewer serious symptoms.  If we talk about chemotherapy well now we are using chemicals to attack cells which are essentially ours in every way.  For those oncologist out there, I will note that neoplastic cells have mutated to such a degree that althouth originally our daughter cells, they have changed quite a bit.  But the point is that we are trying to kill our own cells.  Try to imagine you are the chemical that is suppose to kill neoplastic cells, well sadly it is like playing "Find Waldo".  Good luck!  Anyway I hope this might change your in my opinion incorrect ideas concerning onco research.



For those that care, I am not only a medical resident but also a person that has done a great deal of research in the field as well as virology (specifically HIV) and I can assure you there is no conspiracy out there.  Also to the first poster, I am so sorry that the medications are outragously expensive but sadly, it cost thousands of dollars to do research.



My best wishes to all that have, are and will suffer from this dreadful disease.



Daniel



R1 Medical Resident