The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession have colluded to obscure the availability of a cure? A full 27 per cent of Americans think so, according to Cancer journal.

Since President Nixon declared his «War Against Cancer» in 1971, $20 billion have been spent on cancer research in the US alone, to little apparent avail. One in four people in the Western world currently dies from cancer, and this rate of incidence will increase, according to the WHO, to 50 per cent by 2020. What reason could there be for such an abject and expensive failure other than a cover-up by vested interests?

One of the first to condemn the «cancer conspiracy» was Dr Raymond Rife, an optics engineer in San Diego, who in the 1930s claimed to have discovered the bacteria that cause cancer and then invented the «Rife Ray Tube», a machine that cured cancerous growths by bombarding them with oscillating electromagnetic waves. Proof that the Rife Ray Tube worked came from the University of California, who — according to Rife’s supporters — cured sixteen terminally ill patients with the device. Before the Tube could go into mass production, however, the American Medical Association ordered an outright ban on its use. All Rife’s papers were destroyed by arson. Rife is alleged to have been murdered in 1971. (Violence against critics of «the cancer conspiracy» is, if internet sites are to be believed, routine. «One wintry night our house was burned to the ground,» writes one critic Dr William Kelley. «… These lawless [Medical] Establishment devils went to work and Poisoned … me 3 times … Tried to shoot me once during this time.»)

Rife’s proposition that cancer has a bacterial cause subsequently found favour with, among others, Dr Wilhelm Reich, in The Cancer Biopathy (1948), Dr Virginia Livingston-Wheeler in The Conquest of Cancer (1984) and Dr Alan Cantwell in The Cancer Microbe (1990). In The Cancer Cure That Worked (1987) and Healing of Cancer, the Cures, the Cover-ups and the Solution Now! (1990) Barry Lynes proselytized on behalf of Rife’s cure, and reconstructions of the Rife Ray Tube are currently for sale on the internet. There is no independent evidence that they work.

According to Cantwell, who is also a polemicist against «the AIDS conspiracy», «recognition of microscopic cancer bacteria» would be a massive embarrassment to the medical profession and would require the dumping not only of existing research programmes but also of the entire expensive array of radiation and chemotherapy equipment which fills oncology units. It is certainly the case that the «medical establishment» keeps its bifocals firmly fixed on chemotherapy and radiation as the only worthwhile treatments for cancer, as many believe is shown by the story of Harry Hoxsey’s Tonic.

For three decades the American Medical Association, headed by Morris Fishbein, hounded the alternative practitioner Harry Hoxsey for selling «Hoxsey’s Tonic» as a cure for cancer. In 1956 46,000 PUBLIC WARNING AGAINST HOXSEY CANCER TREATMENT posters were put up in US post offices; in one 16-month period Hoxsey was arrested over 100 times for practising medicine without a licence. Hoxsey was certainly without medical training (he was a coal miner), but generations of apologists have claimed that his tonic, which you might have expected to be snake-oil, in fact wasn’t — indeed that the AMA belatedly admitted the stuff worked on skin cancer, at the very least. The tonic had supposedly been invented by Hoxsey’s great-grandfather (or father; Hoxsey told several versions of the tale), who had noticed that one of his horses cured itself of cancer by eating selected herbs. And indeed subsequent research by The Lancet, say the apologists, confirmed that herbal ingredients contained in Hoxsey’s Tonic, such as barberry and buckthorn, were effective agents against tumours. In fact, what the AMA discovered was that a primary constituent of Hoxsey’s Tonic was arsenic. Arsenic has the property that it «burns» away cells, and of course isn’t choosy about whether those cells are cancerous or healthy. So, yes, if you smeared Hoxsey’s Tonic on a skin cancer you’d get rid of the cancerous cells … along with any other cells with which the stuff came in contact. You’d have no guarantee the cancer wouldn’t return, of course, and more particularly you’d have done nothing about any metastasis that might already have taken place. In a sense, then, Hoxsey’s Tonic was found to have some effect on skin cancer — the same effect you could have got by cauterization, or amputation …