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Decoding the Cancer Code | EXTRACT

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29.11.2020

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Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancerand issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward. In this accessible read, Dr. Fung provides a new paradigm for dealing with cancer, with recommendations for what we can do to create a hostile soil for this dangerous seed. Read on to learn more:

 

Medications that lower blood glucose, like insulin, are the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes. Over time, patients usually require higher and higher doses of these medications. If you’re taking more insulin, then it’s pretty obvious that your type 2 diabetes has become more severe. Yet we in the medical community (researchers, doctors) simply maintain the position that type 2 diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease, and that’s just the way things are.

  None of this is true. When a patient loses weight, their type 2 diabetes almost always improves. We don’t need to prescribe more medication to diabetics; we need to fix their diets. But we have been unwilling to admit that our treatment approach is flawed. That would mean deviating from the agreed-upon narrative that our researchers and doctors are making brave progress against a terrible disease. Admit a problem? No way. The result? A continuing epidemic. Again, as with obesity, if we cannot acknowledge that the prevailing treatment protocol falls far, far short of accept- able, then we will continue to be powerless to help those suffering.

CANCER

This brings us, finally, to cancer. Certainly, we must be making great progress against cancer, right? Almost every day, we hear reports of some cancer breakthrough or medical miracle discovered by our pioneering scientists. Unfortunately, a sober look at the available data indicates that progress in cancer research has lagged behind that of almost every other field of medicine.

In the early twentieth century, cancer didn’t attract much attention. The biggest threats to public health were infectious diseases like pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, and tuberculosis. But public sanitation improved, and in 1928, British researcher Alexander Fleming made the world-changing discovery of penicillin. Americans’ life expectancy began to climb, and the focus shifted to chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

In the 1940s, the American Society for the Control of Cancer (the ASCC, which would later become the American Cancer Society) stressed the importance of early detection and aggressive treatment. The ASCC championed the routine use of the Pap smear, a gynecological screening test for cervical cancer. The results were a stunning success: with much earlier detection, death rates from cervical cancer dropped dramatically. This was an auspicious start, but death rates from other types of cancer continued to increase.

  Deciding that enough was enough, then president of the United States Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in his 1971 State of the Union address, proposing “an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer.” He signed the National Cancer Act into law and injected nearly $1.6 billion into cancer research. Optimism was running high. America had ushered in the atomic age with the Manhattan Project. The country had just put a man on the moon with the Apollo program. Cancer? Surely that could be conquered, too. Some scientists enthusiastically predicted that cancer would be cured in time to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976.

The bicentennial came and went, but the cure for cancer was nowhere closer to becoming a reality. By 1981, the tenth anniversary of the “war on cancer,” the New York Times questioned whether this highly publicized, decade-long war had “brought real progress against this dreaded disease, or . . . been an extravagant $7.5 billion misfire?”2 Cancer deaths continued their ruthless climb; the past decade’s efforts hadn’t even slowed its ascent. The war on cancer, so far, had been a complete rout.

This was not news to insiders like the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Dr. John Bailar III, who also served as a consultant to the New England Journal of Medicine and a lecturer at Harvard’s School of Public Health. In 1986, Dr. Bailar questioned the effectiveness of the entire cancer research program in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.3 In the article, Dr. Bailar noted that from 1962 to 1982, the number of Americans who died of cancer increased by 56 percent (see Figure 1.2). Adjusting for population growth, this still represented a 25 percent increase in the rate of death from cancer, at a time when death rates from virtually every other disease were dropping quickly; crude death rates from causes other than cancer had decreased by 24 percent. Dr. Bailar noted that the data “provide no evidence that some 35 years of intense and growing efforts to improve the treatment of cancer have had much overall effect on the most fundamental measure of clinical outcome—death. Indeed, with respect  to cancer as a whole, we have slowly lost ground.” He wondered aloud, “Why is cancer the only major cause of death for which age- adjusted mortality rates are still increasing?”

 As an insider on the cancer wars published in the most prominent medical journal in the world, Dr. Bailar had effectively yelled, “The emperor has no clothes!” He recognized the need to energize new thinking in the stultifying morass of cancer research, which had been mummifying in reiterations of the same cancer paradigms that had failed so utterly. In recognizing the failures of the medical community, Dr. Bailar bravely took the first step to mak- ing progress in the war on cancer.

the cancer code extract

Figure 1.2: Cancer deaths, 1900–2000.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cancer establishment was not yet ready to admit to a problem. Dr. Bailar’s article received heavy criticism; it was called “erroneous” at best and “reprehensible” at worst. In the polite world of academia, this language was tanta- mount to the highest profanity.4 Dr. Bailar became almost universally reviled within the community he had once led. His motives and intelligence were routinely questioned.

  Vincent DeVita Jr., then the director of the NCI, called Dr. Bai- lar’s editorial irresponsible and misleading while implying that Dr. Bailar himself had “departed with reality.”5 The president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology called Dr. Bailar “the great naysayer of our time.” Ad hominem attacks were plentiful, but there was simply no denying the statistics. Cancer was get- ting worse, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it. The research community responded to the message by killing the messenger. Everything is awesome, they said, even as the bodies piled up.

Little had changed eleven years later, when Dr. Bailar pub- lished a follow-up paper titled “Cancer Undefeated.”6 The death rate from cancer had increased by another 2.7 percent from 1982 to 1994. The war on cancer had resulted in not just a rout, but a massacre. Still, the cancer world could not admit there was a problem. Yes, there were some notable successes. Cancer death rates for children had dropped by about 50 percent since the 1970s. But cancer is the quintessential disease of ageing, so this was a major victory in a minor skirmish. Of the 529,904 deaths due to cancer in 1993, only 1,699 (3 percent) were in children. Cancer was delivering punishing uppercuts to our face, and we had managed only to tousle its fancy hairdo.

 

 

To learn more about The Cancer Code, order your copy today.


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