Discussion on:

One drug could cure 7 different cancers

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria Canadensis) is a Native American and Eastern medicine treatment for cancer that removes the protein coatings on cancer cells, causing cell apoptosis, or cell death. These CD47 proteins allow cancer cells to remain untouched by the immune system (the "don't eat me" sign). Below are two (out of many) cited works produced by respected medical research facilities that look at how Bloodroot (Sanguinaria Canadensis) works on cancer cells, but fall short of actually stating that it "cures" cancer. On the Memorial Sloan Kettering website, the publisher specifically posts a disclaimer on the first page that viewers must read and accept in order to gain access to information on natural herbs and their medical uses.

In an article published on Memorial Sloan Kettering website (1) titled "Sanguinarine-induced apoptosis in human leukemia U937 cells via Bcl-2 downregulation and caspase-3 activation," the researchers discuss how leukemia cells die as a result of having the proteins removed or rearranged on the cell surfaces. This is a scientific study by doctors (Han MH, Yoo YH, Choi YH) in the Department of Biomaterial Control (BK21 Program) Dongeui University Graduate School, Busan, South Korea.

In another article, this one published by the National Institute of Health ("PubMed") website, a research paper titled "Regulation of survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of tumor cells through modulation of inflammatory pathways by nutraceuticals" by the Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, discusses how diet can affect the proliferation of inflammation, which can lead to the creation of an environment in the body that is conducive to growth and survival of cancer cells.

The abstract:
How our diet can prevent cancer is the focus of this review. Specifically, we will discuss how nutraceuticals, such as allicin, apigenin, berberine, butein, caffeic acid, capsaicin, catechin gallate, celastrol, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, fisetin, flavopiridol, gambogic acid, genistein, plumbagin, quercetin, resveratrol, sanguinarine, silibinin, sulforaphane, taxol, gamma-tocotrienol, and zerumbone, derived from spices, legumes, fruits, nuts, and vegetables, can modulate inflammatory pathways and thus affect the survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of the tumor.

With medical research demonstrating the ability of natural herbs to fight cancer at the cellular level, it appears that a cure for cancer is still "shelved" until pharmaceutical manufacturers can patent and produce Bloodroot, or similar nutraceuticals, for profit.

1 http://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/herb/bloodroot
2 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20737283 - Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.

I understand your skepticism, but it may be partially misplaced.

No, of course drug companies are not entirely evil - but neither are they necessarily entirely benevolent - both aspect can co-exist. Let's investigate without agenda and discover which is which.

Suppose that Bloodroot and other non-patentable treatments were not a total miracle cure for all cancer, but were a cheap and effective alternative for some cancers. How would we know about it? Well, in the early stages of uncovering this effect, a small number of researchers or clinicians would be publishing interesting results, but that would be minor news until validated with expensive larger studies. Who's going to fund those studies? Following that line of thought, it would not be in the financial interest of the pharma companies and their shareholders to spend money on something which could substantially reduce profits. We're only talking about the market functioning exactly as it is intended to do here, not about evil intent or inflicting deliberate harm for no purpose. Spending shareholder money to reduce profits would not be due diligence.

IF that had happened, what would we see? No, not "lots of noise in the media and Internet" because officially it's just some unproven treatments among many, since nobody funded the formal large scale testing. All we'd likely see is a small number of people, perhaps including the original researchers, saying that there was a cheap and useful treatment which never got developed. And that's what we do see, including right here.

Does that mean it's true? Hardly! It's also possible that every proposed alternative treatment really *IS* ineffective but some researchers and patients refuse to give up hope and belief. But it does mean that the idea that "expected effects on net profits influence which treatments are allowed/supported to pass from promising to available", passes the "feasible" test, rather than being rejected out of hand.

Suggesting that people should be mad at the FDA instead is (perhaps innocently) off topic, sort of "look over there, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain". That is, your complaints about the FDA's policies on another issue, whether valid or not, have no bearing whatsoever on the current issue, and so come across as an attempt to distract our attention from the topic at hand.