Terry Thompson’s Blog

In the current political-economic environment where the federal government closely scrutinizes and highly regulates almost every economic sector, one industry seems to consistently maintain exemption.  The conventional drug manufacturers and marketers enjoy the freedoms of high pricing and limited competition mostly because of the lack of government interference.  Now, I am a laissez-faire type of person philosophically.   I believe the economy runs most efficiently with the least amount of government interference.  But the Fed’s hands-off  policy for pharmaceutical companies makes for a very unlevel playing field in today’s government restrained market place.  There is consistent reluctance in Washington to question the research and marketing strategies of big pharma.  Tax breaks, protected markets, and generous fiscal policies for the drug producers seem to be free flowing from Congress and government agencies.  Conversely, producers and advocates of anything outside of the conventional medicine realm are usually excluded from the same favors and are often blocked out of the competition through legislative constraints or enforcement of unnecessary rules.  How does this happen?

A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that giant pharmaceutical companies collectively spend over $100 million a year in federal lobbying and campaign donations.  This is the largest lobbying expenditure in the nation.  No other industry spends more money to sway public policy.  The medicine makers employ the services of about 3,000 lobbyists at the federal level.  Over a thousand of these are former federal officials who have valuable connections in the Congress, the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and various other health-related offices.  Currently, seventy-five drug industry lobbyist are former members of Congress.

If you wondered why it is so difficult for this country to begin a shift toward complementary cancer therapies and integrative oncology, you now have the answer.  Yesterday’s post about the huge marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical industry and today’s points about the industry’s influence on government policy form the basis for the impairment of any new approach to fighting cancer.  Anything fresh and new in cancer treatment will have to break through these barriers.  It starts with us.  We must demand complementary therapies from our oncologists, advocate for integrative oncologists, and support specific research into natural, non-toxic complements to conventional therapies.  The pharmaceutical industry, as well as conventional medical providers, will ultimately respond to consumer demands.  I’ll have more on the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the government in tomorrow’s post. 

In the present era of health care when the solution to almost everything that ails us is a new and better drug, one would assume that drug makers place their highest priority on research for new and better drugs.  Actually, the highest priority of most drug corporations, according to their budgets, is marketing what they already have.  More than a third of the resources of pharmaceutical companies are spent on marketing and promotion.  Annually, the industry invests twice as much in marketing as it does in research and development.  The most recent public records show that the top eleven drug corporations invested over $100,000 billion during the year while only about $50 billion went to research and development. 

It seems to me that, if the drugs produced by these corporations were having the positive results claimed, physicians and medical institutions would not need to be convinced by marketing campaigns costing billions of dollars.  The exorbitant costs of cancer treatment drugs are driven more by the expense of their promotion to their users than by their research and development expenses. 

Pharmaceutical marketers argue that it takes this level of marketing expenditures to differentiate their products from those of other companies.  They say that the high stakes business of big pharma necessitates the multi-billion dollar marketing expenses in order to stay competitive.  However, the cartel-like nature of the industry allows it to function somewhat like the utilities industry.  Companies agree to stake out  segments of the market where they perform best and  claim virtually exclusive rights to that segment.  There is just enough competition in each segment to keep it from becoming monopolistic.  Supposedly, the industry polices itself to protect the consumer against price fixing and profiteering.

In my opinion, the real reason that big pharma spends so much on marketing is to ensure that medical practitioners, institutions, and patients see and hear nothing other than their options for solutions to health issues.  Their messages are to convince all concerned that the answer to cancer is promulgation of more and better chemical drugs.  What we need is more research and development of new options, especially natural, non-toxic options.  I invite your opinion.    

Well, I sat down this morning as usual with my coffee and newspaper to stimulate my brain from both.  I was only on the second sip when I was confronted by today’s Associated Press article, Alternative Medicine Goes Mainstream.  The headline looked interesting and even positive.  However, I didn’t get far until I realized it was just another bashing of alternative medical practices and a wholesale defense of conventional medicine. 

The article bemoaned the fact that over a third of our population used unproven, unapproved, and unregulated health care products.  It reiterated the same tiring arguments that these medicines are sometimes poor quality and interfere with what the doctor prescribed.  It implied that we should be alarmed over medical schools and insurances companies that were beginning to consider the demands of their consumers to include more alternative options in their courses and coverages.  Cancer patients, according to the article, can lose their only chance of beating the disease (by opting for alternative treatment).  Dr. Josephine Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a department of the National Institutes of Health, was quoted, “Most patients are not treated very satisfactorily (by conventional medicine).  If we had highly effective, satisfactory conventional treatment, we probably wouldn’t have as much need for these other strategies and as much public interest in them.”  Well, Dr. Briggs, that sums up the whole argument for integrative oncology.

Sometimes it is a matter of semantics, but “alternative” cancer therapy is not the answer.  Alternative therapy is usually understood to be natural, unproven practices that are not evidenced based.  It is also typically advocated as an sole option exclusive of any conventional practice.  Integrative therapy, on the other hand, involves the use of proven, evidence based natural methodologies that augment conventional therapy.  It is a holistic approach that makes conventional therapy highly effective and satisfactory.  It is what Dr. Briggs says is missing.  Alternative medicine has great promise if it is scientifically proven effective and used in a caculated balance with conventional medicine.  That is the advocacy of the Connie Thompson foundation and this blog.  I strongly believe that a new strategy of integrative oncology is critical to disarming cancer. 

Yesterday’s post highlighted the good, the bad, and the ugly of big pharma in America.  We are all beneficiaries of the technological advantages and the convenient availability of modern drugs from our nation’s health care system.  Yet, in many ways, we are victims of the same. 

Simple deductive thinking on this subject would lead us to a conclusion that is unfortunately not reality.  As I noted yesterday, the U.S. is the home to more major pharmaceutical companies than the rest of the world combined.  There are more prescription drug options available to Americans than can be found anywhere else on the planet.  We Americans spend more on legal drugs than people of any other country in the industrialized world.  Therefore, if our country, by comparison, has more and better conventional drugs, and we are using them more, we should have less of a cancer problem than any other country.  Yet, Americans live fewer healthy years and have a higher cancer mortality rate than most other major countries.  So, the questions that no one wants to ask surface.  What are we doing wrong in the long, protracted war against cancer?  What is not working?  What can we do better?  What needs changing in our strategy? 

Obviously, our lifestyle, diet, and environment have some influence on our overall health deficiencies, particularly cancer.  But, as the most pharmaceutical dependent nation on earth, we should be the most healthy nation on earth with the fewest cancer patients and the lowest cancer mortality rate.  The truth is that the narrow parameters of our pharmaceutical dominance is short changing us, especially in the cancer realm.  Exclusive dependence on harsh, toxic chemicals are generally not effective.  Conventional treatment is vastly more effective when accompanied by natural, less harmful, enhancing methods of therapy.  This practice, known as integrative therapy, by integrative oncologists is the core of a new strategy that must be accepted by the mainstream medical community.  A half century of business as usual by big pharma cannot be allowed to continue.  Learn more about integrative oncology.  Get involved and support the science that exists and needs to be applied.   

The pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. is often called “Big Pharma” because of the massive presence it has in our nation’s commerce, economy, and even government.  Of the top 20 pharmaceutical corporations in the world, 12 are in the U.S.  Over half of the world’s market share and total sales of drugs are from this country’s big pharma companies.  The American pharmaceutical industry, consisting of just a handful of tremendously powerful corporations, generally control the strategy and direction of the world’s prescription drug market including cancer treatment drugs.  Note also that the government is not having to bail out pharmaceutical corporations.

We Americans enjoy tremendous benefit from living in a country with such direct access to the most effective medicines from the most sophisticated medical research and development processes in the world.  Thousands of lives in this country are being saved or sustained every day due to the advantages of modern pharmaceuticals.  However, there is a downside to the magnitude and momentum of big pharma, especially for cancer sufferers.  The conventional cancer therapy drugs that have been used for years in mainstream treatment are a big part of the revenue stream for these companies.  With little incentive to pursue less costly, natural, and less debilitating alternatives, the giant drug corporations continue to focus almost exclusively on developing better chemically based compounds for therapy.  The deficiency of interest in anything outside of the conventional is not the fault of any particular company or individual.  It is simply that an industrial culture of that size is next to impossible to change.  But, change we must.

My next few posts will be on the topic of big pharma and what we must do as a nation to invite a broader approach and fresh ideas for cancer treatment.  Come back tomorrow.   

Over the last few years, a handful of conventional oncologist have converted to adding natural, non-toxic therapies that enhance and shorten conventional treatment.  Most of these medical frontiersmen are also associated with a major medical school where creative thinking is perhaps more the rule than the exception.  Today, names like Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Donald Abrams, Dr. Keith Block, Dr. Ralph Moss, Dr. David Rosenthal, and Dr. Jeremy Geffen, just to highlight a few, are prominent champions of the integrative oncology movement.  Although these highly credentialed physicians are respected by the conventional mainstream, their practices and writings haven’t been welcomed and generally accepted by mainstream medicine.  However, there is evidence that such disinterest is beginning to change for the better.

With the latest discoveries of immune system therapy for certain cancers (see yesterday’s post), positive remarks are springing from unlikely critics.  Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society was quoted in the AP release yesterday, “I don’t know what we did differently to make the breakthrough.  Dr. John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute added, “Instead of a single ’A-Ha!’ moment, there have been many ‘ah, so’ discoveries about the immune system that now seem to be paying off.  Dr. Patrick Hwu of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston described the vaccine discovery as “…a mimic to what you’re trying to kill, a training device to train the immune system to kill something.”  Across the country, leading doctors and researchers are buzzing about the immune system being a possible answer to cancer.  Ironically, that has been the integrative oncologists position for years.  But, anything that turns the heads of mainstream oncologists toward integrative options is a welcome sign.  We may be about to cross a threshold into what we have worked so hard for over the last several years.  Let’s keep the pressure on.  We can’t declare victory yet. 

For decades, alternative cancer treatment proponents have been preaching faith in the immune system for fighting cancer.  More recently, integrative oncologist have been proving through scientific tests that conventional therapy is more effective and less debilitating if accompanied by immune strengthening protocols.  Now the concept is taking hold.  Just last week, the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference reported that a “fourth way” to fight cancer has been found to be successful.  Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, the big conventional three, now has a fourth partner.  The fourth way is a cancer vaccine that treats the disease rather than prevents it.  This new modality has been tested on three types of cancer with very positive results.  Victims of prostate, melanoma, and neuroblastoma who received the vaccine in clinical trials averaged remissions considerably longer than those without the vaccine.  Of course, this is a long way from defeating cancer in its tracks, but it is progress.  It is huge in that prominent medical scientists and major cancer organizations are, for the first time, actually stating that something has promise beyond surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation which they have touted as the only way for half a century. 

Integrative oncology is showing signs of staying power.  Immune system therapy as a complement to conventional therapy has been one of integrative oncologists principal practices for years.  Hopefully, conventional practitioners will see this latest discovery as validation of more integrative modalities.  At least, we must continue to research and test complementary methods of therapy with all diligence.  The Connie Thompson Foundation was established with the objective of creating awareness and assisting in the funding of integrative options in cancer therapy.  Learn everything you can about this new strategy for the war on cancer.  Get personally involved.