The fundamental problem is a legislative one, people or organizations will act in non productive ways if given a monopoly supported by existing laws. Can you think of any other service in our communities that will guarantee payment regardless of the quality of service rendered or the outcome? Truly what is the incentive for the existing medical establishment or the drug companies to make available to you successful, inexpensive, non patentable cures for cancer. The existing establishment presently profits from cancer and the expensive treatments associated with this devastating disease. They get paid whether they deliver results or not and you have nothing to say about it other than refuse the treatments that sometimes work. Fortunately many doctors are truly dedicated and have the patients best interest at heart but they themselves are limited to the type of treatments that they can offer to you otherwise they will be censured or possibly loose their license.

Now the situation deteriorates from here, existing laws make physicians the target of law suits that have forced them to significantly increase their fees and do completely unnecessary testing to prevent misdiagnosis. They will not be sued if you die from cancer but they will if they misdiagnosed you. The public has become complacent in believing that the diagnosis of cancer is often a death sentence. As a result the medical establishment has a great track record of correctly diagnosing cancer but is relatively impotent to cure it. We truly have shot ourselves in the foot. Once again the solution is a legislative one.

The story gets worse. Billions of tax payers dollars are made available for research for cancer treatments and cancer cures. That sounds great until you look at the dismal record of success as stated in the beginning of this article. Now there are those that would argue this statement but you need only look at the statistics to tell you the truth. All else is fiction and wishful thinking. Entire groups of people, physicians, technicians, researchers, administrators are dependent on this continuing money flow, its big, big business.

What is the incentive to use a cancer cure, especially if it should involve low tech solutions that cannot be economically exploited, let me tell you there isn't one under the existing system. The pity is that the public and the government are the losers, the public because they don't receive the cures and they die from the disease and the government because it is forced to pay Medicare and Medicaid for services that are extremely expensive and don't generally work.

There has to be a whole new paradigm, a fresh new approach to solving these problems that the legislative branch of our government will have to solve. If the government truly wanted to save money then they would address and correct these fundamental limitations. There are enough brilliant physicians and researchers in this country to come up with creative and effective solutions to most diseases but when they are throttled by laws that effectively limit their ability to employ these advancements then they must do their work on a theoretical basis only, practice in a clandestine manner and face prosecution or leave the country and set up practice across the border where they will not be persecuted. This is a pathetic state of affairs for America.

This is not to say that modern medicine is ineffective, far from that. The traditional medical approach over the past century has been to find cures for the most common afflictions and to minimize contagious diseases. It is a tribute to the medical establishment that they have conquered so many frontiers, cancer is just not one of them and will not be with the current approach.

Treatment of cancer of the major organs could only be classified as a dismal failure in spite of the billions of dollars that have been spent on this disease. The five year survival statistics do not tell the complete story. They are discouraging enough if one counts on conventional treatment for the solution of this disease. If it is an extra 5 year lease on life that is deemed a cure and acceptable then I would have to say that the goal for life extension is far too low and the techniques for reversing the disease are all but ineffective.