How much of Canadian Cancer Society’s research budget is wasted on the terminally flaky?

New advertising effort promotes complimentary and alternative therapies.

The Canadian Cancer Society has undertaken a major new fund-raising campaign called Join the Fight complete with a new, very nice website at fightback.ca. The campaign was introduced through a full page ad in the  December 8, 2009 edition of the Calgary Herald. Roughly a third of the ad was dedicated to the work that is being done in the field of complementary and alternative medicine. 

Highlighting research funded by the Canadian Cancer Society, the headline read: Research team explores impact of complementary cancer treatments. The story describes the research of Dr. Marja Verhoef who readers of ASkepticRTN will recall has been involved in all sorts of CAM nonsense including the laughable Integrative Health Institute (now part of Mount Royal University). 

Dr. Verhoef’s research can best be summarized as determining whether the placebo effect still works if you call the placebo complementary or alternative medicine.  Any competent medical researcher could save Dr. Verhoef the time (and money). The answer is yes. That’s what makes it a placebo.The ad features one patient in Dr Verhoef’s ’study’, Valerie Simons who: became a vegan, went for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medical treatments and took various supplements in the months before her surgery. “I was making my body caustic to the tumor” she says. I had to look at my body as a whole. For example, what are you allowing in your thoughts? It’s important to embrace life.

Ms. Simons has the right to believe, whatever, she wants but I expect something better from the Canadian Cancer Society than promoting such self-indulgent, flaky nonsense. I have two close friends that survived breast cancer precisely because they didn’t buy into this new age woo-woo despite, I might ad, pressure from various sources  to do so. Yes, it is important to embrace life. But doing so has no effect on cancer.

My dad died from cancer last year. I guess it was his fault – he didn’t embrace life enough.

Canadian Cancer Society Defends the Research

I also regret sending money to the Canadian Cancer Society only to discover that it wastes so much of it funding useless research and promoting pseudo-scientific medical quackery. I called the Canadian Cancer Society to get some more information on the campaign and also to convey my disappointment. Concerning the campaign itself, I received this response (in italics) from the Canadian Cancer Society. My own comments in response are printed in [brackets].

As Verhoef points out, an increasing number of breast cancer patients are turning to complementary medicine and it’s important to compare the outcomes of patients who choose alternatives to the conventional line of treatment. [Those choosing conventional cancer treatments have a chance at survival outcome in excess of 70%. Those that choose complimentary medicine have a survival probability outcome of  less than 2%. No research is required, these answers have been known for some time.]

Complementary therapies are used together with conventional cancer treatments. The purpose of a complementary therapy is not to treat the cancer itself. Complementary therapies help a person cope with cancer, its treatment or side effects, and to feel better. [Oh I get it, you're funding treatments that don't actually treat anything beyond getting people to feel better.  What a bunch of disingenuous crap. The ad placed by the Society says just the opposite - it says some CAM therapies address the cancer tumours. Now that we have established the ad campaign promotes the lie that CAM therapies work on cancer, perhaps the Canadian Cancer Society should print a retraction making it clear they don't. CAM therapies only make people feel better. So would a bottle of 18 year old scotch by the way. I wonder what cancer patients would prefer?]
 

Patients have the right to choose what treatment is right for them. The Canadian Cancer Society recommends making a safe and informed choice, which means:

• understanding the differences between conventional, complementary, integrative and alternative therapies [The difference is that only one of these four can actually address cancer. Why doesn't the Canadian Cancer Society get some guts and say it in public as they do in private (above)?]
  
• finding out as much as you can about complementary or alternative therapies you are thinking about, including the possible benefits and risks. [Trendy, trite advise if ever there was some. People don't have time to become medical professionals in addition to their regular jobs, that's why they rely on agencies such as the Canadian Cancer Society for sound advice. That's why the Canadian Cancer Society should say in public what they  say in private - complementary and alternative therapies don't address cancer. They simply take advantage of the placebo effect to make people feel better.]
  
• talking to your healthcare team about complementary therapy or alternative therapies and how they may interact with the care you are receiving [Good idea, especially if by medical team the Society is referring to people that actually went to a medical school].
  

Relying on alternative treatments alone for cancer may have serious health effects. Should a person decide to postpone or refuse conventional treatment in favor of an alternative treatment, it is important to stay in touch with their cancer doctor. It’s important to keep track of how you are doing and you may decide to have conventional treatment later on. [Relying on alternative treatments may have serious health effects? Are you kidding? Out here in the real world we call it dying!  And yes, some people think that's pretty serious]

The Canadian Cancer Society Does a Lot of Good

In a follow up response, the Canadian Cancer Society emphasized all the good work they do. I couldn’t agree more. Here is a listing, as provided to me, of some the positive results that have come from research sponsored in whole, or in part, by the Canadian Cancer Society.

1950s

The “Cobalt Bomb” was developed. It became the most effective radiation therapy for treating tumours and is still used around the world today.

1960s

Researchers discover that stem cells are the source of all blood cells, which led directly to the treatment of childhood leukemia and other cancers.

Researchers learned how various drugs work to kill cancer cells. The design of modern chemotherapy is based on this knowledge.

A tumour marker that exists in the blood of many people with colorectal cancer is discovered. This sparked an entirely new field of research – blood testing for cancer.

1970s

Researchers prove that Pap smear screening for Canadian women is linked to a decline in deaths from cervical cancer.

A new microscope that gives scientists sharper, 3-D images of cancer cells – right down to their individual atoms – is developed. This microscope is now used worldwide.

 1980s

A T-cell receptor gene, a critical component of the immune system, is cloned for the first time. This opens a new chapter in our understanding of how the immune system fights cancer.

The drug called deoxycoformycin – a major advance in the treatment of one type of leukemia – is developed and tested.

 1990s

Dr. Michael Smith wins the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing a technique allowing changes in the genetic code to be studied, which has become essential in identifying genes involved in cancer.

Canadian researchers, working as part of an international team, discover the BRCA1 gene, the first gene ever linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.

  2000s

Researchers find a common virus that can kill cancer cells in mice and in cells from patients with a common type of brain tumour. Clinical trials are now underway.

It’s determined through clinical trials that a drug called letrozole can significantly the risk of cancer recurrence in post-menopausal women who have survived early stage breast cancer.

This is quite a list and the Canadian Cancer Society should be proud of all of it. Readers will notice – nothing in the list above relates to complementary and alternative medicine. That’s not suprising. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (one of the National Institutes of Health) in the United States has spent 10 years and 2.5 billion researching the benefits of complementary and alternative medicine only to discover — nothing!  Not a single finding that supports the use of any complementary or alternative modalities. Oh well, I guess finding cures for cancer is less important than pursuing the politically correct appearances.

Which raises the issue of just how much money the Canadian Cancer Society has wasted on the terminally flaky. How much more could have been done by putting this money into sound scientific research into the causes and cures of cancer. I asked, and to their credit, the Canadian Cancer Society pointed me to the research section of their website that provides some tools to search for funded research projects the Society has sponsored. The search tools make it a little difficult to come to a precise determination, but from what I could see, over $2.0 million has gone funding pseudo-scientific nonsense. 

Here is a Better Research Question

If the Canadian Cancer Society is being honest in wanting to examine the outcomes associated with complementary and alternative therapies, it must examine both intended and unintended outcomes. The intended outcome, as the Canadian Cancer Society states, is to help people cope with their cancer. An unintended outcome is that some people will die as a result of  failing to pursue or delaying conventional treatments.

So here is my research question that I think is worthy of investigation:

How many people have died or required more intensive conventional treatments as a result of putting their faith in claims made by complementary and alternative therapy promoters?

A related research question would be: How many of these cases can be attributed to the misleading advertising of the Canadian Cancer Society?

I think I will apply to The Canadian Cancer Society for some research funding. These are questions that need answering.