Folks, last Sunday night Dateline NBC aired an important episode blasting "alternative" cancer therapies that charlatans are peddling to desperate patients and their families. Sitcom star Suzanne Somers, the renowned medical expert who has written endlessly on subjects of which she has, according to the Sloan-Kettering Institute, “zero proof,” extolled the virtues of “anti-neoplastons,” an absolutely untested and very expensive method of treating cancer, while denying the validity of chemotherapy and/or radiation for that purpose.
This kind of magical thinking about serious diseases really puts people's lives at risk. Cancer quacks, like other peddlers of pseudoscientific therapies, survive by promoting a ridiculous notion: that the reason their therapies aren't used by real doctors isn't because there's no evidence they work, but rather because a shadowy scientific "establishment" – and “Big Pharma” – is working to suppress cancer cures because they're afraid of change and don’t want to lose a lucrative market for their wares. This is persuasive to some people because it plays into a mistrust for authority. But it is truly laughable to believe that any scientists would pass up winning a Nobel Prize for curing cancer simply because they don't want to shake things up. It's important that quacks like this be confronted with the fact that there is complete absence of legitimate evidence for their claims. Dateline NBC did a great job. Let them know at http://www.nbc.com/contact/