Feeling crabby about cancer conspiracy theories

You’ve all seen it at least once, maybe on your Facebook news feed, maybe on your Tumblr dashboard. Someone posts a link to a story about a new strategy of fighting cancer, and how pharmaceutical companies are keeping it secret because they can’t make bazillions of dollars by selling it. Usually, it’s something simple, like vitamins, but maybe it’s something you’ve never heard of, like neoplastons.

The person who posted it is usually outraged, outraged, I tell you. How dare these evil companies sit on something that could save untold millions of lives!! How dare this conspiracy be allowed to continue!!

Guess what? It’s BS. Next time someone posts a story like that, send them to read Cath Ennis’ defense of cancer research at The Guardian. 

Guess what? Cancer is hard to fight. Unlike fighting an infection or something, you have to fight a piece of the human body, without killing the rest of the human body.

“… killing cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed is like trying to win an old fashioned infantry battle in which both sides are wearing the same uniform, except some of the enemy have slightly different shaped buttons, others have slightly longer bootlaces, others have slightly lacier underwear, and all have the ability to suddenly change clothes halfway through the fight.”

Especially once you realize that the people who are being accused of the conspiracy lose loved ones, and even their own lives, to cancer every year.

The only conspiracies out there are the ones that hold up false hope and bad science in order to insult hard-working people fighting the most difficult set of diseases that humans face. It should stop.

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