Thanks for that interesting comment, speedemon, from someone with some perspective from the natural treatment side.

In response to Art's comment that a cancer cure would never be buried, I think you summed up my opinion, speedemon. Especially considering what we've all seen and maybe even experienced firsthand, with the finance companies, banks, realtors, real estate appraisers, mortgage lenders, etc., I certainly don't dismiss the ability of many basically decent people to make business decisions that common sense would call illogical, immoral, and harmful to the welfare of certain people or society at large. Oh, and let's not forget tobacco companies, too.

Why bite the hand that feeds you? It reminds me of the guy, Harry Markopolos, who ran the numbers a long time ago and figured out that Bernie Madoff had to be running a Ponzi scheme. He tried warning the SEC and heads of large hedge funds in Europe that he personally met with but the response? Absolutely nothing. Why spoil a good thing? Bernie was making milliions for these guys. Of course, when Bernie was out'd, everyone claims that they were fooled and that they were victims.

There is a massive multi-billion dollar industry revolving around cancer. It's not in "their" financial best interest to cure cancer. Sure, a single company could reap a windfall for a certain number of years while under patent protection, but then what? What if the company has no more cancer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline? If they were already making money from chemo therapy drugs, anti-nausea drugs, drugs for anemia, for pain, and all the other things that cancer patients need, that revenue could be gone, or at least signficantly diminshed--forever. Only if the pharmas could somehow release different cures for different cancers, and therefore keep the money flowing in for a long time, could I see this happening.

Pharmas are very secretive and guard their proprietary information closely. They don't release their results "for the good of humanity". Almost certainly, during their drug discovery process, there are a number of natural substances that their own labs have shown to be effective at actually killing/curing cancer, at least in the lab. But for reasons like not being able to isolate the active ingredient or not being able to synthesize it or whatever, it's not financially viable so the substance is shelved. Some variation on this process happens all the time.

There's only one non-profit pharmaceutical company that I'm aware of--OneWorldHealth in San Francisco. Their business model is based on this exact scenario--a big pharma finds a substance that kills some parasite that afflicts millions in the Third World, but they decide that they can't make much money so they shelve it. OneWorldHealth licenses those substances from the big pharma, develops them, and finally brings them to market so that those people in Third World can be helped.

What wouldn't happen is that some pharma goes through the trouble of doing very expensive clinical trials on some cancer treatment, and when they find that it works wonderfully, bury it. It would make no financial sense for them to even start the trial if a positive result meant burying the drug. It's kind of scary to think that the "war on cancer" could already have been "won" if not for the profit motive of private industry. (I say "could" and not "should" since I can't say for sure.) For those of you who sport pink breast cancer ribbons and go to Find a Cure walks to raise money for research, it makes you think.

Sorry, way off the Fenugreek track.