Steven Dubner, of Freakonomics fame, will be featuring Devra Davis, author of The Secret History of the War on Cancer, on his blog for the next few days. Today, he introduced her and invited questions from readers. Responses to chosen questions will be posted in a few days.
It shouldn’t come as much of surprise that treating cancer is just like any other commodity, it’s manipulated by capitalism so that the pharmaceutical companies can rake in the big bucks.
A few year ago, the University of Washington announced that their researchers had been able to use a wormwood extract to target cancer cells and ignore healthy ones. We’re talking a natural extract — not a chemical cocktail created in a lab.
Should this extract make it though human trials, the pharmaceutical industry will fight to keep it out of patients hands because gee, given the choice between the side effects and costs of chemotherapy and radiation or a naturally derived treatment that isn’t toxic to healthy cells and is really cheap to produce and, even with a markup, buy. . . which do you think consumers will want to choose?
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