"Vitamin C may be useful to treat cancer after all"

It's interesting that subsequent studies failed to show a benefit, but those studies involved vitamin C given orally. The new study involved injections of vitamin C to enable greater concentrations of it to get into the system.

University of Florida researchers found that talc has the ability to stunt cancer growth by cutting the flow of blood to metastatic lung tumors. Their study revealed that talc stimulates healthy cells to produce 10-fold higher levels of endostatin, a hormone released by healthy lung cells.

Talc causes tumor growth to slow down and actually decreases the tumor bulk. Talc is able to prevent the formation of blood vessels, thereby killing the tumor and choking off its growth.

Previous studies had been disappointing with pharma endostatin because most clinicians had injected the hormone directly into patients, where the hormone broke down in the body before it had a chance to slow the spread of cancer.

But recently, University of Floriada researchers "rethought" the situation by understanding that by allowing talc in the chest cavity, thus constantly causing normal cells to produce endostatin, it inhibits the growth of tumors.

Again, "whiz bang" science often gets a pass without much thought. The problem is that few scientific discoveries work the way we think and few physicians/scientists take the time to think through what it is they discovered.

The FDA has never approved a drug for cancer that was not patented or marketed or produced by a major pharmaceutical company. Today, the trend is towards more expensive cancer therapies with some costing up to $100,000 per patient per year.

Millions of people have suffered and died and will continue to suffer and die because profitability, not efficacy and safety, is ultimately determining what cancer therapies are available to patients.