According to wiki answers.com we spend 4 billion in the advertising campaigns to raise money for cancer research. They place the estimate in the hundreds of billions of dollars raised each year for this research.
I am sure that there is a lot of great work going on in cancer research but you would think that with all of that money there would be a bunch of work being done on why we get cancer in the first place. It has been shown to be environmental because when people come to the U.S. from other countries with low cancer rates they end up with the same cancer rate as Americans. There are many factors that have an effect such as smoking, drinking, exercise, pesticides, perhaps even the GMO food we eat, But out of the billions of dollars being spent very little is being spent on prevention. My theory about this is that the big companies that collect all this money tend to spend it on developing Cancer Treatments. They can charge money for treatments. As a matter of fact the more people develop cancer the more money they can make on treatments. This goes a long way toward creating jobs and fueling the economy.
I want to go on record that I believe that many of these treatments are valuable and worthwhile. I think they do save lives. It just seems to me that we are working only one end of the problem. We should work on treatments but we should also work on discovering what is causing our cancer and putting together programs to prevent cancer. It took years before we could enact laws to curb smoking and smoking is easily proven to cause cancer. We are still getting cancer at alarming rates and it has be increasing. It is clear to me that something in our environment is causing this increase in cancer. You can make the difference. All you need to do is: the next time someone asks you for money for cancer. Ask them how much is going to prevention and what prevention studies they are funding. If you are giving money to” Big Pharma” to that they have money to develop expensive treatments that they can then patent and make a fortune on, you may not be getting your monies worth. Prevention or cure does not line their pockets.
By David Martin, Acupuncture Physician -Holistic medicine, serving Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Naples.