A podcast interview (Ben Greenfield with Dr. Minkoff) discussing criticisms of modern cancer treatment—particularly the focus on genetic/nuclear targets and chemotherapy—arguing that mitochondrial dysfunction and profit motives influence research priorities. The speakers cite historical context (U.S. 'war on cancer' in the 1970s) and reference a 2002–2003 Journal of Cancer study about limited survival benefit from chemotherapy in stage IV patients.
In terms of modern medicine, why the heck are they so focused on the DNA component of cancer or the genetic component on cancer and on chemotherapy and on doing things to the nucleus of the cell rather than addressing the mitochondrial issues?
Well, most of research is driven by, you know, is driven by, you know, how can, how can profit be generated from this? And I'm not against a profit motive. Since 1972 or 74, when Nixon declared the war on cancer, the gains in actual results of people who have cancer are really very little. There's a study published in the Journal of cancer in 2002 or 2003 where they looked at patients that had stage four cancer. And this study was done in Australia and in the United States. And half of them got chemotherapy for their problem and the other half didn't. And the difference in lifespan that the chemotherapy made over a five year period was only about a two and a half percent increase in survival. That targeting chemotherapy as your sole.
Way to kill cancer cells or cure cancer, it doesn't really work very well. And so the statistics on survival with cancer have not really been affected by it.
So that doesn't work by itself. And if you talk to most oncologists, they don't really have a mindset of, gee, maybe environment matters, maybe diet matters, maybe supplementation matters, maybe other strategies to rehabilitate mitochondria matters. The mindset pretty much is do whatever you want, eat whatever.
