So did Dr. Irwin Bross, director of biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York. In the 1970s, Dr. Bross headed a project that studied the alarming increase in rates of leukemia. His sample was 16 million people from New York, Maryland, and Minnesota.

After checking factors as diverse as health history, occupational history, residential history, family background, cause of death for parents and grandparents, exposure to farm animals, pet ownership, whether or not the pets had ever been sick, Dr. Bross came to the conclusion that the main cause of the rising rates of leukemia was medical radiation in the form of diagnostic medical X-rays (Leslie Freeman, ed., Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out, New York: Norton, 1982, p. 27).

Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, was wondering the same thing in the early 1990s. His research led him to write a 400-page book in which he estimates that "three-quarters of the current annual incidence of breast cancer in the United States is being caused by earlier ionizing radiation, primarily from medical sources." Astonishingly, this isn't even news. "[M]edical science," Gofman continues, "has known for 20 years that ionizing radiation is a prominent and proven cause of breast-cancer" (John Gofman, Preventing Breast Cancer, San Francisco: Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, 1995, p. 303).

Let's jump back to 1913. Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the world's largest private cancer treatment and research center, is about to commit itself to the long-term use of radiation in cancer treatment. Why?

A very wealthy businessman named James Douglas wanted to make some fairly hefty donations to cancer research. According to Bob Considine, former Memorial Sloan-Kettering official historian, however, "Douglas's gifts came with strings attached." You see, Douglas owned a large number of radium mines and stood to make an enormous profit if the medical use of radiation caught on. Douglas made it a basic condition of his contributions that radiation be used routinely in all of the center's cancer treatments (John Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, Tiburon, CA: HJ Kramer, 1996,p. 231).

Just in case you think you have a friend to go to with this information in the National Cancer Institute or the American Cancer society, or even the AMA, you'd better think again. It was the National Cancer Institute that cut off Dr. Bross's funding when his Tri-State Leukemia Survey was published. And all three of these agencies have blacklisted all cancer treatments not in line with radiation and chemotherapy models.

What are these alternative treatments? 1) Essiac (principally burdock root, sheep sorrel, turkey rhubarb root, and slippery elm bark); 2) Hoxsey formula (herbal, similar to Essiac); 3) vitamin C (proven effective for most types of cancer by Nobel Peace Prize winner Linus Pauling); 4) Gershon diet (raw vegetarian); 5) Michio Kushi diet (macrobiotic); 6) Burzynski therapy (antineoplastons, substances that occur naturally in the human body).

These natural therapies, blacklisted by all the relevant major medical associations because of their non-patentability, have track records far superior to those of traditional therapies in every category of comparison--even price. The price tag today for standard cancer therapy is approximately $100,000.00. Essiac costs four cents a day.

Ionizing radiation is not, of course, the only determinant of cancer in our society. Other determinants include diets high in meat, eggs, dairy products, refined sugar, white flour, processed foods; chlorine (found in virtually all government-approved drinking water); pesticides; bottle-feeding; having been born to a woman who bottle-fed; supplemental estrogen; and the birth control pill. (Regarding this last, the July 30, 1992 New England Journal of Medicine found that the long-term use of oral contraceptives "appears to increase the risk of breast cancer by about 50 percent"). Radiation is unique, however, in that it is the only one of these substances that we use to diagnose and "prevent" cancer.

Let's jump ahead to May 3, 1998. A Reuters news service article proclaims: Government scientists excited about cancer drugs." Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute: "I am putting nothing on higher priority than getting [these drugs] into clinical trials. [These drugs are] the single most exciting thing on the horizon" for cancer treatment.

Dr. Judah Folkman, who discovered the drugs, has a different take: "If you have cancer and you are a mouse, we can take care of you." Although the drugs have been tested only on mice, somehow one of the drugs, Xeloda, has already won "accelerated approval" from the FDA, requiring the company to confirm the drug's benefit only after it hits the market. Reassuring, isn’t it?

To find out about proven alternative, and possibly illegal, cancer therapies, call: Healing Choices (718) 636-4433, read Sheila Snow's book, The Essence of Essiac; or visit the web site of Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc.