It's not just about the nutjobs in the past. There are plenty of modern nutjobs, and one of the shit-on-shit sandwiches that is fuck cancer is getting (at best) the clueless to (at worst) psychopathic opportunists peddling quack cures, all this at a time when the patient and/or caregivers may be willing to grasp at any straw, no matter how slender, offering hope of a cure, or even a few more good days.

I'd run interference on this some years ago, before the emergence of the public Internet / WWW, and ... it was already bad enough. Whilst online fora are often praised as being of tremendous benefit to patients and caregivers of chronic or terminal conditions, increasingly they're overrun by that same set of dramatis personae, and it absolutely, absolutely boils my blood.

There are criticisms to be made of the FDA and Pharma, but for the most part those engaged are largely subject to poor incentives rather than outright fraud and opportunism.

One of the tremendous values of jseliger's account is his exploration of alternatives, and candid commentary (especially recently) of how even what does work for a while can stop working.

Cancer is a complex set of phenomena which share a common symptom: unconstrained "crab" growth (the tendrils which spread outward from tumors). In German, "cancer" is literally "krebs", that is "crabs" (which of course has its own confusing connotations in direct translation to English). What's coming to be appreciated is that each individual cancer case is ultimately its own evolving community which adapts to, and often overwhelms, the treatments and countermeasures deployed against it. That said, there are cancers which are remarkably amenable to treatment, and are wholly curable. Others not so much. Details in this case matter immensely.