Suzanne Somers has touted all sorts of medical nonsense in the past, but the consequences of her quackery have never been fatal. However with her new book, Knockout, Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer, she has ventured into life-and-death territory.
Somers quite ludicrously claims that conventional cancer treatments are a sham propped up by indoctrinated medical workers and big pharma. In the introduction to her book Dr. Julian Whitaker declares conventional medicine's approach to cancer treatment to be a "deadly fraud." In an interview with me this week in Toronto, the former Three's Company actress insisted that the pharmaceutical industry makes $200-billion a year off cancer and will do anything to protect its franchise right down to crushing the few iconoclasts who hold the real keys to curing the disease.
My encounter with Somers was an intense affair. She's not used to being questioned on her sweeping statements and deliberate distortions. Interviewers seem either intimidated by her celebrity status or they demonstrate a distressing deference to the notion of fairness by nodding at the nonsense that spills from her mouth. I watched in amazement earlier this week as a Canadian TV interviewer -- herself a breast cancer survivor -- failed to challenge Somers on her provably false arguments.
Somers contends that cancer remains just as deadly today as it always has been. That's an argument only a liar or a fool can love. True, people continue to die from cancers, but they're dying a lot later in life. Since no one, not even Somers, can grant us immortality, something's going to get us in the end. There's a big difference between succumbing to prostate cancer at the end of a long life and dying of breast cancer at 35.
In fact, conventional therapies are both curing cancer and prolonging the lives of those with it like never before. If you were diagnosed with cancer in the 1940s in Canada, you had a 25% chance of surviving five years. Today, the figure is 62%. Breast cancer death rates have declined 30% since the 1980s. New therapies, many discovered only in the past few years, are dramatically reducing the number of recurring cancers in patients in remission.
What Somers relies on is a classically engineered conspiracy theory. Debating with her is like arguing with one of those people who insists the 9/11 attacks were an inside job; by her reasoning, every argument that proves her wrong proves her right.
It's the usual circular drill: Big pharma is lying about conventional therapy to protect its profits, regulators are in the pocket of big pharma, and the alternative researchers who are curing cancer can't get the funding they need to prove it because they've been ostracized by the establishment.
When I asked Somers why, if she thought these men were on the verge of curing mankind's greatest scourge she didn't invest her own money in the project, the woman who sold a million Thighmasters and has built a franchise on books about preserving youth and vitality replied: "I'm not rich."
In fact, a number of the doctors Somers interviews in her book are widely regarded as cranks. One was labelled amongst "the five most serious physician offenders in the state of Nevada." A clinical trial of another doctor's protocol for pancreatic cancer found patients were three times more likely to die within a year than those using conventional therapies.
Here is the ultimate test of what's wrong with Suzanne Somers' core theory. The idea that the medical profession and the pharmaceutical companies are involved in a massive conspiracy to foist useless treatments on cancer patients requires us to believe that no one involved in this scam has ever been touched by cancer.
When Ontario's well-loved chief medical officer Sheela Basrur was diagnosed with cancer, was she secretly aware that the conventional cancer therapies she would be receiving were useless -- but then took one for the team by going through with the charade anyway? When the mother of a lab worker at Novartis develops breast cancer, does her loving son or daughter watch her being transfused with chemicals that harm her body ... in order to protect the big lie?
The damage that Somers and other celebrity fools such as autism-activist Jenny Mc-Carthy are doing is inestimable. It is partly due to this kind of charlatanism that in the face of a global flu threat people are suddenly afraid of the same vaccine science that has saved mankind from polio, small pox and a host of other diseases.
On her somewhat cool exit from my radio studio, Suzanne Somers turned and asked, "Does anyone in your family have cancer?" I suspect to her surprise, I replied, "Yes." She hesitated and then said "I'm thinking of them."
If you were truly thinking of them, Suzanne, or of the millions of terrified people who are diagnosed with cancer every year and their families, you wouldn't dare fill their heads with potentially deadly, celebrity-goosed, junk science.
Shame on you and on every celebrity-cowed interviewer who enables your loathsome campaign of misinformation.
[email protected] - John Moore is the host of Moore in the Morning on NewsTalk 1010 Toronto. Outside of southern Ontario he can be heard at www.news-talk1010.com.
30 Oct 2009, 9:14 am
