Comparative Analysis of the Controversy: Vitamin C, 5-Fluorouracil and Interferon

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I gave a detailed sociological account of the processes by which vitamin C was actively constructed as a putative cancer treatment by Pauling and Cameron, and evaluated and found ineffective by their orthodox opponents. I have shown that we cannot account for the orthodox consensus on the inefficacy of vitamin C as a cancer treatment in terms of the disinterested and rational processes generally attributed to the application of the experimental method to the evaluation of medical therapies. Clinical trials, no matter how rigorously they are organized and conducted, do not give unproblematic direct access to nature or reality. There is no neutral, ‘objective’, or value-free way of engaging in them. I have argued that the methodology or protocol of the clinical trial is bound to the research tradition or paradigm of the specialist community that embodies and sustains that paradigm, and cannot be dissociated from the political and social structure of that community. It is the accepted knowledge of the community, together with the vested interests and social objectives that it embodies, that adjudicates the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of therapeutic claims. Reality or nature is filtered through that knowledge and its sustaining interests and social objectives.

In 1978 it must be concluded that there is no chemotherapy approach to gastro-intestinal carcinoma valuable enough to justify application as standard clinical treatment. By no means, however, should this conclusion imply that these efforts should be abandoned. Patients ... and their families have a compelling need for a basis of hope. If such hope is not offered, they will quickly seek it from the hands of quacks and charlatans.

Dr Charles Moertel, New England Journal of Medicine

(Moertel, 1978b)

Where does one get a programme to tell the quacks and the charlatans from the legitimate medical profession?.... If there is no clinical justification for these agents, why do we use them?

Dr Joseph C. Fitzgerald, Response to Moertel

New England Journal of Medicine (Fitzgerald, 1979)

If there’s the slightest possibility that [interferon] might prove helpful to future cancer patients, we feel that every effort must be made to check it out. The exciting promise of a new family of natural substances with anti-viral and anti-tumor activity demands nothing less than a full-dress, prompt, carefully planned and carefully controlled clinical trial.

Dr S. B. Gusberg, National President, American Cancer Society (Anon., 1980a)

I never thought Interferon was a magic bullet for cancer treatment, but you’ve got to go for broke.

Frank Rauscher, Former Director of the NCI

Senior Vice-President of the American Cancer Society (Sun, 1981)

Whether you are talking of mummy dust or crocodile dung, or whether you are talking of laetrile or vitamin C ... you are talking about things that are really not scientifically derived. It’s sort of like the Holy Water of Lourdes. … Our hope for cancer has to be in scientifically-based treatment ...

Dr Charles Moertel (Moertel, 1989)