Busting the conspiracy – is there a hidden cure for cancer?

The thing is though, the truth is often quite dull. It’s easier to spread a false rumour that mobile phones cause cancer, for example, rather than the more complicated explanation of cancer risk factors. Not only are we more likely to share interesting titbits, we’re also more likely to click through to them online. This means that content creators are more likely to write about them – they know the audience is there.

One of the more damaging rumours about cancer is that there is already a cure out there which is being covered up. Believers say that pharmaceutical companies have already found one cure that works for all cancers, but that they hide it because they can make more money off extended periods of treatment.

Rumours about this have been around for a long time, with examples from over 100 years ago, and can be very harmful. They can be used to persuade people to buy ineffective alternative medicines and erode people’s belief in the healthcare system. This sort of thing was so prevalent that the Government made it illegal to advertise cancer treatments or care in 1939.

This ‘cancer conspiracy theory’ is untrue. I’ll work through some of the reasons for this below, but first I would like to introduce you to the childhood cancer experts who have taken their time to share their experiences and thoughts with you on this topic:

Cancer is not one disease

It’s important to remember that cancer cells start out as healthy cells, unlike diseases caused by bacteria which are extremely different to normal cells. This makes cancer much harder to kill, because a treatment that harms cancer cells is also at risk of harming healthy cells. There are over 200 types of cancer, 76 of which can affect children. These cancers can start in many different types of cells, from cells in your immune system to brain cells. Because these cells are so different, the cancer can often behave differently and have different weaknesses.

There are also many different types of treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy, immunotherapy and so on which all work in combination with each other depending on the diagnosis.

This makes it very unlikely that there is one cure that could treat all cancers - it would be very difficult to find a treatment or combination of treatments that could cover all those different cancers whilst not harming healthy cells.

Scientific process

Another potential reason for this rumour is the way science is portrayed in the media. You don’t often hear about the early stages of research, or the projects that didn’t work out, you just hear about ‘breakthroughs’. These breakthroughs often aren’t presented fully, with the caveats needed to give the science it’s proper context. For example, if there was a treatment tested in 10 cancer patients that showed promising results, you would be more likely to hear ‘Scientists discover new treatment for cancer!’ than ‘Scientists discover promising treatment that needs further research in larger groups of patients’.

The fact is that the scientific process is long, complicated, and doesn’t always work. Developing a brand-new medicine can take 10-15 years. However, there are important reasons for this amount of time.

You can’t just find a drug that kills cancer cells in the lab and give it to patients. You need evidence of how it works and how successful it is in cancer models. You need to find out how it affects a patient’s whole body: Does it cause too much harm to other healthy cells? Could it interact with other medicines? What are the side effects? You then must test it in more patients, to make sure it behaves the same way in everyone, and you need to find out whether it is better than the current treatment.

This is why you might hear about breakthroughs on the news, but there aren’t any changes to treatment – it’s either that the medicine is still in development or it didn’t work. Human bodies are complicated and it is not unusual for a medicine that seemed promising in the lab to cause unacceptable issues when looking at how it behaves in the body.

Could it be kept secret?

There are a lot of people who are involved in the development of new medicines: researchers, funders, research institutions, patients involved in testing the medicine, and pharmaceutical companies.

Cancer is common – one in two people will be diagnosed with cancer in the UK within their lifetime. Childhood cancer is less common, but nearly 2000 children are diagnosed each year. So, the odds are that some of the people who would need to know about a cure and be keeping it hidden would know someone with cancer – or be diagnosed themselves. Could you really imagine someone knowing how to cure cancer, but watching their loved ones suffer instead?

Researchers have dedicated their lives to finding better treatments for children with cancer. They are extremely passionate and sacrifice their own time, with the goal of saving more lives. Keeping a cure secret would go against everything they stand for.

My final point on the possibility of the cancer cure conspiracy being true is statistical. Covering up a cure for cancer isn’t a one-off secret, it is something that would require constant subterfuge to hide. A researcher named David Robert Grimes investigated the probability of certain conspiracy theories remaining secret and created models, trained off previous conspiracy theories like the FBI forensics scandal, to estimate how long it would take for a secret cure to be shared.

His models found that the more people were involved, the harder it was to keep quiet. For a coverup to remain effective for five years, less than 2500 people would need to know about it. To last for 10 years, less than 1250 people could know, and so on. However, David’s paper estimates that around 700,000 people would be involved in a cancer cure coverup, based on pharmaceutical companies’ employees. So, statistically, it is extremely unlikely.

But what about the money?

The main argument posed by people who believe in the secret cancer cure is that pharmaceutical companies make too much money off slowly treating people with cancer to ever consider curing them. However, curing patients (especially children) means that you have a lifelong customer who will inevitably need more medicines in the future.

Whilst believers say that it would be more cost effective to give prolonged treatments for cancer than to cure it, the same can be said for other diseases that have had a ‘cure’ developed.

In cystic fibrosis, a life-long genetic illness that gets worse as you age and limits life expectancy, there has been a medicine developed called Kaftrio. It’s not quite a full cure for everyone, but it can significantly reduce the number of medications a patient needs, reduce their time spent in hospital, and increase their life expectancy. Given that these medicines and hospital stays are expensive, you could argue that any medicine that reduces these is against pharmaceutical companies’ best interests.

However, following years of research funded by charities, Kaftrio became available in 2020 in the UK. The revolutionary effect of this medicine meant that the drug company could price the treatment very highly. There are two things to consider. Firstly, that they now have a customer for life, with many more years’ life expectancy. Secondly, that there is little to no competition for those customers, whereas the money spent on all of those medicines and hospital stays pre-Kaftrio would have been split out between many different pharmaceutical companies.

If a pharmaceutical company discovered the cure for cancer, they could also name their price and corner the market. Add that to the potential gains in stock prices at being the company to discover a cure for cancer, and it is highly unlikely they’d keep that to themselves.  

Why does this rumour persist?

Humans are hardwired to talk about things that are dramatic or exciting. So, the rumour spreads – despite most people not really believing it. However, when it reaches the parent of a child who has been told there are no further treatments, it can cause serious problems. People who believe in the hidden cancer cure are often hurting, searching for a reason why their loved ones cannot be saved. Sometimes, it’s easier to be angry at the perceived enemy of ‘Big Pharma’ than to cope with the loss of hope.

This belief isn’t harmless. It is often used to justify alternative treatment strategies with no scientific basis, by arguing that that ‘treatment’ is too cheap and so the pharmaceutical companies have covered up the evidence that it works. Not only can these ‘treatments’ cause harm to the patient, they can cost lives by stopping people from seeking real and effective treatments.

What now?

I want to end this blog with a plea – don’t believe this rumour. It does not offer the answers it promises and it can cause real harm.

We need to continue funding research into the many types of cancer, to get treatments that are targeted and effective. The focus of most childhood cancer research now is into treatments for ever more specific subtypes of cancer. If there was one treatment for all types of cancer, researchers would not be focusing on dividing up the types of cancer further.

‘Big Pharma’ isn’t a faceless machine – people work at these companies, real people with families and loved ones, and likely who have experienced cancer in some way. Whilst pharmaceutical companies are designed to make money, there are other cases where a cure has won out over potential profits. It’s not just medicine sales that makes a company valuable, but also how others perceive that company – and if one found the cure for cancer, their value would skyrocket.

While conspiracy theories may look appealing, they are not the answer. However, research is, and we can all make a difference by supporting research to find the answers we need to keep finding those breakthroughs.