ARA Review by Bona10nder of Winning the War on Cancer

[Bona10nder]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, Winning the War on Cancer.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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Summary

After her parents are arrested and the laboratory they run is raided, New York City attorney Sylvie Beljanski is asked to save her father's natural anticancer therapies from destruction. Despite having largely ignored his work her entire life, she accepts this unique challenge. Doing so takes her on a journey of discovery where she will meet resistance at every turn, yet in time she will come to see the power of her father's work and emerge, after much trial and tribulation, as its greatest champion.

"Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure" is peppered with life-changing epiphanies as the author is forced to reevaluate the chilly relationship she had with her unaffectionate parents, while having a serious reckoning with friends, family, her own health and wellness, as well as her true purpose in life.

Caveat

Now, it would be both naïve and irresponsible to assume that this book has no agenda. It promotes the research of the author's father as proven anticancer therapy. It also promotes a specific company that sells the very extracts used in her father's compounds, despite there being several companies that sell them. The author is the founder and president of that company. By itself this does not invalidate the credibility of the author.

It does however present a problem in reviewing the book. Should it be reviewed as a memoir, or as a book about alternative medicine? It is in fact both. The book's disclaimer says it is a memoir, but if it were merely that, the many citations for relevant scientific publications and the sometimes lengthy scientific explanations of certain pathologies would be wholly unnecessary. A memoirist doesn't need to prove anything, unless, as James Frey found out, your claims are so extraordinary as to demand it.

Background

Since the advent of chemotherapy and its indiscriminate method of killing cells, researchers have been searching for an anticancer treatment that selectively kills the cancer cells without harming the healthy cells. Such a treatment would not only be somewhat curative, it would significantly reduce side effects and it would not raise the patient's risk of developing cancer in the future.

Researchers have spent decades looking for that holy grail, yet what is the best way to differentiate cancer cells from healthy cells, from the perspective of a treatment modality? Solutions in so-called targeted treatment have included targeting proteins expressed on the surface of the cell, chromosomal mutations within the cell, and teaching our immune systems to catch and kill those cells. All offer big promises, almost none have delivered.

Serbian-born French molecular biologist Dr. Mirko Beljanski sought just such a holy grail. Working mostly at the renowned Pasteur Institute in France, he believed he found that holy grail in extracts from three plants: Pao pereira, Rauwolfia vomitoria and Ginkgo biloba. To be clear, Beljanski did not discover the generalized therapeutic value of any of these plants nor was he the first to extract the compounds with a view towards therapeutics. It appears he was the first to apply them as a cancer treatment (and later, against AIDS).

Where he diverged from his peers was in his theory of cancer causation. He believed that carcinogens cause a profound destabilization of our DNA, which in turn leads to faulty cell replication and a resulting cancer. To that end he believed that his formulations of these extracts could selectively bind to the destabilized DNA and halt its replication without harming healthy cells.

So there you go. Cancer cured, case closed, right?

Not quite. As goes the Carl Sagan standard, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Among the most extraordinary claims, perhaps only "I am Jesus Christ" and "There's a Martian in my basement" come before "I have the cure for cancer."

With a reputation as being both competent and contrarian, eventually Beljanski would run afoul of his superiors one too many times, and after thirty years at the Institute his time came to an end.

He then found work at the Châtenay-Malabry campus of Paris-Sud University at the Faculty of Pharmacy, where he worked until his retirement in 1988.

By this time the man had become well-known in ways both good and bad. He had refined his anticancer treatments and was making them available to the public by way of an mail-order association in which people paid a monthly fee to the association (not to Beljanski, cleverly) to receive his treatments.

If this were his only transgression maybe the French Ministry of Health would have left him alone. In 1989 however he was arrested, chiefly because Beljanski insisted that his 'clients' abandon all other treatments, conventional and otherwise, and exclusively use his own. In 1994 he was convicted of practicing medicine without a license.

Two years later this book begins, and it begins with a truly extraordinary claim.

Sponsored by the State

The author describes learning of a massive 1996 raid by French authorities on her father's lab by the Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale (GIGN), a tactical unit of the French Armed Forces. Under an order to destroy "all evidence and testimonials" related to Beljanski's research, both Beljanski and his wife were arrested. We never learn precisely why this action occurred, officially at least, even though it appears to have played out across several courtrooms. The author is a lawyer, yet she gives the arrest and prosecution of Dr. Beljanski the Kafka treatment, and all we really learn is that he was arrested by someone for having done something at some indeterminant time.

Further, and crucially, some people in hazmat suits sprayed his lab with some chemical for radiation-something and forced him to spend the night in that lab.

The absence of detail affords the author room to speculate and she doesn't hold back: Beljanski's curative anticancer therapy so threatened mainstream medicine's bottom line that all of it must be destroyed—including the man himself. Literally. She asserts that this was nothing short of a state-sponsored assassination of her father achieved largely by way of that mysteriously sprayed chemical.

An assassination will strike some as lunacy, but to many in the alternative medicine community, this is not unreasonable. What else but that mysterious chemical sprayed in the lab, she posits, could explain the subsequent onset of acute myeloid leukemia in her father?

"Could my father have been poisoned? … it's not far-fetched to imagine there was probably an unwritten order for the destruction of the man himself, hence the poisoning."

Isn't it though? This is an extraordinary claim by any measure. Does her evidence support it?

Four years earlier in 1992, then-President Francois Mitterrand was facing an existential problem. Unbeknownst to the nation, he had been receiving treatment for cancers of the bone and prostate for eleven years, since the first year of the first of his two terms as president. He was beginning to show signs of ill health, and the whispers began. Mitterrand's physicians told him they had exhausted all known treatment options.

The president's mistress referred him to a naturopath not associated with the government, who administered Beljanski's therapies to the president, with the knowledge of the president's official medical team—although without their tacit approval. Mitterrand's health improved and in 1995 after completing his second term he stepped down from public service. He soon terminated all treatments and passed away in 1996.

The author says that around 1992 or 1993 government ministers had been "greatly disturbed" by Mitterrand's recovery and subsequent ability to finish his term as president. Told he was terminally ill, they were hungry to seize presidential power. His recovery was a blow to their ambitions—although not a fatal blow, merely one that would delay things by a couple of years.

Nonetheless, this put Dr. Beljanski in their crosshairs. Not only had his therapies frustrated their ambitions, they had done so in spectacular fashion and in the face of the failure of mainstream therapies. It was a double insult and Beljanski's death warrant was signed.

"Shortly after Mitterrand passed away, the officials who had been greatly disturbed with Mitterrand's unexpected recovery came back for revenge against my father … The idea that integrative medicine could do better than official medicine was unacceptable to them."

Low-level bureaucrats don't order assassinations, and Mitterrand had twenty-three people in his Cabinet, so the list of suspects is quite large. However one must assume that this order came from the top. It must have come from president Jacques Chirac by way of his Minister of Defense, Charles Millon, right?

By 1998 the case against Beljanski, still Kafkaesque, got worse when prosecutors began a "tax case", one with no legal standing but that wasn't free of motive:

"The tax case was more legal nonsense—unless the intent was harassment and inducing a level of stress that would speed up the progression of my father's disease … Killing the defendant is actually the best way [] to close a case which would otherwise be impossible to win."

It all goes off the chain here. Is killing the defendant really an option in France? Seems like something out of a banana republic, or the French Revolution. Nonetheless, on account of a situation "between … officials who were ready and willing to seize power, and a President who was not ready nor willing to relinquish that power," French officials poisoned Dr. Beljanski with a mysterious chemical. When that didn't work quickly enough, worried prosecutors finished him off.

It is far-fetched and it is entirely unsupported. But it adds a tantalizing aspect to the memory of Dr. Beljanski: assassinated by the state, the humble scientist becomes a martyr who gave his life so that we all might benefit from his research.

This is the myth-making of Mikro Beljanski, and it is not an isolated occurrence.

Skepticism

There are a number of tropes that appear in every book touting natural therapies and villainizing mainstream medicine. For instance, the alternative treatment modality in question not only is curative against a specified illness, it also is effective against others. Behind every successful holistic or natural therapy is the notion that it has the properties of a panacea:

"Could it be possible that the very same extract already proven effective against so many kinds of cancer could also provide a solution for [AIDS]?"

Another is the presentation of outlier patients as being the rule and not the exception. Francois Mitterrand received Beljanski's treatments in conjunction with mainstream treatments—an exception not extended to his other 'clients'. In addition, in any country the citizen getting the finest health care of all will be the head of state.

These authors often express a profound bewilderment that others can't see the efficacy of the alternative treatment in question and astonishment that it hasn't been taken up as the gold standard. In seeking to manufacture her father's treatments and get the word out to the medical world, the author runs into scientists and institutions uninterested in Beljanski's work. The reader may begin to feel a sense of outrage over this perceived injustice, but the author has, without evidence, framed this as something sinister and conspiratorial when in fact she was simply encountering a sine qua non of science: skepticism.

The only evidence she can offer the skeptics is pre-clinical studies (those performed in a dish or in animal models are pre-clinical; clinical studies involve living humans). Every cancer researcher knows that lots of things kill cancer cells isolated in a Petri dish. Few do it inside a living human body.

The author also offers up patient testimony. While interesting, this has little actual value. In the words of renowned health journalist Gary Schwitzer, "the plural of anecdote is not data."

Put another way, if you have disease A and twenty people tell you that juggling apples cured them of disease A, you'll juggle apples and ask questions later. To understand this correlation and bring it to more people, scientists must ask questions now: what is it about apple juggling? What other things were these people doing? What unreported factors, diets, therapies, or habits might also explain this phenomenon and what kind of way can it be explored, and proven or debunked?

To answer these questions, scientists created the prospective, randomized, double-blind placebo controlled study, the true gold standard and when conducted properly, a vehicle for proof, replication, and credibility. Beljanski's body of work is absent of such trials.

White Hats and Black Hats

In this book, skepticism is what ultimately will draw the line between good and bad, between those in white hats and those in black hats. Too much of it earns you the latter, and not enough, the former.

Among those in black hats is her (now ex) husband, whose character she eviscerates to the point where he is the book's biggest jackass. It's not even close.

Others include the Director of the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Jacques Monod, a Nobel laureate in Medicine and a man regarded as one of the fathers of molecular biology. The author tries to dull the shine on Monod's legacy by painting him as an absolutist, fully stuck in his ways and entirely against anything and everything Beljanski. The fact that Monod asserted something about DNA and RNA and Beljanski was able to prove that he was wrong is styled to turn Monod into one of those scientists future generations ridicule, like the guys who asserted that the earth was flat or that leeches cured disease. Nothing supports putting Jacques Monod in such a class of buffoons. In fact, the history of science is less about the story of being right and more about the story of being wrong—and being able to accept it and adapt to it. That class includes names the reader might find familiar: notably, Darwin, Einstein, and Pauling, among others.

However, it is crucial to the story that the author attack her father's critics and in some cases misrepresent their work. In her mind, Jacques Monod and Jacques Servier, founder of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in France, suffered from a blinding absolutism, unwaveringly clinging to their ideas and showing an unwillingness to cede that they might be wrong. She incorrectly refers to a few occurrences in the book as being ironic. Despite the author's many other insights, she appears wholly unable to see this very quality of unwavering absolutism in herself as the defender of her father's ideas.

That qualifies for irony.

Not surprisingly, Big Pharma gets a black hat. And rightfully so. Good luck in finding a comprehensive, quantitative, unbiased and glowingly positive review of the pharmaceutical industry. By almost any measure it is corrupted to the core, and that corruption extends from this industry all the way down to your local family physician and the decisions they make about our health.

White Hats

The list of white hats includes the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), a network of hospitals that exclusively treats cancer patients. Part of CTCA's treatment model is integrative medicine, combining standard protocols with alternative therapies. For this reason it makes sense that the author would find in CTCA a research collaborator. The reader should keep in mind that CTCA is a private, for-profit health network notorious for making false claims about their success in treating the disease. CTCA is as responsible as any other actor in sustaining the alleged multi-billion dollar cancer industry assailed so often by the author.

This collaboration however testifies to the author's wisdom. Although she has indeed taken up the cause of her father's work and carried it into this century, she has done so on a track that does not quite resemble that of her father in this respect. Her father was adamant that his 'patients' abandon all conventional therapies if they were to use his. This insistence contributed in no small part to his downfall, and wisely, his daughter has pivoted accordingly.

Another white hat, though posthumous, is especially bizarre. She claims to have read with great interest the work of Ryke Geerd Hamer, a thoroughly discredited anti-Semitic physician whose license was revoked and who was implicated in the deaths of many cancer patients. The author tells us that Hamer was thrown in prison because his theories "did not sit well with the official cancer establishment".

Hamer believed that emotionally powerful events have the ability to cause cancer in related areas of the body. Part of his evidence is that he developed testicular cancer when his son was killed. Even if the boy's mother developed cervical cancer, this hardly qualifies as proof of correlation.

Claiming a coincidence as the basis for a broader theory of cancer causation is a rather extraordinary claim. However, this hypothesis linking trauma to onset would seem to support her own father's experience with the disease. Or rather, along with the assassination it helps to explain away how a robust and healthy man known for natural anticancer medicine and in the process of being mythologized could have developed this all-too-human disease. It also supports the author's own health scare described in a later chapter. Otherwise, why tie your wagon to this guy?

Conclusion

For my money the most compelling part of the book is not the journey it details nor the extracts it promotes. In chapter ten the author offers very practical and essential questions and issues that every patient should raise when discussing with their doctor how to treat a diagnosed illness. Regardless of your take on medicine—whether you think mainstream medicine is greed-based murder or that alternative medicine is straight-up quackery—the author puts a set of tools in the hands of the reader that can be used to take back some of the control we abandon to our doctors when told that we're sick.

To that end, the author ultimately frames the debate about medical treatments as a First Amendment issue, a notion that first appeared to her after her trip into the Brazilian rain forest. Should the government provide an individual with approved treatment options or should an individual be free to choose the option that most appeals to them, regardless of whether it is approved or not?

The book is a reminder that, no matter their background, you should not blindly trust your doctor. A patient must advocate for themselves, and they can only do so armed with the right set of questions. One of the 'proverbs for paranoids' in the novel Gravity's Rainbow is that if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Those in the treatment field—doctors, naturopaths, and all businesses selling therapies from Servier Pharmaceuticals to the Beljanski Institute—must submit to answering the right questions, since our lives often fall into their waiting hands.

Rating: 3 out of 5

The stars from this rating come from the fact that this is an enjoyable read and that it offers patients both a degree of hope and another potential pathway towards healing. The absence of stars comes from the issues of credibility. The split personality of this book, with its storytelling narrative pockmarked by endnotes to scientific literature, confers a believability on the subject that has not by any objective measure been earned.

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