October 10, 2010 @ 2:08 a.m.
I wonder if “Stand Up To Cancer” operates on a rewards system to doctors who refer patients for the clinical trials. I wonder if doctors and researchers at cancer centers get higher places on the list in terms of getting their own projects funded by Stand Up To Cancer the more patients they persuade to take part in a Stand Up To Cancer clinical trial. In fact, I wonder if they get more flat-out financial rewards from the pharmaceutical and corporate partners in “Stand Up To Cancer” if they can talk a lot of patients into signing up to be experimented on even though those patients might do just fine with treatments that are traditional or that at least have been approved by the FDA and have also proven their worth in practice for at least 10 years?
There are all kinds of ways that industry in general gets around limitations and laws about bribes. How many patients who get sent to clinical trials when approved treatments would work just as well does it take for a doctor who has a project that he or she wants funded to get to the top of the list of grants at “Stand Up To Cancer?”
I realize that “Stand Up To Cancer” fits more easily on a t-shirt than “Our Organization Experiments on Sick People Who Don't Really Know What's Going On And We Try To Get The Public And Philanthropic Organizations To Pay For It" does but I'm curious as to how much regulation of any kind there is on “Stand Up to Cancer,” from the way it gets taxed to the way the grants get given out; I've already expressed my doubts about how much regulation there is on any of the experiments themselves. I assume that whatever government-approved medical regulation there is on it is minimal to nonexistent. Is it even legal? If sick people are being told to give over their lives to experiments as if participation in a Stand Up To Cancer clinical trial is just as good or better than what they can get with standard treatments, isn't that malpractice?
Just getting sick people to sign a piece of paper that says that they understand the risks of participating in a clinical trial doesn't mean that they do understand the risks, or that they've been properly informed about what their REAL, other, safer options are.
Do all the participants in “Stand Up To Cancer” and their families pay for their own lodging and expenses while the patients are being experimented on? What percentage of the money that gets donated to Stand Up To Cancer goes to housing, food and support services for the test subjects and their families? How many of the people who get involved in the trials sell their houses, move to new cities, put their kids into new schools, find new jobs or spend their life savings in order to be part of those clinical trials?
From a Google search on the term “Medicare cover cost Stand Up to Cancer,” I found a Stand Up to Cancer page that said the following in the first paragraph
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Posted on August 27, 2010 11:17 AM
A new federal health law beginning in 2014 will require health plans to pay the routine care costs of patients who participate in clinical trials for the prevention, detection and treatment of cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Routine patient care refers to the range of medical services people with a particular diagnosis might need. It includes treatment for side effects and other medical issues that might arise as a result of the trial. Although Medicare and many private health plans already cover such costs, some plans decline to do so on the grounds that clinical trials are experimental, say experts. More than half of states require coverage of routine costs in a clinical trial, but state requirements vary. The new law sets a minimum standard.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/23/AR2010082303620.html"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What that paragraph is saying is that the U.S. Government is now going to require insurance companies to pay Stand Up To Cancer too, for experimenting on people. I wonder if at some point it will become mandatory, especially for people with government-funded health insurance, to participate in clinical trials BEFORE or INSTEAD of traditional, approved treatments that have been tested for a long time? In fact, I wonder if people who can't afford premium insurance will HAVE to participate in clinical trials in order to get any care at all, if in fact standard care will become available only to people who have the most expensive health insurance or can pay out of pocket costs?
Experimenting on the poor and the sick; it's not very original of the Powers That Be, is it?
I don’t think that rich people, especially rich people who are famous and/or influential who have suffered because they couldn’t get someone that they loved into an experimental program, understand that what they see as the miracle of Stand Up To Cancer isn’t going to be a miracle for anyone but rich people. The whole thing really is poor people getting experimented on, while Stand Up To Cancer acts as a front for the pharmaceutical industry which hands over its costs for cancer research to the public and to charitable foundations so that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have to turn any of the money it makes off mostly useless other kinds of drugs back into research for things that really are useful.
Stand Up To Cancer is owned by the entertainment industry; that’s an industry that makes a lot of money from advertising for the pharmaceutical industry and other divisions of the medical industry. The networks and so on do advertising not just for pharmaceuticals but for Stand Up To Cancer too.
It’s a scam; yes, research is getting done, but it’s at the expense of the lives of people that rich people see as being expendable, and the situation is only going to get worse. To make insurance companies pay for clinical trials makes everyone with insurance vulnerable to what’s inevitably going to happen, which is that only rich people will be able to get tried and true treatment, and everybody else, I mean EVERYBODY else, is going to be experimented on.
It's even worse than I thought; Stand Up To Cancer is going to the Third World. What's the rationale, any treatment at all is better than what the inexhaustible supply of helpless test subjects would otherwise get? And conveniently, who's going to know what happens to those people? They're going to be the subjects of the highest risk, lowest-turn-out experiments, aren't they, the ones that leave them vomiting blood in the dirt until they die. What are they going to do, sue?
I bet people in the Third World who don't even have cancer are going to get experimented on; it'll be "Maybe it's cancer; let's see what happens."
Here's an excerpt from the section of the official website for Stand Up To Cancer that begins "Life's Second Chance: Cancer In the Third World:" "Two years after remission, she made it her mission to improve those odds by establishing Life's Second Chance, which received non-profit status in 2005. Her goal is to build a hospital about 45 miles from the capital city of Addis Ababa. Ultimately, she hopes to create a complex complete with housing, research and training, an orphanage, and a rehabilitation center.
Bowler went straight to the people with her plan, and in 2007, the Ethiopian government donated 134 acres of land.
”The whole city is ready to help me build,” she explains. “We have volunteers, and will be able to hire Ethiopian designers and engineers for the project.”
Building the hospital will cost an estimated $19 million; with equipment and a year of administration, the costs will climb up to $118 million. But, Bowler cautions, this shouldn’t be considered a charity project.
“[The locals will] build their own hospital and homes. When it’s completed, they'll work in the hospital and a portion of their salary will go back into the project,” she says."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure this woman has good intentions, and I'm going to attempt to refrain from saying "And that's how she's building that road to hell for all those poor people."
They're going to build the hospital with local labor? Is the local labor going to get paid for that at all?
And then, if they decide to work in the hospital, some of their pay is going to be taken from them and given to Stand Up To Cancer. First of all, do they have to work in the hospital once it's built, are they going to have to sign a contract for that? Second of all, Stand Up To Cancer is going to take money from their salaries? Forever? They work....and then Stand Up To Cancer takes their money, after having made them build the hospital in the first place. Personally, I don't think that anyone should be taking any money from those people; none, not even a little bit, not ever.
And there's going to be an orphanage, too. Children.....with no parents, with nothing at all. Is that how researchers who would have a lot of difficulty getting First World parents to donate their children to Stand Up To Cancer plan to do their experiments about pediatric cancer?
Copyright L. Kochman October 10, 2010 @ 2:45 a.m.
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October 10, 2010 @ 10:31 p.m.
--continuation of my discussion of Stand Up To Cancer
Last night I realized that NOBODY who gets hurt by Stand Up To Cancer is going to be able to sue for damages, no matter whether the damage happens in the Third World, the First World, or any other world. Once you sign that piece of paper that says that you understand the risks of participating in a clinical trial, you will have to live with the results no matter what those results are.
Also, I am sure that once insurance companies have to pay for clinical trials, it will be no time at all before everyone, insured or not, who isn't rich, will only have access to clinical trials and not standard care. Those people ALSO won't be able to sue anyone for damages; they will get some coverage for the pills or crutches or not-too-expensive things that they'll need for the rest of their lives after Stand Up To Cancer is done with them and that will be it. I bet there will be a cap on that coverage, too; "I'm sorry, sir/ma'am, but your side effects/crippled for life benefits have been exhausted."
Where are the victims that Stand Up To Cancer has already created? Even if someone has investigated that issue, isn't it likely that all of the information from that investigation has been suppressed? Stand Up To Cancer is an entertainment industry/media production; where would someone who had made that kind of investigation publicize it? If the truth about Stand Up To Cancer gets out, that will mean that the pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, research facitilites, research universities and everyone else who is profiting from Stand Up To Cancer will be angry. Everything about Stand Up To Cancer would have to be undone, would have to be reassessed and regulated and maybe just stopped, and that would mean a lot less money for everyone, not least the media and entertainment conglomerate who fronts for the organization. When I say a lot less money, I mean that all of those people who are taking advantage of the public with this monstrosity have staked their futures on it.
1. It's not possible to estimate how much money Stand Up To Cancer is saving and making for the pharmaceutical industry, even with whatever the industry gives to researchers for supplies. (please see above discussion from last night if you haven't read it already for why that is)
2. Researchers and hospitals are not only getting the public and charities to pay for their research, any breakthroughs that they make with that research will enhance their reputations and help them to get more money, awards, appointments to boards, eventually political influence; Stand Up To Cancer is very profitable for those people. Why would they want the majority of their research, all the things that didn't work out, to become public knowledge? Stand Up To Cancer specifically says it funds high risk projects, and what that means is that it funds projects that are high risk even above and beyond the huge risks involved in participating in any clinical trial. Most research doesn't yield big, fast results; that means that probably most of the research done on human subjects in those clinical trials either doesn't help those people and steals from them time and life that they could have used in approved treatments or it hurts them.
3. If all of the above people get mad at the media and entertainment industry in the event that the industry allows what has to be the truth about Stand Up To Cancer to become public knowledge, that's a lot of anger from a lot of highly connected people. Any network, newspaper or other news source that published a story like that would not only lose revenue, it could lose everything.
I hope that cures for all forms of cancer get found, but not like this. If this continues, other organizations like Stand Up To Cancer will get formed and the whole world will be definitively at the end of anybody but wealthy people having a chance to live like human beings.
Copyright L. Kochman October 10, 2010
I wonder if “Stand Up To Cancer” operates on a rewards system to doctors who refer patients for the clinical trials. I wonder if doctors and researchers at cancer centers get higher places on the list in terms of getting their own projects funded by Stand Up To Cancer the more patients they persuade to take part in a Stand Up To Cancer clinical trial. In fact, I wonder if they get more flat-out financial rewards from the pharmaceutical and corporate partners in “Stand Up To Cancer” if they can talk a lot of patients into signing up to be experimented on even though those patients might do just fine with treatments that are traditional or that at least have been approved by the FDA and have also proven their worth in practice for at least 10 years?
There are all kinds of ways that industry in general gets around limitations and laws about bribes. How many patients who get sent to clinical trials when approved treatments would work just as well does it take for a doctor who has a project that he or she wants funded to get to the top of the list of grants at “Stand Up To Cancer?”
I realize that “Stand Up To Cancer” fits more easily on a t-shirt than “Our Organization Experiments on Sick People Who Don't Really Know What's Going On And We Try To Get The Public And Philanthropic Organizations To Pay For It" does but I'm curious as to how much regulation of any kind there is on “Stand Up to Cancer,” from the way it gets taxed to the way the grants get given out; I've already expressed my doubts about how much regulation there is on any of the experiments themselves. I assume that whatever government-approved medical regulation there is on it is minimal to nonexistent. Is it even legal? If sick people are being told to give over their lives to experiments as if participation in a Stand Up To Cancer clinical trial is just as good or better than what they can get with standard treatments, isn't that malpractice?
Just getting sick people to sign a piece of paper that says that they understand the risks of participating in a clinical trial doesn't mean that they do understand the risks, or that they've been properly informed about what their REAL, other, safer options are.
Do all the participants in “Stand Up To Cancer” and their families pay for their own lodging and expenses while the patients are being experimented on? What percentage of the money that gets donated to Stand Up To Cancer goes to housing, food and support services for the test subjects and their families? How many of the people who get involved in the trials sell their houses, move to new cities, put their kids into new schools, find new jobs or spend their life savings in order to be part of those clinical trials?
From a Google search on the term “Medicare cover cost Stand Up to Cancer,” I found a Stand Up to Cancer page that said the following in the first paragraph
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Posted on August 27, 2010 11:17 AM
A new federal health law beginning in 2014 will require health plans to pay the routine care costs of patients who participate in clinical trials for the prevention, detection and treatment of cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Routine patient care refers to the range of medical services people with a particular diagnosis might need. It includes treatment for side effects and other medical issues that might arise as a result of the trial. Although Medicare and many private health plans already cover such costs, some plans decline to do so on the grounds that clinical trials are experimental, say experts. More than half of states require coverage of routine costs in a clinical trial, but state requirements vary. The new law sets a minimum standard.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/23/AR2010082303620.html"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What that paragraph is saying is that the U.S. Government is now going to require insurance companies to pay Stand Up To Cancer too, for experimenting on people. I wonder if at some point it will become mandatory, especially for people with government-funded health insurance, to participate in clinical trials BEFORE or INSTEAD of traditional, approved treatments that have been tested for a long time? In fact, I wonder if people who can't afford premium insurance will HAVE to participate in clinical trials in order to get any care at all, if in fact standard care will become available only to people who have the most expensive health insurance or can pay out of pocket costs?
Experimenting on the poor and the sick; it's not very original of the Powers That Be, is it?
I don’t think that rich people, especially rich people who are famous and/or influential who have suffered because they couldn’t get someone that they loved into an experimental program, understand that what they see as the miracle of Stand Up To Cancer isn’t going to be a miracle for anyone but rich people. The whole thing really is poor people getting experimented on, while Stand Up To Cancer acts as a front for the pharmaceutical industry which hands over its costs for cancer research to the public and to charitable foundations so that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have to turn any of the money it makes off mostly useless other kinds of drugs back into research for things that really are useful.
Stand Up To Cancer is owned by the entertainment industry; that’s an industry that makes a lot of money from advertising for the pharmaceutical industry and other divisions of the medical industry. The networks and so on do advertising not just for pharmaceuticals but for Stand Up To Cancer too.
It’s a scam; yes, research is getting done, but it’s at the expense of the lives of people that rich people see as being expendable, and the situation is only going to get worse. To make insurance companies pay for clinical trials makes everyone with insurance vulnerable to what’s inevitably going to happen, which is that only rich people will be able to get tried and true treatment, and everybody else, I mean EVERYBODY else, is going to be experimented on.
It's even worse than I thought; Stand Up To Cancer is going to the Third World. What's the rationale, any treatment at all is better than what the inexhaustible supply of helpless test subjects would otherwise get? And conveniently, who's going to know what happens to those people? They're going to be the subjects of the highest risk, lowest-turn-out experiments, aren't they, the ones that leave them vomiting blood in the dirt until they die. What are they going to do, sue?
I bet people in the Third World who don't even have cancer are going to get experimented on; it'll be "Maybe it's cancer; let's see what happens."
Here's an excerpt from the section of the official website for Stand Up To Cancer that begins "Life's Second Chance: Cancer In the Third World:" "Two years after remission, she made it her mission to improve those odds by establishing Life's Second Chance, which received non-profit status in 2005. Her goal is to build a hospital about 45 miles from the capital city of Addis Ababa. Ultimately, she hopes to create a complex complete with housing, research and training, an orphanage, and a rehabilitation center.
Bowler went straight to the people with her plan, and in 2007, the Ethiopian government donated 134 acres of land.
”The whole city is ready to help me build,” she explains. “We have volunteers, and will be able to hire Ethiopian designers and engineers for the project.”
Building the hospital will cost an estimated $19 million; with equipment and a year of administration, the costs will climb up to $118 million. But, Bowler cautions, this shouldn’t be considered a charity project.
“[The locals will] build their own hospital and homes. When it’s completed, they'll work in the hospital and a portion of their salary will go back into the project,” she says."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure this woman has good intentions, and I'm going to attempt to refrain from saying "And that's how she's building that road to hell for all those poor people."
They're going to build the hospital with local labor? Is the local labor going to get paid for that at all?
And then, if they decide to work in the hospital, some of their pay is going to be taken from them and given to Stand Up To Cancer. First of all, do they have to work in the hospital once it's built, are they going to have to sign a contract for that? Second of all, Stand Up To Cancer is going to take money from their salaries? Forever? They work....and then Stand Up To Cancer takes their money, after having made them build the hospital in the first place. Personally, I don't think that anyone should be taking any money from those people; none, not even a little bit, not ever.
And there's going to be an orphanage, too. Children.....with no parents, with nothing at all. Is that how researchers who would have a lot of difficulty getting First World parents to donate their children to Stand Up To Cancer plan to do their experiments about pediatric cancer?
Copyright L. Kochman October 10, 2010 @ 2:45 a.m.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 10, 2010 @ 10:31 p.m.
--continuation of my discussion of Stand Up To Cancer
Last night I realized that NOBODY who gets hurt by Stand Up To Cancer is going to be able to sue for damages, no matter whether the damage happens in the Third World, the First World, or any other world. Once you sign that piece of paper that says that you understand the risks of participating in a clinical trial, you will have to live with the results no matter what those results are.
Also, I am sure that once insurance companies have to pay for clinical trials, it will be no time at all before everyone, insured or not, who isn't rich, will only have access to clinical trials and not standard care. Those people ALSO won't be able to sue anyone for damages; they will get some coverage for the pills or crutches or not-too-expensive things that they'll need for the rest of their lives after Stand Up To Cancer is done with them and that will be it. I bet there will be a cap on that coverage, too; "I'm sorry, sir/ma'am, but your side effects/crippled for life benefits have been exhausted."
Where are the victims that Stand Up To Cancer has already created? Even if someone has investigated that issue, isn't it likely that all of the information from that investigation has been suppressed? Stand Up To Cancer is an entertainment industry/media production; where would someone who had made that kind of investigation publicize it? If the truth about Stand Up To Cancer gets out, that will mean that the pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, research facitilites, research universities and everyone else who is profiting from Stand Up To Cancer will be angry. Everything about Stand Up To Cancer would have to be undone, would have to be reassessed and regulated and maybe just stopped, and that would mean a lot less money for everyone, not least the media and entertainment conglomerate who fronts for the organization. When I say a lot less money, I mean that all of those people who are taking advantage of the public with this monstrosity have staked their futures on it.
1. It's not possible to estimate how much money Stand Up To Cancer is saving and making for the pharmaceutical industry, even with whatever the industry gives to researchers for supplies. (please see above discussion from last night if you haven't read it already for why that is)
2. Researchers and hospitals are not only getting the public and charities to pay for their research, any breakthroughs that they make with that research will enhance their reputations and help them to get more money, awards, appointments to boards, eventually political influence; Stand Up To Cancer is very profitable for those people. Why would they want the majority of their research, all the things that didn't work out, to become public knowledge? Stand Up To Cancer specifically says it funds high risk projects, and what that means is that it funds projects that are high risk even above and beyond the huge risks involved in participating in any clinical trial. Most research doesn't yield big, fast results; that means that probably most of the research done on human subjects in those clinical trials either doesn't help those people and steals from them time and life that they could have used in approved treatments or it hurts them.
3. If all of the above people get mad at the media and entertainment industry in the event that the industry allows what has to be the truth about Stand Up To Cancer to become public knowledge, that's a lot of anger from a lot of highly connected people. Any network, newspaper or other news source that published a story like that would not only lose revenue, it could lose everything.
I hope that cures for all forms of cancer get found, but not like this. If this continues, other organizations like Stand Up To Cancer will get formed and the whole world will be definitively at the end of anybody but wealthy people having a chance to live like human beings.
Copyright L. Kochman October 10, 2010