CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE : Cancer Expert Discusses Quackery

Despite warnings about cancer quackery, fear is driving an alarming number of cancer victims to clinics that promise quick cures, a cancer expert told students at Cal State Northridge this week.

But the treatments that people receive at these clinics are medically unreliable, Dr. Helen G. Brown, vice president of the American Cancer Society, told more than 100 students and visitors in the university’s class on the biology of cancer.

“People are diagnosed with a cancer that is often quite curable, but they get frightened and make a beeline to Mexico,” she said. “These are the people we are concerned about.” She said she recently posed as a cancer patient during a visit to three medical clinics in Tijuana. Of 60 or more patients she found seeking treatment, Brown said, many had cancers that were curable. Others had no cancer at all, but were seeking preventive treatment.

None of the clinics’ doctors actually examined her, Brown said. They recommended treatments on the basis of questions she answered about her “possibly malignant cancer.” Among the prescribed cures were phony drugs, diets that supposedly cleanse the body of toxins and stress-relieving devices, Brown said.

These treatments could take up to 10 days and cost as much as $8,000, she said.

Cancer prevention diets also were available. Some people spend up to $5,000 a year to rid themselves of toxins they believe cause cancer, Brown said. But they still go home with the same genetic risks, she said.

“It would be a wonderful thing if we could get a Roto-Rooter into our bodies . . . getting all the bad things out of it,” Brown said. “But we can’t do that.”

Closer to home, Brown said, cancer patients in Los Angeles also should beware of cancer quacks in their own neighborhoods.

At a clinic run by a Bellflower chiropractor, who has since been arrested, she said, a radio-sized machine said to cure cancer could be rented for $1 a day.

Inside the machine, Brown said, she found two Christmas tree bulbs and wires that would provide a small electric charge to the patient who put a pad over the cancerous body part.

When the chiropractor was arrested, “he had an income of more than seven figures,” she said.