Why the War on Cancer Failed

IF 0.9 4区经济学 Q3 ECONOMICS

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Pub Date : 2022-10-27 DOI:10.1111/ajes.12479

Ignacio Castuera

引用次数: 0

Abstract

In 1971, President Nixon launched the “war on cancer” with great fanfare. The dramatic increase in spending on targeted cancer research was supposed to quickly yield new treatments. That did not happen. The cancer establishment, which profits from the $200 billion spent annually on cancer treatment, has never provided an adequate accounting of how more spending translates into lives saved. In fact, by the mid-1980s, it became apparent that most of the “progress” in the war on cancer was little more than statistical sleight of hand. The death rate from cancer had climbed, not declined. Eventually, cancer deaths began to fall, but little of that improvement was due to better treatment. It was mostly a result of campaigns to reduce smoking and to promote early detection of treatable cancers. One reason the progress of treatment stalled was the unwillingness to consider unconventional treatments that were developed by doctors and other healers. Practitioners of unapproved treatments often sought refuge in Mexico from the medical apartheid system in the United States.

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为什么抗癌战争失败了

1971年，尼克松总统大张旗鼓地发起了“抗癌战争”。靶向癌症研究经费的大幅增加本应迅速产生新的治疗方法。但这并没有发生。癌症机构从每年花费在癌症治疗上的2000亿美元中获利，却从来没有提供足够的数据，说明更多的支出是如何转化为挽救生命的。事实上，到20世纪80年代中期，很明显，抗癌战争中的大多数“进展”只不过是统计上的花招。癌症的死亡率没有下降，反而上升了。最终，癌症死亡率开始下降，但这种改善很少是由于更好的治疗。这主要是减少吸烟和促进早期发现可治疗癌症的运动的结果。治疗进展停滞的一个原因是不愿意考虑医生和其他治疗师开发的非常规治疗方法。从事未经批准的治疗的从业者经常到墨西哥寻求庇护，以逃避美国的医疗种族隔离制度。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

1.90

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.