"The Health Ranger" on Cancer Charities

I have heard Jones admonish his listeners not to donate to cancer research, because science isn't really looking for a cure (or has already found it, but won't tell us). Today, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams said essentially the same thing. When you donate to cancer charities, a lot of the money goes toward cancer screening in poor neighborhoods.
So this is a bad thing? According to Adams, it is. He says that public health workers deliberately target low-income neighborhoods occupied by racial minorities in order to kill them. The example he used was of mobile labs offering free mammograms to poor black women. The women may think this is a sensible health precaution, but the radiation will end up killing them, he and Jones agreed.

Current research indicates that "mammography has an average lifetime risk of inducing 1.3 fatal breast cancers per 100,000 women aged 40 at exposure", according to an August New York Times story on the risks of imaging tests. In other words, mammograms can slightly increase the risk of breast cancer for women over 40. But of course if your breast cancer goes undetected, the chance of survival is low indeed. Screening is recommended for women over 40, and I see nothing sinister about offering free exams to women who could otherwise not afford any screening at all. The level of radiation used in mammography is lower than that used in other X-ray exams. It's highly unlikely that THEY give some free mammograms every year just to minutely increase the risk of breast cancer in a very small number of minority women. There are far more effective ways to eliminate a population, and THEY surely know that.

Cancer research funds do, believe it or not, go into actual cancer research. The notion that THEY will withhold a cure when/if one is discovered is absurd, because whoever makes that discovery is going to make himself and a lot of other people very, very rich. A cancer cure will be just as lucrative as cancer treatment, if not more so.

But cancer research doesn't focus solely on a cure; improved treatments, a higher standard of care, and more effective screening are all goals of cancer researchers. We've seen astonishing improvement in all these areas in the past decade alone. When I was a child, even the lowest doses of chemotherapy were a guarantee of terrible sickness, hair loss, and fatigue. Today, it is not. My grandfather recently underwent chemo without suffering more than a few minor side effects like constipation. Five years ago, my brother-in-law reached his fifth year with multiple myeloma. Thanks to state-of-the-art treatment in Toronto, he was active and independent until the very end of his life (in contradiction of what you'll hear about Canadian medicine from those who would prefer the more lucrative, privatized variety). It is worthwhile to donate to cancer research and cancer charities, if that's what you want to do. Don't let bizarre scare tactics and conspiracy speculating (I can't even call it theorizing) stop you.