At its heart, the current incarnation of the Cancer Act is designed to protect cancer patients and the public from being bombarded with adverts for cancer treatments, from any source,
including medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, alternative practitioners, or anyone else.
This is an important point:
the Act functions across the board, preventing pharmaceutical companies from hawking the latest cancer drugs through advertisements in the pages of UK newspapers or on TV, as well as shutting down UK-accessible websites claiming that magic crystals can treat tumours.
...But what about the claim that the Act is ‘suppressing the cure for cancer’ – something we often hear through our social media channels?
As we’ve previously discussed at length, there is no conspiracy to ‘hide the cure’.
Any person or company with a genuine cure for cancer would stand to make huge amounts of money – not to mention save millions of lives and shower themselves with scientific and humanitarian glory in the process.
And cancer affects us all: to suggest that scientists, doctors, nurses, charity and pharma company employees are wilfully hiding a cure while their family members, friends and colleagues die of the disease is offensive in the extreme.
The Cancer Act exists to prevent direct advertising of any treatments to the public – evidence-based or not, proven or unproven. But it doesn’t stop adverts and information reaching the doctors, nurses and pharmacists responsible for treating patients (whether private or NHS), the politicians and hospital governors who make decisions about how NHS resources are used, or researchers working to develop and test new therapies.
So, even if there were a conspiracy – which there isn’t – it’s hard to see how the Act could prevent genuinely effective treatments from ultimately reaching the patients that need them.