I got some spam this morning from “Natural Health Choice”, which you can guess from the name is not going to be a trustworthy source. And when you click on that link (I don’t recommend it), there’s another sign of fraud: they put up a video with no controls and force you to listen to a whole lot of garbage before they’ll tell you the secret of how to cure cancer, or rather, tell you about the book you can order from them that’ll give you a painless, easy natural cure for cancer with no chemotherapy or surgery.
I didn’t need to listen to it. They give it away at the top of their page: a photo (unlabeled, of course) of Otto Warburg. He apparently discovered a metabolic pathway that is only used by cancer cells, and not healthy cells. It’s a lie. None of their lead-up to promoting the Warburg effect is actually true: no, it’s not a way to trivially cure cancer with your diet. Nothing Warburg figured out has been suppressed.
The one remarkable thing about it is how they’re plugging it. They make a big deal of the fact that it was discovered at a Nazi medical center (wait, that’s a positive thing?), and that the Nazis had a cure for cancer in 1944 and that it was suppressed by the American conquerors. Why? I don’t know. I couldn’t stand listening to it that long to find out. I stopped when they announced that if you follow their special diet,
Pretty soon, a shocked oncologist will tell you, “I don’t believe it. Your cancer just disappeared.”
They also whine that their website is going to be shut down by the mysterious pro-cancer powers-that-be, so you’d better act fast. I don’t think it will be shut down soon enough, not because I like cancer, but because lying con artists who exploit people’s fears with lies and false promises deserve to be crushed and given jail time.
Not wanting to click the link…Is that the same Otto Warburg, German botanist, who died in 1938? The one who was president of the World Zionist Organization and lived off-and-on in Palestine? If it is, color me confused.
Otto Heinrich Warburg, 1883-1970, German physiologist. Could have been that other Warburg’s son, I suppose.
FWIW, Wikipedia says the two were distant cousins.
I have never, not even once, had the occasion to tell a patient that their cancer “just disappeared.” I’ve told many thst they were cured, but that’s an altogether different thing.
Otto Warburg was a rather strange person, but would never have been allowed to be a Nazi, since his father was “Jewish” – in quotation marks since he wasn’t a Jew in a religious sense; the only sense in which he could have been considered Jewish would have been a racial sense, which is of course nonsense to anyone other than a Nazi.
For reasons that aren’t entirely understood, Warburg was allowed to continue his research, but not his teaching, under the Nazis. Göring arranged for him to be classified as one-quarter Jewish, rather than one-half Jewish. There have been some claims that Göring and possibly Hitler thought that Warburg would find a cure for cancer, and thus they wanted to keep him in Germany.
If I let my conspiracy-seeking tendencies free, I might believe in Big Cancer. It’s reasonable to assume a lot more money is made off of years of treatment, as opposed to a simple cure. (Or even an expensive cure.)
I might start to believe this… when rich people stop dying of cancer, too.
Yeah, we all know that the Americans suppressed Nazi technology. Like the rocketry stuff that SS Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun came up with. They surely wouldn’t let old Nazis lead their most prestigious technology projects. Or something.
And Ampex and Bing Crosby suppressed the hell out of the reel to reel recorder. No one wanted that much cash.
I guess they’re playing the numbers game. If you get enough people to follow the diet, you’re bound to get a spontaneous remission somewhere. Then you parade that person around and recruit your next batch of desperate victims. Parasitize, rinse, repeat.
People fetishize late WW2 Nazi tech, so it’s no surprise someone would use the supposed advanced nature of Nazi science to try to sell cancer crankery. It doesn’t hurt that a lot of their target audience probably takes some of the really outlandish claims seriously such as that the Nazis had flying saucers, and that “they” have covered it up.
So, let’s check in with an attempt to make Nazis seem warm and fuzzy…
To be fair, the Nazis probably did significantly reduce the number of people who specifically died of cancer..
So, basically: they’re hoping that there are enough people who are not merely racist in the more common, casual, unchallenged sense, but actually straight-out Nazi sympathizers that they will turn a profit, and are trying to inoculate themselves against the inevitable backlash and possible shutdown by claiming that the cause will be, instead, a conspiracy to silence the truth. The obviousness of the latter bit casts doubt on whether they are even sincere in being Nazi sympathizers, which… well, it would be wrong to say “makes them shittier than Nazis”, but it definitely makes them as shitty as Nazis but in a different way. (Then again, maybe they’re genuinely Nazi sympathizers who simply also happen to be willing to commit a fraud against their own kind… is that better or worse?)
It would be really nice if they went belly-up through lack of sales, rather than through any of the other possibilities, since that would mean they overestimated the numbers of the target market. We can only hope.
I actually did have a surgical procedure that was invented in Nazi Germany, and did not reach the United States until German prisoners of war were examined by American doctors. I slipped and fell on about 3 centimeters of snow, and broke my leg in four places. The good doctors of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt made an incision just under my kneecap, drilled out the top of my tibia (the big shinbone) and sucked out the marrow. Then, using a titanium rod, they put together the pieces of broken bone the way you would use a needle and thread to string beads. Instead of six months of convalescence, I was walking in six weeks.
Additional benefit: If I am ever in a plane crash and they can’t find my head, my body can still be identified by the serial number on the titanium rod.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intramedullary_rod
Death makes cancer disappear also.
Nazi-era German doctors also did a lot of the spadework establishing links between smoking and cancer, and popularized it enough to, e.g., regularize non-smoking trolley cars as standard fare. Tobacco corporations used that political connection to (try to) discredit the medical science for decades.
The Nazi’s did do some work on the link between smoking and lung cancer ,that is about the only good thing they did .
Herman -who ate all the Weiner Schnitzel -Goring did do some good work towards conserving the European Bison .
@16. Bugger ,didn’t notice your post .