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Sometimes a reported improvement is what the doctors call "subjective," meaning that the patient feels better, says he has less pain, eats better and often resumes normal activities after having been bedridden. Cancer scientists dismiss all such effects as resulting from the power of suggestion.
But there remain, says Dr. Phillips, a few patients whose diagnosis of cancer was proved by exacting laboratory techniques and who then lived longer than the majority of patients with similar disease. In some of them, the cancer process actually seemed to have been arrested or even reversed. Could this be chance?
The most determinedly anti-Krebiozen spokesman for a leading U.S. cancer research center admits that not all of these cases can be explained away by other factors, though he still insists there is no reason to test Krebiozen further. Another expert, equally skeptical but more judicial, says: "From these cases, you can't help feeling there's something here that needs to be explained." This jibes with Dr. Phillips' tenet: "If the researchers in their ivory towers would stop bickering and get down to work, we could have some valuable information within a year, and a definite answer before too long."
Last week, the New York Post made its own proposal to break the stalemate: The National Cancer Institute should quit making favorable prior evaluation a condition, because adequate data simply do not exist. Ivy should be allowed to determine the drug dosage, because of his experience, but should not be on the evaluating panel.
Krebiozen may be no cure or even palliative for cancer of any kind, but a fair test would cut out most of the cancer of the Krebiozen controversy.
* From the Latin for a "little net" of tissues lining the blood vessels. The ones that produce white blood cells and (presumably) other defenses against disease are in the spleen, lymph nodes and liver. * Actinomyces bovis, cause of the disease "lumpy jaw" in cattle.