Loopy cures for cancer
Tweet
Apart from the conventional medical scientists and the charlatans there is another group of people working on the cure for cancer. They are the authors of the loopy patents I have recently uncovered in the database of the European Patent Office. Clearly they have faith in their ideas and feel they should be protected but applying for a patent doesn’t appear to say anything much about the quality, value or reasoning behind the ideas.
Here’s one I found when I searched for ‘cure for cancer’ in the British part of the patents database.
A Great British loopy patent from 1987 called ‘Po-man's photosynthesis in men's blood to cure cancer’. I think the addition of fizzy water and irradiation to his cure for cancer may be a masterstroke. Clicking through the Original document tab… it’s both funny and tragic. The infelicitously named ‘Po-Man’s Photosynthesis’ with the scientist’s formulae, scrawled all over the page. The drawing of a cinema. Why? And what seems to be a soup kitchen with bedrooms attached. Then there are the drawings captioned with variations of “To show that chlorophyll is needed for photosynthesis in man”. Is this where Gillian McKeith got her ideas? And a diagram to show you how to wave your arms and legs about, but in a clearly choreographed fashion…..
Then, throwing the net a little wider, there is the Time Machine Software in the Worldwide part of the same patent database. It is “a method and system for creating human robots with psychic abilities, as well as enabling a human robot to access information in a time machine to predict the future accurately and realistically. The present invention provides a robot with the ability to accomplish tasks quickly and accurately without using any time. This permits a robot to cure cancer, fight a war, write software, read a book, learn to drive a car, draw a picture or solve a complex math problem in less than one second.”
Chinese traditional medicine has huge numbers of patents but in inverse proportion to the likelihood of looking plausible as cures. I admit I could be guilty of cultural imperialism as a westernised thinker, but I feel I am not.
Here is one cure for cancer from a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner as an example. It is described simply as a pill for treating cancer. “The invention relates to a cancer treating pill, in particular to a traditional Chinese medicine pill used for treating liver cancer, lung cancer, gastric cancer, cervical carcinoma and digestive system cancer, belonging to the cancer treatment medicine technical field. The cancer treating pill is characterized in that: the cancer treating pill mainly comprises wine, ants, muskiness, polygonatum, Chinese wolfberry, rosebush dew and nettles; and the mixture ratio of various compositions is as follows: 100 jins of the wine is mixed with 1.6 to 2.0 jins of the ants, 1 to 3 grams of the muskiness, 15 to 25 grams of the polygonatum, 2 to 3 jins of the Chinese wolfberry, 3 to 4 jins of the rosebush dew and 50 to 300 grams of the nettles. The preparation method is characterized by comprising the following steps that: after sieving, drying, weighing, crushing and disinfection, the raw materials are mixed with the wine for immersion. The cancer treating pill has the advantages of short treatment period, good healing effect, difficulty in recrudescence and no toxic side effect; and the effective rate reaches over 90 percent, and the cure rate reaches over 60 percent.
I can't comment fairly on the wine, ants and muskiness. But what does the cure for cancer actually mean to the patentee? Does it mean the same to a person with cancer? And how did he assess the 60%?
To a great extent the contents of these patents are plain funny – a library of eccentricity and overwrought imaginations, where some basic biology, or any knowledge of cancer would have been more use. On another level, the patents are anything but funny. If you have a cancer there’s always going to be part of you that wishes these loopy patents were linked somewhere to reality or had some global applicability.
I stick with westernised medicine, which is much less likely to talk about the lay concept of ‘the cure for cancer’ and to have rather more robust evidence to back up any claims. I do struggle with 'sentiment' and the lay response to cancer. The sentimental attachment to the concept of the 'cure for cancer' gets in the way of understanding life, cancer and medical science.
