Cancer Charity Funds

[John Hilton]

I was interested to know how much money cancer charities have screwed from the generous public without having (AFAIK) anything useful to show for it. So I asked GROK AI.

How much money has been donated to cancer charities in the last 80 years (rough estimate)?

(GROK thought for 1m 6s.)

Rough estimate: on the order of $150–300 billion (nominal dollars) worldwide over the last ~80 years.

A more central ballpark figure is around $200 billion, but this comes with large uncertainty.

Why it’s hard to be precise
No comprehensive global tally of all donations to cancer charities exists for 1946–2026. Figures must be pieced together from major organizations, and they are in nominal (then-current) dollars, not inflation-adjusted. Definitions also vary (pure cancer charities vs. broader health organizations with major cancer programs; research vs. patient support/awareness).

Key building blocks

• American Cancer Society (ACS): Has invested more than $5–5.6 billion in research alone since 1946. Total public support/revenue is much higher (recent years roughly $700–850 million annually). Relay For Life has raised over $7 billion since 1985. Plausible cumulative donations/revenue over 80 years: tens of billions (likely $40–70 billion range).

• Cancer Research UK (and predecessors): Recent annual income around £700 million (~$900 million). Cumulative over decades: likely in the $15–30 billion range.

• Susan G. Komen: Roughly $1.1 billion invested in research + over $2 billion in patient programs since the early 1980s. Cumulative raised likely several billion to low tens of billions.

• Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (now Blood Cancer United): More than $1.7–1.8 billion invested in research since the late 1940s. Cumulative raised higher.

• Many other national societies, hospital foundations, events, and smaller charities add substantially more.

• Recent context: Global public + philanthropic cancer research funding alone was about $51 billion just in 2016–2023 (majority government, but philanthropy is a meaningful share). Charity activity includes large non-research spending (patient support, education, etc.).

Bottom line

A rough global total in the low-to-mid hundreds of billions of nominal dollars is the best available order-of-magnitude estimate. In today’s dollars (inflation-adjusted), the figure would be noticeably higher.

This covers private and philanthropic donations to cancer-focused charities and does not include government funding (e.g., NIH/NCI) or pharmaceutical industry R&D.
__

Many possible low-cost treatments have been suggested, including Artemisinin, Dandelion root, Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Mebendazole, Black Seed Oil and many more. AFAIK no cancer charity has funded research into any of these. (please correct me if I'm wrong.)

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by John Hilton (here)
Many possible low-cost treatments have been suggested, including Artemisinin, Dandelion root, Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Mebendazole, Black Seed Oil and many more. AFAIK no cancer charity has funded research into any of these. (please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Exactly. I was going to post the very same thing as soon as I saw the title of your thread — but you quite rightly beat me to it.

[Denise/Dizi]

I have always donated to the patient directly if I found I could help in any way. It bypasses the administrative fees, for seemingly a worthless venture. One would think with the kind of funding that has been spent to now, they would be able to eliminate the need to fund raise and sadly they continue to prey on those who are sick, or who have lost someone dear to them.

Why spoil a good money making venture with a cure? I wish I knew years ago, what I know now. The Earth provides... There are cures for everything that ails us, if we know where to look... And your last paragraph is invaluable to those who need the information.

[shaberon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

Posted by John Hilton (here)
Many possible low-cost treatments have been suggested, including Artemisinin, Dandelion root, Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Mebendazole, Black Seed Oil and many more. AFAIK no cancer charity has funded research into any of these. (please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Exactly. I was going to post the very same thing as soon as I saw the title of your thread — but you quite rightly beat me to it.

The American Cancer Society is simply a fraud.

Most of these diseases are self-induced.

This point was, in fact, raised in the 1970s; the result was to pour money into a new disease, AIDS. I have seen a cancer treatment recently, and, it was expensive and excruciatingly horrible. Not discernable as "progress". They're asking the wrong questions in order to sell a miracle.

[John Hilton]

I just received the following link, which seems to be appropriate for this discussion:

12 Things Your Oncologist Was Trained Not to Tell You
https://www.unbekoming.com/p/12-thin...st-was-trained

Excerpt:

"In 1974, Memorial Sloan Kettering hired a young science writer named Ralph Moss as assistant director of public affairs. His job was to translate the institution’s research into press releases and articles for the in-house publication. In the course of that work he befriended Kanematsu Sugiura, MSK’s senior research scientist, then in his late eighties, whose name appeared on foundational papers in cancer chemotherapy going back to the 1930s.

Sugiura had been running experiments on amygdalin, the compound the alternative cancer world called laetrile. His results across five years of work at MSK showed that laetrile did not shrink primary tumors in his mouse models but dramatically reduced the appearance of lung metastases. In one series, mice receiving laetrile showed 21 percent metastasis rates compared to 90 percent in controls. When Moss asked Sugiura in 1977 whether he still stood by his findings, Sugiura told him yes. Moss then asked to see the internal documents.

He found that MSK’s leadership was publicly denying the very findings its own laboratory had produced. On June 15, 1977, at a press conference, MSK president Lewis Thomas told the world: “We have no evidence that laetrile possesses any biological activity with respect to cancer, one way or the other.” Robert Good, director, added: “We have no reproducible evidence that amygdalin, or laetrile, is active.”³

On November 18, 1977, Moss held a counter press conference. He and a small internal working group called Second Opinion released a forty-eight-page report documenting what MSK had actually found, when it had found it, and how the institutional story had diverged from the laboratory data. He named names. He produced the documents.

The next day he was fired."

[RunningDeer]

12 Things Your Oncologist Was Trained Not to Tell You

Explanations for each are found here.

1. The five-year survival statistic conceals the failure.

2. Chemotherapy contributes 2.1 percent to five-year survival in adult solid tumors.

3. The FDA approves cancer drugs on tumor shrinkage, not on survival.

4. Screening finds cancers that would never have killed anyone.

5. The tumor is not the disease. It is the wall the body built.

6. Surgery and biopsy breach the wall the body built.

7. The disease is in the cytoplasm, not the nucleus. Oncology looked at the nucleus for a century.

8. The oncologist earns from the drug margin.

9. The metabolic markers that matter are not tested.

10. Diet counseling is absent.

11. Repurposed off-label drugs work and are not offered.

12. The injection substrate is not investigated as a cause of the cancer being treated.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Sometimes people get very sick with a thing called cancer. There are doctors whose whole job is to take care of people with cancer. They are called oncologists.

Oncologists have three tools. They can cut the sick part out. They can burn it with a special light. Or they can put a strong medicine into a tube in your arm that makes you feel very bad but is supposed to kill the sick part.

Here is the part the doctors do not tell you. The lump is not the sickness. The lump is a wall. The body builds the wall around a spot that got hurt inside and could not get better. Inside the wall is all the bad stuff the body could not get out. The wall keeps the bad stuff away from the healthy parts. That is why the wall is there.

When the doctor cuts the wall out, the bad stuff spills into the surrounding tissue. Some of it lodges somewhere else. The body has to build a new wall there. The doctors call the new wall by a new name and treat it like a new disease. But it is not a new disease. It is the same problem. The body is still trying to hold the bad stuff away from the healthy parts, because the bad stuff never left.

The reason the doctors do not tell you this is that if you understood it you would want them to help you get the bad stuff out of your body instead of cutting the walls. Getting the bad stuff out is slow. It is done with food and sunshine and fixing bad teeth and not being so worried and cheap old medicines that have been around for a long time. None of those things pay the doctor.

Cutting the walls pays the doctor. Burning the walls pays the doctor. The strong medicine in the tube in your arm pays the doctor.

So the doctor does what pays the doctor. And the walls keep coming back, because the bad stuff is still there.

If you ever get sick with the cancer thing, or if someone you love does, remember: the lump is not the sickness. The sickness is what made the body build the lump. And you fix the sickness by taking away what is making the body build the lumps, not by cutting the lumps out.

The oncologist will probably never tell you this.

Now you know.

Posted by John Hilton (here)
I just received the following link, which seems to be appropriate for this discussion:

12 Things Your Oncologist Was Trained Not to Tell You
https://www.unbekoming.com/p/12-thin...st-was-trained

Excerpt:

"In 1974, Memorial Sloan Kettering hired a young science writer named Ralph Moss as assistant director of public affairs. His job was to translate the institution’s research into press releases and articles for the in-house publication. In the course of that work he befriended Kanematsu Sugiura, MSK’s senior research scientist, then in his late eighties, whose name appeared on foundational papers in cancer chemotherapy going back to the 1930s.

Sugiura had been running experiments on amygdalin, the compound the alternative cancer world called laetrile. His results across five years of work at MSK showed that laetrile did not shrink primary tumors in his mouse models but dramatically reduced the appearance of lung metastases. In one series, mice receiving laetrile showed 21 percent metastasis rates compared to 90 percent in controls. When Moss asked Sugiura in 1977 whether he still stood by his findings, Sugiura told him yes. Moss then asked to see the internal documents.

He found that MSK’s leadership was publicly denying the very findings its own laboratory had produced. On June 15, 1977, at a press conference, MSK president Lewis Thomas told the world: “We have no evidence that laetrile possesses any biological activity with respect to cancer, one way or the other.” Robert Good, director, added: “We have no reproducible evidence that amygdalin, or laetrile, is active.”³

On November 18, 1977, Moss held a counter press conference. He and a small internal working group called Second Opinion released a forty-eight-page report documenting what MSK had actually found, when it had found it, and how the institutional story had diverged from the laboratory data. He named names. He produced the documents.

The next day he was fired."