Humanity loves a good conspiracy theory. Whether it's the moon landing, the Rothschilds, 9/11, Sandy Hook, or the Illuminati, most mainstream conspiracy theories have a central characteristic: some powerful person, group, or entity promotes a false agenda to exert a substantial amount of control over a population. Additionally, more often than not, conspiracy theories revolve around government entities because of the inherent link between power and government.
The leading conspiracy theory for 9/11 states that it was an inside job to defend our oil interests in the Middle East. As the theory goes, the United States Government, acting on behalf of major oil companies, fabricated the attack on the World Trade Center in order to create a false pretense for invading the Middle East, where a majority of our oil came from at that point in time. While that could make some sense, like most (but not quite all) conspiracy theories, it's a load of baloney.
The same people who promote these forms of conspiracy theories are the ones who are looking for a way to ascribe malevolent intentions to actions that contradict their worldview or expose them to evidence that contradicts a major core belief. For example, an ardent supporter of the NRA is more likely to think that the attack on Sandy Hook elementary was "invented" by the United States government to push the agenda for gun control because recognizing the role of their support in the deaths of these children exposes them to evidence that contradicts a major core belief.
The healthcare industry is ripe with characteristics that promote conspiracy theories. A huge cash flow in and out of the industry, the shadowy, technical nature of clinical research, the very direct links to the government (through regulation, funding, and the NIH, primarily), and the emotional trauma experienced by patients and families alike are all individual risk factors for the development of conspiracy theories. While many, many theories exist, I have decided to focus on a single topic due to its current, inexplicable popularity in social media: chemotherapy and the cure for cancer.
Chemotherapy is an easy target for conspiracy theories. It takes a somewhat advanced knowledge of cell biology to understand how the drug attacks cancer (leaving patients and their families in the blue), it causes very noticeable, painful side effects, it has a large online support group which drives false rumors, and, due to the very nature of cancer biology, is not wholly effective. Chemotherapy, at its core, involves targeting cancer cells with drugs that will help prevent unregulated cell division. While drugs have numerous approaches, most, in some way, kill cells that reproduce rapidly.
That, typically, is great for killing cancer cells, but it also attacks and kills normal cells that have high rates of division, such as hair follicles and immature red blood cells in the bone marrow. Because these cells die, you have the symptoms such as nausea, hair loss, and fatigue that are characteristic of chemotherapy treatment. Quite frankly, chemotherapy sucks. Now, interventions such as radiation and surgery can help cure some cancers with less vicious side effects, but those are extremely ineffective against cancers that have "metastasized" or spread throughout the body. Radiation therapy and surgery (such as a mastectomy) are great for attacking local cancers; chemotherapy, a treatment that has effects throughout the body, is currently far and away the best option for treating systemic cancer. A better treatment for cancer would undoubtedly be an improvement on the current system, but to claim that the government is hiding a cure is ludicrous for a multitude of reasons.
First of all, there will never be a universal cure for "cancer." While we may find ways of effectively preventing very specific forms of cancer, "cancer" as a single entity is so vast that a cure is just simply not plausible. To claim a cure for cancer exists would be analogous to claiming that a vaccine for the flu will protect you from every viral infection, something that clearly is very, very wrong. Even beyond that, individual cancer groups will likely not have cures themselves. For example, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a very specific form of cancer that causes overproduction of lymphocytes in the blood, could have multiple causes. Whether there is an error in the cellular DNA that prevents a protein necessary in cell signaling from being produced or an overproduction of a chemical messenger to promote growth of lymphocytes is very pertinent to treatment. Cancer is unique in that it can only be stopped if the cause is prevented. Each of the cases requires a slightly modified treatment plan, which is why most chemotherapy treatments are a combination of multiple drugs. It's also the reason that some people are simply unresponsive to chemotherapy; the drugs don't attack their very specific cause of cancer. A cure for cancer, at this point in time and in the near future, is really just a pipe dream.
Secondly, the claims that physician-scientists would suppress the discovery of cancer is downright erroneous. Normally, when people make this claim they are making a direct link to money. More explicitly, they argue that pharmaceutical companies will donate money to political campaigns to gain politically clout with congressmen. The congressmen will then influence the funding for the NIH and NCI and will push an anti-cancer cure agenda. This in turn will prevent funding being available for studying cures for cancer. This makes some sense, except for the fact that nowhere in the theory does it state that the cure has already been found, which is a major component of most chemotherapy conspiracy theories. It also doesn't make sense because a huge portion of funding goes to the National Cancer Institute, which has developed numerous treatments for cancer and is one the main sponsors for the new immunotherapy approach. Lastly, one could assert that Big Pharma would prevent a researcher from spending a significant amount of resources on developing a cure (because it could harm their bottom line), but the researcher would likely then leave for academia where they have more research freedom and can further their research interests. A researcher leaving to further their chemotherapy interests is not unheard of; Dr. Alex Ullrich, the discover of the breast cancer drug Trastuzumab, did that exact thing when he left Genentech.
For the most part, conspiracy theories are harmless. But in this specific case, they erode the important patient-physician relationship. When a patient falsely believes that chemotherapy is a hoax or that their physician is just a pawn used by pharmaceutical companies, they are much more likely to try certain unverified, alternative methods. Beliefs such as this killed Steve Jobs. The police officer from the above posted memes lost his daughter to alternative cures (although he believes that her doses of chemotherapy and radiation killed her, the antineoplastin treatment he gave her is severely neurotoxic). People die because of these conspiracy theories, plain and simple. Just this past Thursday, a famous Chinese TV actress passed away from cancer when she attempted to treat her malady with traditional medicine. And the more people spread this false narrative that there is a secret cure for cancer, the more people are going to die. The world isn't full of these secretive powerful people who are trying to suppress the creation of cures for cancer. Cancer is just really, really hard to treat. And while jumps in treatment are being made, undermining the work of thousands of oncologists and physician-scientists forces researchers to be more defensive and slows the pace of treatment improvement. Stop telling people chemotherapy is a hoax. It's not.
