Looking for diseases in all the wrong places – the genome – has led to billions of wasted dollars in research and treatments, and financial toxicity for patients
As an example, let’s consider cancer. Cancer is a preventable disease triggered by environmental factors. A dramatic rise in cancer is occurring world-wide, including younger people, and that means environmental risk, not a major change in genetics. Cancer is one of the most expensive medical conditions to treat in the US. Financial toxicity is a term used to describe the harmful effect of high cost of treatment on a person’s quality of life. It may also be described as financial burden or financial distress. Households may adjust differently to this stress. Some people may use a large portion of their savings, open a new credit card, or refinance their home to help pay for treatment. Others may skip medical visits or take less medication than they are prescribed. Some families may cut back on food, clothing, or leisure activities, such as going to movies or vacations. Making ends meet in this manner can be stressful, which in turn can trigger symptoms of anxiety and depression, and increases the odds of other diseases such as heart disease.
Let’s see how genetic-based precision medicine contributes to financial toxicity. First, understand that genetic hereditary mechanisms are not a significant cause of disease. The environment is. As Dr. Craig Venter, Ph.D., who is a scientist and founder of the Venter Institute at UCSD and key person involved in partially sequencing the human genome, remarked at a leadership for the twenty-first century conference, “Human biology is actually far more complicated than we imagine. Everybody talks about the genes that they received from their mother and father, for this trait or the other. But in reality, those genes have very little impact on life outcomes. Most biology will come from the complex interaction of all the proteins and cells working with environmental factors, not driven directly by the genetic code” But if we listen to physicians, such as Francis Collins and Leroy Hood, proponents of genomic-based precision medicine, we are led astray. Therefore, using genetic tests in medicine are a waste of time and money. Even if a small number of people are helped by genetic tests, it’s a massive waste of time and money compared to using other methodologies to test and treat disease. “For those it does help, it helps them in a way where they’re in these small populations. And … lots and lots of resources have to be invested.”
Some of those investments are by pharmaceutical companies, which may spend billions of dollars to develop a new drug. If that drug is helpful to only a small number of patients, those companies must recoup their costs with high prices. In countries with insurance-based healthcare systems such as the US, expensive drugs can take an enormous toll on individuals, leading some clinicians to identify a new side-effect: “financial toxicity”. But they can have an impact on systems such as the UK NHS as well.
“A new drug offers some health benefits to those patients that receive it,” explains Dr. Mark Sculpher, Ph.D., director of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. “But depending on the cost of that drug, you may end up with other patients losing more health, because that’s resources taken from them. So you can have this negative overall population health effect if you pay too much for a drug.”
“We’ve cut heart disease death rates by 70%, 80% in the US in the last 50 years,” he says. “None of that’s down to anything genetic. That’s due to understanding the antecedents of heart disease and beginning to control them.” According to Dr. Nigel Paneth, M.D. at Michigan State, “If you look at the resources poured into the genomics agenda, it’s very, very large, but with very little yield.”
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Dr. James Tabery, Ph.D., professor at the Univ. of Utah, writes in his new book, Tyranny of the Gene, repeating advice first attributed to Benjamin Franklin – and this might be worth heeding. “There’s this paradox where the more we learn about the human genome, the less we should expect it to actually have significant impacts for most patients. And yet we’re increasingly accelerating towards it, even though there’s plenty of information to suggest that if we really wanted to combat common diseases, we should be focusing on environmental causes.” I have written the same message in my book, The Medicalization of America and in peer-reviewed publications..
The big push to bring about genetic-based precision medicine came from the physician Francis Collins, head of the NIH, and author of at least 5 fraudulent scientific papers. Predictably, Collins would blame the fraud on an underling, saying he didn’t know what was in the papers that had his name on them. If true, Collins was simply tagging his name to papers in which he did little or no work. Other scientists caught the problems with the papers, yet Collins was so ignorant of what was contained in papers with his name on them that he published this stuff. He was the senior author and responsible for the content. Collins preached that people would carry a “genomics card” that physicians would look at to predict and treat disease. Silly stuff, very silly. But we spent billions in the US on this nonsense. Collins was the guy at the helm of the NIH and saw to it that his nutty genomic nonsense was extremely well funded. A religious guy, this was part of Collin’s religion. Another physician, Leroy Hood at the Univ Washington, pushed this genetic-precision nonsense, including to investors who funded a genetic-precision company that went bankrupt because the company failed to produce anything other than BS.
This genetic-based precision medicine nonsense continues to this day, and you pay for it.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 