Cancer

The standard used everywhere else applies here without exemption: no one may spend another person's life to protect an institution's business.

Start with the numbers, because they are not abstractions. In 2025 the American Cancer Society projected 2,041,910 new cancer diagnoses and 618,120 cancer deaths in the United States alone. Globally the most recent count is roughly 9.8 million deaths a year, close to ten million people. Childhood cancer is where the number stops being a statistic: about 9,600 children aged 0 to 14 are diagnosed in the United States each year, about 1,040 of them die, and roughly 730 adolescents die with them. Nearly 1,700 young lives a year, in the country that spends more on medicine than any other.

Now the question the industry does not answer plainly. If a large share of cancer is metabolic — a failure of energy production in the cell rather than a random genetic accident — why is metabolic therapy almost never put in front of the patient?

Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College has argued this in print and in public for more than a decade, in Cancer as a Metabolic Disease and in hundreds of lectures: that cancer is primarily a disease of mitochondrial energy metabolism, and that restricting glucose and glutamine, the ketogenic metabolic therapy he describes, can weaken tumours and make standard treatment work better. His work is published, the mechanisms are described, and the early clinical work exists. You can hear him make the argument himself: Dr. Thomas Seyfried on YouTube.

Meanwhile the large cancer charities, the national institutes, and the government-backed bodies that set the standard of care keep the machinery pointed at genetic drugs and patented compounds. Almost none of them promotes metabolic therapy to patients, and it is not because the idea lost a fair trial. It is because a diet cannot be patented. A ketogenic protocol cannot be sold at a premium, a patient who changes what he eats does not generate decades of revenue, and the institutions answer to donors, agencies, and pharmaceutical partners rather than to the dying.

None of this makes every oncologist a villain, and it does not make metabolic therapy a guaranteed cure. It means the patient is not being told the whole argument before consenting to the most aggressive treatment available, and consent given without the whole argument is not consent at all. That is the same violation as any other: a body and a life spent by someone else's decision, for someone else's benefit.

A death that information would have prevented is not a tragedy. It is a decision someone else made.