Like many young women I was "Daddy's Girl." My father was a tall, strapping man, full of vitality. The middle child, and only girl, I was the "apple of his eye" and he was my hero. To my young mind he seemed invulnerable. I could not have been more wrong.

In his forties my father began to experience chronic back pains. Repeated examinations and x-rays failed to produce any explanation. Finally, one physician recommended that he go to the Pratt Diagnostic Center in Boston for a then new procedure called a "tomagram." The results were devastating. My father had inoperable lung cancer. There was virtually no hope for survival.

What followed during the ensuing two years was a living nightmare. We could not afford a private duty nurse, so plans for college were abandoned. Instead I stayed home with my mother to care for my beloved father. I did what I could to ease his suffering. I learned how to prepare and administer the morphine injections that became less and less effective. I tried to make his favorite foods to stimulate an appetite depressed by the disease and the drugs. But it didn't help. Day after day, I watched as a once vital human being slowly wasted away before my eyes.

Night after night he would awaken me numerous times to ask that I rub his back to help ease the pain. Sitting in a chair with his back to me, I could tell that every touch was agonizing. Towards the end, when I attempted to rub one side of his back my hand would literally sink in. The cancer had eaten away all of his ribs.

Yet he never complained, always put on a brave face. His courage in the face of this terrible disease was an inspiration. Still, I could see the pain in his eyes. When we went out, people who knew him were shocked by his appearance, clothes hanging on his frame.

After a time our finances were exhausted. Accordingly, just after high school I went to work to help out, but with limited skills there was only so much I could earn -- never enough. There was no money for a new wardrobe. There would be no money for college either, or any of the other things many of my friends took for granted, only for doctors and hospitals.

I knew all about suffering through my father, all about the desperation families faced with the tragedy of cancer feel. And about the emotional and financial toll the disease takes. But today, I know something else as well.

I know that conventional medicine has lied to the public about what it can do, that there is a cancer establishment that has reaped billions of dollars from research grants and pharmaceutical sales -- all on the basis of false hopes and broken promises. How could I know this? Just consider the record.

Three decades have passed since President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1972, with the promise of finding a cure for the dread disease in five years. Since that time the federal government alone has spent almost $45 billion on cancer research1. Yet, after almost thirty years we find little progress has been made.