The year 2004 has been a busy one at The Moss Reports.

My staff and I have written over a dozen new Moss Reports and kept all the others updated. We now have 218 separate Moss Reports. Each report averages about 300 pages. This now represents many thousands of pages of original writing in our Moss Reports library.

Of course, we have reports on the common cancers. But we also have reports on some of the rarest cancers in existence. For some of these rare cancers there is little information available elsewhere to patients. That is why we have become known all over the world as a source of reliable information on rare tumors and their treatment.

People frequently ask about how specific the Moss Reports are to their particular diagnosis. The reports are divided up into several sections. Some of these sections are unique to each particular kind of cancer. Other sections contain information on subjects that are relevant to all patients fighting cancer – for example, the sections on clinical trials, seeking treatment abroad and choosing an alternative cancer clinic are found in most of the reports.

The online newsletter continues to make progress. We now have tens of thousands of subscribers, and consider them among the best informed group of cancer activists in the world. We have produced these newsletters every week of the past year…even during holiday seasons such as this one. As you probably know, these are carefully fact-checked, proofread and referenced. The archives section of the CancerDecisions website, www.cancerdecisions.com, alone now contains nearly 200 newsletters, dating back to 2001. These are available to readers all over the world.

Our Internet standing also continues to improve. I have written before that our website is near the top of all the search engines for the term “alternative cancer treatments” (entered with or without the quotation marks). But we have been steadily rising through the ranks of websites dealing with more general aspects of cancer. If you put the words “cancer treatments” (again, with or without the quotation marks) into Yahoo we now come up first in the world…out of 2,900,000 such sites. We are very pleased by this standing, which has been attained without any advertising, spamming, or commercialization. We are clearly forging a community of readers around the world who respond to an evidence-based approach to cancer, but want a serious and respectful consideration of alternatives. Please help us to grow this site by sharing our newsletters with your friends and colleagues and encouraging them to subscribe.

My staff and I have continued our campaign to bring rationality to the topic of cancer treatment. I continue to write critically about some forms of conventional treatment, such as chemotherapy. I have also recently critiqued the National Cancer Institute director’s “vision statement,” in which he predicted the eradication of suffering and death from cancer by the year 2015. As the years progress, I intend to see how this claim stacks up against the reality of cancer’s toll. At the same time, our approach is even-handed. I have stepped up my “friendly skeptic” investigations of over-hyped alternative treatments, including goji, Tian Xian, mangosteen, and Escozul.

I continue to travel the world in search of better treatment facilities for my readers, clients, and consultees. This year, I traveled to Alberta, southern California, Tijuana, and Germany in order to pay site visits to CAM-oriented clinics. I also attended scientific meetings such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the Cancer Control Society (CCS), where I was honored to receive that organization’s Humanitarian Award.

I also continued to serve as an advisor to many organizations in the cancer field. This year I published a scientific journal article on CAM and cancer in Italy. A similar article, this one on the Mexican cancer clinics, has just been accepted and will be published early in the new year. This represents the latest in a steady string of contributions to the peer-reviewed literature. I also finished co-editing a textbook on “Complementary Oncology,” which is scheduled to appear in 2005. I will let you know the details as soon as I know them.

I want to pay tribute to my devoted staff. Anne and Diane continue to field thousands of phone calls from cancer patients. They are uniformly kind and helpful, regardless of whether the caller decides to purchase a Moss Report or not. Charla maintains our website at a high level and keeps the weekly newsletters flowing. And Louise carefully scrutinizes every word that leaves this office, working the same long hours that I do, and contributing in every way to the growth of our company.

Finally, I want to thank you, my readers, who are my constant inspiration. Helping you is the purpose of this unique enterprise. I wish you the best of health, and hope that the coming year will see major improvements in preventing and treating cancer, both for the world generally and for you personally.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.