Cancer Treatment Centers of America , headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, is a national, for-profit network of five comprehensive cancer care and research centers and three out patient care centers that serves cancer patients throughout the United States. CTCA was originally headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. In January 2015, the corporate office was moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and was renamed Cancer Treatment Centers of America Global, Inc.
History
Cancer Treatment Centers of America® was founded in 1988 by Richard J. Stephenson following the death of his mother, Mary Brown Stephenson, who died from lung cancer. Stephenson purchased the American International Hospital in Zion, Illinois in 1988 and expanded the hospital to include a radiation center, the Mary Brown Stephenson Radiation Oncology Center. That center served as the CTCA's first location. CTCA formally opened its second hospital on May 7, 1990 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, located in the CityPlex Towers, which were constructed by Oral Roberts as part of the City of Faith hospital. Fifteen years later, on April 29th, 2005, the center relocated to a newly constructed 195,845-square-foot hospital in Tulsa. In 2004, CTCA purchased the former Parkview hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. After renovating 104,000 square feet and adding an additional 81,000 square feet for future expansion, CTCA opened the location on December 19, 2005. With a total of 200,025 square-foot facility, the Philadelphia location became CTCA's first hospital on the east coast. On Dec. 29, 2008 CTCA opened Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Phoenix, with a 210,000-square-foot hospital serving patients primary from the west coast. On September 18, 2012, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Atlanta opened its doors to patients. In 2015, it opened a patient concierge and information office in Mexico City. It also advertises in the Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America, offering patients in these regions the opportunity to pursue treatment at one of its U.S. comprehensive cancer care and research centers. Each cancer hospital has earned accreditations and certifications from the Joint Commissions, American College of SurgeonsCommission on Cancer, and National Accreditation Program of Breast Centers.
Clinical services
In 2016, CTCA offered the TAPUR study also known as the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry study. This was led by the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Controversy
Cancer Treatment Centers of America was the subject of a Federal Trade Commission complaint in 1993. The FTC alleged that CTCA made false claims regarding the success rates of certain cancer treatments in CTCA's marketing and promotional materials. This claim was settled in March 1996 with an injunction, requiring CTCA to discontinue use of any unsubstantiated claims in its advertising. CTCA is also required to have proven, scientific evidence for all statements regarding the safety, success rates, endorsements, and benefits of its cancer treatments. CTCA was also required to follow various steps in order to report compliance to the FTC per the settlement. The injunction expired in 2016 with no violations over the 20 year period.
In 2013, oncologist David Gorski, writing for Science Blogs, published an article that criticized CTCA for using pseudoscientific treatments in addition to mainstream treatments. He stated that some "otherwise talented doctors" are now "complicit in the blurring of the line between science and pseudoscience in medicine while believing that they are doing good for the patient by giving them 'holistic care'." The National Cancer Institute claims that some complementary therapies have undergone careful evaluation and have been found to be safe and effective. However there are others that have been found to be ineffective or possibly harmful.
In 2018, Truth in Advertising published a report summarized in Medscape Accessed Feb 5, 2019 reporting that almost all major cancer centers engaged in misleading advertising, They reported that, of all the centers studied, CTCA was the one that spent the most money on such advertising in 2017. In particular, cancer experts reviewed CTCA's claims that its survival rates were better than national averages. CTCA compared its outcomes with the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. The experts said that CTCA's patients and SEER's patients were not compatible, and that the comparison was biased in favor of CTCA. For example, CTCA's patients were younger, and better-insured: According to Reuters, CTCA screened patients for insurance coverage, and " has relatively few elderly patients almost none who are uninsured or covered by Medicaid" Furthermore, it "includes in its outcomes data only those patients 'who received treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness' - patients who have the ability to travel to CTCA locations from the get-go," Additional details on CTCA treatment results on methodology and sources of information can be found on the issued CTCA treatment results publication.
L. Kirk Hagen, humanities professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, points out that in CTCA's Web site is a disclaimer that reads " makes no claims about the efficacy of specific treatments, the delivery of care, nor the meaning of the CTCA and SEER analysis." The Truth in Advertising report noted that the FTC " rewrote the rules governing the use of testimonials, in 2009, to say that such disclaimers are not sufficient because consumers believe that theirs will be the atypical experience depicted in the ad."
