The relationship, stated plainly
The CureRays Innovation & Education Institute is a California nonprofit corporation with 501(c)(3) status. CureRays Radiation Medicine is a for-profit medical practice. They are separate legal entities that share a name, a founder, and a subject matter.
The Institute funds and publishes research about radiation medicine. The practice delivers radiation medicine to patients and bills for it. Research that makes a treatment look good is therefore research that can benefit the practice commercially — and the same person is involved in both. No governance structure makes that conflict disappear. What a governance structure can do is make it visible, constrain it, and let readers weigh it for themselves.
The specific conflicts this creates
- Research direction. The Institute studies techniques the practice offers. A finding that favours those techniques has commercial value to the practice.
- Publication. The Institute publishes a peer-reviewed journal, IJRM-SSS, in a field the practice competes in. Editorial decisions could in principle favour the founder's work or disfavour a competitor's.
- Patient education. The Institute's guide library is read by people deciding how to treat a cancer. Education that steers readers toward the practice's services would be marketing wearing an education label.
- Referral flow. Institute pages link to the practice for patient care. That link is useful to a reader who needs treatment and is also a referral channel.
- Equipment donation. The Institute helps donors establish fair market value for donated equipment and receives a tax-deductible gift. Valuation is a judgement the Institute has an interest in.
What we do about it
These are commitments, and they are worth exactly as much as our willingness to be held to them.
- Separate books. Charitable funds do not subsidise clinical operations, and the Institute does not bill for patient care.
- Findings publish either way. Research supported by the Institute is published whether or not the result favours a technique the practice uses. A null or unfavourable result is a result.
- Recusal on the founder's work. Manuscripts authored or co-authored by the founder are handled by an editor without a CureRays affiliation, and that handling is disclosed in the published article.
- Author disclosure is mandatory. Every IJRM-SSS submission carries a competing-interests statement, and it is published with the article rather than held on file.
- Education carries no advertising and no paywall. The guide library names standard-of-care options regardless of who provides them, and does not present CureRays as the only or best route to any of them.
- Independent valuation. Fair market value for donated equipment is established by professional appraisal, not by the Institute.
What this means for you
If you are a patient or family member: read our guides as a starting point, not as advice about where to be treated. Every guide says the same thing, and it is not a formality — discuss your diagnosis with your own care team, who have no stake in what we publish.
If you are an author or reviewer: you are entitled to know who runs the journal you are submitting to and what else they do. Now you do. If a handling arrangement looks wrong to you, say so.
If you are a donor: you are giving to the Institute, not to the practice. If that distinction ever stops being true in fact rather than just on paper, this page should be the first thing that changes.