BOTANICAL PRODUCTS
This sounds good, but the facts are that following five years of use, the cancer-protective benefit of tamoxifen waned. and while it may hold breast cancer at bay for a few years, it causes uterine cancer, not to mention it triples the risk of potentially fatal blood clots in the lung and increases your risk for stroke, blindness, and liver dysfunction. . So, when you put all the facts together, tamoxifen does not reduce the mortality rate of women. But it does reduce the quality of life. Many women have been forced to have a hysterectomy due to this particularly aggressive form of tamoxifen-caused uterine cancer. It is rarely mentioned that women actually die of tamoxifen-induced uterine cancer. When these women die of uterine cancer instead of breast cancer, it improves the breast cancer statistics. This makes tamoxifen look good, but it's a moot issue to the women in question.Looking at several studies we see that tamoxifen may put a breast cancer to sleep for a few years, and in women who have breast cancer it may slow the rate of recurrence for a few years. But in the long term it tends to do more harm than good. Again the only reason this is such a popular treatment right now is that it seems to oncologist to be better than doing nothing, which many of them believe is the only other viable option to them, but it definitely is not.
Mammography is big business these days. It is conventional medicine's only real answer to breast cancer "prevention" although it isn't preventing cancer at all; it's simply detecting it. Both tissue damage and radiation are know risk factors for breast cancer, so it may even be logical to assume that mammography can contribute to breast cancer.
Proponents of mammograms will tell you that women who discover a lump using mammography will live on the average a year longer than those who discover a lump by self-examination. This is an example of how easily statistics can be misused. Before I explain this in detail, let's look at this fictional story.
Susan and Linda both had a cell mutate into a cancer cell in 1985 and begin to grow. Susan's lump was discovered by mammography in 1994. Linda's lump was discovered by self-examination in 1995. Both Susan and Linda died in 1996 because they both had the type of invasive breast cancer that is prone to spread. Mammography statistics tell you Susan's survival rate was one year greater than Linda's was because they start counting the survival time from the date the lump was discovered. But actually their survival rates are the same when you factor in the one-year difference.
The fact of the matter is that women with breast tumors found by self-examination have lived at least a year from the time when they would have been found by mammography. When this year is added to the survival time to the women whom who did not use mammography, their survival results match those of the women whose tumors were found by mammography. This means that the apparent difference in survival after treatment was due not to earlier treatment, as a result of mammography, but merely to starting the counting of survival time one year earlier among mammography subjects. When this factor is included in the statistical analysis, the so-called benefit of mammography and earlier treatment disappears.
For a breast cancer tumor to become large enough to be detected by self-examination, the cancer has usually been growing for about ten years. If found one year earlier by mammography, the cancer has been growing for about nine years, which is plenty of time to spread if the cancer is prone to do that. The one-year difference between self- examination and mammography detection is ultimately of little importance.
What makes the biggest difference in the woman's survival is not the manner in which the tumor is found, but what type of tumor it is. Because again, the 9 years verses 10 years isn't going to make a significant difference in the woman's survival. If the cancer is the type that spreads, at 9 or 10 years it has already spread. If it isn't the type that spreads, there won't be that much of a difference in the outcome.
I am NOT telling you not to get a mammogram. That is totally your decision. I just want to explain the truth behind the statistics. When your doctor tells you women who discover a lump by mammography live longer, now you know what he or she means.
And please don't take my word for it. The research is there. You need only to read through the actual research papers, not the pamphlets being published by someone or some organization that stands to benefit financially from mammography.
It is difficult to make generalizations about chemotherapy these days because there are so many different kinds, most of them extremely poorly studied. The women who agree to try new chemotherapies are guinea pigs for a type of treatment with a notoriously poor track record. Like most other aspects of the breast cancer industry there's little agreement about what constitutes chemotherapy. We'll make the generalization that chemotherapy is an attempt to poison the body just short of death in hope of killing the cancer before the entire body is killed. Most of the time it doesn't work.
Some chemotherapy does prolong life for a few months, but generally at the high price of devastating side effects, and if a woman does survive that bout of cancer, her body is permanently damaged and recurrence rates are high.
It is important for us to understand how much breast cancer numbers are misused and adjusted, depending upon who wants you to believe what. So let's keep it simple.
Breast cancer is the most common cause of death from cancer among women between the ages of 18-54. and it is the most common cause of death period among women ages 45-50. Women younger than 45 have a 26% higher risk of recurrence of breast cancer compared to older women. The types of cancer that these middle-aged women are dying from are not the mostly benign 99 percent curable DCIS "cancers" that have been detected since the early 1980's with mammograms, thus increasing the rate of detection. What we are talking about here are deadly metastatic cancers that kill quickly once they start to spread.
I feel the breast cancer industry has been using misleading statistics with the disease by including ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) as a breast cancer diagnosis when in fact it's rarely fatal. With or without treatment, many oncologists like to say that DCIS is 99 percent curable. Let me emphasize that. Many oncologists say DCIS is 99% curable with or without treatment. Since DCIS wasn't detectable, and thus not diagnosed or treated until the advent of mammograms, we don't even really know the true nature or course of untreated DCIS because it has always been treated if diagnosed. Given that DCIS is really fatal, lets make some gross generalizations to illustrate a point. If we simply eliminated DCIS from breast cancer statistics, and thus subtract 30% of those who have survived breast cancer from the statistics, we would then not have a recent drop of 20% as claimed by some, but rather a rise of 10% in breast cancer mortality rates. This is a crude way of making the point, but it's important to consider when a doctor is using these types of statistics to justify a treatment. For example, lets say a doctor justifies putting you on tamoxifen to prevent breast cancer based on the much quoted "fact" that breast cancer deaths have dropped by 20 % thanks to tamoxafen. If you know going into the doctor's office that this is a highly questionable statistic, you'll be more empowered to make the right decisions for yourself. If fact, Dr. John Lee. who was a world-renowned expert on natural progesterone and women's health issues such as breast cancer believed that if women with low grade DCIS weren't subject to tamoxifen, chemotherapy, and radiation, their survival rate would stay the same, 99%, but the women wouldn't be damaged for life by the treatments.
Of course the key to reducing the incidence of breast cancer is prevention, but prevention is a dirty word in the breast cancer industry unless you're referring to tamoxifen or mammograms, neither of which is really remotely like prevention. TV personality and author Bob Arnot, M.D. wrote a book called The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet, which contained mostly good, solid practical dietary advice associated with reducing the known risk factors of breast cancer. Sadly, he was terribly trashed by the American media for using the word Prevention as if he were suggesting that diet was a cure-all, which he wasn't. and as if he were somehow hurting women by suggesting that a healthy diet could fend off breast cancer, which it can only help. Arnot was a victim of the intense breast cancer political establishment, which attacks those who stray outside conventional medical boundaries and dare to suggest that something besides surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and tamoxifen might be helpful
The vast majority of the money raised to study breast cancer is used to research pharmaceutical drugs. To support this is like subsidizing the drug companies, which already make billions of dollars in profits after spending billions on advertising, public relations, and lobbying money to influence congressional decisions. Drug testing should be the responsibility of the drug companies, not taxpayers. To add insult to injury, this is research that should have been done by the drug companies decades ago, before the drugs were approved.
The prevention picture is equally dreary in other big cancer organizations. When you log onto the Web site for the ACS, and access the area about cancer prevention, it says "At this time there is no way to prevent breast cancer" This is true only in that we can't point to one cause and make it the culprit. The reality is that we know so much about what causes breast cancer that of course we know what we can to help prevent it, in the same sense we know how to help prevent heart disease or diabetes.
Prevention is also a dirty word during the richly endowed, much hyped and touted breast cancer awareness month that occurs every October, because it's largely sponsored and funded by the drug company that makes tamoxifen. Ironically, this firm also manufactures some of the toxic chemicals that help cause breast cancer. Breast Cancer awareness month is about being aware of breast cancer establishment treatments. There is little focus on preventing breast cancer or raising funds for independent research.
So know you know why I chose not to donate to support breast cancer awareness month. Despite breast cancer being the leading cause of death among middle-aged women in the United States, only 5 percent of the National Cancer Institute's budget is allocated to research on cancer prevention. and if you are thinking that surely some other branch of the U.S. government will pitch in with some unbiased, nondrug, prevention-oriented research, the very expensive taxpayer financed Women's Breast Cancer Initiative will be researching only pharmaceutical drugs in relationship to breast cancer.
There is a new magazine out called CURE. It is devoted to people with cancer. The first year's subscription is free. Why? Because drug company ads are paying the bills. A handful of large pharmaceutical companies are paying $100,000 for each full-page ad. With the drug companies paying the bills, do you think you are going to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I don't think so.
Unfortunately, Finding a physician to help you deal with breast cancer using treatments that are not mainstream is very difficult. The reason is that the pharmaceutical industry now powerfully influences both medical education and research. A recent Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 31% of medical school funding comes from governmental and pharmaceutical grants. I have it from a reliable source that this is probably a gross underestimate. As a consequence, drug company money has a profound influence on the medical research that's chosen. For example, if a drug that has the potential to be patented is competing for funding with a drug that can't be patented because it's found in nature, there's no contest. The patent drug wins, even if the drug found in nature might be the biggest breakthrough of the century. Money talks.
Let's suppose you find an open-minded doctor who would like to try a treatment for cancer that is outside the mainstream. The problem is if an alternative treatment doesn't have FDA approval, a doctor can be fined, be reprimanded, or even lose his or her medical license for using it. and in order to have FDA approval, there has to have been large-scale studies to prove the effectiveness of this alternative treatment. and who is funding all the studies? The pharmaceutical industry. and the pharmaceutical industry will not fund research on any natural product because a natural product can not be patented and therefore could not generate large sums of money for them. Until we somehow release the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on medical schools, continuing education, research, congress, and the whole US medical powers that be, we are not going to get the kind of research done on natural alternative treatments for cancer that we need. My first year of physical therapy school was taken together with the first year medical students. So I know from first hand experience that this is true.
I'm just one person standing on a soapbox. I can't take on the whole pharmaceutical industry, but I can take this message of breast cancer prevention that isn't being heard to one woman or group of women at a time. My message is that breast cancer can often be prevented. and to women, who have had breast cancer, this same message will help prevent a reoccurrence of breast cancer. Lord willing, you will hear this message of prevention in next month's issue of Health Bits and Bytes.
The vast majority of the information in this article was taken from What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Breast Cancer by John R. Lee, M.D. I highly recommend you read this excellent book and take to heart the information you find therein.
This month I am offering a free audio cassette by Lorraine Day, M.D. entitled "Why Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Anymore." Dr. Day (no relation) is an Orthopedic Trauma Surgeon who has personally experienced breast cancer. I encourage you to ask for her tape and listen to her inspiring story.