By Alison Rose Levy via www.healthjournalist.com
When it comes to increasing cancer rates, we’ve done everything right. We couldn’t have done it better if we’d actually planned it.
That’s the takeaway from the President’s Cancer Panel. Legislatively mandated back in 1971, this prestigious panel just issued its 2009 report. Reading it is an eye-opening experience. I’ll synopsize the basic findings here (along with others from other sources) so that if other societies (or other planets) want to replicate our outstanding results in making the world safe for cancer, they can roll up their sleeves and do just what we’ve done:
• For 35 years, pour billions of dollars into vested institutions aiming to self-perpetuate via a perennial “war on cancer” featuring intense and costly treatments, which, according to a GAO report, failed to substantively increase actual survival rates once you factor in reductions in lung cancer deaths thanks to smoking cessation
• Run massive P.R. campaigns to distract the gullible public (with more birthday cake?) until that lucky day when a “cure” is found. (According to AdWeek, the American Cancer Society, which disputes the Panel Report spends $17 million annually on ads.)
That’s just for starters. Then the next step is to:
• Fail to look for causes
• Invoke “prevention” as a buzzword while doing nothing substantive
It takes a little work, but if dedicated to the cause, one can:
• Overlook numerous studies that reveal a wide range of cancer causative factors, including pesticides, toxins, metals, pollutants, food additives, industrial chemicals, endocrine disruptors and other carcinogens–80,000 of them in wide use (PCP)
• Allow widespread exposure to these carcinogens (PCP)
• Rather than concede the overall weight of both research and empirical evidence, quibble over a study detail to assure an implacable entrenchment in treating the problem when it’s too late
• Pay for your own study if your company has deep pockets. Then play “dueling studies.”
By Nicholas Kristof via New York Times
The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.
The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.
I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.
Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.
In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”
It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.
One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.
“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.
The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.
“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”
Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.
Continue reading about New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer
By MATTHEW PERRONE
AP Business Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Food and Drug Administration scientist said Tuesday his job was eliminated after he raised concerns about the risks of radiation exposure from high-grade medical scanning.
Dr. Julian Nicholas said at a public hearing that he and other FDA staffers “were pressured to change their scientific opinion,” after they opposed the approval of a CT scanner for routine colon cancer screening. Nicholas said that he objected to exposing otherwise healthy patients to the cancer risks of radiation.
After FDA officials pushed ahead with plans to clear the device, Nicholas, now a physician at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, said he and eight other staffers raised their concerns with the division’s top director Dr. Jeffrey Shuren last September. The device apparently is still under review.
“Scientific and regulatory review process for medical devices was being distorted by managers who were not following the laws,” Nicholas said. A month later Nicholas’ position was terminated, he said.
Nicholas does not think there was undue influence by the manufacturer in his ouster, but that his more cautious stance was in opposition to that of FDA higher-ups.
The allegations about suppression of scientific dissent come at an inopportune time for the agency.
The FDA announced an effort to improve scanning safety in February after three California hospitals reported hundreds of acute radiation overdoses last year, with many patients reporting lost hair and skin redness.
Tuesday’s meeting was designed to kick off that campaign. The agency is seeking input from physicians and manufacturers on additional safety controls and training to improve CT scanners and other medical imaging devices.
Hundreds of studies have linked certain types of radiation, including the type used in medical imaging, to cancer that can surface decades later.
FDA medical reviewer Dr. Robert Smith, a colleague of Nicholas who also presented at Tuesday’s public meeting, said he hoped the FDA would learn a lesson from Nicholas’ testimony.
“Science must not be ignored, suppressed or distorted as that endangers the public,” Smith told the audience.
Smith, who still works for the agency, supported Nicholas’ conclusion that CT scanning for colon cancer should be rejected on safety grounds.
Agency spokesman Dick Thompson said in a statement the FDA’s inspector general looked into allegations of retaliation against agency scientists and did not pursue further action or investigation. The agency’s policies do not allow staffers to be penalized for expressing scientific views, he added.
Continue reading about Scientist: FDA Suppressed Imaging Safety Concerns
Original link: www.realclearpolitics.com
By Jim Turner & Curt Levey
We are the heads of two non-profit organizations – one of us liberal and the other conservative – who are concerned that the impending healthcare legislation will negatively impact holistic and natural medicine and limit the healthcare choices of the people who consume it.
Because alternative medicine is highly effective in treating many of the chronic conditions which resist treatment by establishment medicine -from arthritis, heart disease, and chronic pain to insomnia and attention-deficit disorders – nearly 50 percent of Americans regularly use some type of alternative therapy, according to a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association. In fact, the study found that visits to alternative practitioners, for treatments ranging from acupuncture and chiropractic to herbal remedies, outnumber all visits to primary care physicians by almost two to one. Additionally, more than 100 million Americans “regularly consume dietary supplements as a means of improving and maintaining healthy lifestyles,” according to a U.S. Senator who has worked on related legislation.
Nonetheless, “alternative therapies (including acupuncture, chelation therapy, biofeedback and holistic medicine) are not covered by Medicare,” says the federal government. The same is true of Medicaid. Nobody expects better coverage for alternative treatments when, as a key part of the reform legislation, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) determines the “essential health benefits” that insurance plans will contain. When supporters of the legislation speak of a right to health care, they mean a right to establishment medicine.
Consumers of alternative medicine are used to health insurance plans that offer little or no coverage for holistic treatments and thus don’t meet their needs. That’s why many of them choose not to purchase health insurance. What they’re not used to – but will have to get used to if the proposed “reforms” become law – is being forced to purchase the very insurance plans that fail to meet their needs. And therein lie the dire consequences of the impending legislation.
If you’re an alternative healthcare consumer, the money you will be forced to spend subsidizing other people’s establishment healthcare, through premiums and higher taxes, is money you can no longer spend on holistic and natural medicine for you and your family. It’s as if the government forced you to join and pay for a food shopping club that didn’t include natural food stores. After you finished paying thousands of dollars up front to the big supermarket chains you rarely if ever visit, where would you find the money for the natural food you really want?
Sure, you can lobby HHS to include a few alternative treatments as “essential health benefits” – just as you can ask the big supermarket chains to carry some natural foods – but you shouldn’t have to beg to spend your money on the type of healthcare you want.
If you don’t think you will be affected by the government’s forced transfer of healthcare dollars from alternative to establishment medicine, consider the breadth of treatments that will be completely or partially excluded when federal bureaucrats draw up the list of essential benefits. You will be affected if you’re one of the patients of America’s 70,000 chiropractors, if you use an athletic trainer to treat your sports injury, of if you’re a woman who would prefer to give birth at home with the help of a midwife. You’ll be affected if you rely on treatments that are a traditional part of your culture or anyone else’s culture, whether you seek help from Native American medicine, acupuncture and other traditional Chinese treatments, India’s Ayurveda – made famous by physician Deepak Chopra – or the Latin American hueseros and sobaderos who treat traumatic and occupational injuries.
Consumers of these indigenous healing traditions are particularly vulnerable to the forced transfer of healthcare dollars because their typically modest incomes will make it difficult to pay for both their traditional medical practitioners and the new federally-mandated health insurance premiums. So much for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendation that indigenous medicine be integrated into national healthcare programs. Instead, so many of the American politicians who pay lip service to respect for racial and cultural differences appear ready to hand the feds the power to impose a one-size-fits-all healthcare solution.
In the end, the essential point is not what the WHO recommends or whether acupuncture will be effective in relieving your chronic pain. The point is that every American deserves the right to make their own healthcare choices with their own healthcare dollars. No healthcare system will guarantee you access to every treatment you ever want – not an unregulated free market, not Medicare, not Medicaid, and certainly not “ObamaCare.” But when you’re allowed the freedom to make your own choices about treatments and insurance plans, you can prioritize what access is most important to you.
We all lose out when those choices are taken away, and not just in the obvious ways. With the impending diversion of money away from alternative medicine, the development of new holistic therapies that could benefit everybody will be stifled. If, instead, the Congress and President chose the path of fostering true competition in the health insurance market, insurance plans that cater more to our varied needs – including the needs of the natural medicine community – would likely bloom and expand. The increase in competition among treatments and insurance plans would put downward pressure on the high cost of establishment medicine, especially because alternative medicine typically has a lower price tag. We would all benefit.
Whether you prefer establishment medicine or are a fan of acupuncture, biofeedback, and dietary supplements, there are good reasons to share our concern about the negative impact of the impending legislation on alternative medicine and healthcare choice in general. With a final vote on the bill just days away, the time to share any concerns with your elected representatives in Washington is now.
Jim Turner is Chairman of Citizens for Health. Curt Levey is Executive Director of the Committee for Justice.
Continue reading about Reform Threatens Alternative Medicine
By Michelle Roberts Health reporter via www.news.bbc.co.uk
Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers – skin and lung – a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.
Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team.
Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer.
The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth.
China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.
The International Cancer Genome Consortium scientists from the 10 countries involved say it will take them at least five years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete this mammoth task.
But once they have done this, patients will reap the benefits.
Professor Michael Stratton, who is the UK lead, said: “These catalogues are going to change the way we think about individual cancers.
“By identifying all the cancer genes we will be able to develop new drugs that target the specific mutated genes and work out which patients will benefit from these novel treatments.
“We can envisage a time when following the removal of a cancer cataloguing it will become routine.”
It could even be possible to develop MoT-style blood tests for healthy adults that can check for tell-tale DNA patterns suggestive of cancer.
Russian Roulette
The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.
Most of the time the mutations will land in innocent parts of the genome, but some will hit the right targets for cancer
The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.
From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke.
Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer.
Wellcome Trust researcher Dr. Peter Campbell, who conducted this research, published in the journal Nature, said: “It’s like playing Russian roulette.
Continue reading about Scientists Crack ‘Entire Genetic Code’ of Cancer