New Mammogram Recommendations
January 11, 2010
Natural News
By E. Huff
Several years ago, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF) issued an updated set of recommendations about mammogram screenings, suggesting which and how often women should get them. Since the last time the group issued its recommendations in 2002, new study data emerged that has led to a few changes. Its new guidelines, suggesting that women over 40 only need a mammogram every two years, has led to a firestorm of criticism from professional and advocacy groups as well as politicians.
The American College of Radiology and the American Cancer Society were quick to condemn the new findings, ones that PSTF has explained made the best sense based on current published data. The group consulted the Evidence-Based Practice Center at the Oregon Health and Science University for all current, relevant information about breast cancer screenings and arrived at what it says is a well-informed conclusion concerning routine screenings for older women.
Dr. Heidi Nelson, the lead researcher at the university who compiled the information for the PSTF panel, and her team scoured all available data on the subject and constructed it for review. Fifteen outside scientists were tasked with reviewing the information prior to being presented to panel members.
One of the primary studies was a recent British study that compared 54,000 women who received routine mammograms beginning at age 40 with 107,000 women of the same age who did not receive them. The results of this comprehensive study revealed that there was virtually no difference in breast cancer death rates between the two groups.
A comprehensive analysis of all available studies, including a few that showed some benefit from routine mammograms and others that did not, led to the conclusion that there is only a minimal benefit to receiving routine mammograms.
What researchers have found is that for every 1,900 women between the ages of 40 and 50 that are screened yearly for breast cancer using mammography, one death is prevented in the following two decades. Five women would have died regardless of screenings, so out of six potential deaths, one would have been prevented.
On the other hand, the potential harm induced by mammography screenings includes excessive testing and over-diagnosis, including many false positives. Analysis revealed that women have a 10 percent change of being falsely diagnosed. A significant number of cancers detected are not even malignant, yet mammograms are unable to differentiate between harmful and benign cancers.
Over-diagnosis, which is a growing concern among medical professionals, was not properly assessed or understood in 2002 when the last recommendations from PSTF were published. Many women are needlessly undergoing invasive and harmful surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy for cancers that are not even harmful.
Dr. Russell Harris from the University of North Carolina, one of the panel members, explained that mammography is only effective at diagnosing one type of cancer, the malignant, slow-growing kind that can be effectively treated when diagnosed early. This kind represents only 15 percent of deadly cancers.
Precise numbers of over-diagnosis were not easy to pinpoint since estimates ranged from six percent to upwards of 50 percent. Dr. Timothy Wilt from the University of Minnesota, however, estimated that about 30 percent of cancers detected by mammography are over-diagnosed, meaning that they were either benign or untreatable.
Statisticians from the Anderson Cancer Center in Maryland were tasked with assessing screening intervals. Based on an analysis of a large cross-section of women, the group determined that there is virtually no benefit from mammography screenings for women in their 40s. Thus they determined that these women could reduce their risk of harm from mammography by getting screened every other year rather than annually.
What do these findings ultimately reveal? First, mammography screenings come with a myriad of potentially negative side effects while offering scant benefits. Over-diagnosis being the primary concern among researchers, countless women have undergone and continue to undergo dangerous procedures needlessly. More often than not, benign tumors are improperly diagnosed at the expense of the woman’s health.
The radiation involved in the screening process also contributes to increasing a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. By subjecting the body continually to low-dose radiation, otherwise harmless cancer cells are encouraged to multiply and spread.
The fact that even mainstream research is now proving that mammograms provide virtually no benefit should be a wake up call to physicians everywhere who embrace the practice. Safer screening methods like thermography confer the same benefits while eliminating radiation exposure.
Since screenings of any kind can still lead to a false diagnosis, a woman’s best bet is to prevent breast cancer nutritionally. Anti-cancer foods and nutrients will prevent malignant cancer cells from ever developing in the first place. When combined with exercise and a healthy lifestyle, there is no reason why any woman should ever develop a deadly form of breast cancer.
Click here for the full report
Women Weighing Breast Cancer Screening Benefits/Risks
December 23, 2009
DailyMail.co.uk
By Nigel Hawkes
Here’s a little test. Breast cancer screening reduces deaths by 25 per cent. If we assume that 1,000 women dutifully turn up to all their screening appointments, how many lives will be saved?
Remarkably, the answer is one. Not 250, or 100, or even 25 - the figures picked by a substantial proportion of gynaecologists who were asked this question.
As a recent study showed, if 1,000 women began screening at the age of 50, and had a mammogram every year, only one would have her life saved through early detection and treatment of cancer by the time screening stops at the age of 70.
Without screening, four women would have died from breast cancer. With it, three would have done so.
But in the same group, between two and ten women would also be treated needlessly - possibly with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
And between 100 and 500 would have a false alarm, suffer worry, and need further tests before getting the all-clear. About half would undergo an unnecessary biopsy.
Here’s another example. The drug giant Pfizer claims, on the basis of a clinical trial, that its statin drug Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attacks in people with multiple risk factors - high blood pressure, high cholesterol or angina - by 36 per cent.
Assume 100 people take Lipitor for three-and-a-half years. How many heart attacks will be prevented?
The answer, once again, is one.
Without Lipitor, there would have been three heart attacks. With it, there were two.
More…
* Thousands of women still waiting months for breast cancer diagnosis despite Labour pledge
This is, indeed, close to the 36 per cent reduction claimed: Pfizer is not lying. But the bottom line is that 100 high-risk people had to take Lipitor for more than three years to prevent one of them having a heart attack. The other 99 got no benefit.
Benefits are easy to exaggerate when they are expressed in this way - and medicine is riddled with examples of inflated benefits and understated risks, misleading the unwell into unrealistic expectations and causing healthy people to worry needlessly.
The problem is called mismatched framing. Benefits are framed in one way; side-effects in another.
Expressing benefits as a relative risk - 25 per cent fewer breast cancer deaths, 36 per cent fewer heart attacks - produces a nice big number that looks impressive. But unless we know what the real underlying risk is, a percentage reduction is meaningless.
Let’s suppose that the risk to women of dangerous blood clots from a contraceptive pill is one in 7,000. A new pill is introduced and the risk doubles. Letters are sent to GPs across the country saying that the risks of the new pill are 100 per cent greater, and panic ensues.
Women give up the new pill in droves, abortions rise, and so does the risk of blood clots, since pregnancy carries a greater risk of thrombosis than the new pill.
This, of course, actually happened in 1995. If women had been told not that the risk had doubled, but it had increased by one in 7,000, would the same panic have occurred? Almost certainly not. One in 7,000 is an absolute risk increase; 100 per cent is a relative risk increase.
In medical journals, it is commonplace for benefits to be expressed in relative terms, while side-effects are given in absolute terms.
One recent study of the BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet found that a third of papers that included both benefits and harms failed to express them in the same metric.
The Academy of Medical Sciences has postponed a report on the issue until later in 2010.
In February, misleading leaflets urging women to get screened for breast cancer were withdrawn by the NHS because they failed to mention risks - false positives, invasive tests, misleading results, unnecessary operations and anxiety - and did not express benefits straightforwardly.
Public health specialists are in a bind over this. Their job is to get as many participants as possible screened, or vaccinated against flu, or whatever the latest wheeze is. So they focus on big numbers in order to make <em>not </em>participating seem like a dereliction of duty.
But what matters to the individual making a decision about whether to participate is not how it affects national statistics, but what it means to him or her.
The best way to express that is as a ‘number needed to treat’ (NNT) - that is, how many people have to take the treatment to save one event. In the case of the statin trial, the NNT would be 100. With breast cancer screening, it is 1,000.
So the chances that an individual will personally benefit are quite small: one in 100 for statins, one in 1,000 for mammography.
Some doctors argue that any treatment with an NNT of over 50 is no better than buying a lottery ticket. If women were told this, some would decide to get screened anyway. Others may prefer to opt out.
Screening is not worthless, but nor is it quite as wonderful as women have been led to believe.
Can public health doctors afford to be honest about risks and benefits? I wouldn’t bet on it. If drug companies, journals, public health campaigners and journalists are allowed to exaggerate without actually lying, who’s to stop them?
Meanwhile, the public struggle to understand what’s really best for them. Much greater transparency is needed, and fast.
Click here for the full report.
Is Your Kitchen Giving You Cancer?
December 9, 2009
The New York Times
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The battle over health care focuses on access to insurance, or tempests like the one that erupted over new mammogram guidelines.
But what about broader public health challenges? What if breast cancer in the United States has less to do with insurance or mammograms and more to do with contaminants in our water or air — or in certain plastic containers in our kitchens? What if the surge in asthma and childhood leukemia reflect, in part, the poisons we impose upon ourselves?
This last week I attended a fascinating symposium at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, exploring whether certain common chemicals are linked to breast cancer and other ailments.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, the chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai, said that the risk that a 50-year-old white woman will develop breast cancer has soared to 12 percent today, from 1 percent in 1975. (Some of that is probably a result of better detection.) Younger people also seem to be developing breast cancer: This year a 10-year-old in California, Hannah, is fighting breast cancer and recording her struggle on a blog.
Likewise, asthma rates have tripled over the last 25 years, Dr. Landrigan said. Childhood leukemia is increasing by 1 percent per year. Obesity has surged. One factor may be lifestyle changes — like less physical exercise and more stress and fast food — but some chemicals may also play a role.
Take breast cancer. One puzzle has been that most women living in Asia have low rates of breast cancer, but ethnic Asian women born and raised in the United States don’t enjoy that benefit. At the symposium, Dr. Alisan Goldfarb, a surgeon specializing in breast cancer, pointed to a chart showing breast cancer rates by ethnicity.
How We Came About Current Cancer Guidelines
November 23, 2009
New York Times
By Gina Kolata
A few years ago, an independent group that issues guidelines on cancer screening decided to review its recommendations for breast cancer. It had last issued guidelines in 2002, but things had changed — there was new science and researchers had become more sophisticated in analyzing existing data.
So the group, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, started what it thought would be a straightforward job: gathering the newest science and asking about the benefits and risks of breast cancer screening, the best time to start and how often women should be screened.
The group ended up recommending that most women forgo routine mammograms in their 40s and test every other year instead of every year.
The response was swift and angry. Professional groups, like the American College of Radiology, advocacy groups, like the American Cancer Society, and politicians said the guidelines would deprive women of a life-saving test. And some said the guidelines were politically motivated to save money.
Panel members have been taken aback by the response. Their work seemed almost mundane, they say, just an effort to gather and evaluate the best possible evidence.
The task force, a 16-member panel of experts appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, began its work as usual. It went to an academic center, in this case the Evidence-Based Practice Center at the Oregon Health and Science University, and asked for an extensive review of all the relevant papers published on breast cancer screening, including ones used in the last review. At that time, the task force recommended routine screening starting at 40, saying that there were benefits although they became greater as age increased. The Oregon group had done similar reviews for the panel, including a review for the 2002 guidelines.
This time, the panel hoped that it could get missing pieces of the puzzle. New studies allowed scientists to zero in on benefits and harms for women in their 40s and to evaluate with far more certainty not just whether women should be screened but also how often.
The Oregon scientists began by combing the literature. By November 2007, the researchers, led by Dr. Heidi D. Nelson, a professor of medicine, medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the university, had finished its review and sent its work to 15 outside scientists for review, then sent it to the panel. Finally, the researchers were ready to make their first full presentation to the panel members.
Part of that evidence, which Dr. Nelson’s group included, was new results from a huge study in England of mammograms for women in their 40s. This study, published in 2006, compared 54,000 women offered mammograms starting at age 40 with 107,00 women the same age who were not offered them. Previous studies of women in their 40s had them starting at various times in that decade of their lives and so were less useful.
Click here for the full report
In Spite of Science, Cancer Industry Still Pushing Mammograms
November 23, 2009
Natural News
By Mike Adams
The cancer industry has blatantly abandoned science these past two weeks by insisting women under 50 should receive annual mammograms even though the industry’s own scientific task force concluded that such screenings result in too many false positives. Essentially, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force took a good, hard look at the science and concluded that mammograms harm far more women than they help (for women under 50, anyway). But when they announced the new recommendations that women under 50 should avoid mammograms — and women over 50 should only get them every other year — the cancer industry cried foul.
Radiologists, oncologists, Big Pharma pill-pushers and cancer industry non-profits all banded together to declare, “We are abandoning the science! We want more mammograms for more women, science be damned!”
Of course, they all still claim to be “scientific,” but what they really do is selectively cherry-pick which bits and pieces of the scientific evidence they choose to adhere to. And when it comes to these new mammogram recommendations, they’ve decided to simply abandon the science and keep pushing more radiation imaging tests for women (mammography).
The cancer industry is a complete failure
What you are witnessing here, folks, is the desperate last gasps of a failed industry. Their technologies do not save lives, their drugs do not cure cancer, and their “science” doesn’t add up. The cancer industry is a fraud, and now its fraudulent nature is finally becoming apparent to everyone. It even has the mainstream media (USA Today) describing the failures of mammography in articles like the one you’ll see here.
Here’s something else you need to know: The cancer industry hasn’t merely abandoned science in terms of mammography; it has also abandoned all science with the pushing of chemotherapy. Did you know there has never been a randomized, placebo-controlled study proving that chemotherapy saves the lives of breast cancer patients?
That evidence doesn’t exist. The whole “treatment” scam is based entirely on fiction. Chemotherapy only works at all against three rare types of cancer, and breast cancer isn’t one of them.
In defending the new mammography guidelines, Dr. Timothy Wilt, a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, said that the task force recommendations “were based on the most rigorous peer review of up-to-date, accurate information about the evidence about the harms and benefits of treatment.”
He repeated that women under 50 should never receive mammograms, and women 50 or over should only receive a mammogram every two years.
The American Cancer Society, quite predictably, has a real problem with that recommendation. Its entire success (and power) depends on more people getting cancer, and one of the best ways to make sure that happens is to keep pushing for more mammograms. In opposing the new mammography recommendations, the ACS has now abandoned science, too.
Chemotherapy: The chemical holocaust
When cancer doctors tell you that “chemotherapy will save your life,” they are lying to you. And they lie thousands of times a day, deceptively recruiting women into modern medicine’s version of a chemical holocaust.
Click here for the full report
Questions Raised About Mammograms
November 23, 2009
Natural News
By Mike Adams
There’s a lot of talk about mammograms and cancer screenings this week. A U.S. government task force altered its recommendations, saying that women under 50 should receive no mammograms at all because the risk of harm far outweighs any promise of saving lives. This, in turn, led to a very vocal backlash from cancer industry promoters and even a few deeply misinformed celebrities like Sheryl Crow who swear by mammograms. (Sheryl Crow has a poor understanding of the effects of ionizing radiation.)
Rather than providing new answers, this week’s debates on mammograms have actually raised all sorts of new questions. Here, I present twenty-one questions that came to mind once I started pondering this issue in more detail.
Twenty-one questions about mammograms
#1) If mammograms are supposed to be based on “science,” and yet all the recent science says mammograms cause far more harm than good, then how can the White House and cancer doctors in good conscience disregard the precautionary conclusions that women under 50 should not get mammograms?
#2) Why do male surgeons recommend “preventive mastectomies” for preventing breast cancer but never “preventive castration” for preventing testicular cancer?
#3) If radiation causes cancer, then why does the cancer industry use radiation-emitting machines to “screen” for cancer?
#4) If women stop getting annual mammograms, exactly how much profit will the cancer industry lose each year?
#5) Vitamin D prevents 77% of all cancers. Why doesn’t the cancer industry give women vitamin D after each cancer screening? They claim to be interested in “helping people…” shouldn’t that help include the most obvious nutritional advice of all?
#6) If buying pink products raises money for cancer research, how much more stuff do we have to buy before cancer will be cured?
#7) Related question: Why are many of the pink-ribbon products sold to raise money for “cancer research” actually made out of cancer-causing chemicals!
#8) Where are all the cancer cures that were promised by the cancer researchers decades ago? Hint: They’re still working on them. All they need is more of your money…
#9) Fifth-grade word problem: If walking ten miles raises fifty dollars for the Susan G. Komen foundation, and if all that money goes to fund cancer screening “recruitment” events that cost $1.25 per irradiated patient, how many miles will we all have to walk in order to irradiate the breasts of 100,000 women? Bonus question: How many new chemotherapy patients will be produced from this irradiation campaign ten years down the road?
#10) If “early detection saves lives” then why are more women dying of cancer today than ever before?
#11) If mammograms are so good for women, why don’t the people who invented mammography machines puts their skulls in them and irradiate their own brains once a year to screen for brain cancer?
#12) Did you ever notice that men invented mammogram machines that smash women’s breasts and blast them with radiation? But then, did you ever wonder why there are no machines that smash men’s testicles (and other junk) and blast the whole package with radiation while calling it “early detection?”
#13) Since cancer doctors don’t track the results of patients who decide to do nothing after being diagnosed with cancer, how can they talk with any authority about the risk vs. reward of harsh chemical treatments like chemotherapy?
#14) How many false positives from cancer screening does it take to make one legitimate cancer tumor?
Click here for the full report
Recent Mammography Findings Under Fire
November 20, 2009
The Wall Street Journal
By Shirley S. Wang, Jonathan D. Rockoff and Barbara Martinez
The federally funded task force that loosened guidelines for breast-cancer screening this week clarified its position Thursday, in response to an intense backlash generated by its new recommendations.
Seeking to dispel confusion over some aspects of the new guidelines, task-force members said they never meant to convey that women in their 40s shouldn’t get mammograms, nor that they sought to discourage women from examining their breasts for signs of cancer.
Diana Petitti, a professor in biomedical informatics at Arizona State University who is vice-chairwoman of the panel — the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — said she felt its conclusions were misinterpreted.
The task force is not against women having mammograms in their 40s,” Dr. Petitti said in an interview. Instead, she said, it is in favor of women in that age range deciding on their own, after consulting with their doctors, whether to undergo regular screenings.
Similarly, the task force merely intended to signal that primary-care physicians no longer need to teach women how to conduct self-examinations because of a lack of evidence that such outreach is effective. But it didn’t mean to deter women from the practice, which can sometimes lead to the early detection of cancerous lumps.
Dr. Petitti and other panel members expressed surprise at the uproar caused by their paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, while conceding they could have handled the message better. “We probably, in retrospect, could have been more clear,” Dr. Petitti said.
The new guidelines reversed a longstanding recommendation that women in their 40s automatically undergo an annual mammogram, an X-ray used to detect breast cancers, and stated that women aged 50 to 74 could reduce the frequency of such screenings to once every two years, from once a year.
Critics of the new guidelines have complained that the task force consists entirely of primary-care experts rather than oncologists, and that the panel’s decision may lead to a decline in coverage of mammography among health insurers for women in their 40s. Some critics say the new guidelines may lead to breast-cancer deaths among women in their 40s who forgo screening.
In reaching its conclusions, task-force members said they relied on large quantities of research published since 2002. They weighed the benefits of frequent screening against the harms of false positives, such as anxiety and unnecessary additional tests and biopsies.
Click here for the full report
American Cancer Society – Non Profit or Big Business?
November 20, 2009
Cancer Prevention Coalition
By Samuel S. Epstein M. D.
The American Cancer Society is fixated on damage control— diagnosis and treatment— and basic molecular biology, with indifference or even hostility to cancer prevention. This myopic mindset is compounded by interlocking conflicts of interest with the cancer drug, mammography, and other industries. The “nonprofit” status of the Society is in sharp conflict with its high overhead and expenses, excessive reserves of assets and contributions to political parties. All attempts to reform the Society over the past two decades have failed; a national economic boycott of the Society is long overdue.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) is accumulating great wealth in its role as a “charity.” According to James Bennett, professor of economics at George Mason University and recognized authority on charitable organizations, in 1988 the ACS held a fund balance of over $400 million with about $69 million of holdings in land, buildings, and equipment (1). Of that money, the ACS spent only $90 million— 26 percent of its budget— on medical research and programs. The rest covered “operating expenses,” including about 60 percent for generous salaries, pensions, executive benefits, and overhead. By 1989, the cash reserves of the ACS were worth more than $700 million (2). In 1991, Americans, believing they were contributing to fighting cancer, gave nearly $350 million to the ACS, 6 percent more than the previous year. Most of this money comes from public donations averaging $3,500, and high-profile fund-raising campaigns such
as the springtime daffodil sale and the May relay races. However, over the last two decades, an increasing proportion of the ACS budget comes from large corporations, including the pharmaceutical, cancer drug, telecommunications, and entertainment industries.
In 1992, the American Cancer Society Foundation was created to allow the ACS to actively solicit contributions of more than $100,000. However, a close look at the heavy-hitters on the Foundation’s board will give an idea of which interests are at play and where the Foundation expects its big contributions to come from. The Foundation’s board of trustees included corporate executives from the pharmaceutical, investment, banking, and media industries. Among them:
David R. Bethune, president of Lederle Laboratories, a multinational pharmaceutical company and a division of American Cyanamid Company. Bethune is also vice president of American Cyanamid, which makes chemical fertilizers and herbicides while transforming itself into a full-fledged pharmaceutical company. In 1988, American Cyanamid introduced Novatrone, an anti-cancer drug. And in 1992, it announced that it would buy a majority of shares of Immunex, a cancer drug maker.
Multimillionaire Irwin Beck, whose father, William Henry Beck, founded the nation’s largest family-owned retail chain, Beck Stores, which analysts estimate brought in revenues of $1.7 billion in 1993.
Gordon Binder, CEO of Amgen, the world’s foremost biotechnology company, with over $1 billion in product sales in 1992. Amgen’s success rests almost exclusively on one product, Neupogen, which is administered to chemotherapy patients to stimulate their production of white blood cells. As the cancer epidemic grows, sales for Neupogen continue to skyrocket.
Diane Disney Miller, daughter of the conservative multi-millionaire Walt Disney, who died of lung cancer in 1966, and wife of Ron Miller, former president of the Walt Disney Company from 1980 to 1984.
George Dessert, famous in media circles for his former role as censor on the subject of “family values” during the 1970s and 1980s as CEO of CBS, and now chairman of the ACS board.
Alan Gevertzen, chairman of the board of Boeing, the world’s number one commercial aircraft maker with net sales of $30 billion in 1992.
Sumner M. Redstone, chairman of the board, Viacom Inc. and Viacom International Inc., a broadcasting, telecommunications, entertainment, and cable television corporation.
The results of this board’s efforts have been very successful. A million here, a million there— much of it coming from the very industries instrumental in shaping ACS policy, or profiting from it. In 1992, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that the ACS was “more interested in accumulating wealth than in saving lives.” Fund-raising appeals
routinely stated that the ACS needed more funds to support its cancer programs, all the while holding more than $750 million in cash and real estate assets (3). A 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, by Thomas DiLorenzo, professor of economics at Loyola College and veteran investigator of nonprofit organizations, revealed that the Texas affiliate of the ACS owned more than $11 million worth of assets in land and real estate, as well as more than 56 vehicles, including
11 Ford Crown Victorias for senior executives and 45 other cars assigned to staff members. Arizona’s ACS chapter spent less than 10 percent of its funds on direct community cancer services. In California, the figure was 11 percent, and under 9 percent in Missouri (4):
Thus for every $1 spent on direct service, approximately $6.40 is spent on compensation and overhead. In all ten states, salaries and fringe benefits are by far the largest single budget items, a surprising fact in light of the characterization of the appeals, which stress an urgent and critical need for donations to provide cancer services.
Nationally, only 16 percent or less of all money raised is spent on direct services to cancer victims, like driving cancer patients from the hospital after chemotherapy and providing pain medication.
Most of the funds raised by the ACS go to pay overhead, salaries, fringe benefits, and travel expenses of its national executives in Atlanta. They also go to pay chief executive officers, who earn six-figure salaries in several states, and the hundreds of other employees who work out of some 3,000 regional offices nationwide. The typical ACS affiliate, which helps raise the money for the national office, spends more than 52 percent of its budget on salaries, pensions, fringe benefits, and overhead for its own employees. Salaries and overhead for most ACS affiliates also exceeded 50 percent, although most direct community services are handled by unpaid volunteers. DiLorenzo summed up his findings by emphasizing the hoarding of funds by the ACS (4):
If current needs are not being met because of insufficient funds, as fund-raising appeals suggest, why is so much cash being hoarded? Most contributors believe their donations are being used to fight cancer, not to accumulate financial reserves. More progress in the war against cancer would be made if they would divest some of their real estate holdings and use the proceeds— as well as a portion of their cash reserves— to provide more cancer services.
Aside from high salaries and overhead, most of what is left of the ACS budget goes to basic research and research into profitable patented cancer drugs. The current budget of the ACS is $380 million and its cash reserves approach $1 billion. Yet its aggressive fund-raising campaign continues to plead poverty and lament the lack of available money for cancer research, while ignoring efforts to prevent cancer by phasing out avoidable exposures to environmental and occupational carcinogens. Meanwhile, the ACS is silent about its intricate
relationships with the wealthy cancer drug, chemical, and other industries. A March 30, 1998, Associated Press Release shed unexpected light on questionable ACS expenditures on lobbying (5). National vice president for federal and state governmental relations Linda Hay Crawford admitted that the ACS was spending “less than $1 million a year on direct lobbying.” She also admitted that over the last year, the society used ten of its own employees to lobby. “For legal
and other help, it hired the lobbying firm of Hogan & Hartson, whose roster includes former House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R– IL).” The ACS lobbying also included $30,000 donations to Democratic and Republican governors’ associations. “We wanted to look like players and be players,” explained Crawford. This practice, however, has been sharply challenged. The Associated Press release quotes the national Charities Information Bureau as stating that it” does not know of any other charity that makes contributions to political parties.”
Tax experts have warned that these contributions may be illegal, as charities are not allowed to make political donations. Marcus Owens, director of the IRS Exempt Organization Division, also warned that “The bottom line is campaign contributions will jeopardize a charity’s exempt status.”
Click here for the full report
Annual Pap Smears Thing of the Past?
November 20, 2009
ABC News
By Lauren Cox and Dr. Joshua Hundert
Pap smears may no longer be called “annuals” if doctors follow new cervical cancer screening recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The group announced today that women should start getting cervical cancer screenings at age 21 instead of 18, and that women could wait longer between the screenings — regardless of when a woman starts having sex.
Women in their 20s with normal Pap smear results now should get screenings every two years instead of every year, and women in their 30s can wait three years between screenings, according to the new ACOG guidelines.
After a week of uproar over the controversial recommendations for less mammogram screenings for women, doctors say they will have to wait and see how the public reacts to the new pap smear guidelines.
“This is not a radical change in screening practices. This is something that’s been coming gradually since the 1980s,” said Dr. Alan G. Waxman, who helped write the new guidelines.
Some doctors hailed the decision as a way to reduce a host of problems caused by excessive screening; yet, a few others worried it might trigger more women to neglect annual checkups with gynecologists.
Waxman said the move toward fewer screenings will reduce unnecessary treatment in young women and protect them from future pregnancy complications.
On one hand, college-aged women have very high HPV infection rates. Dr. John Curtin, of The Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City said 70 percent of all college-aged sexually active people have contracted HPV. These high infection rates translate into a high number of abnormal pap smears.
Overdoses of Radiation at Major Hospitals
November 20, 2009
Natural News
ByPaul Louis
For 18 months at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, patients receiving CT brain scans were unknowingly receiving radiation overdoses. The number of patients subjected to the excess radiation reached 206 before it came to the medical staff’s attention. And that was only because someone undergoing a CT scan lost patches of hair.
Some of those overexposed received twice as much radiation as what a cancer victim receives during a radiation treatment. Hospital officials attributed the excess radiation exposures to an error in the CT scan machine’s programming. But the Los Angeles incident has raised concerns about overexposure from CT and other radiation testing in the medical industry.
NYU Langone Medical Center associate professor of cardiology Dr. James Slater was shocked. “These patients received eight to ten times the normal dose for a head CT and probably reached their allowable radiation exposure for the year at a single test,” he said. “The fact this error occurred and went undetected for 18 months at a well regarded medical [institution] is rather unbelievable.”
Radiation exposure at hospitals isn’t regulated
How many more programming errors and excess radiation from too many tests can occur is anyone’s guess. The government has occupational limits for radiation exposure. But there are no government restrictions on the amount of radiation exposure for medical testing.
Dr. Gary Freedman, a radiation oncologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia explained the government’s position. “It’s assumed that medically, you do what you need to do and worry about the complications later.”
Over-testing has been a common medical practice. Diagnostic imaging has increased the average radiation dosage seven times since 1980. Too much radiation increases the risk of cancer significantly.
Diagnostic imaging tests have the potential for creating the very problem they’re looking for. This has been a concern of holistic health practitioners and aware MD’s against promoting mammogram breast cancer screening for years.
Similar false positive results were found with males undergoing prostate cancer screening. False positives lead to stress, expense, time wasted, and perhaps pain and illness until the mistake is determined.
Click here for the full report
