39 replies to this topic

[stocks]

Steve Jobs' trust in alternative medicine likely shortened his life, researcher contends

According to a 2008 Fortune article, Jobs for nine months pursued "alternative methods to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping to avoid [an] operation through a special diet." The Buddhist vegetarian took this approach from the time he was diagnosed in October 2003 until at least the end of July 2004, when he underwent surgery at Stanford University Medical Center.


The condition might have been nipped in the bud if Jobs had acted right away. Jobs's cancer manifest in neuroendocrine tumors, which are typically far less lethal than the "pancreatic adenocarcinoma" that make up 95 percent of pancreatic cancer cases. Amri said neuroendocrine tumors are so "mild" that...

"In my series of patients, for many subtypes, the survival rate was as high as 100% over a decade...


Jobs

[stocks]

Misdiagnosed with aggressive stomach cancer

Man told he has stomach cancer
Doctors remove 80 per cent of stomach
Tests show he never had cancer

"After independent pathological review the biopsies taken during the gastroscopy, the biopsy findings were wrong in that there was never any evidence of malignancy," the claim says.

Maurice Blackburn lawyer Anna Walsh said Mr Lord received an apology from the pathologist who originally reported on his tissue samples after Central Coast Local Health District had investigated the alleged incident.


Read more: http://www.news.com....9#ixzz1dak5psEU

[stocks]

Argentina's President Fernandez sent home, never had cancer

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez never had cancer despite being diagnosed with the disease last month and having her thyroid gland removed on January 4, her spokesman said on Saturday.

The operation to remove the gland went well, but when it was later analyzed it turned out to have never contained cancerous cells, said spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro.


cancer

[stocks]

Cochrane Colloboration -- Screening for breast cancer with mammography

... for every 2000 women invited for screening throughout 10 years:

1 will have her life prolonged
10 healthy women will be diagnosed as breast cancer patients and will be treated unnecessarily
200 women will experience important psychological distress for many months because of false positive findings

Expert branded a "woman hater" for saying breast cancer screening ruins lives

‘It is a biological fact of life that we cannot avoid getting cancer as we get older,’ says Professor Gotzsche.

‘It’s so common nearly all middle-aged people will have some sign of it and most of them will die without having had any symptoms as a result.’

In other words, scanning finds cancerous changes that would otherwise never have caused a problem in your lifetime.

But once a mammogram picks up something that might be a tumour, you’re on your way to becoming a cancer patient because there are no reliable ways of telling if you’ve got the slow-growing or disappearing type, or if it is going to become dangerously invasive.

You will be sent for a biopsy and, if it’s cancerous, you get the full cancer works — surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and possibly have your breast removed.

Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz1qKBh7SJ2

[stocks]

Doctors call for end to five cancer tests, treatments

As much as 30 percent of health-care spending goes to procedures, tests, and hospital stays that do not improve a patient's health, according to a 2008 analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget office.

Although the task force emphasized that its recommendations -- winnowed from about 10 suggestions by oncologists -- were driven by medical considerations, the report makes clear that expense was a major factor. A number of cancer drugs cost nearly $100,000 but extend life a few months or not at all. Widely-used imaging tests cost up to $5,000 yet do not benefit patients.

ASCO recommends against routine use of four other procedures: chemotherapy for patients with advanced cancers who are unlikely to benefit; advanced imaging technologies such as CT and PET or bone scans to determine the precise stage of both early breast and prostate cancers at low risk for metastasis; and drugs to stimulate white blood cell production in patients receiving chemotherapy if they have a risk of febrile neutropenia, an often-fatal condition marked by fever and abnormally low numbers of certain white blood cells.

The supporting evidence for each recommendation is expected to surprise patients and even some physicians, since these very widely-used tests and treatments have little or no scientific basis, said Schnipper.

One recommendation likely to stir controversy, and even revive charges of "death panels," is to not use chemotherapy and other treatments in patients with advanced solid-tumor cancers such as colorectal or lung who are in poor health and did not benefit from previous chemo.

Such treatment is widespread. At one large health maintenance organization, for instance, 49 percent of patients with a common form of lung cancer but with poor "performance status" (they were largely confined to a bed or chair and capable of only limited self-care) received chemo. Research shows, however, that it is unlikely to extend their life or improve its quality.


http://news.yahoo.co...-041258011.html

[stocks]

Sexually Transmitted HPV Virus Now a More Common Cause of Throat and Oral Cancer Than Tobacco

According to a January report from the American Cancer Society, which found a rise in oral cancer caused by HPV in both women and men. As the report said, as of 2004, 72 percent of oral cancer tumors were HPV-positive -- up from 16 percent of tumors in data collected between 1984 and 1989.

Previously, excessive drinking and tobacco use were the most common causes of the throat cancer, but HPV has replaced tobacco as the leading cause of throat cancers. HPV's rise as the leading cause of oral cancer is not just the result of growing rates of the virus -- it is also explained by drops in smoking, thanks to public health campaigns that describe the dangers of cigarette use.

Despite the growing rates of oral cancer, cases are still relatively rare, with about 7,100 new cases each year, reported USA Today. But that doesn't mean oral HPV infection is rare: According to a 2012 study of Americans, aged 14 to 69, about 10 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women currently have an oral HPV infection.

http://www.huffingto..._n_3377980.html

[Rogerdodger]

So I guess now I'll have to quit smoking too?

[Rogerdodger]

So I guess now I'll have to quit smoking too?

Sorry,
My picture of Monica Lewinsky smoking a cigar disappeared.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 13 June 2013 - 12:46 PM.

[stocks]

A group of experts advising the nation’s premier cancer research institution has recommended changing the definition of cancer and eliminating the word from some common diagnoses as part of sweeping changes in the nation’s approach to cancer detection and treatment.

Officials at the National Cancer Institute say overdiagnosis is a major public health concern and a priority of the agency. “We’re still having trouble convincing people that the things that get found as a consequence of mammography and P.S.A. testing and other screening devices are not always malignancies in the classical sense that will kill you,” said Dr. Harold E. Varmus, the Nobel Prize-winning director of the National Cancer Institute.

The advent of highly sensitive screening technology in recent years has increased the likelihood of finding these so-called incidentalomas — the name given to incidental findings detected during medical scans that most likely would never cause a problem. However, once doctors and patients are aware a lesion exists, they typically feel compelled to biopsy, treat and remove it, often at great physical and psychological pain and risk to the patient. The issue is often referred to as overdiagnosis, and the resulting unnecessary procedures to which patients are subjected are called overtreatment.

“Which cases of D.C.I.S. will turn into an aggressive cancer and which ones won’t?” he said, referring to ductal carcinoma in situ. “I wish we knew that. We don’t have very accurate ways of looking at tissue and looking at tumors under the microscope and knowing with great certainty that it is a slow-growing cancer.”



http://well.blogs.ny...treatment/?_r=0

[stocks]

Should I Be Tested for Cancer?: Maybe Not and Here's Why

Gilbert Welch, M.D., Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, written while he was a Visiting Scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer - the cancer section of the WHO in Lyon, France.

H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, has written an unusually understandable revelation of the folly of testing for cancer in people with no symptoms. He explains how only a few people will benefit from common tests such as PSA, fecal blood, mammograms and others. He is enough of an insider to be able to explain the flaws in clinical trials being used by "authorities" to recommend extensive testing, and the lack of trials in some cases. The unneccessary biopsies, surgeries, radiations, chemotherapies for slow-growing cancers or even non-malignant ones are presented bravely.

The deaths caused by cancer treatment are aired. This is something very few people, even MDs, know. Even when a treatment can cut the deaths from a particular cancer in half, most current treatments create non-cancer deaths, many of which will be improperly reported.

There are good explanations of how 5-year survival rates are calculated, how age-adjustments are made, how randomization for trials is done, and other things not even taught in medical school, but reserved for medical researchers.


http://www.amazon.co...e/dp/0520248368

Breast Cancer Screenings: What We Still Don’t Know

By Gilbert Welch

Among a thousand 50-year-old American women screened annually for a decade:

3.2 to 0.3 will avoid a breast cancer death,
490 to 670 will have at least one false alarm and
3 to 14 will be overdiagnosed and treated needlessly.

That's not very precise, and it doesn’t answer the fundamental question: Now that treatment is so much better, how much benefit does screening actually provide? What we need is a clinical trial in the current treatment era.

Most experts would say that it’s never going to happen. It would cost too much, take too long and need too many subjects.

Maybe they are right. But maybe not. Sure, it would cost millions of dollars. But that’s chicken feed compared with the billions of dollars we spend on breast cancer screening every year. Sure, it would take 10 to 15 years. But it would help our daughters know more. Sure, it would take tens of thousands of women to participate.



http://www.nytimes.c.../...Ir3mJn&_r=0