Senior News October, 2003 Vol. 24. No. 8

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Retirement brought her wit and wisdom to Senior News

When does Medicare pay for motorized wheelchairs or scooters?

Think About It: Thou shalt have teeth

Breast cancer misunderstanding is perpetuated

Sprouts-the lowliest can be the best

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Breast cancer misunderstanding is perpetuated
by Bill Sturgeon

For every American woman who dies of breast cancer, 13 women will die from heart attack. Four out of five breast lump biopsies report no cancer present. Is your preventive action being misdirected?

Seven times as many cancer tumors are discovered during autopsy as are discovered during the person's lifetime. These after-death discoveries were not noticed nor did they became a problem to their living hosts. Most cancers not destroyed by the immune system grow too slowly to ever be noticed. Mammography enables us to image tiny breast tumors but we cannot accurately discern which ones among them will go on to metastasize.

UK Sunday Times, July 7, 2002: "Whilst mammography detects some potentially deadly cancers, it also picks up many times more cancers that might never become symptomatic during the patient's lifetime.

"The widespread and virtually unchallenged acceptance of (mammographic) screening has resulted in a dramatic increase in the diagnosis of ductile carcinoma-in-situ (DCIS), a pre-invasive cancer, with a current estimated incidence of about 40,000 US citizens annually." However, say the authors, "Some 80 percent of all DCIS cancers never become invasive, even if left untreated."

Irwin D. Bross, PhD, former director of bio-statistics at Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Hospital, discovered that more than half of those diagnosed with breast cancer had benign lesions that were unable to spread.

"When a pathologist diagnoses a lesion as 'early breast cancer' more than half the time the pathologist is wrong-it is not actually breast cancer. What most women have is a tumor which, under a light microscope, looks like a cancer to a pathologist. Chances are this tumor lacks the ability to metastasize - to spread through out the body - which is the hallmark of a genuine cancer. "

·Breast cancer and prostate cancer are statistical twins. When the functions of these two sexual organs diminish, the cells often become abnormal and look like cancer cells."

It was PhDs, not MDs, who made this surprising finding. Bross writes, "Our discovery was highly unpopular with the medical profession. Doctors could never afford to admit the scientific truth because the standard treatment in those days was radical mastectomy. Admitting the truth could lead to malpractice suits by women who had lost a breast because of an incorrect medical diagnosis."

A chemotherapy injection will kill a percentage of the cancer cells remaining in the body but never all of them. The goal is to kill cells so the immune system is not overwhelmed, allowing it to then take care of the remaining residue of cancer cells. But chemotherapy drugs exhaust the immune system and render it incapable of killing the remaining cancer cells.

Before you choose to go on a chemotherapy regime, ask to read the package inserts for the drugs proposed. You will need a magnifying glass and a medical dictionary, and what you learn will influence your decision. If you wait until you receive a cancer diagnosis you will suddenly become very busy. Learn the fine art of prevention which is many times more cost-effective than treatment.

Bill Sturgeon of Petrolia lost his whole family to cancer. He is a medical device manufacturer and health science writer and may be reached at sturgeon@ asis.com or 629-3434.