Healthy men should no longer receive a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer because the test does not save lives over all and often leads to more tests and treatments that needlessly cause pain, impotence and incontinence in many, a key government health panel has decided.

The draft recommendation, by the United States Preventive Services Task Force and due for official release next week, is based on the results of five well-controlled clinical trials and could substantially change the care given to men 50 and older. There are 44 million such men in the United States, and 33 million of them have already had a P.S.A. test — sometimes without their knowledge — during routine physicals. Continue reading →

When it comes to health care, there is an oft-sung mantra: “We have received little return from the investment of health care dollars!” Nor, the chorus fervently adds, have we cured cancer or heart disease.

One of the most recent singers of this old song is David Brooks, who breathlessly extolled a tender essay by a dying man weighing the end of his life on the scale of human and economic costs.

Then there’s Dennis Callahan, an advocate of “we have spent too much for so little.” Callahan has argued that it is against the natural order of things to extend marginal lives in pallid substitution for actually finding cures. Continue reading →

In 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer; the National Cancer Act was enacted and the national cancer program was born. An impressive $1.6 billion dollars were allocated to the program for the first three years alone, and its director even reported directly to the President.

So, after 40 years, how has the war on cancer fared?

One would think that after four decades of fervent research and countless billions of dollars spent, we would have this dreadful disease under control. Just think of the rapid explosion of ideas and innovations within other technology areas. Your cell phone is now more powerful than the largest supercomputers of that time, for example. Continue reading →

‘I feel normal, like I did 10 years before I was diagnosed…. This clinical trial saved my life.‘

PHILADELPHIA — A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins. Continue reading →

The World Health Organization announced today that cell phones pose a significant risk of causing cancer.

Cell phones are now labeled under “carcinogenic hazard,” just like lead and chloroform.

You can download the full WHO report below. Continue reading →

A new study finds that many women with early breast cancer do not need a painful procedure that has long been routine: removal of cancerous lymph nodes from the armpit.

The discovery turns standard medical practice on its head. Surgeons have been removing lymph nodes from under the arms of breast cancer patients for 100 years, believing it would prolong women’s lives by keeping the cancer from spreading or coming back.

Now, researchers report that for women who meet certain criteria — about 20 percent of patients, or 40,000 women a year in the United States — taking out cancerous nodes has no advantage. It does not change the treatment plan, improve survival or make the cancer less likely to recur. And it can cause complications like infection and lymphedema, a chronic swelling in the arm that ranges from mild to disabling. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON — Doctors told Ann B. Maddox that she had thyroid cancer and that the cure was to swallow radioactive iodine, to kill the malignant cells. She traveled 500 miles from her home in Fayetteville, N.C., for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

After she was treated with iodine for cancer, she could not go home by plane.

Then began a problem: what do you do when you cannot go home and you are radioactive? Continue reading →

Note: Is this the beginning of even more sub-standard care, due to the onset of what is now commonly called, “Obama Care“? (Ed.)

BREAST CANCER patients in some states may soon lose Medicare coverage for the expensive drug Avastin, after the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to revoke the drug’s approval for that disease.

Palmetto, one of the companies that determine Medicare coverage for different regions, said in a notice posted on its Web site that it would no longer pay for use of Avastin to treat breast cancer starting Jan. 29.

The decision affects South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, California, Nevada and Hawaii, according to Genentech, the manufacturer of the drug. The company said it understood that women already on the drug or who start treatment before Jan. 29 would be able to complete their course of treatment but no new patients would be covered after that. Continue reading →

Cancer Recovery
The stricken cancer victim and their family members have been so deceived by the Establishment that they are completely brainwashed and put in overwhelming fear.

Second, another parameter we often forget is, once a cancer victim or family member has awakened from this imprisoned condition – they trust no one. Third, most of these individuals expect and demand immediate results or they go on to other therapies. Continue reading →

Where patients live in U.S. may decide where they die, new study says

WASHINGTON — One third of U.S. patients dying of cancer end up getting costly but futile treatment in hospitals, when hospice care to ease their suffering would be more appropriate, researchers reported on Tuesday.

The Dartmouth Atlas, a project that studies and documents variations in medical care across the United States, also found that where cancer patients live may decide the way they die: in an emergency room or at home.

The latest study finds that 29 percent of patients with advanced cancer died in a hospital between 2003 and 2007. Continue reading →

Editor’s NOTE: The reference to a ”100% cure rate in Terminal Panceatic Malignancies‘?is based upon the 1986 Memorial Sloan Kettering review of Dr. Kelley’s Pancreatic Cases, conducted by Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez.

Kathy P. Fairbanks, Ph.D.: What is Cancer: “Cancer is a process misunderstood by the medical community. Cancer is classified by the medical community, as a fast-growing malignant tumor, which, if allowed to grow unchecked, will cause death.”

Many clinicians believe that cancer is a complex: a number of different diseases, each having it’s own cause. Most doctors, even research scientists, suppose such things as viruses, X-rays cigarette smoking chemicals, sunlight, and trauma causes cancer. However there are a growing number of cancer researchers who believe that these factors, rather than causing cancer, are indirect stimulators of a normal trophoblast-like pleuripotential cell. This trophoblast-like cell then makes its “faIse placenta”, a malignant tumor mass, which the medical community calls cancer. Continue reading →

BARCELONA, Spain – Up to a third of breast cancer cases in Western countries could be avoided if women ate less and exercised more, researchers at a breast cancer conference said Thursday, renewing debate on a sensitive topic.

While better treatments, early diagnosis and mammogram screenings have dramatically slowed the disease, experts said the focus should now shift to changing behaviors like diet and physical activity. The comments added to a series of findings that lifestyle changes in areas such as smoking, eating, exercise and sun exposure can have a significant effect on all sorts of cancer rates.

“What can be achieved with screening has been achieved. We can’t do much more,” Carlo La Vecchia, head of epidemiology at the University of Milan, told The Associated Press. “It’s time to move onto other things.” Continue reading →

Cancer isn’t a battle, a fight. It’s simply life — life raised to a higher power.

We’re all familiar with sentences like this one: Mr. Smith died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. We think we know what it means, but we read it and hear it so often that it carries little weight, bears no meaning. It’s one of the clichés of cancer.

It is easy shorthand. But it says more about the writer or speaker than it does about the deceased. We like to say that people “fight” cancer because we wrestle fearfully with the notion of ever having the disease. We have turned cancer into one of our modern devils. Continue reading →

Although new cancer therapies have nearly doubled the life expectancy for those with advanced colorectal cancer, their staggering costs may keep the drugs out of reach for some patients, according to an editorial in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

With older chemotherapy regimens, patients with advanced disease lived an average of one year, at a cost of $63 for an initial eight-week treatment. A newer drug regimen has extended survival to 21 months, but at a cost of $12,000, the editorial says.

Drugs such as Erbitux and Avastin, approved in February, may allow patients to live even longer. Adding Avastin to standard chemotherapy, however, raises the price to $21,000; Erbitux combinations bring the total to $31,000, according to the article, written by Deborah Schrag of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Treating all 56,000 Americans with advanced colorectal cancer could total $1.2 billion. Continue reading →

ATLANTA, GA – The number of Americans diagnosed annually with cancer will double over the next 50 years, from 1.3 million to 2.6 million, according to a new study that warns of an intense burden on the health care system.

The expected boom reflects a population that will be larger and live longer – rather than suggesting that cancer itself will become more menacing.

Government and private researchers analyzed census data and applied it to newly compiled cancer statistics to make the projections, which appear Wednesday in the journal Cancer. Continue reading →