(NaturalNews) A new study shows that the increasingly popular practice of "preventive mastectomy" in non-cancerous breasts provides no benefit to the vast majority of women.
"It's important for women to understand that, except for one subset of breast cancer patients, they don't need to do this," said lead author Isabelle Bedrosian of University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. "Hopefully, it'll reassure patients wondering if they should."
Approximately 40,000 women die from breast cancer in the United States each year, and another 200,000 cases are diagnosed. Because cancer in one breast is known to increase the risk of cancer recurrence in the other breast, doctors are increasingly recommending that cancer survivors opt to have both breasts removed as a "preventive" measure. And women are opting for it in huge numbers, seeking the peace of mind that it is said to offer.
The number of preventive mastectomies in the United States increased two-and-a-half-fold between 1998 and 2003. Today, 11 percent of all women undergoing a mastectomy on a cancerous breast choose to have the non-cancerous breast removed as well. Analysts have attributed this increase to more advanced screening techniques that detect cancers smaller and earlier; popularization of genetic screening and the idea that some genes may predispose families to breast cancer; and wider public acceptance of plastic surgery combined with advances in reconstructive technology.
Yet while it has been strongly established that elective mastectomy does reduce the risk of breast-cancer recurrence, there has been no research to suggest that it actually lengthens a woman's life span.
"We have not had real data to guide us," Bedrosian said. "We can't sit down with a woman and say, 'If you do this, this is your expected benefit.' And when we don't have those data, then biases become the big drivers of decision making."
In the new study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Bedrosian and colleagues analyzed the records of 107,106 women in the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registry. All the women had undergone a mastectomy to treat breast cancer of Stage III or lower; 8,902 had chosen to have a healthy breast removed, as well.
After controlling for other risk factors, the researchers found only a small difference in survival rates between women who had chosen to have two breasts removed and women who had chosen to have only one removed. Upon further analysis, they discovered that this benefit was only present in women under the age of 50 with estrogen receptor-negative, early-stage tumors. In this group, elective mastectomy increased the survival rate by 4.8 percent, amounting to just under five lives saved for every 100 surgeries.
Elective mastectomy provided no survival benefit to women outside this demographic.
The researchers believe that even when cancers recur, most women will not be killed by them but will instead die of other causes first. Only in women whose cancers lack estrogen receptors and who would otherwise have long lives ahead of them does recurrence appear to pose a serious threat to survival.
The most effective breast cancer drugs on the market are those that lower the body's production of estrogen, which fuels the growth of many cancers. Tumors that lack estrogen receptors do not depend on the hormone for their growth, however, meaning that women with these cancers cannot use the most effective drugs and tend to have higher mortality rates.
Breast-cancer specialist Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City expressed skepticism about the study's methodology and cautioned against doctors and patients giving it too much weight.
"This is an observational study, and hence it is impossible to control for confounding variables," Norton said, "and should not be used for individual clinical decisionmaking."
Norton admitted, however, that ethics make it impossible to perform a true controlled study on the question, since such an experiment might end up increasing cancer mortality in one group of participants.
Bedrosian disputed Norton's criticism, noting that the researchers used rigorous statistical analysis and controlled well for interference from other variables. She believes that the conclusions are, in fact, strong enough to help women make better-informed decisions about elective mastectomy.
"We looked at this in multiple different ways, and we got the same answer every time. And the results make good clinical sense. That adds another level of reassurance," she said. "Our hope is that when women hear the numbers, they will take a second look and decide not to go forward with a preventive mastectomy [in their healthy breast] if it won't give them a survival benefit."
Victor Vogel, national vice president for research at the American Cancer Society, said the results suggest that women should wait a full year before going through with the removal of a healthy breast.
"In a younger woman with [estrogen receptor]-negative disease, an [elective} mastectomy may be considered," he said. "In the vast majority of women older than 50 with ER-positive disease, prudent waiting is probably the most appropriate."
Bedrosian said that the point of the study was not to impose "a uniform mandate" that women should never get the procedure, but that their decisions must be well informed.
"This is still a decision to be made by the patient after talking with her doctor," Bedrosian said.
"We hope this study helps women make better decisions [and] provides some reassurance that perhaps a [preventive] mastectomy is not necessary, perhaps overly aggressive and perhaps a bit too much."
Sources for this story include: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl... http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/art... http://www.time.com/time/health/art....
Showing posts with label Scam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scam. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Conventional doctor's faith in Big Pharma shattered after Glaxo's latest scams
(NaturalNews) Writing in Forbes magazine, Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz notes that in spite of his desire to believe in the good intentions of the pharmaceutical industry, the actions of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline continue to disappoint him.
"I want to believe in America's pharmaceutical companies," Krumholz wrote on Feb.25. "I want to believe that people in these companies believe that the best strategy for success is to do what is best for patients. I want to believe that they are interested in scientific truth and eager to know of any safety issues and ready to share that information with the public.
"This week I was disappointed again."
Krumholz was referring to a report, issued by the Senate Finance Committee, concluding that even as Glaxo scientists were voicing warnings about the safety of the blockbuster diabetes drug Avandia, the company was taking aggressive measures to discredit critics who publicly raised similar concerns.
"The pages of the Senate report read like a spy novel: Glaxo receiving confidential documents leaked by a sympathetic academic who consulted for the company; the company embarking on a campaign to intimidate critics who warned about potential safety issues with the drug; and executives pulling strings to release data early from a scientific study that was supposedly controlled by an 'independent' committee of researchers," Krumholz said.
The report drew on more than 250,000 internal company documents.
In his article, Krumholz calls for an end to secrecy and intimidation in pharmaceutical research. He calls for all studies conducted on a drug to be made public for independent review once that drug secures FDA approval. He calls for an end to company interference in the studies they finance, and an end to intimidation of academics who question drugs' safety.
"The free flow of information about the effects of drugs . . . will best serve the public's interest," he concludes.
Sources for this story include: http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/24/di....
"I want to believe in America's pharmaceutical companies," Krumholz wrote on Feb.25. "I want to believe that people in these companies believe that the best strategy for success is to do what is best for patients. I want to believe that they are interested in scientific truth and eager to know of any safety issues and ready to share that information with the public.
"This week I was disappointed again."
Krumholz was referring to a report, issued by the Senate Finance Committee, concluding that even as Glaxo scientists were voicing warnings about the safety of the blockbuster diabetes drug Avandia, the company was taking aggressive measures to discredit critics who publicly raised similar concerns.
"The pages of the Senate report read like a spy novel: Glaxo receiving confidential documents leaked by a sympathetic academic who consulted for the company; the company embarking on a campaign to intimidate critics who warned about potential safety issues with the drug; and executives pulling strings to release data early from a scientific study that was supposedly controlled by an 'independent' committee of researchers," Krumholz said.
The report drew on more than 250,000 internal company documents.
In his article, Krumholz calls for an end to secrecy and intimidation in pharmaceutical research. He calls for all studies conducted on a drug to be made public for independent review once that drug secures FDA approval. He calls for an end to company interference in the studies they finance, and an end to intimidation of academics who question drugs' safety.
"The free flow of information about the effects of drugs . . . will best serve the public's interest," he concludes.
Sources for this story include: http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/24/di....
Friday, January 22, 2010
H1N1 swine flu hoax falls apart at the seams
(NaturalNews) The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.
Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on FoxNews, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies "organized a 'campaign of panic' to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is 'one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,' and he has called for an inquiry." (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933...)
H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it...)
And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that's now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.
In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...)
That's $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.
The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.
Meanwhile, countless people were harmed by the swine flu vaccine frenzy (it's "countless" because nobody's counting). In addition to those who were nearly paralyzed after receiving the vaccine shots, grade school staffers in Massachusetts who lined up to receive swine flu vaccine shots were instead injected with insulin. (Insulin injections can put you into a coma.) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...)
The school sent a letter home to staffers and parents blaming the mishap on the school nurse. But if they weren't injecting people with a useless vaccine for a non-pandemic, none of this would have happened in the first place. (Editor's note: The press originally reported this story as "children" being injected with insulin, but they later changed their report to "staffers." This paragraph has been updated to reflect that change.)
Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H...). In fact, according to calculations derived from official CDC estimates, thousands of vaccinated Americans died from swine flu anyway. The vaccines, it seems, don't really work after all. You're just as safe doing nothing.
Actually, getting the vaccine may harm your health. Outspoken Dr. Wodarg even says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. "The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now," he says.
Just what we need, huh? Cancer cells being injected into the population as part of a vaccine campaign.
The swine flu hoax was a huge success not only for drug company profits, but also for certain influential individuals including Dr Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC who has now accepted a high-paying job
as the president of Merck's global vaccine operations. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D...)
One minute you're running the CDC, warning the country about a pandemic while urging everybody to get vaccinated, and the next minute you're running the for-profit vaccine division of the world's largest drug company. Amazing how that works, huh?
http://www.naturalnews.com/Dont_Inj...
Or watch on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXm...
As I stated in the song lyrics, which were written in early August, 2009:
The truth is outrageous
Don't you know the drug companies made this flu
Don't you know the swine flu is made by man
Pharmaceutical scam
It's all part of the Big Brother population plan
They don't want you to see the remedies
you can stop influenza with vitamin D for free
Herbal medicine is all that you need
But they can't charge a fifty dollar fee
Unless
They inject you
The big drug companies are makin' a killing
Collectin' the billions and gettin' away like a James Bond villain
Cuz' they're willin' to do almost anything
Just to make money with the flu vaccine
Many clueless critics thought this song was some sort of outrageous conspiracy rant at the time. Turns out it was a spot-on prediction of the truth behind The Great Swine Flu hoax of 2009.
Sources for this story include:
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933...
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...
Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on FoxNews, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies "organized a 'campaign of panic' to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is 'one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,' and he has called for an inquiry." (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933...)
H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it...)
And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that's now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.
In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...)
That's $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.
A bailout for Big Pharma
Wall Street hucksters have nothing on Big Pharma, the CDC and the WHO, all of which conspired to mislead the public and generate irrational fear in order to make money selling people vaccine shots they never needed in the first place.The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.
Meanwhile, countless people were harmed by the swine flu vaccine frenzy (it's "countless" because nobody's counting). In addition to those who were nearly paralyzed after receiving the vaccine shots, grade school staffers in Massachusetts who lined up to receive swine flu vaccine shots were instead injected with insulin. (Insulin injections can put you into a coma.) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...)
The school sent a letter home to staffers and parents blaming the mishap on the school nurse. But if they weren't injecting people with a useless vaccine for a non-pandemic, none of this would have happened in the first place. (Editor's note: The press originally reported this story as "children" being injected with insulin, but they later changed their report to "staffers." This paragraph has been updated to reflect that change.)
Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H...). In fact, according to calculations derived from official CDC estimates, thousands of vaccinated Americans died from swine flu anyway. The vaccines, it seems, don't really work after all. You're just as safe doing nothing.
Actually, getting the vaccine may harm your health. Outspoken Dr. Wodarg even says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. "The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now," he says.
Just what we need, huh? Cancer cells being injected into the population as part of a vaccine campaign.
Cancelling vaccine orders
The Swine Flu hoax has fizzled out, and countries like Greece, France and the UK have cancelled orders for vaccines that they now realize won't be needed (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8...). But even the fizzling of this hoax doesn't mean it was a failure from the point of view of Big Pharma.The swine flu hoax was a huge success not only for drug company profits, but also for certain influential individuals including Dr Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC who has now accepted a high-paying job
as the president of Merck's global vaccine operations. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D...)
One minute you're running the CDC, warning the country about a pandemic while urging everybody to get vaccinated, and the next minute you're running the for-profit vaccine division of the world's largest drug company. Amazing how that works, huh?
We called it right
I called much of this months ago in my popular hip-hop song, "Don't Inject Me" which you can listen to here:http://www.naturalnews.com/Dont_Inj...
Or watch on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXm...
As I stated in the song lyrics, which were written in early August, 2009:
The truth is outrageous
Don't you know the drug companies made this flu
Don't you know the swine flu is made by man
Pharmaceutical scam
It's all part of the Big Brother population plan
They don't want you to see the remedies
you can stop influenza with vitamin D for free
Herbal medicine is all that you need
But they can't charge a fifty dollar fee
Unless
They inject you
The big drug companies are makin' a killing
Collectin' the billions and gettin' away like a James Bond villain
Cuz' they're willin' to do almost anything
Just to make money with the flu vaccine
Many clueless critics thought this song was some sort of outrageous conspiracy rant at the time. Turns out it was a spot-on prediction of the truth behind The Great Swine Flu hoax of 2009.
Sources for this story include:
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933...
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...
Friday, December 4, 2009
RealAge scheme exposed by NY Times
(NaturalNews) A popular online age quiz, RealAge, has gained notoriety among many Americans for its claims to pinpoint a person's true biological age and make corresponding recommendations for staying healthy and young. Research into the company reveals, however, that while the site itself promotes non-medical solutions to staying young, the company generates revenue by marketing drugs to its members via email.
The quiz is designed to assign a biological age to a person through a series of questions that assess lifestyle preferences, eating habits, and family history. Once compiled, the survey will offer advice on which vitamins to take, what to eat for meals, and how to improve youthfulness. Over 27 million people have taken the quiz and roughly nine million have signed up to become members.
Once a member, a person receives custom-tailored emails that use that person's quiz answers to make drug recommendations based on current symptoms and potential disease propensities. Drug companies pay RealAge to send marketing emails directly to members without any formal diagnosis from the members' doctors.
The quiz is heavily marketed by the company's spokesman, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as by advertisements strewn across the internet. Once at the site, guests are required to submit an email address in order to take the test and are continually asked if they wish to receive a free membership to RealAge. Those who accept have their email addresses entered into the marketing database and may then receive commercial email marketing messages pushing pharmaceuticals.
Andy Mikulak, the vice president for marketing at RealAge, stated that the primary focus of this type of email marketing is to reach what he terms the "undiagnosed at-risk patient". In other words, those who aren't necessarily ill are manipulated into thinking that they might be in order to sell more drugs.
The ties between RealAge and the pharmaceutical companies that use it for marketing purposes is not openly disclosed, typifying the practice as both manipulative and dishonest. Drug companies have a long-standing reputation for deceptive marketing behavior and RealAge appears to be perfectly aligned with Big Pharma's marketing tactics.
Sources for this story include
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/t...
The quiz is designed to assign a biological age to a person through a series of questions that assess lifestyle preferences, eating habits, and family history. Once compiled, the survey will offer advice on which vitamins to take, what to eat for meals, and how to improve youthfulness. Over 27 million people have taken the quiz and roughly nine million have signed up to become members.
Once a member, a person receives custom-tailored emails that use that person's quiz answers to make drug recommendations based on current symptoms and potential disease propensities. Drug companies pay RealAge to send marketing emails directly to members without any formal diagnosis from the members' doctors.
Luring in customers for Big Pharma
Attracted by promises of living longer and changing their lives for the better, people continue flocking to take the RealAge quiz despite the fact that its underlying purpose is to provide detailed, personal health details to drug companies looking for new customers. The crafty manner in which the quiz was constructed entices people to provide personal information many normally wouldn't.The quiz is heavily marketed by the company's spokesman, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as by advertisements strewn across the internet. Once at the site, guests are required to submit an email address in order to take the test and are continually asked if they wish to receive a free membership to RealAge. Those who accept have their email addresses entered into the marketing database and may then receive commercial email marketing messages pushing pharmaceuticals.
Andy Mikulak, the vice president for marketing at RealAge, stated that the primary focus of this type of email marketing is to reach what he terms the "undiagnosed at-risk patient". In other words, those who aren't necessarily ill are manipulated into thinking that they might be in order to sell more drugs.
The ties between RealAge and the pharmaceutical companies that use it for marketing purposes is not openly disclosed, typifying the practice as both manipulative and dishonest. Drug companies have a long-standing reputation for deceptive marketing behavior and RealAge appears to be perfectly aligned with Big Pharma's marketing tactics.
Sources for this story include
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/t...
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