Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Still Covering up the Risks, after all these years

My apologies to Paul Simon for taking off with part of a line from his song, Still Crazy After All These Years, but it seems very appropriate.

I may be called crazy for my positions from time to time but you run that risk when you try to educate people about reality, against the grain of the mass marketing of things that may not really do the job, or cause more harm.

This past weekend I was in Spokane, WA participating in a workshop on various aspects of survival. My section of the program was about natural health care, of course.

While waiting for the program to begin I noticed many women walking in the direction of the new convention center for the women's show, all dressed up in their pink.

I do happen to like certain shades of pink, especially magenta, but I am one not easily swayed by a massive PR campaign that has been operating for too many years, with less than stellar outcomes.

One of the items on the fund raising agenda of the Woman's Show and the Sunday replay of the 'Race for the Cure' was new mammography equipment for Sacred Heart Hospital. I am sure this is an agenda items in most places promoting the 'Race'.

While I am not opposed to raising money for women's health, or other health care concerns, I am opposed to institutionalized campaigns that - in effect - do not achieve the goal as stated.

Ladies, mammogram causes cancer! Why is there no fund raising for Thermography machines that detect earlier, don't promote cancer, and don't force you to compress breast tissue?

Ladies, there is no cure because if one had been found the cash pipeline would disappear.

Ladies, please get educated.

Start here with one of my old fact sheets.

Think Before You Pink –

For well more than a decade I have been teaching women about the facts - and risks - of industrialized medicine. Part of this system is the approach to breast cancer and other supposedly helpful treatments for conditions we are told are risks to our health.

Much of this is far from truth, as is, for instance the information I was given while a college student, that breast cancer would be cured by 1972.

Since this isn't what happened I would like to share some facts for your consideration because mammography offers marginal benefit, the risk is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous."

“…Mammograms increase the risk for developing breast cancer and raise the risk of spreading or metastasizing an existing growth,' says Dr. Charles B. Simone, a former clinical associate in immunology and pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute...“…the annual mammography screening of 10,000 women aged 50-70 will extend the lives of, at best, 26 of them; and annual screening of 10,000 women in their 40s will extend the lives of only 12 women per year."

In a Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of tumors detected by mammography weren't tumors at all. These "false positives" aren't just financial and emotional strains, they may also lead to many unnecessary and invasive biopsies. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of all positive mammograms do not, upon biopsy, show any presence of cancer. Remember also that it takes 8 to 12 years for a 'tumor' to be detected by x-ray.

For some reason mammography-centric medicine has completely overlooked the much safer thermal and infrared imaging technologies... Further no comments are made regarding dangers of X-Ray exposure. An allegation that breast screening is being over-promoted to women who are not being alerted to the harm that can result was published in the British Medical Journal several years ago.

Hazel Thornton, a former breast cancer patient and visiting fellow at the University of Leicester, and Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College, London, and a long-time critic of screening, have teamed up with a colleague to demand information for women that sets out the risks and benefits. They cite evidence showing 1,200 women would have to be screened for 14 years to save one life from breast cancer while during that time scores would suffer anxiety, surgery and mastectomies for suspicious lumps that turned out to be benign.

In 1978, Irwin J. D. Bross, Director of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research commented about the cancer screening program: "The women should have been given the information about the hazards of radiation at the same time they were given the sales talk for mammography... A jump to the exposure of a quarter of a million persons to something which could do more harm than good was criminal and it was supported by money from the federal government and the American Cancer Society."

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) was warned in 1974 by Professor Malcolm C. Pike at the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. A number of specialists concluded that "giving women under age 50 a mammogram on a routine basis is close to unethical." Repeat... The experts in the government were told not to do this to healthy women in the YEAR 1974! The warning was ignored.

"Over 280,000 women were recruited without being told that no benefit of mammography had been shown in a controlled trial for women below 50, and without being warned about the potential risk of induction of breast cancer by the test which was supposed to detect it ...in women below 50…mammography gives no benefit..."

Mammography was known to cause cancer but the media and government "health officials" stayed silent! The mammography policy pushed by the American Cancer Society to fill its bank account remained the U.S. government policy for ten more years until a massive Canadian study showed conclusively what was known 20 YEARS earlier (1972) but what was not in the interests of ACS and NCI to admit: X- raying the breasts of women younger than age 50 provided no benefit and probably endangered their lives.

1992. Dr. Samuel Epstein “…The high sensitivity of the breast, especially in young women, to radiation induced cancer was known by 1970, based on research by John Gofman PhD, MD. Nevertheless, the establishment then screened some 300,000 women with x-ray dosages so high as to increase breast cancer risk by up to 20 percent in women aged 40 to 50 who had mammogram annually. Women were given no warning whatever; how many subsequently developed breast cancer remains uninvestigated. “…Additionally, the establishment ignores safe and effective alternatives to mammography, particularly trans-illumination with infrared scanning.

“…For most cancers, survival has not changed for decades. Contrary claims are based on rubber numbers."

Find more information about the risks of breast screening at http://www.leaflady.org/women.htm

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