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Today I want to share with you the story of a very brave young boy and his equally courageous family. His name is Connah Broom and his story is both a wonderful testament to the power of love and the human spirit and a sad indictment of the ignorance and bias to be found within the conventional medical community when it comes to alternative cancer therapies.
I recently became aware of Connah when I came upon a link to a feature article about him that appeared in the February 10 2009 edition of the Daily Mail, a major newspaper in England. The title of the article is:
The boy with 11 tumours who was sent home to die... and survives after grandparents' alternative therapy treatments.
Briefly, here’s Connah’s story.
In August 2006, after months of intermittent symptoms of pain and a general feeling of illness that physicians initially misdiagnosed, he was found to have a relatively rare and aggressive form of cancer known as neuroblastoma, which attacks the brain and nervous system running along the spinal cord. By the time Connah was properly diagnosed, his cancer was classed as neuroblastoma stage 4. Doctors found that it had spread through his chest near his heart, to his stomach close to several organs including his kidney and intestine, and down his left leg.
Connah received conventional cancer treatments for seven month, at which point his doctors told his family that there was nothing more that they could do for him and that they should “take him home to enjoy his final months” of life. That was in early 2007.
It was at this point that Connah’s grandparents took action. Instead of accepting the doctors’ prognosis, they refused to give up hope and began to educate themselves about any and all potential alternative options that might save their grandson.
The first thing they did was put Connah on an all-organic diet along with filtering his water, after they read doing so could reduce the amount of harmful toxins in his body. “Once we did this, Connah stopped becoming ill,” his grandmother reports.
As they continued their research, Connah’s grandparents (whom he lives with, along with his father) soon added other alternative therapies to his health-care regimen, including reiki, far infrared sauna, laser therapy, ultrasound, and other therapies, some of which they were introduced to when they visited an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico (the newspaper article does not identify which clinic they went to). After being instructed in the use of the therapies they learned about at the clinic, Connah’s grandparents returned home and built their own equipment devices in order to treat Connah on their own. All of the expenses involved were paid for out-of-pocket.
At the time that the Daily Mail article was written—a full two years after Connah’s doctors had given him up for dead—scans showed that ten of Connah’s 11 tumors had shrunk, had no blood flow and appeared to be dead. Today, more than four years after Connah received his death sentence, he is still alive and his latest scans show that “his disease is stable.”
Not only is Connah still with us, he is also living a normal, active life, including pursuing his passion for gymnastics, playing soccer, painting, and winning awards at dance competitions.
As I said, Connah’s story is wonderful.
But what isn’t so wonderful is how the conventional medical community has responded to it. In the same article, the Daily Mail reported that conventional cancer experts remained skeptical and “cast doubt on whether the alternative therapies had made any difference”.
Bear in mind, these are the same types of experts who had handed Connah a death sentence years earlier!
As if that isn’t enough, the article also reported the experts said “levels of toxins in food and drink are unlikely to be high enough to cause cancer”.
Such a claim is not only downright ignorant, it’s also entirely irresponsible. Numerous studies have shown a link between poor diet and cancer, and that includes consuming foods and drinks that contain cancer-causing chemicals. For conventional cancer experts to say otherwise—and for the Daily Mail to allow them to do so unquestioned—verges on criminal negligence.
But the height of the arrogance and ignorance of the conventional cancer establishment is revealed later in the article when the Mail reports that, rather than taking a serious look at the merits of the approach Connah’s grandparents have used to not only keep him alive, but restore him to an active childhood, “They say cancers often go into remission for unexplained reasons.”
In other words, they have no interest whatsoever in admitting that what Connah’s grandparents are doing is not only working, but is actually far superior to the conventional treatment Connah received—treatments which they themselves admitted had failed him!
I wish I could say that this example of ignorance about and bias against viable alternative cancer therapies was rare, but it isn’t. It’s the norm! And because it is, untold numbers of cancer patients around the world are denied the opportunity to explore nonconventional therapies that can quite possibly save their lives. All because they heed the advice of conventional doctors and conventional cancer organizations that say such alternatives are “un proven” and not worthy of consideration.
Fortunately for Connah, his grandparents were smarter than that. Instead of passively accepting the death sentence Connah was given, they did their own due diligence and by doing so, they saved Connah’s life.
My hope is that, should cancer strike you or your loved ones, you too will be like Connah’s grandparents, and also refuse to give up hope.
You can read the Daily Mail article about Connah here.
You can also watch a video about Connah and his grandparents here.
Finally, if you would like to be kept informed about Connah’s progress or make a donation to help support his grandparents’ work, you can visit this website set up in his name:
http://www.connahsappeal.co.uk
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Is the Profit Motive Harming and Killing Cancer Patients?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients.
That’s not supposition on my part. That’s a fact reported by NBC Nightly News back in 2006. You can watch the report here.
As NBC reported, oncologists buy chemotherapy drugs at wholesale prices and then sell them to their patients at “marked up prices.”
This absurd practice was made legal years ago after Medicare and health insurance companies decided it would be a good idea to move cancer patients out of hospitals and into the care of private practice oncologists. Their reasoning was that this was necessary in order to save money. What happened as a result of this misguided decision was the exact opposite.
Instead of saving money, the cost of chemotherapy drugs skyrocketed to tens of thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Medical ethicists have for years questioned the wisdom of allowing oncologists to continue to earn the majority of their incomes from the sale of chemotherapy drugs, correctly pointing out that doing so creates a serious conflict of interest between patient welfare and oncologists’ desire to prescribe the drugs that they are going to make the most money from even when they are not what their patients needs. This includes over-prescribing drugs beyond the point in which they are effective.
How many cancer patients have died because their doctors succumbed to the lure of maximizing their profits and administered chemotherapy drugs inappropriately?
No one can say, but in all likelihood at least some cancer patients did die because of their doctors’ desire for profits.
This is a travesty and it needs to stop!
Correctly this great wrong won’t be easy, however, nor can oncologists as a whole be blamed.
Although I strongly disagree with the use of chemotherapy drugs the way they are administered by conventional oncologists—for the simple reason that, in the majority of cases, they do not work—at the same time I recognize that most cancer doctors and their staffs are extremely dedicated professionals who are doing all they can, based on how they have been taught (persuaded, would be the better word) to treat cancer.
In short, it’s not oncologists who are at the root of this problem; it’s the system in which they are trapped!
This fact was admitted to by Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a conventional cancer specialist who was interviewed as part of the NBC report mentioned above. In it, he said, “Patients should feel that their physician has their best interest at heart, always. And the way the system is set up, because of the incentives [for selling chemotherapy drugs to their patients], does something to destroy that.”
So, what can be done about this?
The first step appears clear-cut. The profit motive for oncologists must be eliminated in the arena of cancer care, by eliminating their ability to buy drugs at wholesale and then to sell them at often much higher prices. (Note: Usually, it is not the cancer patients who pay these exorbitant prices; it is health insurance companies and/or Medicare/Medicaid. The end result is higher health insurance premiums for all of us, and a further drain of taxpayer money from our federal government’s already overstrained resources.)
Oncologists must return to administering their drugs in the same way that all other MDs do: Instead of selling drugs directly, they must simply prescribe them, as they once used to do.
But this step alone, will not fix the problem, and here’s where things get more complicated. And more suspect.
You see, the real reason cancer drugs cost so much has very little to do with how much it costs drug companies to develop them and bring them to market. Nor does their cost have anything to do with their potential to save lives. If that were the case for chemotherapy drugs, their price would be extremely low given how abysmal a track record they have for improving cancer patients’ quality of life and extending their survival rates, let alone actually curing cancer, which they most certainly do not (at best, they only temporarily put cancer into remission).
No, the real reason cancer drugs in the United States costs so much (well over $100,000 a year for a single patient in the case of many of the new generation of cancer drugs) is very simple:
Cancer drugs—especially the new generation of drugs—cost so much because they have no competitors.
In other words, drug companies can charge whatever they want for their cancer drugs, and they do exactly that!
You might think that such price-gouging by the drug companies could easily be curtailed if health insurance companies if they simply refused to pay the prices Big Pharma demands for their cancer drugs. In theory, this is correct, but the reality of this situation paints a different story. First, refusing to pay the cost of cancer drugs would garner a lot of ill-will towards health insurance companies by the public, and these companies already have enough of that as it is.
But the bigger issue has to do with Medicare. You see, when it comes to paying for the price of drugs, both cancer drugs and otherwise, health insurance companies take their lead from Medicare. Medicare does not provide coverage for most types of drugs, but it does cover the use cancer drugs. Most health insurance companies simply follow the guidelines for drug reimbursement that are established by the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). And when it comes to the price of cancer drugs, as far as CMS is concerned, anything goes!
This is in stark contrast to how CMS acts with regard to all other types of drugs. Aside from cancer drugs, CMS controls medical costs by establishing the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for nearly all other medical procedures, including drug usage, by both doctors and hospitals. Once CMS establishes these fees, health insurance companies set their own rates of coverage to coincide with them.
What this means is very simple to understand: If CMS dealt with the price of cancer drugs in the same way that it does for all other medications, the price of cancer drugs would quickly plummet, largely sparing oncologists of the temptation to try and profit from their use.
When it comes to cancer drugs, CMS must change its policies!
Then there is a third, and equally important factor to consider: The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). PhRMA bills itself as the pharmaceutical industry trade group. In plain English, it means that it’s a drug lobby. And since 1992 its work has paid huge dividends for Big Pharma, from which its funding is derived. You see, PhRMA convinced the US Congress and President Bill Clinton to enact a bill known as the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) of 1992. Once the act was passed and signed into law, Big Pharma effectively became the fox guarding the henhouse of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This came about because the act means that, since its passage, Big Pharma actually helps fund the FDA’s research and approval process of the very pharmaceutical drugs the FDA is supposed to be regulating on our behalf. Not only does Big Pharma’s funding of the FDA create a direct and serious conflict of interest, it also ensures that the FDA provides a speedier approval process of pharmaceutical drugs, many of which later prove to be ineffective, life-threatening, or both!
By now, I’m sure you can understand that one of the most serious underlying problems that have kept conventional cancer treatment in the US focused almost entirely on dangerous and ineffective cancer drugs is the fact that cancer is big business. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each and every year on behalf of cancer patients and their loved ones who are desperate to reverse this terrible disease. And all of that money winds up in the pockets of the doctors and clinics that treating cancer with these cancer drugs, and, most especially, the pharmaceutical drug companies who manufacture them and promote their use.
Human nature being what it is, it would be foolish to expect those who profit most from the use of these cancer drugs, including oncologists, will suddenly change course and start investigating the cheaper, safer, and far more effective cancer treatments that I have spent decades of my life investigating. Not when their livelihoods depend so greatly on the status quo of cancer care today.
Therefore, it is up to each and every one of us to pressure our elected officials to clean up this sad state of affairs that we are in. To do so, we must insist on the following:
• Oncologists must be prohibited from buying and reselling cancer drugs for profit.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must begin to establish the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for cancer drugs and cancer treatments, just as they do for all other drugs and medical procedures.
• The influence of Big Pharma and their lobbyist group the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America must end, both at the FDA, and within Congress (the drug lobby has more lobbyists in Congress and spends more lobbying money there than any other lobbyist group), and the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992 must be rescinded.
If we as a nation can achieve these goals, then truly effective approaches for treating cancer in the United States may at last come into the full light of day.
Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients.
That’s not supposition on my part. That’s a fact reported by NBC Nightly News back in 2006. You can watch the report here.
As NBC reported, oncologists buy chemotherapy drugs at wholesale prices and then sell them to their patients at “marked up prices.”
This absurd practice was made legal years ago after Medicare and health insurance companies decided it would be a good idea to move cancer patients out of hospitals and into the care of private practice oncologists. Their reasoning was that this was necessary in order to save money. What happened as a result of this misguided decision was the exact opposite.
Instead of saving money, the cost of chemotherapy drugs skyrocketed to tens of thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Medical ethicists have for years questioned the wisdom of allowing oncologists to continue to earn the majority of their incomes from the sale of chemotherapy drugs, correctly pointing out that doing so creates a serious conflict of interest between patient welfare and oncologists’ desire to prescribe the drugs that they are going to make the most money from even when they are not what their patients needs. This includes over-prescribing drugs beyond the point in which they are effective.
How many cancer patients have died because their doctors succumbed to the lure of maximizing their profits and administered chemotherapy drugs inappropriately?
No one can say, but in all likelihood at least some cancer patients did die because of their doctors’ desire for profits.
This is a travesty and it needs to stop!
Correctly this great wrong won’t be easy, however, nor can oncologists as a whole be blamed.
Although I strongly disagree with the use of chemotherapy drugs the way they are administered by conventional oncologists—for the simple reason that, in the majority of cases, they do not work—at the same time I recognize that most cancer doctors and their staffs are extremely dedicated professionals who are doing all they can, based on how they have been taught (persuaded, would be the better word) to treat cancer.
In short, it’s not oncologists who are at the root of this problem; it’s the system in which they are trapped!
This fact was admitted to by Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a conventional cancer specialist who was interviewed as part of the NBC report mentioned above. In it, he said, “Patients should feel that their physician has their best interest at heart, always. And the way the system is set up, because of the incentives [for selling chemotherapy drugs to their patients], does something to destroy that.”
So, what can be done about this?
The first step appears clear-cut. The profit motive for oncologists must be eliminated in the arena of cancer care, by eliminating their ability to buy drugs at wholesale and then to sell them at often much higher prices. (Note: Usually, it is not the cancer patients who pay these exorbitant prices; it is health insurance companies and/or Medicare/Medicaid. The end result is higher health insurance premiums for all of us, and a further drain of taxpayer money from our federal government’s already overstrained resources.)
Oncologists must return to administering their drugs in the same way that all other MDs do: Instead of selling drugs directly, they must simply prescribe them, as they once used to do.
But this step alone, will not fix the problem, and here’s where things get more complicated. And more suspect.
You see, the real reason cancer drugs cost so much has very little to do with how much it costs drug companies to develop them and bring them to market. Nor does their cost have anything to do with their potential to save lives. If that were the case for chemotherapy drugs, their price would be extremely low given how abysmal a track record they have for improving cancer patients’ quality of life and extending their survival rates, let alone actually curing cancer, which they most certainly do not (at best, they only temporarily put cancer into remission).
No, the real reason cancer drugs in the United States costs so much (well over $100,000 a year for a single patient in the case of many of the new generation of cancer drugs) is very simple:
Cancer drugs—especially the new generation of drugs—cost so much because they have no competitors.
In other words, drug companies can charge whatever they want for their cancer drugs, and they do exactly that!
You might think that such price-gouging by the drug companies could easily be curtailed if health insurance companies if they simply refused to pay the prices Big Pharma demands for their cancer drugs. In theory, this is correct, but the reality of this situation paints a different story. First, refusing to pay the cost of cancer drugs would garner a lot of ill-will towards health insurance companies by the public, and these companies already have enough of that as it is.
But the bigger issue has to do with Medicare. You see, when it comes to paying for the price of drugs, both cancer drugs and otherwise, health insurance companies take their lead from Medicare. Medicare does not provide coverage for most types of drugs, but it does cover the use cancer drugs. Most health insurance companies simply follow the guidelines for drug reimbursement that are established by the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). And when it comes to the price of cancer drugs, as far as CMS is concerned, anything goes!
This is in stark contrast to how CMS acts with regard to all other types of drugs. Aside from cancer drugs, CMS controls medical costs by establishing the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for nearly all other medical procedures, including drug usage, by both doctors and hospitals. Once CMS establishes these fees, health insurance companies set their own rates of coverage to coincide with them.
What this means is very simple to understand: If CMS dealt with the price of cancer drugs in the same way that it does for all other medications, the price of cancer drugs would quickly plummet, largely sparing oncologists of the temptation to try and profit from their use.
When it comes to cancer drugs, CMS must change its policies!
Then there is a third, and equally important factor to consider: The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). PhRMA bills itself as the pharmaceutical industry trade group. In plain English, it means that it’s a drug lobby. And since 1992 its work has paid huge dividends for Big Pharma, from which its funding is derived. You see, PhRMA convinced the US Congress and President Bill Clinton to enact a bill known as the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) of 1992. Once the act was passed and signed into law, Big Pharma effectively became the fox guarding the henhouse of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This came about because the act means that, since its passage, Big Pharma actually helps fund the FDA’s research and approval process of the very pharmaceutical drugs the FDA is supposed to be regulating on our behalf. Not only does Big Pharma’s funding of the FDA create a direct and serious conflict of interest, it also ensures that the FDA provides a speedier approval process of pharmaceutical drugs, many of which later prove to be ineffective, life-threatening, or both!
By now, I’m sure you can understand that one of the most serious underlying problems that have kept conventional cancer treatment in the US focused almost entirely on dangerous and ineffective cancer drugs is the fact that cancer is big business. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each and every year on behalf of cancer patients and their loved ones who are desperate to reverse this terrible disease. And all of that money winds up in the pockets of the doctors and clinics that treating cancer with these cancer drugs, and, most especially, the pharmaceutical drug companies who manufacture them and promote their use.
Human nature being what it is, it would be foolish to expect those who profit most from the use of these cancer drugs, including oncologists, will suddenly change course and start investigating the cheaper, safer, and far more effective cancer treatments that I have spent decades of my life investigating. Not when their livelihoods depend so greatly on the status quo of cancer care today.
Therefore, it is up to each and every one of us to pressure our elected officials to clean up this sad state of affairs that we are in. To do so, we must insist on the following:
• Oncologists must be prohibited from buying and reselling cancer drugs for profit.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must begin to establish the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for cancer drugs and cancer treatments, just as they do for all other drugs and medical procedures.
• The influence of Big Pharma and their lobbyist group the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America must end, both at the FDA, and within Congress (the drug lobby has more lobbyists in Congress and spends more lobbying money there than any other lobbyist group), and the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992 must be rescinded.
If we as a nation can achieve these goals, then truly effective approaches for treating cancer in the United States may at last come into the full light of day.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Thermography: The Safer, More Effective Alternative To Mammograms
Both holistic and conventional doctors agree that early detection of cancer is very important. Simply put, the earlier cancer is detected, the better the odds are for a full and long-lasting recovery.
One of the most effective ways women can detect breast cancer, as well as other types of cancer, early and safely is by using thermography. Thermography is a safe and effective alternative to mammograms. Let me explain why this is so and why you absolutely must know about thermography in your fight to protect yourself from cancer.
What Is Thermography?
Thermography is the name given to a diagnostic technique that employs thermal (heat) imaging to allow health practitioners to get a clearer idea about what is taking place inside their patients’ bodies. Breast thermography is the name given to thermography when it is used to screen for signs of breast cancer, as well as for determining the overall health of the breast. Unlike mammograms, breast thermography is 100% safe, and is far more accurate in detecting signs of breast cancer than mammograms are. Mammograms fail to detect breast cancer 20 to 40 percent of the time. By contrast, breast thermography successfully detects breast cancer 90%, and has the added benefit of being able to do so up to 8 to 10 years earlier than mammography.
Research published in the American Journal of Radiology confirms how important breast thermography is in the fight against cancer. In addition to confirming thermography’s 90% accuracy rate, the Journal reported that breast thermography has a 90% specificity rate and a 99% sensitivity rate. No other screening method for breast cancer comes close to these rates. For example, the sensitivity rate for physical breast exams is only 18%, while for mammograms and MRIs it is 70 and 71% respectively. Moreover, since 1982 breast thermography has also been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Despite all these facts, few physicians are even aware of the powerful, health-saving benefits thermography can provide, and fewer still ever tell their patients about it. This is a travesty of the highest order! And it exists largely because of the multiyear and multibillion dollar campaign by the American mammography industry to suppress pubic awareness of thermography. All for the sake of profit at the expense of public safety and well-being!
The following facts make it clear why I stress the importance of thermography to doctors and patients alike. I hope you will pay attention to what I am going to share with you next because it’s vitally important.
Cancer cells double every 90 days. That means it takes 90 days for a single cancer cell to turn into two cells, and approximately one full year before that single cancer cell grows to 16 cells. By the end of year two, if left unchecked, that single cancer cell will have grown to 256 cancer cells, forming a tumor that is .25 centimeters in size. Thermography can detect tumor cells that are even smaller than that—about the size of a single grain of rice. When tumors that small are detected, patients have nearly a 100 percent (99%) chance of long-term survival.
Now consider this: at best, mammography can only detect breast tumors that are 2.5 centimeters in size (about the size of a dime and 10 times the tumor size at the end of year two). This equates to tumors comprised of nearly 4.3 billion cancer cells, a number that will not occur until the end of the eight year after the first cancer cell took hold. Most times, however, mammograms fail to detect breast cancer tumors until they have grown to contain between 69 billion to over 1 trillion cancer cells! Meaning that it is not until the 9th or 10th year, or even later, that mammography will detect breast cancer. (The same is true if breast self-exams, too.) By then, the spread of cancer can often prove too much for conventional cancer treatments to reverse, and also more challenging for practitioners of alternative and integrative cancer care to treat.
Based on the above facts, doesn’t it make sense for all women over the age of 35 to replace their annual mammograms with annual thermography checkups instead? Of course it does!
How Thermography Works
Perhaps you are familiar with night vision goggles used by the military and police agencies. These goggles enable their wearers to spot people in the darkness by the heat signature of their bodies. Thermography works in much the same way. It employs a special infrared sensitive camera to digitally record images of the surface temperature of the body. This enables technicians trained in the use of thermography to detect variations in surface body temperature throughout, as well as the entire body. (As a result, thermography is also highly useful for detecting a wide range of other disease conditions, including prostate and other cancers, inflammatory breast disease, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorder, thyroid issues, hiatal hernias, and even early warning signs of heart disease and stroke!)
Abnormal variations in surface body temperature are biomarkers, or “fingerprints”, indicating the sign of tumors or other potential health problems. These temperature variations can be very subtle, but where they occur, it is highly likely that they are signs of a pathology in the breast. That’s because research has shown that the metabolic activity and vascular circulation in both pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues and the surrounding areas of the breast are almost higher, resulting in an increase in surface body temperature compared to that of normal, healthy breast tissue.
This rise in surface body temperature is also due to the way that cancer cells nourish themselves. As cancer cells and tumors grow, they require an ever-increasing supply of nutrients. In order to obtain these nutrients, tumors increase circulation to their cells by diverting nutrients through existing blood vessels, as well as by opening dormant blood vessels and creating new ones (a process called angiogenesis), all of which raises surface body temperature in the areas of the breast wherever blood vessels have been taken over by tumors. These temperature variations are among the very earliest signs that breast tissue has entered into a pre-cancerous or cancerous state. In fact, studies have shown that an abnormal thermography reading is the single most important indication of high risk for developing breast cancer, ten times as significant as a family history of cancer. Currently, only thermography is capable of detecting these temperature variations at their earliest stages.
Another major advantage of thermography is that it is noninvasive and quick, and free of the discomfort associated with mammograms. There is no compression, no direct contact with the body, and no harmful substances to be exposed to, let alone the cancer-causing radiation emitted by mammograms. Instead, all you have to do is allow your body to reach a steady temperature state that is compatible with the special temperature conditions of the thermography room. This usually takes no more than 15 minutes. After that, you will be positioned in front of the thermography camera so that all surfaces of your breasts, upper chest and underarms can be imaged. The images are captured in real time and then transmitted to a sophisticated computer for analysis. The computer allows your doctor to isolate differences in surface body temperature and vascularity. After the images are analyzed, they are graded using a strict standardized system based on five categories. Depending on the results of your exam, further tests may be ordered should there be any indication of breast abnormalities. (It’s important to note that neither thermography nor mammograms can definitively determine whether or not breast cancer is present in patients. Subsequent testing is always necessary for confirmation.) If your reading is normal, then your doctor has a baseline reading of your breasts that she or he can compare to followup thermography readings as part of your annual health checkup.
Now that you know more about thermography I think you will agree with me that thermography belongs on the frontlines of every early cancer detection program.
To locate a thermography center near you, visit www.iact-org.org/links.html
One of the most effective ways women can detect breast cancer, as well as other types of cancer, early and safely is by using thermography. Thermography is a safe and effective alternative to mammograms. Let me explain why this is so and why you absolutely must know about thermography in your fight to protect yourself from cancer.
What Is Thermography?
Thermography is the name given to a diagnostic technique that employs thermal (heat) imaging to allow health practitioners to get a clearer idea about what is taking place inside their patients’ bodies. Breast thermography is the name given to thermography when it is used to screen for signs of breast cancer, as well as for determining the overall health of the breast. Unlike mammograms, breast thermography is 100% safe, and is far more accurate in detecting signs of breast cancer than mammograms are. Mammograms fail to detect breast cancer 20 to 40 percent of the time. By contrast, breast thermography successfully detects breast cancer 90%, and has the added benefit of being able to do so up to 8 to 10 years earlier than mammography.
Research published in the American Journal of Radiology confirms how important breast thermography is in the fight against cancer. In addition to confirming thermography’s 90% accuracy rate, the Journal reported that breast thermography has a 90% specificity rate and a 99% sensitivity rate. No other screening method for breast cancer comes close to these rates. For example, the sensitivity rate for physical breast exams is only 18%, while for mammograms and MRIs it is 70 and 71% respectively. Moreover, since 1982 breast thermography has also been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Despite all these facts, few physicians are even aware of the powerful, health-saving benefits thermography can provide, and fewer still ever tell their patients about it. This is a travesty of the highest order! And it exists largely because of the multiyear and multibillion dollar campaign by the American mammography industry to suppress pubic awareness of thermography. All for the sake of profit at the expense of public safety and well-being!
The following facts make it clear why I stress the importance of thermography to doctors and patients alike. I hope you will pay attention to what I am going to share with you next because it’s vitally important.
Cancer cells double every 90 days. That means it takes 90 days for a single cancer cell to turn into two cells, and approximately one full year before that single cancer cell grows to 16 cells. By the end of year two, if left unchecked, that single cancer cell will have grown to 256 cancer cells, forming a tumor that is .25 centimeters in size. Thermography can detect tumor cells that are even smaller than that—about the size of a single grain of rice. When tumors that small are detected, patients have nearly a 100 percent (99%) chance of long-term survival.
Now consider this: at best, mammography can only detect breast tumors that are 2.5 centimeters in size (about the size of a dime and 10 times the tumor size at the end of year two). This equates to tumors comprised of nearly 4.3 billion cancer cells, a number that will not occur until the end of the eight year after the first cancer cell took hold. Most times, however, mammograms fail to detect breast cancer tumors until they have grown to contain between 69 billion to over 1 trillion cancer cells! Meaning that it is not until the 9th or 10th year, or even later, that mammography will detect breast cancer. (The same is true if breast self-exams, too.) By then, the spread of cancer can often prove too much for conventional cancer treatments to reverse, and also more challenging for practitioners of alternative and integrative cancer care to treat.
Based on the above facts, doesn’t it make sense for all women over the age of 35 to replace their annual mammograms with annual thermography checkups instead? Of course it does!
How Thermography Works
Perhaps you are familiar with night vision goggles used by the military and police agencies. These goggles enable their wearers to spot people in the darkness by the heat signature of their bodies. Thermography works in much the same way. It employs a special infrared sensitive camera to digitally record images of the surface temperature of the body. This enables technicians trained in the use of thermography to detect variations in surface body temperature throughout, as well as the entire body. (As a result, thermography is also highly useful for detecting a wide range of other disease conditions, including prostate and other cancers, inflammatory breast disease, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorder, thyroid issues, hiatal hernias, and even early warning signs of heart disease and stroke!)
Abnormal variations in surface body temperature are biomarkers, or “fingerprints”, indicating the sign of tumors or other potential health problems. These temperature variations can be very subtle, but where they occur, it is highly likely that they are signs of a pathology in the breast. That’s because research has shown that the metabolic activity and vascular circulation in both pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues and the surrounding areas of the breast are almost higher, resulting in an increase in surface body temperature compared to that of normal, healthy breast tissue.
This rise in surface body temperature is also due to the way that cancer cells nourish themselves. As cancer cells and tumors grow, they require an ever-increasing supply of nutrients. In order to obtain these nutrients, tumors increase circulation to their cells by diverting nutrients through existing blood vessels, as well as by opening dormant blood vessels and creating new ones (a process called angiogenesis), all of which raises surface body temperature in the areas of the breast wherever blood vessels have been taken over by tumors. These temperature variations are among the very earliest signs that breast tissue has entered into a pre-cancerous or cancerous state. In fact, studies have shown that an abnormal thermography reading is the single most important indication of high risk for developing breast cancer, ten times as significant as a family history of cancer. Currently, only thermography is capable of detecting these temperature variations at their earliest stages.
Another major advantage of thermography is that it is noninvasive and quick, and free of the discomfort associated with mammograms. There is no compression, no direct contact with the body, and no harmful substances to be exposed to, let alone the cancer-causing radiation emitted by mammograms. Instead, all you have to do is allow your body to reach a steady temperature state that is compatible with the special temperature conditions of the thermography room. This usually takes no more than 15 minutes. After that, you will be positioned in front of the thermography camera so that all surfaces of your breasts, upper chest and underarms can be imaged. The images are captured in real time and then transmitted to a sophisticated computer for analysis. The computer allows your doctor to isolate differences in surface body temperature and vascularity. After the images are analyzed, they are graded using a strict standardized system based on five categories. Depending on the results of your exam, further tests may be ordered should there be any indication of breast abnormalities. (It’s important to note that neither thermography nor mammograms can definitively determine whether or not breast cancer is present in patients. Subsequent testing is always necessary for confirmation.) If your reading is normal, then your doctor has a baseline reading of your breasts that she or he can compare to followup thermography readings as part of your annual health checkup.
Now that you know more about thermography I think you will agree with me that thermography belongs on the frontlines of every early cancer detection program.
To locate a thermography center near you, visit www.iact-org.org/links.html
Medical Genocide?
Each an every day in the United States, more than 5400 people die as a direct result of properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs or because of a medical error. Since doctors rarely report medical errors, some experts claim that over 15,000 Americans die each day from medical errors.
Illness is not due to pharmaceutical drug-deficiencies. This basic fact underlies the primary flaw inherent in most of conventional Western medicine.
Illness is not due to pharmaceutical drug-deficiencies. This basic fact underlies the primary flaw inherent in most of conventional Western medicine.
Friday, April 1, 2011
The Dangers of Mammograms: What You Need To Know (Part 2)
Last time I explained to you why mammograms are so often ineffective at accurately detecting breast cancer. Today I want to tell you why mammograms can actually increase women’s risk of developing breast and other types of cancer. This shocking fact is well-documented, but you won’t hear it from most doctors. But knowing the truth can safe your life, and sharing the truth about cancer is what my mission is all about.
A Man Ahead of His Time
To fully appreciate the information I’m going to share with you today, you first need to know about one of the most brilliant and accomplished doctors and researchers it was my good fortune to learn from. I’m talking about the late Dr. John W. Gofman. Besides being a doctor, John was also a nuclear chemist and one of the world’s foremost experts on the dangers of low-level radiation, including low-level radiation emitted by x-rays and mammograms.
You may not have heard of John before, but chances are very good that you are familiar with at least one of his scientific developments. You see, it was John who, during the 1940s and 50s, discovered the full range of lipoproteins that exist in the bloodstream. More importantly, John’s work produced the first evidence that high blood levels of certain of these lipoproteins, including LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, were an important risk factor for heart disease. John, in collaboration with his colleague Frank T. Lindgren, created a variety of techniques that led him to discover both LDL and HDL (“good”) cholesterol, as well as a variety of other lipoproteins, including those in the triglyceride-class. Thanks to John, today doctors routinely screen their patients to determine their cholesterol and triglyceride levels to help determine their risk of heart disease.
Because of his pioneering work in this area, John received numerous awards and recognition from his medical peers. In 1954, he received the Modern Medicine Award for his “outstanding contributions to heart disease research.” In 1965, the American Heart Association bestowed him with its Lyman Duff Lectureship Award for his research on atherosclerosis and heart disease, and in 1974 The American College of Cardiology selected him as one of the 25 leading researchers in the field of cardiology of the previous quarter-century.
Impressive as John’s work was in the field of cardiology, his greatest contributions came in the field of nuclear energy, which he began working in during the early 1940s, while still a graduate student at Berkeley University. During this period, John was awarded two patents for his work in developing processes that enabled plutonium to be separated from the uranium and fission products of irradiated nuclear fuel. His work in this field eventually led to him joining the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). At the AEC’s request, at the beginning of the 1960s John established the Biomedical Research Division of the AEC’s Livermore National Laboratory in order to study the effects of nuclear energy on health. As his research in this area continued, John began to focus his attention on studying cancer and chromosomes, and the effect that radiation had on chromosomal mutations and gene stability.
By 1969, John, once a strong proponent of the nuclear energy industry, had concluded that human exposure to ionizing radiation was far more dangerous than scientists, including himself, had previously realized. From that point on, he became a leading spokesman calling for a moratorium on the expansion of nuclear power plants and an end to underground nuclear testing. In 1969, he urged that federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent, but was ignored. He was ignored. Soon thereafter, the AEC defunded John’s research on chromosomes and cancer.
After a stint as a professor at U.C. Berkeley, John chose to spend the rest of his life conducting pro-bono (free) research into the effects that radiation has on human health. He also founded the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. His research led him to conclude that “by any reasonable standard of biomedical proof” there is no safe threshold of ionizing radiation for any human being, and that the use of medical diagnostic tools such as x-rays, mammograms, and CT scans, all of which expose patients to ionizing radiation was a co-factor in approximately 75% of all cases of breast cancer in the United States.
Nor was John afraid to speak his mind on this important topic. Here are excerpts from an interview he gave on the subject in 1994:
“The human experimentation that has been done is bad…But for 25 years the DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of people, but billions of people.”
“They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there’s a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation…We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.”
In spite of these views, John was not against the use of x-rays, mammograms or CT scans altogether. He was all for them if, as he said, “there’s a diagnostic gain for you, something that can really make a difference in your health and your life.” But, as he warned, there is another important part to this equation. As John often pointed out, government studies have repeatedly shown that most hospitals and radiologists “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what dose [of radiation] they were giving you for a procedure,” and that doses could vary by as much as a 20 times higher than what was actually needed for diagnosis.
In his book The Health Effects of Common Exams, which he co-wrote with Egan O’Connor, John showed that simply reducing the average dose of radiation used in medical diagnoses by one-third would prevent 50,000 fatal cancers each and every year. That adds up to saving one million lives in every generation!
Despite John’s stature as one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of ionizing radiation, his claims about radiation’s link to cancer were strongly refuted by the medical establishment and the nuclear energy industry. But to this day, no one has been able to refute any of John’s claims.
John’s struggle to warn us about the dangers of ionizing radiation, including from mammograms, reminds me of the 19th century physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who was the first Western doctor and surgeon to recommend that physicians wash their hands before treating their patients, and especially before surgery. Dr. Semmelweis made this recommendation after his discovery in 1847 that the incidence of puerperal fever, a common life-threatening condition that killed many women during his time after they gave birth, could be reduced to as low as 1% if physicians would simply first wash their hands before they delivered babies. For making this simple and life-saving recommendation, Semmelweis was ruthlessly attacked by the medical establishment of his time, to the point that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum where he died. He was only 47 years old. It wasn’t until years afterward that Semmelweis was proven correct, when Louis Pasteur published his famous theory of germs. Think how many lives might have been saved had Semmelweis been listened to instead of mocked and destroyed!
The Medical Establishment Is Still the Same Today
Though Dr. Gofman was also mocked and attacked by his peers over his findings about the health risks of radiation, x-rays, and mammograms, fortunately he was able to live a long and productive life (he passed away in 2007 when he was 88). And, unlike Dr. Semmelweis, decades didn’t have to pass before others confirmed John’s findings. In fact, others came to his defense even while he was still alive. Among them is Dr. Samuel Epstein, another outspoken critic of the cancer establishment.
In his book The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Epstein estimates that a 20% increased risk of breast cancer could be expected for pre-menopausal women exposed to ten yearly mammograms with two rads per exposure. Yet women today continue not to be warned about this very serious potential risk. Instead, as Dr. Epstein writes, they are “being falsely assured of the benefits” of mammograms, which are still being highly promoted as a preventive deterrent for cancer.
So, here we are in the 21st century, faced with the same arrogance and obstinance on the part of the medical establishment and our own government that Dr. Semmelweis faced two centuries previously. With the same unfortunate results—untold numbers of women who are developing and dying as a direct result of current widely accepted medical procedures, in this case the overuse of mammograms and other diagnostic techniques that emit ionizing radiation.
Fortunately, information, as they say, is power, and my mission is to empower you so that you can escape the clutches of the medical establishment when their recommendations are harmful. Next time, I will tell you about an alternative to mammograms that are not only much safer (completely safe, in fact), but also capable of detecting cancer up to ten years earlier than mammograms can. It’s called thermography, and I will tell you all you need to know about it in my next post. Be sure not to miss it.
To find out more about Dr. John Gofman and his work, I recommend you visit www.ratical.org.
I also recommend the Cancer Prevention Coalition, which was founded by Dr. Samuel Epstein. To find out more, please visit www.preventcancer.com.
A Man Ahead of His Time
To fully appreciate the information I’m going to share with you today, you first need to know about one of the most brilliant and accomplished doctors and researchers it was my good fortune to learn from. I’m talking about the late Dr. John W. Gofman. Besides being a doctor, John was also a nuclear chemist and one of the world’s foremost experts on the dangers of low-level radiation, including low-level radiation emitted by x-rays and mammograms.
You may not have heard of John before, but chances are very good that you are familiar with at least one of his scientific developments. You see, it was John who, during the 1940s and 50s, discovered the full range of lipoproteins that exist in the bloodstream. More importantly, John’s work produced the first evidence that high blood levels of certain of these lipoproteins, including LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, were an important risk factor for heart disease. John, in collaboration with his colleague Frank T. Lindgren, created a variety of techniques that led him to discover both LDL and HDL (“good”) cholesterol, as well as a variety of other lipoproteins, including those in the triglyceride-class. Thanks to John, today doctors routinely screen their patients to determine their cholesterol and triglyceride levels to help determine their risk of heart disease.
Because of his pioneering work in this area, John received numerous awards and recognition from his medical peers. In 1954, he received the Modern Medicine Award for his “outstanding contributions to heart disease research.” In 1965, the American Heart Association bestowed him with its Lyman Duff Lectureship Award for his research on atherosclerosis and heart disease, and in 1974 The American College of Cardiology selected him as one of the 25 leading researchers in the field of cardiology of the previous quarter-century.
Impressive as John’s work was in the field of cardiology, his greatest contributions came in the field of nuclear energy, which he began working in during the early 1940s, while still a graduate student at Berkeley University. During this period, John was awarded two patents for his work in developing processes that enabled plutonium to be separated from the uranium and fission products of irradiated nuclear fuel. His work in this field eventually led to him joining the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). At the AEC’s request, at the beginning of the 1960s John established the Biomedical Research Division of the AEC’s Livermore National Laboratory in order to study the effects of nuclear energy on health. As his research in this area continued, John began to focus his attention on studying cancer and chromosomes, and the effect that radiation had on chromosomal mutations and gene stability.
By 1969, John, once a strong proponent of the nuclear energy industry, had concluded that human exposure to ionizing radiation was far more dangerous than scientists, including himself, had previously realized. From that point on, he became a leading spokesman calling for a moratorium on the expansion of nuclear power plants and an end to underground nuclear testing. In 1969, he urged that federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent, but was ignored. He was ignored. Soon thereafter, the AEC defunded John’s research on chromosomes and cancer.
After a stint as a professor at U.C. Berkeley, John chose to spend the rest of his life conducting pro-bono (free) research into the effects that radiation has on human health. He also founded the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. His research led him to conclude that “by any reasonable standard of biomedical proof” there is no safe threshold of ionizing radiation for any human being, and that the use of medical diagnostic tools such as x-rays, mammograms, and CT scans, all of which expose patients to ionizing radiation was a co-factor in approximately 75% of all cases of breast cancer in the United States.
Nor was John afraid to speak his mind on this important topic. Here are excerpts from an interview he gave on the subject in 1994:
“The human experimentation that has been done is bad…But for 25 years the DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of people, but billions of people.”
“They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there’s a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation…We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.”
In spite of these views, John was not against the use of x-rays, mammograms or CT scans altogether. He was all for them if, as he said, “there’s a diagnostic gain for you, something that can really make a difference in your health and your life.” But, as he warned, there is another important part to this equation. As John often pointed out, government studies have repeatedly shown that most hospitals and radiologists “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what dose [of radiation] they were giving you for a procedure,” and that doses could vary by as much as a 20 times higher than what was actually needed for diagnosis.
In his book The Health Effects of Common Exams, which he co-wrote with Egan O’Connor, John showed that simply reducing the average dose of radiation used in medical diagnoses by one-third would prevent 50,000 fatal cancers each and every year. That adds up to saving one million lives in every generation!
Despite John’s stature as one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of ionizing radiation, his claims about radiation’s link to cancer were strongly refuted by the medical establishment and the nuclear energy industry. But to this day, no one has been able to refute any of John’s claims.
John’s struggle to warn us about the dangers of ionizing radiation, including from mammograms, reminds me of the 19th century physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who was the first Western doctor and surgeon to recommend that physicians wash their hands before treating their patients, and especially before surgery. Dr. Semmelweis made this recommendation after his discovery in 1847 that the incidence of puerperal fever, a common life-threatening condition that killed many women during his time after they gave birth, could be reduced to as low as 1% if physicians would simply first wash their hands before they delivered babies. For making this simple and life-saving recommendation, Semmelweis was ruthlessly attacked by the medical establishment of his time, to the point that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum where he died. He was only 47 years old. It wasn’t until years afterward that Semmelweis was proven correct, when Louis Pasteur published his famous theory of germs. Think how many lives might have been saved had Semmelweis been listened to instead of mocked and destroyed!
The Medical Establishment Is Still the Same Today
Though Dr. Gofman was also mocked and attacked by his peers over his findings about the health risks of radiation, x-rays, and mammograms, fortunately he was able to live a long and productive life (he passed away in 2007 when he was 88). And, unlike Dr. Semmelweis, decades didn’t have to pass before others confirmed John’s findings. In fact, others came to his defense even while he was still alive. Among them is Dr. Samuel Epstein, another outspoken critic of the cancer establishment.
In his book The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Epstein estimates that a 20% increased risk of breast cancer could be expected for pre-menopausal women exposed to ten yearly mammograms with two rads per exposure. Yet women today continue not to be warned about this very serious potential risk. Instead, as Dr. Epstein writes, they are “being falsely assured of the benefits” of mammograms, which are still being highly promoted as a preventive deterrent for cancer.
So, here we are in the 21st century, faced with the same arrogance and obstinance on the part of the medical establishment and our own government that Dr. Semmelweis faced two centuries previously. With the same unfortunate results—untold numbers of women who are developing and dying as a direct result of current widely accepted medical procedures, in this case the overuse of mammograms and other diagnostic techniques that emit ionizing radiation.
Fortunately, information, as they say, is power, and my mission is to empower you so that you can escape the clutches of the medical establishment when their recommendations are harmful. Next time, I will tell you about an alternative to mammograms that are not only much safer (completely safe, in fact), but also capable of detecting cancer up to ten years earlier than mammograms can. It’s called thermography, and I will tell you all you need to know about it in my next post. Be sure not to miss it.
To find out more about Dr. John Gofman and his work, I recommend you visit www.ratical.org.
I also recommend the Cancer Prevention Coalition, which was founded by Dr. Samuel Epstein. To find out more, please visit www.preventcancer.com.
The Dangers of Mammograms: What You Need To Know (Part 1)
Most women and the men who love them are concerned about breast cancer, and for very good reason. Of all cancers, only lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer each year. Not only will breast cancer strike 1 out of every 8 women during the course of their lives, today breast cancer is striking more and more women much earlier than before. Although it remains true that the risks of developing breast cancer increases with age, being young is no longer a protection against this terrible scourge. In fact, the research shows that 15% of all cases of breast cancer in the United States occur in women who are 45 or younger. More alarmingly, when breast cancer strikes earlier in life it is usually more aggressive, and more fatal than when it strikes older women.
In years past, such a high incidence of breast cancer among young women would have been unthinkable, but no longer. The reason, as I constantly point out, is that we are poisoning ourselves to death with all of the toxins that are so rampant, not only in our environment, but even in our food supply!
But environmental toxicity and poor diet are not the only things you need to be aware of. When it comes to breast cancer, there are other important risk factors to be aware of, as well. One of the most important breast cancer risks is a family history of cancer. If cancer runs in your family, then your risk of developing cancer of any kind is higher. However, 75% of all women who develop breast cancer have no family history of cancer.
Women who are childless or who have their first child after age 30 also tend to have a higher risk of developing breast cancer, as to women who have undergone synthetic hormone therapy, including the use of birth control pills, due to the hormonal imbalances that such therapy can cause. Lifestyle factors, such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor sleep habits, also increase cancer risks, as does alcohol consumption, including wine. (According to cancer researcher Charles B. Simone, MD, drinking as little as two glasses of wine per week can increase the risk of cancer in women by as much as 50%.) Being overweight is another important risk factor.
Sadly, one of the biggest threats comes from the conventional medical establishment and is routinely used by doctors to detect breast cancer. In reality, as I will explain, the use of this diagnostic technique actually significantly increases the risk of cancer. But the medical establishment refuses to admit it.
I’m talking about mammograms.
Why Mammograms Aren’t Your Best Option
Mammograms, along with breast self-examinations, are recommended by most conventional doctors as the best way for women to detect breast cancer. They involved the use of X-rays that allow doctors to look for dense structures within the breast that can be an indication of a tumor. This form of detecting is known as structural imaging. Research shows that mammograms are useful for detecting breast cancer in 80 percent of all women over the age of 50. However, that means that 20% of women age 50 or older can have breast cancer and not have it detected by mammograms! And the problem is even worse when it comes to women under age 50. Among younger women, a shocking 40% of all cases of breast cancer will fail to be detected by mammograms. As I mentioned above, breast cancer in this age group is usually more aggressive (meaning fast-growing) and more likely to prove fatal.
On top of that, mammograms are largely ineffective for detecting cancer located in the upper area of the breast and within the peripheral areas next to the chest wall. They are also likely to miss signs of breast cancer among women who have large or dense breasts, and women who have had breast augmentation. Fibrocystic breast disease can often also prevent breast cancer from being detected by mammograms.
Based on these facts, along with the reliance on mammograms by the medical establishment, it’s no wonder that so many cases of breast cancer fail to be detected until the cancer has metastasized.
The ineffectiveness of mammograms was highlighted by a study conducted by researchers in Norway that was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study showed only a 10% decrease in breast cancer death among women who regularly screened for breast cancer using mammography. Based on these findings, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and author of the book Overdiagnosed, stated that “2,500 [women] would need to be screened for 10 years to avoid one death from breast cancer.” In other words, those same 2,500 women, over the course of 10 years, would receive a total of 25,000 mammograms (once every year) and only one life would be saved! Dr. Welsh also pointed out that such widespread used of mammograms among the women would result in about 1,000 false-positive findings (meaning women would be told they had breast cancer when they didn’t, and would invariably then undergo painful and unnecessary biopsies).
Despite these shocking limitations of mammography, both the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology continue to recommend that all women 40 and over receive annual mammograms. Fortunately, other organizations, including the American College of Physicians and the U.S. Preventative Task Force, are wising up and no longer recommend mammograms for women under 50.
But that’s not enough. That’s because mammograms can actually cause breast and other types of cancer. This startling fact is something all doctors should be telling their women patients, but they’re not. Not because they are bad people. But because even they don’t realize how dangerous and ineffective mammograms are.
I’ll explain why next time.
References
American Cancer Society. Breast Cancer Guidelines and Statistics, 2009-2010.
Kalager M, et al. Effect of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Mortality in Norway. New Eng J Med 2010 Sept 23; 363:1203-1210.
In years past, such a high incidence of breast cancer among young women would have been unthinkable, but no longer. The reason, as I constantly point out, is that we are poisoning ourselves to death with all of the toxins that are so rampant, not only in our environment, but even in our food supply!
But environmental toxicity and poor diet are not the only things you need to be aware of. When it comes to breast cancer, there are other important risk factors to be aware of, as well. One of the most important breast cancer risks is a family history of cancer. If cancer runs in your family, then your risk of developing cancer of any kind is higher. However, 75% of all women who develop breast cancer have no family history of cancer.
Women who are childless or who have their first child after age 30 also tend to have a higher risk of developing breast cancer, as to women who have undergone synthetic hormone therapy, including the use of birth control pills, due to the hormonal imbalances that such therapy can cause. Lifestyle factors, such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor sleep habits, also increase cancer risks, as does alcohol consumption, including wine. (According to cancer researcher Charles B. Simone, MD, drinking as little as two glasses of wine per week can increase the risk of cancer in women by as much as 50%.) Being overweight is another important risk factor.
Sadly, one of the biggest threats comes from the conventional medical establishment and is routinely used by doctors to detect breast cancer. In reality, as I will explain, the use of this diagnostic technique actually significantly increases the risk of cancer. But the medical establishment refuses to admit it.
I’m talking about mammograms.
Why Mammograms Aren’t Your Best Option
Mammograms, along with breast self-examinations, are recommended by most conventional doctors as the best way for women to detect breast cancer. They involved the use of X-rays that allow doctors to look for dense structures within the breast that can be an indication of a tumor. This form of detecting is known as structural imaging. Research shows that mammograms are useful for detecting breast cancer in 80 percent of all women over the age of 50. However, that means that 20% of women age 50 or older can have breast cancer and not have it detected by mammograms! And the problem is even worse when it comes to women under age 50. Among younger women, a shocking 40% of all cases of breast cancer will fail to be detected by mammograms. As I mentioned above, breast cancer in this age group is usually more aggressive (meaning fast-growing) and more likely to prove fatal.
On top of that, mammograms are largely ineffective for detecting cancer located in the upper area of the breast and within the peripheral areas next to the chest wall. They are also likely to miss signs of breast cancer among women who have large or dense breasts, and women who have had breast augmentation. Fibrocystic breast disease can often also prevent breast cancer from being detected by mammograms.
Based on these facts, along with the reliance on mammograms by the medical establishment, it’s no wonder that so many cases of breast cancer fail to be detected until the cancer has metastasized.
The ineffectiveness of mammograms was highlighted by a study conducted by researchers in Norway that was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study showed only a 10% decrease in breast cancer death among women who regularly screened for breast cancer using mammography. Based on these findings, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and author of the book Overdiagnosed, stated that “2,500 [women] would need to be screened for 10 years to avoid one death from breast cancer.” In other words, those same 2,500 women, over the course of 10 years, would receive a total of 25,000 mammograms (once every year) and only one life would be saved! Dr. Welsh also pointed out that such widespread used of mammograms among the women would result in about 1,000 false-positive findings (meaning women would be told they had breast cancer when they didn’t, and would invariably then undergo painful and unnecessary biopsies).
Despite these shocking limitations of mammography, both the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology continue to recommend that all women 40 and over receive annual mammograms. Fortunately, other organizations, including the American College of Physicians and the U.S. Preventative Task Force, are wising up and no longer recommend mammograms for women under 50.
But that’s not enough. That’s because mammograms can actually cause breast and other types of cancer. This startling fact is something all doctors should be telling their women patients, but they’re not. Not because they are bad people. But because even they don’t realize how dangerous and ineffective mammograms are.
I’ll explain why next time.
References
American Cancer Society. Breast Cancer Guidelines and Statistics, 2009-2010.
Kalager M, et al. Effect of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Mortality in Norway. New Eng J Med 2010 Sept 23; 363:1203-1210.
Friday, October 23, 2009
How Health Stories Make the News
The following comes from Jon Rappoport, an investigative reporter I have a lot of respect for.
PROMOTING SWINE FLU FOR FUN AND PROFIT
Jon Rappoport
nomorefakenews.com
OCTOBER 23, 2009.
***
During my 20 years of working as a reporter, I have seen public relations efforts gain more and more power over the press.
I’ve uncovered some simple common denominators when it comes to PR. I’m talking about the kind of PR that provokes reporters into doing pieces that adhere to a planned message.
I’ll boil it down.
First, you have a Group. That Group has some combination of prestige, money, and cultivated authority. It has connections.
The Group has a goal. And it wants the public to agree with the goal.
For example: EVERYONE SHOULD GET VACCINATED.
So the Group formulates a PR plan. It doesn’t operate randomly.
There are meetings and conferences, and a Group leader lays out the steps of the plan.
The plan will involve telling certain stories to reporters. These stories will feature hooks that evoke feelings in the public consciousness. Fear and sympathy, for instance.
Designated members of the Group will contact a list of reporters with these stories. The list is time-tested: the reporters will be friendly. They won’t want to dig deeper or ask embarrassing questions.
Because after all, the stories contain lies.
That’s why there is a need for PR.
A PR agency might be hired, or the PR might be run by the Group’s specialists, who already have good media contacts.
Now, by and large, mainstream medical reporters are lazy when it comes to discovering facts and details on their own. They spend a lot of time talking to experts who can feed them fully formed stories.
Therefore, to serve the reporters, the Group has to have these experts on tap. The experts can be Group members, or they can be friendly outsiders.
BUT THEY MUST BE RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD.
In this case, professors of medicine, researchers, medical bureaucrats, prestigious doctors.
Experts are absolutely vital to the Group’s PR plan. As I say, medical reporters, on the whole, love experts, because then the work is easy. There is no need to question the expert’s reliability or look beyond his statements. There is a rarely a need to find an opposing view to “balance out” the piece.
Medical reporters become pets. They open their mouths, and their owners put food in.
The Group anticipates some degree of resistance from less friendly reporters and from the public. The Group’s plan won’t be a complete cakewalk. But by inundating the friendly reporters with stories that have the ring of authority and evoke fear and sympathy, the Group believes it will carry the day.
There is an interesting wrinkle on the “expert strategy.” The Group funds an advocacy organization, and that advocacy organization will assume the status of an expert, cultivate media contacts, and give statements to reporters who are writing stories on certain issues.
For example:
New York Times
Drug Makers Are Advocacy Group’s Biggest Donors
By GARDINER HARRIS
October 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental Illness , one of the nation’s most influential disease advocacy groups, have come from drug makers in recent years, according to Congressional investigators.
The alliance, known as NAMI, has long been criticized for coordinating some of its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.
End NY Times clip
Then we have the infamous case of CHADD. I wrote about that advocacy group ten years ago, and to give you the flavor of how egregious such a situation can get, I’ll quote myself on it at length:
The PBS television series, The Merrow Report, produced in 1996 a program called "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" The Educational Writer's Association awarded the program first prize for investigative reporting that year. The piece managed to catch a government official in the act of realizing he had made serious mistakes.
In the film, John Merrow, the series' host, explains that, unknown to the public, there has been "a long-term, unpublicized financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation's largest ADD support group."
The group is CHADD, based in Florida. CHADD stands for Children and Adults with ADD. Its 650 local chapters sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings---often held at schools. It educates thousands of families about ADD and ADHD and gives out free medical advice. This advice features the drug Ritalin.
Since 1988, when CHADD and Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the manufacturer of Ritalin, began their financial relationship, Ciba has given almost a million dollars to CHADD, helping it to expand its membership from 800 to 35,000 people.
Merrow interviews several parents whose children are on Ritalin, parents who have been relying on CHADD for information. They are clearly taken aback when they learn that CHADD obtains a significant amount of its funding from the drug company that makes Ritalin.
CHADD has used Ciba money to promote its pharmaceutical message through a public service announcement produced for television. Nineteen million people have seen this PSA. As Merrow says, "CHADD's name is on it, but Ciba Geigy paid for it."
It turns out that in all of CHADD's considerable literature written for the public, there is rare mention of Ciba. In fact, the only instance of the connection Merrow could find on the record was a small-print citation on an announcement of a single CHADD conference.
In recounting CHADD's promotion of drug "therapy" for ADD, Merrow says, "CHADD's literature also says psychostimulant medications [like Ritalin] are not addictive."
Merrow brings this up to Gene Haslip, a Drug Enforcement Agency official in Washington. Haslip is visibly annoyed. "Well," he says, "I think that's very misleading. It's certainly a drug that can cause a very high degree of dependency, like all of the very potent stimulants."
Merrow reveals that CHADD received a $750,000 grant from the US Dept. of Education, in 1996, to produce a video, Facing the Challenge of ADD. The video doesn't just mention the generic name methylphenidate, it announces the drug by its brand name, Ritalin. This, at government (taxpayer) expense.
We see a press conference announcing the release of the video. The CHADD president presents an award to Dr. Thomas Hehir, Director of Special Education Programs at the US Dept. of Education.
This sets the stage for a conversation between Merrow and Dr. Hehir, providing a rare moment when discovery of the truth is recorded on camera.
MERROW: "Are you aware that most of the people in the film [Facing the Challenge of ADD---referring to people who are giving testimonials about how their ADD children have been helped by treatment] are not just members of CHADD ... but in the CHADD leadership, including the former national president? They're all board members of CHADD in Chicago. Are you aware of that? They're not identified in the film."
HEHIR: "I'm not aware of that."
MERROW: "Do you know about the financial connection between CHADD and Ciba Geigy, the company that makes Ritalin?"
HEHIR: "I do not."
MERROW: "In the last six years, CHADD has received $818,000 in grants from Ciba Geigy."
HEHIR: "I did not know that."
MERROW: "Does that strike you as a potential conflict of interest?"
HEHIR: "That strikes me as a potential conflict of interest. Yes it does."
MERROW: "Now, that's not disclosed either. Even though the film talks about Ritalin as [one way of] taking care of treating Attention Deficit Disorder. That's not disclosed either. Does that trouble you?"
HEHIR: "Um, it concerns me."
MERROW: "Are you going to look into this, when you go back to your office?"
HEHIR: "I certainly will look into some of the things you've brought up."
MERROW: "Should they have told you that all those people in that film are CHADD leadership? Should they have told you that CHADD gets twenty percent of its money from the people who make Ritalin?"
HEHIR: "I should have known that."
MERROW: "They should have told you."
HEHIR: "Yes."
This funded video, in which CHADD devotes all of twenty seconds to mentioning Ritalin's adverse effects, is no longer distributed by the US Department of Education.
CHADD has now told its members that it receives funding from Ciba. It says it will continue to take money from Ciba.
This is an example of how a corporation can, behind the scenes, bend and shape the way the public sees reality.
So that’s what I wrote ten years ago. An advocacy organization can become a very powerful “expert” for the Group and thereby influence the public. In CHADD’s case, it managed to work directly through a government media outlet, the US Department of Education.
For a third example, one could do far worse than highlight the fundraising machine called the American Cancer Society (ACS), a billion-dollar non-profit. ACS exerts its considerable influence along many fronts: promoting chemotherapy and funding chemo research; affecting media reporting on cancer treatments; and diverting attention away from non-drug cancer prevention that involves removing chemical carcinogens from the environment. ACS also has become a self-proclaimed authority on alternative cancer treatments---which it labels Quackery.
The ACS has, of course, intimate connections with pharmaceutical companies. Saying the ACS fronts for these companies vastly underplays the power it has gained over the years. ACS has risen to the position of equal partner with the cancer-drug industry and, indeed, the US National Cancer Institute, world center for toxic chemo research.
Which brings us to the CDC PR plan for inducing millions of Americans to receive vaccinations for Swine Flu. Or any flu.
A 2006 article in Harper’s lays it all out. The author, Peter Doshi, focuses on the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, a conference at which Glen Nowak (CDC) used slides to present messages the CDC would project to the public through US media outlets.
Doshi writes, “The [CDC] recipe, as Nowak revealed, relies on creating ‘concern, anxiety, and worry’---its main ingredient, in other words, is fear.”
Doshi continues: “Government officials and health experts following the recipe are instructed to ‘predict dire outcomes.’”
This recipe was, in part, based on experience garnered two years earlier. Doshi: “From a 2002 focus group, the CDC determined death statistics in its flu-prevention literature were ‘eye catching and motivating.’ Participants in the study [focus group] believed ‘20,000 deaths was compelling, frightening,’ and ‘should be part of the headline.’”
Doshi continues: “Another way to ‘motivate behavior,’ the CDC recipe notes…is to describe a flu season as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe’ than previous years, and ‘deadly’…Yet that winter’s flu season was later ruled typical and ‘medium in terms of impact.’”
Then Doshi unleashes a different kind of blockbuster in the article. Speaking to the CDC ‘deadly’ label, he notes: “After looking at more than three decades of data, scientists at the National Institutes of Health last year [2005] concluded, ‘We could not coordinate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.’”
The year 2004 was a strange one for the CDC flu-promotion efforts, and it reveals how disconnected CDC PR can be from the notion of truth. Doshi describes the situation:
“…the [CDC] recipe emphasizes that the public must be made to grasp the ‘seriousness of the illness.’ When 50 million doses of vaccine suddenly became unavailable in 2004, Americans understandably panicked…and medical experts predicted a public-health ‘catastrophe.’ The CDC, with its knowledge of PR, downgraded its scary portrayal of the flu [in general] to ‘an annoying illness’ from which most people ‘will recover just fine.’ It stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing. And once the alleged crisis abated, the agency [CDC] returned to its strident communications plan. By the next fall, the CDC director was publicly stating that the flu is not ‘a benign illness. Many people don’t appreciate that it can result in hospitalization, various complications. For about 36,000 people every year, death.’”
A few final points. The CDC, through one of its departments, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes nicknamed “the medical CIA,” recruits young doctors who do a period of work in the field, with various health departments, looking into potential disease clusters and possible epidemics.
After this time of service, these doctors, returning to their practices, remain on call. They are trained to remain loyal to the CDC, and it’s likely that, wherever they work---for health agencies, in other government positions, in hospitals---they push the party line. They promote adherence to CDC PR. They are useful PR alumni.
Some years ago, I learned that the CDC sends a certain number of its people to the CIA for training. (I confirmed this with a Health and Human Services employee.) These people return to the CDC with higher security clearances. In 2009, with the PR lines between “epidemics” and bio-terrorism blurring, it’s certain that the CDC-CIA connection has become more solid and unified.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every (fake) CDC pronouncement of an epidemic or pandemic, by association, becomes a kind of reference point for the CIA, as it promotes (to the Congress) its own need for greater funding to combat potential bio-terrorism.
Having an ally like the CIA can’t be bad for the CDC. When it comes to telling lies and launching propaganda, the CIA has a great deal of experience. And CIA media contacts are legendary.
Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. His website is nomorefakenews.com
PROMOTING SWINE FLU FOR FUN AND PROFIT
Jon Rappoport
nomorefakenews.com
OCTOBER 23, 2009.
***
During my 20 years of working as a reporter, I have seen public relations efforts gain more and more power over the press.
I’ve uncovered some simple common denominators when it comes to PR. I’m talking about the kind of PR that provokes reporters into doing pieces that adhere to a planned message.
I’ll boil it down.
First, you have a Group. That Group has some combination of prestige, money, and cultivated authority. It has connections.
The Group has a goal. And it wants the public to agree with the goal.
For example: EVERYONE SHOULD GET VACCINATED.
So the Group formulates a PR plan. It doesn’t operate randomly.
There are meetings and conferences, and a Group leader lays out the steps of the plan.
The plan will involve telling certain stories to reporters. These stories will feature hooks that evoke feelings in the public consciousness. Fear and sympathy, for instance.
Designated members of the Group will contact a list of reporters with these stories. The list is time-tested: the reporters will be friendly. They won’t want to dig deeper or ask embarrassing questions.
Because after all, the stories contain lies.
That’s why there is a need for PR.
A PR agency might be hired, or the PR might be run by the Group’s specialists, who already have good media contacts.
Now, by and large, mainstream medical reporters are lazy when it comes to discovering facts and details on their own. They spend a lot of time talking to experts who can feed them fully formed stories.
Therefore, to serve the reporters, the Group has to have these experts on tap. The experts can be Group members, or they can be friendly outsiders.
BUT THEY MUST BE RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD.
In this case, professors of medicine, researchers, medical bureaucrats, prestigious doctors.
Experts are absolutely vital to the Group’s PR plan. As I say, medical reporters, on the whole, love experts, because then the work is easy. There is no need to question the expert’s reliability or look beyond his statements. There is a rarely a need to find an opposing view to “balance out” the piece.
Medical reporters become pets. They open their mouths, and their owners put food in.
The Group anticipates some degree of resistance from less friendly reporters and from the public. The Group’s plan won’t be a complete cakewalk. But by inundating the friendly reporters with stories that have the ring of authority and evoke fear and sympathy, the Group believes it will carry the day.
There is an interesting wrinkle on the “expert strategy.” The Group funds an advocacy organization, and that advocacy organization will assume the status of an expert, cultivate media contacts, and give statements to reporters who are writing stories on certain issues.
For example:
New York Times
Drug Makers Are Advocacy Group’s Biggest Donors
By GARDINER HARRIS
October 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental Illness , one of the nation’s most influential disease advocacy groups, have come from drug makers in recent years, according to Congressional investigators.
The alliance, known as NAMI, has long been criticized for coordinating some of its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.
End NY Times clip
Then we have the infamous case of CHADD. I wrote about that advocacy group ten years ago, and to give you the flavor of how egregious such a situation can get, I’ll quote myself on it at length:
The PBS television series, The Merrow Report, produced in 1996 a program called "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" The Educational Writer's Association awarded the program first prize for investigative reporting that year. The piece managed to catch a government official in the act of realizing he had made serious mistakes.
In the film, John Merrow, the series' host, explains that, unknown to the public, there has been "a long-term, unpublicized financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation's largest ADD support group."
The group is CHADD, based in Florida. CHADD stands for Children and Adults with ADD. Its 650 local chapters sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings---often held at schools. It educates thousands of families about ADD and ADHD and gives out free medical advice. This advice features the drug Ritalin.
Since 1988, when CHADD and Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the manufacturer of Ritalin, began their financial relationship, Ciba has given almost a million dollars to CHADD, helping it to expand its membership from 800 to 35,000 people.
Merrow interviews several parents whose children are on Ritalin, parents who have been relying on CHADD for information. They are clearly taken aback when they learn that CHADD obtains a significant amount of its funding from the drug company that makes Ritalin.
CHADD has used Ciba money to promote its pharmaceutical message through a public service announcement produced for television. Nineteen million people have seen this PSA. As Merrow says, "CHADD's name is on it, but Ciba Geigy paid for it."
It turns out that in all of CHADD's considerable literature written for the public, there is rare mention of Ciba. In fact, the only instance of the connection Merrow could find on the record was a small-print citation on an announcement of a single CHADD conference.
In recounting CHADD's promotion of drug "therapy" for ADD, Merrow says, "CHADD's literature also says psychostimulant medications [like Ritalin] are not addictive."
Merrow brings this up to Gene Haslip, a Drug Enforcement Agency official in Washington. Haslip is visibly annoyed. "Well," he says, "I think that's very misleading. It's certainly a drug that can cause a very high degree of dependency, like all of the very potent stimulants."
Merrow reveals that CHADD received a $750,000 grant from the US Dept. of Education, in 1996, to produce a video, Facing the Challenge of ADD. The video doesn't just mention the generic name methylphenidate, it announces the drug by its brand name, Ritalin. This, at government (taxpayer) expense.
We see a press conference announcing the release of the video. The CHADD president presents an award to Dr. Thomas Hehir, Director of Special Education Programs at the US Dept. of Education.
This sets the stage for a conversation between Merrow and Dr. Hehir, providing a rare moment when discovery of the truth is recorded on camera.
MERROW: "Are you aware that most of the people in the film [Facing the Challenge of ADD---referring to people who are giving testimonials about how their ADD children have been helped by treatment] are not just members of CHADD ... but in the CHADD leadership, including the former national president? They're all board members of CHADD in Chicago. Are you aware of that? They're not identified in the film."
HEHIR: "I'm not aware of that."
MERROW: "Do you know about the financial connection between CHADD and Ciba Geigy, the company that makes Ritalin?"
HEHIR: "I do not."
MERROW: "In the last six years, CHADD has received $818,000 in grants from Ciba Geigy."
HEHIR: "I did not know that."
MERROW: "Does that strike you as a potential conflict of interest?"
HEHIR: "That strikes me as a potential conflict of interest. Yes it does."
MERROW: "Now, that's not disclosed either. Even though the film talks about Ritalin as [one way of] taking care of treating Attention Deficit Disorder. That's not disclosed either. Does that trouble you?"
HEHIR: "Um, it concerns me."
MERROW: "Are you going to look into this, when you go back to your office?"
HEHIR: "I certainly will look into some of the things you've brought up."
MERROW: "Should they have told you that all those people in that film are CHADD leadership? Should they have told you that CHADD gets twenty percent of its money from the people who make Ritalin?"
HEHIR: "I should have known that."
MERROW: "They should have told you."
HEHIR: "Yes."
This funded video, in which CHADD devotes all of twenty seconds to mentioning Ritalin's adverse effects, is no longer distributed by the US Department of Education.
CHADD has now told its members that it receives funding from Ciba. It says it will continue to take money from Ciba.
This is an example of how a corporation can, behind the scenes, bend and shape the way the public sees reality.
So that’s what I wrote ten years ago. An advocacy organization can become a very powerful “expert” for the Group and thereby influence the public. In CHADD’s case, it managed to work directly through a government media outlet, the US Department of Education.
For a third example, one could do far worse than highlight the fundraising machine called the American Cancer Society (ACS), a billion-dollar non-profit. ACS exerts its considerable influence along many fronts: promoting chemotherapy and funding chemo research; affecting media reporting on cancer treatments; and diverting attention away from non-drug cancer prevention that involves removing chemical carcinogens from the environment. ACS also has become a self-proclaimed authority on alternative cancer treatments---which it labels Quackery.
The ACS has, of course, intimate connections with pharmaceutical companies. Saying the ACS fronts for these companies vastly underplays the power it has gained over the years. ACS has risen to the position of equal partner with the cancer-drug industry and, indeed, the US National Cancer Institute, world center for toxic chemo research.
Which brings us to the CDC PR plan for inducing millions of Americans to receive vaccinations for Swine Flu. Or any flu.
A 2006 article in Harper’s lays it all out. The author, Peter Doshi, focuses on the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, a conference at which Glen Nowak (CDC) used slides to present messages the CDC would project to the public through US media outlets.
Doshi writes, “The [CDC] recipe, as Nowak revealed, relies on creating ‘concern, anxiety, and worry’---its main ingredient, in other words, is fear.”
Doshi continues: “Government officials and health experts following the recipe are instructed to ‘predict dire outcomes.’”
This recipe was, in part, based on experience garnered two years earlier. Doshi: “From a 2002 focus group, the CDC determined death statistics in its flu-prevention literature were ‘eye catching and motivating.’ Participants in the study [focus group] believed ‘20,000 deaths was compelling, frightening,’ and ‘should be part of the headline.’”
Doshi continues: “Another way to ‘motivate behavior,’ the CDC recipe notes…is to describe a flu season as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe’ than previous years, and ‘deadly’…Yet that winter’s flu season was later ruled typical and ‘medium in terms of impact.’”
Then Doshi unleashes a different kind of blockbuster in the article. Speaking to the CDC ‘deadly’ label, he notes: “After looking at more than three decades of data, scientists at the National Institutes of Health last year [2005] concluded, ‘We could not coordinate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.’”
The year 2004 was a strange one for the CDC flu-promotion efforts, and it reveals how disconnected CDC PR can be from the notion of truth. Doshi describes the situation:
“…the [CDC] recipe emphasizes that the public must be made to grasp the ‘seriousness of the illness.’ When 50 million doses of vaccine suddenly became unavailable in 2004, Americans understandably panicked…and medical experts predicted a public-health ‘catastrophe.’ The CDC, with its knowledge of PR, downgraded its scary portrayal of the flu [in general] to ‘an annoying illness’ from which most people ‘will recover just fine.’ It stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing. And once the alleged crisis abated, the agency [CDC] returned to its strident communications plan. By the next fall, the CDC director was publicly stating that the flu is not ‘a benign illness. Many people don’t appreciate that it can result in hospitalization, various complications. For about 36,000 people every year, death.’”
A few final points. The CDC, through one of its departments, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes nicknamed “the medical CIA,” recruits young doctors who do a period of work in the field, with various health departments, looking into potential disease clusters and possible epidemics.
After this time of service, these doctors, returning to their practices, remain on call. They are trained to remain loyal to the CDC, and it’s likely that, wherever they work---for health agencies, in other government positions, in hospitals---they push the party line. They promote adherence to CDC PR. They are useful PR alumni.
Some years ago, I learned that the CDC sends a certain number of its people to the CIA for training. (I confirmed this with a Health and Human Services employee.) These people return to the CDC with higher security clearances. In 2009, with the PR lines between “epidemics” and bio-terrorism blurring, it’s certain that the CDC-CIA connection has become more solid and unified.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every (fake) CDC pronouncement of an epidemic or pandemic, by association, becomes a kind of reference point for the CIA, as it promotes (to the Congress) its own need for greater funding to combat potential bio-terrorism.
Having an ally like the CIA can’t be bad for the CDC. When it comes to telling lies and launching propaganda, the CIA has a great deal of experience. And CIA media contacts are legendary.
Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. His website is nomorefakenews.com
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