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Public Libraries Should Offer Access To Grassroots Breast Cancer Activists

HOW TO STOP WORRYING
ABOUT BREAST CANCER

THE ONE SCIENTIFIC FACT
YOU NEED TO KNOW

By Irwin D. Boss, Ph.D.

http://home.mira.net/~antiviv/issue149.htm
 
If you are a women who has been diagnosed as "early breast cancer" (meaning there is no evidence of metastasis) or simply worried about "breast cancer", there is one simple scientific fact that you need to know :

When a pathologist diagnoses a lesion as "early breast cancer", more than half the time the pathologist is wrong - it is not actually breast cancer.

There is no point worrying. What most women have is a tumor which, under a light microscope, looks like a cancer to a pathologist.

Chances are this tumor lacks the ability to metastasize - to spread throughout the body - which is the hallmark of a genuine cancer.

How do I know this scientific fact? First of all, because I have published strong scientific evidence supporting this fact in a series of scientific papers in the 1960's.

At that time, I was Director of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffolo NY.

The world's first controlled clinical trial of adjuvant therapies for breast cancer was centralized in my department.

This study produced the first important advance in the treatment of breast cancer in 50 years. It has changed the treatment of breast cancer worldwide. Unfortunately, these changes were not always for the better.

To explain the new findings, Dr. Leslie Blumenson and I developed a deep mathematical model of early breast cancer which accurately predicted the study data.

It was as Ph.D.'s (not M.D.'s) that we made a surprising discovery: More than half of the patients diagnosed as early breast cancer had tumors that seemed to have little ability to metastasize - that were more like benign lesions rather than cancers.

Our discovery was highly unpopular with the medical profession.

Doctors could never afford to admit the scientific truth because the standard treatment in those days was radical mastectomy.

Admitting the truth could lead to malpractice suits by women who had lost a breast because of an incorrect medical diagnosis.

The furious doctors at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) punished us for our discovery.

They took our highly successful breast cancer research program away from us; they stopped funding our mathematical research; and they eventually succeeded in suppressing our findings and blocking new publications.

In recent years our findings have been indirectly confirmed by several new studies. Breast cancer and prostate cancer are statistical twins.

When the functions of these two sexual organs diminish, the cells often become abnormal and look like cancer cells.

The April 22/29 1992 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association reported amazingly high survival rates in a Swedish study of untreated early prostate cancer which showed 7 out of 8 of the tumors were not cancers and did not turn into cancers.

Hence, there is no reason for women to panic when they hear "cancer"; panic makes them easy victims.

Further proof comes from the NCI's own age-adjusted death rates that are reported in "Cancer Undefeated", a special article by Bailar and Gornik in The New England Journal of Medicine (may 29, 1997 pp 1569-1574).

NCI claims for benefits of mammographic screening are flatly contradicted by its own statistics.

The mortality rate for breast cancer in women over 55 was about 20% higher in 1995 than in 1970. If screening was effective, these rates should have been 20% lower.

Dr. John Bailar III says lamely : The recent and substantial increase in the use of mammography among women over 50, for whom an annual exam is known to be effective, has not prevented this increase."

This is a paradox: How can mammography be effective in reducing mortality rates when the increased use of mammography has resulted in increasing death rates?

This paradox disappears with two assumptions.

First, that, say, 7 out of 8 of the "early breast cancers" found by mammographic screening are not actually cancers and, second that screening by X-rays causes breast cancers.

Under the second assumption, screening caused much of the 20% increase in mortality from breast cancers.

In other words, NCI causes thousands of excess deaths from breast cancer each year.

The one scientific fact about "breast cancer" is the key to understanding most of the "mysteries" of this disease.

It empowers women so they can protect themselves from greedy doctors and scientists.

For example, women can see for themselves what treatment will do the most good and the least harm.

Common sense says that the treatment of a tumor that cannot metastasize should be like the treatment of a benign lesion, simple excision. A good surgeon can cut out the lesion with little visible long-term effect on the breast. This is simple and safe.

There is an easy way to give California women access to the truth about breast cancer.

The state of California should stop wasting $14 million a year on "cancer research" that is useless to women and instead spend this money on California libraries.

Women should be able to go to a special alcove in any public library and get Internet access to the truth about breast cancer from grassroots breast cancer activists.

Women who are concerned about breast cancer need facts, not myths, to make their own decisions.

Women should not have to depend solely on misinformation provided by persons who are in clear conflict-of-interest such as the doctors who promote the hightech treatments for cancer and the scientists whose "research" supports their fraudulent medical claims.

Women would have other questions that have not yet been addressed.

For instance, what about the treatment of a lesion that can metastasize? Murphy's Law is the grim truth here.

Lesions which can metastasize will probably have already done so. In this event, it doesn't make much difference what treatment is given - the prognosis will be poor.

Women have the right to know that high-tech, high-cost therapies are almost worthless here.

Bailar and Gornik show that after high-tech treatment came in after 1970 there was a steady 0.3% annual increase in cancer death rates compared to 0.1% in the pre-1970 years.

In other words, what the high-tech cancer treatment actually did was to triple the increase in the age-adjusted cancer death rates.
Cancer costs increased ten-fold between 1970 and 1990 while the death rates increased - a bad bargain for the public.

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