And then, almost without pause, come rounds of treatments. And in millions of cases, it's a false alarm, a wrong diagnosis… a physically and emotionally draining event that can do terrible damage to body, mind and spirit.
That's why the some of the top dogs in the cancer industry now want to change the definition of cancer…
They woke up and discovered that too many people were being misdiagnosed and given treatments they don't need. Read on…Continued below...
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Have we finally identified the REAL enemy
in the war on cancer?
The famous "war on cancer" has been targeting the wrong enemy — and you may become a victim of friendly fire.
In late July, a National Cancer Institute report published by JAMA online made the shocking statement that benign or premalignant conditions should no longer be called cancer.
This includes low-risk lesions like DCIS -- ductal carcinoma in situ, a breast condition we wrote about in Issue #154. We were already warning our readers back then that it was nothing to worry about. We called it "zero stage cancer" — in other words, not cancer at all
HGPIN is another condition that — suddenly -- is no longer defined as cancer. HGPIN stands for high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, a prostate condition diagnosed in millions of men and then over-treated.
These are normally non-invasive conditions that don't require treatment at all — let alone the aggressive treatment they're often given. They aren't the enemy after all.
As readers of this newsletter know, we've often questioned the use of repeated, cancer-causing x-ray breast screenings and potentially misleading PSA tests. They cause a great deal of needless fear and painful over-treatment. And it turns out the emotional terror can do you great harm.
The War on Cancer: A bunch of hot air
This new study has grave implications, such as:- Millions have received so-called life-saving early diagnosis, followed by rounds of needless and damaging treatment — especially women with DCIS and men with HGPIN.Will these folks now be reclassified as victims of iatrogenesis (medical treatment gone wrong) with full rights to sue? (Iatrogenesis is defined as harm caused by medical treatment or by medical practitioners, and may include negligence, improper sanitation, medical error, misdiagnosis, drug adverse effects or interactions, and more.)
- Anyone who is screened for cancer needs to reconsider the recommended treatment plan in light of this new definition of cancer. It's important to remember that the likelihood of a false positive over a 10-year period is already higher than 50 percent if you do annual breast screening. But if all doctors now give "stage zero cancer" a different name, it will become even more frightening to be told cancer is in stages one through four. I wouldn't hold my breath on all doctors applying the proposed standard universally though, even if it's accepted.
- The money-grubbing, publicity-hungry pink-ribbon industry may be forced to rebrand its message, as it has propagated false ideas about cancer and has promoted the over-diagnosis and overtreatment of millions of women.
"Treatment" can make your cancer cells
30 times more malignant
In fact, it's the fast-growing tumors that are much more challenging to detect early. And this might surprise you: Even in those cases, many of them would never progress to a lethal state.
What's worse… certain of these tumors are enhanced and become more malignant because of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers recently found that radiation therapy transforms breast cancer cells into highly malignant cancer cells — with 30 times higher malignancy after radiation treatments. What they found is that even when radiation kills half the tumor cells, the surviving ones become resistant to treatment. So, radiation cuts the total cancer cell population, giving the false impression that the treatment is working… when in reality it increases the percentage of highly malignant cells that can lead to treatment-induced death.1 This means it's not only possible you never had cancer in the first place, but now the treatment is causing cancer cells to proliferate inside your body. Talk about a double whammy.
Is cancer really an enemy attacking you?
Maybe our entire way of looking at cancer needs to shift from the "enemy attacking you" that requires a raging war… to something your body performs to protect you internally. I recently came across an interesting theory about that, proposed by Paul Davies, of Arizona State University, and Charles Lineweaver, Australian National University scientist.Davies calls cancer "not a random bunch of selfish rogue cells behaving badly, but a highly-efficient pre-programmed response to stress…"
In other words, cancer may be your body's response to an unhealthy cellular environment. It may be more a symptom than a disease… your body's effort to "right itself" in the context of cellular and environmental conditions gone terribly wrong.
If this is true, we'll need to question the prevailing theory that cancer cells are the result of rogue mutations that can kill us — and the prevailing treatment of killing them with chemotherapy and radiation.
Worse than cancer: Crippling fear and needless treatment
for a nonexistent cancer
NCI's panel opined:
...cancers are heterogeneous and can follow multiple paths, not all of which progress to metastases and death, and include indolent disease that causes no harm during the patient's lifetime.That's why this proposed redefinition of cancer is no small matter. It'll affect millions of people. Every year, 60,000 American women are diagnosed with DCIS, besides men with HGPIN, and the rest of the 2 million Americans with other cancers.
The diagnosis unleashes shock and fear — which in and of itself can be a killer. Research shows that a cancer diagnosis can be as fatal as cancer itself. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2012, scientists evaluated 6 million Swedish adults regarding the psychological toll of a cancer diagnosis. After analyzing more than 500,000 cancer diagnoses, they concluded that the risk of suicide was 16 times higher, and the risk of heart-related death was 26.9 times higher — during just the first week following diagnosis — compared to people who were cancer free.
Few women recover from the devastating fear and stress that follows a false-positive breast cancer diagnoses, even three years after they've learned the diagnosis was wrong and they're declared cancer-free. This finding about long-lasting damage is based on measurements of 12 psychological qualities, including a sense of dejection, anxiety, feelings of attractiveness, and negative impact on sleep, behavior, sexuality, and more.
Even after being "cleared of cancer" the psychological impact was equivalent to actually having breast cancer. This finding is so shocking I can't help but think it's got to be a mistake, but that's what the researchers concluded.
This is extremely likely to affect you or someone you love, considering you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting a false-positive at least once if you get a mammogram every year for ten years. One example: A woman in Texas was told she had Stage 4 terminal breast cancer, and was led down the road of chemotherapy and depression… only to learn much later that the diagnosis was wrong. She didn't have cancer in the first place.
And she's not the only one, by ANY stretch.
Disturbing? Yes. But this doesn't have to happen to you…
7 ways to avoid being the victim of a false positive
You may not be able to avoid being told you have cancer due to a false positive from a screening test, but you can chart your own path and spare yourself the trauma of unneeded treatments.And it definitely helps to have thought this out beforehand.
You and your loved ones have far more vested interest in your health than any medical professional you'll ever meet. So take the steps you can take, such as:
- Develop a "what-if" plan for yourself and your loved ones. Now, not later.
- Eat organic food, exercise regularly and avoid exposure to toxins as much as you can.
- Say no to tests that have a reputation for false positives. Mammograms and PSA tests are high on the list. Learn about the shortcomings of these deeply flawed tests and don't let yourself be railroaded into treatment.
- Get a baseline thermogram (if you haven't already) and repeat once in awhile to look for the patterns of body heat and inflammation that are early indicators of cancer. If you don't know what a thermogram is, read the article that follows this one and find out.
- ALWAYS — and I mean always — get a second and even a third opinion. Many things can and do go wrong with diagnoses. The life you save with a second opinion could be your own.
- Remember that early-stage cancer is highly treatable and almost always slow-growing. You've got plenty of time to study all your options and to try alternative treatments before consenting to conventional treatments.
- Don't jump into any conventional treatment protocol until your diagnosis has been confirmed two or three times. The results of surgery, chemo, and radiotherapy can be devastating. Natural treatments, on the other hand, can be started right away. And they'll improve your health in dozens of ways even if you don't have cancer.
What do YOU think about the NCI's new cancer definition? Have you or a loved one experienced the trauma of a misdiagnosis? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page at: www.Facebook.com/CancerDefeated
Don't Let Mainstream Mis-reporting about
Cancer Kill Your Chances of Good Health
I know I'm not the only person disappointed with the news media. It's rife with sensationalism and biased stories. Worst of all are the "journalists" who go in search of tabloid-style stories and don't bother with the details.What happens in these cases? We end up watching biased stories that appear to be objective but aren't. I recently saw a bogus news segment on thermograms, so I want to set the record straight on how this early detection tool can save you from breast cancer despite what some know-nothing journalists may say. It could save your life.Continued below...
Video of the Week:
"Shocking Confessions of a Drug Company Insider"
Mammograms versus thermograms
The news report I saw knocking thermograms was based on ONE case of a woman who received a false negative, indicating she didn't have cancer when in fact she did. The reporter then trotted out sound bites from a couple of radiologists (who make their living off of X-rays) to say that of course thermograms aren't good for much and women should stick to mammograms.The news report didn't say a word about the terrible inaccuracy of mammograms, the countless false negatives and false positives. If we're going to condemn screening procedures for one false negative, mammograms would have been outlawed years ago.
Early detection is key when it comes to any cancer, and breast cancer in particular. And it's a fact that thermograms are a safe, valuable early detection tool for breast cancer.
The problem is, no single early detection tool is flawless. Mammograms are the most well-known, and they certainly detect some cancers. But they're also virtually useless when it comes to detecting tumors in the dense tissue of younger women.
On top of that, mammograms can deliver false-negatives, false-positives, over-diagnosis, over-treatment, and radiation exposure. Last I checked, the false-negative rate was around 20 percent—meaning mammograms will miss one out of five breast cancer tumors.
They're also virtually useless for women under age 40—and though rare, it's the younger-than-forty crowd that develops some of the most malicious strains of breast cancer.
Consider thermograms instead
Thermography is not "alternative medicine" as such. It's legal in the United States and widely used in Europe. In the U.S., conventional medicine has thrown it on the alternative medicine dust heap because it poses a threat to mammography, a huge, profitable industry with tens of thousands of people making a living off it.The FDA approves thermography as safe but doesn't officially support it and says it's not an alternative to mammography. But given the FDA's poor track record in supporting safe, non-invasive, proven health treatments, you shouldn't let that stop you from reaping the benefits of thermography screening.
If you don't know about it, thermography is a form of digital infrared imaging that's completely safe—no radiation exposure whatsoever. It's based on the concept that early tumor sites project more heat than normal breast tissue. This is because of the increased blood vessel circulation and metabolic changes that take place when a tumor first develops.
A thermogram pinpoints the abnormal heat levels that cancerous and — this is important — pre-cancerous areas generate. These areas pour out excessive heat long before a mammogram or any physical examination can detect a thing.But when it comes to thermograms, the key thing is to look at changes over time. So anyone who gets a single thermogram and thinks that's the last word on their risk factor is missing out on crucial information.
The single-bullet approach
While I absolutely do think some screening tests are better than others, it riles me when a news program puts out a sensational story that paints a tool as worthless. It's like the medical industry taking a single-bullet approach to healthcare, trying to pigeon-hole illnesses into one-size-fits-all problems and solutions. Healthcare isn't that easy, and it never will be.Here's what you have to remember. Most high-tech screening procedures are flawed in some way. Take mammograms, for instance. They're just X-ray pictures of the breast. Not only do they not work well on dense breast tissue, as mentioned, but they're subject to error. The machine can malfunction. The technician who interprets your results can screw up. Or a tumor just won't show.
In a thermogram, the tumor site needs to be caught at a certain growth stage. And again, interpretation is subject to human error. The images have to be interpreted by a skilled, experienced thermographer. And as I said earlier, it's the changes seen in a series of images, taken over a period of years, that most accurately flags cancer risk.
If this sounds alarming, it really isn't. The abnormally hot areas that turn up in thermograms can take many, many years to develop into cancer. Immediate treatment isn't needed. You've got time to observe how they change — and to proceed to other tests such as biopsies and mammograms if they seem warranted. Cancerous areas literally get hotter every year, and a thermogram can often see this occurring long before an X-ray could ever detect a mass.
We already know one in five cancers can't be detected by mammography. Some of those cancers can be picked up by a thermogram. On the flip side, there is the occasional tumor site that won't show up on a thermogram, but may with a mammogram or other screening test. In fact, some studies show an increased survival rate when mammography and breast thermography are used together.
It's in your hands…
I'd say the best possible tool for fighting breast cancer is simply awareness. Know your options and choose what feels best for you based on your age, genetic risk, tissue density, and access. I'm not a fan of some of the diagnostic tools out there, but if you opt to use them, make sure you go in with eyes wide open. Ask questions. Don't be a meek little lamb who does whatever doctor says. If you ever have any kind of doubts, get a second opinion. Push for it. It's your life we're talking about.
Kindest regards,
Lee Euler, PublisherFootnote from 1st article:1Lagadec, C, Vlashi, E, Della Donna, L, Dekmezian, C, Pajonk, F. Radiation-induced reprogramming of breast cancer cells. Stem Cells. 2012;30:833-844.References from 2nd article: "What is Breast Thermography." Breast Thermography Home: Medical Infrared Imaging Breast Cancer and Early Detection.http://www.breastthermography.com/breast_thermography_mf.htm "FDA Safety Communication: Breast Cancer Screening — Thermography is Not an Alternative to Mammography." FDA: Medical Devices.http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/AlertsandNotices/ucm257259.htm "How many women get breast cancer?" American Cancer Society, Breast Cancer Overview.http://www.cancer.org/cancer/breastcancer/overviewguide/breast-cancer-overview-key-statistics "Mammograms." National Cancer Institute: Fact Sheet, Mammograms.http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/detection/mammograms
