I watched it.  I thought the reporter provided a balanced perspective but in the end the claimed "cures" purported by the doctors she recommends do not stand up to any scientific scrutiny (peer review or replication).  These doctors provided a few anecdotal cases where cancer went into remission but anecdotal evidence does not translate to scientific evidence.  Sommers' book and her recommendations providing a spotlight on these doctors is irresponsible. 

Suzanne definitely was not in a good light, and I was floored by the hair analysis done by Gonzalez. But, IMO, we need to remain openminded to alternatives to conventional treatment and that for me was the driving message.

She was stage 1 and had lumpectomy/rads.   I don't know what grade it was.    I read that from another interview awhile back, she didn't mention it in this one.

She was stage 2, with a primary tumor of over 2 cm and negative nodes, but without a thorough systemic nodal check or dissection.  She was highly ER positive.

The issue of the valley fever was an interesting one.  She was rushed to the hospital because she developed sudden severe breathing problems.  The doctors who diagnosed her, and these were not rookie residents in training, they were upper eschelon specialists at Cedars Sinai Hospital,   mis-diagnosed her with full body mets because the scans showed shadows everywhere.  They gave her a diagnosis without doing any biopsy--this was not her doing; it was an unfortunate protocol error during this event.  It turned out to be of an infectious nature--valley fever and I believe also some sort of fungal infection.  She also had uterine cancer or cancerous changes in her uterus at some separate point which was treated with surgery only. 

"Valley fever" is a fungal infection, caused by the fungus Coccidioides immitis.  People who contract valley fever usually get it by inhaling the spores, which are found in soil in certain areas of the U.S. 

The infection ("coccidioidomycosis") is usually mild and asymptomatic in healthy people who have normal immune systems.  In someone who has underlying health problems, the infection can be more serious, and can even become "disseminated" -- it can spread to multiple organs and tissues.  The disseminated form is more difficult to treat; but the mild form usually goes away by itself without any treatment.

Here's a short version:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002299

Here's the longer, more technical version:  http://www.medicinenet.com/valley_fever/article.htm

BTW, coccidioidomycosis is just one of several fungal infections that can be contracted by inhaling spores from soil:  http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/mycology/mycology-6.htm  These infections can occur in the lungs.  It's not always easy to distinguish the changes caused by the fungal infections from the fuzzy spots that can be seen with lung tumors, when looking at a radiograph.  That's why physicians need to be alert to the possibility that someone with lung problems might have one of the fungal infections.  (There are tests that can be done, and specific questions asked, to help make the distinction.)  Here is a chest X-ray of someone with Histoplasmosis (another of the fungal infections):

Incidentally, I am not posting this info to try to resurrect the "Fungal Theory" thread.  I'm relieved that thread is no longer active.

otter

Thanks for the link, thenewme. I am looking at it now. I am sure it will show me what I already know; that Suzanne Somers is a very dangerous flake trying to make money off of cancer victims. She is good at one thing and that is marketing herself.  It's an enigma how she can be knocking conventional medicine for treatment of breast cancer when she had a lumpectomey and radiation herself.

Here's a history of her hero Burzynski from Orac:

Dr. Burzynski is a rather difficult woo-meister to tackle for a variety of reasons. First, he really is a legitimate MD/PhD, proving beyond a doubt that having an MD/PhD double threat degree does not necessarily inoculate one from falling prey to pseudoscience. He's also an example of a brave maverick doctor (specifically the "iconoclast" type) who's discovered The One True Treatment for cancer, HIV, and a wide variety of other conditions. In Dr. Burzynski's case, his treatment of choice is something he once dubbed antineoplastons, and, like all brave maverick doctors, be they Mark and David Geier, Andrew Wakefield, or Robert O. Young, he believes himself to be a crusading researcher rather than a quack. He also gives good science-y speak in that he has many of the trappings of a reputable scientist, including publications in reputable journals. Come to think of it, that's just like the Geiers or Wakefield too, all of whom have managed to insinuate themselves into the medical literature. Like Wakefield (but unlike Mark Geier), at one time Dr. Burzynski was actually viewed as a promising young researcher. Unfortunately that time was well over 30 years ago, when he was on the faculty at the Baylor College of Medicine. It was there that he discovered what he would later call "antineoplastons."

Like many brave maverick iconoclasts frustrated with the "arrogance," "blindness," and "inflexibility" of his academic colleagues, Dr. Burzynski apparently ultimately decided that academia was not for him (or maybe the decision was made for him); so he founded his own clinic, which offers a "variety of alternative cancer treatments for patients diagnosed with over 50 different types of malignancies, including colon, pulmonary, breast, prostate, head and neck, ovarian, pancreatic, esophageal, hepatic, renal, bladder, brain, malignant melanoma, lymphoma, and many others," and research institute, which is currently described as "a biopharmaceutical company committed to developing treatment for cancer based on genomic and epigenomic principles." Apparently it's not just about the antineoplastons. Since then, it's been a life of woo for Dr. Burzynski, and of late he appears not to be publishing in anything resembling reputable journals anymore. A PubMed search reveals no publications since 2006, and the closest I find to a recent publication in a reputable journal is this report in 2004 of a single arm uncontrolled trial in children.

In any case, Dr. Burzynski first gained fame for his antineoplastons back in 1988, when Sally Jesse Raphael featured four "miracle" patients of Burzynski, who, according to her, had had incurable cancer and failed conventional therapies but were then cancer-free, thanks to Dr. Burzynski. Unfortunately, four years later in 1992, Inside Edition followed up these four patients:

In 1992, "Inside Edition" reported that two of the four patients had died and a third was having a recurrence of her cancer. (The fourth patient had bladder cancer, which has a good prognosis.) The widow of one of Raphael's guests stated that her husband and five others from the same city had sought treatment after learning about Burzynski from a television broadcast -- and that all had died of their disease. In 1995, a federal grand jury indicted Burzynski for mail fraud and marketing an unapproved drug. The indictment charged that he had billed insurance companies using procedure codes for chemotherapy, even though his treatment was not chemotherapy. He was tried in 1997 but not convicted.

Not surprisingly, in 1998, the State of Texas secured a consent agreement with Burzynski stipulating that he: (a) cannot distribute unapproved drugs in Texas; (b) is allowed to distribute "antineoplastons" only to patients enrolled in FDA approved clinical trials, unless the FDA approves his drugs for sale; (c) cannot advertise "antineoplastons" for the treatment of cancer; and (d) on his website and in promotional material his ads must have a disclaimer that the safety and effectiveness of "antineoplastons" have not been demonstrated. Obviously, big pharma got to Texas.

It also turns out that the substances that Burzynski claimed to have isolated from urine (his "antineoplastons") have never been shown to do anything in cancer by anyone other than Burzynski. As the article at Quackwatch points out, the National Cancer Institute could not replicate Burzynski's results. Neither could drug company Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals. Neither could the Japanese National Cancer Institute. So what we have here is a therapy that has marginal (if that) credibility based on prior probability. AFter all, it's not entirely implausible to think that the body might make substances that arrest the growth of cancer. One might even postulate that it is a deficiency in these substances that allows cancer to develop. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for this, other than from Burzynski. If there's one thing that should raise a red flag for pseudoscience, it's when only one scientist can produce the reported results and no one else can. Replication is utterly key to the acceptance of science, and if other groups could have replicated Burzynski's work I might scratch my head and say, "You know, Dr. B may be on to something there." But no one else can, and I'm left scratching my head and wondering how so many people can believe in Burzynski's results in the absence of any good science.

Faced with a consent decree mandating that he can only use antineoplastons in the context of a clinical trial, Dr. Burzynski used his institute to set up a staggering number of clinical trials. As noted by The Cancer Letter, these clinical trials failed to meet minimal standards for scientifically sound studies. How these things got approved by any institutional review board, I have no idea, unless Burzynski made like the Geiers and created his own IRB. However he did it, what he is doing is sloppy at best, grossly incompetent at worst. Here are some excerpts from The Cancer Letter:

Howard Ozer:

Dr. Burzynski is studying a heterogeneous, ill-defined patient population.

He treats patients who come through the door, and only patients who come through the door. He takes patients with bony disease, liver disease, bone marrow involvement, CNS disease. He organizes data by disease site, whatever the patients' stage, and whatever treatment they received prior to walking through the door of his clinic.

What we have here are bad trials that could never get past peer review of any clinical trials cooperative group. It's not in the public interest to conduct trials that are not going to yield clear results. If you are going to test an alternative approach, you need to test it as rigorously as you do mainstream approaches.

Dr. Burzynski's protocols are written with all the trappings of protocols. They look like protocols. They smell like protocols. But they lack the rigor of protocol design that defines the patient population, defines the endpoints, sets exclusion and inclusion criteria, and allows for statistical analysis.

The protocols are evaluating a single statistical endpoint: response. He doesn't evaluate disease-free survival, time to progression, quality of life, or overall survival. With these endpoints not prospectively defined, he has no basis for making legitimate claims regarding these parameters. This is a fundamental problem: You have to set your endpoints prospectively. It's too late to go back and do it after all the patients are treated.

Dr. Burzynski presents no baseline data. He presents no control data. He presents no description of methodology employed to measure active agents in the blood. How are these values affected by other variables, such as how recently these patients have been on other chemotherapy? How many other chemotherapy agents have they had? Is their liver and renal function normal? In the absence of controls, Dr. Burzynski is constructing his controls from memory and experience, which eliminates any possibility of determining a true response rate.

One huge problem that was noted is that Dr. Burzynski's therapy requires the adminstration of so much antineoplaston as sodium salts that several of his patients developed hypernatremia, in one case as high as 180 mEq/L. (A normal serum sodium level ranges between 135 and 145 mEq/L.) Personally, I've never seen a sodium level that high in a living patient. When sodium levels get into the 155 mEq/L and up range, clinicians start to get very worried and usually start aggressive treatment to bring the sodium levels down. Worse, these are patients with brain cancer. One danger is that, in correcting the hypernatremia, sometimes cerebral edema (brain swelling) will result. That's why we generally try to correct hyponatremia fairly slowly. In a patient with a brain tumor, cerebral edema could be even more dangerous than in a patient without such a tumor. Despite reviewers being alarmed at the hypernatremia some of Burzynski's patients developed, astoundingly he still claimed that he had no "significant toxicity."

The bottom line is that Dr. Burzynski is not a miracle worker. He is not a doctor who sees something that mainstream science has not and who therefore has a cure for many cancers that mainstream medicine scoffs at. He is not a bold visionary. Rather, he appears to be a man pursuing pseudoscience. The reason that mainstream scientific medicine has not accepted the existence of antineoplastons or their efficacy against cancer is because there is no credible evidence to support this thrapy and no one other than Dr. Burzynski has been able to replicate his results.

Sometimes I just wish someone famous who got cancer would go out on television and do a few very refreshing things:

1) NOT say he/she is optimistic or has hope

2) NOT say there is a cure or a great alternative treatment

3) NOT say much of anything, as a matter of fact

....expect "bloody hell, I've got an incurable disease and I have no idea what the future holds for me."

Maybe the cancer world and the public would finally sit up and be forced to acknowledge this incurable disease for what it is.

IMO, one of the things preventing the discovery of a known cure is the language of deception surrounding cancer and Suzanne Somers is no worse than some others out there. And this is true of all cancers to some extent. Words like "hope' and "survivor" and "fight" make cancer sound like a mystical experience, one for which victory lies within reach of the warrior. If we took the illness down off of this ridiculous pedestal of the sublime, the magnanimous and the eternal, we might be forced to deal with what are ugly mutations and organ destroying little pac mans. There is no glamour in cancer. It is ugly and yucky and mean, but to hear celebrities and Pink movement profiteers tell it, you would think it was a martyr's badge.

I vote to call cancer cancer, and not a "fight" or a "battle" because we never declared war; it invaded us and we don't have good ammunition for it anyway. I also vote to have all cancers unite, to stop giving breast cancer the lion's share of the exposure at the expense of other sufferers, and to stop treating metastatic cancer patients like the special ed kids of a wealthy public school district who are kept in a contained classroom where no one can see them so that their dismal test scores will not interfere with the district-wide SAT average, thus scaring away businesses and threatening the local tax base.

She is peddling another book again, she said that she had cancer all over her body, what kind? a mystery. She does more harm than good.

It must have been devastating for her to be misdiagnosed with extensive cancer throughout her body.  It's left unclear as to who ordered the biopsy that cleared up the diagnosis of cancer.  Regardless, it was irresponsible for the Doctor to make the diagnosis to her without knowing more certainly.  Not the first time that has happened.  I wonder, would they have really given her chemo without a biopsy or any other further confirmation?  Or is that a red herring she is throwing out against chemo?  As sympathetic as I am to the way she (says she) was treated, it doesn't really give her any credentials to speak on the viability cancer treatments.  Her issue in that event was a misdiagnosis that, thank god, turned out not to be cancer.

I read Knock Out. According to her, She was admitted to the hospital because she couldn't breathe.  The docs did a CAT scan.  Based on what they saw and the fact that she had prior bc, they made an assumption that what they were seeing were mets throughout her body and therefore gave her a diagnosis of cancer.  A biopsy was recommended only after her step-daughter questioned their diagnosis. She had looked up the symptoms online and suggested that maybe it could be Valley Fever.  After a biopsy was done checking for the fungus in question, it was revealed that it was indeed Valley Fever. 

Unfortunately cancer is misdiagnosed. Suzanne Somers may have dodged cancer treatment the 2nd time around but others haven't been so lucky.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/article_348af9d3-1e52-52bc-862a-9782aa2c5c22.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/health/20cancer.html?_r=2&th&emc=th

 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132213&page=1

http://patients.about.com/od/misdiagnosis/a/misdiagnosis.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1043612/Doctors-remove-firefighters-healthy-lung-misdiagnosed-cancer.html

http://www.westbranchtimes.com/article.php?id=6331

Whether you think she's a flake or you don't...one thing is certain....second, third, maybe even fourth opinions are crucial.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/suzanne-somers-cancer-expert/comment-page-2/#comment-646558

The NY Times just published this column on the Somers Dateline appearance