THINK BEFORE YOU PINK

The whole Breast Cancer Awareness Month was a partnership between the American Cancer Society and the pharmaceutical division of a company called Imperial Chemical Industries (now Astrazeneca) back in 1985.  Astrazeneca makes about 7 different cancer fighting drugs and 4 of them are for breast cancer.  And they, at one time, made Tamoxifen.  They knew if they promoted mammograms more women would get DX with BC and therefore more would end up on their drugs.  It has been described as a masterful public relations coup.  

The majority of these "fund raisers" focus on BC treatment, not prevention, because that's where the big money is made.  If a product has a pink ribbon on it I avoid it like the plague.

An organization I support is Dr. Susan Love's Army of Women.  Their goal is to "challenge the scientific community to expand its focus to include breast cancer prevention".  You sign up for free and they match you up with researchers who ask you a series of questions.  Basically, they are trying to compile information to try to determine how breast cancer is caused in the first place.  You can get more information at armyofwomen.org. 

There are a lot of threads about Susan Love's Foundation. It is a wonderful organization, dedicated to finding out what causes breast cancer, not just treating it after the fact.

The "Think Before You Pink" is from an organization called Breast Cancer Action Group and they are equally dedicated to blasting the pink myth and finding a cure; they believe too much money is spent on advertising, etc and not enough on research. I encourage y'all to check it out!  I am tired of people making money off of my disease. There has to be an incentive for a cure and it isn't going to come from Big Pharma.

Thanks, Kate for your reply!  I'm glad to know those who posted are on to the pink scam!

tuckertwo

Medigal,

I have thought the same thing about ALL diseases. I remember when Jerry Lewis was doing those telethons for musular dystrophy, which still exists.

I was damaged by DES before I was born so I am very suspicious of any drug. They all have side effects. I believe that there is a cure for most diseases if we look to the natural world; however, drug companies can't patent most natural substances and they don't put any money into researching alternatives to chemical substances since that's where they make money. There are some great articles in the link I provided above that exposes how diabolical drug companies really are. They make the drugs, then hire people to say positive things about it; the researchers work in the drug companies (no bias there!) - they caused my breast cancer because of my DES exposure and now they are making bucks off of treating the breast cancer. Nice racket.

tucker

Kate,

Very wise GP you have!  I just posted an article under ADVOCACY about the FDA and physicians, which is an excellent read.

Like the slogan! I'd wear that on a t-shirt too. Your sig is equally great; I saw it on a t-shirt but I don't have the courage to wear it!

 tuckertwo 

lindasa,

Before you get too excited about the benefits of Big Pharma perhaps you can read and compare the info here concerning conventional treatment of diabetes (what MD's do) and naturopathic (what MD"s don't do)

http://www.diabetes-daily-care.com/

Doctors are given many perks to prescribe medications/insulin by pharma. This is becoming common knowledge. Diabetics suffer more disease via the insulin route, insulin does not cure diabetes. The natural route uses herbs that help the body normalize, balance and heal. MD's are not taught this method; they are taught to be good drug pushers. I worked in the medical field and I know this goes on. MD's and the medical world are not into prevention, they haven't a clue.

tuckertwo

lindasa,

You say you would not take the results of that link (I assume you're referring to Propublica) at face value. Did you know that Propublica is sponsored by PBS and NPR? It is investigative journalism. I suggest you read the website before you slam it. People, and by that I mean patients, have a RIGHT to know how much money their doctors receive from drug companies. You cannot tell me that a doctor who is receiving $80,000 from a particular drug company for a few speeches, is not going to push whatever drug that company wants that doctor to push. Many doctors receive much, much more. When there is a conference or symposium for MD's, guess who is there, immersing the doctors with free samples of pills and free trips to Hawaii? Every drug company in America, is who. I am glad Propublica has the cojones to make this information available to those concerned: the patients.

I don't believe in being a guinea pig, and I will not try drugs out for the edification of the drug companies. I already did that in utero with DES exposure, thank you. None of the drugs ever created has cured any disease. Drugs just cause more problems.

And no. Why should the doctor get reimbursed? It's his job. The patients should get reimbursed for putting their lives on the line so drug companies can make money. The CEO of Eli Lilly, alone, makes over 16 MILLION a year. They aren't making drugs to help you. They are making drugs to make you sick, so that you'll buy more drugs. It's called business. It works the same way illegal drugs do; you buy one drug. Then you need another one to counteract the original one, and so on.

Propublica is a very useful website for aware patients who take control of their health,and don't let Big Pharma chemicalize their lives.

tucker

Uh-oh. Did a poster here say there wasn't skullduggery involved!  Think again.

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The FDA is now confirmed as operating criminal conspiracies, having been busted hacking into the Gmail accounts of its top whistleblower scientists who were speaking out against FDA corruption.

FDA managers conspired to commit multiple felony crimes by installing covert spy software and then capturing private passwords and screen shots, then using that information to infiltrate the Gmail accounts of these FDA whistleblowers.

It's all revealed in a shocking article describing the key facts of this case of runaway FDA criminality:
http://www.naturalnews.com/034824_FDA_scientists_hacking_whistleblowers.html

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The FDA ok'd a drug called DES back in the 1930's. My mother took it; it gave me breast cancer. (See DES thread for more info). The doctors knew it was a useless drug, did not prevent miscarriages and was banned from cattle feed in 1954, but still given to preg women until 1970's. So, the drug companies, FDA and doctors were complicit in this hoax which has caused infertility and reproductive problems in women for decades, and now breast cancer.  The FDA has apologized to DES Daughters, though   As if that erases what they did.

That is why I post information from Propublica and Think Before You Pink. Awareness is a good thing!

tucker 

The usual way. With useless chemo. Maybe Herceptin was doing it's job but the taxotere and carboplatin did nothing but harm. However, IF in the future I have a recurrence, I will not be having anything to do with drugs.  This is why:

We live in a country where children are literally taken away from parents who do not want their child with cancer to get chemotherapy. The child can be forced to get chemotherapy and the parents can be arrested. Perhaps...just perhaps...this would be acceptable if it could be conclusively proven that chemotherapy was the right thing to do. But in fact, this is not the case. Actually it is just the opposite. Chemotherapy studies show that it is positively NOT generally effective. One other interesting read you may want to see is:

Chemotherapy Statistics Can Be Misleading.

So What Are the Actual Chemotherapy Statistics?

They are right here (the full text can be viewed here). A review of all known relevant clinical trials concluded that if the average cancer patient gets chemotherapy, his or her chances of still being alive 5 years from now increases by a pitiful 2.1% in America. That is barely worth getting dressed for. And this study does not even say anything about quality of life either.

Seeing as the how current average 5-year survival rate in the U.S. is something like 65% percent, it is clear that chemotherapy contributes very little to successful cancer outcomes. Considering this study shows that chemotherapy essentially does not meaningfully improve average 5-year survival, one must realize that once you account for the patient to patient variability in this measure, that means a significant fraction of patients may actually have their 5 year survival reduced by chemotherapy. This is further confounded by the fact that studies that show negative outcomes are often never published by pharmaceutical companies. Consider another study done in England where 27% of 429 patients receiving "end of life care" were found to have their deaths caused or hastened by chemotherapy they were prescribed.

Even if chemotherapy were shown to radically improve 5-year survival rates, it would still not prove it is generally effective by any intelligent interpretation of the term. A 5-year survival rate is only one metric derived from a complete statistical distribution of patient survival times. In other words, "scientists" are taking meaningful data, and throwing out most of it. It could very well be that if studies had preserved the complete statistical distributions of survival times, that we would see that on a whole, chemotherapy decreases various metrics of survival time, such as perhaps the average survival time.

You can look at the breakdown by cancer type of this study in the chart below.

Some oncologists may argue that these statistics are not relevant to today's drugs, and that the newest drugs work so much better than in the past. Though this is theoretically possible, first consider the fact that this is what oncologists have been saying for decades. Then consider that in the light of the present study, that on average, they have been wrong all that time! If that argument was wrong yesterday and for the 20 or 30 years before that, then why would it all of a sudden be right today?

For further discussion on the unfortunately fatal flaws of the current cancer treatment paradigm, read 18 Reasons Why Conventional Cancer Treatment is Irrational.

The End Result...

In short, chemotherapy in general is known to be not without side effects as well as typically ineffective! I am quickly learning that if society agrees on something, there is a good chance it's wrong! Countless examples from history can be given relating to this.

If an oncologist says alternative treatment is experimental, he needs to take his own advice and analyze the statistics that show that chemotherapy is experimental (and toxic for that matter). At least alternative therapies are generally safe!

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How about yourself? What did you do? What would you do differently?

tuckertwo

 medigal, rightfully so!!  Drugs are not the way to go. That's just a bunch of propaganda from the drug companies. Drugs don't cure problems, they mask them.  Happy to hear you had your second baby without complications or drugs.

No, none of us know the consequences of drugs we've taken. We're guinea pigs for the predominately male dominated drug-cartel medical industrial complex.

I figure herbs and plants have been around longer than synthetic chemicals, and it makes sense to use natural products that actually either prevent or heal disease rather than mask it, right?

tucker