The Sad State of Modern Cancer Treatment

As I pointed out, Neil was a very wealthy man.  Obviously we can conclude that wealth is no guarantee of health.  Like the wealthy Apple genius Steve Jobs who also died of “incurable cancer”, Neil could afford the finest medical care imaginable.  A lot of good it did both men.

For that matter, there is a long list of well-heeled celebrities who have suffered the same fate – Michael Landon, Patrick Swayze, Farrah Fawcett and Linda McCartney to name a few.  Add John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner and Humphrey Bogart to the list.  For that matter, cancer claimed Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, the entire Rat Pack.  All their money and fame could not save any of them. 

Of course it is noteworthy that most of these people were heavy smokers and heavy drinkers.  So it isn’t all that surprising that they paid a stiff price for their years of hard living.

But what about people who know the risks and take precautions? 

What bothers me even more is when I notice an article in the Houston Chronicle about an MD Anderson physician who died of cancer.  I have seen three such stories in the paper.  If people who have devoted their entire lives to fighting this disease aren’t safe, then what hope is there for the common people to survive?   

Wouldn’t one assume that all that knowledge would save them?  Apparently not.  If cancer doctors aren't safe, then none of us are.

Neil was very careful about his health.  Neil exercised religiously all his life, watched his diet and his weight carefully, and avoided the pitfalls of alcohol and tobacco.  He did everything you are supposed to do to minimize the risk.

Consequently, Neil was pretty bitter about his illness.  Personally, I think he had every right to be angry.  After a life of moderation, Neil deserved to be rewarded with good health.  It aggravated him no end to “die before his time”.  Of course 70 isn’t exactly ‘young’, but it does fall significantly short of 76, the average life expectancy of the American male. 
 

About Steve Jobs, Poster Boy for Cancer Treatment Futility

The fact of the matter is that everyone knows the cure rate of mainstream medicine is abysmal.  Some people suggest a cancer victim has a 1 in 3 chance of living more than 5 years after diagnosis using conventional treatment methods.  That doesn't sound very optimistic, does it? The much-publicized story of the cancer treatment received by Steve Jobs has affected us all because it gives a startlingly transparent glimpse into the status of today's cancer treatment. In a nutshell, there are two approaches to curing cancer.  There is the mainstream method of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  Then there are various alternative methods involving anything from herbal teas to strictly controlled diet to ancient folk remedies.  From what I gather, Steve Jobs tried both methods.  He tried alternative methods first, then switched to conventional treatment.  Although the conventional methods failed miserably, the defenders like to say it was his own fault for wasting nine months trying the alternative method route.

Forbes Magazine

According to Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, the Apple mastermind eventually came to regret the decision he had made years earlier to reject potentially life-saving surgery in favor of alternative treatments like acupuncture, dietary supplements and juices.  Though he ultimately embraced the surgery and sought out cutting-edge experimental methods, they were not enough to save him.

Jobs’ cancer had been discovered by chance during a CT scan in 2003 to look for kidney stones, during which doctors saw a “shadow” on his pancreas. Isaacson told CBS’ 60 Minutes last night that while the news was not good, the upside was that the form of pancreatic cancer from which Jobs suffered (a neuroendocrine islet tumor) was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured.

But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods. Isaacson says that when he asked Jobs why he had resisted it, Jobs said “I didn’t want my body to be opened… I didn’t want to be violated in that way.”

His early resistance to surgery was apparently incomprehensible to his wife and close friends, who continually urged him to do it.  But there seemed to be more to his resistance than just fear of surgery.

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something,” Isaacson told CBS, “if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past.”

It worked in business, anyway – and brilliantly. Jobs’ employees had joked that surrounding him was a “reality distortion field,” which allowed him to make his own rules, and conjure up new products for which there was no precedent or apparent market. His capacity to create the reality he envisioned – and convince others of it – was a large part of his business success.

Another element of Jobs’ decision-making process was, according to Isaacson, his trust of his own instinct. Jobs had spent time studying Buddhism in India, and he felt it served him in his work. “The main thing I’ve learned is intuition, that the people in India are not just pure rational thinkers, that the great spiritual ones also have an intuition.”

But however well his intuition and “magical thinking” may have worked for him at work, Jobs’ postponement of surgery in favor of alternative means was a bizarre executive decision. “We talked about this a lot,” says the biographer. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it. … I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. He had an under-the-radar liver transplant and began putting a lot of energy into researching the most sophisticated experimental methods, making a complete about-face from how he began his treatment years before.

According to the New York Times, Jobs was one of the few people in the world to have his genome sequenced. Collaborating researchers at several institutions sequenced his DNA in order to develop a treatment that would target his specifically mutated cell pathways. He went for an experimental treatment in Switzerland in 2009, which involved using a radioactive isotope to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells of the body.

These treatments may well have extended his life, but nine months is a long time to wait in cancer time. And while there’s truth to the notion that food and supplements can aid a body’s repair mechanisms, there’s a limit to what they can do. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most insidious forms of cancer, and has few survivors.

Isaacson says Jobs started talking about an afterlife more and more towards the end. On one of the interview recordings, Jobs says, “Maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.”

But he adds, “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

It’s impossible to know what went into Jobs’ decisions at work and at home, and whether his unexpected medical decisions were in spite of or because of his business brilliance. But for a man who revolutionized the way we work, communicate, and play, it’s certain that his life was too short.

As you have read, people have suggested that Steve Jobs compromised his chance for survival by wasting time with “alternative” cancer treatments, also referred to as “holistic medicine” and “empiric medicine”.

Here is more information about Steve Jobs and his fight to survive. It comes from a mainstream medical doctor.  I do not know the identity of the man quoted here, but his diagnosis seems knowledgeable, so I will share it and let you judge for yourself.

“I am a Professor of Medicine and Associate Chief of Medical Oncology at a major medical center with extensive experience in this arena.

From my understanding of the literature, my personal experience with this kind of tumor, and my understanding of Mr. Jobs condition from reading between the lines of what has been reported, this is what likely happened:

Mr. Jobs was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas which, like a great majority of these tumors, likely had micrometastatic spread at diagnosis. I agree that he likely had a resection of the tumor, whether through a Whipple procedure or another less radical procedure. Whether he had some liver involvement at diagnosis is unclear, but my bet is that he had some minimal liver abnormalities on CT of unclear significance, and they went ahead with the surgery given his age and his desires.

Neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas do not respond all that well to cytotoxic chemotherapy. There are a few older papers in the literature on intrahepatic chemotherapy with anthracyclines, as well as papers on 5-FU and streptozocin systemic therapy. Most of the papers give median survivals for this disease of 6-8 years.

I suspect that Mr. Jobs liver metastases showed up within a few years of diagnosis and he did get systemic and likely intrahepatic chemotherapy. Some pictures released of Mr. Jobs sometime in the late 2000's show him with no hair.

The major complications of these types of tumors have to do with the hormones they secrete. That is why Mr. Jobs had his weight loss.

We also know that he had a liver transplant in 2009 at a hospital in Memphis. This was likely because the tumor burden in his liver and the systemic symptoms such (i.e. the weight loss) were such that a heroic effort of that nature was a reasonable option. It gave all of us two more years of Mr. Jobs.

The reason for his cancer progression and likely death was progressive tumor in either the abdomen (carcinomatous peritonitis with attendant bowel obstruction--the most likely scenario) or recolonization of his liver with metastases (less likely).

He outlived the median survival of his disease by a few years.

Whether he used alternative therapies or not had absolutely no effect on his survival or outcome -- that was dictated from day one by his tumor and its biology, and our current lack of effective therapies for this condition.

It is rare that we have such a public illness.  It is also rare that we have a man with the means to afford any possible cancer treatment he could desire to try.  You have to hand it to the man.  Steve Jobs tried everything!  For example, he went all the way to Switzerland to have his genome sequenced.  That experimental treatment in Switzerland is right on the cutting edge of the latest greatest in mainstream cancer treatment. Too bad for all of us that it didn't work. 

Unfortunately, the only positive conclusion we can draw is that maybe Steve Jobs lived two years longer than he was supposed to.  Sadly, in the end, the finest cancer treatment suggested by the brightest minds in medicine still came up short.

As the stories of Steve Jobs and Neil make perfectly clear, once someone is sick, finding a cure for cancer is a formidable challenge even for people with access to the finest medical care available.  That is very depressing news for all of us.
 

Drug Money:  Welcome to the Conspiracy

The main reason that Mr. Skeptical's criticism hurt me so much is that it hit right on a weak spot.  I don’t exactly trust mainstream medicine myself.  Mr. Skeptical’s negativity exploited my own doubts about the direction of cancer treatment. 

When people like Steve Jobs, Neil and the MD Anderson doctors die of cancer despite having access to the best minds in the business, what kind of hope is there for the rest of us?   To an uninformed person like myself, it seems like we are still in the Dark Ages when it comes to curing cancer. 

The critics of mainstream medicine point out that the Cancer Industry has become such a big business that it has become "too big to fail".  Where have we heard that before?  In other words, too many people are dependent on conventional cancer treatment to even dare to suggest it isn't working. 

A man named G Edward Griffin said this in his book World Without Cancer:

"...eliminating cancer through a non-drug therapy has not been accepted because of the hidden economic and power agendas of those who dominate the medical establishment."

"...at the very top of the world's economic and political pyramid of power there is a grouping of financial, political, and industrial interests that, by the very nature of their goals, are the natural enemies of the nutritional approaches to health."

"...that policy-makers in the medical, pharmaceutical, research and fund-raising organizations deliberately or unconsciously strive not to prevent or cure cancer in order to perpetuate their functions."

If I read that third quote correctly, this man suggests there are people who could care less if we take our sweet time curing cancer.  Now that is a cynical thought indeed.

There is no doubt that cancer is Big Business.  A rule of thumb suggests that each cancer patient spends an average of $50,000 fighting their disease.  Although some cancer victims end up bankrupt as well as dead, someone clearly benefits from their suffering.  With one million new American cancer patients a year, that adds up to 50 billion dollars.  The cynics suggest that a lot of doctors, a lot of drug companies, a lot of hospitals and a lot of cancer researchers have come to depend on the unending supply of those cancer dollars.  What would happen to this giant apparatus if someone discovered that some obscure mushroom growing in the rainforest of Brazil could solve the problem quickly and inexpensively? Then the entire House of Cards would come tumbling down. My problem is that I happen to agree that an awful lot of people are making an awful lot of money off cancer.  Why bother curing it when cancer is making so much money for so many people?

It is so ironic to remember how cigarette commercials dominated TV advertisements when I grew up.  The ridiculous thing is that some doctors weren't much smarter than the rest of us.  Remember the days when cigarette ads would fill the TV screen with garbage like "Most doctors prefer Camels"?  Unbelievable. Compare that to today.  Now when I watch TV, the cigarette commercials are gone, but it seems like cancer hospital advertisements have taken their place.  It is darkly ironic to see one cancer hospital after another competing for all the sick people out there.  One cancer advertisement claimed that their chemotherapy was so accurate it would target only the cancer cells and bypass the healthy cells.  Oh really?  Some hospitals even promise to care about the people they treat!!  Wow!  One would assume that would be automatic, but apparently not.  One begins to wonder what the surcharge is for the extra cost of hiring personnel that actually ‘cares’. It is commercials like these that underscore what big business cancer has become.  Thanks to all those cigarette commercials from thirty years ago, today we have an entire generation of Baby Boomers about to get sick at the same time. Surely these giant hospitals are licking their chops at all the upcoming profits.

The thinly disguised greed behind the constant hospital commercials on TV only serves to make me more suspicious. 

The Houston Chronicle isn't doing much to ease my mind either.  Not long ago, the Houston Chronicle began hammering away at MD Anderson.  The Houston Chronicle ran one headline after another regarding financial improprieties over at MD Anderson. 

The articles were difficult for me to understand, so I guess the articles were written in some sort of code with lawyers looking over shoulders.  I could be wrong, but the implication to me was that some of the leaders in Houston’s cancer community were “ethically-challenged”.  On the surface, it appeared certain people had used their high-ranking influence to champion cancer treatment drugs they had just happened to own stock in.  It looked like they were using their position to make huge profits off the cancer drugs they were sponsoring.  Of course I could be wrong.  Maybe I misread it.

From what I gather, the Holy Grail in cancer is creating a synthetic drug that actually beats this disease.  Unfortunately, no one has even come close.  Nevertheless, the drug companies, aka “Big Pharma”, had found a way to rope in gigantic profits even from drugs that accomplish very little.  One drug kills cancer cells, two more drugs negate the harmful side effects, and another drug helps kill the pain and nausea caused by the other drugs.  It makes you want to shake your head and say, "Enough already!" 

At times like this, the mere mention of the cancer industry makes me feel suspicious.  

I ask myself this question, “Do I dare trust these guys or not?”

A lot of people probably agree with me, but once they get sick, what other choice do they have? 

Distrust of the Medical Profession

These days, the lingering distrust of the medical profession is almost as rampant as our distrust of the politicians.  Who can we trust to do the right thing?  More than any other book, Robin Cook’s Seventies novel Coma touched a national nerve when it suggested there are doctors out there who would stop at nothing to make a buck.  Yes, Coma was fiction, but Cook made his terrifying thriller so plausible that I remember believing something like this could really happen.  The book and the movie made it easy to believe there really are doctors who would do anything for a profit… even something as far-fetched as deliberately murdering patients and harvesting their organs.  After that book came out and the movie as well, no one could ever enter a hospital again without feeling a creepy touch of paranoia.

The plot of the 1993 Fugitive remake with Harrison Ford revolved around a conspiracy of false drug test data.  Once this drug was approved, the crooked doctor stood to become fabulously wealthy. Only one problem - it didn't work.  So the doctor decided to kill to protect his secret. "Kimble discovers that Sykes, the one-armed man, is employed by a pharmaceutical company scheduled to release a new drug called Provasic.  Kimble had investigated the drug in the past and revealed that it caused liver damage. This would have prevented it from being approved by the FDA.  He also deduces that a fellow doctor leading the drug's development had arranged a cover-up and ordered Sykes to kill him.  Kimble's wife's death was an accident caused by Sykes' botched assassination attempt." But this stuff is all fiction, right?  There isn’t anything such as a crooked doctor or an ethically-challenged doctor in real life, is there?  No one would resort to murder to protect millions in pharmaceutical drug profits? As it turns out, I have first hand evidence that there are doctors who have no conscience when it comes to exploiting patients for their own ends.

Cutting Off My Nose to Make a Point 

You have surely heard the old saying about the guy who cuts off his nose to spite his face.  Well, I didn’t do it deliberately, but one time I actually did cut off the tip of my nose.   By looking at me now, you would never know it. For the purpose of this chapter, I asked Marla if she could see any sort of scarring on my nose.  Marla looked carefully and then shook her head 'no'.  Mind you, Marla is as scrupulously honest as they come. They say it just takes one rotten apple to spoil the barrel.  Well, in 1997 I met a rotten doctor.  I don’t remember his name, but I will never forget him.  I'm sure he's still out there.  This jerk put a distrust of medical professionals in my heart that I have never been able to shake.  It was a bizarre accident to be sure.  My daughter Sam was six.  We were scheduled to leave on a ski trip the following day.  I was at the print shop on a Saturday morning.  I was there to get some last-minute dance studio schedules to leave behind while I was gone for a week. Patrick, the owner of the print shop, had become a personal friend.  I knew he often brought his kids with him on Saturday mornings, so I brought Sam along to play with Patrick's children.

I had some time on my hands waiting for the print job to be completed, so I went outside to play with the kids.  I immediately began chasing them.  I was the big monster and the little kids were running from me.  It was in fun.  They were laughing and screaming with excitement.  To escape, three of the children ran down a narrow alley behind the building. I didn't want to actually scare the kids, so I stayed about 15 feet behind them, growling with monster sounds and threatening to catch them. 

That’s when the accident happened.  As I chased after the kids, suddenly my head was violently snapped backwards.  I had no idea what had gone wrong. Instantly I began falling backwards to the ground.  Something out of thin air had hit me, but what? 

As I hit the ground, I felt a searing pain in my face.  I saw blood dripping from my face onto the sidewalk.  That’s when I noticed the front tip of my nose had been nearly completely severed.  It was just barely hanging on to my nose by a slim thread of skin. 

So what happened?   It turns out that there was a metal wire that extended from the metal building to the metal fence.  I have no idea what the purpose of the wire was, but it crossed the alley about five and a half feet off the ground. 

The small children had run under the wire without a problem, so their steady pace gave me no reason to suspect there was any danger.  And the wire was too thin for me to see at the speed I was running.  I never had any idea the wire was even there.  And I am sure whoever put the wire there had any idea it was in a dangerous spot.  In other words, this was a freak accident.

The wire caught me right where my moustache is and snapped my head back.  Oddly enough, it didn't really hurt that much. The bone right under my nose is pretty strong.  The pain came after the wire nearly cut my nose off as my head tilted back.

Gruesome?  Absolutely.  But I will tell you this – it could have been a lot worse.  At the speed I was running, if I had caught that same wire on my throat, I could have been killed.  On the other hand, if it had hit my chest, I wouldn't have been hurt at all.

As I lay there, I cautiously put the tip of my nose back where it belonged and held it in place with my finger.  The kids went inside and got help.  Patrick brought me a towel to help stop the bleeding.  Then he drove me to the emergency room.  I was really upset because I knew our expensive ski trip had just gone down the drain thanks to this accident.  That hurt almost as much as the nose.

After hours of waiting, a plastic surgeon on call finally showed up. He sure took his sweet time getting there.

The doctor proceeded to deaden my nose with a series of shots.  Those shots sent stabbing pains throughout my nose.  My nose was so sensitive that I wanted to scream!  Ouch!  Those shots really stung. 

I was ready to accept pain for one shot, but why did each new shot hurt so much?  For example, at the dentist’s office they give a local anesthetic that hurts a little but not much to numb the area.  Then ten minutes later they bring on the stronger stuff.

Furthermore I have had stitches before.  Usually the first shot numbs the area sufficiently and the rest of the shots don't hurt much at all.

This was totally differently.  Each new shot hurt as much as the previous one.  I didn't understand, so I immediately complained.  Did these shots really have to hurt so much?  I asked if these painful shots were his only choice.  Surely there was there was a less painful way to handle this numbing problem.  

The doctor did not answer my question.  Instead he told me to be quiet; he needed to concentrate.

Okay, I got the message.  I had no choice to comply.  So I trembled with fear in anticipation with each new shot.  This doctor really hurt me with those numbing injections.  Furthermore I couldn’t figure out why I needed six different injections in such a small area.  To put it into perspective, the entire numbing procedure turned out to be equal to any pain I have experienced as an adult.  

To be honest, I still have a lingering suspicion that if the man had waited longer between shots, the pain would not have been anywhere near as intense.  Why not give the anesthetic five or ten minutes to spread like the dentist does?

After ten minutes of non-stop injections, finally it was over.  Once my nose was deadened, the doctor sewed the tip of my nose back on.  Humpty Dumpty was ready to go.  Then the doctor handed me his card and told me to make a follow-up appointment at his office in four days. 

I asked him if I could go on my ski trip.  After all, a nose cut isn't exactly a life-threatening injury.  Besides, inside a ski mask I wouldn't look any different from the rest.

He looked at me like I was out of my mind and shook his head ‘no’.   Did I want to risk an infection?  Did I want to fall and risk losing the stitches? 

Well, I suppose he was right, but to this day I think if I was careful, I could have gone.  Look at it this way - basketball players get stitches in their face all the time and come right back into the game.  So that's another issue where I didn't trust my doctor.

There was a feeling I had about this guy that I didn't like.

Four days later I showed up in his office.  Immediately the doctor began talking about a very ambitious plastic surgery project.  He was going to take skin off my butt and put it on my nose.  The cost was prohibitive, but he was sure that my insurance would cover it “after the deductible” of course. 

It wasn’t the money that made me hesitate.  The deal killer for me was when he said he was going to deaden my nose the same way again with a new series of shots.

I was dismayed.  If I had any choice in the matter, I didn’t EVER want to feel that kind of pain again.  I asked the doctor a simple question.  What would happen if we did nothing?   Now that there were stitches, wouldn’t the tip of the nose eventually reattach on its own?  Wouldn't new skin grow in on its own? 

The doctor said my nose would be deformed for the rest of my life.  He suggested that I would look like an escapee from a leper colony.  Why take that risk?

I wasn't convinced. I pointed out that I had managed to live with acne scars all my life, so what was the problem with a small scar on my nose?

He shook his head in disgust.  He implied that would be the stupidest decision I ever made.  Did I really want to walk around with a massive scar on my nose for everyone to laugh at? 

I admit I am woefully ignorant about medical treatment.  But I have learned to trust my gut and I didn't trust him one bit. I was already angry that I had trusted him on his curt "No Ski Trip" command.  Now I didn't believe him about that scar.  However, my lack of medical knowledge kept me openly challenging him. 

Frightened and insecure, I asked about the surgery again.  Did I really have to go through those painful shots again?   Couldn’t he knock me out ahead of time?

At this point, the doctor insulted me.  He called me a sissy.  He pointed to his own forehead and said he himself had undergone those same shots when he had received his recent expensive hair transplants.  If he could withstand the pain, then why couldn’t I?

For starters, I imagine shots in the forehead would not hurt as much as a hyper-sensitive wounded nose.  And I resented his macho approach to shaming me.

The doctor was so aggressive and so insistent that suspicion continued to grow.  I could not shake the feeling that this surgery might actually be unnecessary.  I was almost certain this doctor was trying to exploit my situation for his own gain.  However I doubted I would ever get a straight answer from this doctor.  He saw me as a mean ticket.

Someone had to pay for those expensive hair grafts, right?  My new nose would keep him from being bald.  I felt like he was playing me for the world’s biggest sucker.

So I pretended to go along with him. I made another appointment with him for the following week just to be able to leave without further bullying.

When I got home, I made an appointment with a dermatologist I had seen once before to remove a wart.  The dermatologist told me exactly what I thought he would say.  He said that if I did nothing, the nose would heal and new skin would grow in naturally.  The dermatologist scoffed at the leper reference.  He said all I had to do was keep it clean and it would heal on its own.  Then he added that in two or three months, the average person would never notice a thing.

It turned out the dermatologist was right.  My nose turned dark black and I definitely looked like a monster for a while.  Then after a month, the new skin came in.  Other than the fact that my pink nose tip didn't match the rest of my nose, the nose didn’t look so bad any more.  Two months later, the coloring blended and the nose was as good as new. 

I might add that today no one notices a thing.

And what is my point? 

I contend this story shows there are some unethical people in the medical profession who will exploit the vulnerability of fearful patients.  If a certain patient has the right insurance, the sky is the limit for the procedures they will suggest.

Mind you, I am aware of the dangers of generalization based on one incident.  And I am also well aware that unethical people can be found in every profession. 

Are there also unethical lawyers?  Yes.  And there are also unethical stock brokers, unethical politicians, unethical therapists and unethical religious leaders. 

For that matter, there are even unethical dance teachers.  I know a couple that come to mind.  But on the other hand, dance students are not typically at the mercy of their Jitterbug instructors.  Unless the instructor cripples them with bad advice, they can come and go as they please.  That's a small joke, incidentally.

It is medical patients who are the most vulnerable of all.  They are afraid for their lives, but often they don't have a clue what their doctor is saying or what will happen if they don't follow his advice.  That dependency makes them easy to exploit. 

How many people can claim to know what a doctor is talking about when he explains cancer?   Oncology, metastasis, DNA mutations, chromosome abnormalities, tumor suppressor genes, epigenetic alterations, osteosarcoma.  Do you know what those terms mean?  I sure don’t.  It's mumbo jumbo to me.

Like me, most patients have little medical training.  Just as I wrestled with the sincerity of my evil plastic surgeon, how are they supposed to judge what the doctor is saying?

Given their pain, given their fear and given their ignorance, these vulnerable people are almost totally at the mercy of their doctor.  They don’t even know what questions to ask.  This vulnerability makes them totally dependent on their doctor’s advice.  

 

How My Mother Became a Medicare Cash Cow

Here’s another example of why I don’t trust the medical profession.  When my mother was on her death bed, the doctors performed what was termed a “risky experimental procedure” on her heart.  A special balloon was flown in from Minnesota for insertion.  It was a test procedure.  This operation had never been tried before.  If it worked, it was supposed to buy Mom another six months… or so they said. I was very skeptical.  They didn't bother to add she would be weak and totally bed-ridden for those six months.  The chances of Mom ever going home again were remote. It seemed like my mother was being used the same way a lab rat would be.  Mom was in a very weak condition.  She had heart failure, cancer, kidney collapse… the wolves were circling.  It was a race to see which dire threat would kill her first.  So what exactly was the point of this expensive and elaborate heart procedure?   I concluded these so-called noble doctors were determined to prolong life at any cost… as long as Medicare would pay for it.  However, it wasn’t my call.  My mother made the decision to give it a try.  So I shut up and stood by to see the results.

What a giant, colossal failure.  First Mom nearly died on the operating table.  They had to take profound measures just to revive her.  Then she never regained consciousness once the operation was over.  Mom died of a massive coronary about fifteen hours after the surgery.  So much for the experimental balloon.  All I can say is a quiet thank you that she probably didn't feel a thing.

But I was disgusted that all my reservations about this ridiculous operation had come to pass.  What a colossal waste of time and good money.  I don't even want to begin to know what the cost was.  I stopped counting the day the hospital billed her $750 to send a taxi to bring Mom to a chemo treatment.  If a glorified taxi ride is $750, then I shudder to think what they charged for this useless operation.

But someone had to pay for this operation, right?   That "someone" would be you and I.  And we wonder why Medicare saps our national budget.  You need wonder no longer.

What a racket.  I concluded was there is definitely a type of doctor whose judgment seems guided by how much money he can generate for himself and the hospital.  This story made me understand why Medicare is so costly to the American taxpayer.  We have all heard of the mythical "death panels" and I certainly don't envy the life and death decisions doctors have to make.  That said, I firmly believe my mother's surgery was a clear-cut abuse of the system... abuses that probably take place all the time. 

So now I have explained why I have a profound distrust of the medical establishment.  And don’t get me started on the skyrocketing cost of medical insurance.  In the past several years, health insurance premiums have increased for everyone at a rate far greater than the rate of inflation.  I worry that the insurance industry is completely out of control.

I don't even know who to blame, but I am certain that I would be appalled if I knew the whole truth.

Not only are the monthly premiums exorbitant, the medical insurance companies deny payment on procedures at the drop of a hat.  I have first-hand experience that you can’t even argue with them.  They always have a reason to explain why this or that isn’t covered. 

Even when you have medical insurance, you don’t even know for sure what they will and what they won't pay for!

For example, I have had two routine colonoscopies in the past six years.  The first colonoscopy cost nothing, but I paid for the last colonoscopy out of my own pocket.  I didn't expect to pay a cent. It was just another routine checkup recommended by my doctor. 

My insurance found a reason to not pay. The reason given for denial of payment was that four small benign polyps were removed.  That is kind of odd considering that during my first colonoscopy they also removed four small benign polyps.  My first routine colonoscopy was completely covered.  What is it about the new set of polyps that gives the insurance company a reason to deny payment?

I couldn't argue with them.  Finally I gave up and paid the deductible.  It was an extra $2,500 out of my pocket that I will never see again.  When a person like me is retired, losing that money stings no end. 

But why do I even bother elaborating?  I don’t need to say another word because you all know exactly what I am talking about from your own experience.  We are all in the same boat.  Something is deeply wrong with the medical field and none of us know what to do about it.

I have identified two enormous obstacles in the medical field.  The first problem is guessing who the good guys are and who the dangerous ones are.  The second problem is negotiating with the insurance industry and their bag of dirty tricks. 

Given what I have said so far, you might think I don’t trust anyone.  Not so.  I trust my daughter's pediatrician implicitly.  She was a caring, brilliant woman who took wonderful care of my daughter Sam back when she was growing up. And I trust my own personal care doctor completely.  I am convinced he is a decent man who has my best interests in mind at all times.  He takes the time to answer my questions and his answers seem reasonable.  I remain wonderfully healthy, so it is easy for me to believe in him.  I willingly follow his advice at all times.  For that matter, I know dozens of other people in the medical field who I believe are fine, decent human beings.  I am convinced these people are in medicine for all the right reasons and that they do unimaginable good on a daily basis.  The problem is finding out who the good ones are and who the dangerous ones are before it is too late.  I consider that today’s medical industry is filled with many good people, but there are clearly greedy, exploitive people in the profession as well.  Just thinking about my evil plastic surgeon makes me shudder.  How do I avoid getting stuck with someone like him again? It isn’t easy to navigate the minefields. Who are the dangerous ones?   How are we supposed to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are?  After all, they all wear the same white lab coat.

Further Criticism of Modern Medicine:

Milton Friedman and Linus Pauling

I am certainly not the only person who is suspicious of the medical industry.  From what I gather, there are many prominent men who have severely criticized the AMA.  Apparently their prestige is too great for them to worry the AMA might try to suppress their voices.
 

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006) was a leading American economist who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades.  He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century after John Maynard Keynes.  The Economist described Friedman as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century and quite possibly the entire century." Milton Friedman asserted that the American Medical Association acts as a “guild”, a fancy name for a group of people who exert total control over their particular craft to increase profits. Over the years, the AMA has attempted to increase physicians' wages and fees by influencing limitations on the supply of physicians Friedman said "the AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopathic (holistic) physicians with the unlicensed practice of medicine, in an attempt to restrict them to as narrow an area as possible." By restricting “non-physician” competition, the AMA completely controls the medical field with its monopoly.

Linus Carl Pauling (1901 –1994) was an American biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator.  He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century.  Pauling was one of the founders of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Linus Pauling was included in a list of the 20 greatest scientists of all time by the magazine New Scientist.  Albert Einstein was the only other scientist from the 20th century on the list. Gautam Desiraju, the author of the Millennium Essay in Nature, claimed that Pauling was one of the greatest visionaries of the millennium, along with Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize In 1962. This makes Linus Pauling the only person in history to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Here is what Linus Pauling said about the war on cancer in 1989.  This quote appeared on the book jacket of The Cancer Industry by Ralph W. Moss, PhD:

“The revelations in this book about the ways in which the American people have been betrayed by the cancer establishment, the medical profession, and the government are shocking.

Everyone should know that the ‘war on cancer’ is largely a fraud, and that the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.”
 

Regarding Chapter Two of the Cancer Diaries There is a growing body of evidence that suggests the American Medical Association has suppressed many attempts to find a non-pharmaceutical cure for cancer.  Those of you who are familiar with the bitter Laetrile controversy will know what I am talking about. Personally, if this is true, I am dismayed.  I say it makes absolutely no sense not to explore Nature in search of a cure for cancer.  There is ample anecdotal evidence that cures for many diseases can be found in Nature.  We already know that certain foods offer protection against disease.  For example, garlic, ginger, oranges, apples, almonds and broccoli are said to have beneficial properties. The list is actually much more extensive.  For that matter, many plants are said to have curative powers.  For example, when I was a kid, I played sports outdoors every summer.  My mother swore by aloe vera and kept several of these plants growing in our garden to treat my occasional bouts of sunburn.  No one can deny the myth of the Indian medicine man who used the secrets of the forest to heal people long before the advent of modern medicine.  Any person with a brain wonders if those legendary healers were on to something. It makes perfect sense. Modern medicine started around 420 BC with Hippocrates.  That suggests 2,500 years.  For over 10,000 years, Native Americans wandered the forest.  Estimates suggest they encountered over 6,000 herbs and derivative plants.  The Indians knew what each plant looked like and where they could be found. Some parts of a plant can be toxic, while other parts of the same plant can have healing properties. The secret is in knowing the difference. Using trial and error, they experimented with different plants and observed the results.  They watched how the plants performed either alone or in combination with other herbs.  It doesn't take much of a stretch to believe a tribe could develop formulas for specific ailments and pass that learning from one generation to the next. In these modern times, most of us are cut off from nature.  For example, here in Houston, a city slicker like me can wander through Memorial Park without the slightest idea what berries are safe, what mushrooms will kill me, and what plant juice might ward off mosquitoes.  That said, if I had one shred of scientific ability, I would be a lot more curious about each plant.  That is because I already know there is are powerful historical precedents to look to Nature for possible cures to disease. One need look no further than Penicillin to recognize nature has the potential to produce cures.  Penicillin is derived from mold, another word for fungus.  Penicillin is one of the earliest discovered and widely used antibiotic agents.  Antibiotics are natural substances that are released by bacteria and fungi into the their environment as a means of inhibiting other organisms - it is chemical warfare on a microscopic scale. In 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming observed that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus could be destroyed by the Penicillin mold, proving that there was an antibacterial agent there in principle. This principle would later lead to medicines that could kill certain types of disease-causing bacteria inside the body. Giving Fleming's amazing discovery, any hint of a mainstream medicine bias that ignores the active search for a natural cure seems preposterous.  Could this be true?  My next chapter will directly address this allegation.  For example, I will present a compelling story of a Canadian woman who once attempted to cure breast cancer using an Herbal Tea gained from the Ojibwa Indians.  She must have been doing something right because she had an entire legion of supporters who believed in her.  In fact, 55,000 Canadians signed a petition asking the Canadian Parliament to legalize her treatment so more people could have access to it.  The measure missing being passed by three votes.  That's right, three votes.  Shortly after that, the Canadian Medical Establishment stepped in and stopped her cold.  Considering I imagine most women with breast cancer would prefer drinking an herbal tea over having a double mastectomy, one would think the positive reputation of her treatment would guarantee her remedy would be given the highest research priority possible.  Not so.  This woman was harassed for the rest of her life. Next week I will present this woman's story and that of several others.  If you are unfamiliar with these stories, I predict you will be shocked. I will now conclude with a comment made by Dr. James Watson, the famed discoverer of the Double Helix DNA model.  When asked about cancer research and the National Cancer Program,  Dr. James Watson, Nobel Laureate, replied: "Intellectually bankrupt, fiscally wasteful and therapeutically useless." And with those harsh words, I conclude Chapter One of the Cancer Diaries, my three chapter series on cancer.  Chapter Two will appear in one week. Rick Archer If you have any comments or questions, please contact me at dance@ssqq.com I will honor any request to keep your comments private. Part Two - The Medical Conspiracy