Please Log in to Vote.

1 out of 2 members found this useful.

Aids skepticism

Posted November 27th, 2008 by janine rickard

If the Aids skeptics are right, this is a staggering error, given the $40 + billion already spent in fighting the "harmless passenger virus" HIV.

Here is my comment on The American Prospect blog today:

Actually, there is a compelling Aids skeptic movement, which is not ideologically based, but scientifically based. World class virologist Peter Duesberg has risked his career to point out that the HIV-causes-Aids hypothesis is questionable in many, many ways. Unfortunately, scientific consensus does not guarantee accuracy, particularly in a field (unlike climatology) in which research objectives are severely distorted by powerful interests seeking to protect or expand their turf: the drug companies, the AMA, the CDC etc. Consider that a 2004 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that chemotherapy treatment, which is routinely prescribed and costs around $100,000 per patient, has only a 2% chance of increasing 5 year survival rates. “It is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival,” the researchers wrote. “To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.”

Remember this the next time someone you know has a cancer diagnosis.

True, the chemotherapy issue is not so much a question of bad research, but as Duesberg points out masterfully in his book, the synergies of the players and incentives within the medical establishment often result in putting the needs of the patient last.

Please Login to Add Comments
show all sub-comments
Report Abuse

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

Cancer and chemotherapy

Posted November 28th, 2008 by sham609

I found your comments regarding cancer and the efficacy of cytoxic chemotherapy uninformed and deceptive. Could you please supply the full reference for the Journal of Clinical Oncology article? I would be happy to dialogue in depth about the relative efficacy of cytoxic chemotherapy in the management of cancer if you desire. However, the information you provided is inaccurate/incomplete, and I am afraid might lead to some gross misunderstandings among the lay public about the role of chemotherapy in cancer management...potentially dissuading someone from pursuing life-prolonging (or life-saving) chemotherapy for the management of their disease.

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

Also pleased to dialogue: onwards!

Posted November 28th, 2008 by janine rickard in response to Cancer and chemotherapy

Here is the link to the Journal: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1563084

Here also are some other statements which, in my preliminary investigations, I have found repeated elsehwere with consistency - on the web and in books written by people who claim to have drawn on legitimate research.

“Doctor Ulrich Able, a German epidemiologist of the Heidelberg Mannheim Tumor Clinic, has exhaustively analyzed and reviewed all the main studies and clinical experiments ever performed on chemotherapy .... Able discovered that the comprehensive world rate of positive outcomes because of chemotherapy was frightening, because, simply, nowhere was scientific evidence available demonstrating that chemotherapy is able to ‘prolong in any appreciable way the life of patients affected by the most common type of organ cancer.’ Able highlights that rarely can chemotherapy improve the quality of life, and he describes it as a scientific squalor while maintaining that at least 80 per cent of chemotherapy administered in the world is worthless. Even if there is no scientific proof whatsoever that chemotherapy works, neither doctors nor patients are prepared to give it up (Lancet, Aug. 10, 1991). None of the main media has ever mentioned this exhaustive study: it has been completely buried” (Tim O’Shea, “Chemotherapy – An Unproven Procedure”)

“Many oncologists recommend chemotherapy for almost any type of cancer, with a faith that is unshaken by the almost constant failures”.(Albert Braverman, MD, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, Lancet, 1991, Vol. 337, p. 901)

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

And Upwards

Posted November 28th, 2008 by sham609 in response to Also pleased to dialogue: onwards!

Thanks for the reference. My confusion mounted because the "Journal of Clinical Oncology" is the premier peer-reviewed medical oncology journal in the USA. Your reference was a radiation oncology journal from Australia. With that clarification, it is important to recognize that this study was a very weak, retrospective meta-analysis based on a literature search looking at reported 5-year survival data on 22 "adult malignancies" and concluded that the benefit was estimated to be 2.3%. It should also be pointed out that though the "study" was published in 2005, it was looking at data from 1998. A lot has happened in oncology in the last 10 years! Also it is unfair to lump all cancers together as though it was one disease. "Cancer" is actually thousands of diseases, some of which can be treated more effectively than others. Lumping pancreatic cancer (which has very few 5 year survivors) with Hodgkins disease (a VERY curable cancer utilizing chemotherapy/radiation therapy) provides no useful information regarding funding for cancer care. Also, within each cancer diagnosis, the stage of the cancer and the particular biological characteristics of the cancer imparts significant prognostic significance, something the authors of the Australian article failed to take into account.

I will simply conclude this initial extension of our dialogue by saying that the above referenced article is NOT good science, and seems to have a political goal rather than a scientific goal. Your other referenced article above is from 1991. That was, I am pleased to report, the stone-age in medical oncology. I will follow up in the next couple of days with some data on the absolute "smashing" success of medical oncology over the last 2 decades, using only cytotoxic chemotherapy (which is, BTW, beginning to appear as archaic therapy compared to the targeted chemotherapy now being utilized and developed in the USA and other countries).

User login

Quick Links

The Archives

Please Log in to Vote.

Aids skepticism

Please Log in to Vote.

Cancer and chemotherapy

Please Log in to Vote.

Also pleased to dialogue: onwards!

Please Log in to Vote.

And Upwards

Please Log in to Vote.

ok waiting for your data, Vitamin C and cancer