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WDDTY e-News Service - 03 July 2003

Thu, 3 Jul 2003 18:19:05 +0100

 

 

WHAT DOCTORS DON’T TELL YOU - E-NEWS BROADCAST No.42 - 03 July 03

 

Please feel free to email this broadcast to any friends you feel would

appreciate receiving it.

 

 

 

 

 

FAT IS NOT ANYBODY'S ISSUE: It's only the symptom, not the cause

 

Medicine is wonderful at pointing at the symptom, but rarely at the cause.

Take, for instance, a recent study that found that overweight and obese people

were much more likely to die from cancer.

 

The researchers concluded, after studying the records of 900,000 people, that it

was the increased body weight itself that was linked to increased deaths from

all cancers. Obesity accounts for 14 per cent of all deaths from cancer in men,

and 20 per cent in women, say researchers from the American Cancer Society.

 

Significant stuff, it seems, and the world's media dutifully reported it (as

they always do when approached by Men in White Coats).

 

Unfortunately, it isn't true. Body weight does not lead to fatal cancers; it's

the lifestyle and diet that does it, and being overweight or obese is merely the

unfortunate display of that poor diet and lifestyle. It's a bit like suggesting

that coughing, caused by smoking, is the cause of lung cancer rather than the

smoking itself. Fat, therefore, is an effect and not a cause of cancer.

 

(Source: New England Journal of Medicine, 2003; 348:1625-38).

 

 

 

TRANSPLANTS: The miracle of medicine that will eventually kill you

 

One of the wonders of modern medicine, as its advocates would posit, is the

organ transplant. This miraculous technique seems almost to defy nature-but

researchers have now discovered it comes at a price.

 

For the new organ to be accepted by the body, it's vital that the patient takes

powerful immunosuppressant drugs, and probably for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, the longer the patient takes the drug, the greater the likelihood

that he will develop skin cancer.

 

One Australian study of transplant patients found that the rate of skin cancer

rose from 7 per cent after one year of immunosuppressants to 82 per cent after

20 years. From this it appears that virtually everyone who has an organ

transplant will eventually develop skin cancer, which can often be fatal.

 

It could be argued that the surgery can buy you up to 20 years of life, but

there's still plenty that can be done to reduce the risk of skin cancer, say

researchers.

 

Patients should avoid direct exposure to the sun by applying high-factor

sunscreen and by wearing a hat and appropriate clothing. Early detection of

skin cancers can also help-and perhaps, too, the immunosuppressant regime could

also be tapered.

 

(Source: New England Journal of Medicine, 2003; 348: 1681-91).

 

 

 

 

SCREENING: What takes 10,000 women up to 35 years to achieve?

 

Screening is one of the golden means of medicine. Regular screening can help

detect in their earliest stages cancers that might otherwise prove fatal-or so

the script reads.

 

Unfortunately it's not that simple. Screening sometimes produces false

positives-where a cancer is wrongly detected, thus putting the person through

unnecessary stress-while mammograms have spread tumours.

 

A new study has put into perspective cervical screening. Researchers have found

that 10,000 women need to be screened for 35 years-at enormous expense and

strain to the medical system-to prevent just one death from cervical cancer. By

comparison, a nurse performing just 200 tests each year would have prevented a

death from cervical cancer once every 38 years.

 

For that one prevented death, 152 women will have gone through the unnecessary

stress of a false positive, while a further 79 would be referred for further

investigation because a benign abnormality had been detected.

 

Not only is this a waste of valuable medical resource, the screening programme

also increases the risks of harm caused by medical intervention, say researchers

at the Avon Health Authority.

 

(Source: British Medical Journal, 2003; 326: 901-4).

 

 

 

RESEARCH: When, and why, the money runs out

 

Research is an essential ingredient of medicine. Drugs and therapies can be

evaluated and reconsidered, and better methods can be adopted as part of

clinical practice.

 

But research can be a time-consuming-and expensive-process, and one that often

needs a benefactor. Pharmaceutical companies are frequent sponsors of research

trials, especially if they have a drug of their own that they want evaluating.

 

Sometimes he who pays the piper calls the tune, and we've come across examples

in the past when results have been massaged, or the summary section altered, to

show the benefactor's product in a better light.

 

This doesn't always happen, of course. Take the case of the CONVINCE trial

which failed to put forward a convincing case for the calcium channel blocker

verapamil, manufactured by GD Searle as Calan, and by other manufacturers under

different brand names.

 

A pity really as GD Searle was the sponsor of the trial-and then suddenly

withdrew its sponsorship before it was completed.

 

Up to the point the plug was pulled, the researchers found that verapamil was no

better than other classes of heart drugs in preventing heart disease. The

researchers, based at Rush University in Chicago, based their findings on 16,602

participants who were given either verapamil or atenolol or hydrochlorothiazide.

 

Searle refused to give a reason for their sudden withdrawal of sponsorship.

Certainly ownership changed several times during the lifetime of the trial, from

Searle to Monsanto, and to Pharmacia, but could it be they got wind of the

findings? The researchers say not, but we will all have our own views, no

doubt.

 

(Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2003; 289:2073-82).

 

 

 

DARK DAYS: The lights of natural medicine are being put out around the world

 

We live in dark times, times of spin when political power and profit count more

than individual choice, freedom or health.

 

In the UK the EU's Food Supplements directive was passed on Thursday (June 3) by

a whisker-just 7 to 6 in favour-by a select committee, no doubt so-called

because the government especially selected it. The original group of 16 had

been successfully lobbied by various pressure groups, and a majority of members

had accepted the argument that the directive was a wicked piece of legislation

that took away freedom of choice.

 

So what happened? The government de-selected those members who were likely to

cause embarrassment to an already embattled government, and replaced them at the

11th hour by MPs who know nothing of the arguments. Even on the day before the

meeting, nobody knew who would be chairing the committee! As it turned out, it

was health minister Melanie Johnson who took the chair, but who clearly did not

understand any of the issues. Tory MP Chris Grayling described the EU and

Labour governments as playing " jackboot politics " .

 

So the directive has been nodded through, and, within a few years, thousands of

high-dose vitamins and other supplements will disappear from our shelves

forever.

 

Not that you need a directive or a reselected select committee to get your way.

In Australia virtually every natural product has suddenly been taken off the

health food shop shelves. The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)

performed this feat just by taking away the manufacturing licence of one

manufacturer that supplies around 80 per cent of the entire alternative

marketplace. The manufacturer, Pan Pharmaceuticals, also makes prescription and

over-the-counter drugs, and it was one of its OTC remedies, Travacalm, for

travel sickness, that aroused the interest of the TGA when people complained the

drug was causing hallucinations.

 

The drug was immediately withdrawn-and then, three months later, the TGA came

back and banned all 1363 alternatives remedies also manufactured by Pan.

 

Similar moves have been happening in South Africa and Canada-and the whole

nutritional industry is under attack in America, too. The US nutritional

industry thought its products were made sacrosanct under the Dietary Supplement

Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994. But it is under threat again, this

time from a new bill, the Dietary Supplement Safety Act, which has been

introduced by Illinois senator Dick Durbin.

 

The new act would give sweeping powers to the FDA, the USA's drug regulator,

which would be able to remove any dietary supplement for which an adverse

reaction had been reported.

 

This bill could be voted on in just two weeks, giving consumer groups virtually

no time to campaign against it. Dark days indeed-so we, as individuals, must

become a light unto ourselves. Watch this space for some good news, and, in the

meantime, don't despair!

 

 

Listen to Lynne

 

On the radio: Hear Lynne McTaggart on Passion the new DAB Digital Radio Station

focusing on your health and your environment -

http://www.wddty.co.uk/passion_main.asp

 

On demand: Select and listen to any of Lynne's archived broadcasts on Passion,

there's a new one each week - http://www.wddty.co.uk/passion_archive.asp

 

 

View missed/lost e-News broadcasts: View our e-News broadcast archives, follow

this link - http://www.wddty.co.uk/archive.asp

 

 

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