Adverse Reactions : cancer

Trouble and Rife

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:54:00 GMT

Instead of the usual rant, this week I want to make an appeal. It’s an appeal for reason, for true science without commercial restraints, and for funding to carry out a simple, and inexpensive, experiment that may have enormous positive implications for all of us.

This line of thinking has been inspired by two pieces of paper that have landed on my desk this week. The first is from the Society of Occupational Medicine, which has just completed some expensive research that reached the astonishing conclusion that people who go to work are less depressed than people who are unemployed. The second is a letter from a gentleman who has seemingly successfully treated his prostate cancer by using a machine that was developed in the 1920s and 30s by an American called Royal Raymond Rife.

Rife, who died in 1970, has marginalised opinion between those who are convinced he was a genius who had discovered a cure for cancer and a range of other systemic conditions, and those who believe he was one of the biggest frauds of the last century.

For his part, Rife claimed to have discovered how to destroy cancer cells by ‘tuning’ into their frequency, just as an opera singer can shatter a glass. In 1934, he demonstrated his frequency machine on 16 terminal cancer patients chosen by the University of Southern California; within three months, they had all been cured, or so his advocates say.

On the eve of a press conference to announce the study’s impressive results, Dr Milbank Johnson, former president of the Southern California AMA, was fatally poisoned and all his papers were destroyed. Within five years, Rife had been vilified, his machines were destroyed, his research papers were burned, and doctors who continued to use the machines were struck off by the American Medical Association.

Critics argue that his theories are based on nothing more than pseudo-science, that people have died because they have preferred the Rife machine over conventional treatment, and they point out that Rife ‘practitioners’ are being rightfully jailed for giving false hope to terminally-ill patients.

But on what do they base their opinions? When I did a trawl through Pub-Med, the depository of every medical study carried out over the past 70 years or so, I couldn’t find one single study into the Rife technology. This seems astonishing for a therapy that offered so much early promise.

So – this is my appeal. Is there a way for us to conduct the very first medical study into the Rife technology? If money can be found for studies that tell us that unemployed people get depressed, surely we can find out a way to finally prove – or disprove – the Rife technology.

Why, when cancer has become the greatest epidemic of our times, should this be so hard for us to do?

Their industry is cancer

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:05:00 GMT

How much do industry groups and their hired ‘experts’ hide from us the carcinogenic effects of their products and services?

We know the way the tobacco industry twisted and turned for years before finally having to admit that cigarettes cause cancer. But there are plenty of other industries, too, that seem to be playing fast and loose with the truth – even though it means that many thousands of us die every year from a cancer caused by our environment or from industrial or electro-pollution.

We know this because Dr Devra Davis, formerly with the US National Institute of Health, has finally blown the whistle on industries that deliberately mislead, confuse or blatantly lie to us about cancer. She wanted to tell all back in 1990 but her bosses warned her off, citing the example of Willhelm Hueper, who was forced out of the National Cancer Institute in the 1940s when he spoke out about the environmental causes of cancer.

As she says of her years at the NIH: “I watched the maturing of the science of doubt promotion – the concerted and well-funded effort to identify, magnify, and exaggerate doubts about what we could say that we know as a way of delaying actions to change the way the world operates.”

Their tactics are well known. They employ ‘experts’ whose task it is to stop genuine research and debate, and she mentions Sir Richard Doll as one example. Doll had concluded in the 1960s that medical x-rays were harmless, and yet they were stopped for pre-natal evaluation only 20 years later. He also supported the pro-fluoridation movement, and he confirmed the view that there was no link to cancer. However, he had miscalculated, and there was a correlation.

Similarly, poorly conducted trials are often touted as ‘proof’ that a service or product is safe. Just such a tactic was carried out on behalf of the mobile phone industry, which surveyed the cancer risk on 421,000 cell-phone users. The survey concluded there was no risk of brain tumour, and it made newspaper headlines around the world. But the study was a short-term review – often, brain tumours do not appear for at least 10 years – it also featured infrequent as well as frequent users, thus muddying the results, and it didn’t include any business people at all, probably the most intensive users.

It all leaves a nasty taste. While it’s every industry’s right to make a profit, should it be done when it risks the health of the general population? And, when they know the truth, isn’t it their obligation to share it with us all? Or is this yet another example of profits before people.

Source: The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Basic Books, New York, 2007. ISBN 978 0 465 015665) by Devra Davis.

Profits before people

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:25:00 GMT

Those who cling to the belief that medicine is more a science than a commercial enterprise might consider the story of a group of drugs known as erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs) and their approval process.

ESAs are routinely given to cancer patients with anaemia. As they are genetically-engineered forms of erythropoietin (EPO), a protein that stimulates production of blood cells, they are the only alternative therapy to blood transfusion.

They’ve been in active use since their approval in 1993 – but it’s only been in the last few months that researchers have started to realize that ESAs are killing the cancer patient, and are quickening tumour growth.

America’s drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), toughened warnings about the drugs last November after studying the results of six trials that demonstrated that cancer patients given ESAs died sooner and demonstrated more rapid tumour growth than patients not on the drugs.

Coincidentally, a week or so after the FDA ruling, Amgen, a drug company that manufactures the ESA Epogen, revealed the findings of its own trial, which painted a similarly disturbing picture. Five days later, Amgen suddenly found some more data, which again confirmed the FDA’s findings.

Now it’s open season on ESAs. A study published last February, led by Charles Bennett of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, found the drugs increase the likelihood of death and venous thromboembolism.

Armed with this new data – partly provided by the manufacturer of one of the ESAs – the FDA is now considering a complete ban, or at least to dramatically reduce their usage.

None of this should come as a great surprise. Scientists were warning that ESAs would likely increase tumour growth 15 years ago, when the drugs were approved. As Bennett says: “We want to move to a more prospective approach on drug approval that is based on science and not on waiting 10 or 15 years to see bad outcomes emerge.

“In 1993, there was a science question suggesting that EPO would spur tumour growth. That needed to be evaluated from the start.”

Instead, a drug was approved that scientists feared would be a killer. The drug manufacturers then adopted their customary drip-drip approach to data release on a drug that they probably also knew was a killer.

This would suggest a model that is closer to commerce than science; worse, it is one that puts its profits before people.

(Sources: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008; 299: 2016; Journal of the American Medical Association, 2008; 299: 914-24).

The science delusion

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:38:00 GMT

Richard Dawkins, Darwin's self-proclaimed rottweiler, has been turning his laser on what he calls the 'enemies of reason'. These enemies are growing in number, and they are people - no doubt a little like us - who believe in 'unscientific' things such as alternative medicine. As a result, we're slipping back into the Dark Ages and to a pre-rationalistic time when superstition, myth and folklore ruled.

Our one constant should be evidence and proof, and our guardian should be science, Dawkins believes. Sadly, science is rarely pure, and evidence can come a poor second to belief, prejudice and, indeed, finance. But scientists don't call it any of these things: instead, they call it a 'paradigm'.

I was thinking about these things while I was reading the life story of an extraordinary medical pioneer called Dr Emanuel Revici. He died in 1998, believing his theories about cancer and treatment had been discredited, and his reputation in tatters.

And yet he was the first person to define lipids according to their molecular properties and activities, he was the first to use lipids in order to carry chemotherapy harmlessly around the body, he was the first to successfully treat cancer with high-dose selenium compounds, and he was a pioneer of the use of omega-3 for treating cancer.

He arrived in New York in 1947, and his treatment protocols had been blacklisted in 1961 by the American Cancer Society. As a result, his book - in which he outlined his 40 years of research and therapy - sold hardly a copy, and the edition was destroyed.

In 1984, the New York State Health Department began proceedings to revoke his licence, and two malpractice suits were started against him. Ultimately, their complaint against him was that his therapeutic approach "departed radically from community practice", another term for the paradigm, this time of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The National Research Council had tried in the 1950s to evaluate Revici's work, but they claimed he was "difficult", and had set unrealistic expectations on the reviewing committee. However, a re-reading of the transcripts reveals that Revici's therapy was complex and multi-factorial, and wasn't the single 'magic bullet' approach that medicine still clings to. Another paradigm, in fact.

A year before he died - at the age of 102 - he regained his licence to practise medicine (and which had been taken away four years earlier). Usually a doctor must apologise before his licence is returned, but speaking on Revici's behalf, Dr Burt Schoenbach told the hearing: "Why should Dr Revici apologise? He was right on selenium and right on other lipid compounds he pioneered to treat cancer patients."

The enemies of reason were the scientists themselves.

Don't mention the Warburg

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:44:00 GMT

Whisper it, for fear of waking the oncologist, but we really could be on the verge of understanding and treating cancer. In recent months there's been a buzz about a theory known as Warburg's Hypothesis. It's not exactly new - it was first...(read more)

It gets nasty for Nice

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:50:00 GMT

For such a haven of faceless bureaucrats, NICE has suddenly become the hate figure of the UK. NICE - or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - is the gatekeeper of the National Health Service, and it is the ultimate arbiter of the drugs that are prescribed by doctors.

Sometimes drugs are turned down on grounds of cost, sometimes because they just don't work. For the drug company, a rejection is nothing less than a commercial disaster, especially if the drug concerned is a pioneering one that would have cost at least £150m to get approved.

The patient, too, may see the drug as the great hope. It happened with the *** cancer drug Herceptin, and it's happening again with the Alzheimer's drug Aricept. If the drug is the 'answer', then NICE's rejection is nothing less than a callous disregard of human life.

Alzheimer's sufferers and their carers are planning a major protest against NICE's decision with nationwide marches and demonstrations. The same thing happened with Herceptin, and the government finally wilted to public demand.

In the case of Aricept, the protestors are being joined by the manufacturer, Pfizer, which is calling for a judicial review of NICE's rejection. If it goes ahead, it will be the first time that NICE has been challenged in court, and itvmay well not be the last.

But how does the patient know that the drug is the solution to his or her ills? In the case of Aricept, there are a few anecdotal reports that the drug has helped, but a major review that was published in 2004 concluded that it wasn't providing any benefits, even to the early-stage patient.

A similar story can be told about Herceptin. Many of the protests were encouraged by the drug manufacturer which eventually got its way.

Will the same happen with Aricept? You betcha it will.

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