Health News:

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (HRT): HRT and the risks of breast cancer were reviewed in a recent symposium. It appears that even using HRT for a short time increased the risk of breast cancer. Which begs the question: why use HRT? The risks are not a small increase, but for some women constitute a doubling of their risk for breast cancer.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: Hormones are powerful and can create huge problems in our bodies. Estrogen, in particular, is a problem for women because of the risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most HRT are synthetic hormones that are not natural to humans. Other problems have to do with the fact that many chemicals in our environment act like estrogens (including plastics, pesticides, and a host of other chemicals). The final question has to be should we be putting hormones in an aging person at all?

HRT is a travesty because there are many natural substitutes that work just as well, without the side effects.

original article

CANCER MUCH WORSE FOR DIABETICS: Cancer is currently the number two killer worldwide and is rapidly approaching number one. People with diabetes are more than 40 percent likely to die in the years right after a cancer diagnosis than people who are not diabetic.

Dr Scott’s Comments: There are no well-established links between sugar consumption and cancer — at least not yet. This new study sheds light on another horrible aspect of diabetes: it makes surviving a cancer diagnosis harder. For me, this adds to the destruction wrought by sugar. Not only is sugar toxic to our blood vessels (witness the kidney, eye and heart damage in diabetics), but it also leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Clearly we have to start avoiding the sugar and foods that act like sugar in our diets.

original article

LOW GLYCEMIC DIET FOR DIABETICS: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article showing that diabetics eating foods that are low on the glycemic index had better sugar control than those that didn’t.

Dr Scott’s Comments: I’m going to borrow a word from my 10 year-old-daughter to describe the finding of this study: DUH! Medical science has come a long way, but they have yet to make any connection between what we eat and the diseases that we get. Maybe this study will change their minds. Yes, diabetes has something to do with the sugar and foods that act like sugar that we eat every day. I think that people eating Eating Below the Glycemic Index would fare even better… maybe even reverse their diabetes.

original article

STRESS INCREASES HEART DAMAGE: People who reported a high amount of stress in their lives increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by as much as 50 percent when compared to people who have a low amount of stress. The increase in disease was evident by the number of heart attacks, bypass surgeries, and strokes that high-stress people suffered from.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: This study shows the strong connection between our minds and our bodies. Stress is a big killer, but is often hard to define or understand. I personally feel the best treatment for stress is exercise. Whenever the world starts weighing too much on my shoulders, I know I have to get out for a run, or hop on my bike, or even just take a walk outside. It also helps to listen to other people’s worries: When you hear someone describe what they are worried about, you realize that many of their fears are ungrounded, maybe yours are too?

original article

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A new study out today brings to question the thought that some cancers may go away on their own without any treatment. The findings are remarkable because in this study, the took a look at one of the more common cancers: breast cancer.

Here is what happened:

The study, in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine took a look at two groups of women.

• The first group were women from age 50 to 69 who were invited to participate in breast cancer screening for five years. These women had mammography three times during the years 1996 and 2001.

• The other group were women were of the same age (50 to 69), but who didn’t have mammography screening during the five years between 1992 and 1997. This group of women, though, did have mammography at the end of the five-year period.

What the researchers found out was that the women who were regularly screened (the first group)had a 22 percent higher chance of having cancer than the group that weren’t screened.

The first thought to pop into your head when you read that is to assume that it was the screening (mammography) that might have caused the cancers, but the researchers say that the much more likely cause for the difference in the groups is that some of the women in the non-screening group had cancer and it simply disappeared.

What to Make of the Findings

The first thing you need to understand about these findings is that it was a population study and the researchers were looking back over what happened in the past. The best way to study if cancers actually go away is to have a group of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and then split them into two groups: one that gets treatments and the other that doesn’t. This kind of study, however, will probably never happen and is considered unethical.

This new study, however, does raise some questions:

• We often rush to treat breast and many other cancers. Is the best approach may be to wait and see?
• Does treating cancers with chemotherapy, surgery and radiation actually help spread the cancer and lead to death quicker than if they were just left alone? This has been shown to be true for prostate cancer, where survival rates are unaffected by treatment or no treatment.¹
• Is it better to be screened for cancers or not?

All these questions leave us wondering what we should do with a cancer diagnosis. Certainly, cancer is a horrible disease and many people die from it every day. The question we need to start asking ourselves is this: what is better, to be treated or not to be treated?

My guess is that time will tell us which cancers will fall under the “watchful waiting” class and which will not; which need to be treated aggressively and which do not. Certainly those people who choose to go the “watchful waiting” route have all manner of natural medicines to support them during this time that have been shown to not only to be safe, but effective in the treatment and prevention of cancer, but that is topic for another day.

For now, we can hope that researchers take this new study as an opportunity to take a look at conventional screening and treatment and start to assess the effectiveness of treatments in a scientific manner: deciding which work and which do not.

1. Prostate cancer. Damber JE, Aus G. Lancet. 2008 May 17;371(9625):1710-21

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