Where’s our money?
Having completed a study on the supplements used by breast cancer patients courtesy of funding from the US Department of Defence, nursing professor Gwen Wyatt can get back to her day job and her other research interest – that’ll be her study on the effects of reflexology on symptom management and quality of life for women with breast cancer.
That study is funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). They are funding it to the tune of.. wait for it… $3.1 million.
This is not an isolated case. In fact CAM researchers in the US are now benefiting from the president’s economic stimulus package.
Although cancer survival rates reportedly have improved, several types of cancers are forecasted to increase worldwide. Recognizing the opportunity to curtail the impacts of this disease on vast numbers of patients, Congress granted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) $10.4 billion – that’s around seven billion pounds - over two years for research and infrastructure through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The NIH actually has something called the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM). That Office has grabbed a portion of these stimulus funds to study three natural supplements for their chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic effects on pancreatic and other cancers. These are B-DIM – the “broccoli supplement”, the green tea polyphenol epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) and a Chinese herbal mixture.
On top of that, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has even bowed to public pressure and is now, for the first time, making grants for researchers interested in starting small pilot and feasibility studies of CAM therapies and practices. “These studies can generate data needed for conducting larger scientific studies of CAM in the future”, says the NCI. Anyone feel a wind of change sweeping through?
Well no, you wouldn’t, as we’re in practice in good old Blighty.
I think it’s fair – hey, even evidence-based – to say that here, when it comes to CAM, the powers that be are more interested in regulation than research.
Why cancer screening isn’t all it’s cracked up to be - by Prof Baum
Well worth a read is Prof Michael Baum’s new essay “Why I am still a screening sceptic”, now up on the Spiked website.
Highlights:
‘The largest threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses. The real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms.’ (Actually a quote from other writers: “What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses”, H GIlbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, New York Times, January 2, 2007).
“More recently, last weekend The Sunday Times reported that more and more women are angry about having had needless breast cancer operations, after research showed that ‘10 patients will be treated unnecessarily for every life saved’. The paper reported my view that, instead of breast-screening the whole female population over the age of 50 every three years, women should be tested ‘according to their level of risk’ - an argument I will expand on in this essay (3).”
“Although it seems counterintuitive, a growing body of informed opinion is moving in the direction of exposing early detection of cancer as just that: possibly a ‘bad thing’.”
“As a result, the overall mastectomy rate rises after any country implements screening in contrast to the message in the NHSBSP leaflet - ‘Breast Cancer: The Facts’ (10) - which implies that screening saves breasts. It doesn’t.”
“I want to argue that some of these earliest stages of ‘cancer’, if left unperturbed, would not progress to a disease with lethal potential.”
“…you would need to screen 1,400 men for 10 years to save one prostate cancer death at the expense of over-diagnosing 48 cases of cancer that would be treated with radical surgery that frequently leads to impotence and incontinence and on rare occasions death from the complications of surgery.”
