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Cancer Victors News

March 25, 2008

Make Plans to Attend Las Vegas Expo in July!

Make plans to attend the Natural Marketplace 2008 EXPO
Designed exclusively for the natural products industry.
From the information-packed seminar program to the dynamic exhibit floor to networking and special events, Natural Marketplace 2008 connects you with buyers seeking to grow their business. Join the Natural Products association community in Las Vegas July 17-19 for this great event.
Over 650 booths, Natural Marketplace is the perfect place to exhibit for manufacturers, brokers, and distributors.

For booth availabilty call 800 966 6632 ext 247

Conference ~July 17-19
Trade Show July 18-19

Sands Expo and Convention Center @ the Venitian Resort Hotel

more info click here....

http://www.naturalproductsassoc.org

Posted 3/25/2008 8:58:00 PM

March 22, 2008

Patrick Swayze diagnosed with pancreatic cancer

Patrick Swayze, 55, has had an enviable life. The actor, dancer and former professional figure skater lives close to nature on ranches he owns in California and New Mexico, where he raises cattle and Arabian horses and maintains a wildlife preserve. He's been married for more than 30 years to Lisa Niemi, whom he met in dance class. And of course famous for his starring role in "Dirty Dancing" (1987) which became a cultural touchstone for a whole generation. Subsequent hits like "Ghost" with Demi Moore (1990) solidified his image as good-guy heart throb.

Now he faces pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. Less than 5 percent of patients live five years or more after diagnosis; most die within a year. The American Cancer Society estimates that 37,680 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year, most them will be over 65 years of age. About a quarter of all cases are related to smoking, and diabetes and obesity are considered to be risk factors for the disease. (Swayze smoked.) Excessive drinking may also be a risk factor.

Why is it so deadly? Patients rarely know they're sick before the cancer has reached a late stage. "Often patients first go to the doctor when they notice weight loss," says Edgar Staren, chief medical officer of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, based in Zion, Ill. Then in a matter of days or weeks, they may develop symptoms of jaundice (about 80 percent do), which include yellow eyes and skin, clay-colored stools and dark urine. Normally, bile in the liver passes through a duct to the bowel, and turns stools brown. When the duct is blocked by a tumor in the pancreas, a fish-shaped organ that sits behind the stomach, it colors the skin and urine instead.

Some pancreatic-cancer patients may go into surgery to remove the tumor, but often the surgeons will discover in the operating room that the cancer has spread or involves blood vessels, circumstances that make it inadvisable to remove the tumor. And even when the tumor is removed, it returns in three quarters of all cases, despite chemotherapy. Patients who do not have jaundice generally experience pain and are not usually likely candidates for surgery.

Staren stresses that the difficult physical and mental effects of the disease can be addressed by psychological support, pain relief and procedures that reroute the bile. With state-of-the-art care, patients often actually feel better than they did before the diagnosis, he says. However, when symptoms return, the patient typically dies within days or weeks. Swayze has said through his representatives that he intends to continue with his normal schedule, and hopes to star in a pilot about an FBI agent, which is under consideration by the A&E network. He is being treated at Stanford Cancer Center at Stanford University by Dr. George Fisher, an oncologist who released a statement recently saying: "Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far."

Posted 3/22/2008 12:22:00 AM

March 21, 2008

Expo West Record attendance turnout

Natural Products Expo West/SupplyExpo 2008 Continues Upward Climb with Record Attendance

BOULDER, Colo. (March 19, 2008) — More than 52,000 retailers, manufacturers, functional ingredient suppliers and industry professionals attended the country's largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show, Natural Products Expo West/Supply Expo 2008 (www.expowest.com), an increase of 11 percent over last year's attendance. In its 28th year, Natural Products Expo West/Supply Expo, produced by New Hope Natural Media, a division of Penton Media, attracted a record 3,392 exhibits to the Anaheim Convention Center in Calif.

Keynote speaker, The New York Times best-selling author, Michael Pollan told a capacity crowd to think about "not just what is in our food but how we enjoy our food," and reminded the audience that shopping is part of the pleasure of food.

The $57 billion dollar natural and organic products industry continues to enjoy brisk sales with strong growth in certified organic meat and seafood, beer and wine, pet products, herbs and botanicals, and personal care, according to The Natural Foods Merchandiser's 2007 Market Overview. Innovation continues in this marketplace with new biodegradable goods, from housewares and home cleaning products, to certified fair trade products and organic fiber fashions and bedding.

"Each year, Natural Products Expo West gives a sneak peek into what the public will find in America's stores tomorrow," said Fred Linder, president of New Hope Natural Media. "This year, more buyers from the full retail spectrum—from supermarkets, pharmacies, club and convenience stores to independent co-ops and ethnic markets—saw more products than ever before."

Click here for the whole story.

Posted 3/21/2008 5:11:00 PM

March 8, 2008

Chemo...Good, Bad...Indifferent

Chemo:

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United StatesHalf of all men and one-third of all women in the US will develop cancer during their lifetimes. Today, millions of people are living with cancer or have had cancer. The risk of developing most types of cancer can be reduced by changes in a person's lifestyle, for example, by quitting smoking and eating a better diet. The sooner a cancer is found and treatment begins, the better are the chances for living for many years. - American Cancer Society Although the American Cancer Society and many other orthodox medically endorsed organizations state that prevention of cancer is dependent on diet and lifestyle choices, they do nothing to help people take the next step toward such practices! Instead, We The People, are generally left with the following failed methods.

Chemotherapy / RadiationIn the Physicians Desk Reference, available in any library or doctor's office, the top 10 chemotherapy drugs used in the USA all have cancer as a listed side effect. In fact, depending on how you interpret the statistics, more cancer patients die from the chemotherapy than of the cancer. The medical statisticians count these deaths as a success for chemotherapy because the patient did not die of cancer. A select few know that chemotherapy drugs are not FDA approved. They are legally administered under the "Rule of Probable Cause", which states that experimental drugs may be used if the side effect of the drug is no worse than the end effect of the disease. In fact, every chemotherapy bottle is stamped "For Experimental Use Only" and the patient must sign a release before the doctor will prescribe or administer it.

Do We Need A New Approach to Cancer?
In 1971 Richard Nixon announced the War on Cancer, and promised a cure by the 1977 bicentennial. In each of the 25 plus years since, more Americans have died of cancer than the year before. The failure of chemotherapy to control cancer has become apparent even to the oncology establishment. Scientific American featured a recent cover story entitled: "The War on Cancer -- It's Being Lost." In it, eminent epidemiologist John C. Bailar III, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University cited the relentless increase in cancer deaths in the face of growing use of toxic chemotherapy. He concluded that scientists must look in new directions if they are ever to make progress against this unremitting killer.

Adding its voice, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, decrying the failure of conventional therapy to stop the rise in breast cancer deaths, noted the discrepancy between public perception and reality. "If one were to believe all the media hype, the triumphalism of the [medical] profession in published research, and the almost weekly miracle breakthroughs trumpeted by the cancer charities, one might be surprised that women are dying at all from this cancer" it observed. Noting that conventional therapies -- chemotherapy, radiation and surgery -- had been pushed to their limits with dismal results, the editorial called on researchers to "challenge dogma and redirect research efforts along more fruitful lines."

John Cairns, professor of microbiology at Harvard University, published a devastating 1985 critique in Scientific American. "Aside from certain rare cancers, it is not possible to detect any sudden changes in the death rates for any of the major cancers that could be credited to chemotherapy. Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet to be established." In fact, chemotherapy is curative in very few cancers -- testicular, Hodgkin's, choriocarcinoma, childhood leukemia. In most common solid tumors -- lung, colon, breast, etc. -- chemotherapy is NOT curative.

In an article entitled "Chemotherapy: Snake-Oil Remedy?" that appeared in the Los Angeles Times of 1/9/87, Dr. Martin F. Shapiro explained that while "some oncologists inform their patients of the lack of evidence that treatments work...others may well be misled by scientific papers that express unwarranted optimism about chemotherapy. Still others respond to an economic incentive. Physicians can earn much more money running active chemotherapy practices than they can providing solace and relief.. to dying patients and their families." Dr. Shapiro is hardly alone. Alan C. Nixon, PhD, Past President of the American Chemical Society wrote that "As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good."

In 1986, McGill Cancer Center scientists sent a questionnaire to 118 doctors who treated non-small-cell lung cancer. More than 3/4 of them recruited patients and carried out trials of toxic drugs for lung cancer. They were asked to imagine that they themselves had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they themselves would choose. 64 of the 79 respondents would not consent to be in a trial containing cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug. Fifty eight found all the trials unacceptable. Their reason? The ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable degree of toxicity.

Famed German biostatistician Ulrich Abel PhD also found in a similar 1989 study that "the personal views of many oncologists seem to be in striking contrast to communications intended for the public." Breast cancer activist Rose Kushner wrote that by 1981 "indiscriminate, automatic adjuvant chemotherapy was replacing the Halsted radical mastectomy as therapeutic overkill in the United States." Thomas Nealon MD, Professor of Surgery at NYU School of Medicine, concluded in 1990 that "The treatment of this tumor now has slipped from too much surgery to too much adjuvant therapy."

Why so much use of chemotherapy if it does so little good? Well for one thing, drug companies provide huge economic incentives In 1990, $3.53 billion was spent on chemotherapy. By 1994 that figure had more than doubled to $7.51 billion. This relentless increase in chemo use was accompanied by a relentless increase in cancer deaths. Oncologist Albert Braverman MD wrote in 1991 that "no disseminated neoplasm (cancer) incurable in 1975 is curable today...Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.

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Why the growth in chemotherapy in the face of such failure? A look at the financial interrelationships between a large cancer center such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the companies that make billions selling chemo drugs is revealing. James Robinson III, Chairman of the MSKCC Board of Overseers and Managers, is a director of Bristol-Myers Squibb, the world's largest producer of chemotherapy drugs. Richard Gelb, Vice-Chairman of the MSKCC board is Bristol-Myers Chairman of the Board. Richard Furlaud, another MSKCC board member, recently retired as Bristol Myers' president. Paul Marks MD, MSKCC's President and CEO, is a director of Pfizer.

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There are more and more reports by establishment oncologists doubting the value of chemotherapy, even to the point of rejecting it outright. One of these, cancer biostatistician Dr. Ulrich Abel, of Heidelberg, Germany, issued a monograph titled Chemotherapy of Advanced Epithelial Cancer in 1990. Epithelial cancers comprise the most common forms of adenocarcinoma: lung, breast, prostate, colon, etc. After ten years as a statistician in clinical oncology, Abel became increasingly uneasy. "A sober and unprejudiced analysis of the literature," he wrote, "has rarely revealed any therapeutic success by the regimens in question in treating advanced epithelial cancer." While chemotherapy is being used more and more extensively, more than a million people die worldwide of these cancers annually - and a majority have received some form of chemotherapy before dying. Abel further concluded, after polling hundreds of cancer doctors, "The personal view of many oncologists seems to be in striking contrast to communications intended for the public." Abel cited studies that have shown "that many oncologists would not take chemotherapy themselves if they had cancer." (The Cancer Chronicles, December, 1990.)
"Even though toxic drugs often do effect a response, such as a partial or complete shrinkage of the tumor, this reduction does not prolong expected survival," Abel finds. "Sometimes, in fact, the cancer returns more aggressively than before, since the chemo fosters the growth of resistant cell lines." Besides, the chemo has severely damaged the body's own defenses, the immune system and often the kidneys as well as the liver.
In an especially dramatic table, Dr. Abel displays the results of chemotherapy in patients with various types of cancers, as the improvement of survival rates, compared to untreated patients. This table shows:

-In colorectal cancer: no evidence survival is improved.
-Gastric cancer: no clear evidence.
-Pancreatic cancer: Study completely negative. Longer survival in control (untreated) group.
-Bladder: no clinical trial done.
-Breast cancer: No direct evidence that chemotherapy prolongs survival; its use is "ethically questionable."
-Ovarian cancer: no direct evidence.
-Cervix and uterus: No improved survival.
-Head and neck: no survival benefit but occasional shrinkage of tumors.

The Nov. 17, 1994 Wall Street Journal, in a front page article on political pressure being exerted for insurance companies to pay for bone marrow transplants in advanced breast cancer, experts give a totally negative report on this approach. The procedure, called ABMT (Autologous Bone Marrow Transplant) involves temporarily removing some of the patient's bone marrow, applying a potentially lethal dose of chemotherapy, then returning the marrow to the patient's body. The cost of this procedure is in excess of $100,000.00.
The University of Colorado's Dr. Jones, continues the Journal, claims that, with conventional chemotherapy, not more than 2% of patients with spreading breast cancer get a positive response. A non-profit independent technology assessment agency, the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI), says that for the average woman with the most advanced form of breast cancer, the high dose ABMT procedure is not only worthless, but also likely to shorten her life. This report by the ECRI is based on an analysis of 40 studies of ABMT and similar procedures involving a total of 1,017 patients, and 61 studies covering 4,852 patients who had conventional chemotherapy Dr. Nelson Erlick, the project's lead analyst, concluded that "many patients are led to believe that this (ABMT) is a successful therapy. We found no evidence whatsoever that it provides any benefit."

Posted 3/8/2008 3:34:00 PM

March 5, 2008

Long Term Use of Cancer Pill Could Affect Womens Fertility!

BOSTON (Reuters) - Long-term use of the cancer pill Gleevec may produce fertility problems in women, Greek doctors reported on Wednesday.

Chemotherapy and radiation have long been known to damage the fertility of patients, but little is known about more targeted drugs such as Gleevec, known generically as imatinib.

Dr. Constantinos Christopoulos of the Amalia Fleming General Hospital in Athens and colleagues reported on the case of a 30-year-old woman with chronic myeloid leukemia who stopped menstruating after two years of taking Gleevec, made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

She had terminated a pregnancy after the cancer was discovered, initially received 400 milligrams per day, and the dose had been boosted to 600 milligrams six months before her periods started to become unusually light or irregular, Christopoulos and colleagues wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.

After the periods stopped, ultrasound revealed that the number of eggs in her ovaries was greatly reduced, they said.

"These findings suggest that prolonged administration of imatinib may have profound effects on female fertility," the Christopoulos team wrote.

"The true incidence, possible dose dependence, and reversibility of imatinib-induced ovarian failure should be examined in future studies."

It is not the first time the drug has been linked to reproductive issues. The Journal published a report in 2004 of a man who also developed fertility problems while on an even higher dose -- 800 milligrams daily.

Gleevec is a so-called targeted drug that supposedly affects a protein active in tumors, It is not supposed to be taken during pregnancy. The drug is also approved for certain tumors of the intestinal tract.

Posted 3/5/2008 3:47:00 PM