I need your help

On Saturday, May 7th, I will be participating in the 18th Annual EIF Revlon Run/Walk For Women. You can join me in the fight against women's cancers by making a donation on my behalf. Your donation will help fund important research into the cause and cure of women's cancers, prevention, education and support service programs. Every dollar will help bring us one step closer to a cure.

I have my own fundraising page and I'm on my doctor's team (Team Taras):

Revlon Run/Walk

Thank you so much.

This means more to me this year than ever because a friend is having emergency surgery tomorrow...we need to protect all of the women in our lives!

Abortion Nearly Triples Breast Cancer Risk, New Study Finds

A new study published by scientists who examined diabetes mellitus type 2, reproductive factors, and breast cancer found a statistically significant association showing a 2.86-fold increased breast cancer risk from one induced abortion.

Elderly women are being denied life-saving breast cancer surgery that is routinely given to younger patients, alarming research reveals.

Some doctors look at a patient’s age in their notes – and decide on a treatment plan before they have even met them, experts warn.

Their study, which provides evidence of ageism in the Health Service, found that 90 per cent of breast cancer patients aged 30-50 are offered surgery to remove tumours, compared with 70 per cent of those in their seventies.

The breast cancer patients TOO OLD to save: Thousands are being denied surgery by 'ageist' doctors

HAT TIP: HotAir.com

The Boob Poem

For years and years they told me,
Be careful of your breasts.
Don't ever squeeze or bruise them.
And give them monthly tests.

So I heeded all their warnings,
And protected them by law.
Guarded them very carefully,
And I always wore my bra.

After 30 years of astute care,
My gyno, Dr. Pruitt,
Said I should get a Mammogram.
"O.K," I said, "let's do it."

"Stand up here real close" she said,
(She got my boob in line),
"And tell me when it hurts," she said,
"Ah yes! Right there, that's fine."

She stepped upon a pedal,
I could not believe my eyes!
A plastic plate came slamming down,
My hooter's in a vise!

My skin was stretched and mangled,
From underneath my chin.
My poor boob was being squashed,
To Swedish Pancake thin.

Excruciating pain I felt,
Within it's vise-like grip.
A prisoner in this vicious thing,
My poor defenseless tit!

"Take a deep breath" she said to me,
Who does she think she's kidding?!?
My chest is mashed in her machine,
And woozy I am getting.

"There, that's good," I heard her say,
(The room was slowly swaying.)
"Now, let's have a go at the other one."
Have mercy, I was praying.

It squeezed me from both up and down,
It squeezed me from both sides.
I'll bet SHE'S never had this done,
To HER tender little hide.

Next time that they make me do this,
I will request a blindfold.
I have no wish to see again,
My knockers getting steamrolled.

If I had no problem when I came in,
I surely have one now.
If there had been a cyst in there,
It would have gone "ker-pow!"

This machine was created by a man,
Of this, I have no doubt.
I'd like to stick his balls in there,
And see how THEY come out!!

From Susun Weed

The FDA is considering designating the drug Avastin "off-label" for stage four breast cancer patients in the next few weeks...

It's starting: ObamaCare: Why Avastin Matters

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose

MEDICINE AND HEALTH: Here’s a Second Opinion

By Scott W. Atlas

Scott W. Atlas is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School.

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose.

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Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system.

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.

3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

• Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
  
  
• Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.
  
  
• More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
  
  
• Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and care for the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

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This essay appeared on the website of the National Center for Policy Analysis on March 24, 2009. An earlier version was published in the Washington Times.

Available from the Hoover Press is Power to the Patient: Selected Health Care Issues and Policy Solutions, edited by Scott W. Atlas. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.


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Scott W. Atlas is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School.

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Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Phone: 650-723-1754

Health Reform and Cancer

The danger is that ObamaCare will stifle medical innovations that could save patients like me.

By MYRNA ULFIK

I have been battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an incurable blood cancer, for the past nine years. Last year, I was also diagnosed with uterine cancer.

I didn’t run to Canada for treatment. Medicare took care of my needs right here in New York City. To endure, I just need the freedom to choose my insurance, my doctors, and get the diagnostic scans and care I need. And one more thing: I need hope that a treatment will be developed that can control my diseases the way insulin controls diabetes.

Every cancer patient needs these things, especially hope. But the government’s plan to reform the health-care system in this country threatens all of this—particularly the development of new treatments.

Read more

How Barack Obama is going to endanger stem cell research...and other medical research and innovation

The truth is, despite the great promise of new medical technology out there now, in terms of new cancer treatments, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and more, the potential marvels of the next twenty years will never be developed unless some developer thinks there's a market.

And with bureaucrats in charge of deciding what treatments to pay for, the existence of such markets will be much less certain. Oh, sure, federally-funded medical research will still go on at the NSF, NIH, etc. But turning that research into actual products is a different story.

My family benefited from innovative treatments that probably wouldn't be around if the United States had adopted socialized medicine when that was first proposed over half a century ago. In 20 years from now, a lot more treatments -- and, probably, dramatically better treatments -- won't be around if we adopt a national healthcare program now.

It's ironic that the same Democrats who were pushing the medical prospects for stem-cell research during the last election are now pushing a program that will make such progress far less likely.

Glenn Reynolds on the hidden cost of national health care

Breast Cancer Epidemic Linked to Abortion: New UK Study

A new UK study says that induced abortion is the “best predictor” of breast cancer, and calls the current widespread incidence of breast cancer “epidemic.” The study appears in the Fall edition of The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, and is authored by Patrick Carroll, M.A., who is the Director of Research for the Pension and Population Research Institute in London.

The study is based on data collected in eight European countries: England and Wales; Scotland; Northern Ireland; the Irish Republic, Sweden; the Czech Republic; Finland; and Denmark. The national cancer registration data in each of these eight countries was correlated with comprehensive abortion data on file. The study made special note of the fact that such detailed, reliable data is not available in the United States, asserting that “official abortion statistics in the United States and France are known to understate the numbers of legal induced abortions.”

The forecasts for the increase in breast cancer in the eight countries studied are huge and they are dire. In England and Wales, for instance, the cases are expected to explode from the 39,229 cases reported in 2004 to over 65,000 in 2025, an increase of more than 66 percent. Similar trends are forecast in the other seven countries.

The study lists seven known factors which either raise the risk of breast cancer or lower it.

Factors that raise the risk:

Induced abortion. Induced abortion is given as the number one risk-raising factor, especially when a woman has never given birth to a child because, the researchers said, such an abortion “leaves breast cells in a state of interrupted hormonal development in which they are more susceptible.”
Hormonal contraceptives
Hormonal replacement therapy (HRT)

Factors that lower the risk:

Bearing children
Giving birth at a low age.
Higher fertility — giving birth to a larger number of children.
Breastfeeding

The study concludes that the increase in breast cancer rates is tied first to an increase in abortion rates, and second to lower fertility (fewer births). For the immediate future, the study said a further increase in breast cancer is to be expected because women who are now older than 45 have had more abortions and fewer children than previous generations.

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Housework cuts breast cancer risk

Drat!

Just as I've FINALLY convinced my husband to let us pay for some help around the house.

The research on more than 200,000 women from nine European countries found doing household chores was far more cancer protective than playing sport.

Dusting, mopping and vacuuming was also better than having a physical job.

Out of all of the activities, only housework significantly reduced the risk of both pre- and post-menopausal women getting the disease.

Housework cut breast cancer risk by 30% among the pre-menopausal women and 20% among the post-menopausal women.

Read it and weep--or laugh, it's hard to figure which.

Boy, does this put a whole new light on "The Politics of Housework"!!!