However, I went without health insurance for seven years because I couldn’t afford it. Two years ago a government program paid for a mammogram, which showed a possible problem. That same program paid to send me for more tests, during which I wondered what I would do if it turned out I had cancer. I realized I would have to sell everything I owned, sell my house, put my pets to sleep, live in a Salvation Army hostel, and then see how long the money would last before I died anyway. After all, if the sum total of my estate was $150,000, I figured that was good for maybe six months or less of treatment. Given those choices, I would have stayed and home and learned how to cook macrobiotically.

And I did research their suggestions, as well as the documented results of “traditional” (modern medical) treatments.

I found a collection of quacks selling snake oil and people ranting against organized western medicine. I found a complete and total lack of actual research and a lot of he-said, she-said “reports”. And I found nothing, nothing at all, to back up the claims and boasts for the alternative “cures”.

Meanwhile, I found detailed, peer-reviewed research using thousands of patients that backed up what my western medical professionals claimed. Before we started I went to UCLA for the worst medical experience of my life and completely rejected the so-called expert’s recommendation. I returned to my local cancer center and discussed the proposed treatment with my excellent and caring docs, as well as several experts across the country.

In the end, I had to abandon a couple of dear friends because they would not shut up about their belief system-based healing regime and the evils of modern medicine.

No mistake, the modern treatment regimes are deadly, horrible, and make us sicker than dogs. I hated it, but I threw myself into it with complete dedication.

Two and a half years later I am healthy, cancer-free, running over 20 miles a week, and still cool and groovy. I have a nice scar on the side of my neck from stripping out my lymph nodes, a “second belly button” from my feeding tube, and my throat doesn’t work quite as nicely as it did before the radiation. But I’m alive.

We make choices using our intelligence and the tools available. I really tried to find alternative therapies that would spare me medicine’s difficult treatments, but in the end, I had to go with what works. I think I’d be dead today, not heading for a nice five mile morning run and attending my ten-year old’s swim championships this weekend, if I’d listened to my friends and ignored medical research.

Germany is so far ahead of US on cancer treatment. It is amazing how good health care can be when there is no profit to be made. They use inducing high fevers to allow the body to fight the cancer. No longer use chemo and radiation…which to me is as barbaric as leeches.

Have you noticed how our elites… movie stars and politicians seem to live a lot longer with so called deadly cancer? Sen Kennedy is a good example. His son was cured with the Ojibway herbal formula Esiac.It cures , unlike AMA approved formulas which put you through hell on earth with no good statistics for serious cancer.

Unfortunately with state media and a carefully controlled health care system …these cures are kept secret.

The point that emptywheel is making is just one aspect of a wider underlying truth, that medical interventions are expensive in proportion to how invasive they are. If an intervention costs a lot of money, you can bet that its costs in human terms to the patient are also high in proportion, and, in absolute terms, much steeper.

This simple truth should dispel concerns about the need to “ration health care” to control costs after we make it freely available. You can make health care free of dollar cost to the patient, but you can never make it free of costs in terms of blood, sweat and tears. The more expensive interventions are the ones that exact the highest prices in these human terms, and are therefore in no danger of being used except where the alternative of not using them is even worse.

Well, unnecessarily invasive treatments are in no danger of being used as long as the patient can exercise rational, informed, control over the decisions of what interventions to use. Making health care universally available is only the first step in reform. The next step is to put the patient in charge of his or her primary care provider, and primary care in charge of the welter of subspecialists. That second step won’t happen just by making care universal, or even with the additional reform of getting the private insurance industry out of the way. But it can’t happen until and unless care is made universal by way of destroying the insurance industry. The industry needs to stay in control if they are to continue to profit, and if the patient is to be put in control, this rival for control must be first destroyed.

I’m not a clinician, but I’m currently working on drugs for prostate and breast cancer, and have read some recent scientific literature on this topic. High dose estrogen treatment is indeed applicable in some settings, most notably in women previously exposed to antiestrogen treatments. That would be the treatments so derided here (tamoxifen and DES, for example).

My understanding is that high dose estrogen is not a first line of attack because of the unacceptable side-effect profile when compared to selective ER modifiers. The long-term effects of high levels of estrogen are unknown, and the acute effects are unequivocally associated with severe side effects not typically seen with pharmaceutical company-developed ER antagonists like tamoxifen or DES (death by thromboembolism and hepato-renal disease, for example). I refer you to

http://jcem.endojournals.org/c…../90/6/3688

as a starting point in the literature. Please consider that, as with all data in oncology, clinical trials examininng high dose estrogen AND selective estrogen receptor targeted drugs point the way to newer, better synthetic compounds that will reduce side effects and improve efficacy.

Blind acceptance that Mother Nature knows best, and insistence on the least common denominator in cancer treatment (i.e., based on population statisics for survival) is, of course, anyone’s option. I chose to err on the side of enlightenment and science. I can recommend a few good Hospices and funeral directors for those who chose otherwise.

Do ya remember Dr. Jack Kevorkian, “Dr. Death”? I heard a speech of his one time where he talked about government interfering with medicine and how it had to stop. Well, the fact is medicine hasn’t been doing it’s job (researching what treatments work best) and we have to have government activism (just like the public option for health insurance) to do that job and get the medical profession onto the straight-and-narrow. There’s far too much corruption of medical practice due to money and only government can (try to) fix it.