Page 17How often this happens we have no way of knowing, because doctors get on
the case and mess things up. I can infer from less-doctored societies, like the
Eskimos and natural-born Indians, that if there is little or no doctoring, that the
low rates of cancer are due to the fact that doctors are not getting involved.
The cancers are there allright, but they go away! Nature takes her course; the
“disease” resolves.
Now a new study had shed a great deal of light on what I’m talking about here.
This is not some miraculous “spontaneous remission”; this is what is supposed to
happen and does happen, when doctors leave matters alone.
Cancers heal themselves! And it’s NOT a rare thing at all.
The study, from Norway, which was published yesterday in The Archives of
Internal Medicine (Dec 2008), suggests that even invasive breast cancers may
sometimes go away without treatment and in larger numbers than anyone ever
believed.
Maybe doctors should re-consider what they do? If the spontaneous remission
hypothesis is credible, it should cause a major re-evaluation in the approach to
breast cancer research and treatment; in fact all cancers.
But predictably, the old guard entrenched against any new discoveries, reacted
with fury: “Their simplification of a complicated issue is both overreaching
and alarming,” said Robert A. Smith, director of breast cancer screening at the
American Cancer Society.
He’s paid a lot of money to keep cancer cures from the public (by which I mean
if a cure is ever found, he’s out of his job, per the terms of the Society charter).
But many doctors have responded as I would wish and have started to re-think
things. Robert M. Kaplan, the chairman of the department of health services
at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, has
already suggested that it could eventually be possible for some women to opt
for so-called watchful waiting, monitoring a tumor in their breast to see whether
it grows. “People have never thought that way about breast cancer,” Kaplan told
the New York Times.
The study was conducted by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a researcher at the VA
Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt., and Dartmouth Medical School; Dr.
Per-Henrik Zahl of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; and Dr. Jan Maehlen