Page 20Don’t get caught by the phoney propaganda argument we are living longer
than ever, so more cancer is showing up. In my piece I quoted extensive
research showing we are NOT living significantly longer than our mid-Victorian
counterparts (once past the first 5 years, our survival rates are pretty similar to
those of 1850).
In any case, there is more to this; not only were cancers rarer but Victorians
seemed to withstand the disease better than our modern citizen. It was not
feared nearly so much, for this reason. Take breast cancer: the average survival
time was 4 years, with a maximum time of 18 years. But this was almost all due
to stage 3 and 4 (late) cancers.
If Victorian physicians had had our modern sophistication in diagnostic
equipment, they would have picked up stage 1 and 2, so dramatically extending
average post-diagnosis survival times. The average may well then have shot up
to 10 years and maximum to 40- 50 years!
Let’s go back to the Norwegian study that is so exciting and controversial:
The study’s design was not perfect, but researchers say the ideal study is not
feasible. It would entail screening women, randomly assigning them to have their
screen-detected cancers treated or not, and following them to see how many
untreated cancers went away on their own.
But, they said, they were astonished by the results.
“I think everybody is surprised by this finding,” said the journal editors. They
spent a weekend reading and re-reading the paper (see, not every doctor is a
crook or a sham). “Our initial reaction was, ‘This is pretty weird’ but the more we
looked at it, the more we were persuaded.”
Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the Office of Disease Prevention at the National
Institutes of Health, had a similar reaction. “People who are familiar with the
broad range of behaviors of a variety of cancers know spontaneous regression is
possible,” he said. “But what is shocking is that it can occur so frequently.”
Although the researchers cannot completely rule out other explanations, they
went to a lot of trouble to show these other interpretations are not valid.
A leading alternative explanation for the results is that the women having regular
scans used hormone therapy for menopause and the other women did not. But