Cancer cures going cheap

Blog pundits tell me that articles should be kept 400-800 words as people won’t read longer stuff. Well let me break this rule as the video is over an hour long, but I urge you to watch it all the same. Think of it as an online documentary, which it is. A few points from it:

• Average cost of cancer treatment in the USA is US$50,000. As the saying goes there, if you haven’t got insurance, you can lose your home.

• Natural substances can’t be patented so are not profitable for the big drug companies often known as Big Pharma. Natural remedies tend to be cheap but can’t be approved by Drug regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration so doctors can’t prescribe them. If you want these remedies you may have to go outside the USA e.g. Mexico.

• Cures for cancer have been found and buried the American medical establishment for over a century. Doctors that have cured many people of cancer like Max Gerson (below) and Harry M Hoxsey have been vilified.

• Big Pharma business is worth US$ 550 billion. It has tried to buy out previous cancer cures but the deals have collapsed when the cure discoverer has insisted that the drugs be freely available to people who need them.

• There is a disturbing parallel with the tobacco industry aptly shown in the 1999 film The Insider 

Has this touched a nerve? You bet! Last but not least, thanks to @EdelOMahoney for forwarding this to me via Twitter. And for professional advice on alternative treatments, you could start with Cancer Options

Is George overreacting here – feedback please?

The main heading by the way, comes from the video featured.

“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants“

While science was the subject of Isaac Newton’s above quote in a 1676 letter to his rival Robert Hooke [shown exactly as he wrote it] it could quite easily be applied to medicine in general and certainly to cancer. Cancer claimed a giant recently when Terry Hamblin passed away, a pioneer of stem cell research now considered by some to be the best long-term cure for cancer and certainly an alternative to the toxic drugs used in chemotherapy.

The three types of treatment for cancer have the nicknames: cut (surgery) burn (radio therapy) and poison (chemo therapy).

Hamblin’s stem cell treatment for lymphoma using the patient’s blood rather than drilling into bone marrow for example, is now a standard treatment and far less invasive.

We Shall Not Remember Them

First full week of the new year and nearly everyone is back at work. Only three weeks after the festivities and several weeks since Remembrance Sunday, the official time of year to be sad and think back. But not everyone is remembered and certainly not all with gratitude, reminding us of the words from Laurence Binyon’s  For the Fallen

Age shall not weary them,

nor the years condemn.

David Day’s story brings me up short as he was one of thousands of what were called Bevin’s Boys whose contribution to the war effort was only officially recognised in 2008 - one of few things that Gordon Brown will be fondly remembered for, I suspect – but I digress. Wind the clock back to WW2, and many of the miners have joined up leaving a critical gap in coal production. No North Sea Oil in those days and coal is used for heating, power, transport and armaments. Ernest Bevin appointed by Winston Churchill as Minister of Labour in 1940, is a brilliant organiser and has the brainwave of replacing the missing miners with young lads chosen by ballot.

48,000 of them end up working down the mines, many of them from middle-class families who lived miles away from where the mines were. Hailed as a wonderful social experiment it was a failure, as Day’s book The Bevin Boy (The Echoes of War) states very clearly. The experiment did raise coal production but was only possible with The Emergency Powers (Defence Act) 

Disturbing the Universe

If the Bevin Boys were the only forgotten heroes of WW2 perhaps one could leave things there but another scandal still rancours and has not been resolved, nor I suspect (again) ever will be. Some of the highest casualties in WW2 were in Bomber Command The (official) figures are eyewatering. Out of 125,000 Bomber Command personnel: 55,500 killed (44%) Total casualties 73,741 (58%). It gets worse. Hidden in another book which deals with this era: Freeman Dyson’s autobiography Disturbing the Universe is another story.

Many of the pilots in Bomber Command are between 18 an 20. As if flying over enemy territory is not bad enough, getting the planes in the air isn’t easy either. You are about to take off in a heavily laden bomber. Up to about 40 knots, the plane is basically a ground vehicle and the controls will only start giving aerodynamic control above that speed. Add in a nasty cross wind or some inconvenient gusts with perhaps a sticky wheel bearing or brake and accidents happen. No time to complain, there’s a war on and to cap it all, the powers that be in the RAF keep raising the take off weights making the planes even more difficult to fly.  No mamby pamby Post Traumatic Street Disorder stuff in those days, and some of the guys couldn’t take it – they cracked up.

But with a war on, you simply can’t have people thinking that too many of the combatants are cowards (something the Bevin Boys were accused of). A euphemism is invented L M F or Lack of Moral Fibre. In modern day parlance, a WIMP, so if the guy had a breakdown, it was his fault!

We won the War!

1945 the soldiers come home and get a demob suit as a start in civilian life again. Campaign and other medals are awarded but no Campaign Medal for the heroes of Bomber Command. Bomber Harris Chief of Bomber Command is so angry that he refuses the offer of a peerage and only later accepts a Baronetcy when Winston Churchill insists. The lack of RAF bombing accuracy in WW2 that led to area bombing was probably the main reason for this. No excuse for bombing inaccuracy these days, where modern technology allows us to put a bomb through a window several hundred miles away, the target coordinates being obtained by satellite.

So let me bring this full circle and finish with David Day’s Obituary, that prompted this rant.

***********************************************************

David Day, who has died aged 85, was one of the thousands of “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work in the coal mines in the later years of the Second World War, and afterwards wrote a book about his experiences.

David Day as a Bevin Boy 

Physician heal thyself – or maybe not?

It is easy to forget that doctors get ill too, as mentioned in this thought provoking review from Slashdot Will this start another debate about funding the NHS, I wonder? The review mentions “futile care” which in the USA, tends to be paid for by insurance companies. Being privately funded, the doctors have an incentive to treat/cut/prescribe more as they earn more that way. And if you haven’t got insurance and need a major operation? You can lose your home. 

For all its faults, the NHS has much to commend it.  

How Doctors die by Ken Murray

“Dr. Ken Murray, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes that doctors don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get when faced with death themselves, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves because they know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want.

‘Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people,’ writes Murray. ‘What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.”‘ Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming.”

This could be a follow on from an earlier book:

If you are describing your symptoms to a doctor, you have an average of 18 seconds before you get interrupted. Something to keep in mind next time you visit your GP.

Regrets? I’ve had a few..la..la..la

Frank Sinatra fans may recognise the mangled headings from his hit My Way where the words were written by Paul Anka and the tune based on the French song Comme d’habitude (As usual). But the first words of My Way 

“And now the end is near….”

seem appropriate with the birth of a new year only a short time away.

But why this morbid view, where the talk is of new year resolutions? Well, sometimes you come across something which encapsulates everything there is to say about a subject. The following appeared on Twitter and Tumblr this morning and with or without new year resolutions, makes a worthwhile read.

Nurse Reveals Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Enjoy 2012 and thank you to nurse Kelly Oxford who wrote the article.

Merry Christmas

It’s that time of year again when you tend to look back and plan forward. Not for nothing is the first month of the year named after the two-faced Roman god Janus who is the god of beginnings and transitions as well as being the god of gates and doors.

Best news professionally? Have at last finished my studies for the RDR Retail Distribution Review - in plain language raising the qualification level for financial advisers. After this, 30 or so hours a year of CPD Continuing Professional Development will keep me current – until the regulators/government/EU move the goalposts again. Any bets on how long before this happens?

Along with more qualifications, comes fitness and propriety previously mentioned in The Law is a Ass where the issue is, is the guy/gal concerned the right sort of person to advise on how people should invest their money? Showing the limitations of exams, a case comes up on the forum for financial advisers IFALife where a firm has satisfied itself on the qualifications of a guy, but are unhappy about his fitness and propriety. He currently works for a high street bank where every month, you get a list of potential clients – people you can flog their products to. But 6 complaints have been upheld against him, he has had his wrist slapped for giving out incorrect product documentation in another case and didn’t mention plastic debt of over £20,000 as he didn’t feel it was important. The question asked on the forum was, is this guy fit and proper? Would you employ the guy?

If not, should the regulators and his professional association be informed – otherwise known as whistleblowing? Whistleblowing is a clear duty for IFAs where money laundering is concerned, or employees generally where there is a public interest or health and safety issue, but how far does this extend into professional standards? Feedback welcomed.

Being Nice to your Customers

Continuing the banks or lender theme, one client contacts me when another high street lender has approved a large Buy-to-Let mortgage in principle. Client is refurbishing property and would like the (re)mortgage money now please – tax bills due in January. Manager concerned is on holiday until second week January so papers will only be fully completed then. After this, they go to the monthly credit committee meeting with the bank kindly informing my client that she will get the money first week March! Quicker lenders are available but only at a higher rate, so client is stymied.

Cancer Claims

On a sadder but ultimately positive note, another client contacts me with a cancer diagnosis. Could I check the benefits? After buying protection, it is quite common for clients to forget the exact details of their policies which highlights the importance of regular financial reviews with your adviser. Fortunately, the amount of Critical Illness Cover is more than the mortgage so there will be money for time off to recover from surgery planned before Christmas. The income protection policy will help too.

This reminds me of another claim where a couple needed a mortgage and had two small children. Recommended Critical Illness Cover for the mortgage but after they both discussed it, told me they couldn’t afford the premium. How much can you afford? I asked. Working out an amount of cover they could afford was quite straight forward and covered about two-thirds of the loan. Four years go by and husband is diagnosed with cancer. He is self-employed and while the claim will not extinguish the whole mortgage, some of the cash will allow him to take time off to recover. Ask anyone who has had cancer treatment, and they will tell you that fatigue is often the main issue.

Christopher Hitchens

Writer, journalist, polemicist and perhaps most famously atheist, died from cancer complications this week. Why do I mention this? Well both us were born in the same year and our cancers were similar. Makes you feel life can be a bit of a lottery and whether you agreed with his atheist & other contrarian views or not, the world is a duller place without him. Obituary link here which is worth reading. It is much longer than the average Daily Telegraph obit which of course, says much for its subject.

Using your Computer to help Cancer research

You are a post-grad student/professor/lecturer/doctor and want to do some research. Working out a budget and timeline, you start knocking on doors of your own department or research foundation and make a pitch. The money is there but so are lots of other projects, and you might be forgiven for thinking that chance is the main factor deciding whether you get your funding or not.

Even worse, what if your field is purely scientific with no obvious use now? Like astronomy or even more esoteric, a Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? SETI. Easy to ask for money for medical research for example, but looking for Little Green Men? LGM

Never mind that lasers were described in 1960 by Theodore Maiman as A Solution looking for a problem Or that the movie business originated as a bet between two guys who wanted to know if horses legs were spread out or came together while galloping. Laser uses include eye surgery and the optical drive in the computer you are reading this blog with, while the movie business is worth billions and employs thousands of people. So important is it to American values that movie companies are allowed to have three sets of accounts. (Bottle of wine to any reader who can help me on this point)

Time for some lateral thinking. Computers are now cheap and most people have them. They are left switched on for the day and are not used continuously, so sit idle for long periods. This is spare computing capacity which could do the number crunching for your research. Distributed computing is born where the number crunching is split up into small files called work units which are processed when you are not using your computer. The number crunching programme is free and you can set parameters as to how much of your computer’s drive and time is used. Biggest distributed computing project is Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing BOINC.  The cost is about the same as leaving a low wattage light bulb turned on, but  there is an added benefit of doing this. Microchips are most vulnerable to damage by spikes in power, when they are turned on - leaving the computer turned on reduces this risk.

Cure for cancer? It computes! as Spock used to say

Best known by far is SETIatHome but for people not interested in finding LGM there are plenty of others including research into: global warming  cancer research  AIDS  predicting earthquakes and the biggest killer on the planet malaria While cancer is primarily an old persons’ disease malaria kills people of all ages or as the SOS Children’s Villages Charity puts it, a child in Africa dies from it (on average) every 45 seconds It has killed more than half of the people who have lived on our planet.

Your computer can run several projects and in my case, is set to switch project every hour. When the work unit is finished, the results are sent back to BOINC and a new one is downloaded. You can run this stuff individually or as a member of a team, plus setting how many days worth of work units you wish to store in your computer. And the cost of keeping your laptop on all the time at home? It’s worth it.

Lung Cancer X-Ray

QUESTION: Are any other readers a member of BOINC or other distributed computing projects? Please let me know.

What to Do with all this time?

One of the more enduring and amusing myths about retirement that IFAs come across, is that you will be able to watch TV and loaf about at home all day. In my experience, wives get fed up with hubby being at home 24/7 and often tell them to go out and do something useful – even if it is playing golf. This isn’t confined to the UK either. At my daughter’s wedding in Italy, I was at first puzzled to see groups of old men standing round in groups gossiping during the day. Seems wives there eject hubby from the marital home after breakfast with the instruction not to come back until lunchtime.

Spoiled Brats

This longevity raises other issues too. If you are going to live longer meaning have a longer retirement, then contribution levels need to be increased. If the 65 State Pension Age established in 1948 when the NHS was founded, had been increased in line with current life expectancy, we would get our State Pensions at age 71 - very close the original State Pension Age from 1908. Public sector workers with their gold-plated pensions planning to strike on Wednesday where the cost to the country may be about £500 million, please note.

It gets worse

If you are living longer then you can get illnesses, with the major one these days being cancer. As Cancer Research UK states, Cancer is primarily a disease of older people with 63 per cent of cancers in people 65 or over. Fortunately, cures get better all the time and the so-called Cyberknife is a good example. Actually it isn’t a knife at all as the “cutting” is done by gamma rays, a form of ionising radiation - radio surgery is probably a better description and it is apparently more accurate than ordinary radio therapy RT.

At £3 million each, there is only one in the UK currently at The Harley Street Clinic but money for a second one is being raised by the Freemasons’ Metropolitan Grand Lodge which will be at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts) in the City. Interestingly, Barts is the oldest surviving hospital in the UK and has the second highest survival rate.

Where did we come from?

One thing that should aid physical health for any elderly person is keeping mentally active and possible doing some Family History research. Elderly people will have stories and recollections which if not written down will disappear with them. The one problem you do not have is a shortage of information. There is just so much: Parish records   Census records   International Genealogical Index IGI British Library Newspapers in Colindale  Military Records to name but a few.

Let me pass on a few things passed to me from my own tribe, who have done a lot of work for me:

• Be organised. With so much information available, it is very easy to get side tracked. Plenty of books on the subject. If you have just been diagnosed with cancer for example, you may wish to solve that family riddle you heard about, sooner rather than later.

• Some research can be delegated to professional genealogists. Outside London, the going rate is around £15 hour. Society of Genealogists website link here.

• Stories from old relatives can be a help as much as a hindrance. People swear that Uncle Joe lived or did whatever and then you find evidence proving this was completely wrong. Very puzzling or perhaps a family version of Chinese Whispers. At the same time, some of these old stories can lead to fascinating facts about your forebears.

• Former curious custom in marriages where a family disapproved, was to send the couple a crust of bread on the day of the wedding.

• One source of information not mentioned is Bishops’ Transscripts  From 1598, parishes were required to send copies of their records to the Diocese or Bishop. Whereas original details might be scrawled in the parish register, the copies the Church Warden or Parish Clerk would send each year were sometimes more neatly written. Occasional pithy comments that  might be written in the margin of the Parish Register would not be passed on. Copying inevitably created transcription errors. Even worse, war and accidents create gaps. One years records at a parish my father wanted to look at were absent, as the Church Warden’s house burned down on the day he took the papers home.

• And as a final point to keep granddad on his toes, if your family name is consistently spelled the same way in all the records he looks at, you will be lucky. 

Isn’t Victorian English lovely? Some names you just can’t make up, and the heading comes from Martin Booth’s Opium A History Still widely used today, the opium poppy papaver somniferum produces two drugs used in cancer treatment: codeine and of course, morphine 

In my own cancer treatment, codeine was part of the background pain control with the morphine being reserved for “breakthrough pain” or in plain English, when you were having a bad day.

Opium was the first widely used strong pain killer and like any strong drug, can be harmful if misused not to mention having side effects where the least of them is constipation

For the better off, it was a recreational drug and the list of writers who used it is long: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Ancient Mariner) Elizabeth Barrett-Browning (How do I love thee?) John Keats (Ode to a Nightingale) Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone) plus fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes  Of all the opiate stories, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater is the best known, published in 1821.

Mother’s Little Helper

But for the less well off, opium was a brief release from drudge and poverty and for a careless or unlucky few, a permanent release from everyday life. Strengths and quality of the drug varied enormously so overdosing wasn’t uncommon. Main customers were hard pressed mums

(nothing changes?) closely followed by child minders. For the really poor, opium’s effect of suppressing appetite was useful in keeping hungry children quiet. An opium pill in a pint of beer was another remedy. But increasing living standards and education prompted the middle classes to do something, leading to where we came in with The Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge which became The Ladies’ Sanitary Association.  Apart from the main goal of improving hygiene, tackling Infant Doping was another high priority.

When Karl Marx said in German Religion is the opiate of the masses he knew from first hand experience

Because You’re Worth it?

Another week and another cancer drug dropped by National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) as it is not worth the money according to their Quality-adjusted Life Year QALY yardstick. The drug this time is Eribulin used in breast cancer treatment and fails NICE’s QALY test, costing twice a much as their guidelines allow.

This comes shortly after concerns about over use of antibiotics where their over-presciption just makes the diseases they are supposed to cure, more resistant. This of course requires more £billions spending on antibiotic resistance which can only be afforded by multi-national pharmaceutical companies. Which can only really be funded by sales of drugs of dubious benefit as detailed in what could be a good Christmas read ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by The Daily Telegraph’s Dr James le Fanu. Summary here

NICE of course has to have some yardstick to gauge the effectiveness of a treatment or drug, but even for one who has spent his whole life working in money, the £30,000 figure is chilling. Puts a slightly different spin on the L’Oreal advert celebrating its 40th year

Article from The Daily Telegraph by Stephen Adams Medical Correspondent 17th November 2011

A drug which could benefit up to 1,700 women a year with advanced breast cancer has been rejected for prescription on the NHS by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence