Write To Karl Loren About This Page
Ed Uthman, MD uthman@neosoft.com
"Nemo liber est qui
Pathologist, Houston/Richmond, Texas, USA corpori servit"
http://www.neosoft.com/~uthman
-Seneca
From: Karl Loren <karl@karlloren.com>
To: uthman@neosoft.com
Subject: Your article on biopsies
Date: Tue, Jul 4, 2000, 5:00 PM
Dear Doctor Uthman,
I'm finding your article on biopsies informative, but find no reference to the danger of cancer starting to spread just because of a biopsy.
Have you written on that subject, or would you be willing to comment?
Karl Loren
Original Message-----
From: Ed Uthman [mailto:uthman@neosoft.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 5:02 PM
To: karl@karlloren.com
Subject: Re: Your article on biopsies
Hi, Karl,
The danger of a biopsy spreading a cancer is not known and can never be known with certainty. This is because no one can be diagnosed with cancer until they have had a biopsy that shows it. Well-documented cases of so-called "needle-track metastasis" are very rare, and in practice the risk is thought to be very small and is therefore ignored. The risk of morbidity and mortality from doing major cancer surgery on a patient who actually has something other than cancer is considered much, much greater.
Best regards,
Ed
July 5, 2000
Dear Ed,
Thanks.
I don't want to intrude, but consider:
IF, IF, IF, a person would not be willing to accept traditional chemo, radiation or surgery, under any circumstances, and if such a person discovers a "lump" or whatever, the biopsy, finding cancer, and not followed by traditional treatment, would surely increase chances of spread compared to "no biopsy?"
If someone, for whatever reason, would only consider "alternative" treatments, no matter how much you might disagree with that choice, would the biopsy be useful?
Perhaps some "alternative" treatments could be guided by an accurate diagnosis -- but many would claim that such a diagnosis is not necessary -- that a "lump," whether malignant or not, can be "treated" with some alternative approach, while the biopsied lump, with cancer found, is harder to treat with that same alternative approach because of the now-spreading problem?
Typically "traditional doctors" don't much want to engage in such a dialogue, but if you are willing to pursue this a bit, I would find it useful and interesting.
Karl Loren
July 5, 2000
Dear Karl Loren,
Yes, I agree that it would make no sense to do a biopsy on an individual who would not under any circumstances agree to have any subsequently discovered cancer treated. One may as well wait until the autopsy to document the disease.
Ed
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your candid reply.
Karl Loren
Notice that Dr. Ed does NOT quote me accurately. This is not unusual. Doctors like Ed do not believe ANY treatment other than chemo, radiation or surgery even exist.
He refers to a person who would not allow a cancer to be treated as not needing a biopsy.
I refer to a person who prefers "alternative" treatment to "traditional" treatment.
"Traditional treatment" is defined by law in many states as including ONLY chemotherapy, radiation and/or surgery. A medical doctor who diagnoses cancer and does not give "traditional treatment" would likely be found guilty of malpractice and could lose his license by government intervention even if the patient did not complain.
Such is the strength of the drug industry that it perverts the medical educational system so that otherwise good-hearted doctors will assert that ONLY drugs, surgery or radiation CAN be effective. Thus, the person who wishes, for any reason, to pursue some alternative method of treatment does so at the risk of intervention, by the police, and heavy persuasion by good friends and close family.
When and as Dr. Ed reads how his opinion has been published he will undoubtedly be far more reluctant to reply to questions such as mine. I have quoted him exactly above.
Karl
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Uthman [mailto:uthman@neosoft.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 8:41 PM
To: karl@karlloren.com
Subject: Re: Your article on biopsies
<boink!>
I just thought of an obvious reason to have the biopsy done. What if the patient actually didn't have cancer, but instead had a fungal infection, abscess, or tuberculosis, which would respond to treatment if the diagnosis was known, and would kill him is left untreated? Presumably, even a person who refused cancer treatment would not be also averse to having his infection treated.
N'est-ce pas?
Ed
Karl Loren
July 6, 2000
To Karl Loren
There is no sense in arguing this. Alternative medicine by its nature is a nonempirical belief system. It makes no more sense to argue against alternative medicine than against some particular religious creed. If alternativists do not require rigorous scientific demonstration of their assertions, then we have no common language.
Cancer is a difficult challenge; still, even in the time I have been in medicine, there have been great strides in treating and preventing it. It is only human nature that people grasp at the supernatural when the natural world fails them.
Alternative medicine is just another manifestation of the need to believe in something. My job is not to eliminate alt med, but to distinguish it from science-based medicine, which it is often erroneously portrayed as.
Ed
Dear Ed,
> There is no sense in arguing this. Alternative medicine
by its nature is a
> nonempirical belief system. It makes no more sense to argue against
> alternative medicine than against some particular religious creed. If
> alternativists do not require rigorous scientific demonstration of their
> assertions, then we have no common language.
>
> Cancer is a difficult challenge; still, even in the time I have been in
> medicine, there have been great strides in treating and
> preventing it. It is
> only human nature that people grasp at the supernatural when the natural
> world fails them. Alternative medicine is just another
> manifestation of the
> need to believe in something. My job is not to eliminate alt med, but to
> distinguish it from science-based medicine, which it is often erroneously
> portrayed as.
>
> Ed
Science, if it is anything, is an action that constantly questions its own premises and seeks particularly to include what appear to be exceptions to its laws.
Science, also, is best based on personal observation, not the study of the observations of others -- thus publication in peer-reviewed journals includes sufficient data about a study for another to replicate it -- failing which is typically grounds for criticism.
Thus, one person's observation about his personal experience with an "alternative" is just that -- an observation. It is no different from the observation by a scientist of the results on one white mouse of the administration of some substance. Obviously, scientists are more often careful record-keepers.
You are perhaps familiar with the ONLY double blind scientific study ever done on patients in an intensive heart care unit? At least I've never heard of any other.
Here is an article I've written that might interest you.
The Only Double Blind Study
In Non-Drug Treatment
Of Heart Disease
A "double blind study" means that neither the patient nor the attending physician knows which patient is getting the special treatment. This story is also included on another page on this web site. Click Here to read that.
The drug company, for instance, wants to test new drug A. It's in a red pill. So, they make a batch of these new red pills, with the drug. Then they also make a batch of pills containing sugar, or something inert, and make them red too. These are called the "placebo" pills, because if the patient "gets better" when taking these sugar pills (with no drugs inside) they would know that the improvement is due to the placebo effect -- not due to any drug inside. They keep these pills carefully separate.
Then, they find some doctors to administer the pills. The doctors are given two batches of red pills. One is marked "Number One," and the other is called "Number Two." The doctors don't know which is the real pill and which is the sugar pill.
The doctors give these pills to their patients -- the patients who have the symptoms which the drug is supposed to treat. The doctors keep careful track of which patient gets which pill, and then follows the course of the patients' health in his normal fashion.
If, after the appropriate time, the doctor finds that all the patients who got the Number Two pill are much more healthy, and the patients who got the Number One pill are just as sick as before, the Doctor might guess that the Number Two pill was the "real thing." In any event, the drug company knows which is which.
This type of test eliminates what often happens otherwise.
The doctor gets the new drug -- no double blind, you understand. He tells the patient he has a new drug for his ailment. The patient takes the pill and gets better. We can't be sure it is the drug or some mysterious placebo effect.
So, doctors have these kinds of tests going on all the time.
The test in my Book was not widely reported in the medical journals but most heart specialists will admit they know about it when you remind them with some details, but none of them think the new special treatment is valid.
In this case the In Charge of the experiment, Randolph C. Byrd, M.D., took the entire population of a coronary intensive care unit at the San Francisco General Hospital -- all the 450 patients who happened to enter into that unit, during the period from August 1982 to May 1983. Each patient in that unit was told about the treatment. Fifty-seven declined to be a part of the test. That left 393 patients who signed consent forms to be included for the test.
Remember, about half of those patients would get the treatment and the other half would not. Those who agreed to be in the test did not know which group they would be in.
some of the patients were just arriving, in some cases scheduled to receive bypass surgery. Some were recovering patients -- in some cases just having had bypass surgery. There were a wide variety of different conditions in this group of patients.
The In Charge divided the group into two parts so that each group would have, as much as possible, a similar number of patients with the same conditions.
In fact, out of 393 patients, 109 had been admitted with severe heart attacks and these were evenly split between the group getting the special treatment and the control group which did not.
In this amazing test the physician in charge of each patient had no idea of whether or not his patient was getting the special treatment. In fact, each patient continued along whatever course of treatment had been originally scheduled for him -- with no knowledge that he was going to get, or not get, a special treatment in addition to the already scheduled treatment.
Dr. Byrd never personally met any of the patients.
You understand the simplicity of this test?
Joe was in the intensive care unit, after a heart attack. he was scheduled to get bypass and he got it. AT no time did he know whether or not he also received some special treatment, nor did his doctor know.
The results were startling!
The group which got the special treatment had a statistically significant improvement in their recovery rates and over all health indicators compared with the group which did not get the special treatment.
This special treatment was provided at a basic cost of zero!
In other words, the only double blind study ever done on heart patients in intensive care units, showed a very good improvement from the treatment, but you have never heard about it and you will never hear about it anywhere else except from Karl Loren.
Wouldn't you think that a test which such results would be repeated over and over again to make sure that the results were valid!
Wouldn't you think that the big hospitals, and the big drug companies, and the AMA would all clamor to find out more about this treatment -- perhaps start teaching other doctors about it?
I owe this story to my good friend, now deceased, Dr. Robert Mendelssohn when he was a guest on my radio talk show. He had a wonderful way of stringing out a story, just as I have above. Since then, of course, I've obtained the entire scientific report.
What was that treatment?
Well, the In Charge took the name and some simple symptoms for each of the patients who were to get the special treatment. He gave these names and information to several individuals located in various cities around the United States.
The job of these individuals was to pray for the patient whose name they received!
The In Charge did not tell them HOW to pray, or when, or anything else. he picked people who believed in prayer and were willing to pray for these patients who they had never met. They were supposed to pray at least every day for the patient they got. Each patient got at least three different persons saying prayers and not more than seven persons.
Dr. Byrd picked persons to pray on the basis of their being Born Again Christians with an active Christian life as manifested by daily devotional prayer and active Christian fellowship with a local church. member of several Protestant churches and the Romany Catholic Church were represented among the intercessors.
Those patients for whom prayers were said did better, by quite a bit, than the patients for whom no prayers were said.
That's all! Very simple! Unbelievable.
You'd think that this research report would have been broadcast in every newspaper, and then in every church. It was viewed as a curiosity.
There were actually critical reviews of the test -- criticisms on the basis that there was no control over the praying method and that such techniques lacked scientific basis.
So much for God in the halls of medicine!
These may seem like a humorous story, but consider how serious it is.
I've reported above about the placebo effect.
In variably when patients are given some sugar pill, and told that it is effective in curing their problems, about 25% of them will get better. That is the power of the spirit and mind. Doctors are frightened to death of this because they can't relate to it. Playing god, themselves, they are not usually ready to acknowledge that there might be a real God, and that real spiritual healing can actually take place.
Remember, the patients in this test did NOT know, for sure, whether they were being prayed for or not. it is possible that ALL of the patients did better than they would have otherwise because ALL of them knew that there was some chance, at lest, that someone was praying for them!
Would you like someone to be praying for you when you next visit a doctor?
It would be a lot more effective than bypass surgery or Mevacor!
Bypass surgery has a rate of improvement, too, compared to patients who don't get it. The most famous study of this type was done at thirteen different Veterans Administration hospitals. The study was reported in the prestigious New England Journal Of Medicine in September 1977.
A total of 596 patients were included in the study. Ninety-four percent had angina pains and two thirds had had heart attacks. These were serious problem patients! Every-one of these patients would normally have received bypass surgery -- that's how they were diagnosed.
As in any good study, the patients were divided into two groups, taking into account all the differences in age, medical condition, etc.
This was a very courageous test because the doctors in charge had all agreed to give bypass surgery to HALF of the patients, and NO BYPASS surgery to the other half.
Right away you can see that this is not a blind study at all. The patients, and their doctors, certainly knew which group they were in. But, with this type o test, that's the best they could do.
You'd have to wonder at the half who agreed to forego bypass surgery. Were they more courageous, and therefore more likely to do well without surgery? that was one of the criticisms of the study when it was reported.
One group got bypass surgery. the other group was treated with drugs only -- mostly nitroglycerin tablets.
What do you suppose?
Could bypass surgery show that it had made a statistically significant improvement in the lives of the patients who got it? After all, prayer had been shown to be effective -- even meeting the fancy test called "statistically significant."
You can guess the results!
The study followed these patients over a period of many years. The basic test was whether the person died or not, and then what further heart complications they had.
Of those who received bypass surgery 86 percent were still alive after two years.
Of those who did NOT receive bypass surgery, 87 percent were sill alive after two years.
the study followed these patients for many years. Generally, even after more than ten years, it proves out that prayer is far better than bypass surgery and receiving NO surgery is just as good as receiving a bypass surgery.
Despite this devastating report, in a respected Journal, the number of bypass surgeries grew rapidly.
To Karl Loren
July 6, 2000
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Uthman [mailto:uthman@neosoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 12:41 PM
To: karl@karlloren.com
Subject: Re: Your article on biopsies
The prayer study is interesting. Where was it published?
Ed
Dear Ed,
Here you are:
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Karl Loren
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