The most widely used chemo drug for breast cancer and it does not work for the most common form of breast cancer, and helps far fewer patients than has been believed? This would be roughly half of all breast cancer patients who get chemotherapy now.

MD Anderson’s Donald Berry says that “we should have done this [study] a long time ago.” He says that “tools” were lacking to do this, so they gave virtually every breast cancer patient Taxol, just in case? I’m sorry, the “tools” were there. They’ve kept them under a breadbox for the last fifteen years.

Taxol is an extremely potent drug, often producing a number of side effects in patients. Side effects can include severe allergic reactions, cardiovascular problems, infections developing from white blood cell deficiencies, apolecia, joint and muscle pain, irritation at the drugs injection site, low red blood cell count, mouth or lip sore, and numbness or burning in the hands and feet.

They say that for now, many doctors will be reluctant to skip Taxol for fear of lawsuits if the cancer recurs and Taxol wasn’t given. It’s just so much easier (and more money to be made) to give the Taxol and know you’ve been “super-aggressive.”

Oncologists have the responsibility to their patients to be aware of this report and patients should be given the choice not to receive Taxol.

According to the National Cancer Institute’s official cancer information website on “state of the art” chemotherapy, no data support the superiority of any particular regimen. It would appear that published reports of clinical trials provide precious little in the way of guidance.

I agree with University of Michigan’s Dr. Hayes, we should use the biology of the cancer to decide whether the chemotherapy will work before subjecting women to it. The problem is that few drugs work the way oncologists think and few of them take the time to think through what it is they are using them for. More emphasis should be put on matching treatment to the patient (personalized medicine), through the use of individualized pre-testing.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/357/15/1496

all the illnesses and deaths rates the anti-smokers blame solely on smoking and second hand smoke, are rising exponentially, even though so few smoke anymore.

More and more ’snake-oil’ PILLS are being sold to the victims, reaping huge profits for the profiteers,

There are people, Genetic Engineers, Industrial Polluters, Car Manufacturers, Pill Pushers, and those who get ‘money’ because of anti-smoking, etc,

who would much prefer that we all believe all the quickly rising illnesses and deaths can all be blamed on 1 thing.

Second Hand Tobacco Smoke.

That way we don’t go after the real culprits.

Smoking for pleasure has been around for 1,000s of years, and the planet is overpopulated today, instead of extinct, as it should be according to today’s anti-smokers’ fantasy claims based on Junk Science. Despite that quite visible common sense fact, anti-smoking rages around the planet. But, it is not the first time.

Anti-smoking has actually always been with us for the past 400 years.

Soon after modern day smoking began, thanks to Cristobal Columbo more than 500 years ago, Tobacco ranked with sugar and tea and salt as one of the world’s most important commodities, without which none of today’s civilization would now exist. Within 100 years Tobacco out performed all the gold ever stolen from the ‘new world’. Control of the Tobacco Trade was quickly realized to be a ‘gold mine’ that would never end.

In 1606 King Philip Ill of Spain decrees that tobacco may only be grown in specific locations. Sale of tobacco to foreigners is punishable by death. In 1614 the King establishes Seville as tobacco center of the world. Attempting to prevent a tobacco glut, Philip requires all tobacco grown in the Spanish New World to be shipped to a central location, Seville, Spain. A list of 36 maladies treatable by Tobacco soon appeared, and sales and profits skyrocket.

But Control of Tobacco, and the resulting profits, became ever more difficult. Many methods are tried. In 1624, the Pope threatens excommunication for snuff users; sneezing is thought too close to sexual ecstasy. Selling ‘illegal’ tobacco was also punishable by pouring hot lead down the throats of those caught. Whippings and executions and bans became common.

THE Number 1 MOST Successful method, has always been - Anti-Smoking.

Rulers of Europe declared Tobacco to be a Demonic Curse from Satan that kills, to justify raising taxes on it by up to 4,000 % for the continuing right to smoke it.

In hindsight, it is quite obvious that anti-smoking 400 years ago was about ‘the money’, and 400 hundred years later, nothing has changed on that score. We should learn from the past. Too bad we never do.

Despite 400 years of anti-smoking,

We’re still smokin’,

and anti-smoking is still about ‘the money’.

The Global News Industry has a Fiduciary Duty to the public to report all the sides and information.

Yet the world’s entire news mediae and journalists is refusing to report all sides of the second hand tobacco smoke issue.

They are knowingly and deliberately refusing to report that there are many researchers, scientists, even doctors and politicians, and millions of tax paying voters who do NOT believe the anti-smoking claims about second hand tobacco smoke.

And, by not reporting that information, the news industry deliberately and knowingly violates it’s Fiduciary Duty to the public.

Steve Hartwell
Toronto, Canada
www.reducedriskcigarettes.ca

We are now under orders; be healthy [mind and body] or pay the price with punishments, as once again our rights are diminished or perhaps eliminated altogether. Those who don’t smoke will also pay the price as a precedent is being established for comparative wisdom, to affect other demands. Established by tobacco control as an absolute example, in measuring the rights of the individual and of parental autonomy now by lobbied and exaggerated fear are comfortable wards of the state. It should be obvious to those of us who simply don’t like the smell, what we loose at the cost in eliminating it, is a possession much more valuable, we will not be able to retrieve, without a huge cost to all of us.

The smoking ban is only one of many insults lodged against those who smoke to force a moralist restriction on them. This is not a reflection of community values but a top down imposition rallying the worst, in and among us, in an attempt by those in power to control community values top down, as a statement of arrogance among politicians, confusing who actually works for whom.

The trash science created to empower the campaign is obvious and blatant political spin, in place of health relevant information. Health relevant information presented by a health department which no longer has the resources to investigate the legitimacy of the claims being made.

The imposition of chemically treated fire safe cigarette paper is an excellent example of lobby borne incompetence; in a compassionate world this is known to be medical experimentation, which by international Law requires consent or at least education and choice.

While reviewing the larger issue of Tobacco control and a number of other World Health Organization campaigns designed to modify how we think, I came across a number of ways different demographics are to be treated, because they realized in the planning stages; different groups will react to manipulations in different ways.

It was not so long ago we heard the announcement Canadian taxes were going to be compensating a similar moral adjustment in our past among the native people. A reprehensible re-education plan now known to be crimes by government against the native people a shameful mistake, borne of promoted cowardice. Native children were taken from their homes and forced to integrate with so called right headed morality at that time. They were beaten for speaking in their native tongue, wearing traditional clothing or for any sign their personalities refused to abandon the old ways associating them with their own culture. We hear about land claims today and mostly believe they no longer have a right to the property taken from them more than a century ago, despite holding legal documents to that land which would be recognized in international law. Many feel they have no rights to the land again because of the process of denormalization along with its associated and necessary component of discrimination, controlling how the story is told to us in the media.

One has to ask how the current assault on their culture with a similar ideological tact applied to our own cultures in different ways could be seen as any different, than the forced “cultural adjustments” we imposed upon them in the past. And the horrors we inflicted to set the standards, they would be forced to accept.

We are compensating today our mistakes of the past and incredibly set out to repeat those same acts we recently apologized for. Repeated ignorance is promoted today with Health Scare and Social Marketing described at Health Canada. It could be argued the horrors the Native People faced in the past or the horrors of the death camps during the second world war, were a lot more vigorous and physical, however one has to ask in response; is torture of the mind any less painful than a torturing of the body?. Hitler was the first to coin the phrase second hand smoke and he certainly didn’t stop there in creating his master race. What gives the tambourine banging crowd the right to impose their will on the rest of us by coercive means? We who only wish to live a very short life on this planet, enjoying a simple right to live that life guided by the ethics we alone should decide?

Promoting hatred no matter the goal, is still promotion of hatred and that promotion will have consequences. I fear much more consequence than the shortened lives created by smoking and certainly much more dangerous than the smell of cigarette smoke.

The bandwagon of local smoking bans now steamrolling across the nation has nothing to do with protecting people from the supposed threat of “second-hand” smoke.

Indeed, the bans are symptoms of a far more grievous threat, a cancer that has been spreading for decades and is the only real hazard involved – the cancer of unlimited government power.

The issue is not whether second-hand smoke is a real danger or a phantom menace, as a study published recently in the British Medical Journal indicates. The issue is: if it were harmful, what would be the proper reaction? Should anti-tobacco activists satisfy themselves with educating people about the potential danger and allowing them to make their own decisions, or should they seize the power of government and force people to make the “right” decision?

Loudly billed as measures that only affect “public places,” they have actually targeted private places: restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, – whose customers are free to go elsewhere.

All decisions involve risks; some have harmful consequences; most are controversial and invite disapproval from the neighbours. But the individual must be free to make these decisions.
Yet when it comes to smoking, this freedom is under attack. Smokers are a minority, practising a habit considered annoying and unpleasant to the majority. So the majority has simply commandeered the power of government and used it to dictate their behaviour.

Thomas Laprade
480 Rupert St.
Thunder Bay, Ont.

In chemotherapy selection, Gene and Protein testing examine a single process within the cell or a relatively small number of processes. The aim is to tell if there is a theoretical predisposition to drug response.

Whole Cell Functional Profiling tests not only for the presence of genes and proteins but also for their functionality, for their interaction with other genes, proteins, and processes occurring within the cell, and for their response to anti-cancer drugs.

Genes create the blueprints for the production of proteins within the cell. A protein is a molecule that makes a cell behave in a certain way. It does so by interacting with other proteins in a complex series of steps.

The goal of Gene testing is to look for patterns of normal and abnormal gene expression which could suggest that certain proteins might or might not be produced within a cell. However, just because a gene is present it does not mean that an associated protein has been produced.

Protein testing goes one step further by testing to see if the relevant protein actually has been produced. However, even Protein testing cannot tell us if a protein is functional or how it will interact with other proteins in the presence of anti-cancer drugs.

Gene and Protein testing involve the use of dead, formaldehyde preserved cells that are never exposed to chemotherapy drugs. Gene and Protein tests cannot tells us anything about uptake of a certain drug into the cell or if the drug will be excluded before it can act or what changes will take place within the cell if the drug successfully enters the cell.

Gene and Protein tests cannot discriminate among the activities of different drugs within the same class. Instead, Gene and Protein tests assume that all drugs within a class will produce precisely the same effect, even though from clinical experience, this is not the case. Nor can Gene and Protein tests tell us anything about drug combinations.

“Whole Cell” Functional Tumor Cell Profiling tests living cancer cells. Functional Tumor Cell Profiling assesses the net result of all cellular processes, including interactions, occurring in real time when cancer cells actually are exposed to specific anti-cancer drugs. Functional Tumor Cell Profiling can discriminate differing anti-tumor effects of different drugs within the same class. Functional Profiling can also identify synergies in drug combinations.

Gene and Protein tests are better suited for ruling out “inactive” drugs than for identifying “active” drugs. When considering a cancer drug which is believed to act only upon cancer cells that have a specific genetic defect, it is useful to know if a patient’s cancer cells do or do not have precisely that defect.

Although presence of a targeted defect does not necessarily mean that a drug will be effective, absence of the targeted defect may rule out use of the drug. Of course, this assumes that the mechanism of drug activity is known beyond any doubt, which is not always the case.

Although Gene and Protein testing currently are limited in their reliability as clinical tools, the tests can be important in research settings such as in helping to identify rational targets for development of new anti-cancer drugs.

As you can see, just selecting the right test to perform in the right situation is a very important step on the road to personalizing cancer therapy.

http://weisenthalcancer.com/Patient%20Pages/EGFRXPatients.htm