<\/p>\n
VIDEO: Exclusive video of Suzanne Somers: Birth Control Pills May Have Caused My Breast Cancer.<\/h3>\n Be it from imbibing the atmosphere within the bubble of woo-friendly southern California or taking a crash course at the University of Google and, through the arrogance of ignorance, concluding that they know more than scientists who have devoted their lives to studying a problem, celebrities believing in and credulously promoting pseudoscience present a special problem because of the oversized soapboxes they command. Examples abound.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s Bill Maher promoting anti-vaccine pseudoscience, germ theory denialism, and cancer quackery on his show Real Time with Bill Maher and getting the Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance International in spite of his antiscience stances on vaccines and what he sneeringly calls \u201cWestern medicine.\u201d Then there are, of course, the current public faces of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey, the former of whom thinks it\u2019s just hunky dory (or at least doesn\u2019t appear to be the least bit troubled) that her efforts are contributing to the return of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases because she apparently thinks that\u2019s what it will take to make the pharmaceutical companies change their \u201cshit\u201d product (her words), and the latter of whom spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines and contempt on people suffering from restless leg syndrome.<\/p>\n
Finally, there\u2019s the grand macher of celebrity woo promotion, Oprah Winfrey, who routinely promotes all manner of medical pseudoscience, be it \u201cbioidentical\u201d hormones, the myth that vaccines cause autism (even hiring Jenny McCarthy to do a blog and develop a talk show for her company Harpo Productions), or other nonsense, such as Christiane Northrup urging Oprah viewers to focus their qi to their vaginas for better sex.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, last week the latest celebrity know-nothing to promote health misinformation released a brand new book and has been all over the airwaves, including The Today Show, Larry King Live, and elsewhere promoting it. Yes, I\u2019m talking about Suzanne Somers, formerly known for her testimonial of having \u201crejected chemotherapy and tamoxifen\u201d for her breast cancer, as well as her promotion of \u201cbioidentical hormones,\u201d various exercise devices such as the Thighmaster and all manner of supplements. Her book is entitled Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer\u2013And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place. It is described on the Random House website thusly:<\/p>\n
In Knockout, Suzanne Somers interviews doctors who are successfully using the most innovative cancer treatments\u2013treatments that build up the body rather than tear it down. Somers herself has stared cancer in the face, and a decade later she has conquered her fear and has emerged confident with the path she\u2019s chosen.EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS<\/strong>INTEGRATIVE PROTOCOLS<\/strong>METHODS FOR MANAGING CANCER<\/strong>I first found out about Somers\u2019 book about a month and a half ago and was fortunate enough (I think) that one of my readers who had a review copy of the book sent me a chapter list. The reason I wanted a chapter list was because I was really curious just who these doctors were whom Somers had interviewed. In particular, back then I predicted (and hoped) that one of the doctors would be one whom we\u2019ve met before. It was. Can you guess which one? Think about it. What major study did I blog about in the middle of September? What form of cancer quackery has been covered so ably by Kimball Atwood since the very beginning of this blog? No, no, you don\u2019t have to go back to the archives and search. I\u2019ll tell you:<\/p>\n
Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez. He\u2019s the second featured doctor who is \u201ccuring cancer,\u201d right there in Somers\u2019 book in Chapter 6!
From my perspective, it was incredibly bad timing and bad luck on Somers\u2019s part to have one of the subjects she lionized in your book to have his protocol shown to be not just worthless, but likely actively harmful, a mere two months before the release of her book. In case there are any journalists who might be interviewing Somers and are interested in more than a puff piece that lets her promote her book, I list all the posts on Science-Based Medicine that have discussed the rank pseudoscience that is the Gonzalez protocol because, as many of you have figured out, I\u2019m never satisfied with a hammer to smack down a form of woo when going nuclear is so much more fun:
The Ethics of \u201cCAM\u201d Trials: Gonzo (Part VI)The \u201cGonzalez Trial\u201d for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed
Somers, who has rejected chemo herself, seems to relish the fight.
Prelude by flashback: Suzanne Somers\u2019 breast cancer<\/p>\n
In preparation for my talk at TAM7, I searched for all the information I could find that was publicly available about Suzanne Somers\u2019 diagnosis of breast cancer back in 2000. For your edification, I\u2019ve also uploaded the slides from my presentation relevant to Suzanne Somers\u2019 breast cancer diagnosis as a PDF file. Suffice it to say, there is a great deal of misunderstanding of breast cancer in Somers\u2019 testimonial. In this case, I don\u2019t actually blame Somers all that much for her misunderstanding, because it is a very common misunderstanding that clearly derives from a misunderstanding of the difference between using chemotherapy for primary treatment of cancer versus adjuvant treatment of cancer. In early stage breast cancer, which can be surgically removed for cure, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are in general used as additional therapies that decrease the risk of recurrence of the cancer after surgery. That\u2019s what adjuvant therapy is, extra therapy that improves a patient\u2019s odds of surviving after a primary treatment. In the case of early stage breast cancer, the primary treatment is surgery.<\/p>\n
From what I can find from publicly available information on the Internet (I\u2019ve never read one of Suzanne Somers\u2019 books), at age 54 Somers was diagnosed with a breast cancer that was treated by lumpectomy (excision of the \u201clump\u201d or tumor) and a sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy, the latter of which was negative for tumor cells in the SLN, plus radiation therapy. For those not familiar with the SLN procedure, it is a procedure that developed in the 1990s to determine whether a woman\u2019s breast cancer has spread to the axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under the arm) without actually removing all of the axillary lymph nodes. Before the advent of SLN biopsy, the standard of care was to do an axillary dissection (removal of all the lymph nodes under the arm) on the side of the tumor in order to determine if and how many of the lymph nodes are positive for cancer. This is critical information, because the single most powerful prognostic indicator for potentially curable breast cancer (i.e., breast cancer that has not spread beyond the axillary lymph nodes to the rest of the body, such as bone, liver, or lung) is the presence of metastases in the axillary lymph nodes and, if they are present, how many. Unfortunately, as less invasive means of treating breast cancer were developed, such as lumpectomy, the part of the operation that carried the most morbidity was the axillary dissection. Consequently, as science-based physicians are wont to do, during the 1990s surgeons tried to find a way to get the same information (are the lymph nodes positive or negative) with a less morbid procedure and thus reserve axillary dissection only for patients who do have lymph nodes with breast cancer metastases in them.<\/p>\n
Why do I mention this? Because I want readers to understand that Somers underwent, as far as I can tell, standard surgery for a favorable, estrogen receptor-positive stage I cancer. She also underwent radiation, although she has stated in the past and now states in Knockout that, if she had it all to do over again, she would not have opted for radiation. Be that as it may, she has been trumpeting proudly for a number of years that she rejected chemotherapy and tamoxifen and has done quite well. This claim, although true, says nothing about whether he decision to eschew those adjuvant therapies was a good one and even less about whether the woo she pursued after that had anything to do with her survival. As I described so long ago, however, surgical excision is curative for most small breast cancers. Radiation therapy reduces the risk of local recurrences (recurrences in the breast), and chemotherapy and antiestrogen therapy (like Tamoxifen) reduce the risk of systemic recurrences (recurrences elsewhere in the body). In other words, chemotherapy and radiation are \u201cicing on the cake\u201d after surgery. Indeed, there is a website known as AdjuvantOnline.com that allows physicians to calculate the estimated risk of recurrence and the estimated benefit of chemotherapy and, if appropriate, antiestrogen therapy. Given when Somers had her cancer diagnosed (2000) and because I know that she had a stage I tumor, i entered data for her assuming a tumor between 1-2 cm in size, mainly because most tumors under 1 cm would not warrant adjuvant chemotherapy. Here is a blowup of the key slide from my talk where I showed the results I got when I entered the known information about Suzanne Somers\u2019 tumor into AdjuvantOnline:<\/p>\n
As I said before, Somers\u2019 misunderstanding of the role of adjuvant therapy in breast cancer is somewhat understandable. It is a concept that can be difficult to communicate this to patients under the best of circumstances, and the absolute benefit of chemotherapy in treating a stage I ER(+) cancer is relatively small. Moreover, treatment paradigms change with new scientific evidence. Most women these days with a stage I ER(+) tumor would undergo Oncotype DX\u00ae testing, and the results of that testing would guide the decision of whether chemotherapy is recommended or not. Oncotype DX did not exist in 2000, and adjuvant chemotherapy was recommended for the vast majority of women with a stage I breast cancer with a tumor greater than 1 cm in diameter.
Knockout: Suzanne Somers\u2019 \u201cwhole body cancer\u201d scare<\/strong>Now, on to Chapter 1:<\/strong>Right off the bat, to me Somers\u2019 symptoms sound like an allergic reaction to something or an anaphylactic reaction. It could be something else (more later), but the first thing that comes to mind is an allergic reaction. Indeed, upon hearing this story, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if one of the many supplements that Somers takes on a routine basis was the cause. Did she start any new supplements recently? Certainly I\u2019d wonder about that.So what was it?<\/strong>Day 5.<\/strong> Dr. Oncologist comes into my room. Now, you would think he\u2019d say, \u201cWell, sometimes it\u2019s good to be wrong.\u201d Or \u201cIsn\u2019t it great that you don\u2019t have cancer?\u201d But no. He walks in, doesn\u2019t sit down, just looks at me and says angrily, \u201cWell, you should have told me you were on steroids.\u201d<\/p>\nI am flabbergasted. I don\u2019t know what to say to him; I am so stunned by his lack of compassion that I just stare at him. I am not on steroids. I would never take steroids. But because he is stuck in old thinking and so out of touch with new medicine, he has no clue and doesn\u2019t understand cortisol replacement as part of the menopausal experience.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know where to begin with him. He\u2019s too arrogant to listen to a \u201cstupid actress,\u201d anyway. So much of his attitude with me has been the unsaid but definite \u201cSo you think all your \u2018alternatives\u2019 are going to help you now, missy?\u201d<\/p>\n
Why steroids would have anything to do with being misdiagnosed with full-body cancer, I can\u2019t guess. But we still don\u2019t know what has gone wrong in my body. We still have to find out what caused me to end up in the ER.<\/p>\n
A guy can hope, can\u2019t he?<\/strong>Such are Suzanne Somers\u2019 \u201cdoctors who are curing cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that, whatever her intentions, whether they be to help people or make money or both, Somers is unwittingly promoting dangerous cancer \u201ccures\u201d that are anything but cures. They are treatments that are anything but science-based, as well. Just as Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and Bill Maher are promoting anti-vaccine pseudoscience to the nation and Oprah Winfrey is providing an unmatchable soapbox for all manner of promoters of woo, Somers is taking advantage of her position to bash conventional medicine and promote non-science-based medicine, most likely raking in the cash hand over fist.<\/p>\n
Posted in: Book & movie reviews, Cancer, Science and the Media13 Comments
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