Jack Andraka (center), a 15-year-old student from Maryland, came up with a paper sensor that detects pancreatic cancer 168 times faster than current tests. It’s also 90% accurate, 400 times more sensitive, and 26,000 times less expensive than today’s methods. In short: It’s a lot better.
Andraka was inspired to focus on pancreatic cancer because a friend’s brother was killed by the disease. “I became interested in early detection, did a ton of research, and came up with this idea,” he says.
THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not foresee that after having dedicated myself for 40 years to a life of the law, including more than two decades as a New York State judge, my quest for ameliorative and palliative care would lead me to marijuana.
[…]
Inhaled marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep. The oral synthetic substitute, Marinol, prescribed by my doctors, was useless. Rather than watch the agony of my suffering, friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the substance. I find a few puffs of marijuana before dinner gives me ammunition in the battle to eat. A few more puffs at bedtime permits desperately needed sleep.
This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue. Being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am receiving the absolute gold standard of medical care. But doctors cannot be expected to do what the law prohibits, even when they know it is in the best interests of their patients. When palliative care is understood as a fundamental human and medical right, marijuana for medical use should be beyond controversy.
My friend Wendy ran through what her insurance company would pay for chemo, then ran through her own life savings, and another $10,000 from her mother.
However, it was ovarian cancer, which returns usually within three years — Wendy got 5 years, but was considered uninsurable because of that “pre-existing condition.”
After 15 years with the same firm, it folded, and the only work Wendy could get didn’t offer group health insurance.
Because of circumstances too long to go through here, Wendy fell between the cracks: couldn’t get chemo through an insurance company, wasn’t poverty-stricken enough for government care.
But the doctors agreed: If she’d gotten the chemo in time, Wendy probably would have lived.
Her daughter is 14 and Wendy only wanted to be able to see her daughter through high school graduation. But by the time she was poverty stricken enough to get government aid for chemo, it was too late.
Wendy suffered through four bouts of chemo (government paid) just hoping against hope she’d make it another four years for Esme’s sake.
We, the taxpayers, could have saved the expense of three of those chemos — and saved Wendy’s life and Esme’s mother — if the U.S. system of healthcare wasn’t such a hellish patchwork.
Wendy died in February, a single mother, who left an orphaned daughter.
Wendy didn’t roll the dice: the health insurance companies did. They, and the Republicans, and the Blue Dogs, gambled with her life and Wendy paid for their gambling debts.
Now the Social Security Administration is paying to raise Esme with our taxpayer dollars.
Wendy would have rather saved the taxpayers, and done it herself.
Here’s yet another irony: Wendy had been a vegetarian since she was 16 — she could, and did, buy broccoli by the truckload.
No matter a Supreme Court Judge’s specious argument: what Wendy couldn’t buy was healthcare in this country.
Fuck you, Scalia. Big time.
The patient in the emergency department smelled of advanced cancer. It is the smell of rotting flesh, but even more pungent. You only ever have to smell it once.
[…]
She hadn’t gone to the doctor because she had no health insurance. The only kind of work she could get in a struggling rural community was without benefits. Her coat and shoes beside the gurney were worn and her purse from another decade. She could never afford to buy it on her own. She didn’t qualify for Medicaid, the local doctor only took insurance, and there was no Planned Parenthood or County Clinic nearby.
So nothing was done about the bleeding until she passed out at work and someone called an ambulance. She required a couple of units of blood at the local hospital before they sent her by ambulance to our emergency department.
[…]She needed a biopsy to confirm the type of cancer and a CT scan to see if the tumor had spread beyond the cervix. If she were lucky, she would have a some combination of a hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation with a 50-65% chance of survival. If the cancer had spread, she would have radiation and chemotherapy with about a 25% chance of surviving.
But the cancer surgeons were not allowed to offer an uninsured woman a hysterectomy. Every now and then they snuck someone in, claiming to the administrators that the patient was more emergent than they really were. But one surgery doesn’t cure stage 2 or 3 cervical cancer, or even stave it off for long. It takes multiple admissions and week after week of expensive chemotherapy and/or radiation.
The radiation doctors were also not allowed to see uninsured patients. They could not even give a dying women a few weeks of radiation to ease her tumor’s stench while it caused her to bleed to death or killed her another way. They could give her one dose today. A very temporary measure for the bleeding, but only if her blood count was low enough. It wasn’t because she’s had the blood transfusion to get her here.
There was a charity program that paid providers and hospitals pennies on the dollar for cancer care. One hospital had signed up, resigned to the fact that they were seeing those patients anyway so better to get something for the cost of the care than nothing. Our hospital administrators had declined to participate. Better to get no money and keep seeing these uninsured patients over and over in the emergency room, each time providing the same stop-gap care that has no hope of cure or even palliation like a purgatory version of Groundhog Day, than to be inadequately reimbursed for the right care.
I had never encountered this clinical scenario during my training in Canada. I had never seen a woman suffer because she couldn’t afford something as simple as a Pap smear, never mind deal with the indignities of shopping around her sorrow and hard luck to try to patch together what would inevitably be inadequate medical therapy. It is this reality of medical care in America for which I was wholly unprepared. Many times I found the residents comforting me.
I gathered my thoughts before explaining the situation. To get her care through the charity program there was a catch. A set of hoops to jump through and we could jeopardize her eligibility with specific tests. I explained the ins and outs of accessing care through the program, where she needed to go, and what specifically she must say. The Intern printed out the sheet of community resources and advocacy groups that might also be able to help her patch together some kind of treatment.
It’s not health care, not by any stretch. But as long as the Supreme Court finds it constitutional I guess they’ll sleep better than I do.
A Harvard Medical School-led study shows that cancer care provided by the Veterans Health Administration for men 65 years and older is at least as good as, and by some measures better than, Medicare-funded fee-for-service care obtained through the private sector.
Since they were first licensed nearly 50 years ago, birth control pills containing estrogen have prevented some 200,000 cases of ovarian cancer world-wide, estimate the authors of a study published January 26, 2008, in The Lancet. Further, in the absence of having taken oral contraceptives, half of these women would have died of the disease.
The researchers showed that oral contraceptives (OCs) continue to confer protection for years - even decades - after women stop using them. Thus, they surmise, “the number of ovarian cancers prevented [will] rise over the next few decades” to at least 30,000 each year.
These figures emerge from a comprehensive meta-analysis based on prospective and case-control data from 45 epidemiological studies in 21 countries, mostly in Europe and the United States. “These findings set a new standard in prevention for a deadly cancer,” wrote the editors of The Lancet, “and have important public health implications.”
The results showed that women who had ever taken OCs were 27 percent less likely to develop ovarian cancer. The studies included 23,257 women with ovarian cancer, 31 percent of whom had taken OCs; of the 87,303 controls, 37 percent took OCs.
Two trends emerged that were really striking, according to Dr. Beth Karlan, editor-in-chief of the journal Gynecologic Oncology and director of the Gilda Radner Cancer Detection Program at Cedars-Sinai Outpatient Cancer Center in Los Angeles. First, the longer OCs were used, the greater the ovarian cancer risk reduction, decreasing about 20 percent for each five years of use.
The second clear trend was the duration of the protective effects, which lasted long after women had stopped using OCs. For each five years of use, risk of developing ovarian cancer was reduced 29 percent in the first 10 years after stopping. The risk reduction was still significant though smaller (19 percent) for years 10–20, and smaller still (15 percent) 20–29 years after discontinuation.
Another feature of these results is their uniformity. OCs seem to protect against nearly all types of epithelial and nonepithelial tumors, with the possible exception of mucinous ovarian cancer (which accounted for only 12 percent of cases studied in the meta-analysis). The Lancet editorial points out that the results show “the benefits of oral contraceptives are independent of the preparation [estrogen dose], and vary little by ethnic origin, parity, family history of breast cancer, body-mass index, and use of hormone replacement therapy.”
Representatives from nearly all of these studies - including Drs. Patricia Hartge, James Lacey, Louise Brinton, and Robert Hoover from the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Program in National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) - worked together to ensure the integrity of the analysis, forming the Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer, under the leadership of Dr. Valerie Beral and colleagues at Oxford University’s Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit.
The absence of proven screening methods for ovarian cancer make these findings all the more welcome. But the issue is not straightforward, because calculating “the net effect on women’s health is fraught with uncertainties,” wrote Drs. Eduardo L. Franco and Eliane Duarte-Franco of McGill University in Montreal in a comment accompanying the article. They went on to list possible side effects of OCs as increased risk of thromboembolism, heart disease, migraine, liver disease, and several other relatively uncommon conditions.
The analyses were not focused on comparing the benefits and risks of OCs, explains DCEG’s Dr. Brinton, but only examined their effect on ovarian cancer risk. In the absence of detailed risk-benefit data, including currently unknown risks, such as cancers in women who have taken OCs and later take long-term hormone replacement therapy, she says, “This meta-analysis does not recommend widespread prescription of OCs as a preventative measure against ovarian cancer.”
Dr. Beral commented that while OCs may pose a slight increased risk of breast and cervical cancer, the effect is small and disappears once the drugs are no longer being used, as contrasted with the ongoing protective effect against ovarian cancer.
Dr. Karlan added, “Ovarian cancer remains a disease with a high mortality due [mainly] to our inability to reliably diagnose it at an early stage. Women are concerned about this risk.” She noted that it is important for women to be aware that OCs reduce that risk when discussing their contraceptive choices with their health care providers.
A recent study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of Glyphosate, a carcinogenic chemical found in herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup, in all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering, with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. This is just one more piece of evidence that herbicides are, at the very least, being sprayed out of control.
Koch famously gave a double fist pump when then-presidential candidate Herman Cain called himself a Koch brother from another mother last fall. The Kochs haven’t endorsed any presidential candidates, but their Americans for Prosperity Foundation is behind millions’ worth of ad buys attacking the policies and leadership of President Obama.
Lately Americans for Prosperity has focused on drawing attention to the administration’s ties to failed green-energy grantee Solyndra.
Asked about his efforts to sway public opinion, Koch acknowledges his group is hard at work in places such as Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker is facing off with public unions and grappling with a likely recall vote.
“We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years,” he says. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”
By “we” he says he means Americans for Prosperity, which is spending about $700,000 on an “It’s working” television ad buy in the state. It credits Walker’s public pension and union overhaul with giving school districts the first surpluses they’ve seen in years. The unions and the left see things differently.
[…]
“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch says after a benefit dinner of salmon and white wine. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”
Among the 1.2 million American citizens living in mountaintop removal mining counties in central Appalachia, an additional 60,000 cases of cancer are directly linked to the federally sanctioned strip-mining practice.
That is the damning conclusion in a breakthrough study, released last night in the peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health: The Publication for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx, among others, the study entitled “Self-Reported Cancer Rates in Two Rural Areas of West Virginia with and Without Mountaintop Coal Mining” drew from a groundbreaking community-based participatory research survey conducted in Boone County, West Virginia in the spring of 2011, which gathered person-level health data from communities directly impacted by mountaintop mining, and compared to communities without mining.
Click on the link to read the entire article.
Gov. Dave Heineman compared the University of Nebraska to a wealthy “special interest group” with its hand out for taxpayer dollars while the state’s citizens want tax relief.
Heineman, in an interview Friday, said that his top priority remains passage of his proposed tax-cut package and that the university needs to reprioritize its spending or use private dollars from its foundation to finance the $91 million in new construction spending it is requesting from the state.
The university is seeking funds to expand nursing classroom space in Lincoln and Kearney, do design work on a new veterinary laboratory in Lincoln, and build a $370 million cancer research tower at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
“Here’s what the average Nebraskan tells me: ‘The university has over a billion dollars in their foundation, and they can’t afford $400 million to $500 million to afford that (cancer tower) project?’ ” Heineman said. “They’re offended, and they have a right to be offended,” he told The World-Herald.
Ron Withem, an NU spokesman, said the university has worked well with the governor in the past and hopes to do so again this year. Withem said, however, that 30 “average Nebraskans” were among those testifying Thursday in support of NU’s spending priorities before the budget-writing Appropriations Committee.
“There were nurses, students, medical professionals and cattle producers telling legislators that they should invest in economic development and health initiatives at the university,” he said. “We think the average Nebraskans did speak yesterday.”
Withem added that the state’s largest business groups, including the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, also support the NU requests.
Several members of the Appropriations Committee have voiced support for the university project, although they doubted NU would get the entire $91 million. Much, they said, would depend on the health of the state economy and competing demands for state dollars, including the governor’s tax-cut proposal.
I wonder how Governor Heineman would respond if the Board of Regents declared that only people who make significant donations to the NU Foundation are eligible to receive any benefits from the research conducted at the new cancer research facility, since Heineman thinks the Foundation should bear all of the cost.
Or, let’s put it another way: If you don’t understand the myriad ways that a major research university benefits the people of your state, maybe it’s best to let someone else be the governor.
HT: Brandon Locke.
I am alive right now thanks to a lymphoma drug trial at that Medical Center in Omaha. So this kind of pisses me off.
The U.S. healthcare system is more effective at delivering high costs than quality care, according to a new study that found first-rate treatment for cancer but insufficient primary care for other ailments.
The study, released on Wednesday by the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, said Americans pay more than $7,900 per person for healthcare each year — far more than any other OECD country — but still die earlier than their peers in the industrialized world.
The cost of healthcare in the United States is 62 percent higher than that in Switzerland, which has a similar per capita income and also relies substantially on private health insurance.
Meanwhile, Americans receive comparatively little actual care, despite sky-high prices driven by expensive tests and procedures. They also spend more tax money on healthcare than most other countries, the study showed.
An “underdeveloped” U.S. primary care system is plagued by shortages of family doctors and high rates of avoidable hospital admissions for people with asthma, lung disease, diabetes, hypertension and other common illnesses.
In their relentless ideological crusade against President Obama’s health care reform law, Florida’s GOP lawmakers have repeatedly proven willing to throw the state’s most vulnerable citizens under the bus to make a statement. Gov. Rick Scott (R) has rejected millions of federal dollars to provide health care for retirees, seniors, children, and people with disabilities. Florida Republicans have even turned down money to fight child abuse and neglect. Now the Florida Independent reports that cancer patients are the latest group to suffer from Republicans’ political games and unwillingness to accept federal grants
Occupy San Francisco protester Miran Istina stands outside the US Bank building on Market Street, San Francisco. Photograph: Martin Lacey
As Miran Istina puts it, she has been living on borrowed time since she was 14. Diagnosed with cancer, she was given just months to live after her health insurer refused to provide her with life-saving surgery.
Now 18, Istina, from the city of Sisters in Oregon, has spent the past three weeks living in a tent at the Occupy San Francisco protest and says she will stay there indefinitely, despite her illness.
She was inspired to take part in the protest by the refusal of her insurance company to pay for treatment for her chronic myelogenous leukaemia.
She said: “They denied me on the terms of a pre-existing condition. Seeing as I had only had that insurance for a few months, and I was in early stage two which meant I had to have had it for at least a year, they determined it was a pre-existing condition and denied me healthcare.”
Treatment would require a bone marrow transplant and extensive radiation therapy and chemotherapy, at a cost of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Coming from an ordinary middle-class background, her family has no way of paying for the surgery that would save her life.
Following her insurer’s refusal, she spent three years travelling the US looking for a healthcare provider who would give her a chance at life.
Istina said: “I went all over the place, looking for someone to give a damn, really, someone to care enough to treat me. Because we were middle class, we couldn’t afford to treat my disease. We’d be in debt for the rest of our family life.”
After repeated refusals to offer her treatment, she said: “I decided I was going to spend the rest of my life doing whatever my heart wants.”
The Occupy movement attracted Istina as she ties the corporate influence on American politics to the decision that has sentenced her to death.
She said: “The corporate influence on politics influences just about anything that happens, seeing as politicians write the plans that healthcare has to follow. It directly links the fact that insurers only pick and choose those who are actually worth it [financially]. I just happen to not be one of the ones they wanted to be around much longer.
“The decision was absolutely influenced by some corporation or some bank saying, ‘we can’t afford her. She’s not worth our money.’ In end terms, corporate greed is going to cost me my life.
“I used to be really upset about it. I’m not as much any more. I’m angry, for sure, but I think me being here might help it never happen again. That’s why I’m here. It’s that there are other people this is going to happen to if this movement doesn’t succeed and that’s not healthy. I’m done being the victim. However long I have left is dedicated heart and soul to this movement, no matter what it takes.”
She has immersed herself in the movement, becoming the chief media relations officer for Occupy SF and organising fundraising events around the city. On Thursday afternoon she led a CNN television crew on a walk through the camp, to show how they were living, explain their motives and refute claims that the living conditions are unsanitary.
She said of her new life: “My heart is finally satisfied.”
The Occupy San Francisco movement has seen up to 300 protesters take over the Justin Herman Plaza, at the Embarcadero in the downtown district since October 5.
The occupiers are given food by local restaurants and have received donations from supporters to provide supplies.
Health professionals from the San Francisco General Hospital are providing round-the-clock care for Istina, who needs strong pain killers and constant monitoring of her condition. Earlier in the month she suffered a kidney malfunction which required urgent hospital treatment.
Throughout the afternoon four police officers kept a watchful eye over the groups of tents and makeshift shelters but the atmosphere was relaxed. When the officers staged a walk-through some of the occupiers shared jokes with them. One said: “Please leave the automatic weapons outside the camp. This is a peaceful protest.”
Another said: “We’re not doing any harm. We’re just a bunch of peace-loving hippies.”
But a raid on the camp is possible at any time. San Francisco mayor Ed Lee has repeatedly insisted that the camp is illegal and all tents should be removed but so far little has been done to enforce the law.
He has threatened a raid and on Wednesday night occupiers expected police to move in, sparking a larger than normal demonstration. Two candidates for the upcoming mayoral election joined with the protesters but despite the presence nearby of riot police, the raid did not go ahead.
- © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
This should be a crime.
Last month, during a GOP presidential debate, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain scored major points when he spoke about his personal experience surviving stage IV cancer. Cain claimed that if he’d been covered under President Barack Obama’s health care plan, he’d be dead by now. He suggested that if bureaucrats had been involved, his treatment would have been delayed and probably would have led to an early death.
It was a compelling story, but an incomplete one. As Cain makes clear in his new book, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, he is probably alive today because he’s rich. And that’s not something Obamacare would have affected one way or another.
Cain devotes a whole chapter of his new book to his battle with cancer. He never once mentions insurance companies not paying for treatment, skimping on reimbursement, or disqualifying his claims. He never mentions having to fend off threats that his coverage will be revoked. He never has trouble paying the bills or getting to the hospital or into the best treatment programs. Instead, Cain’s health care story is a happy tale of selfless doctors and the brilliance of the private sector.
The sort of treatment Cain received would have put many people into bankruptcy, even if they had health insurance, thanks to caps and co-payments and other tricks insurance companies use to shift costs onto patients. Cain has never mentioned just what sort of health insurance he had during his cancer treatment, or what he has now. Multiple calls and emails over several weeks requesting information about his health care coverage went unreturned.
These omissions are glaring because as a 65-year-old stage IV cancer survivor, Cain would be all but uninsurable if he tried to get insurance now on the private market. Cain may be insured through his motivational speaking company, the New Voice (there’s no way to know for sure since he won’t answer our questions), but if he is, there’s no doubt that he’s driving up the costs for everyone else who works for him who’s also on the plan. At 65, he’s eligible for Medicare, and his participation in the government plan would drastically reduce his company’s costs. Has he signed up? The public might like to know, but Cain won’t say.
Instead, in his book, he lays out all the ways his privileged status impacted his care. For instance, when Cain was first diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver and a 30 percent chance of survival, he was told that he should go to a specialized cancer center rather than a hospital, namely the M.D. Anderson cancer center in Houston. Not everyone who wants to go to such a top-flight facility gets to go there, however. Plenty of people with private insurance have died waiting for an insurance company functionary to approve such treatment. It can take weeks to get into Anderson, and it requires traveling at short notice, which can only add to the costs. So Cain called his friend T. Boone Pickens, the oil magnate, who used to be on the board of the center and was a big donor to the cancer center. Pickens made a call, and Cain was in.
Poor people without health insurance have a hard time getting doctors and hospitals to treat them at reduced costs, much less for free. But when Cain, a multimillionaire, needed a second opinion about his cancer surgery, he went to see a doctor in Savannah, Georgia. After giving him a full workup, Cain writes, the doctor “didn’t charge me a dime—and he supported me in my Senate campaign. He said, ‘There’s something greater that you’re supposed to do for this country and this is my contribution.’”
After Cain had his surgery in Houston to resection his colon and remove most of his liver, he spent a couple of weeks in the hospital recuperating. He was able to go home a week early because, although he was still weak, one of the companies on whose board he sits dispatched its private plane to fly him back to Atlanta so “we did not have to endure the stress of commercial travel.” (Cain notes that he doesn’t ID the company because “some jackass might want to make an issue out of it.”)
It’s disingenuous for Cain to pretend his luck comes from a lack of government meddling rather than his position of extreme privilege. Other people in his situation have recognized that their experience was very different from those of most Americans. Marjorie Williams, a well-connected Washington journalist who had liver cancer just like Cain, and eventually died from it a year before Cain was diagnosed, readily acknowledged being one of the “luckiest cancer patients in America,” by dint of having really good insurance, contacts, and access to the best doctors. In writing about her battle with the disease, she observed, “I’m quite sure that if I were among the 43 million of my fellow Americans who had no health insurance—let alone really good insurance—I’d be dead already. “
