Posted on 04/07/2005 1:52:05 PM PDT by Hillary's Lovely Legs
Peter Jennings' lung cancer, which he disclosed Tuesday on ABC World News Tonight, may be in an advanced stage, a local expert on the disease says.
Most patients don't have their conditions diagnosed until the cancer is "so advanced that it can't be cured by surgery, and the patient has a poor chance of long-term survival," says Rita Axelrod of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital's Kimmel Center.
Details of Jennings' condition haven't been disclosed, but his hoarse voice and the fact that he isn't having surgery immediately "suggests he could be in at least stage III" of lung cancer, says Axelrod, director of pulmonary medical oncology.
In stage III, life expectancy for lung-cancer patients is 12 to 18 months, with less than 9 percent living for five years after their diagnosis, according to Axelrod.
Jennings, 66, World News anchor since 1983, shocked his ABC colleagues - and the broadcast world - by revealing in a staff e-mail Tuesday morning that the cancer had been diagnosed the previous day.
He said that he would begin outpatient chemotherapy next week, and that he would anchor when his health permits. Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson and Elizabeth Vargas of 20/20, among others, will fill in.
Jennings had planned to anchor World News Tuesday, but changed his mind late in the day due to a weak voice. Looking thin, he told viewers his news in a taped segment at the end of the broadcast.
Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in the United States, with roughly four out of five people who have the disease dying within five years, Axelrod says.
The five leading causes: "Smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking and smoking."
Jennings, once described by a colleague as a "relentless smoker," says he quit 20 years ago but started again during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Nightline's Ted Koppel "was always goading Peter to quit," says Bob Zelnick, chairman of Boston University's journalism department and an ABC correspondent from '77 to '98.
"Sometimes Peter was like a kid, smoking in the bathroom or stealing a cigarette in the hallway," Zelnick says. "At one point, he went to a hypnotist to try to get control of it."
The traditional course of chemo for lung cancer is in cycles of three to four weeks, Axelrod says.
Some people "actually do very well. They're able to work and enjoy life... . They only need to take a few days off at a time."
Meanwhile, the abcnews.com message board has been flooded with good wishes for Jennings, ABC News' Jeffrey Schneider says.
Jennings joined Wednesday in World News' daily 9 a.m. editorial conference call and spoke throughout the day with exec producer Jon Banner, but he didn't anchor last night.
In the wings. Though ABC has no succession plan in place for Jennings, news division chief David Westin has the luxury of a deep bench.
Gibson, 62, and Vargas, 42, already designated subs, would be on any short list. Vargas is considered a fast-tracker at the network.
Other possibilities: chief White House correspondent Terry Moran and World News Saturday anchor Bob Woodruff.
If ABC decides to go with network evening news' first solo woman, GMA's Diane Sawyer, 59, is the logical choice, says CBS Evening News interim anchor Bob Schieffer.
"I have no idea whether she would want to leave GMA, but she's always been the one I would have thought was the strongest woman anchor right now in television, and she works for ABC."
Since Tom Brokaw stepped down Dec. 1, Jennings has brought World News close to the top-rated NBC Nightly News in the Nielsen wars. (CBS Evening News remains a distant third.)
With CBS's Dan Rather having stepped down March 9, ABC is perfectly poised to make a move. Its promo for Jennings says it all: "Trust is earned."
Wishing I could die of sex poisoning. Fat chance, the wife says.
****ROTFLMAO***THAT'S FUNNY!
Then go back and re-read what prompted the so-called flames.
The catalytic relationship you note (10x, 5x, 50x) is interesting.
This is very true. The "scarring" isn't just mental, either - once you are overweight, your body fights to stay at that weight...for the rest of your life. Fat, as it turns out, is anything but inert tissue - it is very active, and produces hormones.
I was at the drugstore the other day, and the woman in front of me was picking up an anti-infection type prescription for her 9-year old girl (who wasn't present). The pharmacist was checking back with the doctor - she figured a mistake had been made, as the dosage was for an adult.
It turns out the dosage was correct - the "little" 9-year old girl weighs more than 150 lbs. (Or so the mother said.) That young girl is now doomed to weight problems the rest of her life, even if she diets and exercises religiously. Very sad.
I have reached a point where I am confidant that I will never smoke again. Every once in a while, I have a small desire for a smoke, but I haven't had a real craving in a couple of months.
For anyone wanting/thinking about quitting, go to www.whyquit.com. For the first two weeks of my quit, I didn't visit freerepublic once and was reading www.whyquit.com for several hours a day, to constantly remind myself why I should go through the pain of quitting.
All I can say is that quitting was absolutely worth it. The first couple of weeks suck and are completely miserable - there is no denying that - but it is worth it 100 percent.
I gained a few pounds (5-10) and now having "fixed" the smoking problem, I am working on my fitness/nutrition. One step at a time!
"The stench of cigarettes." Now...why did you feel compelled to put that in there?
Sure, smoking isn't for everyone. But those of us that enjoy it don't look at it the same way you do. If we did, we certainly would not be smoking.
I understand that everyone just wants the best for the next person. But smoker's do not need an intervention. We know the risks. But it's a legal commodity. We enjoy it. I don't drink and I don't take drugs. Smoking is relaxing to me. It's my choice. No one is twisting my arms to light up.
Take beer for instance: I can't stand it. I can't stand being with people that have "Old Beer Breath," but I certainly wouldn't whine and cry about it. I tolerate it because they are my friends.
George Harrison also had been a very heavy smoker and had only quit a few years before he to was diagmosed with cancer, I think throat caner maybe lung cancer, it then spread to his brain and that was it. Harrison was very honest in admiting that it was his heavy smoking that got him. Very sad.
This cannot be stressed enough.
One of the little cliques I have run into on FR is a group who tell each other that this is not true. They have various conspiracy theories to explain the bad news about smoking.
You are the most obnoxious smoker I've seen in all my years online. You must be really in denial, and really scared to quit, if you have to keep throwing this stuff at us. If you really believe smoking is harmless, against all evidence and common sense, why be so militant about it? Just smoke, stay out of threads like this, and shut up.
Then again, if ever the sad day comes when you find yourself on the way to chemo, I hope you'll have a loved one to hold your nicotine-stained hand and tell you you'll be missed.
I never said that smokers that died early in life didn't exist - I was just saying that pointing out that an 80 year old man died from smoking isn't going to change anyone's mind about the dangers of smoking.
In fact, pointing out that Carson smoked actually hurts the anti-smoking cause as he exceeded the average life expectancy and enjoyed a very good quality of life.
There's no way anyone can claim that Carson probably had 10 good years left without the smoking. After age 65 or so, the body can break down almost overnight. Many people who didn't smoke can appear perfectly healthy one day and be dead with 2 months. Maybe Carson had 20 more years left or maybe he had another 2 months - there is just no way to know.
On average, smoking will shorten a person's life, but pointing out an 80 year old guy that exceeded the average life span is not a winning strategy to make this fact hit home with smokers.
Congratulations and keep it up. You should be very proud of yourself.
Here you go.
| Journal of Theoretics Vol.1-4 Oct/Nov 1999 Editorial |
Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer (According to WHO/CDC Data)* click hereBy: James P. Siepmann, MD Yes, it is true, smoking does not cause lung cancer. It is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer. I initially was going to write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective. (No, I did not get paid off by the tobacco companies, or anything else like that.) When the tobacco executives testified to Congress that they did not believe that smoking caused cancer, their answers were probably truthful and I agree with that statement. Now, if they were asked if smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer, then their answer based upon current evidence should have be "yes." But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is much less than anyone would suspect. Based upon what the media and anti-tobacco organizations say, one would think that if you smoke, you get lung cancer (a 100% correlation) or at least expect a 50+% occurrence before someone uses the word "cause." Would you believe that the real number is < 10% (see Appendix A)? Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer (see Appendix A). In fact, the data used is biased in the way that it was collected and the actual risk for a smoker is probably less. I personally would not smoke cigarettes and take that risk, nor recommend cigarette smoking to others, but the numbers were less than I had been led to believe. I only did the data on white males because they account for the largest number of lung cancers in the US, but a similar analysis can be done for other groups using the CDC data. You don't see this type of information being reported, and we hear things like, "if you smoke you will die", but when we actually look at the data, lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths worldwide and only 3% in the US.** When we look at the data over a longer period, such as 50 years as we did here, the lifetime relative risk is only 8 (see Appendix A). That means that even using the biased data that is out there, a USWM smoker has only an 8x more risk of dying from lung cancer than a nonsmoker. It surprised me too because I had always heard numbers like 20-40 times more risk. Statistics that are understandable and make sense to the general public, what a concept! The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. Some of the known risk factors include genetics4,5,6, asbestos exposure7, sex8, HIV status9, vitamin deficiency10, diet11,12,13, pollution14 , shipbuilding15 and even just plain old being lazy.16 When some of these factors are combined they can have a synergistic effect17, but none of these risk factors are directly and independently responsible for "causing" lung cancer! Look in any dictionary and you will find something like, "anything producing an effect or result."18 At what level of occurrence would you feel comfortable saying that X "causes" Y? For myself and most scientists, we would require Y to occur at least 50% of the time. Yet the media would have you believe that X causes Y when it actually occurs less than 10% of the time. As ludicrous as that is, the medical and lay press is littered with such pabulum and gobbledygook. Even as web literate physician, it took me over 50 hours of internet time to find enough raw data to write this article. I went through thousands of abstracts and numerous articles, only to find two articles that even questioned the degree of correlation between smoking and lung cancer (British lung cancer rates do not correlating to smoking rates)19,20 and another two articles which questioned the link between second hand smoke (passive smoking) and lung cancer.21,22 Everywhere I looked, the information was hidden in terms like "odds ratio," "relative risk," or "annualized mortality rate." Most doctors probably could not accurately define and interpret them all these terms accurately, let alone someone outside the medical profession. The public relies on the media to interpret this morass of data, but instead they are given politically correct and biased views. If they would say that smoking increases the incidence of lung cancer or that smoking is a risk factor in the development of lung cancer, then I would agree. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the need to use language appropriately in both the medical and scientific literature (the media, as a whole, may be a lost cause). Everything in life has risk; just going to work each day has risk. Are we supposed to live our lives in bed, hiding under the blanket in case a tornado should come into our bedroom? We in science, have a duty to give the public accurate information and then let them decide for themselves what risk is appropriate. To do otherwise is a subtle imposition of our biases on the populace. We must embrace Theoretics as a discipline that strives to bring objectivity and logic back into science. Every article/study has some bias in it, the goal is to minimize such biases and present the facts in a comprehensible and logical manner. Unfortunately, most scientists have never taken a course in logic, and I'm sure that English class was not their favorite. Theoretics is a field of science which focuses on the use of logic and appropriate language in order to develop and communicate scientifically credible theories and ideas which will then have experimental implications. As someone whom I respect says, "Words mean things." Let us use language and logic appropriately in our research and in the way that we communicate information. * * * * * Yes, smoking is bad for you, but so is fast-food hamburgers, driving, and so on. We must weigh the risk and benefits of the behavior both as a society and as an individual based on unbiased information. Be warned though, that a society that attempts to remove all risk terminates individual liberty and will ultimately perish. Let us be logical in our endeavors and true in our pursuit of knowledge. Instead of fearful waiting for lung cancer to get me (because the media and much of the medical literature has falsely told me that smoking causes lung cancer), I can enjoy my occasional cigar even more now...now that I know the whole story. |
I heard his voice for the first time in years. If he sounds like that all the time he won't be speaking professionally much longer.
Hey, it's cool... I was stonewalling myself... attacking your spin in order to spin off attacks coming from other quarters. Just another day at FR.
muuuwaahhahhhhaaaaahhhahahahaha!
To whom it may concern, please knock off the personal stuff.
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