Posted on 12/07/2010 11:17:27 AM PST by NYer
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - How often do doctors in America prescribe a Group One carcinogen - one recognized as a “definite” cause of cancer - to otherwise healthy patients?
Answer: as often as they prescribe the hormonal birth control pill.
This little-known fact about the pill was presented by Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a breast surgical oncologist and co-founder of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, who shared her expertise on the drug at the “50 Years of the Pill” conference in Washington, DC on Friday.
“When is it ever right to give a group one carcinogen to a healthy woman?” she asked the audience. “We don’t have to take a group one carcinogen to be liberated.”
Lanfranchi offered a wealth of statistical data from various sources to support a fact that is known by the medical community to be true yet is rarely acknowledged: use of the pill has been strongly linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. The pill is also believed to increase the risk of cervical cancer and liver cancer.
“This stuff is not new, it’s not magic, it’s in the literature,” she said, linking pill use to the 660 percent rise in non-invasive breast cancer since 1973. “Women want to know, and women have a right to know, what researchers have known for over 20 years.”
She compared media treatment of the pill’s cancer risk to that of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which was found to be carcinogenic in 2002. Once word got out, 15 out of 30 million women in America taking HRT stopped; by 2007, invasive breast cancer in women over 50 for estrogen-receptive positive tumors dropped 11 percent.
Meanwhile, she noted, hormonal contraception - essentially the same drug as HRT and with a similar cancer risk, about 25-30 percent - continues to be touted as harmless and even healthy. And yet, the International Agency on Research of Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified hormonal contraceptives in 2005 as a group one carcinogen along with asbestos and radium.
Unlike the HRT discovery, “I don’t remember one six o’clock news report about that information,” said Lanfranchi.
While even medical textbooks attest to the 30 percent increase in cancer risk, Lanfranchi noted a pervasively dismissive attitude: one British medical textbook she cited said that, “Considering the benefits of the pill, this slight increased risk is not considered clinically significant.”
Not clinically significant? “To whom?” Lanfranchi asked, showing a sobering photograph of one of her own cancer patients, Suellen Bennett. While breast cancer caused by the pill is often caught early, she said, the pill’s “benefits” are hardly a reason not to mention its dangers.
“This is what you have to go through when you’re cured. You lose your hair, you lose your breast,” she said. Had Suellen been told of the risk, Lanfranchi said, “she would very well have been one of those women who would have chosen not to take the pill.”
The surgeon explained that the extra estrogen received by taking the pill not only encourages excessive multiplication of breast tissue - usually a normal occurrence in the menstruation cycle - but, when metabolized, can also directly damage breast tissue DNA.
Because breast tissue remains susceptible to cancer until it undergoes a stabilizing transformation in the childbearing process, said Lanfranchi, the pill is particularly dangerous to women who have not yet had their first child: perhaps the most popular demographic among pill users in the U.S.
To show just how much of a threat the pill posed to young women, Lanfranchi pointed to several statistics, including a 2006 Mayo Clinic meta-analysis that concluded that breast cancer risk rises 50 percent for women taking oral contraceptives four or more years before a full-term pregnancy. In 2009, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that women starting the pill before 18 nearly quadruple their risk of triple negative breast cancer. Even more shocking, Swedish oncologist Hakan Olsson concluded that pill use before the age of 20 increases a young woman’s breast cancer risk by more than 1000 percent.
“It’s like you took this molotov cocktail of a group one carcinogen and threw it into that young girls’ breast,” said Lanfranchi. “Is this child abuse?”
In a world where 50 percent of teenagers are on the pill, Lanfranchi lamented that publicly controverting the deep social dependence on the pill has become nearly impossible - even though the message would save countless women’s lives. She sympathized with doctors who would find the information hard to swallow.
“It’s hard to talk about this because you’re changing a culture ... I want to think that I did good, that I helped my patients, that I did better because of what I did,” she said. “25 years down in my career, when I hear that I’ve been handing out a group one carcinogen for the last 25 years, I’m going to be resistant to that.”
I recall reading something years ago (back in the late 80s I think) about a lot of the *female problems* that women considered fairly normal but problematic (cramps, etc) were because we now had cycles most of our childbearing years. In the past this was not the case, as most women would have cycled a few times, been pregnant, then nursing, then cycled a few times, pregnant, nursing, cycled, etc. At the time, that doctor talked of hormone therapy that would mimic that. I don’t know whatever came of that line of thinking. Seems to make some sense.
I”m sorry, I meant to ping you to my last post, # 61.
you know, only a few of my Catholic patients used natural Family planning, but quite a few of my “green” type patients did, as did some of my Native American patients.
But I’m not sure it’s the pill per se or because if you don’t have children and don’t breast feed, you have a higher risk of breast cancer.
Thought maybe you had missed this one?
I didn’t find labor that horror, either. I was excited about our son’s birth, of course, and there was work to be done. Wouldn’t say it was comfortable — it was just hard work.
Towards the end I did beg for them to take my leg off and just get that baby OUT!! haha, but it is a really amazing delivery system the Lord has created, and kind of spectacularly wonderful to be part of that Plan.
I asked my birth coach — ‘You did that FIVE times?’ But after about an hour I wanted 10 more. Those little bitty babies are so darned cute. (As hulking teenage boys they are quite a bit less so).
Well, if God gave us teenagers FIRST we might just change our minds... ;)
Endometriosis is not spasmodic dysmennorhea. That much I know. I’m not a doctor but I know a couple who are specialists and work with patients who have endo (including me and now, sadly, my little niece).
P.S. I will check on the thiamine. Do you know the recommended dosage for this? Thanks!
Well, the old ‘natural’ herbs etc. for female trouble (blue cohosh, etc.) never made a dent in my discomfort, so we just went with the OB/GYN’s recommendation.
I never tried the herbal route- at that time there was nothing for knowing what was or was not in anything- and my meds did not agree with cohosh so that was contraindicated. When life got totally unbearable I did have the hysterectomy- removed a ton of fibroids and a huge grape fruit sized tumor on the outside of the uterus that was deemed malignant until the path report said not- it was a nasty thing.
I think we miss the boat on alot of the alternate stuff- but until relatively recently not enough fact was separated out from fiction for me to get into that.
However, my granddaughter that recently lost a nearly term baby was not put on meds for milk suppression. The doctor- plain ordinary every day GP had her use cabbage leaves on the skin under the bra and it worked well.
I asked her a few weeks later how it worked and she said it worked fine.
So yes there are things out there.
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