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.”
You gotta do what you gotta do. Being a woman isn’t for wimps. ;)
I brought it up because I was on the pill to deal with pain and when I went in for treatment of breast cancer it was only then that fibroids I’d had for a lifetime were found. When I had the hysterectomy the fibroids wrapped around my uterus and ovaries weighed almost ten pounds. Like I said, a simple ultrasound will show this but you have to insist that they look.
That is true in every way. Just like our sedentary lives. We were not meant to be so inactive.
I suppose it’s a mixed bag. However, I had 3 children, and I didn’t find labor and delivery to be nearly the horror that many women make it out to be. 2 of mine were without medication (first one I let the doctors and nurses talk me into pain meds). Sure, things go wrong and everyone is an individual, but when I watch a woman on TV screaming her head off having a baby I always think either I’m super woman or that was really fake.
Whew - then I am safe!
Why does the left/science always want to defy nature?
Hey, stop talking about me! ;)
No, you’re exactly right. If we all just had to have normal activity levels I bet most people wold be fairly healthy.
It was. Poor Edith. She really did change (temporarily).
A pro-life group recently held a forum on this topic. Three doctors who refuse to prescribe birth control pills were on the the panel. Planned Parenthood was invited to be on the panel as well. They refused to attend. However, the media gave Planned Parenthood a huge amount of rebuttal time in their news write-up for the local paper. It was totally unnecessary for them to waste their time in the forum where they would lose their arguments, when they could simply spew their lies to the press and get them published as fact.
Yes it does.The only thing worse than not having children is ending a pregnancy eapecially a first one before the age of 20 by abortion.So women who have done that and use the pill are basically doomed.I’m shocked by the 1000% increase that is very dramatic.
bttt
A hysterectomy would’ve had much less risk especailly if she’sbeen on the pll for the past 20 years.Many doctors recommend that women with her problems have as many kids as they want as quick as they can and then have the surgery.
“Why does the left/science always want to defy nature?”
I guess because they hate its Author.
It's a mute point for my wife right now because she is premenopausel and is off of the BC but good information for other women who may suffer with this condition.
There is a risk with the delivery - it has nothing to do with the screaming woman.
I had to do a survivorship study for a class I took. It was for species survival in humans. What I found was that in the 25 span of male/female born from 1880-1905 (way before we had the modern obstetrical methods), women died disproportionately to men during the childbearing years, even when factoring in the fact that the male mortality rate is higher. Once women passed the childbearing years and reached their late 50s, then the women surpassed the men significantly, which we even see today. There are much greater numbers of old women.
Even accounting for a host of other variables, the truth is that childbearing carries risk and it shows up statistically. It was a very interesting finding for me since I had thought the males would have had lower survivor rates (esp. due to war and farm accidents, etc.).
I have seen women scream their head off during labor, and yes you are superwoman. It is such an individual thing- I had mine “natural” and it was more a case of hard work scooting those little ones out-but body build plays into it- my first OB doc told me my hips were made for having babies.
It also depends on how the woman is raised- I remember one mom telling the about to be new mother to hang on to her hand and scream as loud as she could- the mom got kicked out of the labor room and the new mother to be had her baby. I don’t remember where the dad to be was, but he was not there although he was in the picture.
WOW!
Of course, that’s not what I said.
One thing, it’s hard to scream and push effectively at the same time. In addition, women tend to like to tell how awful it was to other women and set them up for it before they ever get to that part. I won’t say it’s something I would do as a fun excursion, however, when I see young women scared to death and already set for what type of drugs they want before they are even pregnant, and then complaining about the expense, I have to wonder.
My preference would be to have a baby with medical help close at hand, but as little intervention as possible. My worst delivery was the one with the most medical intervention. It appears (from women I talk to) that fewer women have unmedicated deliveries than they did when I was having my children (30 years ago). And I’m not on a crusade at all, people should do what they want, I think the drugs they have are perfectly safe. But I also have to laugh (to myself) when I hear them complain about the expense, but they also want these expensive things, some of which they could probably do without. However, I’m not going to suggest against anything, because if something goes wrong....well, I don’t want that on my conscience.
Oh, btw, my Mom and Mother in Law BOTH advised me to have drugs during labor. So, it certainly wasn’t how I was raised. ;)
I’m not sure who this is news to, outside of the posters so far on this thread. It’s certainly not news to anyone who has inquired with a doctor about bc pills.
I am over 40, and have known for years that because I have an already high risk of breat cancer from genetic factors, no doctor would prescribe birth control pills to me. Nor will they prescribe BC pills for any women over 35 who smokes. Because of increases in breast cancer risk.
None of this is new. But I’m glad it makes some feel smug in their choices. :~)
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