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.”
According to literature I've read, having your first baby before age 30, and then breastfeeding the baby, helps to protect against breast cancer.
Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Where's the huge Breast Cancer organizations and pink ribbons and stuff on this? Hmm?
Now they tell us.
Brytlea, one of my friends told me she screamed her head off during her first delivery. She said they could hear her miles away. You were very fortunate.
Few realize that up until 1930, all Protestant denominations agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching condemning contraception as sinful. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican church, swayed by growing social pressure, announced that contraception would be allowed in some circumstances. Soon the Anglican church completely caved in, allowing contraception across the board. Since then, all other Protestant denominations have followed suit. Today, the Catholic Church alone proclaims the historic Christian position on contraception.
Evidence that contraception is in conflict with God’s laws comes from a variety of sources. read more.
I’m sure she did. I didn’t say women don’t scream. I didn’t say there was no pain. I didn’t say there was no mortality. On the other hand, some of the *horror* of childbirth is self perpetuated and created. Watch a group of women telling their horror stories. They try to top each other (and worse, they love to tell young women who have never had babies how awful it was). It’s not something you would choose to do for fun, but I’d rather have a baby without medication (without complications!) than sit and listen to Obama give a speech (ok that is a joke!). Seriously, I’ve had other procedures done that were at least as painful without painkillers (the injections they gave me into my back for back pain were MUCH worse to me than childbirth).
I think it depends on the woman, but it also depends to a GREAT extent on what the person is primed for. Few woman now go into childbirth thinking they could possibly do it without painkillers. The medical profession pushes painkillers, their friends push them, etc. I don’t really care, but I find it interesting. Human females mostly survived childbirth for thousands of years with little help other than other women and probably some sort of herbs. Some died, but most didn’t (or we wouldn’t be here). That’s all I’m saying. It’s a personal issue. I’m not even going to discuss it with my daughter’s in law. It’s a personal choice. Just an interesting thing. I seem to be the only person alive who thinks childbirth is not nearly as big a deal as it’s made out to be. And btw, my last baby was about 9 1/2 lbs, so it’s not like I pushed out tiny little preemies.
I don’t feel smug, but I am glad I had kids and nursed. I didn’t do it to staved off health problems, I did it because, well, I just seemed to get pregnant for some strange reason... ;)
They still are hiding the fact that abortions contribute to breast cancer. And of course many (not sure if all or not, I’m no expert) BC pills are abortifacients.
I stopped prescribing the pill to women who have not yet carried a pregnancy to term when the Mayo Clinic report came out. I can’t see the justification in prescribing a known class 1 carcinogen to prevent a physiologic event (pregnancy). Are there women for whom the pill is an appropriate medical treatment like any other serious drug? Yes. After weighing the risks and benefits and informing the patient that we are recommending (or they are requesting) a course of treatment that may result in breast cancer.
For those struggling with spasmodic dysmennorhea ( a catch-all term for the most common types of extremely painful periods) daily thiamine supplementation has been shown in a double blind trial (the best type of study) to be very effective.
Great.
She did a cost benefit abalysis. She chose to accept the health risk (cancer) posed by the therapy ( the pill) because the therapy alleviated a serious health problem (debilitating menstrual periods).
But a healthy reproductive system is never a health problem. And pregnancy is not a disease or a health risk. Yet doctors continue to shove pills at women without telling them about this serious health risk (does anyone not doubt the serious breast cancer epidemic? those pink ribbons are on everything for a reason). And women keep whoring around offering sex without consequences to men who demand it.
Water broke at 5 p.m. (quittin' time!) and I didn't really feel a contraction until around 9 p.m., just felt a little crampy. Contractions stayed exactly 2 minutes apart until 11 p.m., when my first made her appearance.
It was really much easier than my torn ACL. And, by the way, I had hellacious cramps until I went on the Pill. And my poor daughter seems to have inherited that tendency, she's on the mini-pill which seems to have solved her problems, she had hideous cramps and heavy bleeding for weeks at a time. Now she's got her life back.
I absolutely cracked my doctor up after my first was born. I’d been holding him about two minutes, and I told my husband “I guess we could do this again pretty soon.” She said she’d never heard another woman say that on the delivery table. :)
Now my pregnancies were HORRENDOUS.
A genetic predisposition has been identified.
Smoking is a very high risk factor when combined with the pill.
Age is a factor (my OB/GYN says, if you live long enough, you get breast cancer. And she adds that the cancer you see in post-menopausal patients is different.)
And there are widely varying dosages, from the old heavy-duty high-dosage pills like Ortho-Novum (which gave you morning sickness) to the low-dosage stuff like Yaz (on which you can get pregnant).
The way I look at it, all medication is a risk. Ask me about my hideous intractable sinus infection and Levaquin, which finally knocked out the infection but gave me a nasty case of tendonitis . . . . thankfully not ruptured achilles tendons as I have nice thick, flexible achilles and have always been an active dancer.
Never mind...I was going to post something, but I”m not. :)
I think that women who have long, difficult labors just LOVE to tell everybody about them (especially young women pregnant with their first), so those of us who had a (relative) walk in the park need to speak up.
Long before the Berenstains did the Bears, they did a funny little book called And Beat Him When He Sneezes, all about childbirth and childrearing. It really was a riot, but the cartoon that sticks with me is the older lady on the hospital elevator with four or five screaming kids telling the young pregnant lady, "And with THIS one I was in hard labor for 36 hours, and when I say hard labor . . . " The young pregnant lady is looking sick, and who can blame her?
Oh, if you’d asked me during the first four months of all day morning sickness I would have slapped your face. I always was sick as a dog from the day after I got pregnant until I was four months along. But, I would have gladly had a much larger family. But my silly husband had this idea that we needed to be able to actually support them.... ;)
Well, that’s the thing, I wouldn’t call my labors easy. I had 28 hours with my last one. I called my husband a few names. ;) But, I never screamed. I knew which one of us was the baby and which one of us was going to be in charge of getting the baby out of there. :) I was determined that barring a medical need, I could do it. My last one was not exactly head down when I got to the hospital. I had a wonderful nurse who had been a midwife and she helped get him turned. Otherwise, the doctor mentioned a C-section, which NOT on my agenda. And as I said he was rather large.
I do cringe when I hear women tell younger mother’s to be how horrible their labors were. Why do they do that?
If any young pregnant ladies are reading this, the second piece of advice (after NOT listening to the old croakers with their tales of cross births and so forth, as I think Queen Elizabeth I's physician said one time) is to go to Lamaze class and pay attention. The breathing really works.
Re: C-sections. These days, doctors are awfully quick to go to the knife, mostly because you never get sued for doing an unnecessary C-section. My OB/GYNs were grizzled old practitioners who dated back to the high forceps days, they didn't do Cs unless it was absolutely necessary. My labor was as uneventful as anything could possibly be, but a good friend of mine had a long labor with a tricky presentation, but the old guys got her and the baby through without a C, and the only consequence was a couple of forceps marks on the sides of her head (she's an honors student at Columbia right now).
Good advice. I did take Lamaze classes all 3 times as well. Helped me a lot.
I think my first suggestion I had that labor did not need to automatically be awful (again, it is such an individual thing) was when a gal came in around 3 AM to deliver and all she had was back pain. She darned near precipted on us in the labor bed because “nothing was happening”. Dad brought her in from out in the country- went home to get the other children to grandma-and she had the baby before he got back, and very nearly before we got the doctor there.
It is great when things can go well and reasonably easy. Course there was my dau-in-law that labored for 24 hours - then had a section. My grandson’s head was oval shaped and he could not come down. He was bruised and swollen to the top of his ears from trying though.
Glad your daughter has been able to find a solution to her problems. Wouldn’t you think something that is “natural” could go better?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.