Cancer Stem Cells Identified
Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) May Be Responsible for Malignancy [Note: This article was originally a report on the first identification of cancer stem cells (CSCs) in a solid tumor. But breast cancer...
Breast Cancer Invasive Ductal
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People Aren’t Statistics
Sir Thomas Lewis, MD Sir Thomas Lewis (1881-1945) once wrote a profound essay on this very question: “Diagnosis is a system of more-or-less accurate guessing, in which the end-point achieved is...
Femara Takes the Cancer World by Storm
Hailed as a Breakthrough for Breast Cancer It is being hailed as the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of breast cancer in years. An anti-estrogen drug called Femara (letrozole) has been...
Stunning Avastin Reversal
A Revocation In a stunning rebuke to a former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an advisory panel has recommended removing the approval of the drug Avastin® (bevacizumab) for...
What does Perjeta Add to Herceptin for Breast Cancer?
What does Perjeta Add to Herceptin for Breast Cancer? If you use the Predict nomogram from the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), created by Cambridge University scientists, you get a...
Fate of Endostatin
An Instructive Look It is instructive to look at endostatin, a much-touted angiogenesis inhibitor treatment. The New York Times once ran a front-page story in which prominent scientists virtually...
Disclaimer
Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. Is Not a Medical Doctor Ralph W. Moss earned a doctor of philosophy degree from Stanford University (1974) and has been a medical journalist in the cancer field since that...
Do PARP Inhibitors Work?
Poly ADP Ribose Polymerase The acronym PARP stands for “poly ADP ribose polymerase.” For the past few years, a great many hopes have been riding on the alleged effectiveness of this...
Exciting Tests for Cancer – Blood Tests, ENOX2 and ONCOblot
Noninvasive Blood Tests for CancerThis is an exciting time for noninvasive blood tests for cancer. Several biotech companies are vying to become the first to introduce a “liquid biopsy.” This is...
CellSearch – Tests for Cancer
Noninvasive Blood Testing This is an exciting time for noninvasive blood tests for cancer. Several biotech companies are vying to become the first to introduce a “liquid biopsy.” This is a blood...
The Human Genome Project Reconsidered
Nobel Laureate James D. Watson PhD The 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the span of the Human Genome Project, of which the Nobel laureate James D. Watson, Ph.D., was the U.S. director. (He...
A Sobering Perspective on Genomic Testing
Isolate a Single Abnormal Gene In July 2012, Gina Kolata of the New York Times published an article on the remission from acute leukemia of a St. Louis cancer researcher named Lukas D. Wartman,...
Molecular and Genomic Testing
A Most Essential Topic Molecular and genomic testing is among the most essential topics in oncology. The fundamental question is, Can scientists analyze tissue at the molecular level to yield...
Mistletoe
Transcript In the 1990s, I started to visit Germany and German complementary medicine clinics for cancer just about every year, and I think I added up a total of 18 separate trips to Germany...
Radiation
Transcript What is radiation therapy, is it harmful, is it dangerous? Is it painful? Well, all of those questions arise, and I'm not going to go into any great detail to describe the physics of...
Fermented Wheat Germ
Transcript One of the most interesting and promising of all food supplements for cancer is fermented wheat germ extract. This also goes by other names Avemar, Ave, Aveultra and more recently...
ASCO 40th (2004)
Breast Cancer and Targeted Therapies I attended the 40th annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The meeting coincided with my 30th anniversary in the cancer field,...
Breast Cancer Incidence and Hormone Replacement Therapy
What Caused a Sudden Decline in Breast Cancer Cases? You may remember the news, announced in mid-December, 2007, that breast cancer incidence in the U.S. had plummeted by seven percent, or...
Breast Cancer and the Hype Over Herceptin
Big Buzz I have nothing against miracles, but whenever there’s a big buzz about a new drug, it’s a fair bet it’ll be down to the usual suspects: vested interests, early research, and uncritical...
Breast Self-Examination
Another “Pillar” Falls There was big news concerning a huge clinical trial of breast self-examination (BSE) in China. A total of 266,064 women who worked in Shanghai factories were randomly...
Breast Cancer Genes Picture Becomes Cloudier
Breast Cancer GenesSome years ago, the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes [pronounced “Bráck-ah) were widely heralded as the definitive “breast cancer genes” (in fact, the abbreviations BR = breast, CA =...
National Cancer Institute in Trouble
Andrew von Eschenbach, MD The game around the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 2006 was to guess how long it would take the acting director, John Niederhuber, MD, to remove some of the...
National Cancer Institute Press Release Distorts Results on Raloxifene
Evista vs Tamoxifen Tamoxifen (sold in the US as Nolvadex®) is a useful drug. It can reduce the chance of developing breast cancer in women who are at high risk of that disease and can...
Early Detection and Policy
Von Eschenbach's Challenge In 2006, The Bush Administration announced its intention of cutting a program that provides free breast and cervical cancer screening for low-income, working...
Cluck for the Cure – KFC, Acrylamide and Pinkwashing
Recently we learned that in order to fight cancer, we should buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. This spring, the sprawling poultry purveyor and Susan G. Komen for the Cure teamed up...
How are Things in Vanuatu?
How Are Things in Vanuatu? One of my readers asked me to look into a new website, www.cancer.vu (now defunct). It was offering a remedy for cancer, she said, which appealed to her. What I found...
In God We Trust, All Others Show Data
A Reply to the NCI director's "Challenge Vision"--Part 2 Predictions of Cure In a 2004 article, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, the director of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) boldly...
Is the War on Cancer Futile?
35th Anniversary of the National Cancer Act NEXT week marks the 35th anniversary of the National Cancer Act, the opening salvo in the US government’s battle to eradicate cancer. In those 35...
Patient Advocacy and Activism
Cancer Activism: Gender, Media and Public Policy (Published in the British weekly journal, New Scientist, May 23, 2007) The beginnings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s ushered in an era of...
History of Breast Cancer Treatment
An Ancient Disease From the time of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt until the late nineteenth century, the standard treatment of breast cancer – if it was treated at all – was painful, brutal, and...
Mushrooms Against Cancer
Value in Traditional Medicine Mushrooms are important for cancer patients. If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, vis-a-vis the state of your immune system, you will be urgently looking...
Surprising Power of Supermarket Mushrooms
What about button Mushrooms? Most readers have heard about the healing powers of exotic medicinal mushrooms, such as reishi, shiitake, and maitake. But what about the white button mushroom...
Active Hexose Correlated Compound – AHCC
Hybridized Species of Mushroom AHCC stands for Active Hexose Correlated Compound. It is a brand name owned by the Amino Up Corporation of Sapporo, Japan. AHCC is an extract from some hybridized...
Vitamin D3
Vitamin D and Disease There is probably no stronger association in the dietary field than that between vitamin D and disease, including cancer. The topic is a huge one. A PubMed search of...
Chaga Mushroom and Cancer
Inonotus Obliquus He could not imagine any greater joy than to go away into the woods for months on end, to break off this chaga, crumble it, boil it up on a campfire, drink it and get well like...