Tamoxifen: Praised As "Life Saving" But Still Causing Cancer

Tamoxifen: Praised As "Life Saving" But Still Causing Cancer







Sayer Ji, Contributor
Activist Post

Many of the drugs used to treat breast cancer today are probable or
known cancer-causing agents. Tamoxifen, for instance, is classified by
the World Health Organization as a "human carcinogen," but recent news
headlines praised extended use of this drug for "saving lives." It is
obvious that the mainstream media has swallowed the tamoxifen-flavored
Kool-Aid ... will you?

Last week, mainstream media headlines lit up like Christmas lights with
exuberant news that the chemotherapy drug tamoxifen, "Cuts Breast Cancer
Deaths," "Saves Lives," "Dramatically Lowers Risk of Death," ad
nauseam, when extended from 5 years of use to 10 in breast cancer
patients.

These mostly uncritical pronouncements followed from a newly published study in Lancet,
funded by a long list of contributors, including the US Army,
EU-Biomed, UK Medical Research Council, and the UK division of
AstraZeneca, the company that formed after the now defunct Imperial
Chemical Industry, the drug's original patent holder and manufacturer,
de-merged its pharmaceutical division Zeneca Group in 1993, merging with
Astra AB in 1999 to assume its present incarnation as one of the
world's most powerful pharmaceutical companies.

Most of these news stories made no mention of the
fact that a major pharmaceutical industry funding source for the study
would benefit directly and indirectly, perhaps in tens of millions of
dollars, from its ostensibly positive findings. Mind you, AstraZeneca
is a founding (and still controlling) sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month,
the more than a quarter-century-old push to screen millions of
asymptomatic women for so-called 'early-stage cancers' with X-ray
mammography, a campaign which was recently shown to result in the overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment of an astounding 1.3 million American women over the past 30 years.


Therefore, it is a sad reflection on the state of journalism today that
more was not said about this glaring conflict of interest. Indeed,
increasingly, mainstream medical news reports have transmogrified into
thinly veiled infomercials for their major advertisers.

What Did The New Lancet Tamoxifen Study Actually Show?

According to the much lauded study, these are the actual differences observed between the 5 and 10 year treatment groups:
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Diagnosed breast cancer recurrence on
tamoxifen was reduced from 25.1% in the 5 year group to 21.4% in the 10
year group – a 3.9% reduction. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Breast cancer deaths on tamoxifen were reduced from 15% in the 5 year group to 12.2% in the 10 year group – a 2.8% reduction.</blockquote>Based
on surface appearances, a 3.9% reduction in breast cancer recurrence,
and especially a 2.8% reduction in breast cancer mortality, are benefits
that can not be considered too small to be of consequence. After all,
saving even one woman's life is no small thing.

Looking a bit deeper, however, these ostensibly positive numbers conceal
a darker reality: many, if not most, of the initially diagnosed breast
cancers in the studied populations, and which justified their follow-up
treatment with tamoxifen in the first place, were probably misdiagnosed
(which the medical establishment euphemistically calls "overdiagnosis").

And
so, too, were many of the "recurring" cancers observed during the
course of the 10-year study period. Therefore, the professed differences
in morbidity and mortality in the extended tamoxifen treatment group,
versus the 5-year group, may simply reflect the differing degrees to
which these women were subjected to misdiagnosis and mistreatment
(again, euphemistically known as "overtreatment"), and not any intrinsic
therapeutic value to the drug itself.

In 2008 alone, it has been estimated that 70,000 U.S. women were
overdiagnosed and overtreated for early-stage breast cancers that were
not (and would not have become) malignant, and therefore were
technically not cancerous at all, i.e. mammography detected lesions in
women that were inherently benign, but were termed "pre-cancerous" and
treated preemptively with the standard treatments, e.g. mastectomy,
lumpectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. In fact, approximately 95% of
early-stage breast cancers are overdiagnosed and overtreated, according
to the latest meta-analysis on the topic that we covered in far greater
depth in a recent article: 30 Years of Breast Screening: 1.3 Million Wrongly Treated.

So, taking this deeper context into account, what do the aforementioned Lancet study figures really indicate?

Tamoxifen May Indirectly Reduce The Risk of Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment, While Doing Nothing To Fight Breast Cancer Itself

Due to the fact that tamoxifen is a powerful anti-estrogen, and that
breast cells in their normal state have estrogen receptors susceptible
to being "blocked" by it, it should be expected that this chemical would
suppress the growth of estrogen-sensitive tissues, regardless of
whether or not those tissues are benign or malignant. Many things, in
fact, suppress breast cell growth, even cancerous breast cells, by
antagonizing these receptors (see Flaxseed Breast Cancer
study). Longer tamoxifen treatment, therefore, would naturally result
in a longer duration of estrogen-mediated growth suppression of cells
within the breast, especially faster growing ones that are more likely
to form a mammography-detectable lesion or benign tumor. As a result,
the observed 3.9% reduction in the recurrence of breast cancer observed
in the 10 year study group (versus the 5 year group) may have resulted
not from tamoxifen's ability to selectively target and kill breast
cancer stem cells (which it is quite ineffective at doing), but rather,
from reducing the likelihood of detection and the subsequent risk of
over- or misdiagnosis.

This would also explain how extended tamoxifen treatment resulted in a
2.8% reduction in breast cancer mortality. By reducing the number of
mammography-detected "abnormal findings," and subsequent false cancer
diagnoses, tamoxifen helped these women evade a battery of unnecessary
diagnoses and treatments, which translated into a slightly lower overall
breast cancer mortality. The "cause" of their lower mortality would
therefore be from the avoidance of strictly iatrogenic
(medicine-induced) psychological and physical trauma caused by what
would have been for many of these women a second round of unnecessary
and/or inappropriate treatments, and not the purported increased
anti-cancer benefits of extended tamoxifen use.

Tamoxifen Treatment Increased Overall Mortality When Breast Cancer Deaths Were Excluded

Consistent with the view that no real benefit emerged as a result of
tamoxifen treatment, the study found "mortality without recurrence from
causes other than breast cancer was little affected."

In
fact, they found that there were "691 deaths without recurrence in 6454
women allocated to continue versus 679 deaths in 6440 controls" –
essentially, 12 women (excluding breast cancer deaths) died sooner in
the extended treatment group than in the 5 year group. What kind of
deaths increased?

According to the study "The cumulative risk of endometrial cancer during
years 5-14 was 3·1% (mortality 0·4%) for women allocated to continue
versus 1·6% (mortality 0·2%) for controls (absolute mortality increase
0·2%)."

Endometrial cancer is actually one of the most well-known adverse health
effects of tamoxifen. Tamoxifen is classified by the World Health
Organization and American Cancer Society as a human carcinogen, which is
why it is not a surprise that it has been linked to gastric cancer,
leukemia, bladder cancer, colorectal and vaginal cancer as well. To
review the clinical literature on this disturbing connection visit our Tamoxifen Endometrial Cancer Research page, which has 15 studies on the topic. Or, view our general Tamoxifen Toxicology page, which lists abstracts describing over 20 adverse health effects linked to this drug.

Now, considering all this information, if we interpret the surplus of
2.8% increase in breast cancer deaths associated with shorter tamoxifen
treatment to over- /misdiagnosis and over-/mistreatment, the overall
result of the study would be an increased all-cause mortality linked to
the drug's well-known and multitudinous toxic effects.

Keep in mind that only two months earlier, a Cochrane database review
found that the use of tamoxifen after surgery reduces the recurrence of
carcinoma in situ, a type of lesion (probably mostly benign)
discoverable through mammography, but does not reduce the overall risk
of death.[i]


Actual Breast Cancer Causes and Therapies Ignored or Suppressed

The reality is that tamoxifen, a known carcinogen, exists in order to make money.

There is no other equally compelling explanation for why the
conventional medical establishment useschemicals that cause cancer to
treat cancers caused by chemicals. No matter how institutionalized this
insane and illogical approach to cancer treatment has become, it only
makes economic sense to the industry who invented it. To the patient, it
ultimately defrauds them of both their health and money.

The modern oncology drug printing-press rivals the Federal Reserve in
its ability to convert nothing of value into something of great value;
through a sleight-of-hand, and the collusion of hundreds of thousands of
folks in medicine-associated fields ("more make a living off of cancer
than die from it"), this industry converts extremely toxic chemicals
(some of which have chemical weapons designations, such as HN1, HN2 and
HN3, forms of nitrogen mustard-based chemotherapy) into successful,
multi-billion dollar drugs, some bearing markups as high as 500,000%
from cost.[ii] We have discussed this problem in greater depth in our article: Has Drug-Driven Medicine Become A Form of Human Sacrifice?

GreenMedInfo.com has expended considerable effort indexing research on
natural compounds which exhibit anti-breast cancer properties, including
in multi drug resistant cancer cell lines, and tamoxifen-resistant
ones. In total, we have 249 natural substances indexed of potential
value, as well as 61 carcinogens implicated in breast cancer
pathogenesis. To view this research, provided open access, visit the Breast Cancer Research page.

For additional Breast Cancer research, visit our Breast Cancer Health Guide.

Source:-
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/12/tamoxifen-praised-as-life-saving-but.html