health

The Canadian government is cracking down on Internet scams offering a miracle cure for cancer. Now, if only they (and allied governments) would go after Hasidic rabbis with quack cures for the same:

The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.

By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…

Our friendly cyber-neighbourhood rabbi Lazer Brody is at it again, it would appear. You may remember our unfortunately-named friend from an incident last month in which he told a woman experiencing homosexual urges that she could ‘lick the battle’ with her latent desires by, among other things, making sure to ritually wash her hands in the morning. Today, Rabbi Lazer is peddling a cure for cancer found in mushrooms, which somebody forwarded to him in the full-blown manner of an e-mail scam. The typography has been preserved exactly:

THERE WAS A MAN IN BORO PARK (BROOKLYN, NY) WHO WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. HE ASKED FOR A FRUM DOCTOR, BUT HIS INSURANCE AFFORDED HIM WHAT THEY OFFERED JAPANESE DOCTOR. IT ENDED UP, THAT THIS DOCTOR WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN. THE DOCTOR WAS STRAIGHT WITH HIM AND TOLD HIM THAT THE MEDICAL PROFESSION COULD GIVE HIM 6 MONTHS OF LIFE, BUT IN HIS COUNTRY (JAPAN) THEY USED A PARTICULAR MUSHROOM WITH SUCCESS AND THAT HE COULD GIVE HIM SOME AND SHOW HIM HOW TO USE IT. 4 YEARS LATER HE IS THANK G-D DOING WELL. FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED, THE CURE IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF A PH BALANCED BODY, THERE IS THE OPINON THAT CANCER FEEDS IN AN ACID BASED BODY. THIS MUSHROOM IS VERY ALKALISING.

Amazing, isn’t it? If you only ‘balance’ the pH of your body, you can cure cancer! And guess what—doing this is, in fact, really easy, because all you have to do is eat this mushroom! There is a link to more information, helpfully provided, on a Hebrew-language website from Israel about the pseudo-medicine of reflexology. More nonsense can be found on a herbalism website, which again refers to the natural powers of this mushroom to balance your pH.

For his part, Lazer himself responds:

From what I understand from alternative-medical literature, cancer patients have too little L-Lactic acid (+) in their connective tissues. In theory, as long as L-Lactic acid (+) is predominantly present in tissue, cancer cannot develop. When there is a deficiency, the cellular respiration starts to fail and this leads to a build up of DL-Lactic acid (-) in the tissues.

Of course! The obvious problem, with cancer, is that they’re missing the right kind of acid in their connective tissues! Why did the medical establishment never think of this, and insist that they just go home and drink a tall glass of milk? (It could be mushroom milk, if you really want, I guess.) No need for all this expensive chemotherapy or anything debilitating. Besides, what do these doctors really know? All they have are fancy degrees from fancy medical schools. They don’t have the thousand-year traditional knowledge of Eastern medicine to back up their ’science’! (By the way, this particular orientalizing tradition among many Jews—especially among, but by no means limited to, Hadisim—is one worthy of a lengthier rant, but that’ll have to come at a later time.) Back to Lazer:

The Kombucha cultured fungus … is supposedly able to re-balance the blood pH and, in so doing, prevent disease conditions from occurring, and repair and relieve existing suffering. I need to learn more about this, but in the meanwhile, I sent out emails to all the Cancer patients who are in contact with me. This is certainly worth further investigation.

I don’t know anything about this subject, but I sent this nugget of information out to every cancer patient I know. This has all the trappings of an e-mail scam, doesn’t it? ‘I don’t know anything about Prince Omar, the deposed former president of Nigeria, but his story is just so compelling, I think I have to send it to everyone in my e-mail address book!’ Or, ‘I don’t know anything about these penile enlargement pills (or that they could be called “male enhancement supplements”), but the mere fact that someone somewhere says they work is enough to get me to forward it to my entire e-mail list!’ Or, ‘This eight-year-old girl who survived a catastrophic plane crash…’ you get the picture.

Seriously, how can seemingly intelligent people buy into this crap—and not only buy into it, but repost it without a second thought on their blogs, and more importantly, send it to all the cancer patients they know, thus proving, yet again, that (false) hope springs eternal? Pity the fool who buys into this miracle mushroom cure (and stops her chemo as a result), but no pity for the man who sells them the snake oil.

A big Beam blessing to Ruth from Crown Heights!

Just…no.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that a county school district in Maryland has implemented a controversial—even illegal—new policy that ‘directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant’. Way to go, Howard County, to ensure that more girls who need medical help will be even less willing to seek it out.

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

Ugly, gross, crazy, and stupid. The way to help pregnant high schoolers is to provide them with medical assistance and the love and support of their community, not to sic their parents, their school officials, and the full weight of The Law on them.

Tip of the hat to Cara at The Curvature, via Ann at Feministing.

Today marks twenty years since the Morgentaler decision in Canada, affirming a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. As usual, Jill at Feministe has the whole story more eloquently and comprehensively than I could do.

Canada is very progressive in many ways, but, like most countries, it still has a long way to go when it comes to abortion rights. To all the Canadians out there, I wish you a very happy anniversary — and best of luck in making next year even better.

A heartfelt amen to that. Feministe is also linking to this article from the Globe and Mail, highlighting the problems in the Canadian ‘choice’ system—specifically, that there often is no choice, or at least that alternatives are scarce and treatment options are few, for hundreds of thousands of women: drug-induced abortion (think RU-486) isn’t even available in this country! This just blows my mind—you can buy Allegra and codeine over the counter here, but you can’t even get something a hundred times as essential by a doctor’s prescription. I can’t wait to see the web-based Canadian pharmacy companies illegally importing drugs from America to fill this void in the system.

So yeah. Both countries have a long way to go, it would appear. We are making progress, slowly, on the legal, ethical, and medical fronts, but it’s going to be a while before we can put this issue to bed, especially given how out of the spotlight abortion is in Canada, as compared to in the States.

Today, in the United States, is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which essentially held that women may elect to have an abortion for any reason up until the point when the fetus becomes ‘viable’. Ever since this ruling, social and religious conservatives have attempted to curtail or even reverse this crucial right, and unfortunately have been seeing some successes in various parts of the country with measures like parental-notification laws, laws mandating waiting periods before the abortion may be carried out, and laws restricting particular kinds of abortion techniques.

Jill Filipovic has an excellent post up at Feministe, which is also posted in the Huffington Post, outlining ‘10 Reasons to Support Reproductive Justice on Roe Day’. There’s nothing there I feel I can improve upon—just go read it. Also check out her roundup of the best Roe Day commentary out there.

Yesterday’s New York Times runs an article that paints a very complicated picture of Lyrica, the first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat fibromyalgia. The drug is already available in the United States, Canada, and other countries as a prescription antidepressant, but it is not being approved for this other purpose. Two other large pharmaceutical companies are seeking government approval for their own fibromyalgia-treating drugs. I see three main troubling things about this development:

1. Fibromyalgia may not really exist. Its symptoms, which seem to vary from person to person but often include chronic pain, fatigue, and ringing in the ears, may in fact be attributable to various factors such as stress, age, depression, and others. There are no standard diagnoses and no established causes, it is not communicable or linkable to any external factors, and, as the article reports, ‘doctors who are skeptical of fibromyalgia say vague complaints of chronic pain do not add up to a disease.’ The article further reports that some skeptical doctors ’say that diagnosing the condition actually worsens suffering by causing patients to obsess over aches that other people simply tolerate. Further, they warn that Lyrica’s side effects, which include severe weight gain, dizziness and edema, are very real, even if fibromyalgia is not.’
2. The drug in question, which goes by the generic name pregabalin, is, as previously mentioned, already marketed as an antidepressant. The problem is nobody really seems to know how it specifically works. It apparently has some effect on the central nervous system that may desensitize it to pain on some level, but using this drug to essentially blot out a person’s ability to feel some kind of nebulous pain strikes me as a rather cavalier way to approach medicine. Now, as a matter of course, painkillers and antidepressants alike act upon the nervous system, but when an antidepressant appears to have an effect on chronic pain, might it not be possible that it’s actually treating an underlying depression?
3. The marketing itself is scary. What’s being marketed is not so much the drug as the disease: the pharmaceutical industry is hoping that by saturating the market with the message that fibromyalgia is real, they’ll get people to buy their drug.

It is the third of these that really bothers me. By legitimizing the disease, or at least appearing to by putting out lots of advertising, they’re going to make a huge profit selling drugs to millions of people who may not really need them. Again, the article paints a fairly bleak picture: ‘In November, Pfizer began a television ad campaign for Lyrica that features a middle-aged woman who appears to be reading from her diary. “Today I struggled with my fibromyalgia; I had pain all over,” she says, before turning to the camera and adding, “Fibromyalgia is a real, widespread pain condition.”‘ And at the end, after speculating that this drug will probably be prescribed in conjunction with others—thus enabling multiple drugs to be sold to the same patient for the same ‘problem’—the article gives us the kicker:

But physicians who are opposed to the fibromyalgia diagnosis say the new drugs will probably do little for patients. Over time, fibromyalgia patients tend to cycle among many different painkillers, sleep medicines and antidepressants, using each for a while until its benefit fades, Dr. Wolfe said.

“The fundamental problem is that the improvement that you see, which is not really great in clinical trials, is not maintained,” Dr. Wolfe said.

Still, Dr. Wolfe expects the drugs will be widely used. The companies, he said, are “going to make a fortune.”

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? It reminds me of the episode of Dilbert in which Dogbert invents a ‘disease’ called ‘chronic cubicle syndrome’, publishing a book full of made-up information and anecdotal evidence. The book’s tagline is ‘If you think you’ve got it, you’ve got it’. Dogbert proceeds to flood the airwaves with this message, but Dilbert remains skeptical. He convinces his company to engage in some research to determine whether ‘chronic cubicle syndrome’ actually exists, but runs up against the common reaction: ‘Of course it’s real, I saw it on TV!’ (You can find this episode in three parts on YouTube beginning here, at least until some overzealous authority removes the files.)

Whether or not fibromyalgia actually exists, the fact remains that once you’ve created the perception of a problem, the door is open for you to sell people things to alleviate that problem.