AMERICANS TREATED AND OVERTREATED TO DEATH

[Guest guest]

The proliferation of the cancer industry is an utter and absolute disgrace on

this nation, taking more lives than current warfare and enriching the pockets of

a select few! Chemotherapy and radiation are multi-billion dollar industries

where doctors get paid to sell these horrific treatments to their patients who

have entrusted their lives to them!

For-profit-disease maintenance governs 'health care' in this country - this is

completely criminally insane and absolutely, needlessly irrational!

C'mon, Americans! Wake up to this outrage and demand better for yourselves! One

recent prognostication predicts one in three Americans will have some type of

cancer by the year 2012. Assuming this to be true, this is unacceptable!

Information is key to knowing what creates cancer and other life-threatening

diseases, information is vital on knowing how to prevent and avoid cancer and if

you are diagnosed as having cancer - knowing there are safe, rational, non-toxic

options available to restore health without ever needing to enrich the bloated

chemotherapy and radiation industry and never having to need hospice care!

Demand the Cancer-Chemotherapy industry be shut down!

There are currently over seventeen thousand different chemicals in packaged food

being manufactured in America. Not to mention the irreversible and ubiquitious

electro-smog assaulting our immune systems everywhere, in schools, movie

theatres, in our homes, work places, on the street and even in the very grocery

stores!

Cancer is preventable, avoidable and curable without slash, burn and poison!

This is outrageous! /th

AMERICANS TREATED AND OVERTREATED TO DEATH

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione, Ap Medical

Writer

–

2 hrs 38 mins ago

The doctors finally let ria Vandenberg go home.

For

the first time in months, she was able to touch her 2-year-old daughter

who had been afraid of the tubes and machines in the hospital. The

little girl climbed up onto her mother's bed, surrounded by family

photos, toys and the comfort of home. They shared one last tender

moment together before Vandenberg slipped back into unconsciousness.

Vandenberg, 32, died the next day.

That

precious time at home could have come sooner if the family had known

how to talk about alternatives to aggressive treatment, said

Vandenberg's sister-in-law, andra Drane.

Instead, Vandenberg, a pharmacist in lin, Mass., had

endured two surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation for an incurable brain tumor

before she died in July 2004.

" We

would have had a very different discussion about that second surgery

and chemotherapy. We might have just taken her home and stuck her in a

beautiful chair outside under the sun and let her gorgeous little

daughter play around her — not just torture her " in the hospital, Drane

said.

Americans increasingly are treated to

death, spending more time in hospitals in their final days, trying

last-ditch treatments that often buy only weeks of time, and racking up

bills that have made medical care a leading cause of bankruptcies.

More

than 80 percent of people who die in the United States have a long,

progressive illness such as cancer, heart failure or Alzheimer's

disease.

More than 80 percent of such patients

say they want to avoid hospitalization and intensive care when they are

dying, according to the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which tracks health

care trends.

Yet the numbers show that's not what is happening:

_The average time spent in hospice and palliative care,

which stresses comfort and quality of life once an illness is

incurable, is falling because people are starting it too late.

In 2008,

one-third of people who received hospice care had it for a week or

less, says the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

_Hospitalizations

during the last six months of life are rising: from 1,302 per 1,000

Medicare recipients in 1996 to 1,441 in 2005, Dartmouth reports.

Treating chronic illness in the last two years of life gobbles up

nearly one-third of all Medicare dollars.

" People

are actually now sicker as they die, " and some find that treatments

become a greater burden than the illness was, said Dr. Ira Byock,

director of palliative care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Families may push for treatment, but " there are worse things than having someone

you love die, " he said.

Gail

Sheehy, author of the " Passages " books, learned that as her husband,

New York magazine founder Clay Felker, spent 17 years fighting various

cancers. On New Year's Day 2007, they waited eight hours in an

emergency room for yet another CT scan until Felker looked at her and

said, " No more hospitals. "

" I just put a cover over him and wheeled him out of there with

needles still in his arms, " Sheehy said.

Then

she called Dr. R. on, president of the American Academy of

Hospice and Palliative Medicine and a doctor at Mount Sinai School of

Medicine in New York.

" Nobody had really sat

down with them about what his choices are and what the options were, "

said on, who became his doctor.

About a

year later, Felker withdrew his own feeding tube, and " it enabled us to

go out and have a wonderful evening at a jazz club two nights before he

died " in July 2008, Sheehy said.

Doctors can't predict how soon a patient will die, but they

usually know when an illness has become incurable. Even then, many of

them practice " exhaustion medicine " — treating until there are no more

options left to try, said Dr. Martha Twaddle, chief medical officer of

Midwest Palliative & Hospice Care Center in suburban Chicago.

A stunning number of cancer patients get aggressive care in the last

days of their lives, she noted. One large study of Medicare records

found that nearly 12 percent of cancer patients who died in 1999

received chemo in the last two weeks of life, up from nearly 10 percent

in 1993.

Guidelines from an alliance of leading cancer centers

say patients whose cancer has spread should stop getting anti-cancer

medicine if sequential attempts with three different drugs fail to

shrink their tumors. Yet according to IntrinsiQ, a cancer data analysis

company, almost 20 percent of patients with colorectal cancer

that has spread are on at least their fourth chemotherapy drug. The

same goes for roughly 12 percent of patients with metastatic breast

cancer, and for 12 percent of those with lung cancer. The analysis is

based on more than 60,000 cancer patients.

Often, overtreating fatal illnesses happens because patients don't want to give

up.

Saideh Browne said her mother, Khadija Akmal-Lamb, wanted to fight her advanced

ovarian cancer

even after learning it had spread to her liver. The 55-year-old Kansas

City, Mo., woman had chemo until two weeks before she died last August.

" She kept throwing up, she couldn't go to the bathroom, " and

her body ached, Browne said. The doctors urged hospice care and said,

" your mom was stubborn, " Browne recalled. " She wanted her chemo and she

wanted to live. "

Browne, who lives in New York, formed a women's cancer

foundation in her mother's honor. She said she would encourage dying

cancer patients to choose comfort care over needless medicine that prolongs

suffering.

It's easier said than done.

The American way is " never giving up, hoping for a miracle, " said Dr.

Porter Storey, a former hospice medical director who is executive vice

president of the hospice group that on heads.

" We use sports metaphors and war metaphors all the time. We

talk about never giving up and it's not over till the fat lady sings

..... glorifying people who fought to their very last breath, " when

instead we should be helping them accept death as an inevitable part of

life, he said.

This is especially true when deciding whether to try one of the

newer, extremely expensive cancer drugs such as Avastin, Erbitux and

Tarceva. Some are touted as " improving survival by 30 or 50 percent "

when that actually might mean living three weeks or months longer

instead of two.

" It's amazing how little benefit those studies show, " Storey said, referring to

research on the new drugs.

Dan Waeger tried just about all of them. A nonsmoker, he was

diagnosed with lung cancer at age 22, and pursued treatment after

treatment before dying nearly four years later, in March 2009.

" He decided if there were odds to be beat, he was going to beat

the odds, " said his boss, Ellen Stovall, then-president of the National

Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, where Waeger worked as a fundraiser

and development manager.

" He received just about every experimental new drug for lung

cancer that I'm aware of in his last two years of life. He would get a

treatment on a Friday afternoon, be sick all weekend and come to work

on Monday, " she recalled.

" He had these horrific rashes. He would get these horrible

coughs that were not just the lung cancer. The treatments were making

him cough up blood, just horrific side effects — vertigo, numbness,

tingling in his hands and feet. He suffered. "

Waeger's fiancee, Meg Rodgers, said they worried about

exceeding the lifetime limits on his insurance, since the care was so

expensive.

" I think every time he got a treatment, it was $10,000, " though he paid only a

$10 copay, she said.

Yet it was clearly worth any price to him — he died a week

before they were to be married, after receiving home hospice care for

only two weeks.

" I honestly believe he would have done anything he could to live one more day, "

Rodgers said.

Some health policy groups say cancer patients, as well as people

with failing hearts or terminal dementia, should get better end-of-life

counseling. Last year, a plan that would have let Medicare pay for

doctors to talk about things like living wills was labeled " death panels " and

was dropped.

Ultimately, how patients and their families make the journey is a

matter of personal choice — and there are resources to help them,

Stovall said.

" I've heard a lot of people over the years say what they would

do if they had cancer until it is them. And then they will cling to

even the smallest glimmer that something will help, " she said.

" Cancer that can't be cured is often called daunting but not

hopeless. So that's what patients hear. Hope is the last thing to go.

People don't give that up easily. "

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this story.

" Dismantle your perceptions. Lose your mind. Abandon your ego. Come to your

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