Cancer Decisions - Free Newsletter

HERE AT THE MOSS REPORTS

People facing a diagnosis of cancer must often make a series of crucial treatment decisions in very short order. It can be hard to make informed choices at a time when one is under such intense pressure. The sheer volume and complexity of the medical information that the newly diagnosed cancer patient must absorb can be overwhelming. While physicians would almost certainly like to spend more time with their patients, explaining things in more depth and answering questions more fully, the constraints imposed by today's managed care system are making the allocated time per visit shorter and shorter. Deprived of the opportunity to discuss their medical needs thoroughly with a physician, cancer patients often turn to the Internet for answers.

Certainly, the Internet has made vast quantities of formerly unavailable medical literature easily accessible to everyone. But it has also made available an abundance of unreliable and downright misleading information, much of it couched convincingly in pseudo-scientific language. Without the necessary background in the biological sciences, it can be extremely hard for the layperson to make sense of medical journal articles and technical literature, or to avoid falling for persuasively packaged snake oil.

For more than thirty years I have been studying cancer and its treatment, monitoring emerging research and writing about promising new approaches. The Moss Reports are the distillation of my long involvement with the field of cancer. There are now individual Moss Reports for well over two hundred different types of cancer. Each 400+ page report presents the available treatment options for that particular kind of cancer, discussing the rationale behind the treatment and objectively analyzing the expected success rate, drawbacks and alternatives. The reports also contain extensive dietary and nutritional advice both for those who are undergoing treatment and for those who are recovering from cancer and striving to regain full health.

If you would like to order a Moss Report for yourself or someone you love, you can do so securely from our Web site, www.cancerdecisions.com, or by calling 1-800-980-1234 (814-238-3367 from outside the US).

I also offer phone consultations to clients who have purchased a Moss Report on their particular cancer type. A phone consultation can be enormously helpful in drawing up an effective treatment strategy and getting one's options clearly prioritized. A recent Moss Report client expressed his appreciation this way:

"The phone consultation was extremely helpful and reassuring. The consultation allowed Dr. Moss to provide more focused information on my unique situation. It was most valuable to discuss my own thoughts and understandings about treatments, new therapies, diet, etc., with someone who not only stays current, but has thoughtfully processed the myriad of information and data and is able to bring it to bear on my particular situation. I received several suggestions for complementary and medical options that I intend to pursue." - R.H.

To schedule an appointment, please call 1-800-980-1234 (814-238-3367 from outside the US) or send an email to Jacquie@cancerdecisions.com.

We look forward to helping you.

CURRENT TOPICS

Recently we launched a new report in our popular Current Topics series focusing on the controversial new anti-cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil. This report, and the others in the series (listed below), can be purchased for $9.95 each and downloaded directly from our Web site, www.cancerdecisions.com:

On Guard - Gardasil
Mammography, Biopsy and the Diagnosis of Breast Cancer
Herceptin or Deceptin? (An evaluation of the use of Herceptin in breast cancer)
Avastin: Your Money Or Your Life. (A clear-eyed look at the targeted drug Avastin)
Do Antioxidants and Chemotherapy Conflict?
The Politics of Hope: Andrew von Eschenbach and the Decline of the National Cancer Institute
The Mexican Cancer Clinics in the Era of Evidence-Based Medicine

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OP-ED IN NEW YORK TIMES

For the first time, I have had an op-ed piece published in the New York Times. It appeared in last Sunday's Times (April 1st 2007) and can be viewed online at:

http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=239737

I was asked to write this article as part of an entire page devoted to cancer. Unlike so much of what you read about cancer in the mainstream media, the tone of the page was rather critical of current directions.

Other contributors included Susan Love, MD, the well-known surgeon and author on breast cancer; Harold Varmus, MD, Nobel laureate, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and current president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; and Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

I was honored that the Times asked me to join this distinguished group and submit an editorial comment. I chose to write about the issue of drug patentability and how that affects the pace of discovery and therapeutic progress in cancer. This is a topic I first wrote about in the 1970s, and so I was glad to have an opportunity to revisit the subject, and to reach the New York Times' vast and influential audience.

The Times is the largest metropolitan newspaper in the US, with a Sunday circulation of 1.6 million. In addition, its Web site receives 11.6 million visitors per month and ranks as the number one newspaper site. Needless to say, the influence of America's "newspaper of record" goes beyond what the sheer numbers say. In a sense, it defines the boundaries of a debate. Thus, for the Times to include my critical point of view on the foundering war on cancer is an indication that times have changed, and that opinion makers are willing to take a more searching look at where we are going in pursuit of victory over cancer.

In case you have difficulty accessing the article online, here is what I wrote:

We could make faster progress against cancer by changing the way drugs are developed. In the current system, if a promising compound can't be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market - no matter how well it performs in the laboratory. The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result.

The reason for this problem is that bringing a new drug to market is extremely expensive. In 2001, the estimated cost was $802 million; today it is approximately $1 billion. To ensure a healthy return on such staggering investments, drug companies seek to formulate new drugs in a way that guarantees watertight patents. In the meantime, cancer patients miss out on treatments that may be highly effective and less expensive to boot. In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate could arrest the growth of liver cancer in rats. The results were dramatic; moreover, the investigators estimated that the cost to treat patients would be around 70 cents per day. Yet, three years later, no major drug company has shown interest in developing this drug for human use.

Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumors in laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However, as a university news release explained, dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. So the university is soliciting public donations to finance a clinical trial.

The hormone melatonin, sold as an inexpensive food supplement in the United States, has repeatedly been shown to slow the growth of various cancers when used in conjunction with conventional treatments. Paolo Lissoni, an Italian oncologist, helped write more than 100 articles about this hormone and conducted numerous clinical trials. But when I visited him at his hospital in Monza in 2003, he was in deep despair over the pharmaceutical industry's total lack of interest in his treatment approach. He has published nothing on the topic since then.

Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit, not on their patentability. One solution might be for the government to enlarge the Food and Drug Administration's "orphan drug" program, which subsidizes the development of drugs for rare diseases. The definition of orphan drug could be expanded to include unpatentable agents that are scorned as unprofitable by pharmaceutical companies.

We need to foster a research and development environment in which anticancer activity is the main criterion for new drug development.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

The news and other items in this newsletter are intended for informational purposes only. Nothing in this newsletter is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice.