Re: My Findings on Laetrile, Part One
- From: "Peter Moran" <moringa@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 09:12:39 +1000
"Laura" <lhann10243@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1122153589.666022.226370@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> My Findings on Laetrile, Part One
> by Laura Landsberg Hanning
>
> ----
>
> (I have been gathering my thoughts and research on Laetrile for a
> relative who has cancer. I'm hoping this might be helpful to others
> also. This is an ongoing process for me as I am still waiting for more
> books to arrive. I am not a medical professional and this is not
> medical advice. These are my opinions - references are provided.)
>
Laura, don't forget to include the studies of Manner, the Laetrile
sympathizer and user who was also unable to produce a significant effect of
Laetrile when used alone on mouse tumours, just as with the studies at
Sloan_Kettering and elsewhere.
The only dispute at Sloan-Kettering, one in which the experts deserve some
credence when compared to a simple journalist like Ralph Moss with his
obviously poor understanding of the vagaries of animal research and its
clinical significance (he has learnt a lot since, and does not even promote
Laetrile strongly now ), concerned studies that suggested a modest effect in
preventing or more probably simply delaying pulmonary metastases in a
specific mouse cancer model.
Even if such an effect was translatable to humans, it would have very little
clinical usefulness. Most cancer patients either wisely have their primary
cancer (which was not affected by Laetrile in the mouse studies) removed,
in which event metastasis can no longer occur, or have cancers that have
already metastasised when diagnosed. In either event such an agent would
contribute little.
So, even if this particular study had been consistently positive they would
have been wise to await the clinical studies (which were consistently
negative) rather than risk endorsing Laetrile in any way. Otherwise
ill-informed public or political hysteria might have forced doctors to be
giving everyone Laetrile with the risk of cyanide toxicity (see the studies
of Moertel).
Endorsing Laetrile on such weak material was never an option.
Sloan-Kettering were absolutely right not to be advertising the
non-replicable studies, and I (perhaps rather fondly) hope Ralph Moss will
have the decency to one day apologise for his contribution to "alternative"
medical mythology that doctors want to suppress cancer effective
treatments..
Peter Moran
> 10/3/01
>
> Dear C,
>
> I am on an alternative health list where we mainly discuss the
> properties of colloidal silver. Silver has been used in medicine since
> the time of the Egyptians. I've heard stories that the older
> generations would drop silver dollars in a glass of milk to keep it
> from spoiling.
>
> The idea of consuming a metal never held much appeal for me until I
> understood that we do consume metals, i.e. minerals, every day in our
> foods. Vegetables contain minerals, which are various metals in ionic
> form. The principle behind colloidal silver is that it is made by
> electronically shaving pure silver ions off of silver wire so that they
> are suspended in a solution of water. Consuming the water in small
> amounts gives a person a powerful antibacterial, anti-fungal, and/or
> antiviral weapon against disease or illness.
>
> And why is colloidal silver such a big secret? The theory is that it
> cannot be patented, so modern medicine, i.e. pharmaceutical companies,
> would not be able to make much profit from it. As a few years have gone
> by, and as I've used colloidal silver for various things (cleaning
> vegetables, dropping in infected ears, using in pet water, warding off
> bronchial infections, killing fungus on plants, etc.) I realized that
> theory might be correct. It occurred to me the other day how very many
> prescriptions we've been able to avoid around here just by using
> colloidal silver.
>
> So on this silver email list, people go off-topic from time to time,
> and one of the off-topic subjects was about Laetrile. I was curious
> about it and followed the discussion closely. I vaguely remembered
> hearing about Laetrile on the news when I was in high school -
> something like that. There was a big controversy over it and that's
> all I knew. I read what these people had to say and learned that one
> can get essentially the same benefit of using Laetrile by eating raw
> apricot kernels (the seeds inside the pits.) I looked up a couple of
> websites that sold apricot kernels, but never went as far as to buy
> any. In the last couple of years, I've gone this route a few times - my
> curiosity gets piqued, I search, read, and almost buy kernels but
> don't, and then I forget about the whole thing.
>
> When you got your diagnosis, I told you I would look up some things to
> see if I could find info on herbs or vitamins that might help you as
> you went through treatment. So I did the whole Laetrile thing again,
> but this time more carefully. I read site after site after site, mostly
> the mainstream medical sites, and came away feeling very discouraged.
> It looked like Laetrile was quackery after all, and more than that, it
> could be harmful. There was much talk of cyanide toxicity in patients
> using Laetrile or eating too many apricot kernels, and that was pretty
> scary. The sites that spoke well of Laetrile were mostly full of
> personal accounts by ordinary people with little science behind it all.
> I generally dislike doctors, not as individuals but as a group, and I
> love nutritional therapies, so I was really hoping there was something
> to this Laetrile. But it was looking more and more like a dead end. I
> was almost ready to give up and start looking for herbs that might help
> you rebuild your body after the damage of the chemo and radiation, but
> figured I'd give Laetrile one more try. I went to some used-book
> websites and looked for books on Laetrile. I went to eBay too. I found
> some books cheap, and ordered about six.
>
> The first one to arrive was "Politics, Science and Cancer: The Laetrile
> Phenomenon" edited by Gerald E. Markle and James C. Petersen. (An
> American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium Volume,
> #46, Westview Press Inc, Boulder, CO, 1980).
>
> Excerpt:
>
> About the Book
>
> "At no time in U.S. history has there been a more effective challenge
> to medical expertise and authority than that mounted by the
> contemporary Laetrile movement. The efficacy of Laetrile has been
> debated for over twenty-five years, but despite vigorous opposition
> from the medical community, support for the purported cancer treatment
> continues to grow and the controversy has in recent years intensified
> and become highly politicized. How does one account for the continuing
> debate and spectacular political growth of the movement to promote
> Laetrile? This and related questions are addressed by an
> interdisciplinary group of authors in this first scholarly analysis of
> the Laetrile phenomenon."
>
> ----
>
> This book is indescribably dull. I slogged through the first two
> chapters bored to death. The history, the background, the court cases,
> on and on and on. I came to chapter 3, "Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering" by
> Richard D. Smith. Smith's brief bio says:
>
> "Richard D. Smith is editor of 'The Sciences,' the Journal of the New
> York Academy of Sciences. A former staff writer and associate editor of
> the magazine, he has a special interest in and has written numerous
> articles on the biomedical and behavioral sciences. He is a member of
> the American Medical Writers Association and the National Association
> of Science Writers."
>
> ----
>
> Because of public pressure and publicity, and generally all the ruckus
> being stirred up by Laetrile advocates, Sloan-Kettering took it upon
> themselves to test Laetrile. For a little background, there are two
> basic types of tumors tested in mice. The first are transplantable
> tumors, and the second are spontaneous tumors. All the former National
> Cancer Institute tests were performed on transplantable tumors, and the
> results for Laetrile were negative. Sloan-Kettering's tests were the
> first to be performed on mice with spontaneous tumors. The initial
> experiments were carried out by Kanematsu Sugiura, "a veteran
> researcher with more than sixty years experience at the institute."
>
> Excerpt, page 63:
>
> "From the point of view of those who had hoped for a quick, negative
> judgment on Laetrile, Sugiura came up with resoundingly 'wrong'
> results. In three separate experiments he found that Laetrile, though
> failing to actually eliminate the primary tumor, did appear to retard
> its growth. What's more, he found that the Laetrile-treated animals had
> fewer metastases (secondary tumors) in their lungs than did the control
> animals, which received an inert saline solution. Since it is often the
> metastatic spread of cancer that is responsible for the lethal effects
> of the disease, this finding was of great potential clinical
> significance. In addition, Sugiura observed that the Laetrile-treated
> animals appeared to be livelier and healthier-looking than the control
> animals."
>
> ----
>
> I almost dropped the book! So there really IS something to this!
>
> It goes on to say:
>
> "Sugiura's unexpected findings were not published in the scientific
> literature, nor were they made public by Sloan-Kettering. 'If we had
> published those early positive data,' Chester Stock later told a
> journalist, 'it would have raised all kind of havoc.'"
>
> ----
>
> News of Sugiura's experiments got out anyway, because the results were
> used in support of a doctor who was on trial for using Laetrile on his
> patients in California. Sloan-Kettering went on to study Laetrile
> further, in mice with both transplantable tumors and spontaneous
> tumors. In June, 1977, they called a press conference to make public
> the five years of Laetrile experiments.
>
> Excerpts about what was revealed:
>
> "In none of the collaborative or independent studies conducted after
> Sugiura's initial positive findings were the veteran researcher's
> results duplicated. His findings were described as 'seriously
> challenged' by the body of subsequent experiments, including those in
> which he participated."
>
> "Nonetheless it was noted that Sugiura still believed Laetrile to be a
> 'palliative' if not a cure for cancer, and when questioned whether he
> stood by his positive results in the face of subsequent studies, he
> responded, 'I stick.'"
>
> And then it gets really interesting...
>
> "...In November of 1977, about five months after the Sloan-Kettering
> press conference, another press conference was held in New York, this
> one by a group called Second Opinion, which had just published a
> 48-page pamphlet on Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering. The group charged that
> the work described in the June Sloan-Kettering papers was 'both
> incomplete and scientifically invalid.'"
>
> "The Second Opinion organization described itself as a group of
> rank-and-file employees of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
> including both scientific and non-scientific personnel. An offshoot of
> the radical national organization Science for the People, Second
> Opinion claimed that its basic aim was to organize the workers are
> Sloan-Kettering. In the 'war on cancer,' the group advocated 'putting
> prevention first, making research relevant to human diseases,' and
> encouraged 'an open-minded policy toward new and unorthodox methods,
> making the best treatment available to all people, and taking the
> profit out of cancer.'"
>
> "Until the Second Opinion press conference, no employee of
> Sloan-Kettering had ever publicly identified himself as a member of the
> organization. The only name openly associated with the group had been
> that of a City University graduate student. But at this press
> conference, Ralph Moss, Sloan-Kettering's Assistant Director for Public
> Affairs, identified himself as a member of Second Opinion. He was fired
> from that position the next working day."
>
> "According to the Second Opinion report, a fair test of Laetrile had
> been impossible at Sloan-Kettering from the start. The group's analysis
> of anti-Laetrile sentiment at the institution included the assertion
> that Sloan-Kettering had been set up not to produce just any cancer
> cure, but a patentable one..."
>
> "...The anonymous authors of Second Opinion asked readers of their
> report who did not share their political perspective not to reject
> their scientific critique of Sloan-Kettering's Laetrile experiments
> because of ideological differences. That critique proved to be a
> wide-ranging analysis that included charges that Sloan-Kettering had
> failed to report pro-Laetrile findings (other than Sugiura's) from
> experiments conducted at the center and that it had willfully
> misrepresented the results of those experiments that it did report..."
>
> "...Among the charges of incompleteness made by Second Opinion, the
> most serious was that an experiment had been carried out between
> December 1973 and January 1974 in the laboratory of Elizabeth Stockert
> at Sloan-Kettering. This experiment was conducted with a strain of
> laboratory mice that, like the CD8F1 strain with which Sugiura had
> worked, develops spontaneous breast cancer. Second Opinion claimed that
> Stockert had obtained results similar to those reported by Sugiura and
> included in their pamphlet a copy of a memo written by a technician in
> Stockert's laboratory and addressed to Sloan-Kettering's vice-president
> Lloyd Old. The technician reported a longer life, healthier appearance,
> retarded tumor growth and fewer lung metastases among the mice treated
> with Laetrile than among control animals."
>
> "Though not challenging the authenticity of the document, Chester Stock
> explained that his failure to include a report of the experiment in the
> scientific papers of which he is principal author hardly indicates a
> will to maliciously 'suppress' pro-Laetrile findings. In the first
> place, he said, he was not even aware of the work until it was brought
> to his attention by the Second Opinion report. But even had he known
> about it he insisted that he would never have published it because the
> results as presented were 'uninterpretable.' Elizabeth Stockert, in
> whose laboratory the work was done, attributed the fact that she did
> not bring the study to Stock's attention to her view of the experiment
> as only a preliminary study designed no so much to test Laetrile as to
> familiarize herself and her staff with the animals and materials
> involved. Furthermore, she pointed out that she had been called away to
> Europe in the middle of the study and that it was therefore never, in
> her judgment, properly completed."
>
> "Sloan-Kettering thus acknowledged the existence, though not the
> validity, of the Stockert experiment..."
>
> "...Sloan-Kettering never picked up the Second Opinion gauntlet and
> answered the group's scientific critique on a point by point basis
> either in the press conference format in which those results were
> originally presented nor in the less public medium of the scientific
> literature."
>
> ----
>
> I realized that there was more to this issue than met my
> internet-searching eye. When the next book arrived, written by a doctor
> who was harassed, jailed and repeatedly tried in the courts for using
> Laetrile, I was ready to listen to his story with an open mind. More
> later.
>
> ----
>
> Update 07/23/05:
>
> The 'next book' was "Laetrile Case Histories: The Richardson Cancer
> Clinic Experience" by John A. Richardson, M.D. and Patricia Griffin,
> R.N. (Bantam Books, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1977, ISBN #0-553-11491-3.)
>
> Excellent book. If you can only order/read one book, this is it, in my
> opinion.
>
> ----
>
> Laura
> http://home.earthlink.net/~lhann10243/index.html
> .
> .
> .
> The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
> Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature
> is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. --
> Emerson
>
.
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