Canadian Cancer Society Wrong Again
19 Jan 2004
Why would The Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) make such an asinine statement? And why wait nearly two years to worry women once again about hormone replacement therapy (HRT)? The logic escapes me, but doesn’t surprise me. Years ago, when I fought for the legalization of heroin to fight terminal cancer pain, CCS publicly fought me and continually made illogical statements.
CCS has now urged women not to take HRT for menopausal symptoms except in rare instances, because it says, the health risks outweigh the benefits. Dr. Andre Lalonde, vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC), on reading the report remarked, "What’s this nonsense? This isn’t based on science. They are leaving women with the impression that if they take HRT they will get cancer and this is not true." I couldn’t agree more.
In July 2002, a US study called The Women’s Health Initiative reported that postmenopausal women who took HRT longer than four years had an increased risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease. The risk, however, was extremely small. HRT, on the other hand, decreased the risk of colon cancer and hip fractures.
Critics argued the report was flawed. Many women in the study were overweight which increases the risk of any number of health problems. As well, estrogen had been used for 60 years by millions of women. It had not caused an epidemic of cancer.
The 2002 report stressed that whether or not women should take HRT depended on their "quality of life". So today, many women are still using HRT as they cannot function adequately without it, knowing that the risk of HRT complication is minute.
Years ago the CCS fought tooth and nail against another quality of life issue when I proposed the legalization of heroin to ease the agony of terminal cancer pain.
It argued that morphine was as effective as heroin in treating cancer pain and this is unmitigated nonsense. Then it contradicted itself with the dim-witted statement that only a few patients would benefit from heroin. But didn’t offer any consolation if you happened to be one of the few!
The society suggested that heroin posed security issues. But research at Britain’s Scotland Yard revealed this was not a problem. It even worried about addiction when patients had only days to live! It simply had not done its homework and caused patients untold misery by trying to block the use of an effective painkiller. When I tackled the subject in this column 99 per cent of readers agreed with me.
Once again the Canadian Cancer Society has neglected its homework. No mention is made in its report that women can safely take HRT for four years. Or that estrogen alone has not been found to cause breast cancer or heart disease. Or any talk about quality of life.
Nor is there any mention that a vaginal estrogen can be safely used to treat senile vaginitis that affects 75 per cent of postmenopausal women. A deficiency of estrogen causes a gradual thinning of the vaginal lining sometimes making sexual intercourse either painful or impossible. It’s a condition often overlooked by doctors and is easily prevented and treated.
The nightly insertion of "Vagifem", a vaginal estrogen tablet for 14 nights, quickly restores the lining to its normal thickness. Then to prevent recurrence it can be used once or twice a week. No report in the world has ever implicated the use of vaginal estrogen as a cause of malignancy.
What is regrettable is that CCS has made the same error as newspaper headlines. They never tell the entire story. What is equally appalling is the fact that it waited nearly two years to needlessly worry and confuse women again. Is it such a bungling bureaucracy that it takes that long to reach the wrong conclusion?
I and many others believe that quality of life is the question. Terminal cancer patients should receive as much narcotic as needed to control pain. And in this case women whose lifestyles are made unbearable by menopause should be told accepted facts of estrogen, not fiction by the CCS.
