Senate
Inquiry a Whitewash?
As mentioned in our last Newsletter Senator Peter Cook was instrumental in
setting up a Senate Inquiry into services and treatment options for persons with
cancer. This was prompted by his being diagnosed with late stage melanoma last
August and given a prognosis of 12 months.
Because we thought this Inquiry could be a turning point for cancer
treatment for Australia we devoted most of the last issue to this subject.
There were 105 submissions including one from CISS that was the longest
and most detailed.
In the last week of June 2005 the Senate posted its report on the Inquiry.
It essentially supports the status quo with only minor changes.
It implied all conventional therapies are safe, proven to be effective and
do no harm. It stated that
Australia's cancer treatment is second only to that in the US. Yet it gave no
explanation for the admitted fact that more than 50% of cancer patients are
turning to complementary and alternative therapies.
It looked at complementary and alternative therapies as essentially unproven
and something to be careful of and therefore needing tighter regulation. (In
fact perhaps 5-6 deaths a year compared with thousands of deaths from
conventional therapies).
It ignored the evidence from 8 randomised trials showing psychotherapy can
have dramatic results on survival and instead referred to psychotherapy as a way
of providing psychosocial support, a way of getting people to stick to their
conventional treatment and not be too depressed by the process. It
ignored the implications in 35% of the submissions that reported that they got
the most benefits from attending places like the Gawler Foundation where they
also learnt the benefits of taking
back control of their life and health.
It also ignored results from randomised trials showing hydrazine sulphate
and Iscador are safe and effective.
It saw no need for community representation on any national cancer planning
bodies.
It accepted the claim from one expert that there was no suppression of
cancer therapies and ignored copious evidence to the contrary.
In
other words, a complete white wash.
Two
useful recommendations
Most of the 33 recommendations related to minor changes to the status quo.
Many tasks were given to Cancer Australia, a new national body set up in the
recent federal budget, to provide some leadership in the cancer area.
Six of these related to promoting multidisciplinary care; three to promoting
co-ordination of cancer services; six to improving support, including
psychosocial support, for cancer patients; four to increasing research into
complementary therapies; and four to improving access to information about
complementary therapies.
From the wording used throughout the report the information about
complementary therapies would be compiled by those in the allopathic school of
medicine so would give little credibility to any of them. Reliable information
about alternative therapies only became available in the US after this task was
taken out of the hands of the cancer establishment.
The only useful recommendations were:
· Carers
should be made aware of additional support services provided by organizations such as The Gawler Foundation in VIC, Balya Cancer Self Help and Wellness Inc in
WA and Bloomhill Cancer Help in QLD; and
·
Cancer Australia to take a leadership role in developing a
national approach to the collection of cancer staging data.
Although lip service was give to evidence based medicine, the fact that all
the evidence based statistics presented in the CISS submission was ignored and
only one recommendation in the Report referred to improving statistic shows how
little weight is given to evidence.
In our submission we argued for a level playing field, with all treatments
being treated the same, whether orthodox or alternative. Only therapies proven
in properly run randomised trials to extend life or improve quality of life
should be supported by Medicare. Subsidies to others should phased out over 10
years. This approach wasn’t even considered.
Anecdotal evidence is accepted for orthodox therapies but not for
alternative therapies.
The way science is supposed to work is you put forward an hypothesis; you
test this hypothesis with an experiment. If
the experiment provides evidence for that hypothesis you accept that hypothesis
as likely to be valid until later evidence causes you to modify it so that it
predicts the evidence better. That approach has not been used for cancer as very
few conventional interventions for cancer have been proven effective in
randomised trials. Most cancer treatments are therefore experimental or
anecdotal with their hypothesis unproven.
Copies of the full CISS submission are available from the CISS office for
$10. A copy of all 105 submissions,
transcripts from the public hearings and the Report are available on the Senate
Committee’s website at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/commit-tee/clac_ctte/cancer/Index.
Htm or on a CD by contacting the Committee Secretary, Community Affairs
Committee, Department of the Senate, Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600, Phone (02) 6277 3515 or by email at
community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
I would suggest that it would be hard to find any anecdotal cases of people
with late stage cancer who were given a prognosis of a few months after
conventional treatment and were alive and well over ten years later.
On Saturday 25 June at the CISS monthly public meeting we provided just two
of the hundreds of anecdotal cases in Australia that suggest that an alternative
paradigm is more likely to be valid than the currently accepted one on which
orthodox therapy is based. Barbro
Spike and Frank Hewstone were diagnosed with late stage cancer over 12 years ago
and a alive and well. We hope to
have transcripts of their talks for the next newsletter.