By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
In a startling reversal of years of pressing healthy and symptom-free men to get routine PSA prostate tests, U.S. health officials now say these tests do more harm than good.
What’s more, the United States Preventive Services Task Force Continue reading
By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
The US Preventive Services Task Force recently published its draft recommendations on hormone replacement therapy.
While the task force has previously sparked controversy with its recommendations for breast cancer- and PSA prostate cancer screening, their recommendations for hormone replacement Continue reading
By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
Dr. Christine Horner began her career as a board certified general- and plastic surgeon, performing breast reconstructive surgeries on women who’d had full mastectomies due to breast cancer.
In this interview, she shares her extensive knowledge about breast cancer—its Continue reading
By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
Many conventional health experts believe the hormone testosterone causes prostate cancer — but research actually suggests that estrogen may be the more likely culprit.
Like women, men also make estrogens such as estradiol, although (usually) in much lower amounts Continue reading
By: John Phillip
Source: NaturalNews.com
Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer and second most common cause of cancer related death in men in the United States. Nearly one in five men will develop the disease during their lifetime. New research demonstrates Continue reading
By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
Statins, drugs that lower your cholesterol levels, are one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.
In the US, a staggering one in four over the age of 45 is now taking this unnecessary drug!
Statins act by blocking a crucial enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol.
But that’s not all this enzyme is responsible for.
This enzyme also makes CoQ10, which is essential for mitochondrial health.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that many potentially dangerous side effects go hand-in-hand with statin drug use.
To date, there are no less than 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to diabetes, to birth defects and increased cancer risk.
One recent study sought to determine whether the use of statin drugs was associated with prostate cancer risk.
The researchers looked at close to 400 prostate cancer patients who had a first-time diagnosis during the period between 2005 and 2008.
They found that use of any statin drug, in any amount, was associated with a significantly increased risk for prostate cancer.
In addition, there was an increasing risk that came along with an increasing cumulative dose.
According to the study:
“The results of this case-control study suggest that statins may increase the risk of prostate cancer.”
While the evidence still appears a bit all over the map, with study results ranging from increased cancer risk to reduced risk, to no noticeable risk at all, what IS clear is that conventional medicine still does not understand the full ramifications of artificially lowering your cholesterol levels, and they simply don’t know whether or not the use of these drugs may be adding fuel to an already out of control cancer epidemic.
In short, with well over 30 million Americans now taking statin drugs, we’re witnessing a massive ongoing ‘live’ experiment.
Over 10 years ago, research indicated that besides lowering cholesterol, statins could also promote the growth of new blood vessels. And, although this effect may help to prevent heart attacks and other forms of heart disease, it may also promote cancer as well by increasing the growth of blood vessels in cancerous tumors. Meanwhile, other studies have indicated the complete opposite; that statins can inhibit angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels), so again, it’s virtually impossible to say that statin safety and effectiveness is based on hard science…
But the statin-cancer connection actually goes much farther back than that. A review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996 stated:
“All members of the two most popular classes of lipid-lowering drugs (the fibrates and the statins) cause cancer in rodents, in some cases at levels of animal exposure close to those prescribed to humans. …
Longer-term clinical trials and careful postmarketing surveillance during the next several decades are needed to determine whether cholesterol-lowering drugs cause cancer in humans.
In the meantime, the results of experiments in animals and humans suggest that lipid-lowering drug treatment, especially with the fibrates and statins, should be avoided except in patients at high short-term risk of coronary heart disease.”
Needless to say, such warnings were completely ignored. Instead, public health officials have gone the opposite way, happily following the trail littered with the most cash.
Over the past decade, cholesterol guidelines have been altered to create ever more ‘patients’ to be treated with cholesterol-lowering drugs. In 2004, the U.S. government’s National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL (bad) cholesterol to extremely low levels, and it’s been a health disaster ever since.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk. These updated guidelines instantly increased the market for cholesterol-lowering drugs. The marked has further increased with the call to begin screening children prior to puberty, and prescribing statins to kids as young as eight.
Not surprisingly, eight of the nine doctors on the approval panel for these absurdly low guidelines had financial ties to the companies making these cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Back in 2008, troubling study findings were released showing a dramatically increased risk of cancer related deaths in those taking Inegy (also sold under the trade name Vytorin). The drug combines the widely-used statin drug simvastatin with another medication called ezetimibe, which blocks the absorption of cholesterol in your gut. The study also found no benefit whatsoever from the drug.
This despite the fact that it reduced LDL cholesterol levels by a respectable 61 percent, which “should have” had an effect on cardiovascular events, based on the prevailing hypothesis that high LDL equates to high risk of heart disease. So, in a nutshell, the drug had no beneficial impact on the primary outcome (meaning it did not reduce major cardiovascular adverse events), while more people developed cancer on the treatment (105 versus 70 patients taking a placebo), and more cancer related deaths (39 cancer deaths versus 23 in the control group).
A couple of months after the results were revealed, a panel assembled by the American Academy of Cardiology declared that:
“… the aggressively marketed drug combination should be used only as a last resort. There is currently no evidence that ezetimibe, which reduces levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, improves clinical outcomes such as myocardial infarction or death.”
In December 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the completion of their review of the disturbing SEAS trial (above), as well as interim data from two other large-scale ongoing cardiovascular trials using Vytorin: the SHARP and IMPROVE-IT trials. (The SHARP trial was concluded in 2010, while the IMPROVE-IT trial is expected to be completed in 2012.)
Their conclusion?
“FDA believes it is unlikely that Vytorin or Zetia increase the risk of cancer or cancer-related death.”
I don’t know how much faith you have in the FDA’s beliefs, but mine is on pretty shaky ground… The FDA goes on to list a number of factors that were weighed to reach the conclusion that they believe cancer is unrelated to the drugs. You can review them for yourself here, and see if you would concur with their assessment.
Ironically, while reducing your risk of cardiovascular events and heart disease is the primary motivation for prescribing statins, these drugs can actually increase your risk of heart disease because they deplete your body of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which can lead to heart failure. Statins have also been linked to:
As mentioned in the beginning, statin drugs also block the production of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), and that in and of itself poses a very serious health risk. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure. Coenzyme Q10 plays a vital role in the process of neutralizing free radicals and the optimal production of cellular energy.
Unfortunately, the majority of people who take statins are unaware of their need for CoQ10, and physicians rarely advise their patients to take this supplement along with their statin—at least in the United States. It’s also important to supplement right from the start, to ward off irreversible mitochondrial damage.
Make no mistake about it, if you’re on a statin drug, you simply must take a CoQ10 supplement. If you’re over the age of 40, I strongly recommend using the reduced version, called ubiquinol. Ubiquinol is a far more effective form—I personally take it every day as it has far-ranging health benefits. There’s evidence that CoQ10/ubiquinol is beneficial for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and even cancer, as well as staving off premature aging in general by preventing telomere shortening, which can slow or potentially even reverse the aging process.
Unlike prescription drugs that kill over 125,000 people every year in the U.S. alone, there are no reported side effects of CoQ10 supplementation and no one has ever died from taking it.
While statins drugs are very effective for lowering so-called “bad” cholesterol, the low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, it’s important to realize that there are different sizes of LDL cholesterol particles, and it’s the LDL particle size that is relevant, as small particles get stuck easily and causes more inflammation. Unfortunately, most people don’t hear about that part, and very rarely, if ever, get it tested.
Naturally, the drug companies really don’t want you to know about this, because statins do not modulate the size of the particles.
The only way to make sure your LDL particles are large enough to not get stuck and cause inflammation and damage is through your diet. In fact, modulating LDL particle size is one of the things that insulin does. If you eat properly and maintain normal insulin levels, then everything works as it should—the LDL particles are large and buoyant; they don’t get stuck, and don’t cause inflammation.
So rather than worry about your cholesterol numbers, you really want to work on reducing inflammation, which can be caused by numerous things, including:
When you get to the bottom of it, the real “villain” of heart disease is typically an unhealthy lifestyle, characterized by a heavy reliance on sugars and grains, processed, highly cooked foods, and insufficient amounts of exercise – not “high cholesterol” per se.
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By Andreas Moritz
Cancer is considered to be the second leading cause of death for Americans. A total of 1,529,560 new cancer cases and 569,490 deaths from cancer were estimated to have occurred in the United States in 2010, according to the American Cancer Society. Among men, the top three cancer diagnoses are prostate cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer. The leading types of cancer among women are breast cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) lists the top ten killer cancers (deaths between 2003 and 2007) as follows:
In addition to the diagnosed cases of cancer, there are tens of thousands of underprivileged people who have cancer, but will not even receive a diagnosis because they cannot afford health insurance or a visit to the doctor. Cancer is not just a word, but also a statement that refers to abnormal or unusual behavior of the body’s cells.
However, in quite a different context, cancer is referred to as a star sign. When someone says you are a ‘Cancer’, are you going to tremble with fear of dying? Such a reaction is unlikely, because your interpretation of being of the Cancer sign does not imply that you have cancer, the illness. But if your doctor called you into his office and told you that you had cancer, you would most likely feel shocked, paralyzed, numb, terrified, hopeless, or all of the above. The word ‘cancer’ has the potential to play a very disturbing and precarious role in your life, one that is capable of delivering a death sentence, and actually execute it.
Although being a cancer patient seems to start with the diagnosis of cancer, its causes may have been present for many years prior to the patient feeling ill. Yet within a brief moment, the word ‘cancer’ can turn someone’s entire world upside down. Who or what in this world has bestowed this simple word or statement with such great power that it can preside over life and death? Or does it really possess this power? Could our collective, social conviction that cancer is a killer disease, along with the trauma-generating, aggressive treatments that follow diagnosis, actually be mainly responsible for the current dramatic escalation of cancer in the Western hemisphere?
Such a thought is too far fetched, you might reply! I state with absolute conviction that cancer can have no power or control over you, unless the beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings you have, allow it. Would you be as afraid of cancer if you knew what caused it or at least understood what its underlying purpose was? Unlikely so! If the truth were told, you would probably do everything you could to remove the causes of the cancer and thereby lay the ground for the body to heal itself. A little knowledge – which I also call ignorance – is, in fact, a dangerous thing.
Almost everyone, at least in the industrialized world, knows that drinking water from a filthy pond or polluted lake can cause life-threatening diarrhea. Yet, relatively few people realize that holding on to resentment, anger, and fear, avoiding exposure to the sun which causes vitamin D deficiency, not getting enough sleep on a regular basis, holding a cell phone to your head for an hour each day, being regularly exposed to X-rays, mammograms or CAT scans, or eating junk foods, chemical additives, and artificial sweeteners is no less dangerous than drinking polluted water. These ‘habits’ of life may just take a little longer to kill a person than poison or tiny amoeba do, but there is no more doubt that they can.
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This is an excerpt from my book CANCER IS NOT A DISEASE! – IT’S A SURVIVAL MECHANISM
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By: Sherry Baker
Source: NaturalNews.com
When men with advanced prostate cancer are treated with hormone therapy, the cancer usually stops growing for a year, maybe two. But then the disease often begins to grow again, and mainstream doctors have few if any options left to try to help.
So why did the hormone treatment work for a while and then stop? According to findings recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the explanation may be unexpectedly simple: the very drugs given to men to fight their prostate cancer actually spur some cancer cells to grow.
The new study, headed by Chawnshang Chang, PhD, director of the George Whipple Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and colleagues, suggests the androgen receptor, through which male hormones like testosterone work, turns out to be far more versatile than scientists realized. Specifically, a common form of hormone therapy for prostate cancer works by blocking the androgen receptor. And Dr. Chang’s team found that it was true that depriving the male body of testosterone this way can at times stop cancer in the short term by preventing some cells in the prostate from growing. But, unfortunately, they also discovered that blocking the receptor can actually cause a revving up of other prostate cell growth and can lead to a proliferation of cancer cells down the road.
While the findings are based on both laboratory studies and in experiments with mice, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned that androgen receptor blocking therapy could be putting men with prostate cancer at heightened risk for spread of the disease instead of a cure.
“When a man receives hormone therapy, initially the treatment works well, and his PSA (prostate specific antigen) level goes down,” urologist Edward Messing, MD, an author of the paper, said in a media statement. “But inevitably, the PSA will start climbing again, and that is usually the first sign that the treatment is beginning to fail. It’s a sign that the cancer in the prostate is making a comeback.”
“The androgen receptor acts differently in different cells in prostate tissue,” Dr. Chang said in the media release. “It’s always been assumed that blocking the androgen receptor will stop all prostate cells from growing, but we have found that that’s not the case. Since current treatment acts non-specifically on all the cells having androgen receptors in the prostate, blocking the androgen receptor will give mixed results.”
Bottom line: It turns out that when common cancer drugs are used to block hormone receptors, they “turn off” epithelial cells, which form the membranous tissue covering internal organs. By doing this, these drugs remove one of the body’s natural protections that prevent prostate cancer cells from spreading in the first place. The result? Cancer cells are more likely to metastasize and invade other tissues.
In addition to potentially causing prostate cancer to eventually spread, hormone treatment for prostate cancer comes loaded with a host of side effects including loss of muscle mass, impotency, brittle bones, weight gain, memory loss and hot flashes.
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