IT'S COSMETICS, A CLASSIC WOMEN'S PRODUCT:

Author Dr. Christiane Northrup says early breast cancers may vanish (Charlie Smith, October 21, 2010 , Straight.com)

Northrup, a former surgeon, said that breast and prostate cancers are very similar but the response may differ dramatically. For example, physicians practise “active surveillance” in the case of prostate cancer, where they observe what’s happening in the man’s body but don’t perform surgery unless necessary.

“It’s the way to go, because 90 percent of prostate cancers are never going to grow,” Northrup said. “A man remains—sexually and urinarily speaking—intact and gets healthier while the cancer just stays contained.”

However, she stated that a woman will undergo radical surgery after a diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ—a tumour confined to the milk duct in the breast—even though 99 percent of these cancers don’t lead to death. “She has been taught that self-sacrifice is the way to go,” Northrup said. “She will go in and have a bilateral mastectomy because she can’t live with the idea that, ‘What if this becomes cancer?’ ”

She noted that when men are told that surgery may lead to sexual, urinary, or bowel problems, they are apt to consider the consequences. Men will never voluntarily submit to an orchectomy—surgical removal of the testicles—even though, she said, it is a very effective treatment for prostate cancer. Northrup suggested that women, on the other hand, can be far too eager to have their breasts removed, even though they are sexual organs.

She pointed out that cellular inflammation—which is measured as heat in a breast-thermography examination—“in the vast majority of breast cancers…is a precursor”. However, she said that this inflammation doesn’t necessarily indicate the existence of precancerous cells. And even when these cells are detected early, she said, they are usually slow-growing.

“People are under the erroneous belief that the moment you have a breast-cancer cell, the cells divide and grow over time in a linear fashion,” Northrup said. “Therefore, if you get it early, you’re going to prevent a death from breast cancer. There is some serious problems with that belief system, which is held by almost every doctor, by the way.”

To support this point, Northrup cited a book called Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why (University of California Press, 2004), which was written by Dartmouth medical school professor Dr. H. Gilbert Welch. “He goes through the biology of cancer,” Northrup said. “The fact is we have some studies—one big one out of Norway—showing that women who had the fewest number of mammograms had the fewest amounts of breast cancer. The end result of that study was that early breast cancers actually go away. Isn’t that amazing? It happens more than you would think.”