So Suzzanne Somers has breast cancer.
She has chosen to treat it homeopathically instead of chemotherapy.
Is this a level headed idea?
How likely is this to heal her?
Or is it a foolish chance she is taking?
Chemotherapy, as defined by Taber’s Medical Dictionary, page 363, is an application of chemical agents that have a specific and toxic effect on the disease-causing microorganism in the treatment of disease. Any homeopathic agent aimed at curing breast cancer would have the same effect. Breast cancer is a quick-moving disease state, with the metastisis moving to the near-by lungs and lymph nodes, where the cancer will be distributed to other areas of the body. Time is the critical factor. I hope women don’t spend this valuable time looking for homeopathic remedies when there are excellent treatments available. My mother had a cancerous colloid tumor removed this summer and opted for no radiation and resisted the idea of “chemo”. I told her that taking penicillin is chemotherapy, putting antimicrobial gel on a wound is chemotherapy, using a chemical to treat any disease, even a “all natural” agent like aloe vera is chemotherapy. She agreed to take oral meds and is cancer-free. I spoke to a oncology surgeon who said he liked being a cancer doc because he could cure with surgery one of the only two known cureable diseases: cancer and infection.
http://www.quackwatch.com has a lot of info about the fad treatments; herbals, acupuncture, homeopathy, magnets, etc., etc., ad nauseum. A relevant article might be How Quackery Harms Cancer Patients.
Here is an especially horrifying article about the harm done by an unregulated homeopathic cancer clinic: An Experience at a Mexican Cancer Clinic.
The way I see it, with doctors you at least have a chance of getting relief. With the homeopaths, you’d do better staying at home doing nothing, saving yourself the botheration and saving your money for your heirs.
Here is what Cecil had to say about homeopathic remedies. I say she doesn’t stand much of a chance beating her breast cancer that way.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000225.html
You’ve heard of doctor-assisted suicide?
She is participating in homeopathist-assisted suicide.
Buh-bye.
I don’t know what kind of breast cancer she has, or how far along it is. If her prognosis is really bad regardless of treatment, I can’t blame her for trying anything. Even the idea that one is doing something can be valuable.
However, that’s not the impression that I get. Many types of breast cancer respond very well to treatment, and if this is the case for Ms. Somers, then she is indeed making a mistake. She is well within her rights to do so, but being legal doesn’t make it any less of a bad idea.
I can only hope that her choice of treatment doesn’t encourage others to follow along. She claims not to be endorsing this treatment for anyone else, but if her cancer goes into remission or she beats her prognosis, you can bet she’ll be pushing it for all it’s worth.
I think celebrities often mean well when they promote bad medicine, such as Katie Couric’s colonoscopy crusade.* Still, it’s irresponsible. If it works, we’ll do our best to get the word out ourselves, OK?
Dr. J
(* If I’m remembering the story correctly, Katie Couric’s husband died fairly young of a colon cancer that only would have been caught early enough to treat if he had had a colonoscopy a few years before. Therefore, Katie had the procedure done on herself, and had it broadcast on her show, in an effort to raise awareness.
However, Katie is under 50 and has no family history of colon cancer, which means she should not have a colonoscopy. The slim possibility of finding and successfully treating a colon cancer in that situation is far outweighed by the risk of complications in the procedure, primarily from bowel perforation.
In other words, if everyone under 50 with no FHx of colon cancer had a colonoscopy, it would kill more people than it saved.)
I believe Ms. Sommers said on the The Larry King Show that she has had surgery to remove the lump, and followup radiation therapy.
This often cures breast cancer without followup chemotherapy. My mother-in-law was cured of breast cancer in this way (hi, Mary! I love you!).
Now all we have to worry about is her doing the talk show circuit and claiming that homeopathy cured her cancer. Then other people try the homeopathic nonsense without the real treatment, and die, and Ms. Sommers goes back to peddling ThighMasters.
Regards,
Shodan
Cyn wrote:
I’ve noticed that women seem to partake in homeopathy and other such “alternative” practices more often than men do. Why is that?
BTW, if Ms. Sommers wants to try a “not completely mainstream” cure for her cancer, I’m hoping she turns to something like angiogenesis inhibitors instead of homeopathy. At least angiogenesis inhibitors have demonstrated real effects in laboratory animals.
Shodan said:
Ugh! I hadn’t heard this, and really, really hoped that she was doing the homeopathy alone. Why? Not because I wish her dead, but because of the reasons you indicate. I can’t count the number of times people have said, “Oh, the alternative method cured me!” Then you ask, “Didn’t you have real medical treatment too?” Their response: “Oh, sure, but I know it was the other method that cured me.”
Again, ugh.
Incidentally, here is a CNN article about her announcement. It does note that she has already had radiation, but doesn’t say anything about surgery.
Interestingly, the article notes that the compound she plans to take includes an extract of mistletoe. Provided there is actually any of the mistletoe in the compound (this is homeopathy, after all), it’s particularly ironic, because I’m sure I just saw an article about an actual scientific study on that very plant showing that it did nothing for cancer. Unfortunately, I can’t find any link to it right now (my guess is that I saw it on HealthCentral, but I can’t get their search to work for me right now – it keeps timing out).
I suspect this is at least partially true (seen any studies with hard numbers?), due to the existence of a variety of debilitating conditions that affect women more commonly than men (i.e. migraine, autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, urinary incontinence etc.). There are variably effective mainstream treatments for such conditions, but enough people who don’t respond well for there to be a reservoir of unhappy patients who want to try “natural” remedies and may wind up prey for “alternative medicine” hucksters. I have my doubts that significantly more female cancer patients than males opt for alternative therapy.
I wish Suzanne Somers the best of luck in her treatment, but I also think she was irresponsible in publicizing her use of homeoquackery. The worst recent example of encouraging people to avoid chemo was USA Today reporter and breast cancer patient Cathy Hainer (now deceased), who went through several “alternative” regimens including colon cleansing, prominently and uncritically reported on in her paper. This sort of media irresponsibility kills people.
I’m not sure if this is a cause or an effect, but a lot of alternative medicine is marketed at women more than men.
For example, when I went to my first holistic health fair, everything was aimed at women (as I describe in the article I’ve linked to).
I suspect some of it has to do with stereotypes. Women are often stereotyped as being more emotional, more “feeling,” etc. Alternative medicine sure as hell ain’t based on logic and critical thinking – it’s based on emotion.
And I also think some of it has to do with medicine being traditionally a man’s role. While there are a lot more female doctors now than there have been in the past, males still make up the bulk of the profession. Therapeutic touch, for example, is believed in great part by nurses. Why? In part so the nurses can feel like they are doing something helpful. When our newsletter published a letter once by a skeptical nurse who is against Therapeutic touch, we got a response letter from another female nurse who obviously didn’t bother to read the whole thing (she saw it on the Web) and who said the author was just against women and nursing in general. In other words, it was a knee-jerk reaction which showed me that the person responding cared more about being a female nurse than she did about any evidence that might exist behind the method she was backing.
(Edited to fix my link, dangit!)
[Edited by David B on 04-01-2001 at 08:55 PM]
The CNN article says, “Somers, 54, said she did go to a liposuction clinic to have some cosmetic work done on one of her breasts, after part of it was removed because of the cancer.”
The typical treatment now is to remove a portion of the breast (the shape and amount depending on the location of the tumor) and x-ray therapy. Is chemo always done as well? I don’t think so, it seems that it depended on the type of CA and the condition of the lymph nodes. I saw the Larry King interview and thought she also said her lymph nodes were normal.
So, this might not be as brave or foolish at it seems, she may have just followed the normal proceedure for the stage of CA observed and the type of CA tissue involved.
Jois
Jois, that must be a different CNN article than the one I saw. Do you have a link? Thanks.
David B., The article I quoted was one linked at the bottom of the page you cited, maybe written the day before. “SS says she has breast cancer” or something close to that.
Jois
Have you seen Fight Club, when Brad Pitt dumps lye on the back of Edward Norton’s hand? That’s chemotherapy.
Penicillin is an antibiotic.
Jackmannii wrote:
Well, of course not. How can I make this a Great Debate without spouting off half-baked unsubstantiated opinions? 
I could believe that, if it were only alternative medicine that seems to attract more women than men. However, women also seem to be the target audience for things like psychic hotlines, astrology, and angels. (Belief in extraterrestrial visitors seems roughly equally divided across the gender line, though. I guess.)
Tracer, I think it has to do wiht the fact that women are often praised for being “intuitive.” Furthermore, historically mysitism was a realm where a woman could be both femmine and powerful. Mary would be the most obvious example of this, and it became even stringer in America in the mid-nineteenth century when women were widely believed to have greater “spiritual” authority than men to off set th higher intellectual authority of men (You can see the very human charecteristic of breaking things down into dicotomies and recipical relatoinships here). It was in this same time period that alot of the elements of modern mystisism were solidified.
My MIL recently had breast cancer so they performed a lumpectomy. As part of the lumpectomy they removed about 15 lymph nodes and performed a biopsy.
One of the nodes came back malignant.
Therefore, along with the standard radiation, she needs to go through a “mild” course of chemotherapy. If the lymphnode had been clean, she would have been given radiation alone.
So, the question for SS was “Had the cancer spread outside of the breast?”
My mother recently went through this. She had a partial mastectomy and, although her lymph nodes were clean, it was recommended that she have both chemo and radiation. I believe the decision was made partly because of the size of the tumor and the speed of its growth. (It took them some time to decide exactly what type of cancer it was.) Apparently also, there can be cancer cells circulating in the body which don’t necessarily show up right away.