Arkansas Jurors Find Cancer Therapy a Fraud

Updated 3/2017--  all links (except to my own posts) removed as many no longer active. 

I hope @oracknows, Respectful Insolence, will write more about this. He is much better than I at sussing out fraudulent medical treatments.

I have lived and practiced in Little Rock, AR for over twenty years and I did not know this was in my backyard until my local paper (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) reported on the outcome of the trial last week. The article title caught my eye as I was skimming the news: Jurors: Cancer therapy a fraud, Award in suit is $2.5 million (subscription only unfortunately).

A federal jury awarded $2.5 million in damages Tuesday to a California woman who paid $6,250 to undergo alternative treatments from a Jacksonville woman who promised a “100 percent success rate” in destroying cancerous breast tumors.

Antonella Carpenter, the former Jacksonville woman who has since moved to Broken Arrow, Okla., and continues to proclaim on her website that she has found a simple, painless way to kill cancerous tumors, wasn’t present for the verdict against her and her company, Lase Med Inc. …….

I don’t recall every hearing of Lase Med Inc: LIESH Therapy.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit is Therese Westphal, 54,

a mother of three sons, said she read about the treatment in a flier she found in a health-food store in California where she went to research nontraditional cancer treatments shortly after being diagnosed in September 2007 with a 2 1/4-inch tumor in the upper right corner of her left breast.

A local oncologist, Bill Tranum, MD, testified Westphal had a 75% to 90% chance of beating the cancer immediately after being diagnosed, the delay dropped her chances to 20%.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article notes Carpenter refers to herself on the website as a “doctor.”

Bond (Will Bond of the McMath Woods law firm in Little Rock) says she’s not a medical doctor, but claims to have a doctorate in physics, possibly from an online university.

A local television station, KTHV, has a segment (open access) on the trial: Company defends laser treatments, despite loss in court

….."I am a physicist. I never claim to be a medical doctor, that's why the patients come to me because those are the ones who want alternative," Carpenter said.

It's an alternative using lasers to kill cancerous tumors. Carpenter says the heat activated in the process does the job.

"Elevated temperature, the tumor reached 134 degrees Fahrenheit, and that is the temperature sufficient to kill the tumors. I have the science that backs it," Carpenter said. ….