New York Times Punked Once Again

Updated 3/2017-- all links (except to my own posts) removed as many no longer active. 

The NY Times initiated a pay wall earlier this week. The timing is fortuitous as they have been taken again by an April Fool's prank. You may recall how New York personal-injury lawyer and blogger Eric Turkewitz began last year’s prank with his April 1st post where he claimed he’d been appointed official White House law blogger. He and a cohort of bloggers and tweeters posted corroborating responses and updates throughout the day. Eventually the Times picked up the story.

Get more details of this year’s prank here.

Know Your Surgeon

Updated 3/2017-- all links (except to my own posts) removed as many are no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

I would caution anyone who elects to have cosmetic or plastic surgery to go to a surgeon’s office.  Meet your surgeon.  Along with learning about the procedure, ask about their training.  If your procedure is to take place outside of a hospital (for example, in a surgery center), ask if your surgeon has privileges to do the procedure in a major hospital (the hospital should have checked their training when doing the credentialing).

Treat cosmetic/plastic surgery as surgery with all the benefits AND risks of non-elective surgery.

I stumbled across this article Owner of Cosmetic Surgery Clinic Sentenced in New York for Health Care Fraud.

Arthur Kissel,a/k/a "Arthur Froom," was sentenced October 25th in Manhattan federal court to 10 years in prison for healthcare fraud offenses.  Neither Kissel nor his wife Sonia LaFontaine are doctors, but they engaged in a series of fraudulent practices out of their Manhattan cosmetic surgery clinic.  (pdf file of press release from United States Attorney Southern District of New York)

LaFONTAINE and KISSEL, along with several coconspirators including doctors who worked at LRMA, engaged in four different types of fraud at the clinic:
•  LaFONTAINE performed procedures which were billed as if they had been performed by licensed physicians.
•  LRMA billed cosmetic procedures as medically necessary procedures so that health insurance companies would be duped into paying for them.
•  KISSEL and LaFONTAINE submitted claims to health insurance companies for procedures that were never performed.
•  KISSEL and LaFONTAINE exaggerated insurance claims by increasing the number and complexity of procedures.
KISSEL and LaFONTAINE were indicted in March 1998 with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. KISSEL was extradited from Canada in 2008 and pled guilty on September 4, 2009.

Kissel and LaFontaine’s practices actually led to the death of one patient:

In imposing the maximum sentence permitted by law,Judge CHIN rejected KISSEL's claims of "ignorance and dumbness"and found that he "acted out of greed." He also stated that his crimes "led directly to the death" of JOEL CUNNINGHAM, who died on January 8, 1998, while undergoing an outpatient abdominal liposuction procedure at LRMA. CUNNINGHAM had wanted to become a NYPD police officer, but was too heavy to meet the entrance standards. He decided to have a liposuction procedure at LRMA,which used extensive advertising claiming that it was operated and supervised by a "world renowned surgeon," when in fact it was operated and supervised by KISSEL and LaFONTAINE. Evidence presented at a subsequent wrongful death suit in state court indicated that Cunningham had died of complications from anesthesia, which had been administered by an LRMA anesthesiologist who was at the time on professional probation due to drug and alcohol abuse.

Recent Breast Cancer News Articles

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

Interesting news recently related to breast cancer.  Original journal articles are listed in the references below.

First topic --
'Cancer risk' for house-proud women – Associated Press

Houseproud women who like to keep their homes clean and fragrant may be at greater risk of breast cancer, research has suggested.

Household cleaners may double risk of breast cancer – Telegraph.co.uk

Women who regularly use household cleaners and air fresheners are at double the risk of developing breast cancer than those who never use the products.

If you take the time to look at the study done by Dr Julia Brody, from the Silent Spring Institute, and colleagues which was published in the July issue of the Journal of Environmental Health you do find it suggests there is a link.

However, it is a study using data collected by telephone interviews of 1,508 women (787 who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1988 and 1995; 721 who did not) about their cleaning regimes.  The authors even noted a bias among women who believed pollutants contribute “a lot” to breast cancer.  The study's authors acknowledge that "recall bias" may have skewered the results.

So while there may turn out to be a true link between household cleaning products and the development of breast cancer, this is a very weak study.  There needs to be a prospective study done with all possible recall bias filtered out.

Next topic:
New Arsenic Nanoparticle Blocks Aggressive Breast Cancer – Nanotechwire.com

…….Prior to the new research, arsenic hadn't been effective in solid tumors. After the drug was injected into the bloodstream, it was excreted too rapidly to work. The concentration of arsenic couldn't be increased, because it was then too toxic.

A new arsenic nanoparticle -- designed to slip undetected through the bloodstream until it arrives at the tumor and delivers its poisonous cargo -- solved all that. The nanoparticle, called a nanobin, was injected into mice with triple negative breast tumors. Nanobins loaded with arsenic reduced tumor growth in mice, while the non-encapsulated arsenic had no effect on tumor growth. The arsenic nanobins blocked tumor growth by causing the cancer cells to die by a process known as apoptosis. ………

Looking ahead, the challenge now is to refine and improve the technology. "How do we make it more toxic to cancer cells and less toxic to healthy cells?" asked Cryns, also the director of SUCCEED, a Northwestern Medicine program to improve the quality of life for breast cancer survivors. ……….

Arsenic Trioxide Nanoparticle Can Target Triple Negative Breast Cancer  -- About.com: Breast Cancer Blog

…………In a study on mice with breast cancer, this arsenic trioxide nanoparticle made tumors shrink!  Dr Cryns and Richard Ahn published their research on arsenic trioxide nanobins in Clinical Cancer Research on July 15, 2010. 

Nothing negative to say here.   To me it’s obvious that this is all preliminary – still in the mice research stage.    I find it interesting.

Third topic:
Fish Oil May Help Reduce the Risk of Breast Cancer --
Fish oil reduces risk of breast cancer by a third – NaturalNews.com

The new study, just published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, was conducted by a research team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. They investigated 35,016 postmenopausal women between the ages of 50 and 76 with no history of breast cancer who were participating in the Vitamins and Lifestyle cohort study (dubbed VITAL, short). The woman was asked to complete a 24 page questionnaire about their use of supplements other than vitamins and/or minerals.

After six years of follow-up, 880 of these women had been diagnosed with breast cancer. However, those women who reported regularly taking fish oil supplements, which contain high levels of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, were found to have a 32 percent reduced risk of invasive ductal breast cancer -- the most common type of breast cancer. The use of other specialty supplements, such as the herbs black cohosh and dong quai which are often taken by women to relieve symptoms of menopause, was not associated with raising or lowering breast cancer risk.

Yes, fish oil is important to heart health, and the original article did find an association in lowering the risk of ductal breast cancer, but the above news articles over state it.  The authors state their results as (bold highlight is mine):

Current use of fish oil was associated with reduced risk of breast cancer (HR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.50-0.92). Ten-year average use was suggestive of reduced risk (P trend = 0.09). These results held for ductal but not lobular cancers. The remaining specialty supplements were not associated with breast cancer risk: Specifically, use of supplements sometimes taken for menopausal symptoms (black cohosh, dong quai, soy, or St. John's wort) was not associated with risk.

REFERENCES

Self-reported chemicals exposure, beliefs about disease causation, and risk of breast cancer in the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study: a case-control study; Ami R. Zota, Ann Aschengrau, Ruthann A. Rudel, Julia Green Brody; Environmental Health 2010, 9:40 (20 July 2010)

A Novel Nanoparticulate Formulation of Arsenic Trioxide with Enhanced Therapeutic Efficacy in a Murine Model of Breast Cancer; Richard W. Ahn, Feng Chen, Haimei Chen, Stephan T. Stern, Jeffrey D. Clogston, Anil K. Patri, Meera R. Raja, Elden P. Swindell, Vamsi Parimi, Vincent L. Cryns, and Thomas V. O'Halloran; Clin Cancer Res July 15, 2010 16:3607-3617; Published OnlineFirst June 2, 2010; doi:10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-10-0068

Specialty Supplements and Breast Cancer Risk in the VITamins And Lifestyle (VITAL) Cohort; Theodore M. Brasky, Johanna W. Lampe, John D. Potter, Ruth E. Patterson, and Emily White; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev July 2010 19:1696-1708; doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-10-0318