Shannon Brownlee
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 At that rate, radiologists will be running patients through a CT scanner one hundred million times a year by 2010, or an average of one CT a year for every third citizen—a "ridiculous" number, in Baker's view, because in his opinion, many of the scans being done today are already unnecessary. These days, utilization rates of all kinds of imaging tests—MRIs, ultrasounds, PETs—are going up faster than those of any other medical technology. The use of images is rising in lockstep with the supply of increasingly sophisticated imaging machines—without much evidence that they are helping patients. |
Devra Davis
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 The radiologists believed that since they could not see anything on x-ray, no real problem existed. Phil Morgenstern looked at things differently. Many of the workers in the chemical weapons facility eventually started coughing most of the time. The plant supervisors assured Morgenstern that these men could not possibly have been exposed to any of these agents. If there had been even the slightest exposures, he was told, they would have been obviously and immediately sick. Morgenstern wasn't so sure. |
| Proponents and opponents agree that a serious problem exists with mammography: A large proportion of test sites use substandard equipment, are staffed by inadequately trained technicians and radiologists, or are rarely if ever inspected to be sure the equipment is working properly at a minimal dose of radiation."6
The federal government didn't even have national standards for mammography until 1994. |
| Radiologists appreciate that we could be creating more cancer in young people by what happens in emergency rooms all over the country today."
Heron referred me to a surprising new advocate on this issue. In a 2007 white paper on radiation in medicine, the American College of Radiology noted that in the past quarter century, the amount of radiation the U.S. population receives each year from medical imaging has increased fivefold. A single computerized scan of the stomach today can give half the dose that was shown to induce cancer in those who survived the atomic bomb blasts in Japan. |
| We held meeting after meeting and reviewed reports from the nation's top radiologists. We talked about creating master mammography readers who would provide standardized second opinions on all films, which has long been done in Scandinavia. Blumenthal came up with an innovative scheme to use technologies of the space and intelligence agencies that can read a license plate from outer space to enhance the ability to find early signs of cancer within the breast. |
Bill Sardi
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 Neither surgeons nor radiologists advocated watchful waiting. [Journal American Medical Association 283: 3217-3222, 2000] informed decision making for screening tests such as the PSA test, whose net benefit has not yet been proven," the PSA test is taken for granted as being a reliable test and few patients are informed of its drawbacks. [Journal General Internal Medicine 18: 350-56, 2003]
With each additional five years of age, a man was twice as likely to choose watchful waiting over surgery or radiation treatment. |
| Guy Faguet cites the fact that radiologists are 53% more likely to prescribe radiotherapy when they own a treatment facility and spend less time with patients, and charge more, for their services. Chemotherapy accounts for two-thirds of the income of oncologists in private practice. On their day of diagnosis, about 30-50% of cancer patients have tumors that have spread to other locations and only about 2% of these patients treated with chemotherapy will be cured.
Does any of the advice in this book work? |
| Certain staff members must meet strict standards including radiologists (the doctors who interpret the mammograms)
Source: The American Cancer Society unnecessary treatment. The test obviously does not catch estrogen-negative tumors.
With all of the screening, breast exams, mammograms, and biopsies for breast cancer being performed today, it seems that the end result has paradoxically been to produce more disease.
A woman participating in breast screening from age 50 to 64 increases her chances of surviving to age 75 by 0.6%. |
| The Cancer Care Industry
INTRODUCTION
An army of doctors, pathologists, surgeons, radiologists, nurses, researchers, and pharmaceutical company personnel go to work every day in the war against cancer. They depend upon a steady stream of patients to keep the industry churning dollars rather than cures. This year some 1.4 million Americans will have a frightening diagnosis of cancer and enter a cancer care system that is dysfunctional if not outright fraudulent. |
| A 70-year-old man was diagnosed with lung cancer. radiologists had missed a lung tumor the size of a golf ball in an earlier x-ray. A year later it was the size of a softball. Chemotherapy reduced the tumor by 75 %. In 1999, the man began taking IP6. By 2004, the lung tumor had completely disappeared, which was confirmed by bronchoscopy and x-ray.
þ A man with recurrent bladder tumors submitted to surgical removal in 1999, 2000 and 2001. He then embarked upon the use of IP6 as a dietary supplement and has not experienced a return of bladder tumors in 38 months. |
Devra Davis
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| Some radiologists have never seen a microcalcification they can leave alone, and surgical biopsy—or the use of fine needles to withdraw cells and look at them under a microscope for evidence of cancer—is booming. Others will advise waiting half a year to look again. New machines take much higher resolution digital mammograms and find microscopic changes that could not be seen a decade ago. They cost about seven times more than conventional ones. Magnetic resonance imaging of the breast costs between $2,000 and $3,000 per procedure. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Very clear and specific standards and targets need to be set for interpretation of mammography," said the study's lead author. "Radiologists who perform outside acceptable ranges need to be told: 'that's not acceptable.'"37
We are not saying that a substantial proportion of physicians are incompetent. What we are saying is that the competence of physicians, even specialists, cannot be assumed as a given.
2. Does Screening Improve Prognosis?
The question is fundamental. Diagnosis has value, but not in and of itself. |
Bill Sardi
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| Journal National Cancer Institute 92: 1657-66, 2000] The false-positive rates (percent of the time cancer is diagnosed when in fact it doesn't exist) among radiologists varies by 1.5 to 24.1 %. [Breast Cancer Research Treatment, July 4, 2006 online]
Doctors who interpret mammograms only need to read 480 films a year to maintain their standing whereas studies indicate doctors need to read 2,500 films a year to stay sharp. Canada and Britain requires that many readings a year to maintain certification. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| That's more MRI machines than there were in all of Canada, and radiologists in Toledo sometimes joke that it's a wonder that cars don't swerve back and forth on the streets where many of the city's hospitals are located, owing to the strong magnetic fields that are created by MRI machines.
When hospitals buy faster machines, says Baker, it lowers the barrier for physicians to order yet another unnecessary test, setting up a vicious cycle. Why not send a patient off to get a scan—for bed control, to avoid a malpractice suit, because a patient demanded it? |
| These "decision trees" have been carefully constructed to help emergency doctors and radiologists decide when it is in a patient's best interests to order a test and when an image is not only unwarranted but potentially harmful. One set of rules, for example, which was designed to help physicians decide if they need a CT scan for a patient who might have a neck injury, could eliminate 12.6 percent of CT scans for neck trauma, or about one hundred thousand scans a year, without risking the possibility of leaving a patient untreated for a serious spinal injury. |
| Stephen Baker points out that radiologists make money on every image they read, so they have little incentive to argue with ordering physicians.) But the two reasons doctors give most often for why they do so much excess imaging are patient demand and worries about malpractice suits.
Many physicians, but especially those who work in high-wire specialties like neurology, emergency medicine, and radiology, live with the quiet but persistent fear that they will be sued for failing to order an imaging test—or failing to correctly diagnose a disease on a scan that's been performed. |
| Curtis Bakal, one of the senior radiologists in the department, switches the image on the screen to the man's chest X-ray and briefly describes his case: "Seventy-eight-year-old male, history of prostate cancer, brought to the ED from a nursing home with shortness of breath. He's a DNR." Translation: Sometime in the past, the man recognized his condition was terminal, and he signed a "do not resuscitate" order, which means he did not want any heroic measures taken as he neared death. |
| While most academic radiologists have been critical of the practice, by 2001 at least one hundred scanning centers had sprouted up around the country. Demand for their services was fueled in part by testimonials from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who actually underwent a whole-body scan on television. At one time, scan shops on the West Coast, like Health View, in Newport Beach, the most popular center in the Los Angeles area, had ten-month waiting lists. Other entrepreneurial doctors load CT scanners into mobile units and send them on the road with a technologist. |
Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
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 The hospital radiologists (who bill separately from the hospital) have been hurt by having to serve our patients, who cannot afford to pay. As a result, the radiologists get paid less (the same could apply to other specialists), and the hospital has been losing radiologists to the other hospitals, where they get paid more. A vicious cycle. Or justice in health care, American style.
Why Do Our Patients Think
We Don't Have Universal Coverage?
In an attempt to figure out why the uninsured are not rising up in protest to demand universal coverage, I carried out a mini-survey at my clinic. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 Prenatal ultrasound examinations are performed by trained professionals, such as sonographers, radiologists, and obstetricians. The procedure involves using a transducer, which sends a stream of high-frequency sound waves into the body and then detects their echoes as they bounce off internal structures. The sound waves are then converted into electrical impulses, which are processed to form an image, which is displayed on a computer monitor. It is from these images that videos and portraits are made. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Because everybody's making money from disease, including the doctors, hospitals, medical imaging specialists, oncologists, radiologists, anesthesiologists and, of course, psychiatrists, who are now making money by imagining that people have all sorts of brain chemistry disorders like Road Rage Disorder that they claim need to be treated with prescription drugs. |
John E. Sarno, M.D.
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 These abnormalities are simply mentioned by the radiologists in their reports because it is their job to report everything they see. It is the job of the treating physician to put all the information together in arriving at a diagnosis. I had been too quick to jump to the conclusion that the reported "abnormalities" on the MRI were the cause of the patient's pain. I was dazzled by the clarity of the MRI technology. Like most physicians, I had a need to demonstrate that the cause of the pain was physical. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 The campaign was enthusiastically supported by the drug companies, who make money selling the drugs for the condition, and the specialist doctors called radiologists, who make money doing the tests. Using a raft of sophisticated public relations techniques, this informal alliance has tried to convince a generation of healthy women that they are at risk of breaking a bone at any moment and that their very lives are in peril, stalked constantly by the "silent thief" of osteoporosis. |
G. Edward Griffin
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 This is an embarrassing fact for radiologists to face, for it brings into question the justification for their existence in the medical fraternity. Consequently, one does not expect to hear these issues being discussed by radiologists or those whose livelihood depends on the construction, sale, use, or maintenance of the multi-million-dollar linear accelerators. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to hear these truths spoken frankly by three radiologists sharing the same platform at the same medical convention. They were William Powers, M.D. |
Bruce H. Lipton
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 Differentials in the energy spectra enable radiologists to distinguish between healthy and diseased tissues (the black spot in the center). started to pay for services they once deemed quackery, and major teaching hospitals allow a limited number of such practitioners inside.
But even today very little scientific rigor has been marshaled to assess the effectiveness of complementary medicine. The National Institutes of Health did create an "alternative medicine" branch, thanks to pressure from the public. |
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
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 If you have any doubt, just assemble surgeons, radiologists, and internists in a room to discuss the merits of their particular approaches to treatment of a specific disease. But those members of a USCHC board drawn from outside the health care community would at least introduce a moderating influence.
CURING THE ILLS
This is not to suggest that a single-payer system overseen by a Federal Reserve—like board or some other independent organization would instantly correct everything that's wrong with market-driven health care. What it would do is provide the framework to reach that goal. |
The Life Extension Editorial Staff
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 Surgeons, for instance, strongly endorse surgical removal of the tumor(s), although radiologists often recommend various forms of radiotherapy to kill cancer cells. Medical oncologists, on the other hand, are proponents of chemotherapy, immune-augmentative, and hormone modulation therapies. In many cases, a particular type of cancer may wanant utilization of all conventional therapies, that is, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
When it comes to alternative approaches, there are a wide variety of choices that can be accessed on the Internet. |
G. Edward Griffin
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| Consequently, one does not expect to hear these issues being discussed by radiologists or those whose livelihood depends on the construction, sale, use, or maintenance of the multi-million-dollar linear accelerators. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to hear these truths spoken frankly by three radiologists sharing the same platform at the same medical convention. They were William Powers, M.D., Director of the Division of Radiation Therapy at the Washington University School of Medicine, Phillip Rubin, M.D. |
Walter Last
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 Persecution for Therapeutic Success: Siemens, the manufacturer of CT equipment, has independently verified the existence of the Hamer Herds in the brain, which radiologists had claimed to be artifacts. Furthermore, their diagnostic significance was confirmed in 1998 at the University of Trnava in Slovakia. Nevertheless, Dr Hamer faced exceptional persecution. |
Francisco, M.D. Contreras
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| When shown a duplicate set of chest x-rays, 56% of the school's radiologists, graduates of the best school of medicine in the world, gave two different diagnoses. Furthermore, in one review of radiographic archives, significant diagnostic errors were detected in 41% of all chest x-rays. In a review of 100 x-rays with colon tumors, 20 studies had been diagnosed as negative, that is to say, the specialists did not see the tumors. As recently as 1994, the New England Journal of Medicine informed us that radiologists are mistaken in a "disturbingly high" number of mammogram cases. |
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