Lobular Carcinoma in situ (LCIS)

CANCER!!!!!! AAAARRRGH!!!!!! That word strikes fear into people's hearts, so much so that they will go for extreme, harsh treatments to "kill" the cancer rather than A) adopt an attitude of watchful waiting or B), even better, commencing Iodinesupplementation. I can link you to lots of long, boring studies proving the effectiveness of iodine against Breast Cancer cell lines...:)

Huge problem(from link below):

"Some cancers never cause symptoms or death, and can grow too slowly to ever affect patients. As it is impossible to distinguish between those and deadly cancers, any identified cancer is treated."

Bonus points for anyone that makes it all the way through this post:) That's where the good news is:)

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-09-breast-cancer_N.htm?obref=obin...


One in three breast cancer patients identified in public screening programs may be treated unnecessarily, a new study says...

...Some cancers never cause symptoms or death, and can grow too slowly to ever affect patients. As it is impossible to distinguish between those and deadly cancers, any identified cancer is treated. But the treatments can have harmful side-effects and be psychologically scarring.

"This information needs to get to women so they can make an informed choice," Jorgensen said. "There is a significant harm in making women cancer patients without good reason."

Jorgensen said that for years, women were urged to undergo breast cancer screening without them being informed of the risks involved, such as having to endure unnecessary treatment if a cancer was identified, even if it might never threaten their health....

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A recent article about the "new" ductal carcinoma in situ, follow link for complete text:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-11-new-breastcancer_N.htm


"When a mammogram detected a lump in Barbara Laufer's breast, the fear was paralyzing.

"You think you're going to die," says Laufer, 40, of Burbank, Calif.

Laufer was diagnosed with a perplexing condition called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, a growth of malignant cells inside the milk ducts of the breast. Though some doctors describe the condition to patients as a very early breast cancer, others compare it to a precancer.

Although the disease is almost never life-threatening, Laufer says the diagnosis put her life on hold.

She has had three surgeries, including two lumpectomies that disfigured her right breast. She spent seven weeks in daily radiation treatment. And she has had to delay trying to have children for five years while she takes a hormonal treatment called tamoxifen, which can cause birth defects.

"The huge effect from DCIS is that my life has to stop," says Laufer, who was diagnosed at 37 and recently began taking the drug. "I can't have babies. I'm going to have to wait until I'm 44½ until I can even find out if I can. It's just really poor timing for me."

More than 60,000 American women are diagnosed with DCIS each year. Doctors would like to spare these women from the rigors of cancer therapy, says breast oncologist Patricia Ganz, a professor at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. But doctors today don't know enough about DCIS to tell a harmless tumor from one that could turn lethal. As a result, they tend to treat all women the same, regardless of the tumor's size.

"We're asking women to make decisions that are crucial to their lives, without a lot of hard evidence," says Susan Reed, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who served on an expert panel on DCIS last month at the National Institutes of Health. "We're giving them a lot of uncertainty."

If doctors know so little, it's partly because DCIS is so new.

"When I started my career, this disease did not exist," says Ganz, who has been in practice for 30 years.

The incidence of DCIS has grown seven-fold since the early '70s, when doctors began using mammograms, says the University of Florida's Carmen Allegra, a cancer specialist and chairman of the NIH panel.

Mammograms, which take X-rays of the breast, can find tumors that are too small to be felt by hand.

Doctors, who had never seen such tiny tumors, assumed that they should treat them like the large, lethal masses they were used to finding. They piled on additional treatments over the years as studies showed that radiation and hormonal therapies further reduced the risk of relapse...

..."We don't need more effective treatments," says Eric Winer of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "We need to talk about eliminating some of these treatments for women who might do well without them. The real question is, who could do well with less?"

Doctors need to answer these questions with more research, says Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action, an advocacy group.

But because virtually all women get aggressive therapy, doctors don't know what would happen if women opted to scale back...

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carcinoma in situ and other pathology around tumor. From the book " Breast Cancer and Iodine", By Dr. David Derry. Buy the book, folks! LOTS of good info... :)

"Another new patient came to me after a lumpectomy only and no lymph node dissection. Not only was there a ductal carcinoma with multiple foci up to 5 cms from the main lesion, but tissues surrounding her cancer contained many abnormal breast changes including carcinoma in situ.The margins of the cancer came within 0.5 mm of the resection margin. Under the advice of the cancer clinic and because the margin of clear breast was small and the tissue surrounding the tumor contained many obvious abnormalities, the surgeon carried out a wider resection of the same area and excised the sentinal axillary node six months after I met her. During the interim the lady had been on Lugol's Iodine two drops daily and 180 mgs of dessicated thyroid. When a wider resection was carried out all resected breast tissue was completely clear of fibrocystic disease, pre-cancerous and cancer lesions. The lymph node was negative. The lady had been on her iodine for close to six months at that time as well as thyroid hormone. Theoretically, we should have seen some pathology in her newly resected breast tissue. These results are suggestive that carcinoma in situ and abnormal cells may all disappear with adequate iodine and thyroid therapy."

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