Lancet birth control pill report betrays women

Sheesh! They are at it again.

It's all over the news that that the latest study on birth control pills appearing in The Lancet reduces women's chances of getting ovarian cancer.

But the study is so flawed as to defy common sense.

The researchers compared about 110,000 women, namely 87,000 healthy women who do not have ovarian cancer to 23,000 who do and found that a higher percentage of those who had no ovarian cancer had previously taken birth control pills. (I'll get back to the bolded healthy part in a minute.) The study sounds pretty clever, right?

It sure did trick Lancet who published it, and the media who were happy to report it.

The problem...and it's a ghastly one...is that the researchers didn't track the women from the beginning. They merely took the results of studies on living women.

So what we don't know is how many of the women who took birth control pills died from other causes. It is well known that birth control pills cause blot clots and strokes, along with increasing other types of cancer. Thus we have no clue as to the total health effects on the women.

Even so, if one were to swallow the results whole, the birth control pills protected 2 women in 1,000 from dying from ovarian cancer. Not 2% or 20%, but two-tenths of a percent.

When a supposed improvement is so tiny, it requires multiplying it b an extraordinarily large number to claim that 100,000 lives would be saved. The authors were only to happy to do that.

But the problem is that with such a tiny sliver of improvement, the darn thing could be horribly wrong. Furthermore, when you factor in the deaths...remember them...from strokes, the .2% 'benefit' evaporates like rain drops on a sunny day.

Now let's talk about the 87,000 healthy women. The fact that they were healthy skews the study so bad one could make a french-curve ruler out of it. For instance, it would exclude women in wheelchairs who got put there by blot clots to their brains.

The study doesn't include the women who died from strokes either. They couldn't be a part of the study because the researchers hadn't tracked patients from day one!

Restricting the study to living healthy women while excluding sick or dead women makes the study worse than worthless. Here is why.

The study is bound to get major publicity. Which means more doctors will prescribe birth control and more women are going to go on the pill mistakenly thinking it offers some protection.

Since the study could only produce a .2% improvement by restricting the population, and while excluding all the debilitating and deadly downsides, more women will die needlessly.

This study published by The Lancet is an embarrassment to their reputation.
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William Kelley Eidem is the author of The Doctor Who Cures Cancer and It's Not Just For Sex. Your comments including signature lines (2 lines max) are welcome.

Phantom Limb Pain Cure For $3?

Phantom limb pain is a serious problem for those who have it. The missing limb feels paralyzed and cramped in excruciating pain.

Every once in a while, someone makes an invention that is so extraordinary that it defies adequate superlatives. The link below is one such innovation.

A genius neurologist has come up with a stunning $3 cure giving relief from the pain in many cases. You've got to see it to believe it. You might have to register in order to see this most extraordinary talk. The speaker notes that relief of phantom pain might otherwise cost millions of dollars to produce a virtual reality machine to do the same thing.

The same $3 invention is also being tested on stroke victims.

It seems to me that it could work to improve physical therapy treatments as well.

To see the discovery, go to http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/184

The speaker talks about three different fascinating brain behaviors. His discussion of phantom limb pain takes place in the middle portion of his talk. This man with an Hindu name has a Scottish accent, sounding a bit like Sean Connery, making him a compelling speaker.

The speech was put on by TED.com which gets fellow geniuses together to give each other speeches on their latest findings.
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William Kelley Eidem is the author of The Doctor Who Cures Cancer and It's Not Just For Sex. Your comments and signature lines are welcome.

Antibiotic ban in the UK?

Doctors in the UK are being advised not to prescribe antibiotics for colds, flues and sore throats. From the UK Telegraph online:

Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, says it is time to end the unnecessary use of penicillin and other commonly-prescribed pills, which cost the NHS £1.7 billion a year.

	Watch: Why patients should not panic

Using antibiotics too liberally has led to bugs such as MRSA becoming resistant to treatment with the drugs. Most colds, coughs and flu are caused by viruses, which cannot be treated with antibiotics anyway, Mr Johnson points out.

Finally!

If we could get doctors in the US to do the same, the benefits to patients could be huge.

The government led program is designed to slow the spike of MRSA, a deadly bacterial infection that has been sweeping hospitals.

But the real danger of antibiotics far exceeds the hospital danger. Antibiotics allow yeast to spread in our bodies. That can make us crave sweets and excess carbs.

Why? Because the yeast lives on sugar and so does our brain. When we have too much yeast, our brain tells us it is starving. Then our brain walks us to the refrigerator or drives us to the store to buy high sugar and high carb foods.

In other words, antibiotics carry the real risk of causing our pants not to fit. A bigger waistline is a risk factor for all sorts of health problems including depression, heart trouble and diabetes.

Each of those factors decreases the quality of our lives and shortens life expectancy.

In short, antibiotics are dangerous drugs.

By the way, have you ever noticed how one round of antibiotics leads to another and another?

There's a good reason for that. I'll cover it in an upcoming post.
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William Kelley Eidem is the author of The Doctor Who Cures Cancer and It's Not Just For Sex. Your comments and signature lines are welcome.

Back pain and leg pain go bye bye!

First some related good news...the price of CoQ10 dropped dramatically about a month or two ago...it's about 75% to 80% lower than it used to be! I read about a year ago that a new manufacturing facility was to open in Texas. Apparently it has opened. Before all the CoQ10 was made in Japan.

As a result of the drop in price I decided to increase my dose from 100/200 a day to 400mgs a day to see if it would increase my energy.

Meanwhile, I'd been dealing with nerve pain in my leg due to a fall which had aggravated an old back injury since infancy that included poorly healed broken bones. Since the fall, I often needed a crutch and had great difficulty walking 100 yards.

In fact, I was looking forward to my appointment with the neurosurgeon...that's how bad my situation was.

Well, to my utter surprise, the CoQ10 did a lot more than increase my energy and help me to sleep better. From the very first day the burning nerve pain in my leg has been greatly reduced. Whereas the burning used to be almost all the time, now it's maybe a half-hour a day, and it's less distracting.

Also I can walk without having to think about every step. I can walk a few hundred yards without a crutch and do it more quickly.

I had no prior inkling that the CoQ10 would help me in this way.

I'm not back to 100%, but I'm postponing the surgery...hopefully forever.

I gave some CoQ10 to a friend who was suffering 24/7 from degenerative back pain down her leg that was made far worse from a physical therapy session.

Again, from the very first day of taking 400 mgs, her pain was greatly reduced. She only takes it intermittently now because she suffers from OCD and too much CoQ10 makes her a little hyper. She's trying 100 mgs but that doesn't seem to be helping her much.

I've read that super high doses of 1,200 mgs has helped Parkinson's patients quite a bit, so there is some evidence that it has a positive effect on nerves.

Also, a pharmacist told me that nerves contain fluid. When the nerves swell, it can cause pain that is untouched by NSAID's and heavy duty pain killers. Well, CoQ10 has been shown to be extremely beneficial for congestive heart failure, which is also a fluid problem.

So maybe the CoQ10 is affecting the nerves in a similar fashion. Maybe it's reducing the fluid swelling inside the nerves.

I don't know for sure. My preliminary Google search hasn't turned up anything other than the original question in this thread.

But it might be something to try for any nerve pain to see whether it would help or not. Remember, it did nothing for me as regards my pain and mobility when I took 100-200 mgs. So a half dose didn't produce a half benefit.

I'd be interested to hear if this works for anyone else. If it does, then this accidental discovery sure could benefit a whole lot of people.

Please let me know.Publish Post
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William Kelley Eidem is the author of The Doctor Who Cures Cancer and It's Not Just For Sex.

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