Rationing Cancer Care In the Name of Science

The federal government has decided that your cancer diagnosis should not be called cancer.  Why?  Well, you see, you might want it treated, you may want to be proactive and have it removed.  You may want to have a second opinion, have more tests and so on, and the Feds just don’t want you to do that.  It is costly.  You may even want to see a nutritionist to change your diet, join a gym, start an exercise routine and get healthy. A bunch of bother all for naught.  All of these decisions are being taken away from you.  Not by your doctor –  their hands are being tied more and more every day by the red tape of Obamacare.  These decisions are made by the federal government.  They have no idea if skin cancer runs in your family, if your grandmother and her sister had breast cancer, or if prostate or colon cancer  has hit every male in your family between the age of 45 and 50.  But there they are, sitting in that exam room with you and your doctor, who has your test results right there on the computer screen and she or he is telling you what you thought might be cancer is actually something called ‘IDLE’ -Indolent Lesions of Epithelial Origin.  The National Cancer Institute proposed this change in a paper written 29 July 2013, and mind you, they are the main government agency for cancer research.  In other words, they will say what the government wants them to say.

From The Wall Street Journal:
Removing the word “cancer” from the terminology used for many slow-growing lesions in the breast, prostate, lung, skin and other body areas could ease patients’ fears and reduce the inclination of doctors to treat them aggressively, says a panel of experts advising the National Cancer Institute.

The thought process behind this is that most cancers are not a death sentence, and can, with proper monitoring, not kill you right away.  Got that?  So, what they intend for your doctor to do, perhaps unbeknownst to you, is to track the cancer and its progression, have you come back every 4 to 6 months or so to track your IDLE.  But what if you are the type of guy that doesn’t want to go back to the doctor at regular intervals, gets a clean bill of health and says “wahoo!” down the steps of the doctor’s office, what then?

More from the Journal:
The panel calls for large clinical trials and registries to identify and track slow-growing lesions to study their progression. But first, patients and physicians will need to overcome the temptation to treat them immediately.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?  D0es it sound like a certain syphilis study at Tuskegee?

In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks.  It was called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.”

The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease.  The study was conducted without the benefit of patients’ informed consent.  Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue.  In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance.  Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years.

Tuskegee-syphilis-study_doctor_injects_subject_with_placebo

The federal government has once again seen fit to deem the public at large as human guinea pigs.  This is infuriating.  How dare they intrude into the inner sanctum of my body and decide what I should do with my health.  My body, my health, my decision.  (Isn’t this the argument we hear over and over again for abortion?)  I get the privilege of paying for these studies, and now I could possibly be the unwilling science experiment that they want?  And before long, someone we know is going to be diagnosed with IDLE, and we are going to be faced with telling them the heartbreaking truth of what that means.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s Health Rationer in Chief, is probably jumping for joy over this report.  Actually, he probably penned it himself.

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