more under-reporting the side-effects of medication

CANCER is bad news, and Lung Cancer is especially bad because survival rates are not what people have been led to believe they are.  Wikipedia tells us that, “Worldwide, lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death in men and women, and was responsible for 1.56 million deaths annually, as of 2012“.  And according to our own government’s National Caner Institutes (SEER Stat Fact Sheets: Lung and Bronchus Cancer) the five-year survival rate is only about 17% — certainly not as severe as PANCREATIC CANCER, but poor nonetheless.   Although the moral of the story is “DON’T SMOKE“, that is not what this post is about. 

Do you remember when I showed you, via the peer-reviewed scientific literature, that the side-effects of medications and procedures are under-reported by somewhere between 90 and 99% (HERE)?  This simply should not be happening in our ‘enlightened’ age of “EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE” — and certainly not to this magnitude or extent.   Unfortunately for patients, clicking the previous link will reveal incidence after incidence after incidence of Under-reporting, OVER-TESTING, DATA FUDGING, INVISIBLE & ABANDONED STUDIES, “PRESS RELEASES” disguised to look like science, FINANCIAL CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST, HYPE, and OUTRIGHT FRAUD within the scientific medical community.

The study, published in the latest edition of JAMA Oncology (Hospitalizations During Systemic Therapy for Metastatic Lung Cancer: A Systematic Review of Real World vs Clinical Trial Outcomes) by a team of medical oncologists, led by Dr. Dr. Monika Krzyzanowska of Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto, let us know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  After searching medical databases for studies that met criteria, they compared five clinical trials (clinical trials are where you are reporting to the FDA to get your drug approved) to five studies that involved giving chemo in a “real world” setting.  The results can be seen in the red highlighted statement at the top of the page. 

Dr. K’s takeaway?  “I think the low-hanging fruit is that clinical trials should start reporting hospitalizations.”    With billions of dollars at stake, don’t expect things to change any time soon — except to get worse.  As is always the case, make sure you are LOOKING OUT FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY, and doing your own research when it comes to health-related matters.