healthy4u: complementary/ alternative medicine

The Dangers of Big Corporate Health Care: Deceptive Marketing of Cancer Treatments

A series of articles over the last few months, culminating in an <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/06/us-usa-cancer-ctca-idUSBRE9250L820130306">investigative report </a>by Reuters, provided the newest example of what can go wrong when corporations provide direct care to vulnerable patients.  In this case, the vulnerable patients had cancer, and the corporation that provided them care was the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA).  I will try to go through the case chronologically. As Rueters reported, CTCA "was founded in 1988 by Richard J. Stephenson, who has been chairman ever since." The Founder's Checkered Past A Misdemeanor As Reuters noted, <blockquote class="tr_bq">A graduate of Northwestern University Law School, Stephenson started out as an investment banker. In 1966 he became a trustee of Americans Building Constitutionally, an organization that helped wealthy individuals set up not-for-profit corporations and personal trusts to avoid paying federal income and inheritance taxes. In 1969, a California state court found the group's top official and six others guilty of grand theft or conspiring to commit grand theft. Stephenson had pleaded no contest to false advertising, a misdemeanor, and testified for the state, according to media reports at the time.</blockquote> Allegations of Use of Unproven Cancer Treatments Stephenson seemingly stayed out of trouble until 1975, but <blockquote class="tr_bq">Stephenson ventured into healthcare in 1975, when he and partners bought Zion-Benton Hospital in Zion, Illinois, renaming it American International Hospital. By the late 1980s, American International was facing financial problems and its 'reputation had been severely damaged' by local press reports about its use of unproven cancer treatments, according to a 2004 court opinion on a successful petition by a former CTCA president seeking an increased valuation for his share of the company.</blockquote> CTCA: No More Unsubstantiated Claims Apparently around the time American International Hospital starting having major troubles, Stephenson branched out, <blockquote class="tr_bq">In 1988, Stephenson founded CTCA. He was motivated, said CEO Bonner, by the difficulty he had identifying and obtaining the best therapies for his mother after she developed bladder cancer. She died in 1982.</blockquote> By 1996, CTCA got into trouble too,   <blockquote class="tr_bq">Cancer Treatment Centers of America got in trouble with regulators in 1996, when the Federal Trade Commission accused it of, among other things, presenting survival claims it couldn't support. The company entered into a consent decree with the FTC and, without admitting any of the allegations, agreed not to make unsubstantiated outcomes claims.</blockquote> "Unscientific Therapies" As far as I can tell, all was then quiet until 2012.  Late that year, a Forbes columnist <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/12/31/making-a-profit-from-offering-ineffective-therapies-to-cancer-patients/">wrote</a>, <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Alongside standard, science-based cancer therapies, CTCA also offers an array of questionable, unscientific therapies, which it proudly labels as part of its 'integrative cancer treatment.'  <a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-treatments.cfm">CTCA advertises many such treatments</a>, including: <div style="padding-left: 30px;">* Acupuncture * Acupressure * Chiropractic * <a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/complementary-alternative-medicine/naturopathic-medicine.cfm">Naturopathy</a> * <a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/complementary-alternative-medicine/naturopathic-medicine.cfm">Homeopathy</a> * Mind-Body medicine (including Reiki and Qi Gong)</div> None of the treatments in this list has any scientific support showing that they provide a benefit to cancer patients.  Some of them carry a real risk of harm, as I’ve written about previously.</blockquote> He further charged, <blockquote class="tr_bq">CTCA makes multiple unsupported, unscientific claims for its alternative treatments, such as: <ul><li>'<a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/brain-cancer/naturopathic-medicine.cfm">Naturopathic medicine can help</a> reduce these [cancer-related] symptoms, strengthen the immune system and support the healing process throughout your brain cancer treatment.'</li><li>'<a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/complementary-alternative-medicine/acupuncture.cfm">Acupuncture may help</a> to alleviate [cancer] treatment-related side effects, such as nausea and vomiting.'</li><li>'<a href="http://www.cancercenter.com/leukemia/chiropractic-care.cfm">When used during your leukemia treatment</a>, our chiropractic care services can help correct bone, muscle and joint problems and restore nerve function.' </li></ul>These are just a few examples. These claims, and CTCA’s marketing of the therapies involved, present a huge ethical problem. </blockquote> Manipulated Survival Statistics Then, in March 2012, the Reuters investigative reporters <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/06/us-usa-cancer-ctca-idUSBRE9250L820130306">charged</a> that CTCA manipulated its survival statistics to make its results look better. <blockquote class="tr_bq">CTCA reports on its website that the percentage of its patients who are alive after six months, a year, 18 months and longer regularly tops national figures. For instance, 60 percent of its non-small-cell lung cancer patients are alive at six months, CTCA says, compared to 38 percent nationally. And 64 percent of its prostate cancer patients are alive at three years, versus 38 percent nationally. Such claims are misleading, according to nine experts in cancer and medical statistics whom Reuters asked to review CTCA's survival numbers and its statistical methodology. The experts were unanimous that CTCA's patients are different from the patients the company compares them to, in a way that skews their survival data. It has relatively few elderly patients, even though cancer is a disease of the aged. It has almost none who are uninsured or covered by Medicaid - patients who tend to die sooner if they develop cancer and who are comparatively numerous in national statistics. Carolyn Holmes, a former CTCA oncology information specialist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said she and others routinely tried to turn away people who 'were the wrong demographic' because they were less likely to have an insurance policy that CTCA preferred. Holmes said she would try to 'let those people down easy.' Equally significant, CTCA includes in its outcomes data only those patients 'who received treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness' - patients who have the ability to travel to CTCA locations from the get-go, without seeking local treatment first. That means excluding, for example, those who have exhausted treatment options closer to home and arrive at a CTCA facility with advanced disease. Accepting only selected patients and calculating survival outcomes from only some of them 'is a huge bias and gives an enormous advantage to CTCA,' said biostatistician Donald Berry of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.</blockquote> Furthermore, <blockquote class="tr_bq">CTCA also appears to exclude the vast majority of its patients when it calculates survival data. In survival results from 2004 to 2008 posted on its website, CTCA reported 61 patients with advanced prostate cancer, 97 with advanced breast cancer, 434 with advanced lung cancer, and 165 with advanced colon or rectal cancer. These are the four most common solid tumors. In the same period, CTCA treated thousands of patients at its Zion facility alone, according to filings with state regulators. 'We agree that some of our sample sizes' are small 'and have always stated this as a limitation of our study,' said Xiong, the consultant to CTCA. 'I'd have some concerns about why and wonder if some cherry-picking was going on,' said Spectrum Health's Campbell. Moreover, while the standard reporting period for cancer survival is five years after diagnosis, CTCA on its website doesn't go that far; for the four most common tumors, it reports survival up to four years at most. And as Reuters found, the company's advantage often diminishes as the five-year mark approaches </blockquote>  The Founder's Checkered Present By the way, also in the last few months, watchdog groups have asked for an investigation of CTCA's founder for possible deceptive actions that might have violated US election laws.  In December, 2012, the Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/freedomworks-tea-party-group-nearly-falls-apart-in-fight-between-old-and-new-guard/2012/12/25/dd095b68-4545-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html">reported </a> <blockquote class="tr_bq">In the weeks before the election, more than $12 million in donations was funneled through two Tennessee corporations to the FreedomWorks super PAC after negotiations with [CTCA Founder Richard J] Stephenson over a preelection gift of the same size, according to three current and former employees with knowledge of the arrangement. </blockquote>Then, <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Two watchdog groups last week asked the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to investigate the donations from the two Tennessee companies. The groups, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, say the arrangement could violate federal laws that prohibit attempting to hide the true source of a political contribution by giving it under another name.</blockquote> Summary In summary, there are now charges in the media that Cancer Treatment Centers of America manipulated its survival data to makes its advertised results appear better, while it also advertises unproven complementary and alternative medicine treatments  as effective.  In the past the company had signed a consent decree not to make (presumably any more) unsubstantiated claims.  Meanwhile, the company's founder, who has a past history of a no contest plea to false advertising, and who had previously run a hospital system also charged with making unsupported survival claims, has been accused of hiding political donations. Thus this organization, run by someone who has his own history of deception, has been found to make exaggerated and/or unsubstantiated advertising claims of several types and at different times.  These claims could attract vulnerable patients who perhaps could get better care elsewhere, possibly leading to excess morbidity and even early mortality.  So Cancer Treatment Centers of America seems to be the latest reason to worry about the laissez faire US system which allows lightly regulated for-profit corporations to provide direct "care" to our most vulnerable patients.   We have recently discussed how a for-profit hospital chain may have been over treating some patients and under treating others, possibly risking patients' health to increase revenues (look <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/08/paging-doctor-ebdita-how-private-equity.html">here</a>);  how for-profit hospice corporations by enrolling patients who do not actually have terminal illness for palliative care only  could be denying potentially curative treatment to curable patients (look<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/hospices"> here</a>); and how for-profit mental health clinics and drug treatment centers could be providing shoddy, and potentially dangerous care to boost revenues (look <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/07/private-equity-vs-patient-care-bainful.html">here</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/03/deadly-over-doses-and-private-equity.html">here</a>). We will see if the newest part of the pattern of news reports about CTCA and its founder, coupled with reports about other for-profit health care corporations that provide direct care to vulnerable patients provoke any official action.  However, the pattern is substantial enough so that it should make all health care professionals and all patients  reconsider whether ever to trust a for-profit hospital system, hospital, clinic or other site providing direct health care to patients. On a policy level, as I have said before,....   In my humble opinion, before the health care bubble bursts, we need to challenge the notion that direct health care should ever be provided, or that medicine ought to be practiced by for-profit corporations. Before market fundamentalism became so prominent, many states prohibited the corporate practice of medicine, and the American Medical Association <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2007/12/relman-in-jama-on-threats-to-physicians.html">forbade the commercialization of medicine.</a>  It is time to heed that wisdom. I submit that we will not be able to have good quality, accessible health care at an affordable price until we restore physicians as independent, ethical health care professionals, and until we restore small, independent, community responsible, non-profit hospitals as the locus for inpatient care.

The Dangers of Big Corporate Health Care: Deceptive Marketing of Cancer Treatments

A series of articles over the last few months, culminating in an investigative report by Reuters, provided the newest example of what can go wrong when corporations provide direct care to vulnerable p…

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11 Mar 2013

Steve Jobs: Computer Geniuses and Medical Mysticism, a Very Bad Combination

Brilliant computer innovators may not be so brilliant in all domains. It is <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001283/">well known</a>, and well documented for many decades, that pancreatic cancer is often extremely aggressive and detected relatively late due to lack of early symptoms. Its detection should lead to aggressive treatment ASAP, such as radiation/chemotherapy or the <a href="http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/promise/pancreatic?ibp-adgroup=google&utm_source=eruptr&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pom_panc_whipple_proc">Whipple procedure</a>, if the person is to survive. I consider this tragic: <blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/technology/book-offers-new-details-of-jobs-cancer-fight.html">Jobs Tried Exotic Treatments to Combat Cancer, Book Says</a> New York Times Steve Lohr Oct. 21, 2011 ... His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private ... Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine. (Per <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Jobs-questioned-authority-all-apf-1873950574.html?x=0">Yahoo finance)</a> ... he also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, the book says, before finally having surgery in July 2004. </blockquote> I would replace the term "doctor" above with the onomatopoeia imitating the noise made by females of the species <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallard">Anas platyrhynchos</a>. Medical mysticism and "alternative therapies" may have their place, especially in hypochondriacs and for relatively minor problems (in my view, via the placebo effect), but not in dire, well studied conditions such as cancer of the pancreas. A brilliant computer entrepreneur, one of the world's best, may have been unnecessarily lost due to the seduction of medical mysticism. In such diseases, sadly, an Apple a day does not keep the doctor - or the grim reaper - away. -- SS 10/22/11 Addendum: This story has a personal angle of sorts to it. In the early 1970's when I began my fascination with computers, I became friends with Hank, a brilliant computer programmer and fellow ham radio enthusiast, shown stting in this picture from the George Washington High School (Phila., PA) 1973 yearbook in front of our high school's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--l7FhoXZb4">DEC PDP-8/S</a>: <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIzhDFLM7nnYVAvQKYf2viVCS-V77LJbVWCxojxWZGS42BWuK4OTbPmcUFaujHbzDFTKGEfw8hpE4BLHrg3ExFa7yi2DqW-45C2j_IHzx9JNiTnM65FZLc0vy3aAjkY6LjaRc4kAqTpbS1/s1600/gw-pdp8s.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5666315868221160882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIzhDFLM7nnYVAvQKYf2viVCS-V77LJbVWCxojxWZGS42BWuK4OTbPmcUFaujHbzDFTKGEfw8hpE4BLHrg3ExFa7yi2DqW-45C2j_IHzx9JNiTnM65FZLc0vy3aAjkY6LjaRc4kAqTpbS1/s320/gw-pdp8s.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 320px;" /></a>Me (standing, right), Eric Benshetler (standing, left), and Hank O'Neill (sitting), 1973. <div style="text-align: left;"> Hank had a distrust of medicine. I last saw him when I was in Residency, when he visited my home to see my ham radio setup. He became a programmer working on military weapons systems, the B1B bomber I was told. I was told this, unfortunately, at his funeral just a few years ago. He'd developed a severe respiratory infection and tried to "tough it out." He died at home, apparently of pneumonia. A few dollars worth of antibiotics would probably have saved him. At the funeral, his friends told me he spoke occasionally of his former computer friend who'd gone into medicine. I was quite sad at his funeral. All he'd needed to have done would have been to call me. I'm sure I could have talked him into treatment. -- SS </div></div>

Steve Jobs: Computer Geniuses and Medical Mysticism, a Very Bad Combination

Brilliant computer innovators may not be so brilliant in all domains. It is well known, and well documented for many decades, that pancreatic cancer is often extremely aggressive and detected relativ…

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22 Oct 2011

University Board Defeats Proposal for Chiropractic School

University Board Defeats Proposal for Chiropractic School

See the story here about the defeat of the proposed school of chiropractic at Florida State University. It isn't clear whether this decision was made on epistemological grounds.…

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27 Jan 2005

A School of Chiropractic for Florida State?

The Florida state legislature and Governor Jeb Bush have <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6835571/">approved a proposal to set up a school of chiropractic at Florida State University</a>. The President of the State Senate conceded that "political patronage" was behind the proposal. Such a school would become the first school of chiropractic affiliated with a major US university. In response, some Florida State faculty members have been distributing a satiric map of the future university campus, including a Bigfoot Institute, School of Astrology, and Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory. The creation of the new school is now up to the University Board of Governors. Here is a pithy comment from Prof. Norman Levitt, author of Higher Superstition: <blockquote>"I found this story very disturbing because of its implications for scientific medicine in an era swamped by politicians who are not very bright and "alternative" hucksters who are very adept at taking advantage of that kind of stupidity. I think the chiropractic school at FSU (or any major university for that matter) has to be stopped dead in its tracks. I don't think physicians and scientists should be at all coy about putting forth the argument that there's a vast gulf between science--even highly speculative science--and pseudoscietific dogma of whatever persuasion. It would be too much to expect most pols to become epistemologically sophisticated, of course, but maybe it will penetrate that there are, eventually, painful social and economic costs to trampling on scientific judgment in the name of pet theories." </blockquote>

A School of Chiropractic for Florida State?

The Florida state legislature and Governor Jeb Bush have approved a proposal to set up a school of chiropractic at Florida State University. The President of the State Senate conceded that "political …

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18 Jan 2005