I have good news and I have bad news.

The Bad News: The year was 1969 when President Richard Nixon declared 'The War on Cancer'. It's now been 40 years and over $50 billion has been spent on this 'war'. What do we have to show for it? Nothing. No cure. No promise of a cure. In fact, according to an article published in October 21, 2009 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and which was announced in The New York Times, we might be moving backwards in our noble but misdirected efforts:

"The American Cancer Society, which has long been a staunch defender of most cancer screening, is now saying that the benefits of detecting many cancers, especially breast and prostate, have been overstated", the NY Times article states.

"We don't want people to panic,"said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical office of the American Cancer Society. "But I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated."

The article goes on to state that both breast and prostate cancer screening

"Have a problem that runs counter to everything people have been told about cancer: They are finding cancers that do not need to be found because they would never spread and kill or even be noticed if left alone. That has lead to a huge increase in cancer diagnoses because without screening, those innocuous cancers would go undetected."

Said Dr. Barnett Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), "'The issue here is, as we look at cancer medicine over the last 35 or 40 years, we have always worked to treat cancer or to find cancer early. said. 'And we never sat back and actually thought, 'Are we treating the cancers that need to be treated?'"

"And those cancers," he said, "are the reason screening has the problem called overdiagnosis - labeling innocuous tumors cancer and treating them as though they could be lethal when in fact they are not dangerous.

"Overdiagnosis is pure, unadulterated harm," Dr. Kramer is quoting as saying.

As I read this article, I couldn't help but think, 'What are these doctors and researchers NOT saying?'

• How many women have unnecessarily had their breasts removed for "overdiagnosed" breast cancer?
• How many women, or worse, their daughters, have had prophylactic or preventive, bilateral radical mastectomy?
• How many women have died from the toxic "side effects" of chemotherapy and radiation therapy for cancers and tumors that didn't need to be treated?
• How many men have had to undergo prostate surgery and chemotherapy, and had their lives irrevocably changed or possibly died from these potentially unnecessary procedures?

The point is truly brought home when the JAMA article's lead author, Dr. Laura Esserman, [Department of Surgery and Radiology, University of California, San Francisco and director of the Carol Frank Buck Breast Care Center there] is quoted as saying: "Just like everything in medicine, there is no free lunch. For every intervention, there are complications and problems."

The Good News: Science has now shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that engaging in a healthy lifestyle is the best way to avoid or prevent cancer and the best prognosis for beating cancer, should you develop it.

You can do it!

Yours in health, Dr. Paul

PS. Coming up next: The "gene therapy" bubble has burst.