Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
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Money Taints Myeloma Research, Care
“They (oncologists) really are falsifying the information that others (MM patients like me) rely on to assess that research,”
Evidence-based research is the cornerstone of myeloma research and treatment. Study after study has shown that cancer research in general and myeloma research specifically, is biased when the researchers are compensated in any way.
Therefore, the challenge for MM survivors like me is to find “research” that isn’t tainted by payments made to the medical doctor or to his/her institution.
I consider myself a realist when it comes to financial disclosures. Money will always be a part of for-profit business. I don’t expect drug companies to police themselves. I don’t even expect medical journals to police the MDs who submit myeloma research for publication.
But I do expect oncologists to be fully transparent if they or their employer are recieving compensation.
I have no problem with oncologists who recieve compensation for myeloma research. Hell, they can wear big pharma logos on their white coats if they want to.
As a cancer survivor who researches and writes about all things cancer and who is trying desperately to manage his own cancer, all I am asking is that my oncologist be up front about what he/she is writing, recommending, prescribing, etc.
I wrote the Recommended Reading post, linked below, about not being able to trust conventional cancer research. And the examples are as relavent today as they were when I wrote the post years ago.
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Have you been diagnosed with cancer? What type, what stage? Are you trying to figure out your therapy plan? Scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
Thank you,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading:
- Oncologist’s Don’t Explain Blood Cancer Diagnosis, Therapies or Side Effects-
- Cancer Coaching-“Is my Oncologist Speaking a Foreign Language!?
- Why Cancer Patients Can’t Trust Conventional Cancer Research
What These Medical Journals Don’t Reveal: Top Doctors’ Ties to Industry
“One is dean of Yale’s medical school. Another is the director of a cancer center in Texas. A third is the next president of the most prominent society of cancer doctors.
These leading medical figures are among dozens of doctors who have failed in recent years to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals, according to a review by The New York Times and ProPublica and data from other recent research…
In all, the reporting system still appears to have many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago when it recommended fundamental changes in how conflicts of interest are reported. Those have yet to happen…
Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business. Studies have found that industry-sponsored research tends to be more positive than research financed by other sources. And that in turn can sway which treatments become available to patients…
The issue has gained traction since September, when Dr. José Baselga, who was the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, resigned after The Times and ProPublica reported that he had not revealed his industry ties in dozens of journal articles…
Dr. Carlos L. Arteaga, the director of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas, said he had “nothing to disclose” as an author of a 2016 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine of the breast cancer drug Kisqali, made by Novartis. But Dr. Arteaga had received more than $50,000 from drug companies in the three-year disclosure period, including more than $14,000 from Novartis…
Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, an associate vice president for research at the University of Utah, recently argued in JAMA, a leading medical journal, that researchers should face misconduct charges when they do not disclose their relationships with interested companies. “They really are falsifying the information that others rely on to assess that research,” he said. “Money is a very powerful influencer, and people’s opinions become subtly biased by that financial relationship…”
Conflicts of Interest Continue to Plague Oncology Guidelines and Research
“Financial relationships between health care providers and the pharmaceutical/medical device industry have been shown to influence published treatment recommendations.1 Conflicts of interest are prevalent, and particularly problematic, among authors of clinical practice guidelines,2,3 mainly because these become widely adopted by physicians. The issue is being complicated further by the diminishing government support for research — a hurdle that may steer researchers toward industry dollars…
Dodging conflicts of interest may be particularly tricky for junior faculty, as industry funding appears to be linked to indicators of academic success in this group. In the second study, the authors looked at 229 assistant professors from the top 10 cancer centers. The researchers included data on National Institute of Health (NIH) funding; industry funds listed in Open Payments from 2013 to 2017; conflicts of interest self-reported to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and American Society of Hematology (ASH) disclosures databases; and disclosure data from recent publications. The investigators measured a faculty member’s academic success by looking at their h-index and number of publications.”