You Can't Smell It, Taste It or See It, But It's Gotcha!
 
You may be living a time bomb and not even know it. In my younger years when I believed that "Doctor's knew it all!" My life went into a spiral of bad health but was able to overcome it later. But no this isn't about bad medicine but about your living space!
 
After selling our three story house and opting for a ground level one my husband didn't want to build another house, he's a retired building contractor, so he decided a manufactured home would be the way to go if we could find just the right one we could live with. We shopped for weeks looking at every manufactured home within 50 miles of us and found that right one
 
We moved into our beautiful new home with great expectations of spending our last years in comfort and enjoying it. We chose just the right floor plan for us with plenty of bedrooms for our grandchildren and children's visits, a large office for me to have my home business. Everything was just perfect and there is nothing like a new home and the fact that you are the first to live there and can do whatever you want with it.  Such a great feeling. This wasn't our first new home but we knew it would be our last one. Anticipating the serenity of the country where wild animals and beautiful blue skies are so very appreciated and enjoyed with evenings to relax sitting in the swing watching the clouds and birds and the gorgeous southwest sunsets. Short lived thoughts?  
 
October 3, 2001, three days after our move into our new home my husband and I became ill with what felt like a cold, which is totally out of character for either of us. We chalked it up to being overly tired from the moving and not eating regular meals nor taking our herbs and minerals as we usually do?
 
Two years later a small little sticker that was placed inside the corner of the kitchen cabinet became a huge little sticker and a possible death warrant! [CAUTION: Portions of this manufactured home may emit toxic fumes that can be dangerous to some. Cabinets, flooring, carpet, woods are prone to emit formaldehyde.]
 
The anticipation of peace soon became one of misery. My Meniere's vertigo and unsteadiness became so much worse, allergy symptoms were bothering me and fibromyalgia started kicking up as it had not since starting my herbs and minerals in 1995.  It seemed that my herbs and minerals had stopped working.  Most days I was extremely tired and had no energy and felt that I had digressed 30 years to the beginning of the fibromyalgia nightmare. My husband had two colds that first year in the house and he had only two colds in the whole of our 43 years of marriage. I reluctantly went to see my doctor for a physical and see what had happened. I worked at adjusting my herbs and mineral intake to try and compensate, with very little results. Did a huge cleansing session still the symptoms increased... After weeks and weeks of poking and prodding and thousands of dollars worth of tests the doctor said, "You should be as healthy as a horse as the tests are all perfectly normal!" Then I told him that I had begun to suspect my house was a toxic dump! His reply, "Why didn't you mention that before? Formaldehyde poisoning! There are no tests to determine that, but you better move out of your house immediately!"  I explained we didn't have that option so soon as we were still doing upgrades and landscaping along with finishing the porches and patio on the house.  Beside why would I put that problem on someone else? He then suggested that I take an extended vacation of a couple of months away from the house to prove absolutely that it was the house causing the problem.
 
I was in the throes of severe symptoms and had a full debilitating week making it impossible to leave immediately.  I finally was able to leave on October first - exactly one year after moving in - for seven weeks. By the end of the first three weeks the symptoms all disappeared, confirming my worst fear, and continued to be absent while I was gone.
 
I spent a lot of those weeks searching online and the library for information on environmental toxic poisoning and counteracting such problems. I learned several ways to minimize toxins in the house upon my return home. Lots of plants, etc. During my absence my husband purchased a sealer to cover carpet, cabinets and surfaces that is considered the worst offenders, that was suppose to stop the emissions of toxins, which was supposed to do the trick.
 
I returned home Thanksgiving week and within 24 hours the pain, allergic rhinitis, lethargy, pain and vertigo began again.  My husband immediately got an emergency permit to build an addition on the house that could keep me away from the toxins. I spent a lot of time outside away from the house to try and counter the problem...
 
Before the addition was completed we ran across a system that was purported to help with such toxic problems. An air filtration exchange unit that exchanges inside air for outside air every fifteen minutes and contains a infrared heat lamp that kills any bacteria that comes into the house from outside.  We had it installed and at the same time Dr. Wayne Garland upgraded the Mind Power to a more potent formula and with the new air exchange unit and starting the new formula, within a couple of days the vertigo disappeared. Being able to ambulate better made life easier to live and the pain and lethargy subsided after the filtration/purification system was installed a week later, making life bearable again. Symptoms continue to be absent until such time we forget to change the purification filter in a timely manner then I notice my plants looking sick and I become lethargic and pain begins to raise it's ugly head but once the filter is changed it's back to okay again!
 
It has been four years since those months of hell and moving into our new home and three years after installing the air purification system and starting the new Mind Power formula and I continue to feel well. I realize the toxins are still there and may at some point show their ugly head in something more sinister but for the time being I choose to live life and not dwell on it... I now meet a lot of people exhibiting toxic poisoning, after moving into a new home or new addition to their home, who have not put it together yet...
 
If you have moved into a new home or had a new addition put on a home and find you are experiencing more illness but your doctor can't find the cause, think about the possibility that it's your environment. 

Lena

This was to have concluded today but in order to spare you a really long article it will continue at least one more week!

MAMMOGRAPHY – THE HIDDEN DOWNSIDE - PART FIVE

Over-diagnosis is an acknowledged problem with screening mammography, leading to treatment that for some people may be both unnecessary and intrinsically damaging in its own right. The danger of a false positive reading, with all the attendant anxiety and ensuing interventions, is also always a risk in current screening mammography programs. Similarly, the real possibility of a false negative – a clean bill of health that turns out to be illusory – is inherent in screening mammography. Moreover, there is no guarantee whatever that a breast cancer identified by screening mammography will be curable.

Furthermore, as we have seen, for some premenopausal women, particularly those with node-positive disease, there is the additional danger that early diagnosis by means of mammography may actually reduce survival rather than extend it. It is worth noting that mammography screening for premenopausal women is not recommended in any other country except the US.

For older (postmenopausal) women, the benefits of mammography may be marginally greater, at least over time, although here again, there is a danger of over-diagnosis, and of high false positive (and negative) results.

Meanwhile, the debate over screening mammography continues unabated. The US medical profession continues to stand unwaveringly behind its recommendation that women aged 40 and up should undergo annual mammography. Just last month, for example, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a paper that made headlines all over the world. It claimed that mammography had been proven responsible for saving lives from breast cancer. It is therefore worth examining this report a bit more closely.

It should be borne in mind that this was not actually a new clinical trial. Instead, this study was based on what are called "computer modeling techniques" (i.e., statistical inferences and predictions based not on direct observations of patients but on computer simulations). These techniques were used to re-analyze seven prior studies of the effectiveness of mammography. In addition, no modifications or allowances were made in order to achieve consistency between the seven studies. Five out of the seven studies showed that mammography had contributed less to the decline in death rates than had improvements in treatment.

The most vocal proponents of screening mammography tend to claim that screening reduces the death rate by anywhere from 45 percent to 64 percent. However, in this study screening mammography was only found to have contributed approximately 15 percent to the decline in death rates from breast cancer, while improvements in treatment were found to have contributed approximately 19 percent (Berry 2005).

The usefulness of this study, and the validity of its conclusions, are further undermined by the fact that the sample population spanned the entire age range, from 30 to 79 years. No attempt was made to separate women into different age groups. As Professor Cornelia Baines of the University of Toronto pointed out, this is a particularly important omission since the natural history of the disease varies widely in different age groups. For women in the age group 30-49, mammography’s benefits are the most questionable of all – a fact that was entirely ignored by this study (Baines, personal communication).

Yet despite this latest favorable NEJM article and despite the incessant repetition of the "mammography saves lives" mantra, there is, astonishingly, still no consistent, substantial scientific evidence that regular mammography results in a significant reduction in mortality from breast cancer. In an important paper published in 2000 in the prestigious journal Lancet, Swedish researchers, working on behalf of the international Cochrane Review organization, reviewed the quality of the major mammography trials to date and came to the following conclusions:

"Screening for breast cancer with mammography is unjustified. If the trials are judged to be unbiased, the data show that for every 1000 women screened biennially throughout 12 years, one breast cancer death is avoided whereas the total number of deaths is increased by 6" (Gotzsche 2000).

In a paper examining the contradictory evidence concerning mammography screening, Steven Goodman, MD, a biostatistician at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Baltimore, MD, has written:

"If we take a step back, this controversy looks almost Swiftian when we consider that even under the most optimistic assumptions, mammography still cannot prevent the vast majority of breast cancer deaths….There will come a time when all the study patients have been followed up, all the analyses have been done, all the expert groups have met, and all the editorials have been written, and we still won’t be sure how much benefit and how much harm are caused by mammography. We must find good ways to help women deal with this uncertainty, for that time is imminent" (Goodman 2003).

The Role of Breast Self-Examination

So how can a woman prudently and effectively improve her chances of detecting breast cancer? What alternatives and adjuncts are there to annual mammography? What new developments are in the pipeline?

First, the value of a really thorough clinical breast examination (CBE) and breast self-examination (BSE) has been routinely downplayed and underestimated by the medical profession. A surprisingly high proportion of breast cancers are actually discovered by women themselves, without the aid of anything more high-tech than their own familiarity with the way their breasts feel, month by month. The American Cancer Society admitted some twenty years ago that almost 90 percent of all breast cancers were actually initially detected by women themselves (Ross 1987).

Although false positives do occur with clinical breast examinations, they are, perhaps surprisingly, less than half as common as they are with mammography. One study has shown that CBE is more sensitive (i.e., better able to detect abnormalities) than mammography in younger women with denser breast tissue. The same study found that CBE is better than mammography at detecting dangerous ‘interval’ cancers. Indeed, this study found that the combined use of CBE with mammography detected more abnormalities than either modality used alone (Elmore 1998).

The Canadian National Breast Cancer Screening study concluded that in women aged 50-59 years, "the addition of annual mammography screening to physical examination has no impact on breast cancer mortality." That is, even though mammography was able to detect cancers at a smaller size, before they became large enough to be detected by CBE or BSE, this still did not improve survival rates, because "the majority of the small cancers detected by mammography represent pseudo-disease or overdiagnosis" (Miller, 2000).

This is not to suggest that there is no place for mammography in the detection of breast cancer. Far from it. Mammography certainly does have a place, and a useful place. As a diagnostic tool, it is the best we currently have. However, screening and diagnosis are two entirely different things.

Screening is intended to pick up possible abnormalities in otherwise healthy individuals, whereas diagnosis is the method whereby an abnormality, often initially detected by screening is more closely examined in order to identify its true nature (i.e., what its origins are, and whether the abnormality is benign or malignant, for example). The characteristics that make a good screening test are not by any means the same as those that are needed for diagnostic purposes.

The judicious and selective use of an imaging technique as a diagnostic tool in patients who have already been identified as having a suspicious lesion is not at all the same thing as the blanket application of an imaging technique in the mass screening of an entire population.

In the headlong rush towards mass mammography, the value of really thorough clinical and self breast examination has been almost entirely eclipsed. As we have seen, there are distinct dangers and drawbacks to mass screening with mammography, and the standard recommendation of annual mammography for all women over 40 is badly in need of revision. Particularly in these younger women, in whom mammography is both more dangerous and less able to detect abnormalities, regular CBE and BSE are of great importance (Baines 1997; Epstein 2001).

 TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK.
 
--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.