January 8, 2016::End of the day round-up (pg 2)

You’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer. How soon do you need treatment?

When a patient with breast cancer comes in to see me, not infrequently I have to reassure her that she doesn’t need to be wheeled off to the operating room tomorrow, that it’s safe to wait a while. One reason, of course, is that it takes years for a cancer to grow from a single cell to a detectable mass. The big question, of course, is: What is “a while”? Two studies published online last month attempt to answer that question. One study (Bleicher et al) comes from Fox Chase Cancer Center and examines the effect of time to surgery on breast cancer outcomes; the other (Chavez-MacGregor et al) is from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and examines the effect of time to chemotherapy on outcome. Both find a detrimental effect due to delays in treatment.
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I realize that these two studies are about as close to “Well, duh!” studies as there are. Of course, delaying surgery for breast cancer is not a good thing. Of course, delaying chemotherapy when it’s indicated is also not a good thing. These are results that are not unexpected. However, these studies are still very important because they give us estimates of how much of a delay is safe and at what point delaying care starts to have a measurable impact on patient outcomes. Putting the results of these studies together suggests that it’s best to do surgery within about 60 days in patients not needing chemotherapy first, and that for patients with disease lacking the estrogen and progesterone receptor it’s best to start chemotherapy within 90 days of surgery.
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This sort of analysis is also yet another bit of data demonstrating that conventional treatments work. After all, if a conventional treatment didn’t work, it wouldn’t matter how long you waited to administer it. For instance, if you treated a woman with breast cancer with homeopathy right away, the results would be the same if you waited 120 days. I’ve discussed examples of patients who paid a steep price for their delaying effective treatments for their cancers, beginning with breast cancer patients over eleven years ago and a man I encountered as a resident with rectal cancer who had turned himself orange with megadoses of carrots trying to treat his disease. We also know that the use of alternative medicine as a primary treatment in breast cancer is associated with recurrence and death. Using alternative therapy for breast cancer is a good way to die when you don’t have to or to die sooner than you would otherwise. Refusing surgery also results in death.

Jehovah’s Witnesses Say God Used a Typhoon to Deliver Sand for the Building of a New Kingdom Hall

In the latest episode of the Jehovah’s Witness’ online show JW Broadcasting, construction overseer Travis Brooks explains how sand was hard to come by when his team was building a new hall. But Jehovah answered their prayers by way of a supernatural disaster.

Raif Badawi supporters to give petition to Saudi embassy in London

Supporters of Raif Badawi, the jailed Saudi activist and blogger, plan to hand over a petition with 250,000 signatures to the Saudi embassy in London on Friday [today] calling for his release.

A separate petition for the release of Badawi’s lawyer, Waleed Abu al-Khair, will also be handed over to mark a year since Badawi received 50 lashes in a public square in Jeddah. He was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for insulting Islam.

Meet Marco Rubio's 'Religious Liberty Advisory Board'

Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign has announced its creation of a Religious Liberty Advisory Board that includes Religious Right legal and political activists, including academics and some big names, like Rick Warren of Saddleback Church.

The list could be seen as a response by Rubio’s campaign to last month’s closed-door meeting at which “dozens” of Religious Right leaders voted to rally behind his rival, Sen. Ted Cruz. But Rubio’s director of Faith Outreach, former Manhattan Declaration Executive Director Eric Teetsel, told World Magazine that “membership on the board doesn’t equal an endorsement of the GOP candidate, and the members could advise other campaigns if they wanted.”
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Also on Rubio’s advisory board are people affiliated with legal groups promoting Religious Right efforts to portray LGBT equality and religious liberty as incompatible, including Doug Napier and Kellie Fiedorek of Alliance Defending Freedom and Kyle Duncan, lead counsel for the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby, and former general counsel of the Becket Fund, which was once described in Politico as “God’s Rottweilers.”

Formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund, ADF is a heavyweight among Religious Right legal groups, and is spreading its anti-gay, anti-choice advocacy worldwide. Fiedorek argues that the “agenda to expand sexual liberty and redefine marriage” puts religious liberty in “great peril.” She has compared business owners who refuse to provide wedding-related services to same-sex couples to Rosa Parks.

ISIS’ War On Children

The reasons for indoctrinating children are both strategic and optic. By training and filming children along with its fighters, ISIS presents its brand of militancy as a family affair — and the family as integral to the state it’s created.
“Children are shown in propaganda videos for calculated psychological value,” Rachel Bryson writes in the Independent. “It aims to arouse global fear through portraying to the world that it is a powerful and fully-functioning state, fueling a multi-generational war.”

That fear seems deliberate on the part of ISIS, which has developed a specialized curriculum and camps to indoctrinate children into their extremist world view — and train them to defend it. Children of ISIS fighters and sympathizers are reared in ISIS’ ideology and trained to fight in camps far from their parents’ reach.