The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter November/December 2002,Volume 7, No. 6 WOMEN'S FREEDOM NETWORK TOWNHALL MEETING Disrupting Medical Misinformation by Sally Satel, M.D. A practicing psychiatrist, Sally Satel is a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, and is the W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her articles have been published in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

A bout a year ago, Patricia Ireland predicted that the toxicity of women's breasts would be one of the major political issues of this new millennium. She, along with California Democratic Representative Nancy Policey, leaders of the San Francisco based Breast Cancer Fund, and other advocacy groups, gathered on Capitol Hill to announce the formation of the National Breast Cancer Prevention Campaign (NBCPC). NBCPC includes about 60 women's health organizations and its mission is to address this toxic problem.

As Patricia Ireland stated, there are hundreds of synthetic chemicals in breast milk. We are poisoning the earth and women are dying because of it. Andrea Martin of the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco told the audience that rates of breast cancer are increasing and demanded "We have a right to know what chemicals we are carrying around in our breasts."

Politicians are subject to their fraudulent moral authority, while the rest of us are subject to victim politics creeping into health.

At the Capitol Hill event, Ireland, Martin and the NBCPC demanded that there be more federal funding for research into the role of a particular class of synthetic chemicals called endocrine disrupters. Supposedly, these chemicals interfere with human hormones, specifically with estrogens, and cause a range of defects such as breast cancer.

However, the dispassionate facts tell a different story. First, the death rate for breast cancer has been declining for several years since the mid 1980's, and the incidence is increasing only for the less advanced stages of breast cancer. This means that women are being screened more regularly and their cancers are being caught earlier. But this type of good news is not being shared with the public by such groups as NBCPC.

Second, the endocrine disrupters theory has been discredited. The theory holds that estrogen like chemicals in pesticides and other human manmade products are leaked into the soil where they become more powerful and more potent in synergies. They can then disrupt the endocrine function of humans and other animals. However, it was found that estrogens are available naturally in vegetables, nuts and fruits. We eat them in far greater Concentrations. Because they exist in the environment there have been many regulations passed to limit their presence. Moreover, the researchers who first reported the estrogen disrupters theory later retracted their findings because they could not replicate their study and findings. But, this did not stop the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, head of the EPA and close Al Gore ally, in 1998 required companies to develop testing and screening guidelines for endocrine disrupters.

Certainly research and preventable causes of breast cancers are logical, but the preoccupation with these manmade estrogen disrupters was a triumph of junk science. Nevertheless, Al Gore is poised to view women's health as a victim of male indifference. He wrote the doomsday introduction to the 1996 book Our Stolen Future which popularized the estrogen disrupters theory. During Gore's campaign he said, "Throughout my career I have fought for more research funds for diseases considered to be less important because they only befell women, such as breast cancer. I pledge to you. Women's health will be at the top of my agenda."

While it is hard to imagine what more Al Gore could do, here are some facts about what has been done. Women represented 62 percent of the more than six million participants in NIH funded research in 1997.

To the contrary, a researcher from John's Hopkins showed evidence that breast cancer was among the five conditions most generously funded. But this type of good news is not being shared with the public.

Breast cancer research has traditionally received more money than any other type of cancer research each year since 1985, which was the first year that the National Cancer Institute began keeping track of disease specific funding. Breast cancer also receives considerable funding compared to other diseases, not just other forms of cancer. The New England Journal of Medicine last year published an article by a researcher from John's Hopkins showing that breast cancer was among the five conditions most generously funded. Also, women's health receives considerable Congressional attention. For example, Congress has passed special bills, commonly referred to as body part legislation, that would pay for reconstructive surgery from mastectomies. What we do not see is comparative body part legislation for men's problems.

The women's health movement is fueled by misinformation and aggrievement. It is well organized and almost no one seems willing to refute their faulty facts except for a handful of people. Also, there is If Gore becomes president he would seize on the misinformation and continue with victim politics.