Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...free man's right to choose his own assassin." Twain's fulmination is now being echoed by contemporary opponents of the medical establishment. Championing Laetrile, their painless apricot-pit panacea, they are insisting that Americans should be allowed a "freedom of choice" to pick their own cancer therapy...
...America, where citizens relied less on Government and were in turn less encumbered by it-paying fewer taxes, able to build on their property without restriction, allowed to bear whatever firearms they wished. The crusade also has a basically humanistic ring. For all the progress in the war against cancer, medicine's advances have seemed agonizingly slow to many people, especially to this killer disease's victims and their desperate families. Finally, the Government's fervent opposition to Laetrile, barring it even to the terminally ill, seems not only cruel but fundamentally contradictory. The nimblest Washington lawyers...
...gynecological examinations in order to regain control, as they put it, of their own bodies from the male-dominated medical profession. Vastly different ideologies may be at play, but these grievances express a common discontent with officially proclaimed wisdom about public health. Though he himself is suffering from cancer (and refuses to take Laetrile), Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the witty editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has said it well: "Forbidden fruits are mighty tasty, and especially to those who hope that a bite will be life-giving...
Unfortunately, as innocent as such a solution may seem, it is filled with as many perils as, well, a 19th century medicine man's wagon. In the case of cancer, quack remedies involve more than bustled ladies sipping alcohol-laced Lydia Pinkham's compound or husky baldpates rubbing themselves with hair-growth oil. They are a cruel hoax that distracts cancer patients from possibly effective therapy. Even if it were accompanied by a caveat, an FDA stamp of approval for Laetrile would draw still more cancer patients away from conventional treatment-with disastrous consequences. Says Dr. Vincent DeVita...
Even in our own day, medical ideas change as often as skirt lengths. Until recently, U.S. doctors almost always insisted on re moving the breast when cancer occurred there. Now, under pres sure from women horrified by the prospect of such mutilation, they are finally beginning to restrain their scalpels and try al ternatives, notably radiation therapy, that have long been fa vored by European doctors. Similarly, many doctors are now having second thoughts about the value of hysterectomies, which are about as common as tonsillectomies...