Lies, damn lies and statistics

I will delay my rant about radiotherapy for another day, and say more about Jane Plant's book that has rekindled my anger about conventional cancer treatment.

Should I as a Christian be angry?

I think of Wilberforce and the slave trade. In his day there must have been discussions amongst slave owners of the cost benefits of providing good food and health care for ones slaves. Yesterday I was reading cost benefit studies for radiotherapy! The cost benefit could easily have shown things such as a 3% increased return on investment if one provided better food for slaves, just as today's chemotherapy could provide Jan with a 3% risk reduction. But Wilberforce saw that was irrelevant, and in his anger saw through to the abolition of slavery.

Similarly I want to see a change from concentrating on almost useless conventional treatment to more effective lifestyle changes.

Jane Plant says similar things, she has re-enforced my view. How can the established medical service be so blinded to what I see as obvious? Is it our enforced multi-culturalism, whereby we cannot say something is wrong? For example the formal guides Jan has on aftercare list diet, acupuncture, meditation, Yin and Yang, Yoga, exercise, visualisation, aromatherapy etc. all as valid. No wonder diet does not stick out if mixed with quackery....

I am not knocking Professor Sir Richard Peto's statistics or work at all, I quote him as the UK's most authoritative source of UK cancer mortality statistics, the Peto method of meta analysis is named after him. But when he says chemotherpy adds a 3% benefit and we are making progress towards a cure do politicians understand that 3% is next to nothing???? Is it that because it is so close to UK target inflation figures they think 3% is goodness? It is the result of something like 50 years research and billions invested, and in my opinion rubbish!

Or is it that folk don't understand statistics? Jane suggests that reason.

I had said just by surgery Jan's chances of healthy life for at least 5 years was 4 in 5, and with conventional treatment we are trying to extend that to 6 in 7. Sounds good??? Or does it? Take Jane's airline example. Suppose you were off to Greece for a holiday tomorrow. There was a choice of seven flights, all leaving that day and scheduled for Greece. Suppose intelligence said one plane had a terrorist bomb on board and would explode that day, killing all its passengers. Would you still fly that day knowing you had a 6 in 7 chance of being OK?

Is that why a 6 in 7 chance is unacceptable to Jane and me, we are so close to the risk, albeit for me it is in a spouse? Yet for an Oxford university professor who has worked on cancer stats for the last 33 years it is old hat and acceptable. Not that I wish to discredit Sir Richard Peto, he was the first to demonstrate the magnitude of the growing worldwide epidemic of tobacco deaths.

So I stay in anger, I trust justifiably. I see another book coming to balance any bias by Jane,

"Foods to fight cancer" by Richard Beliveau. Richard is a leading authority in the field of cancer research. He holds the Chair in the Prevention and Treatment of Cancer at the University of Quebec at Montreal, where he is a professor of biochemistry. He is the director of the Molecular Medicine Laboratory of UQAM—Sainte-Justine Hospital (Centre de cancérologie Charles-Bruneau) and is also a professor of surgery at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal.

I like his french name! Lets see.