Angela Lanfranchi, clinical assistant professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center, has written a most provocative article which was published last week in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. In the article, Dr. Lanfranchi accuses federal agencies and academicians of actually being impediments to women's rights to direct their health care and provides specific and alarming examples showing these agencies and individuals have suppressed information concerning the breast cancer risks of oral contraceptives and abortion.The article begins: "Informed patient consent for medical treatment is required by both law and medical ethics. Yet, both federal agencies and academicians are participating in the suppression of information about the heightened risk of breast cancer posed by oral contraceptives and induced abortion. There is historical precedent in the long-delayed acknowledgment of the smoking/lung cancer link...
"Informed consent is the process by which a patient can participate in choices about medical treatment. It originates from the legal and ethical right of the patient to direct what is done to her
body, and from the ethical duty of the physician to involve the patient in her medical care. Our federal government has become a barrier to informed consent concerning oral contraceptive drugs and induced abortion.
Both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a component of the NIH, have violated their mission statements..."
Examples of this irresponsible denial that Dr. Lanfranchi goes on to cite include:
1) A study in the journal Nature documenting fraud among NIH grantees;
2) Contradictory statements on the NCI's website about oral contraceptives as a cancer risk;
3) "Blatantly incorrect information" on the NCI's website saying that estrogen levels decrease during pregnancy, perhaps to avoid explaining why early first full term pregnancy reduces risk, but premature birth before 32 weeks and abortion raise risk;
4) Failure to admit during its 2003 workshop that the premature birth-breast cancer link is explained by the same hormonal changes that account for an abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link;
5) An NCI workshop leader who told CancerPage.com that she didn't want the ABC link to be included in the discussion of abortion's legality;
6) NCI directors who misled a reporter and a New Jersey State Senator;
7) A medical text that omits early full-term pregnancy as a means of prevention because having more than two children per woman is bad for the ecology; and
8) Breast cancer groups with political influence whose leaders have a conflict of interest because of strong connections to the abortion industry.
And an added note here -- Dr. Angela Lanfranchi knows her stuff. Her practice is devoted to the treatment of breast cancer and benign breast disease. She is a 1979 graduate of Georgetown Medical School, a Diplomat of the American Board of Surgery, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the American Society of Breast Surgeons. She has held an appointment as Clinical Assistant Professor of Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School since 1986.
Dr. Lanfranchi was the co-director of the Breast Center at Somerset Medical Center for 5 years. She is on the Expert Advisory Panel for the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners. She is collaborating with breast cancer researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center on work to discover the genomic basis for breast cancer as it relates to reproductive history. She has lectured nationally and internationally on breast cancer risk prevention to lay and medical audiences in her work with Breast Cancer Prevention Institute.
