Dr. Otis Brawley: 'The System Really Is Not Failing ... Failure Is The System'

(courtesy of Kaiser Health News) Anyone going to hear a speech by Dr. Otis Brawley might think he or she could easily predict what Brawley will say. Since he's the chief medical officer and executive vice president of the American Cancer Society, you might expect him to urge doctors to aggressively screen all their patients for cancer, and to aggressively treat them as well. You'd be wrong. At a recent Association of Health Care Journalists meeting in Atlanta (where Dr. Brawley also serves as a professor at Emory University), he slammed everyone in the health care system for overuse of under-proven treatments. These themes are also in his new book, How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick In America. Dr. Brawley's whole speech can be seen here, and here is a transcript of edited excerpts: I spend a lot of time as chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society worried about where trends are going and what's happening and trying to make sure that people actually focus on relevant pertinent things. So first thing I'm going to say is always keep in mind that the leading cause of cancer and indeed the leading cause of heart disease is tobacco usage. Also please keep in mind that the second leading cause of cancer is the combination of very little physical activity, bad diet, which usually means high caloric intake and obesity. At some point in time health care is going to so dominate commerce and so dominate costs in the United States, so dominate our economy it's going to cause our economy to collapse. What we've gone through in the last couple of years is going to be nothing compared to what we will go through when health care is 25 to 30 percent of every dollar spent in the United States. And that's only going to be in the next 10 to 15 years. We have an amazing health care system. Or I should say a health care system with amazing potential that it is not meeting. When we had the conversation about health care reform, I can remember some of the politicians talked about how great our health care system is. And I was thinking 'gee, we're 50th in life expectancy. We're 47th in infant mortality right. Countries such as Cuba do better than the United States in those.' There really is a subtle form of corruption in American health care. Who is at fault for this corruption? Quite honestly it's the doctors, it's the hospitals, it’s the hospital systems, it's the insurers. It's the drug companies, it's the lawyers and it's even the patients. Everyone is at fault for the fact that the system really is not failing. Quite honestly, failure is the system. We have doctors who want money. We have companies that want money, they give — those doctors give unnecessary chemotherapy. In my business those doctors give unnecessary surgeries and treatments, unnecessary imaging. They make promises about screening tests that we don't know. Then we have patients who consume too much health care. Patients who want things. We have patient families who are unable to accept that fact their comatose father with stage four, widely-metastatic prostate cancer, widely-metastatic lung cancer is dying. And they insist that everything be done. Actually in my book I talk about how I still think I have post-traumatic stress disorder from what I did as a 28-year-old second-year resident to a man who had widely metastatic lung cancer for whom the answer was: 'We need to try to keep him comfortable because he's dying.' But we kept him alive for an additional six weeks. And finally on the day that he died I was sitting at his bed — at the foot of his bed and I realized that he was on a ventilator. [I]t would be interesting to know what this guy would have thought of this, had he been able to think, because he was probably a redneck and I was this poor kid from Detroit sitting at the foot of his bed deciding how much air he would breathe in with every breath, how often he would breathe it, what his respiratory rate would be. [H]is family could not accept the fact that he was dying and what we should do is try to keep him comfortable. They continuously said we need to give this guy everything possible. We would say: 'Do you mean everything reasonable?' And they would say: 'Everything reasonable is everything possible.' That happens all the time. … [P]eople cannot accept that death is a part of life. Death is an imminent part of life. And so let's get back to how doctors promise people and indeed many of these people can't accept that folks die because we in medicine have subtly lied to them over the years and thought that we can do much more in medicine than we actually can do. We started widespread prostate cancer screening in the United States in 1990. It was 2010 that the first study actually was recorded that told us that prostate cancer screening might save lives. Dr. Otis Brawley So we did it for 20 years because some people thought it might save lives. [W]e in medicine told people it does save lives and you should get it. My own American Cancer Society recommended every man over 50 get prostate cancer screening, every black man over 40 back in 1992, without adequate scientific data. Of course the study in 2010, which is still questionable as to whether it saves lives, but the study actually suggests that it might, which was published with the study that suggests that prostate cancer screening actually increases the risk of death, by the way. The one study that suggests that it might save lives said that we had to treat 48 men in order to save one life. Prostate cancer treatment with radical prostatectomy in the United States has a one percent risk of death. You can kind of start doing the math. There's not a lot of people saved. [When I became] an assistant director at the National Cancer Institute and I have to go out [to a hospital] that is an NCI-designated cancer center. And there is the whole dog and pony show where they tell you how great the hospital is and how much service they do. This [hospital marketing] guy explained to me how if his hospital announced they were going to do free prostate cancer screening in six weeks at a particular mall, and they would screen the first 1,000 men who rolled up their sleeve and said 'please screen me' - men over 50. He explained to me how much free publicity they would get off of that announcement. And how much increased business their chest pain center would get off that announcement. How much increased business their breast screening service, their women's center would get off that announcement. If they screen 1,000 men, they'll have 145 abnormal. They're going to charge about $3,000 to figure out why each of the 145 abnormals is abnormal and that's how they charge for the free screening. Now with this mall about 10 of that 145 won't come to this hospital ... Now the 135 that they have, 45 will die of prostate cancer and the other percentage they're going to get radical prostatectomy at about $30,000 to $40,000 per case. With a percentage they're going to get [radioactive] seeds and about $30,000 a case. IMRT radiation therapy at the time was about $60,000 to $70,000. And then his business plan goes further. He knew how many guys are going to have so much incontinence that diapers don’t do it so he had in his business plan how many artificial sphincters the urologists were going to implant. And then he was a little apologetic because there is this new thing called Viagra on the market and that screwed up his estimate about how many penile implants he was going to sell because of guys who were upset about impotence due to prostate cancer treatment. This is 1998. [I said] if you screen 1,000 people how many lives are you going to save. He took his glasses off, looked at me like I was fool and he said ‘Don't you know nobody has ever shown that prostate cancer screening saves lives. I can't give you an estimate on that.’ Quite honestly, a whole bunch of doctors have drunk the Kool-Aid. They don't actually understand that prostate cancer screening may not save lives. The fact that some of them make money off them helps them to not understand, of course. And unfortunately doctors tend to confuse what they believe with what they know. That's actually something that we docs need to work on. We also need to realize that a profession is a group of people who puts its customers and the welfare of its customers above the welfare of members of the profession. A profession is a group of people who polices itself. That's one of the reasons why when a group of doctor professional organizations a couple of weeks ago announced these are tests that we are overdoing and we need to stop doing so often. I actually thought that was a good thing. We're starting to finally realize what the real meaning of the profession is. When I hear the politicians talk about death panels and rationing, we need to be talking about rational use of medicine. Not rationing but rational. And unfortunately that is not happening in the United States. There is this drug called Prilosec. Suppresses acid in the stomach. Great drug. AstraZeneca only had one problem. Eighteen-year patent. Four years left on the patent. Five billion dollar a year drug. Lots of money made off of Prilosec. ‘What's going to be our next multibillion dollar drug?’ Well they started this thing called 'operation shark fin,' the search for the next multibillion dollar drug. They couldn't find a new drug but they found a very smart chemist who knew a little bit of patent law. You see Prilosec when it was made is a big molecule and - not to get too much into the chemistry - there is really two chemicals there and they're mirror image isomers. Well, you have the pill Prilosec - the left suppresses acid, the right [side of the pill] your liver takes out sends it to the kidney and you urinate it out. But it’s the left [side] that's active. Well the smart chemist realized it's just one quick easy chemical step in the lab to do what your liver does for you. Separate left from right. And so they separated left from right, they did a series of studies that they sent to the FDA arguing that this new drug, which we have patented called Esomeprazole is equivalent to the old drug. And the FDA agreed that the new drug was equivalent to the old drug so the FDA approved it. It's equivalent in side effects, its equivalent in efficacy. And then they went to their marketing guys and they said how are we going to market this drug, the next multibillion dollar drug for AstraZeneca? And the marketing guy said 'we're going to package it as a big purple pill and then they said what are we going to call our next multibillion dollar drug? Let's screw them, let's call it Nexium.' Okay, now I happen to go to Costco yesterday. A pill of Nexium is $6. A pill of Prilosec is $1 and a pill of generic Prilosec is 35 cents. Okay. Now one of the ten most prescribed drugs in the United States today is Nexium. At $6 a day. But, all the science tells us it was FDA approved because it was equivalent to something that costs 35 cents a day. And we wonder why we have 18 percent of our GDP going towards health care. By the way, about $8,000 per man, woman and child is what health care costs in the United States today. The number two country, which is Switzerland, is a little less than $4,000. Switzerland is fourth among UN countries in life expectancy and we're 50th. I don't think we get what we pay for. You see, what we need to do and what we desperately need to do is not reform health care. We need to transform how we view health care. We need to become much more appreciative of prevention efforts. We need to reimburse doctors who coach and talk to patients far better than we are. Today we give doctors who do interventions in patients a lot more money than they should be getting and doctors who talk to patients very little money. The incentive on the doctor today is to not talk to patients, just move them in, move them out and get volume. We need to understand and appreciate science. We're not going to have improvements in our healthcare system until the mass population demands that doctors appreciate science, justify their recommendations and justify their decisions. We need the skeptical, educated consumer. We need people who consume medicine to think about health care the same way they think about buying a television set at a Best Buy.

The Misunderstanding of the Current Obama--Catholic Church Controversy

The Obama administration’s recent confrontation with the Catholic Church over religious liberty is emblematic of an administration that is callous towards the religious freedoms afforded by the First Amendment. Although only recently reported, and often misstated by the mainstream media, this conflict has been brewing for over a year and has become heated since August, 2011 when the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) held public hearings on their interpretation and implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Catholic hierarchy, led by Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), clearly and strongly voiced opposition to the mandate, proposed by unelected bureaucrat HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The mandatedirectsthat all private health plans throughout the country provide preventive services, such as screenings and mammograms to everyone to prevent disease. In a stretch of reason, HHSconstrues pregnancyto also be a disease and therefore, all private health plans must provide insurance coverage for prevention of pregnancy, including sterilization procedures, oral contraceptives, contraceptive devices, and abortifacients. Religious employers have always been exempt from offering such services under the protection of federal conscience laws. With the new mandate, Secretary Sebeliusexcludes religious institutions like Catholic hospitals and universities from the federal conscience clause and they are now subject to the mandate.

The mainstream media has often presented this controversy as an infringement on thereproductive rights of women and their access to contraception. Regardless of one’s stance on contraception, this has little to do with the controversy. At a time when abortifacient drugs (the morning after pill) are dispensed from vending machines on our college campuses, one can hardly claim that women do not have access to contraceptives.  Rather, the media, even conservative cable news channels, has missed the real news. The important, earth-shattering issue relates to how it came to pass that religious institutions lost their religious exemptions under this present administration. Exactly how can a department of the government, directed by an unelected official, by the stroke of a pen, change federal protections afforded by the First Amendment? Under what legal structure does President Obama and his underling, SecretarySebelius, have the authority to force religious institutions to offer services that are clearly and categorically opposed to their core teachings?

Ironically, it is the Catholic hospital’s own mission statement that has rendered it undeserving of the conscience clause exemption under the new ruling. Catholic hospitals were established to provide health care to the poor and the disenfranchised of society, regardless of the patients’ religious affiliation or their ability to pay for services. Therefore, they are obliged to care for all, as directed by the Gospels. The irony is that if Catholic hospitals allowed only Catholic doctors to practice, employed only Catholic staff, and cared for, and provided services to,only Catholic patients, then they would be protected by the new,narrowly defined exemption to the mandate. Catholic churches and other places of worship are still exempt because their memberships are of the same religious affiliation. The Catholic Medical Association has clearly pointed out that thenewly defined law is so assiduously crafted that even Jesus and his disciples would not qualify for thereligious exemption. Likewise, Catholic hospitals and universities, because they serve everyone, from atheists tobelievers of all faiths, do not qualify for the religious exemption.  One can be certain that the encroachment on religious freedom from this mandate will cause even further judicial challenges to the already beleaguered Obamacare legislation.

President Obama’s first solution to the dissent was to give the religious institutions a year to comply with the mandate. Having received an unexpected backlash to the mandate, Mr. Obama recently proposed a new compromise: have the insurance plans provide the contraceptive services for free. The savings they would receive from fewer pregnancies would more than offset their expense in providing the contraceptives. So, to understand the president, the solution to the infringement of religious freedom is to strong-arm private companies to offer services ‘for free’. Of course, if faced with a federal mandate, the insurance companies would comply and then quickly pass the cost back to the plan sponsors, leading us back to square one. The USCCB has already rejected this last charade. Unfortunately, the administration continues to dupe some well-meaning, but misled, Catholic leaders like Sister Carol Keehan, D.C., president of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. Sister Keehan would like to believe the president is sincere in promising to protect religious liberty as he stated personally to Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, at the White House in August. If the president were truly sincere, the solution is clear: restore the religious exemptions to all religious institutions.No one will go without her contraceptives. Nothing will be different than it is now.  The president must just stop trying to force religious institutions, fundamentally opposed to contraception, to fund these services.

One must ask himself: ‘Why would the administration pick a fight with an institution that provides roughly a quarter of all the healthcare in the country, often to the uninsured poor and the most vulnerable in our society, at a time when we are facing a crisis in access to healthcare and skyrocketing costs?’ The answer lies in the hubris of this administration and their unceasing efforts to secularize our society to such a degree that all religious thinking and belief is ridiculed and belittled, to the point that God no longer has any place in public discourse. The First Amendment is often mischaracterized to support this viewpoint.

The administration’s ideological bent trumps even political expediency in bringing this issue before voters in an election year. The administration well understands that the president cannot be re-elected without the Catholic vote. Nonetheless, this has not refrained them from creating a quagmire that may threaten the president’s re-election hopes. Hopefully, all Catholics and religious citizens will be heard next November.

This administration favors a truly secular government where rights and liberties are dispensed by the government. Given by the government, these rights can be rescinded at any time, just like they were whenan unelected bureaucrat altered the conscience clause to suit the administration’s agenda.  The president himself has often said that he is ‘tired of old worn out ideas’.  Remember ‘change you can believe in’? Perhaps these old ideas include the founding principles of this country like the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Our founding documents are based on the principles of Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. God, not government, grants us these rights. It’s disappointing that a constitutional attorney like the president would have such disregard for these soundly crafted documents.

Alfonso Oliva, MD

530 S. Cowley Street

Spokane, WA 99202