My name is Don Benjamin. I live in Sydney. I am a retired electrical engineer/experimental scientist. I worked for Australia's national science organisation, CSIRO, for 35 years. During this period I published two scientific papers.
My second interest is as a Health, Safety and Environment Consultant, for which I have Masters Degree in Engineering Science. I am currently employed on a contract to Local Government.
My third interest is in cancer. Twenty-five years ago I helped to found a charity called the Cancer Information & Support Society in Sydney. As a scientist I was asked to evaluate alternative cancer therapies. To do this I had to compare their results with those of orthodox therapies. When I tried to evaluate orthodox therapies I got a surprise. Surgery had never been evaluated in a randomised trial; radiotherapy had not been shown to extend survival; and chemotherapy extended survival in only about 3% of cancers. At the suggestion of a British Consultant Physician who agreed with most of what I had discovered, I published my findings on cancer surgery in Medical Hypotheses in 1993. When it was later claimed that mammograms saved lives by enabling earlier surgical intervention I concluded that either this claim was wrong or my findings on the inefficacy of cancer surgery must have been wrong. I therefore evaluated the mammogram trials and found they did not affect overall survival. I published my findings in Medical Hypotheses 1996. My findings were confirmed in 2001 by the Danish Cochrane Group who specialise in evidence based medicine.
I subsequently reviewed randomised trials evaluating the survival benefits of radiotherapy and found the same thing. No properly run randomised trials had confirmed that radiotherapy resulted in a significant reduction of mortality or increased survival. Results only showed it could produce a significant (up to 70%) reduction in recurrence of tumours. As with my earlier findings with mammography, reduction in cancer mortality after radiotherapy was invariably accompanied by a comparable increase in deaths from other causes, presumably as a result of the harm from the radiotherapy. Clearly if reduction of recurrence was rarely if ever accompanied by increased survival the paradigm must be wrong.
When I looked at chemotherapy I found that Ulrich Abel had already reviewed randomised trials of chemotherapy. He found significant benefits with only a small number of fairly rare solid tumours. And for these the survival benefits were in terms of weeks or months rather than years.
I confirmed that chemotherapy also increased survival with acute childhood leukemia (ALL) and some lymphomas but this had not been confirmed in randomised trials. The benefits however in the case of ALL was very large and unlikely to be due to poor methodology.
When I evaluated hormone therapy I found several examples where it produced significant benefits in terms of increased survival.
I have not been able to identify a single example where orthodox therapies produce a cure for any type of cancer (using the standard medical definition of cure, not the misleading one of 5-year survival without symptoms).
Since then the limitations of orthodox cancer therapies have been confirmed by many international medical researchers. I list them as references in a recent submission I wrote to the Australian Senate Inquiry into services and treatment options for person with cancer. See submission No. 15 at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/cancer/submissions/sublist.htm
In that submission I suggested that perhaps 3% of cancers were helped by orthodox therapies removing or shrinking tumours that were obstructing or otherwise threatening vital organs; another 3% were helped by chemotherapy.
In January 2005 I found that Wikipedia did not reflect the severe limitations of orthodox cancer therapies, but rather included only the viewpoints of those who don't accept the findings of evidence based medicine. I tried to balance this situation by pointing out the lack of evidence for most orthodox interventions and some better results from using an alternative cancer paradigm that see cancer as a late stage in a process in which a major early contributory factor is an emotional trauma or a particular cancer prone personality. My contributions to Wikipedia were immediately blocked. Don Benjamin 21:18, 10 February 2006 (UTC) Don Benjamin 01:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC) Don Benjamin 01:06, 11 February 2006 (UTC) Don Benjamin 01:11, 11 February 2006 (UTC)