NEWS

Cancer Therapies Touted in Physician, Hospital, Web Advertising

Laura Newman

Besides the flurry of direct-to-consumer marketing by drug and device manufacturers, many physicians and hospitals are energetically marketing avant garde cancer care. They are not exempt from criticism.

Patients with prostate cancer avidly seek out treatments that can protect them from well-publicized potential consequences of traditional treatments, namely impotence and incontinence. Flooded with an information explosion on the disease, news of celebrities with prostate cancer, and a fluorishing advocacy network, patients are primed for better cures without side effects.

Anthony Zietman, M.D., associate professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, said that marketing of seed therapy for prostate cancer often goes well beyond the outcomes data demonstrated to date.

Zietman is careful to draw a line between those who pioneered and continue to refine the technique and those who market it. "The pioneers [referring to John Blasko, M.D., of the Seattle Prostate Institute and others] are very reputable and have built their reputation with very honest endeavors," said Zietman. "They would be the first to admit that it isn’t a free lunch." But the downsides, the unknowns, often get lost in the marketing of the procedure, setting patients up for high expectations, he said.

Popular accounts portray seed therapy as "a treatment without side effects," a picture that Zietman contends is inaccurate. "What has barely surfaced yet is the data on long-term urinary problems and studies that show 40% of men do not keep normal erections." Zietman said that the average man on the street doesn’t have to look far for skewed information: it is readily available on Web sites, in popular magazines and newspapers, and from advocacy groups eager for a cure.

"The great irony, of course, is that many doctors practicing it are in their first year." For a cancer treatment that Zietman considers highly operator-dependent—and for whom the long-term effects are not yet known—he worries that "incredibly high expectations—much higher than we can deliver—are out there." It’s an uphill battle convincing men that seed therapy may not work out the way that the men believe it should, he said. "They are terribly disappointed hearing it."

That said, Zietman is quick to point out that questionable marketing should not lead anyone to discard the technique. "It is not that it is sham treatment," he said, convinced that "like radical prostatectomy, which is a much improved procedure in the year 2000 compared with 1995," brachytherapy will likely make similar strides. He argues further: "One thing we shouldn’t do is say that seeds are rubbish. This is real therapy and patients are cured."



             
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