Two Things: Cancer For The First Time-- And Johnny Ramone For The Last Time

The first time I heard a diagnosis of cancer it shocked me. My mind didn’t go blank; it was more like white noise. I heard the doctor say prostate cancer. Cancer seemed like something to be ashamed of. My doctor sent me to a prostate cancer specialist, a urologist. He had a bad bedside manner. I didn’t like him at all and he really wanted to do a lot of stuff to me, stuff that would change my life pretty drastically… for the worse.

I was getting ready to retire. So much for the worries about outliving my savings. My father had died of prostate cancer. Actually, he didn't. He died from the treatment he got meant to save him from prostate cancer. A lot of people do. And in the statistics, I soon learned, those deaths don’t count as deaths from prostate cancer. But long before I was learning, I was panicked, which was how most people feel when they get that kind of a “death sentence." My doctor, gently pushed me towards surgery, although he asked me to read a book he gave me so I could make an “informed decision” about which kind of treatment was right for me. The urologist he introduced me to-- "the biggest in L.A.; and the stars and all the doctors use him"-- insisted on surgery. He was a surgeon, I soon learned. He was an asshole as well. I hated everything about him. But all the alternatives were abysmal. They guaranteed a miserable, brutish retirement. In fact the head of radiology at Cedar Sinai had persuaded me to go for radiology (seed implantation) instead. When I mentioned that radiology had killed my father, she said, "Oh, we didn't know a thing about it back then. We've come so far." But that was what my dad's radiologist had told him, more or less.

I decided to get a second opinion. I went to see a holistic doctor, Timothy Brantley. This guy had no intention of mutilating me but he wanted to change life too— in a good way. Most of the things he wanted me to do, I was already doing— no alcohol, no drugs, no tobacco… and there were three other things he wanted meet do: no sugar, plenty of supplements and plenty of raw food. He taught me how to heal myself. I'm a chapter in his book, The Cure: Heal Your Body, Save Your Life.

Ten years ago The Independent published this story: Study raises doubts over treatment for prostate cancer, which reinforced my already pretty strong wariness of the Medical Industrial Complex.

Cancer specialists are bracing themselves for publication of a research study that will challenge the way one of the commonest cancers is treated. The world's biggest randomised trial of prostate cancer has found that the standard surgical treatment for the disease is ineffective.

The study compared surgical removal of the prostate gland— radical prostatectomy— with "watchful waiting" (doing nothing). The results show that surgery did not extend life. A leading British specialist, who asked not to be named, said: "The only rational response to these results is, when presented with a patient with prostate cancer, to do nothing."

Cancer of the prostate is the commonest male cancer affecting 37,000 men a year in the UK and causing 10,000 deaths.

But in up to 50 per cent of cases it is slow-growing so that patients affected, even when left untreated, can live for many years and die of something else.

Some specialists are beginning to question whether these cases qualify for the label "cancer" at all.

The results of the Prostate Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT), led by Timothy Wilt and started in 1994 with 731 men, showed that those who underwent the operation had less than a three per cent survival benefit compared with those who had no treatment, after being followed up for 12 years. The difference was not statistically significant and could have arisen by chance.

When the findings were presented at a meeting of the European Association of Urology in Paris in February, attended by 11,000 specialists from around the world, they were greeted with a stunned silence.

One expert who attended the meeting said that while most research results are immediately transmitted by specialists in the audience using social media, "I did not see any urologists enthusiastically tweeting about [this one]."

Prostate cancers are already classified as "tigers" (aggressive) or "pussy cats" (low risk). But some urologists who have spent years training to perform complex surgical techniques find the idea of watchful waiting unacceptable.

Surgery carries a risk of side effects that can have a serious impact on quality of life with 50 per cent of men suffering impotence and 10 per cent incontinence.

According to the NY Times, hustlers and clueless doctors are still pushing ineffective-- at best-- treatment. When I asked a friend, a doctor, why those in his profession never consider warning people away from sugar, fast food, and other unhealthy things people eat, he told me that his entire time in medical school— including advanced degrees for surgery— included one two-hour lecture on nutrition. One. And yet... "The US National Cancer Institute reports that males who include greater than one third an ounce of chives, garlic, onions and scallions have a greatly reduced risk of developing prostate cancer.”

So when I went back to my regular doctor a a year and a half later, he ran the tests again and announced that the diagnosis of prostate cancer was incorrect and that I never had it. He just couldn't fathom that Brantley's method worked. I should have stopped seeing him then but it took a second, unrelated, cancer diagnosis a decade later before I did. Meanwhile, though, an old friend, Johnny Ramone, came to see me about his own diagnosis of prostate cancer. He was diagnosed around the same time I was and had been getting traditional treatment for several years. It wasn’t helping and he had heard I was “cured.” Joey Ramone died in 2001 while Johnny was being treated— lymphatic cancer— and then Dee Dee died the following year from a drug overdose. Johnny asked me what I recommended.

Johnny and I had a funny relationship. We were the same age but very different guys. He was politically very conservative, but not a fascist. When I would try raising money for left-wing organizations, he would always contribute something. I met him in the late 1970s, long before I became general manager of his record company, Sire. He would always banter that I was a commie. I told him about Dr. Brantley. He laughed and called me a hippie as well as a Communist. He wasn't interested. I went to a kind of Ramones tribute concert as he was dying— he had about 4 months to go— a celebration of The Ramones 30th anniversary. Only one Ramone, Tommy, the drummer who left the band years earlier, was still alive. Johnny died September 15, 2004.