This is the Health Show, a presentation of national productions.
Almost a decade ago, Dr. Richard Besser, the chief medical editor for ABC News, lost his
sister while she was having elective surgery.
Since then, he's been a vocal advocate for patients demanding information from their
health care providers.
When you're bombarded with information and you don't know what is hype and what is
real, it can be very confusing.
And today's Health Show will hear about the book, Tell Me The Truth, Dr.
We'll also hear about the health concerns being raised by the increasing popularity
of raw milk cheese.
And hear the story of two women dealing with breast cancer in two different worlds.
I'm Dr. Nina Sack.
I'm Bob Barrett and this is the Health Show.
Dr. Richard Besser is chief medical editor for ABC News and a practicing pediatrician
who has made a name for himself by sifting through a barrage of medical literature, examining
the evidence and turning an informed, unbiased analysis into straightforward advice.
What anyone would hope to receive from their personal physician.
Dr. Besser's sister died during elective surgery in 2004.
That tragedy defined his mission to empower people to understand and take responsibility
for their health by questioning their doctor, asking for a second opinion and learning how
to protect themselves from things that can go wrong during treatments.
In his new book, Tell Me The Truth, Dr. Easy to Understand Answers to Your Most Confusing
and Critical Health Questions, Dr. Besser addresses some of the most controversial and
hotly debated current health and wellness issues.
He spoke about the book with the health shows Joe Donahue.
When you look at your job as the chief health and medical editor at ABC News and a book
like this fits into that in the sense of you're trying to make us the general public more
aware of very important health issues.
And I think it seems considering you could do it.
You did a whole book on this that we as a public have a lot of questions, don't we?
I think so.
You know, I get questions all the time wherever I am.
And it's really no surprise.
There's so much confusing information out there.
Part of it is that there's just so much information available to us, either on the web or through
media or through friends.
It's hard to know what to believe.
Why is that the case, do you think?
Because there is so much information, we don't know what to believe, but science is science,
right?
So where does that end?
I'm a great believer in science and the power of science, but science can also be misused.
And it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a paper that comes out that
really is what I would call advocacy science.
A paper designed to sell a product or promote a treatment.
And science that has less bias to it.
My background before coming to ABC, I was at the CDC for 13 years and left there as the
acting director.
And the goal there was to really wade through evidence and come up with the best recommendations
for people so that they could take charge of their health and make decisions to improve
their health.
But when you're bombarded with information and you don't know what is hype and what is
real, it can be very confusing.
Okay, so when you give us advice, then we choose if we are going to trust you, right?
So it's the same thing with our personal doctor.
If they tell us something, there's very much an issue of trust here of who has the final
say.
Yeah, I think that that's right.
One of the points I make is that one of the most important things you can do for your
health is before you get sick or when you're not sick, find a doctor who you can really
talk to and work on establishing that relationship of trust.
Because it is so important and you want someone that you can turn to to bounce things off
of.
And the thing about people like you, i.e. doctors who do this on a public scale and in
a journalistic and broadcasting world, is that in some ways we have more access to you
and your information than we do to our own personal doctors.
Getting an appointment, getting an answer can take a long time.
Yeah, you know, it's one of the things I hear all the time.
With appointments getting squeezed into shorter and shorter time slots, it's hard to feel
that comfort and the luxury to really have a conversation and to ask those questions.
And so getting information before you go in for that visit, either by reading books
or going to credible websites and reading can help you make use of that limited time
you have on that visit.
One of the sections in the book, chapter three, is o doctor one more thing.
Your questions when I'm walking out the door.
And you make this case in the book that that's often the most important.
That's what's weighing on the patient's mind, right?
Even though it's sort of like the last minute, that's what they're there for.
Yeah, I always like to leave time for that because so often a parent will come in with a child.
And I hear this from adults as well when they see their doctor.
There's something that's really on their mind.
It may be a difficult question or an uncomfortable question to ask or they feel that they're
stupid to ask that question and they wait until your hand is on that door and they say,
doctor's one more thing.
And that's often the main reason they're there.
And if you don't leave time for that, you're really doing your patient a disservice.
And some of its general you have one in here is antibacterial soap better than plain soap.
Yeah, you know, I started the program at CDC on promoting appropriate antibiotic use.
And one of the public health issues that really concerns me is growing antimicrobial or antibiotic
resistance.
And coming out of that, there has been a lot of marketing of antibacterial or antimicrobial
everything.
The sense that you can sterilize your world and that you should.
And the data are pretty strong that good old handwashing with soap and water is every
bit as good as washing with something that's antimicrobial.
And there's a theoretical risk that using all these antibacterial products can promote
resistance in your environment and set you up for something that you really don't want
to get.
So I'm a big fan of handwashing with good old soap and water using alcohol sanitizers
when you don't have access to that.
I've also noticed there's quite a few questions in the book having to do with technology, such
as can using an iPad damage my hearing or do cell phones cause brain cancer.
We have an interest now in this.
We are so tied to our technology of what impact is it having on our health?
Yeah, it's a big concern.
You know, clearly there is a risk from iPods and other music devices when they're played
too loud.
My generation, it was going to concerts and standing too close to the speakers our ears
would ring.
But now you can be barrage with that every single day.
And so it's so important that kids learn to turn it down.
They're at an age frequently where they feel invincible and it's a hard thing to do.
But if you can negotiate around setting some volume limits to those devices, it's a good
idea.
The cell phone and cancer question, I've probably done more stories on that than anything
else at ABC News because there is such a fear of these devices and how dependent we've
become on them that they could have a negative health consequence.
As I look at the evidence, I don't see any risk of these devices and cancer.
But that doesn't mean if you're concerned that there aren't easy things that you can
do to reduce your contact with the devices.
They are optional.
You can text instead of talk on them and you can use hands-free devices.
But the science does not support it.
The reason is, although they release radiation, it's not the type of radiation.
It's called ionizing radiation that directly damages ourselves and our DNA.
Again, the name of Dr. Richard Bessar's new book is, Tell me the truth, Dr. Easy to Understand
Answers to Your Most Confusing and Critical Health Questions.
He spoke with the health shows, Joe Donney.
All of the specialty cheeses sold in U.S. grocery stores grew by 7% last year, in large
part because of increasing demand for exotic, artisanal cheeses and even raw cheeses made
from unpasteurized milk.
Raw milk cheese has gathered a fervent following for its taste, nutritional benefits and freshness.
But as Appief and Triss Wonson reports for Harvest Public Media, recent safety concerns threaten
the market.
I've spent a lot of time in front of cheese coolers in my life.
That's because I love cheese, whether it's stilton, greyer or drunken goat.
But raw milk cheese, that's new to me.
So I asked Noah Earl, the grocery manager at Clover's Natural Market in Columbia, Missouri,
to recommend a raw milk cheese for me to try.
I'd choose a couple of setters, if you're game.
Cool.
We head to the back of the store and slice up a shiny yellow raw milk cheddar.
Okay.
Yeah.
Hmm.
I wasn't really expecting that.
It's very smooth, it's smoother and consistency than the one we just tried.
We were just eating that raw cheese straight, but Clover's customer Sinyata Marke likes
her raw cheese on top of apples.
In fact, she doesn't eat cheese unless it's raw because her blood's type A.
Type A is just because of our biology, do not digest dairy well or meat and we're unable
to assimilate the nutrients from those products.
Mainly, when it comes to dairy, I feel like it was part of the pasteurization process
that makes it unavailable to me.
And so the raw cheese I could eat.
Consumers like Marke believe that raw cheese is more nutritious because pasteurization
hasn't killed living beneficial organisms in the milk.
But not pasteurizing can also allow harmful bacteria to live.
And contamination problems have been a challenge for Missouri cheese makers lately.
Eating Landary and Mountain View, Missouri just went out of business after the state milk
board seized 36,000 pounds of its raw cheese because some of it was found to be contaminated
with Listeria and staff.
Also in the northwestern part of the state, three people got sick after eating a raw cheese
called Florey's favorite, a batch of it tested positive for E. coli.
Nebraska cheese maker, Krista Dittman says these problems can be devastating for the
raw milk industry.
I think it creates a lot of fear in the industry and it creates a lot of dissonance between
producers and regulators.
Dittman's talking about the feeling from small producers that inspectors from state agriculture
departments and the food and drug administration, which regulates the raw milk cheese industry,
will never find their operations to be clean enough or safe enough to meet their standards.
Morning Landary's lawyer Pete Kennedy points out another fear.
Well, I think it creates a chilling effect on other people getting into the business.
You know, you're going to spend all that money on equipment and a plant if something
like this can happen.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say raw milk cheese poses a very real threat
sickening hundreds of people over the past decade.
A few years ago, the FDA began a comprehensive risk assessment of raw milk cheese, which
can be sold legally nationwide as long as it has been aged 60 days.
The FDA is expected to release its findings by the end of September and some producers
worry the agency will extend the amount of time required to age raw cheese or worse,
ban the sale of raw cheese across state lines.
But food safety expert Richard Raymond wouldn't mind raw milk cheese ban.
The pasteurization of milk, which became more or less the standard in the 1940s dramatically
dropped the incidence of foodborne illness as particularly in children because it's
a very simple step to guarantee the safety of the milk.
Back at Clovers, a regular named Kathy Lane stands in one of my favorite spots at the
cheese cooler and gazes at the dozens of delectable cheeses available for sale.
She and her 11-year-old daughter don't eat products made from pasturized cow's milk due
to antibiotics that might be found in them.
But she's still debating whether or not to try raw milk cheese.
For the raw milk cheese industry, that uncertainty is a familiar feeling.
The venture swans at Harvest Public Media.
Still to come, how a woman deals with breast cancer can depend on where she lives.
That story's next on the health show.
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This is the health show.
I'm Bob Barrett.
And I'm Dr. Nina Sacks.
There are some things about breast cancer that are universal.
There's the initial fear.
There's a sense that your body has betrayed you in a very personal way.
But some parts of the breast cancer experience very much depend on where you live.
Report a Joanne Silburner of Seattle, Washington compares her experience to that of a woman
in Uganda where there are few treatment options and the disease is highly stigmatized.
My name is Joanne Silburner.
I'm a freelance reporter and I teach journalism at the University of Washington.
Last year I traveled to Uganda, Haiti, and India to do radio stories about cancer in developing
countries.
I met a woman in Uganda who, like me, has had breast cancer.
I spent an afternoon hearing about her experiences and I came home and I started thinking about
mine.
In some ways, her story is a lot like mine.
And in other ways, our stories are very different.
On August 9, 2010, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
My name is Gatru D. Nathya Gudde, an accountant.
A founding member for Uganda Women's Cancer Support Organization.
And this is an organization formed by breast cancer survivors.
My finding out I just attached my breast accidentally and felt a swelling.
And which swelling I didn't take serious.
I touched it, felt it, and I didn't mind.
I was sharing a house with a friend and I told her that she said, why are you bad about
something that's not painful?
So I also kept quiet.
I had a lamp fire.
I didn't go to hospital.
I had it, I always felt it.
I got my breast cancer diagnosis after a routine mammogram.
It came three days before I was scheduled to move 2700 miles from Atlanta to Seattle.
I knew I'd get breast cancer.
My mom died of it.
My dad was exposed to radiation during medical training and he got it too.
But I had trouble believing the initial diagnosis.
I figured the Atlanta doctors had gotten a little too excited about some equivocal tests.
It was after like eight months.
It started growing big.
It was bigger than before.
But at one time I felt a sharp pain.
And that's when I decided to take a surgeon to remove it.
To me it was removed.
And when they removed it, that's when they told me I had breast cancer.
When I had that it was cancer, the feeling was terrible.
I knew it was death.
Many people believe cancer is an untreated disease.
In Seattle doctors confirmed my diagnosis.
Definitely cancer.
And it definitely had to go.
If you're going to have breast cancer, you may as well be me.
As a journalist I understand the issues pretty well.
I've been writing about advances in controversies and breast cancer treatment for 30 years.
My husband is a physician and he understands things even better.
I had enormous support from him and from the rest of my family.
I knew what to do and I could afford it.
I wasn't remained fully insured.
For me getting treatment was also another nightmare because there was no free treatment at that
time.
And my family wasn't a rich family.
Nobody knew what to do.
My family didn't know what to do.
But we didn't even know where cancer is treated.
We went to clinic to clinic.
Of course you pay money.
And when we had spent all the money, I had to go to my lab because I had no take government
hospital and free.
Early on the Tuesday morning I had a mastectomy.
It was a rare sunny day in Seattle and I got immediate reconstruction.
That night the hospital served fresh salmon for dinner.
This is Seattle after all.
My husband slept in the chair beside me.
The next day we went home.
I got mastectomy and I had surgery for the total removal of the breast.
And when I recovered one month I started on chemotherapy.
I was supposed to go for radiotherapy but the machine was down for many months.
So I missed that but I proceeded for hormone therapy.
I was more of an outpatient than a hospital patient but it was very uncomfortable.
Because after chemotherapy I would go home and people didn't know what to do if we needed
for me.
When I felt nausea, when I felt bad people didn't know what to do and they always kept
running back to hospital.
What is having breast cancer meant here life?
So at that time I felt it was then of my life.
I had finished my university, I had a job, I was preparing to get married and develop
my career and then cancer came in.
So it was like a cut off.
I couldn't continue my career and I was worried.
Maybe my boyfriend would leave me.
I felt I was a cuss.
A curse in the US cancer survivors are celebrated.
Patients and friends and families marching giant parades that extend for miles.
Bright pink shirts and bracelets and caps and ribbons are badges of honor.
People feel if you have a member of the family who have cardiac cancer, probably your
daughters or sons will not marry because people will be scared about that family.
I felt I was alone.
I was so lonely that I didn't have a child.
Despite being emotionally and financially supported, I was angry.
I didn't feel like I deserved cancer.
Not that anyone does.
It meant time away from work.
There was pain during the post-op period.
I had just moved away from most of my friends and family.
The disease had taken my mother.
Wasn't that enough?
I couldn't help it.
I was really angry.
You ever angry?
Well, I was very angry about myself with God, with my body betraying me.
I was very faithful with my life and I felt why I came from an area where which was most
hit by HIV.
And I said now I was so careful with my own life to survive HIV and how come that God
gives me cancer this time?
I was very angry but I have outlived the anger.
I don't think breast cancer will kill me, at least not most of the time.
But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night or I read about some of my age dying
of breast cancer.
And I think about whether or not I'm ready.
Do you ever think you're going to die of breast cancer?
No, but now I don't think of dying breast cancer.
I guess what I feel.
I know since I've lived in the 14 years I know I have died of natural death.
At first I thought our experience in Africa would be different from somebody's experience
in America but the fear is the same, the fear of death.
I mean to ask why me?
So I mean to feel sorry about yourself.
So your experience is good and also touches me and I feel we have the same destiny.
That was Joanne Silburner reporting from Seattle.
That's all the time we have for this week's health show.
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I'm Bob Barrett.
And I'm Dr. Nina Sack.
Stay healthy and be sure to join us next time for another edition of the health show.
Dr. Nina Sack is a practicing member of the American College of Gastroenterology.
Bob Barrett is producer of the health show.
Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer.
The health show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for
