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By Root 765 0

rate for bone cancer,” Mrs. Hysong recalls. That was obviously too good to be true, and there were other clear warning signs. The seller refused to list the ingredients of his “supplements,” Mrs. Hysong says, adding that he also demanded $5,000 payment, in advance, not covered by any medical insurance. She refused to pay, but the relative put up the first $2,000. “Chuck was desperate,” Mrs. Hysong recalls. “He was still a relatively young man, and he wasn’t ready to go, and he was ready to try anything within what he considered reason.” That’s typical of many seriously ill people for whom science offers little hope; they fall prey to quackery and medical fraud, losing money and sometimes suffering further damage to their health.

Mrs. Hysong describes what happened when her husband took the $2,000 Optimizer preparation:

“By nine-thirty, he had uncontrollable diarrhea; almost constant discharge from his nose; he was hallucinating that he had smoke coming off his body; he was burning hot; he made uncontrollable noises; he was nauseated; he was scared; and he was angry. After about an hour of diarrhea, when he tried to stand, he could not do so without bracing himself. He could not walk back to bed.”

Mr. Hysong was rushed to the hospital, where he spent the night. He was left “dehydrated, weak, and ashamed that he had been sucked into this,” according to his wife. His earlier improvement ceased. “About a week later he started going south again,” Mrs. Hysong said. “I don’t know if it was coincidence, or the stress to his body.” Chuck Hysong died three months later. Cancer killed him, but as Mrs. Hysong describes it, the pills added to his suffering and weakened him in his final days.

The red flags still fly. Robert Dowling, the man Mrs. Hysong says sold the pills to her husband, runs something he calls the North Carolina Institute of Technology. Though he claims no formal medical training, in 2006 his website—www.cancercured.org—claimed to have a method of finding and curing breast cancer before it develops. Dowling had done business in South Carolina before coming north, but South Carolina authorities shut down his operation in September 2001 after the death of a client, a seventy-one-year-old woman suffering from stomach cancer. A few months earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had warned Dowling that he was illegally selling an unapproved medical device by marketing “Bioscan 2010” home kits, which could supposedly predict disease. Dowling moved on to an even smaller town, giving his address as Hot Springs, North Carolina.

What Really Kills Women?

Far more lethal than any quack healer, however, is the misinformation about our bodies and our health that millions of us carry around unquestioned. As recently as 1997, for example, adult women and men were most likely to name breast cancer as the leading killer of women, which isn’t close to being true and never has been. The plain fact is women are nine times more likely to die of heart disease, and more than twice as likely to die from stroke. Lung cancer kills far more women than breast cancer, and so do other chronic lung diseases, such as emphysema. Furthermore, many of these deaths could be avoided if women had a more accurate mental picture of their true health risks and acted accordingly.

To be sure, the attention to breast cancer has done a great deal of good, making women more likely to detect cancers at a curable stage through regular mammograms and self-examinations. That’s one reason breast cancer deaths have been declining. But the hard facts imply that women should be many times more concerned about heart attacks, stroke, and lung disease than about breast cancer. They should educate themselves about the warning signs of heart attack (these signs are somewhat different in women than in men, by the way), and consider preventive diet and exercise habits. For the millions of women who smoke, the facts might convince them to try quitting. Everybody knows smoking increases the risk of lung disease and heart attack, but a more accurate picture of how