Future Visions Foundation

Ask The Doctor

This section will be for your questions. Email us with your questions. We will select one or two a month to highlight in this part of the web site. Your name will be kept confidential. We reserve the right to edit the published version of your question. Understand, please, that some questions cannot be answered simply without a direct evaluation of you as a patient, and a lot of ancillary data about you and you health being collected. Nevertheless, there are particular nutrients, and certain health challenges that many people share that can be answered in a general way. We hope to make this section one of the most fun and interactive parts of this web site. This will be one of the best ways to continue our mission of educating more and more people about integrative medicine and some of the vast array of alternatives that are out there to help people attain optimal health. To access previous questions, click on the links on the left.

This month's question:

Letter to Dr. Laule:

Dear Dr. Laule,

I've read on the Internet that doctors are doing a lot of women wrong by not testing their CA-125 to see if they have ovarian cancer, and that women are dying needlessly, just because the doctors won't perform this test on everyone.. Have you heard about this? Sincerely,

LD

Dear LD:

I'm not at all fond of checking for ovarian cancer with this test. It is actually not diagnosed by a CA-125 test, any more than prostate cancer is diagnosed by a high PSA. Those tests merely indicate that there is a level of inflammation, or disturbance in the given organ, and a possibility that the disturbance is from cancer. Again -- I'll repeat, this is not the way you diagnose ovarian cancer. Yes, it might be of utility in certain women who have a new onset of irritable bowel syndrome, and perhaps would detect the cancer sooner. But to run CA-125 on every woman creates a situation where a whole lot of women are going to have to go for surgical biopsies, and a lot of those women won't have ovarian cancer. A prostate biopsy is not quite as invasive, and so one can make a better case for doing routine screening PSA, and biopsying every man who has an elevation (those biopsies are done trans-rectally). Even there, the diagnosis of prostate cancer is not that simple.

The real utility of PSA and CA-125 is to followup a known cancer to see how the treatment is progressing. There is a huge misunderstanding of the utility of these "tumor marker" tests amongst the public and even amongst physicians. A digital rectal exam of the prostate is a much better diagnostic test of prostate cancer than a PSA. There are men with normal PSA's who have prostate cancer. Like wise, there are probably both false positives and false negatives with the CA-125. It is no where near as cut and dried as the public has come to believe.

The sad thing about certain cancers, ovarian being one of them and pancreatic cancer being another one is that they are simply difficult to diagnose early.

I am much more interested in new information from several researchers on the connection between ovarian cancer and a low iodine level. I would rather see that get out on the internet. That way, by getting sufficient iodine back into our systems, we prevent ovarian cancer instead of going round and round about the best way to diagnose it after it has already happened.

Like ovarian cancer, prostate cancer seems to be (in part at least) related to iodine deficiency.

I just got done doing a 24 hour urine collection called an "iodine load test" to determine if I had enough iodine, since I have had a brush with breast cancer, and have had thyroid problems in the last 4 years. My iodine is, in fact, low. I would rather do this personally, than have a CA-125 drawn.

I hope this is helpful.

Sincerely,

Alice R. Laule, M.D.