So Sue Me

Way back in the summer of 2006 I wrote to a doctor who runs a site by the name of www.pathguy.com. This doctor was discussing the risks and benefits of a test that my former employer (the creepy lab) was providing. Naturally and because I am concerned about public health (seriously, a more healthy public means that my risks of catching something from the unwashed are reduced), I wrote to the doctor to contribute my two cents. Actually it was not really my two cents that I was able to contribute, but rather my first hand account of two deaths resulting from the false hope my shyster former employers were selling.

Here is what I wrote originally. I have blocked out the names of the people who employed me, the test they offer, and they lab they run.

To Whom It May Concern:
Where to begin about the negligence of the █ test?
First off I should say I am a former employee of Drs ██ and ██ ██ and I can give a first hand account of the negligent conditions under which the lab operates. I find it shocking that two people are able to operate what is essentially a "mom and pop" medical facility with little or no oversight or accountability. Since having terminated my employment with the ██ I have attempted to contact the FDA and other regulatory agencies regarding what I believe is criminally negligent activity going on at ██.
To respond to your request regarding deaths as a result of a false belief in the work of the ██ I can tell you about two. The first involved a woman in her late twenties who died of advanced lung cancer. According to what I was personally told by the doctor who ordered the test for her (██ was the doctor's name, she is a chiropractor working out of Oregon) the patient believed that the ██ test was so accurate that it would trump the biopsies and other more conventional cancer diagnostic methods.
Firstly this is the kind of loophole that the ██ exploit. Rather than requiring a certified a pathologist, oncologist, or even internist to request their test they will accept the signature of anyone claiming to be a doctor. There is no credentialing involved and there are many instances where the "doctors" ordering AMAS tests are holistic practitioners or even those who own herbal treatment shops. Certainly the ██ are not the only parties at fault in the death of this woman, but their credibility played the primary role in her death and dying belief that she was cancer free because of the ██ test.
The second death I am aware of was of an elderly man who ignored the results of several PSA tests in favor of believing the false negatives he was receiving from ██. I do not have nearly as many details about this instance as it occurred when I first began working for the ██.
These are the only two confirmed deaths I am aware of although during my nearly two years at ██, not a day went by that I did not receive a call from a patient saying that the had been diagnosed with cancer weeks after having received a negative result on their ██ test. More often than not these claims came from patients with early stage breast cancer. For a test that purports to be best in early detection, of all cancers, this does not bode well for patients that wish to put their faith in what is nothing more than quackery.
Thank you for taking the time to read this note. If I can be of any assistance to you in your review of the ██ test, please do not hesitate to contact me. I only ask that you do not use my name if you chose to include this information on your site. Please feel free to indicate that I am former employee however.

Obviously what is written above is anecdotal evidence. I am no scientist. I don’t purport to be a scientist. I have no ambitions to be a scientist. Ever. The only science I will ever need to know I have already learned from Bill Bryson and Radio Lab.

That being said, I was shocked to discover that a rebuke to my letter had been posted on the www.pathguy.com site back in July of last year.

Here is the contents of the rebuke with the same comical black-outs as my own letter.

I am very dismayed regarding the letter that you posted on July 20, 2006 from the person claiming to be a former employee of the █. Not because she was not a former employee – she was. Rather I am dismayed because for all of your efforts at maintaining an objective "scientific" viewpoint, I can't believe that you would jeopardize your own position by publishing something (a) unverifiable – even with the caveat explaining that you have no proof, and (b) completely unscientific. There is no science in her letter; nothing disproving anything the █ research has said. It is merely unsubstantiated inflammatory libel. If it were anything else, there would be proof.
How do I know this? I, too, am a former employee of the █. I worked at █ as a technician for 5 ½ years, and was the senior technician for the last three and a half. The author of the other letter was an office staff member whose primary duties involved assembling and shipping the collection kits – which the █ send out free of charge to the patients.
As a technician, I know a great deal about the test and its mechanics, and was also responsible for a lot of technical support and customer service. I answered some angry phone calls over the years, but I also answered many very, very happy calls, as well.
The author of the previous letter was a disgruntled employee who felt that she was not getting paid what she deserved, and who was not re-hired after leaving █ for a different position, and wanting to come back when the other position didn't work out. She has no science background; she has no firsthand knowledge or understanding of the mechanics of the test or the underlying science upon which it is founded.
I would like to address some of the claims that she makes in her letter, and perhaps some of yours, as well. If you are indeed trying to benefit patients worldwide, you will listen to what I have to say, and if you doubt me, you may do your own research – contact Dr. █ himself.
1 – █ has what I believe is termed "FDA permission to market". I don't know the exact terminology; I do know that the laboratory has regular inspections from both the state laboratory licensing agency and the FDA. They see what is going on, and have never felt anything █ has done is "criminally negligent".
2 – I do not wish to publish details why the woman in her 20's died of lung cancer. There is an obvious explanation to anyone who knows the details, but I do not wish to say anything negative about the doctor publicly – and I criticize you for publishing the doctor's name! You have no evidence to substantiate the claim; it is slander. If you want the details on why she died, contact me. I guarantee you it was not directly because of the █ test.
I should also point out the obvious here. The █ test has a 7% false negative and 5% false positive rate. That means that out of every 100 negatives, 7 are really positive! And for every 100 positive, 5 are really negative! So, for thousands of tests, that number is going to increase from 5 or 7 to 50 or 70 (out of 1000 tests). And yet, the accuracy of the █ is still way higher than any other test available! Why complain of one or two people dying because the █ test was wrong? Is it tragic? Of course. Is it criminal, or bad science? No! How many people die in the hospitals because of the OTHER tests they took that were wrong? Here's an article on the inaccuracy of the PSA – it claims that the PSA misses 82% of prostate cancer in men younger than 60. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=4012 but doctors still rely on it – why? Because they always have! So don't try to claim that a few reported deaths "because of the █ test" is an indicator that it's a "public health risk"!
3 – The author of the other letter claims that, "not a day went by that I did not receive a call from a patient saying that they had been diagnosed with cancer weeks after having received a negative result on their █ test. More often than not these claims came from patients with early stage breast cancer. For a test that purports to be best in early detection, of all cancers, this does not bode well for patients that wish to put their faith in what is nothing more than quackery".
Again, that is patently false. █ keeps meticulous phone records, as is required by the FDA and CLIA. There are relatively few complaints about false negatives – I'd say at most one or two a month. And out of the tens of thousands of tests they run, the number of reported false results is miniscule! The claim that these calls came in on a daily basis is either completely false, or an indication that this former employee did not record her messages or pass them along to the doctors to address. I'm going for the first, since I answered phone calls every single day of my employment with █, and I never heard nearly that many complaints.
I should point out that █ received many phone calls praising the test for its accurate results. Many doctors read the literature thoroughly and call to speak with the Drs. █ if they have any questions, and use the test appropriately. As a result, there are many doctors – and the number is, as a matter of fact, increasingly rapidly – who use the test for their patients with much success.
There is one downside to the test, which is that it relies greatly upon a local laboratory to follow the preparation procedure properly. There are many factors that can induce a false negative – improper storage (not freezing the serum on dry ice immediately) or using a butterfly tubing apparatus are two factors that will decrease the protein levels in the blood, and since (a) antibodies are proteins, and (b) once the blood is out of the body, there are no more proteins being made to replace the ones that are absorbed by the plastic or broken down by the proteases, both of those can cause false negatives.
4 – You raised another important question – why has no big-money corporation taken it on, and why have so many doctors not heard of the test? The answer is mainly that the █ are scientists, not business people. They have been approached by big-money corporations – I personally took several of those messages over the years – but the █ want to run their business the way they want it, not the way someone else wants to run it. Whether that made better financial sense or not is a different question. As for the other question, it takes a long time for tests to become accepted by the mainstream medical community. I read an article years ago – sent in by a patient who loves the █ test – that said that it took 30 years for the PAP smear to become accepted. So give the █ another ten years or so.
I also want to point out that in addition to being a former employee, I am a patient, also. I had a growing tumor excised from my ear, and the █ test confirmed that there was no cancer a week before the biopsy came back. Is that proof that the test works? No more than the stories from people with bad experiences. But it balances them out when you hear both sides.
The long and short of it is that yes, there is much more research that can be done on the █-█ █, and its functions, etc. But that doesn't detract from what has already been done, already been published, and already been shown to work. That independent study that showed a 59% sensitivity and 69% specificity – can you confirm that they followed the preparation procedure properly? When you do that, then you can come back and criticize the █ test. More than that, what stage breast cancer did the women have? How big were the tumors? The study was weakly done and poorly prepared, in my opinion.
**However, time after time, the █ test has been shown to be as sensitive and specific as reported when used properly. There is no reason for anyone to claim that the █test is junk, any more than the PSA, CA125, or any other cancer test currently accepted by the traditional medical world.** Feel free to contact me, and I will be happy to respond to any inquiries that come your way in regards to my letter to you.

There is just so much to say about this letter and I really should write to the doctor who runs www.pathguy.com , but I don’t think that he would be interested in being the mediator in this dispute which is essentially what he would be.

Aww. He called me a disgruntled employee. See? I do indeed know mine self.

Seriously though, the guy who wrote this letter has a serious case of battered wife syndrome. The people that we both used to work for treated him like absolute shit. This guy is Jewish and our ever brilliant bosses had no shortage of anti-Semitic things to say about him. Their one instruction to me when I was tasked with hiring another lab tech (I did a whole lot more than just fold boxes, but I will get to that below) was “no more fucking Jews.” If they had said to someone about hiring my replacement “no more fucking dykes” I would have been even more scathing in my account of their practices than I already was. Under no circumstances would I have gone out of my way to say good things about them or their work.

Which brings me to the tasks that each of was responsible for. In my second week of work I was asked, in no uncertain terms, to head out to the back yard and build a fence. I guess all that box folding showcased my manual dexterity well enough to make my employers think that I was capable of such feats of construction. That is not the only odd request I received in my nearly two years at the creepy lab. I was often asked to clean the bathroom, to clean the basement, to clean the sub-basement, to wax the floor, and to go to the basement of the adjoining house and fetch something from there. (Side note: this basement consisted of a long hallway with padlocked doors off of it. Each door had a sign that read “Do not open under any circumstances.” Also featured in this basement were animal cages caked in filth and perhaps old blood.) The best thing about being asked to do all of those tasks was that when I refused (as any sane person would) the tasks would fall to the guy who wrote the letter. I guess that would make him senior janitor as well. My job was not multi-faceted, I did admin stuff and nothing more, including fence building. The real reason that my job was reduced to just shipping boxes in the above letter, was because my actual primary duty, for which I was compensated with the same amount of money as the letter writer, was making sure that the lab technicians, senior or otherwise, were getting their work done on time. I left because they never were and I was the one who had to deal with the angry phone calls that resulted from their laziness and ineptitude. It is no secret that I left my position for the one job that was worse then the creepy lab, which is how I came to be writing here to begin with. And yes, desperation did lead me to ask (just once and in a non-begging fashion) for my job back.

But anyway, a bit about the letter writer. During his time at the creepy lab as “senior” lab technician (a term that our employer certainly did not give him) he did not have so much as a Bachelors degree, let alone any real first hand knowledge of how a lab should work. How could he? You can’t get a reputable science job WITHOUT a degree. At least I did not misrepresent myself by claiming to have first hand knowledge about something that I clearly do not. The extent of this guy’s job was to unpack boxes, label test tubes, and then fill them with our bosses’ secret serum made of 40 herbs and spices, or what ever the fuck they used, so as to detect cancer. This mixture then went into the incubator and four hours later results were produced. (Sidebar: They called their secret substance “target” and they would not let anyone know what it was made out of except that it required a lot of white vinegar. I was once told that they tried to sue the Target Corporation for use of the name because they had come up with it first…in the form of a secret chemical whose formula they refused to divulge). The inner scientific workings of the test were just as big a mystery to the letter writer as they were to me.

Also, apropos of nothing, the letter writer is an aspiring male model. This was something that my other co-workers and I derived hours of amusement from. Perhaps the reason he had no degree while working at the creepy lab was because he spent all of his money on the Hansom Boy Modeling School. This is just my own personal speculation though.

I really just don’t understand the motivation for the letter writer to have written this letter. I can only hope that in true battered wife fashion, this guy was turned out by our former employer and made to feel guilty for nothing cleaning the toilet well enough, or not polishing the floor to a sheen, shiny enough to be walked on by the likes of people as important as our former employers believed themselves to be. I really suspect that he was turned out because our former employer just couldn’t pay their employees anymore. I know that my “paycheck” (a personal check with no address listed at the top, simply the name of the company) bounced more than once, which is always a good indicator of financial stability. I am sure that this guy did not leaving willingly, because clearly he loved the place.

My real question though is this. If my letter was so very baseless and slanderous, why has my former employer (who sure as shit has been informed about this) sought charges against me? These people are insane. They tried to sue the Target Corporation. They tried to sue Mel Brooks on the basis that he stole the script for Young Frankenstein from their then elementary school aged children! I have seen the evidence of this. I have also seen the evidence of their criminal behavior, which is part of the reason I am not at the moment writing this from a homeless shelter due to the financial ruin of a lost slander suit. That and the fact slander has to be false to be slander. The truth is that the “extensive” phone records that these people keep are “while you were out” message slips, taped to note book paper. It doesn’t matter what method was used because half of these “extensive” records were faked. I know because it was my job before one of the lab’s inspection was to fake 6 years worth of phone records. I was also tasked with faking any test results that happened to have been missing at any time in the previous 15 years. Oh and those personal paychecks? They were drawn from an off shore account in Bermuda because taxes were not part of these people’s scientific vision. Nor was active American citizenship. Or medical licenses (my former employer’s son, who also called himself “doctor” attended medical school but never passed his boards or received a medical license. He now runs (into the ground) several IT companies, but quickly adopts the title of doctor when the family business requires). I guess my definition of criminally negligence is quite different from my former co-workers, because all of these things (plus the things I have not mentioned) are criminal activities that put people in danger.

I just don’t understand why people would even buy that this test will tell them they have cancer to begin with. The largest supporters of this test are a veterinarian who administers this test to horses, a doctor who writes a “health” newsletter about how the government uses scare tactics and propaganda to make people think that cigarettes are unsafe (yes, you read that correctly) and last but not least, a group of doctors who run what they call not a health center but a “longevity institute.” Certainly these are people who I would be willing to take life and death advice from.

If I am wrong or lying about this, go right ahead and sue me bitches!