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tv   Larry King Live  CNN  December 19, 2010 12:00am-1:00am EST

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-- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com >> larry: tonight, are you or a loved one in the fight of your life against cancer.
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>> it takes courage to be a cancer survivor. >> larry: professional break-throughs, and personal triumphs, fueling the wave of positive developments. >> you can be honest, but you can also be hopeful. >> larry: some of the world's experts on the disease are here, telling us how far they've come, how far we have to go. >> you're clawing and scratching for every extra penny that you're getting for the national cancer institute funding. >> larry: in the war to destroy a killer. an hour that could save your life. it's next on "larry king live." good evening. we have done many shows about cancer during our 25 years on tv. it's such an important subject, we wanted to do one more. we welcome dr. dean ornish,
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best-selling author of "the spectrum, a scientifically proven program to feel better, live longer, lose weight and gain health." michael milken, philanthropist and cancer survivor. he co-founded the milken family foundation in 1982, to advance progress in medical research and education. in 2004, forbes magazine called him the man who changed medicine for increasing funding and attention for cancer treatment. dr. mukergee, assistant professor of medicine, columbia university, cancer staff -- staff cancer physician at columbia university medical center and author of a brilliant new book "the emperor of maladies, a biography of cancer." just named by "the new york times," one of the ten best books of 2010.
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dr. derrick rackavan, chairman and director of the toxic cancer center at the cleveland clinic. joining us in a moment from atlanta, dr. sanjay gupta, cnn's chief medical correspondent, and associate chief of neurosurgery, grady memorial hospital. we're dedicating this hour to one of our senior producers, who has booked the guests for a number of these shows. his name is hunter waters. he is battling the disease with dignity and courage. hunter, this one's for you. let's take a look back at some of the important discussions we've had about cancer over the years. watch. >> this may shock you, but 1,500 americans die every day of cancer. that's the equivalent of four jumbo jets crashing every day of the year. every day, including sundays. broadcast news anchors join forces to fight a killer. it may be hard to watch what inoperable cancer has done to
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her. it's tough for us to see tammy faye looking so weak. what in your opinion is the best way to deal with cancer? >> accept it. do whatever you can to help get rid of it. >> you never want to hear those words. it's not something i ever thought i would hear. but, yeah, i was shocked. but it's somewhere in me, i just had this idea. >> and i cared by my life, what drugs i was going to take, the interaction with the doctors and nurses. i wanted to know everything. >> when you do radiation, they do these little tattoos. i kept my tattoos, because you can see the little -- it is a reminder for me. it's a reminder of that time, and a reminder of how i want to look at my life. >> i never told anyone in the last year i've been battling and surviving breast cancer. >> i'm a prostate cancer winner. >> i would like to kill the
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cancer a little bit of a time and on this constant downward slide. but it's not like that. it's up and down. >> for us, every day, every week was a supreme victory. so it wasn't like, oh, my gosh, could we make it to six months. yeah, we made it. >> lo and behold, there it was. i had prostate cancer. i felt wonderful. we had just won second world series. and i was tickled pink. all of a sudden you get hit in the face. >> larry: do you ever think we're going to defeat breast cancer? >> i hope so. i think definitely with a lot of the research going on. a day like today, really are very inspiring, for the researchers and survivors and people dealing with it every day. >> larry: we've now assembled a panel and discussed the most important topic we can, cancer. doctor, why the title the emperor of all maladies? >> i picked this title because
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it's actually a handwritten note by a surgeon, and he said cancer is the king of all trors. i like the image of the emperor, because this disease has really enveloped our lives. and is a imagine es tierrial disease. >> we've come a great deal, larry. i'm very optimistic here. 2010 is probably the greatest year for cancer research ever. and we're seeing a decrease in the death rate. and i have great optimism that the next ten years will substantially reduce the death rate in cancer. and not only will tens of millions of people who have had cancer be living, but we're eventually going to move cancer to a chronic disease, not a life-threatening disease. >> larry: it is your sense it's preventable? >> we talk about advances in medicine being a new drug or surgery. but what we've done in our studies is show that the simple
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choices that we make in our lives, what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke, how much exercise we get, and we found that when you change your lifestyle, it actually changes your genes that prevent cancer, and turning off the genes that cause cancers and other illnesses. >> larry: why has the cure eluded us for so long? >> well, i have to say, larry, that we've cured many different types of cancer in my 30-year career. i think a good example includes cure aids so we can report on the leukemia, testicular cancers. the reason that some tumors are still resistant is that cancer is such a complex disease, as sid illustrated in his book. it changes their stem cells that change the behavior of the patterns of the little seedlings
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in cancer. >> larry: where at the spectrum is brain cancer? >> i think in terms of making an impact overall, as a neurosurgeon i think over the last few decades we have not made the sort of progress with one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer, glioblastoma. we talked a lot about senator ted kennedy. that was a type of cancer that he had. and this is one of those tumors, still, larry, that when you get the diagnosis, oftentimes it comes accompanied with this average survival around 14 months. with some types of brain cancers, we've done before. with this type of cancer t is so complicated, not just one cancer, there are so many different types of cancer literally within a tumor, and they're all smart. they're all wiley. they all evade treatment.
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that's what makes it so difficult to treat. >> larry: we'll be back with more. don't go away. ♪ oh, my gosh. oh, my gosh. ♪ [ male announcer ] you know her. we know diamonds. together we'll make her holiday. that's why only zales is the diamond store. where you can get up to $1,000 off now through sunday.
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i did everything. i did east meets west. i did western therapies with chemotherapy, and i did all the western traditions. i did yoga, meditation. and acupuncture. and combined the two things. i found as wonderful as my doctors were, my western medicine doctors, they didn't have any information, and didn't really believe it was anything to do with nutrition. so i had to -- i kind of divided it in half and went my own way with the other treatments. >> larry: rolled all the dice. >> yes. >> larry: doctor, i want to read a little more from your brilliant book which "the new
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york times" labeled one of the ten best books of the year. here's what he said. in most ancient societies, people didn't live long enough to get cancer. if cancer existed, it remained submerged under the sea of other illnesses. cancer's emergence of the world becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed. 19th centuries doctors link cancer, caused by modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. the link was correct. the casualty was not. civilization didn't cause cancer. but by extending human life spans, civilization unveiled it. why, dr. mukherjee, did we hide it so long? why didn't we say the word? >> part of the answer is cancer is an age related disease. many cancers are age related, breast cancer importantly.
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prostate cancer. and so as the population ages, in general, the rates of cancer incidence will increase. that said, for a long time, the word cancer was not even uttered in the public realm. there was the big c, it was hidden. a woman called up "the new york times" and wanted to place an advertisement for breast cancer. and they said what if you place an advertisement for disease of the chest wall. we're just now talking about this in a public way. >> larry: richard nixon declared war on it. whatever happened to the war? >> we've had a war, larry. >> larry: but it was late, wasn't it? >> well, we have made tremendous progress. you know, we should look at this very optimistically. not -- more than 12 million people in america, tens of millions around the world are living normal lives. i couldn't be happier to be with you here today, larry, 17 years
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after i was diagnosed when they gave me 12 months to live. i think we underestimate, as people see more and more people living normal, successful lives, cancer no longer is a word that is not spoken from that standpoint. and we sometimes forget that the greatest achievement, the greatest achievement of the 20th century was a doubling, a doubling of le expectancy on this planet in 100 years. one out of five americans lost their life before 5 years old. so 20% of the population didn't make it to 5. today you go to 62 before 20% of the population passes away. and so yes, we're living longer. cancer is more common. one in two men, one in three women. but as we focused our attention and modern technology on cancer, the death rate from prostate cancer from projected levels has now dropped almost 50%.
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>> larry: how much do the pharmaceuticals? >> if you actually look at the death rate from cancer in the last 50 years, it hasn't changed a lot. but i think mike is a perfect example of how diet and lifestyle can make a difference. 17 years ago when we talked about these things, he has been making -- >> larry: no medications helped him? >> i think medications -- it's not one or the other, it's a combination of the two. we did a study with the chair of at the cancer center. we worked with men who had biopsy driven prostate cancer who selected not to have traditional treatment. the simple lifestyle changes could stop or reverse the progression in many men. >> it's the same lifestyle that can also reverse heart disease, many of the same underlying mechanisms, like inflammation are the same in both conditions. >> larry: dr. raghavan, is
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cancer a civil war in the body, in which cells go to war with other cells? >> you know, i guess that's one way of expressing it. i think of it a little bit differently. it's certainly a battle where the body is trying to defend itself. if you think of the great australian immunologist many years ago who was interested in transplantation, he said when you sup prels the immunity of the body by doing a transplant, cancer cells could get totally out of control. i kind of think of cancer more as an invader that's in the body, so that as i think many people know, we've come to understand that there are different genes that control the way cancer cells grow. and some of those genes mutate, so that the cells become almost unrecognizable. so essentially you've kind of got what you might call the good
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guys, the cavalry, which is the body's defense system fighting the invaders. and as dean ornish said a minute ago, there are some sets of data that suggest that you can influence that yin and yang, that balance. there are data coming out now to suggest that some types of lifestyle modification are helpful. on the other hand, there are also a number of trials that show that many of the remedies that are out there with great popular interest actually don't work. so i think one of the very important things that dean has done with pete carroll and the late bill fare was to actually test the hypothesis in a randomized trial. unfortunately we don't do that enough in the usa. >> larry: i'll pick it up in a minute. don't go away. a, man. home of the highway... last minute detours and spontaneous acts of freedom. ♪ we're wanderers. wayfarers. even nomads. so doesn't it just make sense
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>> as i was watching your show, one night when you had michael on. michael milken. >> larry: prostate cancer. >> prostate cancer. and it was before i had received word that i had cancer. it was only one day before i received word. and i called you, i received word, and within a matter of hours i called you to see if i could get the information on that doctor with his diet. and figure out a way to give up smoking. >> larry: before we pick it up with what michael wanted to say, dr. gupta, do we know why jim gets it and john doesn't? >> well, it's an interesting question. a lot of people subscribe to the idea that you may be born with some sort of predisposition, if you will, some likelihood of getting cancer. and then something in the environment, or something that you've done to your own body in some way may sort of cause the cancer to actually happen.
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so it could be that. but there's still bewildering questions. we talked a lot, for example, around peter jennings when he developed lung cancer, and he had been a smoker. dana reeve developed lung cancer and had never been a smoker. so sometimes you just don't know. >> larry: dr. mukherjee, it is a puzzle. when it kills us, what kills us? why do we die? >> well, much like the disease itself, the causes of death are in some cases, in most cases, cancer kills through me tas ta sis. where the cells take over different parts of the body. and that's called me tas te sis. that's not the only reason. in the case of leukemia, which is a cancer of the white blood cells, it grows in the bone marrow. part of the reason that often people die is from infections because the cancer cells take over the bone marrow and they make it impossible for the bone
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marrow to normally work. so much as the disease itself are hetro gs again esis. >> i think you can see the people living normal lives today, larry. we've funded over 1,500 cancer research programs in over 30 countries around the world. >> including ours. >> including dean's over the years. i just can't tell you, as you travel around the world, you see one success story after another. >> larry: you hear it every day. >> we have an aging population that's dramatically older. the incidence is higher. one in two men, one in three women. and so if the number of deaths is the same, as the population grows and ages, actually the death rate adjusted is dropping. but the number of men dying has dropped from 43,000, let's say in prostate cancer in '83 to 9,000 today.
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it was projected because an age of 60 or 70. we discovered there's 24 forms of prostate cancer. maybe six of them don't even have to be treated because they're not going anywhere. maybe six are so aggressive, that you want to treat more than just early treatment through surgery or radiation or something. so we know so much more. it's just a function of science. and determination. but dean has made another very important point. what we have found in these hundreds and hundreds of studies is, yes, for 20% to 30% of the population, it might be your genes and it might be heredity. but for 60, 70, maybe as many as 80% of the cases it's your lifestyle. you can actually change your genes today through your lifestyle, diet and how you conduct your life. and so it's a partnership. it takes courage to be a cancer survivor. but to do something about your life, change your life. you've got cancer, partly because of the way you were living your life. and dean, 30 years ago, when we first met, has been the
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forerunner of the fact that you can change the outcome in your own life. >> larry: why is chemotherapy, dean, a terrible word, since it must help people? >> it can be a beautiful word. >> larry: somebody's on chemotherapy you go -- >> because of the lack of specificity. it not only poisons your cancer cells, it poisons your whole body. the future of chemotherapy is using jen oh micks, to tailor -- not one size fits all. >> larry: he can get one and i'll get this? >> something like that. it's also changing the soil, as i talked about before. what you include in your diet is as important as what you exclude. there are hundreds of thousands of protective substances, particularly in blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes and soy products that help to prevent against prostate cancer. by understanding that, we can have a sense of abundance while helping to prevent cancer at the same time. as far as your genes go, we found out not only do you change
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your life chil, it changes the ends of our chrome oh soems. we did that in collaboration with elizabeth blackburn who got the nobel prize last year. there's a lot we can do. and these mechanisms of not only inflammation, but angiogenesis, we can start the tumor in ways that don't have the kind of toxicity of chemotherapy. >> larry: we'll be back with more on this most important topic, cancer. don't go away. i said "sure." "well, let's grow some algae." and that's what started it. exxonmobil and synthetic genomics have built a new facility to identify the most productive strains of algae. algae are amazing little critters. they secrete oil, which we could turn into biofuels. they also absorb co2. we're hoping to supplement the fuels that we use in our vehicles, and to do this at a large enough scale to someday help meet the world's energy demands.
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subject that interested you? >> i think so. when you consider one out of every two men and one out of every three women will get this disease, and 40% of our nation's population has the disease, saddam hussein got our attention when he went into kuwait and killed a few thousand people. we're talking about something that's going to kill millions and millions and millions of americans. >> larry: we're back with our outstanding panel on this very, very important topic. dr. raghavan, do we now fully ups what we're dealing with? >> i think we ups a lot more about cancer. as mike milken said a few minutes ago, the last few years have been absolutely spectacular. when i started in the 1970s, there was an awful lot of educated guesswork, using good clinical skill and a bit of guessing. now as we've discussed, we're starting to understand the genes
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that control cancer, some colleagues of mine finished a trial using chemotherapy was completely predicated on a mutation in a gene called p-53, which is one of the genes that suppresses one of the types of cancer. i will make the comment, because i, like several of the others, am very up on the fact that we're making progress, that it's a slow steady slog. but i still there's a problem. that is, we have an immense disparity in the united states, and in north america generally, where there are populations of patients that just don't get an even break. people who are elderly, the poor, people who are geographically isolated get a really generally pretty raw deal. and when people say to me, if i were the emperor in control of things and could do one thing that might reduce death from cancer, if i could magically create a situation where the
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death rate from cancer across america was the death rate for college educated white males, we'd drop the national death rate by a huge proportion. >> larry: do you agree, dr. gupta? >> yeah, that's a fascinating way of looking at it. you know, it's interesting, we just did a story specifically looking at the elderly. and what was interesting is that so many times hospitals, health care professionals, i think with best interests in mind, oftentimes some of these therapies dr. raghavan was just talking about, they're thought too be too old. even if their bodies can be actually quite young. if you go back and ask those elderly patients, more than 3/4 of the time they actually wanted the treatment that wasn't offered to them. i think making sure what we know works is actually made available to those who need it is a very important step. >> larry: dr. mukherjee, would
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you read another little passage from your book? >> here's a passage in which i talk about the idea that cancer, when we began to solve the cancer genome, several groups have done this, it turned out there was an enormous level of diversity. one could become holistic and say this problem is just too complicated. then even within the diversity, it turns out there are unified principles. here's where i'm writing about that. the bedlam of the cancer genome in short is deceptive. if one listens closely, there are in fact organizational principles. the language of cancer is grammatical, and i hesitate to write, git beautiful. genes talk to genes in perfect pitch. reducing a familiar and yet foreign music. underneath what might seem like overwhelming diversity is in fact a deep genetic unity. cancer that looks vastly unlike each other often have the same or similar pathways unhinged.
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cancer as one scientist put it is a pathway disease. >> larry: michael, i know you're optimistic. but it's still a word -- it's still the big c. it's still a word you don't want to hear. >> you don't want to hear it, larry. but 12 million people in america are living normal lives that have had cancer. computers -- >> larry: who have had cancer, now don't have cancer. >> that's correct. computers are a million times faster than they were 10 to 15 years ago. we have the computing capacity now to deal with numbers that we are dealing with in a number of cells. 1 trillion calculations a second. so we can test every single thing today. what we could have only dreamed of doing when i started working on cancer research more than 30 years ago, we can do today in an
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hour, or an afternoon. it is a totally different world today. and larry, you've been a big part of that world. on this very show in 1995, really, the first cancer show, people were concerned, what about ratings, how are people going to feel about the big c. i know it was one of your more successful shows that year. but in 30 days, we collected enough data that used to take 12 years to collect when general schwarzkopf came on that show. and we announced the cancer march on this show, the cancer march in 1998 mobilizing people throughout the country. doubling of the nih budget. tripling of the nci budget. and research for specific cancers. it has changed the world. this show has led a path that has changed the world. >> i want to say a lot of that is because of mike. and i salute him for that. >> larry: and we'll be right
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back. major events going to take place in washington this saturday. called the march. >> you are the father of this march. and that night we talked about it. it just sort of came to us, thanks to you. let's have a march on washington. because i've watched over the years, about 38 years in this town, people who marched on washington, made an impression.
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>> larry: were you scared the night before the surgery? >> i sure was. i suddenly realized that cancer, you mentioned cancer to some people, and the lights go out. >> larry: we mentioned it on this show. the news came in on this program. it's a scary word. >> but you'd be surprised the people that i've heard from with different kinds of cancer, and
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the key to all this is early detection. >> larry: we're back with our panel. i don't want to toot my own horn, but you credit this show with saving -- i know we saved a couple of lives when we did a show with senator dole. and he revealed about the psa. and i know people came up to us and said they had no idea about taking it. they took it. they found they had it and they're cured. >> larry, i'm alive today because of the psa test. if i had not taken that test i would not be alive today. but there's 7 million people around the world that can see your show, who are going to lose their life to cancer this year. you give them hope. you give them opportunity. and potentially you'll give them access to care. but the doubling of the nci budget and tripling of that budget, the elimination of cancer as a cause of death in just america, is the greatest stimulus we could have. it's worth $50 trillion to the u.s. economy. >> i was going to say that part of the value of your show is to give voice to this. it used to be when you got
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diagnosed with cancer, it's bad enough that you feel isolated already, but not to be able to talk about it makes it doubly so. >> larry: isn't it said, dr. raghavan, that if you can go to the cleveland clinic, you've got a better deal than if you go to wackamacka institute of cancer in some remote city. >> well, it is a pity. although in many remote cities there's absolutely superb cancer care available. you know, one of the models that we have developed in cleveland, and that i hope to export now that i'm moving to the levine cancer institute in charlotte is the concept of linking central facilities with outstanding science to smaller places. so in cleveland and in charlotte, we will be evolving a mechanism to collaborate between centers of excellence with laboratories and clinical trial centers, and making those
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facilities available out in the homeland of usa. the leukemia lymphoma society is another superb patient advocacy group, actually sponsors currently studies that take clever new early phase clinical trials, which are designed to look at new drugs and test them for safety and efficiency in the blood cancers, and exports them from, for example, the cleveland clinic into small centers throughout ohio. and my own feeling is that if government sponsored more work for collaboration between centers of excellence, and smaller centers that were prepared to collaborate, we could make an awful lot of progress. there's some absolutely wonderful clinical trial doctors, and clinical oncologists out in small places who would be only too pleased to participate. >> larry: dr. gupta, we spend more in iraq and afghanistan than we do on cancer, don't we? >> oh, yeah. far more.
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and as i think michael milken is alluding to you, you're clawing and scratching for every extra penny you're getting for the funding. i think dr. raghavan is sort of talking about this, that the way the scientific establishment is now, you often have people working in silos separate from each other all over the country. if somehow you could make this effort that michael milken is describing more unified in some way, and all these smart minds, like sid mukherjee, working on the same things, as opposed to working separately, you might make some of these audacious yet very achievable goals that michael's describing much more quicker. >> larry, you know, millions of people use skype. you talk to your wife, you talk to your kids, you talk to your grandkids. the ability for one scientist to communicate with another, we look at sending watching movies
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online today. but that same enormous ability to send data allows you to send medical records. there is no place on the planet that if you have a life-threatening disease that you cannot interact with one of the leading experts using technology today, technology will solve the problem. as you pointed out, larry, it's not that we spend more money on wars than cancer, the united states spent more money last year buying potato chips than we invested in the national cancer institute. the last political election we've spent more in one election than we do on cancer. and so if cancer -- elimination of cancer as a cause of death is worth $50 trillion to the u.s. economy, and imagine it's worth hundreds of trillions to the world, imagine if we doubled or tripled that budget, you couldn't get a higher rate of return. and we would compress that time. >> larry: we'll be right back with more.
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we're going beyond the racism and sexism. >> are we even trying. >> larry: you talk of love. you love the chinese. >> certainly. >> and there is the origin of life. >> everybody should have a broad picture of how the universe operates. >> that anger can be a force if properly directed. >> given amnesty on very strict conditions. >> mike coleman used to preach the love of god and forgiveness of god. >> larry: elizabeth edwards recently died after a six-year battle with breast cancer. let's take a look at her last interview on this program.
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what do you say to the other cancer patients? >> that as long as you're walking around, as long as you're not dead now, that you're alive. >> larry: look in the mirror. >> that's right. you're alive. don't spend your time worrying about when it is you're going to die. spend your time worrying how you'll live today. >> larry: can you add something to what michael said? >> what encourages me is the research is changing focus now. it used to be we would look at the organ the cancer started in and we focus on that. now that we have a better understanding of the america nisms that underlie cancer, we can tar get the therapies accordingly. >> larry: dr. mukherjee, should the oncologists be very honest with the cancer patient? >> yes. the oncologist should be very honest with the cancer patient. the history as i point out in my book, there are several moments when doctors fool themselves. major trials of breast cancer, for instance, where episodes in
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which doctors fool themselves. when doctors fool themselves and fool their patients, in the end, you know, it creates a rift between patient and doctor. but honesty, you can be honest, but you can also be hopeful. you can be -- you can look to the future. and honesty doesn't equate to hopelessness. >> larry: we'll be back with more right after this.ur eason'st sales event and receive the gift of asphalt. experience the exhilarating cadillac cts with a direct injection v6. it's the one gift you can open up all year long. see your cadillac dealer for this attractive offer. backed by the peace of mind that only comes from cadillac premium care maintenance. the season's best sales event. from cadillac. 20 minutes later, she'll bring one into the world in seattle.
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i was so lucky we found it early, because of the mammogram. i thought, you know what, i really owe this to the women out there that are putting it off, to speak out and say, you know what, get that mammogram every year. because you never know when it will save your life. that's why i'm here to encourage women to get the yearly checkup. >> larry: we're back with our panel. michael, did your own cancer cause you to have increased interest in -- or were you fighting for this before? >> i began in '72 when my mother-in-law was diagnosed. and by the time i was diagnosed with ca with cancer, my stepfather, my cousins, et cetera had cancer. i knew nothing about prostate cancer. i knew everything about breast cancer, melanoma, brain tumors, et cetera. but one of the things i did know -- learn is that i was
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going to do something different. my prognosis was so negative at the time, that my belief was, you know, i had to embrace nutrition. i had to embrace what some people called eastern medicine. and i'm a firm believer here that it's a partnership. it takes courage, as i said before, to be a cancer patient. you want to know all the facts. but we cannot underestimate the will of an individual to live and improve themselves and focus and take action to do things that give you the best chance for hope. when people tell you 50% of the people pass away, or what these averages, those are only average also. and those averages also relate to the past. people that had treatment many years ago, which might not be the current treatment. and so we need to look forward, not back from that standpoint. doctors around the world are collaborating, larry. scientists around the world. this is no longer just a u.s.
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challenge. and whether you go to china or india or singapore or england, witser land, wherever you might be in the world, there's amazing break-throughs coming. and i just don't think anyone can leave this program, larry, first, without thanking you for your trkss. you were the very first person that was willing to address this issue on the air. you were the very first person to give people hope. that people -- you can see people that have had cancer are living normal lives. and i want to say to you, as this 25 years is coming to an end, that people should not take away from this show that we're not going to see a substantial reduction in death from cancer, and move to the period of time where cancer is a chronic disease. >> larry: you flatter me. >> i also want to build on what mike is saying, which is love is a very powerful weapon against cancer. in addition to whatever else you're doing, one classic study that dr. david speigel at stanford did, the women were all
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getting the same chemo and surgery. one group was randomly assigned to receive a support group where they talked with each other, let down their emotional defenses, talked about what it's really like to have cancer. because they were going through it. they just did that for a year. five years later those women were found to live twice as long. now, the love, the connection, the ability to be able to express your feelings authentically with another is one of the most powerful things you can do for your life. >> larry: you can go to ornish.com, all of it free. the afternoon tour begins with more pain and more pills. the evening guests arrive. back to sore knees. back to more pills. the day is done but hang on... her doctor recommended aleve. just 2 pills can keep arthritis pain away all day with fewer pills than tylenol. this is lara who chose 2 aleve and fewer pills for a day free of pain. and get the all day pain relief of aleve in liquid gels.
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>> larry: we played that aretha franklin song, because it's reported that she has cancer. you were going to say something? >> aretha also was an inspirational force at the cancer march in 1998, larry. she entertained hundreds of thousands of people in the mall. and it was an uplifting experience. and it was quite interesting, whether it was bob dole from the republican party, and you had crosby, sills and nash, very interesting collection of individuals. >> larry: dr. mukherjee, are we going to see it end? are we going to defeat it? >> well, the ability to convert cancer into a chronic disease is a victory. as i point out in my book, you know, in 1970s we were obsessed with the idea of a cure. for some cancers indeed, as pointed out, testicular cancer is the poster child of that.
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some leukemia cancers are curable. but the ability to reduce or delay death from cancer is going to really transform the way we think about cancer in the future. and the ability to convert cancer into a chronic disease for some cancers is going to transform the way we think about cancer. and last and not least, you know, even the ability to bring this word out into the public, and talk about how we can take care of people who have terminal cancer, is a very, very important part of this process of learning about this disease. >> larry: dr. raghavan, do you agree? >> i do. i once had a patient who was dying of lung cancer, and we were having real trouble controlling his pain. and i asked him what was troubling him the most. and it turned out that he lived alone. was in australia having em grated. and his fear was that he would die and be buried alone. so my house officer and my chief nurse and i told him that we
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would actually send him off when he died. and his pain requirements dropped about 80%. the point i make, is that you can have the best science in the world, but you have to have good old-fashioned clinical doctoring to make the package complete. >> larry: michael, you think we've turned the corner, right? >> i think we've more than turned the corner, larry. and testicular cancer, 95% of men used to die. one of our young investigators, einhorn, from the university of indiana, changed the world there. and there are people who are changing the world every day in this disease. we really did not focus on this, or have the tools. but as dean ornish has so eloquently explained over such a long period of time, this is a partnership. let's first prevent it. we'd all rather not get cancer thaf have early de tex. we know in many parts of the world incidents are 10% of what they are here. >> larry: we thank all of our guests and panelists.
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it's been an honor to have had the ability to do shows like this. dr. dean ornish, michael milken, dr. siddhartha mukherjee, dr. derek raghavan, and dr. sanjay gupta. we know so many of your families have been affected by cancer. so has ours. the "larry king live" family will leave you tonight with the faces and names of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and others we know who fought the good fight. some are survivors. some are no longer with us. we honor them all. good night.
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