April, 2001

Dear Mary:

I am a subscriber to your About Thyroid Disease Newsletter and have subclinical Hashimoto's Thyroiditis associated with chronic urticaria that I treat by taking thyroid hormone. I have read your book Living Well with Hypothyroidism and found it to be a very useful source of information.

I noticed in Issue 110 of your About Thyroid Disease Newsletter that you include a link to a news article from the Seattle Times Newspaper ("Uninformed Consent....") that claims that physicians at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ("the Hutch") treated a woman with metastatic breast cancer in a clinical trial with a high dose of chemotherapy after another patient had died from being treated with a lower dose of chemotherapy.

I have worked at the Hutch for the past 6 years and can say without a doubt in my mind that the faculty and the staff at the Hutch are dedicated to providing the absolute best patient care possible. In addition, the faculty and staff have the highest ethics and integrity of any place that I have ever worked. The Hutch is the world leader in clinical trials and research to find better methods of bone marrow transplantation that result in greater patient survival. As a result, we have the highest survival rates in the world for people who undergo bone marrow transplantation. People with cancer come to the Hutch from around the world because we are oftentimes their last and best hope for achieving a cure. However, the treatments that patients undergo and the complications that they may face can be very serious and severe. Not every patient is cured and sometimes patients do die. That's the heartbreak of clinical cancer care, and the reason why our faculty and staff are so dedicated to finding a cure to this devastating disease.

The Seattle Times series of articles are biased, sensationalized, often plain wrong, and do not report the scientific rationale about why this woman who died was treated with a high dose of chemotherapy. I urge you to visit the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's web site at http://www.fhcrc.org and read the Center's response to these false allegations by the Seattle Times.

I have cancelled my subscription to the Seattle Times because I could not in good conscience continue to subscribe to a newspaper that publishes such sensationalized lies and misrepresentations. I urge you to read about both sides of this issue and then decide for yourself if you wish to continue to list this link to the Seattle Times on the "About Thyroid News" web site.

Kind regards,

Karen Peterson