"Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions

quote:

---

That's how the alternative med people feel about conventional med, that they are encouraging people to accept treatments that are poisonous, rarely work and put people through misery

---

And alternative med people will do even worse. Do some research on black salve to start with.Cancers vary a lot. Good information is crucial if you want to make the right decisions. You won't get that from the "alternative" crowd.

Just don't assume that all (or really any) "alternative med" people are saints bringing cures suppressed by "Big pharma" to the public. There are reasons why testing is required for drugs. Alternative medicine is not all harmless and ineffective - some of it is actively harmful and ineffective. There are some horrific treatments out there.Nutritional advice may be helpful, but don't expect it to do anything much against cancer and a real nutritionist can probably give better advice than any "alternative medicine" type.

That just reads weirdly to me. I get that the hospital was serving cheap and nasty food. I get that it could use a good shake-up in the kitchen. But your complaint to the nutritionist seems to miss all that in favour of arguing about low carb diets. Maybe it's just the way you've written it but it sounds like you missed the opportunity to make genuinely important point that shouldn't be controversial.

I think that "too much sugar" makes that point perfectly well. But that seems to be only part of the problem - and could easily be a consequence of the real issues.

Bread won't have much sugar in it. It may be unpleasant, over-processed and full of preservatives but sugar shouldn't have been a problem.More, if you think not eating would be better than eating the food provided, you are very likely wrong. Which is probably the point that the nutritionist was trying to get across.There may have been a lack of nutritional control at the hospital, but the central problem was much more likely ill-informed "cost-cutting" that lead to poor quality food. E.g. "Long life" bread is cheap because it has a long shelf life so that gets bought by the hospital. I can't speak to the U.S. But over here there certainly have been efforts to improve hospital food, which have had some success.Alternative medicine is as likely to get you on some silly fad - or, especially, try to sell you overpriced supplements that you don't really need - as to give you good nutritional advice.As I said above the problem is far more likely with management and the financial aspects of running the hospital than the nutritionists.

quote:

---

Bread is a simple carb, it rapidly metabolizes to sugar in your body, that's why I used the term "simple carbs."

---

Bread is mainly carbohydrate, but starch not sugar. So I was right to think that you were bringing your diet into it. You are right that it metabolises quite quickly but it shouldn't be a problem on it's own.ABE: And I will add that there is a really big difference to objecting to the bread because it is cheap and nasty and objecting to it because it's bread. Even good bread is mostly starch and quickly metabolised.

quote:

---

I'm sure it's about money, so what. If it's defended as nutrition that's a crime, maybe of ignorance of what nutrition is, but it's sad if such unhealthy food is given to sick people. Why they have to be cheap about the food I don't get; it's a very good rehab otherwise.

---

It may well not be as bad as you suppose considered from the point of nutrition. But the problem of cheap unappetising food is certainly real, and fixing it could very well improve the food in other respects. It does depend on maintaining a proper kitchen, which may be the problem (although even a cook chill service might be better than what they had)

quote:

---

Most people of your opinion don't bother to find out anything about what's really entailed in the alternative diet strategies. And since you didn't even know what a simple carb is I'm very sure you know next to nothing of what this is all about

---

Oh dear. There you go bragging about your misuse of technical terminology again.For your information I did originally assume that you were using the term "simple carb" in a non-technical sense, and including the bread. You then insisted that you weren't talking about weight-loss diets and talking about sugar which lead me to question that. But I only emphasised the sugar because you did.In fact - and this is a quite simple point to rememember - if you are going to try to use technical terminology, sugars are simple carbohydrates and starches are complex carbohydrates. So, I know what a "simple carbohydrate" is and you didn't.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Do you think he should have preferred a lower chance ? Because that is what he really chose.The five year statistic is given because it is an actual measured value.It's needed because if the danger of cancer recurring - which is the point of the chemotherapy after surgery.You don't know that his diet made any difference to his chance of survival. We do know that refusing chemotherapy reduced it.

quote:

---

But I DO believe his diet is what made the difference to his chance of survival; I believe it is the reason he is alive today fourteen years later after having been given a mere 60% chance of living five more years on the standard treatment. I also believe it was the Gerson juicing regime that cured Jay Kordich's bladder cancer, and carrot juice the local man's prostate cancer, adding decades to both their lives. I find all three of these people credible.

---

Since they are making claims they cannot know to be true, their credibility on the issue can't be considered to be high. There is simply no way around that.

No, the odds are not "pretty enormous that they are right". Indeed, on a sensible evaluation the odds are that they are wrong. You can't conclude a link just based on one or even two cases. Some people with cancer do better than others - sometimes a lot better. People who drank lots of carrot juice and did well will report it. Those that died will not. Without actual numbers - or other relevant evidence - we can't tell that there is anything more than (unintentional, but pretty much inevitable) selective reporting

quote:

---

We hardly ever KNOW much of anything, but such a direct cause and effect is pretty good evidence.

---

You don't HAVE a direct cause and effect, you have a weak correlation, with a built-in bias to the reporting, which may be the whole of the story.

It's worth pointing out that a 60% five year survival rate means a 60% chance of living AT LEAST five years.Wark chose to take a gamble - to take a bigger risk of dying in five years in the hope of finding a better treatment. It's not an obviously sensible choice. And, while he has survived, we don't have much reason to think his choice of treatment had anything to do with that.And if he really is advising people to avoid surgery - then his advice will probably kill people. That's really not something I find praiseworthy and it reflects very badly on his judgement.

quote:

---

At least five years, but obviously the flat five years given means that's the best they can offer, and anyone who does live longer is beating the statistic and has to be very rare.

---

Utterly wrong. It's just a standard statistic. If 60% last 5 years, many of those will last longer. American Cancer SocietyAccording to Cancer Research UK the 10 year survival rate for bowel cancer is not much lower than the 5 year rate

quote:

---

Y'know, all this moral highgrounding here could be turned against you, since the record of survival on conventional treatment is clearly a lot shorter than the alternative treatments in the cases I've given. I've given five who died on conventional treatment within a few short years, and three who lived decades longer on alternative treatment and you are all acting as if that is big nothing. And that makes YOU the ones enticing people to inferior chances for longer life and health.

---

It isn't much. The numbers are way too low to make a good test, even if the data were unbiased - and it very likely is. If you want to claim the moral high ground you need to give up your obsession with winning the argument and rationally consider the evidence.

quote:

---

I don't recall what the two other cancers were but there's someone I could ask who would probably know. Maybe later. The three others who did the juice treatment are known too: Wark's colon cancer, Kordich's bladder cancer and local man's prostate cancer.

---

Prostate cancer survivability is really high. 15 year survival is 96% according to the American Cancer SocietyAnything short of Stage IV colon cancer has a 5 year survival rate of well over 50%
American Cancer Society and there doesn't seem to be a great drop off past that from the figures I cited in my previous post.Bladder cancer has a 15 year survival rate of 65% American Cancer SocietyUsing these figures I get an estimate of about 30% that all three would survive at least 15 years. With more details I could do better, but as a first pass it certainly doesn't point to any massive odds, even if we assume that all declined chemotherapy after surgery, and that that would noticeably affect their chances. And that's before we add the selective bias of only the survivors telling their story.If anything the other cases seem odder. If the survival rates are all above 50% the chance of all 5 dying is going to be less than 3%. So it sounds as if something is biasing those figures - maybe 1 or more having a Stage IV cancer which greatly reduces survival.

quote:

---

The rate you are giving is with current treatments, right? The man I'm talking about was diagnosed some time in the 80s, what was the survival rate at that time? And he lived 25 years past his diagnosis.

---

The rate doesn't exactly decline quickly, so we should certainly expect a very high survival rate for 25 years. The figures are reasonably "current" - so that means people diagnosed somewhere around 2000 - if you have more applicable figures then let's see them.

quote:

---

That's even less than the 60% Wark rejected in 2003. And again your source is probably giving a rate based on current treatments. Sounds liess promising than in 2003.

---

That's the worst case short of Stage IV, and not much lower. The UK figures don't suggest a lot of change in the last 10 years. And again if you have more applicable figures let's see them.

quote:

---

Jay Kordich was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1949. He wasn't looking for alternative treatments, he just thought Gerson sounded like he had a good track record so he went with his juicing plan and lived another 67 years. Any idea what the standard treatments were in 1949?

---

And Gerson's been tested and found not to work. Also, I rather feel that the built-in bias is rather strong for that case.

quote:

---

Yes I don't know the stage of any of them at diagnosis, but I don't think any of them were found early

---

In other words, not a valid comparison. Seriously if you actually care about whether the treatments work this is not the way to go about it.

Here's some information QuackwatchAnd more on site.

quote:

---

I'm not interested in trying to prove some universal cure. This is all trial and error at this point, but the cases I do know of I find convincing

---

But - and this is the point - objectively considered they aren't convincing evidence. And you really ought to ask yourself why the Alt medicine people aren't doing better in providing evidence - especially when the Gerson treatment has been around for 70 years.