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Author Topic:   "Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


(1)
Message 258 of 606 (822308)
10-22-2017 2:59 PM
Reply to: Message 257 by Granny Magda
10-22-2017 12:42 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
The point is she had ONE plasmapheresis treatment and the numbers went back up soon after, and she had it after her relapse. The seven years before that she brought her numbers down entirely by diet and lifestyle changes. Entirely. Stability at least means SYMPTOM-FREE. And she returned to that stability after the plasmapheresis after the relapse too, entirely through the same diet that did it before the relapse.
Chemo sometimes cures people, great, but who wants to be poisoned into health if it's possible to do it without being poisoned? Some people get so sick on the chemo they give it up without anyone telling them there's another way, willing to die when they might not have to. Why are you so reluctant to support the fact that nutrition IS a potent treatment for some cancers? Despite your best efforts on this one it remains true that this woman got rid of her cancer as well as chemo could have without the chemo, and since the chemo rate is only 50% for twelve-year survival my guess is her diet changes did a lot better than chemo could.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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 Message 257 by Granny Magda, posted 10-22-2017 12:42 PM Granny Magda has replied

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 Message 259 by Granny Magda, posted 10-22-2017 5:11 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 260 of 606 (822314)
10-22-2017 5:35 PM
Reply to: Message 259 by Granny Magda
10-22-2017 5:11 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
Yeah well give us the statistics for those who survived twelve years with her disease without doing anything at all.
And how do you explain her decreasing cancer signs in her blood with every three-month blood test? And how do you explain that her cancer came back in spades when she changed her diet? And again decreased with each following blood test when she was back on her diet?
And since the plasmapherosis did nothing except very briefly push down her numbers, what good do you expect from more of those treatments?
And the doctor she saw who diagnosed her said that chemo can't cure her either. So she'd have the rest of her life to look forward to more chemo treatments. As she said, she'd rather die in her current state of health than be sick from chemo for the rest of her life. And now she can look forward to a life on her changed diet, apparently not as appealing as the one on her cruise that caused her relapse, but I'd venture the guess that it's more pleasant than chemo.
She was following the protocols in a book about nutritional cancer treatment. That makes her not just a single case. Wark did something similar, and he has fifty videos of interviews with people who also did something similar and beat back their cancers. Sorry, your reasoning is just the usual prejudiced tripe.
And I could not care less about one failed effort or misstatement by the nutrition people since you ignore the thousands of other things that are true and that worked. Greger has thousands of videos up about nutrition research but you focus on one about kidney stones. Give me a break.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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 Message 259 by Granny Magda, posted 10-22-2017 5:11 PM Granny Magda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 261 by Granny Magda, posted 10-22-2017 6:00 PM Faith has replied
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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 262 of 606 (822323)
10-23-2017 4:31 AM
Reply to: Message 261 by Granny Magda
10-22-2017 6:00 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
Interesting that you don't answer the most telling facts about Karen's story: the decrease in cancer in her blood with every three-month blood test when her entire treatment was diet; its return when she went off her diet for a couple of months, and the same pattern of decrease when she resumed it. This kind of pattern is in fact reported for most of the testimonials I've read or listened to. The idea is that they will continue to be tested to see if it is working and if it isn't they will consider the standard options of chemo and radiation etc.
I did not say the other examples were of Karen's same kind of cancer and you know I didn't, you just chose to ignore the implication that similar dietary protocols work for different kinds of cancer. In a few cases no change other than adding large amounts of carrot juice, in other cases changing over to a completely plant-based diet, and variations of all kinds in between, but the general rule is clear: cutting back on meat and dairy and emphasizing plant foods makes a big difference. Of course there are differences in whether some standard treatment was also used, and in particular protocols used in different cases, but the overall trend is clear, that there are changes in diet and environment that can reduce or cure cancers of all kinds. Certainly the information is scattered and needs some refinement and controlled study, but your refusal to see the obvious implications of the information already available doesn't inspire trust to put it mildly. Oh maybe you can preach to the EvC choir effectively enough, but you're only convincing me you're just the usual EvC voice for the status quo.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 261 by Granny Magda, posted 10-22-2017 6:00 PM Granny Magda has replied

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 Message 263 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 2:19 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 264 of 606 (822361)
10-23-2017 3:37 PM
Reply to: Message 263 by Granny Magda
10-23-2017 2:19 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
Karen's description of her successful blood tests is the typical story among the people who tell their anecdotes and it ought to mean something, enough to spare us the blanket dismissal of anecdotal evidence. It's not just a "single case," it's quite typical of these reports. The main difference is her relapse and subsequent recovery, which makes the case even more compelling.
I've agreed that true research needs to be done but I still see your attitude as reprehensible. Nobody's dying from this standard nutritional veggie/raw veggie protocol so you can stop the scare tactics. Yes YOUR scare tactics. Many of the people have tried or intend to try the standard treatments if necessary, I haven't yet heard of one who flat-out refuses, they are hoping the diet change will do it and in these reports it does.
Yes, there are differences in what people did WITHIN the basic range of diet changes. So what? ALL of them point to the efficacy of going veggie FOR CANCER. Most of them who have gone to the furthest extremes in that direction don't know exactly which of their many treatments did the work, from the juices to the meal plan to the supplements to the odd stuff like "ozone therapy" and so on, so sure, sort all that out in research, and I hope someone will, but meanwhile we're talking about desperate people who want to cure their cancer, not talking about scientists, including nutritionists. And yes it certainly is very suggestive, but the one thing they ALL have in common is the plant foods, particularly raw vegetables and juices, they switch to. Carrot juice is a raw vegetable too of course. There's only one case among the group I mentioned of someone curing her cancer with only forty ounces of carrot juice a day and no other changes. Probably wouldn't work for many others, but her case is like the local man I talked about earlier who treated his prostate cancer with carrot juice and no other differences in diet.
Maybe someone will eventually do such studies for the nutrition journals Greger reads. How would you propose such a study be done? They'd have to get groups of people suffering from the same kind of cancer, wouldn't they? Oh, maybe they could take one at a time I suppose. They'd probably have to get them from doctors, wouldn't they? Wouldn't it be intrusive, to propose a treatment to people already under treatment? Wouldn't doctors be disinclined to cooperate with such a study? Perhaps subjects could be recruited through ads? How about patients in hospice who have given up anyway? How would you control their diet? I don't think it's as easy as you claim to do such studies. And it would take tons of money to do it right.
And no, doctors do not tell anyone to avoid meat and dairy that I'm aware of, for any disease or for health in general. They usually give some version of a "balanced diet." As Karen and others Wark has interviewed report, hospital food is the opposite of what the alt-med recommends. Karen says she took a course in holistic medicine and I think got some kind of certification. Anyway she became aware that chemo patients, and hospital patients in general, may be given coca cola, which is about as bad as the chemo for undermining health.
Why would you object to calling chemo "poison?" That's what it is. I never heard that denied by anyone. The idea is to kill the cancer with this poison.
And since this came up earlier, I want to ask if there is even ONE case of spontaneous remission of cancer that you know of? Why even pretend that could explain any of these cases? Why lament the lack of a statistic for that when you probably know there aren't any such cases?

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 Message 263 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 2:19 PM Granny Magda has replied

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 Message 266 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 5:39 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 265 of 606 (822365)
10-23-2017 4:26 PM


Spontaneous remission cases???
I looked up spontaneous remission of cancer and it is claimed there have been many cases. But there is usually also a cause of the remission at least hypothesized. Here's one historical study of such remissions, thought to be due to infections in many cases.
Another article is rather amusing for defining spontaneous remission as the curing of cancer by alternative "unproven" treatments or "inadequate" treatments, such as nutrition changes. Ha ha. A patient named Ann Fonfa cured herself of breast cancer with diet changes and supplements and stress reduction.; This is called "spontaneous remission" instead of what it obviously was, a cure brought about by diet change.
And then it mentions the failed alternative treatments WITHOUT DEFINING THEM. Not identified as changes in nutrition, just "alternative treatments." Could be any weird thing for all the article makes clear, like a study mentioned earlier in this thread that damned all "alt-med" methods without bothering to specify which of the many methods were applied.
The article goes on to mention a book by Kelly Turner, "Radical Remission" which reports on her study of 200 cases of cancers that were cured specifically by diet change and supplements and social support etc. But her study is dismissed for lack of a comparison group. (she herself says she just wants to stimulate further research).
OK, but when they say that for every person who rejected standard treatment and was cured there are others who reject it and die. Wow. Reject it and die, no mention of whether they did any particular alternative treatment, just rejected the standard treatment and died. Wow.
First it is very strange to call the cure of a cancer "spontaneous remission" when specific nutritional protocols were followed. Very strange. It's even stranger when they compare such cases of successful nutritional treatment with the vague category "others who refused standard treatment" or used unspecified "alternative treatments." Who do they think they are kidding?
abe: Here's the blurb on the Amazon page for Turner's book:
While getting her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkley, Dr. Turner, a researcher, lecturer, and counselor in integrative oncology, was shocked to discover that no one was studying episodes of radical (or unexpected) remissionwhen people recover against all odds without the help of conventional medicine, or after conventional medicine has failed. She was so fascinated by this kind of remission that she embarked on a ten month trip around the world, traveling to ten different countries to interview fifty holistic healers and twenty radicalremission cancer survivors about their healing practices and techniques.Her research continued by interviewing over 100 Radical Remission survivors and studying over 1000 of these cases. Her evidence presents nine common themes that she believes may help even terminal patients turn their lives around.
And one reviewer says:
Turner points out in her book that not one doctor she asked who had personally witnessed a Radical Remission had tried to publish the case as a classic case study. She also points out that there are over 1,000 reports of "spontaneous remissions" that have been reported in the medical literature, but that they weren't being pursued by researchers as to the commonalities among them. Turner has done that!
She asked the right questions, "Why did each of these people experience a spontaneous remission? What it spontaneous or was it something they did?" She found out that their remissions were due to something they did.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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 Message 268 by Phat, posted 10-25-2017 10:33 AM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 270 of 606 (822485)
10-25-2017 9:12 PM
Reply to: Message 268 by Phat
10-25-2017 10:33 AM


Re: Solutions Should Be Up To The Individual.
I personally find nothing wrong with some of the alternative health solutions suggested by your sources. I think that the key is to be aware of reality rather than to place one's hope in some miracle cure, however.
We're not talking about any "miracle cure" so I don't know where you're getting that idea.
You said once that you hoped that reading up on some of these nutritional testimonies would perhaps inspire you to eat better, and I think this is a good thing. Your health should be up to you rather than to some Doctor, Nutritional Guru, or alternative "solution".
The problem is that the "alt-med" methods are not established so if you choose to go that direction it's a bit of a shot in the dark. I think merely the anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of some methods is well worth the risk for anyone who wants to try it, and especially if the cancer is slow-growing so there is enough time to put into experimentation, but I also think it has to start with a regular medical diagnosis and an intention of undergoing all the usual tests while pursuing it. This is the case with most of the anecdotes.
As Turner says in her book, doctors are often in the position to report on the effectiveness of some alternative methods because of their own patients who have tried it, but they don't make such reports. For some reason everybody is waiting around for the alt-med people to do the necessary research. But that's an odd expectation it seems to me. The ones to do such research are the well-funded major health agencies or the medical establishment itself. But not the silly kinds of research that lump all "alternative" methods together when obviously some have promise of being effective but others are just weird.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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 Message 275 by Granny Magda, posted 10-29-2017 12:21 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 271 of 606 (822487)
10-26-2017 12:58 AM
Reply to: Message 266 by Granny Magda
10-23-2017 5:39 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
I agree that her circumstances make for a relatively compelling anecdote. The problem is that you simply cannot extrapolate from a single case.
It's a solid example of nutrition alone effecting a cure, it's not vague at all. And I continue to claim it's not a single case.
There are too many potential confounding factors; not least the possibility that she is missing out important information.
There's also the possibility that she isn't.
You say that she is not a single case, but that's not true. You just can't take fifty disparate anecdotes and smoosh them together. There are too many confounders; gender, general health and age of patients, type of cancer, stage of cancer, other illnesses that they might have, and - above all else - the vagueness and lack of detail that characterises these amateur accounts.
There is a sense in which cancer is cancer and the anecdotes are quite consistent in their description of nutritional cures of cancers of all kinds. Fifty is a lot of anecdotes for that purpose. Your caveats are important for scientific rigor but I think this collection of mere anecdotes deserves a LOT more respect than they get, which would encourage the research they need but won't get if they keep being treated as the daydreams of idiots.
With respect, I don't think you have any inkling as to how complicated a business it is creating and administering a statistically meaningful medical study.
Funny then that I go on to say how you don't seem to recognize that very difficulty.
No scare tactics necessary. I have already shown evidence that alternative medicine cause people to die of cancer quicker. Let me remind you;
"Alternative Medicine (AM) utilization for curable cancer without any CCT is associated with greater risk of death."
That study, of which you are so dismissive, was based on data from real patients with real cancers. Many of them died very real deaths. And the ones who chose to pursue alt-med died quicker. Those are real lives being shortened unnecessarily for the sake of quackery. I have to condemn that.
And I continue to object to this example as blurring together the most likely effective alternatives with a bunch of wacko notions that probably don't work. It's utterly meaningless.
As for your claim that "Nobody's dying from this standard nutritional veggie/raw veggie protocol", that is quite false. Of course the diet doesn't kill them directly; it's the untreated cancer that kills them. Case in point;
Less than four days ago, a young Australian woman died of a very rare type of cancer. Most of my American and probably many of my European readers have never heard of her, but in Australia she had become quite famous over the last seven years as a major proponent of natural health. Her name was Jess Ainscough, but, ... she was better known by her brand name. That brand name was The Wellness Warrior.
Aniscough was one of these internet nutrition gurus that you're so impressed with. She chose to fight her cancer with nutrition, specifically the high volume veggie-juice regime of Gerson therapy. It didn't help. She didn't beat the odds, she died before her time thanks in no small part to her rejection of the conventional therapies that could have extended her life. I urge you to read about her case here, it serves as a cautionary tale.
Page not found – Science-Based Medicine
Very sad story. But just as you complain about my examples I think there isn't enough detail given to be clear what happened in this case. It's interesting that the Gerson therapy seems to have been working to the extent that she started baring her arm, implying that the tumors had disappeared -- a main clue to their return was her wearing long sleeves. But the timing is also not clear: she was on Gerson for two years and then changed to some other kind of nutritional method which isn't described.
The disappearance of her tumors should be recognized as an alt-med success, on a par with many chemo successes; this doesn't deserve a denouncement as quackery.
And the tumors returned after the death of her mother which was quite a trauma for her, and stress is considered by most of the alt-med systems to be a major cause of cancer.
In my opinion she should have had the drastic surgery when the tumors started to reappear.
To be continued.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 266 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 5:39 PM Granny Magda has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 272 of 606 (822491)
10-26-2017 10:04 AM
Reply to: Message 266 by Granny Magda
10-23-2017 5:39 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
You go on to examples where the alternative treatment didn't work.
Even more tragic is that Ainscough's mother, Sharyn Ainscough had previously died of cancer; an eminently treatable breast cancer that she chose to treat with the nutrition-woo of Gerson therapy.
http://scienceblogs.com/...her-daughter-the-wellness-warrior
I couldn't get very far through that long blog which is bright white and hard on my eyes and repeated a lot of what was in the Jess Ainscough story, so if I miss what you think is important please copy it out for me.
But in Sharyn's case too it sounds like the nutrition was helping up to a point and that should be recognized, otherwise the critic should be called the quack.
Some of the Gerson protocols do sound quaint and based on old-fashioned fanciful "science," but some of it also works, and those parts are incorporated into many other nutrition-based regimens that anecdotally seem to work more efficiently than pure Gerson. However, when a regimen stops working it's time to look to something else and in my opinion since she didn't go to a more effective alt-med treatment, Sharyn should have gone back to standard treatments.
So I'm not defending any particular treatment because sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, I'm just saying you and the critics are ignoring elements of alt-med that seem clearly to work in many cases, unfairly dismissing them as quackery, when often standard treatments don't have any better record and people die who follow those treatments too.
You won't see them mentioned on sites like chrisbeatcancer though. They only report the good news stories, preferring to gloss over or down-play the failures. Oncologists are quite open about the fact that conventional therapies don't always work. Alt-med, by contrast, is in denial about it failings.
Chris Wark has the objective of showing that alt-med can work, he's not pretending to be a researcher, he is definitely a cheerleader and shows off the cases that worked. He doesn't deny that sometimes they fail, and keeps open the option of adding or returning to standard treatments. Stop calling people quacks who are not pretending to be scientists.
Many of the people have tried or intend to try the standard treatments if necessary, I haven't yet heard of one who flat-out refuses, they are hoping the diet change will do it and in these reports it does.
You have heard of such a case. I have documented such cases in this thread. Jessica Ainscough is one example.
And I've pointed out that her alternative treatment worked better than you are willing to recognize. Nevertheless I would agree that when it stopped working she should have had the surgery, and of course it's possible to be suicidally bull-headed about sticking to something that isn't working. If it clearly stops working, do something else for pete's sake. If you've been sent to hospice because standard treatment is no longer working, that's a good time to try some alt-med protocols. If the alt-med has stopped working do whatever has a better chance of working, which in Ainscough's case was amputation of her arm. The cases that are most convincing to me are those who can actually show continued progress, which those I've seen on Chris Wark's site do show.
The problem with this reasoning is that by the time the alt-med patient has realised that the diet isn't working, it may be too late.
That can happen but that's a problem of judgment, not the treatment itself. It can also happen with standard treatment. People can bull-headedly stick to that too when it's stopped working. You need to acknowledge that there IS evidence of the effectiveness of nutritional treatments in some cases, and I'm happy to acknowledge that they can fail and that in any case people can always fail to make the most reasonable judgments.
In cancer treatment it is vital to act fast, any delay can lead to increased mortality risk.
Not so. There are some cancers that are slow-enough growing that trying diet changes is a reasonable option, as Karen's Mayo Clinic specialist acknowledged in her case. He also pointed out that chemo takes a toll on all parts of the body so that since there was time and a good chance of success with diet, in her case that was the best option.
Your approach would be fine for a minor chronic complaint (like migraines), but with an aggressive cancer, a few months could literally mean the difference between a treatable cancer and a death sentence.
Yes, if we're talking "aggressive" cancer that may be true, but in the cases where I'm aware of diet change working, that was not the case, the time was available for going that route. And one of the questions Wark advisees cancer patients to ask their doctor is whether the cancer is slow or fast-growing. Obviously the person needs to know as much as possible about their condition to make a meaningful decision. And even with some fast-growing cancers it could be more reasonable to choose diet over the conventional approaches, there's no reason to assume that standard treatment is going to work either, or better, in some category of cases. It's always a judgment call, and unfortunately doctors rarely have the knowledge that would allow for making that call on the side of an alternative approach. The people who are convinced of alternative treatments DO in many cases know better. Either side can err.
Most of them who have gone to the furthest extremes in that direction don't know exactly which of their many treatments did the work, from the juices to the meal plan to the supplements to the odd stuff like "ozone therapy" and so on,
Exactly right. There are too many confounders. For reliable data - and we're all agreed that we want reliable data - you need to compare like with like, use a control group, eliminate lead-time bias, ensure proper sample-group size... It's a complicated business, very far removed from a collection of sparse anecdotes.
But these are people who have to make a decision without that sort of knowledge, you can't ask them to start conducting research when they are engaged in trying to find a cure for themselves. There is no way for them to sort out the effectiveness of the many things they are trying, that's the job of someone else.
so sure, sort all that out in research, and I hope someone will,
Me too. But if you're waiting for the likes of Chris Wark to do such research, I wouldn't hold your breath.
I'm not. It makes no sense to ask Wark to do such research. He's not in any position to do that and it's ridiculous to criticize him for that. He's trying to collect information to show the effectiveness of nutritional cures for those who could benefit from that knowledge. I think he's doing a good job of that, and I don't see denial involved in any of it. Always in the background is the possibility of failure of any mode of treatment. Often standard treatment has already failed before alt-med is tried. In the case of a small child with a brain tumor it failed and the child was sent home to die, but from that point his mother kept him alive on nutritional treatment for many years. I think in the end he succumbed anyway but I haven't found the rest of his story yet. Both methods in such a case failed in the end, but it seems you'd ignore the standard treatment failure and make a big deal out of the ultimate failure of the nutritional method even if it prolonged his life by years.
As it happens, some work has been done on this topic. It is widely accepted, for instance, that a high-fibre diet reduces the risk of bowel cancer and there are plenty of studies to back this up. Studies of nutritional supplements (including -carotene, a compound present in carrots) however have failed to find any benefit against cancer and shown that they may even have negative effects.
abe: As I remembered in a later post, the subject of foods that can cause cancer is something other than the main topic here, which is foods that may actually cure it, and continuing to focus on the former over the latter has the effect of muddying the argument. /abe
And there is a difference between the beta (or alpha?) carotene in carrots and extracted or synthetic beta/alpha carotene. I'm told I shouldn't use the latter for my macular degeneration because it is associated with higher risk of lung cancer in former heavy smokers like me (and smoking is a causative factor in macular degeneration), but carrots are not a problem.
To be continued.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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 Message 266 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 5:39 PM Granny Magda has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 273 of 606 (822492)
10-26-2017 11:24 AM
Reply to: Message 266 by Granny Magda
10-23-2017 5:39 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
but meanwhile we're talking about desperate people who want to cure their cancer
That's precisely my concern. People with a cancer diagnosis are often scared witless and desperate. Some will do anything for a cure, no matter how implausible.
I was making a different point. Since they are engaged in trying to find a cure for their own cancer they can't be expected to sort out the effect of everything they are trying. If they are doing a lot of different things and showing progress in the reduction of their tumors, they are just going to keep doing it all because something is working. A researcher might ask them to stop a particular protocol for a while so its effect on the progress could be identified, but how many cancer patients are going to do that on their own?
Such people are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by dubious snake-oil salesmen like Bollinger and Wark. I don't want to see such people bilked. I don't want them sold on false hope or tricked into blow their life's savings on fantasy. I don't want to see them waste their last years on Earth being dragged into the weird personality cults of people like Adams. I just think that it's unethical to support these charlatans.
But this is all the scare language I was talking about. The cases I've brought up show progress on the changed diets, they aren't being exploited and they aren't being bilked. Most of these treatments are a lot cheaper than the standard treatments anyway. And it seems to me that desperate people are in fact more likely to do what their doctors tell them to do rather than seek alternatives. When the standard treatment fails, THEN they may get desperate enough to become vulnerable to quack methods, OR they may be lucky enough to find an alt-med protocol that actually does push back their cancer, as so many of the people Wark showcases have.
How would you propose such a study be done? They'd have to get groups of people suffering from the same kind of cancer, wouldn't they?
For preference yes. It's perfectly possible to study multiple cancers at once, but the more consistent the data-set used, the greater the weight of the results.
I agree, but as long as good records are kept of each patient you can create a group just from the records for the purpose of comparing like with like.
They'd probably have to get them from doctors, wouldn't they?
Yes. Studies should be carried out by qualified professionals with the necessary expertise.
I totally agree. So why are you lambasting the alt-med people for not conducting such studies? As Kelly Turner found out in researching these things for her book about cancer remissions. doctors have the information necessary to such research but don't use it.
Wouldn't it be intrusive, to propose a treatment to people already under treatment?
Perhaps. But clinical trials usually use volunteers, or they pay their subjects. How intrusive it might be would depend upon the protocol being tested. Drinking 40Fl oz of carrot juice a day for example, shouldn't be too difficult, even for those taking chemotherapy. The more extreme regimens however, can be very demanding and might be more challenging to test.
Right. Seems to me that even a major change in dietary regimen could require housing patients and feeding them a controlled diet, so that exactly what they are eating could be tracked. It would be like going to a health spa so people would have to be free to do that, and it would cost a lot. Gerson conducts such a spa but the people themselves pay for it, and a researcher would need better controls anyway.
Wouldn't doctors be disinclined to cooperate with such a study?
Good God no! Why would they object? Despite the many bizarre conspiracy theories out there, doctors actually want to cure their patients. To suggest otherwise sounds overly cynical to say the least.
It is true that pharmaceutical companies have no particular incentive to study a cure which they cannot copyright, but that's more of a problem with the healthcare market than with the actual science of the thing. Besides, there are plenty of institutions doing medical research other than big pharma.
Greger finds a lot of such research in the nutrition journals that he reports on, but there should be others involved in that work to prevent one person's bias from skewing the assessment.
How about patients in hospice who have given up anyway?
That doesn't sound practical or entirely ethical. For most hospice patients, their stay is a short one. Nutritional therapies, if we are to take them at seriously, are going to take time. Too much time to be able to take effect so late in the game.
Probably so, but they often start taking effect within the first three months by many reports I've seen, and continue to show progress from then on, so anyone who has the health to live that long could possibly benefit. But I agree that the logistics of establishing such research are probably prohibitive.
I don't think it's as easy as you claim to do such studies. And it would take tons of money to do it right.
If I have given the impression that medical research is easy then I apologise. It is far from easy. It's extremely challenging and, as you rightly point out, costly. It must be done nonetheless.
But you can't ask people who are engaged in seeking alternative methods to cure themselves or help others, to just stop doing that until such research is available, which is what you seem to be suggesting, or that they do it themselves although they aren't in a position to do that.
This is no higher bar than that which every drug coming to market must face. Drug manufacturers have to prove efficacy before bringing their products to market. I fail to see why any other sort of medical intervention should not be subject to the same standards of evidence, especially when so many alt-med vendors are so effective at monetising their wares.
Perhaps they could be required to put some of their money into an independent research project, and drug companies should do the same to keep the research less subject to bias.
And no, doctors do not tell anyone to avoid meat and dairy that I'm aware of, for any disease or for health in general.
Well no, they don't warn against dairy, it's true. But that's because there's no clear evidence that dairy causes cancer. Feel free to produce some if you disagree.
They are usually objecting mainly to the drugs such as antibiotics and hormones that are given to the animals that produce the meat and the dairy, on general health concerns.
Meat on the other hand, they do warn you about, or at least they ought, since it's rather common knowledge. You must have heard it said that red meat is a potential risk-factor for bowel cancer? I thought everybody knew that. What is most certain is that highly processed meats, such as bacon, salami and ham very much are a causal factor in bowel cancer. This is from Cancer Research UK;
Eating lots of processed and red meat can increase the risk of bowel cancer
Eating a diet high in processed and red meat can increase the risk of bowel cancer [1-3].Red meat includes all fresh, minced and frozen beef, pork and lamb. Processed meat includes ham, bacon, salami and sausages [1].
The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies processed meat as a cause of cancer, and red meat as a probable cause of cancer [4]. Scientists estimate around a quarter of bowel cancer cases in men, and around a sixth in women, are linked to eating red or processed meat [5]. Bowel cancer risk increases by nearly a fifth (17%) for every 100g of red meat eaten per day, and by a similar amount (18%) for every 50g of processed meat eaten per day [6].
There is also some evidence linking red meat to pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer, and processed meat to stomach cancer, however this is still uncertain [4, 7-10].
There is no strong evidence that eating fresh white meat, such as chicken, or fish increases the risk of cancer [11].
In the UK, the Government advises that people who eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red and processed meat a day should cut down to 70g or less [12].
More here (including plenty of stuff promoting a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables); http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/...r/diet-facts-and-evidence.
Yes that's pretty standard, but it's also pretty general. If cancer patients would benefit from eliminating meat altogether the doctor probably isn't going to be the one to tell them that. Wark's subjects often say the doctor told them to eat whatever they want. Also such advice doesn't isolate what it is about the meat that is the causative factor, say if it happens to be more about the drugs given to the animals than the meat itself of an animal not subjected to such drugs.
The nutrition-oriented treatments are often vegan-inspired, though not necessarily completely anti-meat, and part of the rationale is that most diets around the world are founded primarily on vegetables, with meat being a small part of them.
So yeah, your doctor is quite likely to warn against excessive meat consumption. They won't tell you to give up all meat, or to drink gallons of carrot juice, but that's because real doctors tend to restrict themselves to what the evidence can support.
Meaning what research happens to have studied in enough depth, which leaves out a lot.
abe: But the main lack in the nutrition advice is that it has nothing to do with treating cancer once you have it. Warning of risk of cancer from this or that, fine, but there is no comparison with the alt-med application of specific nutritional protocols to treat and even cure the cancer. That's what this whole discussion is about, so your response here is really inadequate. Doctors do NOT apply nutrition to treat cancer, and of course like you they tend to deny that it could have any effect. The one Mayo Clinic doctor Karen consulted is a very rare exception.
To be continued.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 266 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 5:39 PM Granny Magda has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 274 of 606 (822502)
10-26-2017 3:49 PM
Reply to: Message 266 by Granny Magda
10-23-2017 5:39 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
As Karen and others Wark has interviewed report, hospital food is the opposite of what the alt-med recommends.
That is far from universal. Anyway, that's more of a problem with crappy healthcare policy than it is with medical science.
It's a big chunk out of universal from what I've heard. And if doctors really did know much about nutrition it wouldn't be left up to sloppy healthcare policies.
Why would you object to calling chemo "poison?" That's what it is. I never heard that denied by anyone. The idea is to kill the cancer with this poison.
I object because it is propaganda. No-one denies that chemo is toxic; that why it's called cytotoxic chemotherapy. But to refer to it as "poison" is simply inflammatory scare-mongering. Why not refer to it as life-saving medicine? That would be at least as accurate.
One could just as easily call amygdalin (a substance found in various fruit seeds and much much beloved by alt-med quacks) a poison. It does, after all release cyanide. But somehow, the alt-med cheerleaders never call amygdalin "poison". They call it "natural".
Lots of things are poisonous. Aspirin is poisonous. Paracetamol is poisonous. They are used nonetheless because a) they are are effective and b) they are effective at a lower dose than is dangerous. Few drugs are without their side-effects and there is always a risk/reward analysis to be done. Referring to chemotherapy as "poison" however, focuses only upon the negative, implicitly ignoring the many millions of lives that have been saved.
You seem to have fallen into a rather disingenuous way of arguing this topic. Amygdalin is hardly a standard alt-med treatment from what I've been following. And chemo actively makes people sick, aspirin doesn't. It works like a poison in its very work of supposedly treating the cancer; it's not a matter of dosage.
And the opponents of alt-med are very liberal in their propaganda methods too, calling people quacks and charlatans who are sincerely describing effective treatment of cancer by nutrition, and denying any efficacy at all where much efficacy can be plainly seen, and damning it all without a fair hearing.
I want to ask if there is even ONE case of spontaneous remission of cancer that you know of?
Yup.
Spontaneous breast cancer remission: A case report
Spontaneous breast cancer remission is a rare phenomenon. We report the disappearance from the remaining breast of a new primary carcinoma that had been confirmed through cytology of a pathological specimen, in a case that is strongly suspected to be spontaneous remission.
Spontaneous breast cancer remission: A case report - PMC
No mention of any alternative therapies, just an unexplained remission. It happens. And since you mention it, why yes, that could be an explanation for some of these cases. Certainly you cannot rule that out with anecdotes. For that you would need clinical trials.
Did you read Message 265 on remissions? Kelly Turner found out in the cases she studied that most (all?) could be tracked to a clear cause, something the patient did with the intention of treating the cancer. Your case is "strongly suspected" to be spontaneous remission, but since Turner found lots of cases regarded as spontaneous remission that weren't, I don't see any reason to think yours is an exception.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 266 by Granny Magda, posted 10-23-2017 5:39 PM Granny Magda has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 277 of 606 (822602)
10-29-2017 1:29 PM
Reply to: Message 275 by Granny Magda
10-29-2017 12:21 PM


Re: Solutions Should Be Up To The Individual.
I'm not promoting anything about alt-med other than specific nutritional protocols, not their supplements or any hyperbole they apply to them. I haven't endorsed any "miracle" cures whatever and Phat didn't say anything about where he got the notion.
I'm not promoting Adams or Bollinger, both of whom I'd never heard of until this recent conference, nor Mercola, since although I've heard of him I haven't read much of his stuff. I do like Chris Wark but he's the only one I've followed at all, and some of the cures he highlights do seem rather miraculous in the light of all the failed chemotherapy and other standard treatments. He's not calling a product miraculous, he's calling the healing miraculous.
I address specific issues and don't endorse all the stuff you keep talking about which is irrelevant to the points I've been making. I even specifically reject some of their concepts. So all it does is skew the topic to keep doing what you are doing and denying the points I've been making.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 275 by Granny Magda, posted 10-29-2017 12:21 PM Granny Magda has replied

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 Message 278 by Granny Magda, posted 10-29-2017 1:47 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 279 of 606 (822607)
10-29-2017 3:50 PM
Reply to: Message 276 by Granny Magda
10-29-2017 1:04 PM


There's no point in attacking people for not doing what you think they should do
From your later post:
And as we have seen, he is wrong. None of the examples Wark provides go beyond what would be expected under standard medical expectations.
But it's clear from some examples that some have added years after standard therapy gave up on a person. And besides, to say they don't "go beyond standard medical expectations" is already saying quite a bit, since obviously good food is a lot easier on a person than chemo and radiation and surgery. Just to equate the different modes as you do here is a big plus for alt-med.
It certainly is vague. It fails to provide a detailed break down of Karen's treatment, it doesn't mention whether she has other illnesses, and we only have Karen's word for what her doctors told her — a major failing since patients frequently misinterpret what their doctors tell them.
There isn't much to misinterpret when she went to more than one doctor and none of them gave a hint of extenuating circumstances. She would certainly have mentioned anything that affected her condition if a doctor had made anything of it. If she forgot it in one example she'd have remembered it in another because she's obviously not a dishonest person.
But near the end of the interview Wark does ask her to describe her treatment, and she starts by saying she eliminated dairy and I forget the rest. Sorry, I'll try to remember to go back and check later.
ABE: DId go back. Starting about 21:00 she describes it. Eliminated dairy because of the hormones given to cows. She had been a vegetarian before all this and dairy had been a big part of her diet. She didn't completely get rid of meat, had some organic chicken, also organic eggs. Vitamin D, exercise, and replaced all cleaning products with "green" products, and all clothing with organically grown fibers. Now I think I've forgotten something but I'm not going back right now to recover it. /abe
I don't think she's vague, though as usual I agree that a lot more research is needed to pin down the circumstances of any given case.
And it is not an example of anything providing a cure, as Karen isn't cured and still has cancer. No matter how many times you tell this particular lie, you will not make it true. Karen still has cancer and is not cured.
I think outright lying is very rare, that people get things wrong or unconsciously exaggerate or anything else but lying is very rare.
Yes I shouldn't have said "cured" and I'm not sure why I lapsed into that. But she was as "cured" as she could have been on standard therapy, as she says her first doctor told her -- she'd always have the disease even with standard treatment, but she got her numbers down as far as possible on FOOD and other very ordinary interventions, as far as she could have on chemo, and that has to mean a lot, has to mean she beat down the disease as far as it is possible to beat it down and without suffering the harm to her body the Mayo Clinic doctor told her is always the result of chemo. Hey, that is a VERY BIG deal.
Besides, what if she DID have some other disease, that would just make the alt-med method more effective than expected.
Fiath writes:
There's also the possibility that she isn't [leaving out important information].
Exactly my point. By refusing to engage in meaningful analysis, Wark and his ilk destroy any chance they have of proving their case. Assuming for a moment that Karen is onto something big with her nutritional therapy, we'll never be able to tell, because she is wasting her time on meaningless videos.
One of the tragedies of alt-medis that the tiny handful of treatments that potentially might work are drowned out by an ocean of whackiness and sloppy methodology. This is the fault of alt-med itself. No-one else is to blame for their promotion of insane rubbish. Mike Adams and Joe Mercola both promote reiki, which is little more than faith-healing. No-one forces them to promote such piffle, they queue up to do it. That it discredits their entire field is very much their own fault.
I would agree except that all I've been talking about is the nutrient blitz method, which stands out in Wark's program and in the cancer conference too, with very little of the other oddball stuff, which as a matter of fact I myself have not encountered in any of my own researches to any degree I'd call "drowning out" the effective methods. As a matter of fact I haven't even run across a mention of Reiki anywhere yet.. And Greger studies nothing BUT nutrition. I know you want to attack all of "alt-med" but that is not what I'm posting about: this thread is about Plant-Based Nutrition, as per the title.
I agree about videos, but it's a failing in all kinds of subject matter. It's a form of documentation though, so it's there for anyone to use as a starting point who does have the means to do more thorough research. I don't have the time or motivation to sort through them all either so I can't even boil down their points for you.
You are calling Chris Wark dishonest for failing to provide information about failed nutritional cures. But oddly enough nobody has yet provided that information on this thread. I get the impression it doesn't really exist. It's possible that he doesn't have any examples of that because people are looking to him for a hopeful alternative and finding it there, and failures don't visit the site. The one study mentioned earlier on in this thread just lumps everything alt-med together without distinguishing among the various forms of treatment so its conclusion that alt-med doesn't work is bogus.
I'm already tiring with your long post so I'll have to shelve it for a while.
But I think my overall position here is that we are NOW at a point that we COULD sort out the effective from the ineffective methods proposed by all the various alt-med sources, and NOW is the time when effective research could begin. I don't think anything is served by the constant labelling of alt-med people as charlatans and quacks, and I don't think the necessary research is to be expected from the alt-med people who have experienced cures and feel they suffered at the hands of doctors too, it's got to come from some independent agency, people without any axe to grind, well-educated in the necessary scientific principles of research, and paid well enough for the task of wading through all the literature for starters, AND the video testimonials too.
Back later, God willing.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 276 by Granny Magda, posted 10-29-2017 1:04 PM Granny Magda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 308 by Granny Magda, posted 11-14-2017 2:41 PM Faith has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 280 of 606 (822614)
10-30-2017 11:55 AM
Reply to: Message 278 by Granny Magda
10-29-2017 1:47 PM


Re: Solutions Should Be Up To The Individual.
You claim that by promoting the Truth About Cancer Conference I'm promoting Ty Bollinger himself, which is absurd. All he did was host the conference, he didn't even speak himself.
So yes, you have been promoting Bollinger and his ridiculous course. And Bollinger is a total fraud.
He made one false statement according to you and you've lambasted him ever since. I think he believes that statement and I'm still not going to agree with you when I don't know the context or anything else about it except what you've said about it. He should get to speak for himself. But I also don't care enough about ONE statement to follow it up. As far as I'm concerned it's just a distraction from the point of this thread, as are many other things you've brought up.
It wasn't a "course," it was a conference with dozens of independent speakers who all have their own area of interest, big difference. How am I in any way promoting the convener of the conference about whom I know absolutely nothing except what you've been carrying on about? My interest was in the different approaches to cancer presented at the conference and I could not care less about who convened it.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 278 by Granny Magda, posted 10-29-2017 1:47 PM Granny Magda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 309 by Granny Magda, posted 11-14-2017 3:06 PM Faith has not replied
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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 281 of 606 (822615)
10-30-2017 12:14 PM


Cherry juice, carrot juice, greens as healers
Tart Cherries for gout and other forms of arthritis
It's common knowledge that pie cherries and "tart cherry juice" can eliminate the inflammation and pain of gout, which is a form of arthritis. I know two people who have treated gout that way and say it works. I know another who uses it for arthritic pain in her hands and says it works. I've tried it too for my arthritic pain and have the impression it cuts down on it quite a bit but the stuff is so sweet with natural sugar I'm afraid to take it often enough to give it a real try.
Lutein: Spinach for eyesight
Read an account a few years ago by a woman who, yes, is into nutrition based health and big on "green smoothies," who says she got in the habit in her twenties of eating a handful of raw spinach every day just for general health and by her forties no longer needed to wear glasses, which she attributes to it.
Carrot Juice again, for cancer
She also claims her grandmother cured herself of cancer by drinking carrot juice, a case of that I haven't mentioned before to add to the local man I knew who lived twenty five years drinking lots of carrot juice after a prostate cancer diagnosis. plus of course all those I've found online, particularly at Chris Wark's site.
Green Smoothies (spinach, kale etc.) for asthma
And that she got into green smoothies as a way to treat her children's asthma and that it worked. There's another woman who did the same, and claims to have been the originator of the green smoothie, a Russian woman whose name I can't remember.
Anecdotes anecdotes, there may be research on these things somewhere, I plan to check eventually. But I trust people's accounts of such things, idiot that I am.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Replies to this message:
 Message 282 by ringo, posted 10-30-2017 12:20 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 283 of 606 (822617)
10-30-2017 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 282 by ringo
10-30-2017 12:20 PM


Re: Cherry juice, carrot juice, greens as healers
Mine is bad enough to be a problem all the time, though weather changes, particularly at this time of year, make it worse. But cherry juice is well known to cure gout. Friend of mine had an attack of gout, not knowing what it was, and her father who is an M.D. told her it's gout and said to eat cherries, which she did and it worked.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 282 by ringo, posted 10-30-2017 12:20 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 284 by ringo, posted 10-30-2017 12:43 PM Faith has replied

  
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