Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
2 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,817 Year: 3,074/9,624 Month: 919/1,588 Week: 102/223 Day: 0/13 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   "Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 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 1445 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.

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 1445 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 1445 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

  
Granny Magda
Member
Posts: 2462
From: UK
Joined: 11-12-2007
Member Rating: 4.0


Message 275 of 606 (822600)
10-29-2017 12:21 PM
Reply to: Message 270 by Faith
10-25-2017 9:12 PM


Re: Solutions Should Be Up To The Individual.
We're not talking about any "miracle cure" so I don't know where you're getting that idea.
Maybe he got it from the cranks whose work you've been promoting.
From Ty Bollinger;
Is the sea cucumber the next miracle cure for cancer?
Is the Sea Cucumber the Next Miracle Cure for Cancer? (video)
From Mike Adams' Natural News.com
Black cumin: The secret miracle heal-all remedy
Black cumin: The secret miracle heal-all remedy - NaturalNews.com
From Chris Wark's chrisbeatcancer.com;
Ashlie’s breast cancer miracle and radical diet change
Ashlie's breast cancer miracle and radical diet change
From Joe Mercola;
One of my favorite sources of whey protein is Miracle Whey Protein Powder.
http://shop.mercola.com/...e-whey-original-11-servings-1-bag
Only $38.91 a pound! It's a miracle!
Of course anyone can fall into the trap of hyperbole in promoting a cure, but it seems to me that alt-med quacks are really keen on it, even using it as a selling point for their snake-oil.
So, yes, some people are talking about miracle cures. Which orifice they are using to talk out of I shall leave to your imagination.
Mutate and Survive

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

This message is a reply to:
 Message 270 by Faith, posted 10-25-2017 9:12 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 277 by Faith, posted 10-29-2017 1:29 PM Granny Magda has replied

  
Granny Magda
Member
Posts: 2462
From: UK
Joined: 11-12-2007
Member Rating: 4.0


Message 276 of 606 (822601)
10-29-2017 1:04 PM


Alternative Medcine Proponents Should Grow Up
It's a solid example of nutrition alone effecting a cure, it's not vague at all.
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.
And it is not an example of anything providing a cure, as Karen is not 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.
And I continue to claim it's not a single case.
Yeah, because of those fifty Youtube videos that you haven't even posted.
Nobody cares about your Youtube videos. Science is not conducted by Youtube video and nor is debate on this forum. I am under no obligation to debate bare links, so I am under no iobligation to accept into evidence a bunch of videos that you haven't even posted.
Arguing by video is a standard trick of the alt-med loon. It makes their claims harder to counter, because the critic must wade through hours of tedious videos and transcribe their contents. I am not playing that game. If you have evidence, please bring it in text format, not videos.
No-one is going to watch fifty half-hour long videos, so stop going on about them.
GM writes:
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.
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-med is 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.
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.
Of course they're consistent; Chris Wark is a dishonest enough source that he doesn't bother to provide the counter-examples where people on nutri-woo treatments died early. He is not engaged in valid data presentation, only dishonest propagnada.
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.
Again, if you have data, provide it in written form. Otherwise, your anecdotes will continue to be ignored.
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.
That's on the alt-med loons. It is their fault that alt-med is chock full of insanity. If they bothered to test their claims, they might be freed from such problems, but until then you can place the blame for this at the doors of people like Ty Bollinger and Joe Mercola, who enthusiastically spread nonsense.
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
No it isn't interesting, it's completely banal. From the linked article;
quote:
As of three years ago, she thought and taught that it had controlled her tumor, deluding herself into believing that just because tumors popped out of her skin and then disappeared it meant some sort of therapeutic effect had occurred. In actuality, it’s not at all uncommon for some cancers like epithelioid sarcoma to do just that. They grow to a certain size, erode through the skin, and then seem to disappear.
So what we see here is a completely ordinary occurrence that has been misinterpreted by an alt-med hack who had no idea what she was talking about. It's very sad, but it's nothing that suggests efficacy for Gerson.
In my opinion she should have had the drastic surgery when the tumors started to reappear.
It's not my place or yours to say whether she should have had the surgery or not; that was entirely her decision. But that decision should have been made on the basis of informed consent. Clearly, Ainscough was not well informed. Her nave belief in Gerson coloured her decision. That's not informed consent.
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.
Very well;
Unfortunately, Ainscough’s propensity for quackery has now claimed the life of her mother, who followed her daughter’s example and paid the ultimate price. Here’s what Ainscough wrote when her mother was first diagnosed:
My family has been pretty much consumed by this disease for almost four years, so when my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer in April this year we knew exactly how to deal with it. Following her diagnosis, my mum refused any sort of conventional interference. She said no to a mammogram and a biopsy, told them that she wasn’t interested in going down the path of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and instead chose the same therapy as me.
Which involved:
My mum, who has been my primary carer for the past 14 months, has just been told she has breast cancer. The carer suddenly becomes the patient and the former patient is now gearing up to become the primary carer. And because I’m still on the therapy myself, my amazing dad has stepped into the carer role as well (while still working six days a week). Mum is also on the full Gerson Therapy and she will have to stay on it for the next two years. She is now drinking 13 juices per day, having five coffee enemas per day and — much to her disgust — taking castor oil every second day. We’re now in this together! Our solid routine gets us through, but it’s just days like yesterday when I was sick and mum was feeling crook from castor oil that the pressure is on my dad to care for us both.
But what was her mother’s stage when she was diagnosed? We really don’t know. The video included with this post is private, and I can’t watch it. The best I can do is to make inferences from the limited information on the website. For instance, what we are supposed to learn from this video includes:
What my mum believes triggered her cancer.
The role hormones play in disease manifestation.
Why we believe that mammograms are useless, and even dangerous.
Why my mum refused to have her breast tissue biopsied.
Why she would refuse to have a lumpectomy (removal of the lump) and a mastectomy (removal of one or both of the breasts), and refuse to have chemotherapy and radiation.
Why Mum is so confident that Gerson Therapy will work.
The number one message she would like to get out to people watching this video.
From the limited information I can find about Sharyn Ainscough’s cancer, it seems to me that it was probably fairly early stage and therefore treatable with multimodality therapy including surgery plus chemotherapy, radiation, and/or hormonal therapy with a high probability of success. Unfortunately, Sharyn Ainscough followed her daughter’s path and opted for quackery. Once that happened, the end was inevitable. In fact, the natural history of untreated breast cancer is a median survival of 2.7 years. Her mother was diagnosed in April 2011. She died a few days ago. That’s roughly two and a half years, very close to the expected median survival of untreated breast cancer. Along the way, mother and daughter made the same rationalizations that I’ve seen from people who have chosen quackery time and time again. For instance, a few months after her mother began the Gerson therapy, Jessica Ainscough reported that her mom was having flare-ups:
When you choose Gerson Therapy as your weapon of choice, you must make peace with the fact that you are going to be in for some whopping healing reactions or flare-ups — how, where and the severity of the reaction is exclusive to each person. I guess I have been lucky because my flare-ups have been quite mild. My left arm swelled up (about a year ago and still hasn’t deflated), I’ve had headaches, a little nausea, a few days where I’ve been too exhausted to get out of bed, and countless days where I’ve cried uncontrollably and been moodier than a storm season, but the physical symptoms have been limiting. My mum, on the other hand, is having ALL of the textbook reactions. If we hadn’t gone to the Gerson clinic or spoken to fellow Gerson patients, I don’t think we would have been quite as prepared for what she’s been going through.
That swelling is probably lymphedema caused by her cancer obstructing the lymph vessels of the arm; so it’s not surprising that it’s never deflated. As for Sharyn Ainscough, she reported:
The left boob (the one with cancer) has what mum calls a string of pearls at about 12 o’clock high, a row of three or four small palpable lumps. She can feel action in this boob.
The right boob has also flared up, which was frightening at first before we realised that is was a healing reaction. Mum says it feels like a thickening with a swollen gland under the arm. She had a benign lump taken out of this boob about 15 years ago, so it is very likely that this is flaring up again as she heals.
No, what was likely happening is that the cancer in the left breast was growing and forming satellite lesions. What’s truly depressing about this post, however, is that virtually anything that a Gerson patient experiences is attributed to a healing reaction or a flare-up. For instance, in July 2012, when her mother wasn’t getting any better, a quack did a hair test and claimed that she was copper toxic. He also did live blood analysis (more utter quackery) and applied kinesiology (even quackier quackery) and concluded that she was suffering from candida. The result? Her mother was subjected to chelation therapy and anti-candida treatment, while Jessica Ainscough revealed her utter lack of understanding of cancer:
If Mum had followed conventional orders and had surgery or drug interference, there is no way that these underlying issues would have been addressed. Yet another reason why it is SO important to deal with the cause and not just eradicate the symptom. Lumps in breasts are not the issue. It’s the toxicity and deficiency of our bodies that cause an imbalance and lead to dis-ease.
How many times have we heard cancer quacks say this, that the cancer is not the problem but rather a symptom of the real problem or a protective reaction to the real problem? German New Medicine, Robert O. Young’s acid-base woo, Andrea Moritz’s quackery, Hulda Clark’s claim that liver flukes cause cancer, or many other alternative cancer cures, it’s a common theme in cancer quackery to claim that the cancerous tumor is not the true problem, a theme that the daughter echoes at every turn.
In the end, I have very mixed feelings here. As a cancer surgeon, I’ve made it very clear, particularly when it comes to Stanislaw Burzynski’s patients, that I don’t like to criticize cancer patients who choose quackery. I can completely understand why in their desperation they would be vulnerable to the blandishments of preachers of false hope. It’s ignorance and desperation, rather than ill intent. That resolve, however, wavers when I encounter a person like Jessica Ainscough. Think about it. She’s become a media figure in Australia because of her promotion of natural healing. She promotes Gerson therapy to cancer patients, and if you read the comments of some of her blog posts you will find people praising her for changing their lives by persuading them to choose natural treatments like the Gerson therapy (although how it is in any way natural to shoot coffee up one’s rectum has always evaded me). That means she might well have led cancer patients with potentially curable cancers to choose quackery instead of effective medicine, leading them to their deaths. Worst of all, her example led her mother, who, unlike her, appears to have had a very treatable, potentially curable breast cancer, to eschew surgery and other effective treatments, such as radiation and chemotherapy. The end result was a dead mother, while Jessica Ainscough saying:
I do want to say this though. I know some of you have cancer and are on Gerson Therapy or you love someone in this position, and I don’t want this news to deter you from believing in what you are doing. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the past few years it’s that no one cancer therapy is right for everyone, just the way no one diet is right for everyone. We all have different bodies, different minds, different histories, and different journeys.
As angry as this makes me, surprisingly I still don’t have it in my heart to be too hard on Ainscough. You might think that, seeing her mother die might have been a wake-up call that leads her to change the course she’s on, but I know human nature. She won’t. After all, if she admits that Gerson therapy is useless, even harmful, quackery that failed to save her mother, then she would be forced to acknowledge her role in the death of her mother. She would also be forced to accept that Gerson therapy can’t save her, either. These are both conclusions that Ainscough would likely find too painful to accept. On the other hand, such a jolt might be a good thing. She might not be beyond salvaging with a radical amputation. At the very least, it would be a very good thing if Jessica Ainscough stopped dissuading cancer patients from undertaking conventional therapy and persuading them to pursue the same self-destructive path that claimed her mother and is likely to claim her.
(Note that this was written before Jessica Ainscough's death.)
TLDR? The main point;
quote:
From the limited information I can find about Sharyn Ainscough’s cancer, it seems to me that it was probably fairly early stage and therefore treatable with multimodality therapy including surgery plus chemotherapy, radiation, and/or hormonal therapy with a high probability of success. Unfortunately, Sharyn Ainscough followed her daughter’s path and opted for quackery. Once that happened, the end was inevitable. In fact, the natural history of untreated breast cancer is a median survival of 2.7 years. Her mother was diagnosed in April 2011. She died a few days ago. That’s roughly two and a half years, very close to the expected median survival of untreated breast cancer.
Sharyn Aisncough seems to have had a very treatable cancer, but she rejected treatment in favour of woo. She followed a nutritional regime and it left her no better off than she would have been if left untreated. Which she essentially was.
You claimed that nutrition-based therapies don't kill people. You were wrong about that.
Some of the Gerson protocols do sound quaint
Given that Gerson therapy involves stuffing coffee up one's arse, quaint is not the word that I would have chosen.
Sharyn should have gone back to standard treatments.
She should have chosen them from the start. Gerson clearly did nothing for her. But again, it's not up to me or you. It was her decision. I just think that she made her decision under the influence alt-med misinformation.
So I'm not defending any particular treatment because sometimes they work and sometimes they don't,
A moment ago you were complaining about crazy stuff being lumped in with Faith-approved treatments. Now, you refuse to pick a specific treatment to approve. You can't have it both ways.
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.
Then you can't brag about how consistent his anecdotes are. Either the anecdotes present a clear picture of all the data, or they are biased to a particular view. You can't have it both ways.
Stop calling people quacks who are not pretending to be scientists.
No. Wark absolutely is pretending to a degree of expertise that he does not possess. He is selling people products that falsely claim to have medical benefits. As far as I am concerned, that makes him a quack.
Nevertheless I would agree that when it stopped working she should have had the surgery,
You are making the unwarranted assumption that surgery was still an option by the point where she finally realised that the nutri-woo wasn't working. It may not have been. She may never have been able to admit to herself that it wasn't working.
GM writes:
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.
Judgement that has been clouded by the false claims of alt-med hacks.
It can also happen with standard treatment. People can bull-headedly stick to that too when it's stopped working.
False equivalence. I am talking about people who reject proven treatments in favour of the unproven (and disproved) claims of alt-med. People who take conventional therapies are not rejecting proven claims and they are accepting proven treatment.
You need to acknowledge that there IS evidence of the effectiveness of nutritional treatments in some cases,
I do not. You haven’t provided any.
Not so. There are some cancers that are slow-enough growing that trying diet changes is a reasonable option
That some cancers are more indolent certainly gives the patient more wiggle room. But it remains a fact that untreated cancer can progress beyond the point where it can no longer be treated. That is true even of indolent cancers.
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.
As caffeine pointed out, it is not unusual for Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia patients to not undergo chemo. Sometimes the disease is indolent enough that the benefits might not outweigh the risk. Nothing presented here is beyond the conventional medical understanding of WM. Karen's case is not especially impressive or exceptional. This is just another case of Chris Wark credulously over-interpreting an anecdote.
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.
Not true. In Sharyn Ainscough's case, the cancer was a quite aggressive and dangerous breast cancer. She did not have the time to screw around with discredited nonsense and she paid the price for it.
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
Which aggressive cancers would you treat with nutrition? Specifically? And which specific treatment do you recommend? Where can you demonstrate that a nutritional treatment has a better chance that conventional therapies?
The people who are convinced of alternative treatments DO in many cases know better.
Then why do they make insane and moronic claims, like chemo being 97% lethal? Or Chris Wark's imbecilic claim that chemo is only effective in 2% of cases? Why would someone who knows so much spout such utter crap?
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.
Wark profits from the rubbish that he sells. He makes medical claims. That means that he should be able to back it all up. If he cannot or will not, he should refrain from selling unproven quack-cures.
Anyone who wants to peddle medical products should be able to clearly demonstrate efficacy. I am only holding alt-med to the same standards that exist for everybody else. If a rep from Phizer turned up at the FDA, looking to get a new drug approved, and all they had to show for it were a few Youtube videos, they would be laughed out of the building. If people like Wark are unable or unwilling to do better, then they only have themselves to blame if they are laughed at too.
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.
From what I've seen, the risk to smokers from beta-carotene probably applies to natural beta-carotene just as much as synthetic. The only difference between the two is the chirality. But everything that is in the synthetic product is also present in the natural product. Sources that I've looked at suggest that smokers avoid all beta-carotebne super-dosing, including natural beta-carotene.
It may be that super-dosing on carrots is not as safe as we thought.
It is also worth mentioning that Gerson Therapy in particular relies heavily upon supplements, including potassium, vitamin B12, pancreatic enzymes, thyroid supplements and Epsom salts.
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.
Exactly why they need reliable information, not partisan propaganda.
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?
No-one is asking them too, and indeed, they shouldn't, as it would be meaningless. One cannot conduct a meaningful clinical study on a cohort of one person.
But this is all the scare language I was talking about.
It's not scare language. Sharyn Ainscough rejected the treatment that most likely would have saved her in favour of woo. It cost her her life. This is a real phenomenon. It remains unethical to offer false hope to the dying.
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,
No. Sharyn Ainscough rejected conventional therapy entirely, as did her daughter.
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.
Can you see now why I was unwilling to take your early my aunt's friend type anecdotes at face value?
GM writes:
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?
Because they want to skip the bit where they learn their trade and prove the efficacy of their wares and go straight to the bit where they pretend to be experts whilst making a fortune selling snake-oil.
This is like complaining that it's unfair when people who have no expertise in engineering aren't allowed to build bridges. Well of course they aren't! They shouldn't be allowed! And nor should unqualified frauds be allowed to pose as medical experts.
If alt-med people aren't willing to do the work, to study, train and qualify, then they shouldn't be selling cures, nor touting medical advice. No-one is stopping someone like Wark from doing the work that's involved in becoming a real oncology expert.
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.
So in other words, the people at the Gerson Institute are well placed to do such research, but they choose not to.
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.
As it happens, I work for hospice charity. The average length of stay at our hospice is 12 days. This is a non-starter.
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.
I am asking that people back up their claims with valid evidence. If they cannot do that, then absolutely, they should stop making those claims. If they are not in a position to validate their claims, that's very sad for them, but it's no excuse. People who make medical claims should back them up, end of.
What people do for themselves is their own business, but they should be properly informed, so again, proper testing is needed.
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.
In the UK and Europe growth hormones are banned, so this is a bit of a red herring. The fact remains that many alt-med gurus — Dr Greger for instance — are rabidly against all dairy, regardless of antibiotics and hormones.
Yes that's pretty standard, but it's also pretty general.
It is not general, it is extremely specific. Processed meats have been exhaustively demonstrated to increase risk of bowel cancer.
If cancer patients would benefit from eliminating meat altogether the doctor probably isn't going to be the one to tell them that.
Why the hell wouldn't they? This is some conspiracy theory level nonsense right here. Doctors want to cure people. If they knew that all meat carried a risk of cancer, they would have no reason to deny it. They aren't being paid off by the Meat Marketing Board or something.
GM writes:
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.
It doesn't leave out Gerson therapy, which has been studied and found to be worthless;
quote:
Gerson regimen.
Cassileth B1.
Abstract
The Gerson regimen, developed by Max Gerson in the 1930s, is promoted as an alternative cancer treatment. It involves consuming fresh, raw fruit and vegetable juices, eliminating salt from the diet, taking supplements such as potassium, vitamin B12, thyroid hormone, pancreatic enzymes, and detoxifying liver with coffee enemas to stimulate metabolism. Gerson therapy is based on the theory that cancer is caused by alteration of cell metabolism by toxic environmental substances and processed food, which changes its sodium and potassium content. It emphasizes increasing potassium intake and minimizing sodium consumption in an effort to correct the electrolyte imbalance, repair tissue, and detoxify the liver. The coffee enemas are believed to cause dilation of bile ducts and excretion of toxic breakdown products by the liver and through the colon wall. None of these theories has been substantiated by scientific research. Despite proponents' claims of recovery rates as high as 70% to 90%, case reviews by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the New York County Medical Society found no evidence of usefulness for the Gerson diet. An NCI-sponsored study of Gonzalez therapy, which is similar to the Gerson diet, showed that patients with inoperable pancreatic adenocarcinoma who underwent standard chemotherapy with gemcitabine (Gemzar) survived three times longer and had better quality of life than those who chose enzyme treatment, which included pancreatic enzymes, nutritional supplements, detoxification, and an organic diet.
Source
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.
I agree, there is a big difference. That is because food-as-risk-factor is well evidenced, whereas food-as-cure is not. Doctors don't use nutrition as a post-diagnosis treatment because it has never demonstrated efficacy. And quite right too.
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.
Doctors don't control healthcare policy, politicians do. That your country has such a pisspoor healthcare system, isn't really my problem however. In my country, NHS hospitals have dieticians to ensure that they provide nutritious food. That US healthcare is amongst the worst in the developed world is not the fault of medical science or doctors.
Amygdalin is hardly a standard alt-med treatment from what I've been following.
There is no standard in alt-med. That's one of my major criticisms.
Still, amygdalin is toxic, but it is hailed as a miracle, not derided as poison.
And chemo actively makes people sick, aspirin doesn't.
The harmful side effects of aspirin are well known and I am amazed that you are ignorant of them. Aspirin can cause strokes, burst blood vessels and gastro-intestinal bleeding.
It works like a poison in its very work of supposedly treating the cancer; it's not a matter of dosage.
It very much is a matter of dosage. Low-end chemo is almost free of side effects; I should know. I have undergone chemotherapy myself (not for cancer, but chemo nonetheless). I felt no ill effect, had no hair loss and generally felt fine. I was permanently cured of a debilitating and potentially life-threatening illness. That I experienced no side effects, but was still cured was very much a function of dosage. To call the medicine that transformed my life for the better pouson is hyperbolic and borderline offensive.
Chemo is toxic stuff, no-one is denying that. But it is as toxic as it needs to be to do its job. It it wasn't, it would be worthless. Chemo has saved millions of lives and transformed cancer survival rates for the better. To dismiss it as poison is crude propaganda.
Did you read Message 265 on remissions?
You mean the one about that book you haven't read? Yeah, if I'm not going to accept a bunch of moronic Youtube videos that you haven't posted as evidence, then I'm certainly not going to accept a book that you haven't even read.
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.
So you challenge me to find a case of spontaneous remission that doesn't involve alt-med. I provided one. You then claim that it must have involved alt-med, despite the fact that you have no evidence that this was the case.
If the very existence of a case of spontaneous remission is enough to prove in your eyes that alt-med must be responsible, why even ask?
The fact remains that spontaneous remission occurs and it needs to be controlled for in testing. This is done by using larger cohorts than the one-at-a-time case studies so beloved by cranks.
In summary, alt-med cranks want to have their case and eat it. They want to be able to claim whatever they want, sell whatever they want and they don't seem to think that they need prove their claims. That's bullshit. It's illogical, unethical and naive.
Anyone wanting to give medical advice or sell medical products should be subject to the same standards. Drug companies wanting to sell their wares have to adhere to strict licensing rules. All I am saying is that everyone should be subject to those same rules. Alt-med falls well short of this standard.
Alt-med proponents should grow up, do the research, put in the work and generally engage in proper medical practise. If they're not up to that challenge, they should probably shut the #### up.
Mutate and Survive

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

Replies to this message:
 Message 279 by Faith, posted 10-29-2017 3:50 PM Granny Magda has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 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

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

  
Granny Magda
Member
Posts: 2462
From: UK
Joined: 11-12-2007
Member Rating: 4.0


Message 278 of 606 (822603)
10-29-2017 1:47 PM
Reply to: Message 277 by Faith
10-29-2017 1:29 PM


Re: Solutions Should Be Up To The Individual.
I'm not promoting Adams or Bollinger
You dedicated this post to promoting Bollinger's circus;
There's going to be a three-day conference on alternative methods of healing cancer online starting tomorrow. It's free but if a few of you sign up I can maybe get a reward for snaring you into it.
Even if you hate this stuff you can sign up and jeer or gather ammunition against them.
Here's the link:
The Truth About Cancer Conference
This one too;
The conference is underway and I'm really fascinated with it. Tons of research is being discussed, this isn't snake oil stuff. I could make this my career if I had the time to put into it.
And this;
You could register and watch a little if you like, or don't watch, it's easy to register, just email address and first name and so far all they've sent me is the titles of upcoming talks so I don't think you risk getting spammed. If enough people register at the link I get credit and maybe a free DVD or book. And in my opinion you could get some very useful information.
And this;
The conference is over and I just want to say I thought it was extremely good and inspiring. I feel sorry for the people who dismiss out of hand anything about healing strategies that don't agree with the medical establishment. I changed my mind about the presenter I tuned out because he seemed fringey, I was just impatient because he said he doesn't prepare for talks and he was slow getting started and I was tired so I tuned him out.
I think all the presenters had something important to say. A bunch of smart, knowledgeable and passionate people committed to learning and teaching everything they can about improving people's health through nutrition, which is an area of study doctors are simply not trained in. They covered a huge array of factors that contribute to cancer as well as factors that heal it.
The conference isn't online but there is a You Tube series by the convener Ty Bollinger with the same title, The Truth About Cancer in which he goes around the world interviewing people about cancer causes and cures.
So yes, you have been promoting Bollinger and his ridiculous course. And Bollinger is a total fraud.
And lest we forget, you have maintained an obstinate silence regarding the lies and misinformation that Bollinger and Adams spread. Acknowledge that and I'll stop bringing it up. Keep ignoring it and I'll keep reminding you of just how bad your sources are.
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.
And as we have seen, he is wrong. None of the examples Wark provides go beyond what would be expected under standard medical expectations.
Mutate and Survive

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

This message is a reply to:
 Message 277 by Faith, posted 10-29-2017 1:29 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 280 by Faith, posted 10-30-2017 11:55 AM Granny Magda has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 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 1445 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
 Message 310 by Phat, posted 11-15-2017 7:10 AM Faith has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 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

  
ringo
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 20940
From: frozen wasteland
Joined: 03-23-2005


Message 282 of 606 (822616)
10-30-2017 12:20 PM
Reply to: Message 281 by Faith
10-30-2017 12:14 PM


Re: Cherry juice, carrot juice, greens as healers
Faith writes:
I've tried it too for my arthritic pain and have the impression it cuts down on it quite a bit....
I use nothing for arthritic pain and it comes and goes unpredictably. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that something works.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 281 by Faith, posted 10-30-2017 12:14 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 283 by Faith, posted 10-30-2017 12:26 PM ringo has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 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

  
ringo
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 20940
From: frozen wasteland
Joined: 03-23-2005


Message 284 of 606 (822618)
10-30-2017 12:43 PM
Reply to: Message 283 by Faith
10-30-2017 12:26 PM


Re: Cherry juice, carrot juice, greens as healers
Faith writes:
Mine is bad enough to be a problem all the time, though weather changes, particularly at this time of year, make it worse.
My sympathies - but my anecdote makes the point that anecdotes can't be trusted.
Certainly, diet can relieve some pain, particularly if the pain is caused by poor diet in the first place. That isn't an excuse for jumping to the conclusion that diet can relieve all pain.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 283 by Faith, posted 10-30-2017 12:26 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 285 by Faith, posted 10-30-2017 12:55 PM ringo has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1445 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 285 of 606 (822619)
10-30-2017 12:55 PM
Reply to: Message 284 by ringo
10-30-2017 12:43 PM


Re: Cherry juice, carrot juice, greens as healers
Nobody said "diet can relieve all pain."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 284 by ringo, posted 10-30-2017 12:43 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 286 by ringo, posted 10-30-2017 1:00 PM Faith has replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024