Guess they cured cancer

quote:

---

I also remember reading that when a person is opened up during an operation, the cancer grows quicker. Would that be due to oxygen exposure???

---

No, that's a myth.

Thanks for the link. The article has important information that I'm going to excerpt here. (Please understand that I don't intend this as a rebuttal to you, rather, as important information about false and potentially misleading or dangerous pseudomedical claims.)

quote:

---

The National Cancer Institute explains that "the names Laetrile, laetrile, and amygdalin are often used in place of one another, but they are not the same product. The chemical make-up of Laetrile patented in the United States is different from the laetrile/amygdalin produced in Mexico. The patented laetrile is a partly synthetic (man-made) form of amygdalin, while the laetrile/amygdalin made in Mexico comes from crushed apricot pits."

​

Though it is sometimes sold as "Vitamin B17", it is not a vitamin, as no disease is associated with a dietary deficiency of laetrile.

​

Amygdalin has been advocated by some as a "cure" or a "preventative" for cancer: as there is no scientifically accepted evidence of its efficacy, it has not been approved for this use by the Food and Drug Administration.[2]

​

The US government's National Institutes of Health reports that two clinical trials with laetrile have been published. One Phase I study found that amygdalin caused minimal side effects; the side effects that were seen were similar to the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. One Phase II study with 175 patients had some patients reporting improvements in symptoms, but all patients showed cancer progression 7 months after completing treatment, and it was determined no further tests were necessary.

​

While no double-blind clinical trials may have been conducted, a clinical trial was carried out in 1982 by the Mayo Clinic [3] and three other U.S. cancer centers under NCI sponsorship. Laetrile and "metabolic therapy" were administered as recommended by their promoters to 178 patients with advanced cancer for which there was no proven treatment. None were cured or stabilized or had any improvement of cancer-related symptoms. The median survival rate was about five months. In survivors after seven months, tumor size had increased. Several patients suffered from cyanide poisoning.

​

In 1974, the American Cancer Society officially labelled laetrile as "quackery," but advocates for laetrile claim a conspiracy with regard to this label.

---

Wow. Does it also reverse the polarity, and generate a stable warp field, too? (Maybe it could generate a tachyon beam from the main deflector array.)Oh, and also, as disclosed at the bottom:

quote:

---

Bill Sardi has a commercial interest in resveratrol pills.

---

Cancer is probably the disease most responsible for religion. It has all the hallmarks of a condition you'd seek religion to treat - it comes out of nowhere, with little warning, and is very often fatal. Medical science offers little hope but a grueling process of painful treatments with no guarantee of success. And it often takes a very, very long time to kill you.It's no surprise that even people who don't have cancer turn to religious nonsense and pseudomedicine. And it's unconscionable that so many people line up to provide it to them (at a "reasonable" fee.)

Why do you hate our freedom?

---

"I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut."
-Stephen Colbert

The state of medical etiology has just lurched forward. The next step will be the discovery that religion causes homosexuality. And then the next step will be the discovery that homosexuality causes colon-rectal cancer. All of which means that gays are screwed coming and going.”Hoot Mon

Congratulations. You're the only person I've ever met who can hear unambiguously joyful news, like a possible cure for cancer, and decide it's a good idea to try and steer it towards his favorite subject... making fun of gay people.Folks, can we ignore Ralph on this one? I'm actually finding this thread interesting, and would prefer to not let him steer it off into crazy-town.

---

"I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut."
-Stephen Colbert

Sorry about drifting off (must be the Ralph in me). I'm back on topic now. I think the aricle you cite is credible enough. I've been suspicious for a long time that pharmaceutical companies would like to conceal information like that this for obviously capitalistic reasons. The article concludes:

quote:

---

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

---

The mutation part certainly concerns the genes, and I often wonder if oncogenes are predisposed to express when certain metabolic (or enviromental) conditions favor their expression. For you to ask about your risks from smoking, I'd say look at your family's health history to see if cancer was or is a significant problem. Maybe you will find that your relatives tend to sicken and die from other causes besides cancer. I know several heavy smokers who you'd think should be dead by now from lung cancer; and I have known several non-smokers who have died from lung cancer. So environmental factors causing cancer can be ambiguous.”Hoot

I stand corrected, cheers mate

Um, you are kind of preaching to the converted, mate; surely you know that.I mentioned Resveratrol mainly because I drink gallons of red wine and it has a similar effect and was pertinent to the OP so I thought it would be appropriate to chime in.Sorry if that bugged you.If I miss-judged the tone of your post then I appologise.

I was just messing around, friend. No intent to offend.

This doesn't surprise me. I've always gotten a chuckle out of the idiots who frequent health food stores for things like apricot kernals, etc. Given the fact that they contain cyanogenetic glycosides (to prevent herbivory or seed predation, depending on the species), it never fails to strike me as odd that anyone would actually want to eat them. Amygdalin, the primary ingredient in laevomandelonitrile ("laetrile"), hydrolises to hydrogen cyanide fairly easily in the stomach. The fact that the "side effects" noted in the clinical trials were indistinguishable from cyanide poisoning is really a "no shit, sherlock" to me.Of course, I LOVE almonds and yucca (cassava or Manihot esculenta) root, which have the same problem, so maybe I shouldn't scoff... Edited by Quetzal, : Left off a phrase

The topic is a specific medical study about a specific chemical. Let's keep it there or I shut this down for awhile.Maybe a longish while since there doesn't seem to be much to say on the topic until we have new information.

No worries, dude; I reckon we are on the same side .

If that first one doesn't work, maybe capsaicin will pan out. It's also been used to cure type-1 diabetes in rats.Edited by truthlover, : messed up the url codes