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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: "Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: And alternative med people will do even worse. Do some research on black salve to start with. Cancers vary a lot. Good information is crucial if you want to make the right decisions. You won't get that from the "alternative" crowd.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3
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Just don't assume that all (or really any) "alternative med" people are saints bringing cures suppressed by "Big pharma" to the public. There are reasons why testing is required for drugs. Alternative medicine is not all harmless and ineffective - some of it is actively harmful and ineffective. There are some horrific treatments out there.
Nutritional advice may be helpful, but don't expect it to do anything much against cancer and a real nutritionist can probably give better advice than any "alternative medicine" type.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
That just reads weirdly to me. I get that the hospital was serving cheap and nasty food. I get that it could use a good shake-up in the kitchen. But your complaint to the nutritionist seems to miss all that in favour of arguing about low carb diets. Maybe it's just the way you've written it but it sounds like you missed the opportunity to make genuinely important point that shouldn't be controversial.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
I think that "too much sugar" makes that point perfectly well. But that seems to be only part of the problem - and could easily be a consequence of the real issues.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Bread won't have much sugar in it. It may be unpleasant, over-processed and full of preservatives but sugar shouldn't have been a problem.
More, if you think not eating would be better than eating the food provided, you are very likely wrong. Which is probably the point that the nutritionist was trying to get across. There may have been a lack of nutritional control at the hospital, but the central problem was much more likely ill-informed "cost-cutting" that lead to poor quality food. E.g. "Long life" bread is cheap because it has a long shelf life so that gets bought by the hospital. I can't speak to the U.S. But over here there certainly have been efforts to improve hospital food, which have had some success. Alternative medicine is as likely to get you on some silly fad - or, especially, try to sell you overpriced supplements that you don't really need - as to give you good nutritional advice. As I said above the problem is far more likely with management and the financial aspects of running the hospital than the nutritionists.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Bread is mainly carbohydrate, but starch not sugar. So I was right to think that you were bringing your diet into it. You are right that it metabolises quite quickly but it shouldn't be a problem on it's own. ABE: And I will add that there is a really big difference to objecting to the bread because it is cheap and nasty and objecting to it because it's bread. Even good bread is mostly starch and quickly metabolised.
quote: It may well not be as bad as you suppose considered from the point of nutrition. But the problem of cheap unappetising food is certainly real, and fixing it could very well improve the food in other respects. It does depend on maintaining a proper kitchen, which may be the problem (although even a cook chill service might be better than what they had)
quote: Oh dear. There you go bragging about your misuse of technical terminology again. For your information I did originally assume that you were using the term "simple carb" in a non-technical sense, and including the bread. You then insisted that you weren't talking about weight-loss diets and talking about sugar which lead me to question that. But I only emphasised the sugar because you did. In fact - and this is a quite simple point to rememember - if you are going to try to use technical terminology, sugars are simple carbohydrates and starches are complex carbohydrates. So, I know what a "simple carbohydrate" is and you didn't. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3
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Do you think he should have preferred a lower chance ? Because that is what he really chose.
The five year statistic is given because it is an actual measured value. It's needed because if the danger of cancer recurring - which is the point of the chemotherapy after surgery. You don't know that his diet made any difference to his chance of survival. We do know that refusing chemotherapy reduced it.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Since they are making claims they cannot know to be true, their credibility on the issue can't be considered to be high. There is simply no way around that.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3
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No, the odds are not "pretty enormous that they are right". Indeed, on a sensible evaluation the odds are that they are wrong. You can't conclude a link just based on one or even two cases. Some people with cancer do better than others - sometimes a lot better. People who drank lots of carrot juice and did well will report it. Those that died will not. Without actual numbers - or other relevant evidence - we can't tell that there is anything more than (unintentional, but pretty much inevitable) selective reporting
quote: You don't HAVE a direct cause and effect, you have a weak correlation, with a built-in bias to the reporting, which may be the whole of the story.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
It's worth pointing out that a 60% five year survival rate means a 60% chance of living AT LEAST five years.
Wark chose to take a gamble - to take a bigger risk of dying in five years in the hope of finding a better treatment. It's not an obviously sensible choice. And, while he has survived, we don't have much reason to think his choice of treatment had anything to do with that. And if he really is advising people to avoid surgery - then his advice will probably kill people. That's really not something I find praiseworthy and it reflects very badly on his judgement.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Utterly wrong. It's just a standard statistic. If 60% last 5 years, many of those will last longer.
Statistics on the outlook for a certain type and stage of cancer are often given as 5-year survival rates, but many people live longer — often much longer — than 5 years. The 5-year survival rate is the percentage of people who live at least 5 years after being diagnosed with cancer.
American Cancer Society According to Cancer Research UK the 10 year survival rate for bowel cancer is not much lower than the 5 year rate
Bowel cancer survival falls only slightly beyond five years after diagnosis, which means most patients can be considered cured after five years.
quote: It isn't much. The numbers are way too low to make a good test, even if the data were unbiased - and it very likely is. If you want to claim the moral high ground you need to give up your obsession with winning the argument and rationally consider the evidence.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Prostate cancer survivability is really high. 15 year survival is 96% according to the American Cancer Society Anything short of Stage IV colon cancer has a 5 year survival rate of well over 50%
American Cancer Society and there doesn't seem to be a great drop off past that from the figures I cited in my previous post. Bladder cancer has a 15 year survival rate of 65% American Cancer Society Using these figures I get an estimate of about 30% that all three would survive at least 15 years. With more details I could do better, but as a first pass it certainly doesn't point to any massive odds, even if we assume that all declined chemotherapy after surgery, and that that would noticeably affect their chances. And that's before we add the selective bias of only the survivors telling their story. If anything the other cases seem odder. If the survival rates are all above 50% the chance of all 5 dying is going to be less than 3%. So it sounds as if something is biasing those figures - maybe 1 or more having a Stage IV cancer which greatly reduces survival.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The rate doesn't exactly decline quickly, so we should certainly expect a very high survival rate for 25 years. The figures are reasonably "current" - so that means people diagnosed somewhere around 2000 - if you have more applicable figures then let's see them.
quote: That's the worst case short of Stage IV, and not much lower. The UK figures don't suggest a lot of change in the last 10 years. And again if you have more applicable figures let's see them.
quote: And Gerson's been tested and found not to work. Also, I rather feel that the built-in bias is rather strong for that case.
quote: In other words, not a valid comparison. Seriously if you actually care about whether the treatments work this is not the way to go about it.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Here's some information
Quackwatch
In 1947, the NCI reviewed ten cases selected by Dr. Gerson and found his report unconvincing. That same year, a committee appointed by the New York County Medical Society reviewed records of 86 patients, examined ten patients, and found no evidence that the Gerson method had value in treating cancer. An NCI analysis of Dr. Gerson's book A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases concluded in 1959 that most of the cases failed to meet the criteria (such as histologic verification of cancer) for proper evaluation of a cancer case [16]. A recent review of the Gerson treatment rationale concluded: (a) the "poisons" Gerson claimed to be present in processed foods have never been identified, (b) frequent coffee enemas have never been shown to mobilize and remove poisons from the liver and intestines of cancer patients, (c) there is no evidence that any such poisons are related to the onset of cancer, (d) there is no evidence that a "healing" inflammatory reaction exists that can seek out and kill cancer cells [17]. ... [16] American Cancer Society. Unproven methods of cancer management: Gerson method. CAA Cancer Journal for Clinicians 40:252-256, 1990.[17] Green S. A critique of the rationale for cancer treatment with coffee enemas and diet. JAMA 268:3224-3227, 1992. And more on site.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: But - and this is the point - objectively considered they aren't convincing evidence. And you really ought to ask yourself why the Alt medicine people aren't doing better in providing evidence - especially when the Gerson treatment has been around for 70 years.
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