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Author Topic:   "Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 114 of 606 (819060)
09-05-2017 4:12 PM
Reply to: Message 111 by Faith
09-05-2017 3:44 PM


Re: where's the moral high ground here?
Also I realized I should ask you to do a little more translating of that abstract because I don't have the patience to figure out what all the numbers mean. Please?
The hazard ratio is a measure of how much more likely someone in one group in to die than those in another group (over 5 years, in this study). So the hazard ratio of 2.5 means that those receiving only alternative treatments were 2.5 times more likely to die over the 5 year study period than those using conventional treatment.
I find visuals easier than statistics; and the below is very simple to understand:
This is measuring the percentage of patients in the conventional and alternative groups still alive after a certain number of months. The dotted line is conventional, the solid line alternative treatments. As you can see, about 80% of the patients using conventional treatment were alive after 3 years, compared to about 70% of those on alternative treatments. After 5 years, a little over half of the patients on alternative treatments were alive, compared to more than three quarters of those on conventional treatments.
Studies like this are where things like 5-year survival rates come from, by the way. Note how not very many die between 5 and 7 years (in both groups). When they say you have a 60% chance of living 5 years, it doesn't mean only five years.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 133 of 606 (819829)
09-14-2017 5:41 PM
Reply to: Message 132 by Faith
09-13-2017 7:40 PM


Re: Managing Meniere's Disease of the Inner Ear with nutritional supplements
I do have one cautionary concern: that she too may have already passed beyond the active stages into the end stage where her recovery might be more a function of having lived it out than the effect of her treatment regimen. She does say, however, that she did experience her symptoms going away as long as she stuck to the dietary regimen, and then returning with a vengeance when she got complacent and stopped following it. I'm very interested in seeing what it does for my brother and his friends who are now all following it. All three of them had chicken pox and I think herpes simplex and two had shingles.
I had also never heard of Meniere's disease until a few minutes ago when I read your post, and I know nothing about Mary Jay Carr, so I am not commenting on this case specifically. I did want to raise a note of caution about how bad we are at self-reporting though - experiments in which people are asked to record certain things as they happen; and then later asked to make summaries without access to their recordings, show that we're surprisingly bad at remembering these things accurately.
So when someone says 'it got worse when I was doing x and better when I was doing y'; I think it's always wise to take such things with a pinch of salt.
This is the whole point of clinical studies - it's the best way we have to figure out if the apparent patterns we see actually have a basis in reality. Anecdotes are a way to find out what might be worth studying; they're not reliable as a way to how things actually work,
Having said that, if it's a rare or difficult disease that doctors don't know how to treat, and the recommended treatment is not something dangerous in itself, no harm in giving it a try,

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 168 of 606 (820502)
09-21-2017 2:55 PM
Reply to: Message 149 by Faith
09-18-2017 2:49 PM


Re: Carrot juice
[qs]Well, I'm a big fan of carrot juice and I do believe the anecdotes about its curing some cancers. There are just too many such stories to ignore. It would be very nice if somebody did a controlled experiment with it of course and I hope somebody will get around to it.one of the most recent studies had promising results with one candidate.
It's not like carrots have been ignored by the scientific community.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 149 by Faith, posted 09-18-2017 2:49 PM Faith has replied

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 Message 169 by Faith, posted 09-21-2017 3:11 PM caffeine has replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 172 of 606 (820537)
09-22-2017 12:04 PM
Reply to: Message 169 by Faith
09-21-2017 3:11 PM


Re: Carrot juice
I'm not aware of studies of carrots, you are? What results are you aware of?
Bizarrely, I somehow seem to have deleted most of my previous post; but what I was writing was that I went to Google Scholar and searched for carrots+cancer - there is an enormous amount of research out there dating back decades. The evidence seems to suggest that regular consumption of carrots lowers the risk of cancer and can slow the progress of tumours.
Now the focus is on finding out what it is in carrots that's doing. That's what the study I linked to in the last post was about. They took a bunch of mice, some of which were fed food rich in certain chemicals extracted from carrots; some the same diet without. They then dosed them with a carcinogen. The mice fed with the carrot extract had less and smaller tumours than the others.
Nothing to suggest that carrot juice can actually cure cancer, though.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 169 by Faith, posted 09-21-2017 3:11 PM Faith has replied

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 267 of 606 (822424)
10-24-2017 4:26 PM
Reply to: Message 260 by Faith
10-22-2017 5:35 PM


Re: Cancer survivor on changed diet anecdote
Yeah well give us the statistics for those who survived twelve years with her disease without doing anything at all.
It's probably a fairly respectable number.
While I can't find anything that addresses your question directly, I just did a little bit of reading about her type of cancer. The median survival rate is 5 years, but this figure is probably a bit misleading since most patients diagnosed with the disease are elderly. A median survival rate of 5 years means a very different thing if you subjects are 65 than if they're 23. The median survival rate only looking at causes related to the disease is estimated at 11 years, though I'm not sure how they calculated that.
A Spanish study found that 55% of participants survived at least 10 years, and this for a study population with an average age at diagnosis of 69. 10 years after diagnosis, 10% of the patients in this study had received no treatment at all - not because they were opposed, but because the doctors didn't think the progress of the disease justified intervention.
All numbers from Diagnosis and Management of Waldenstrm Macroglobulinemia: Mayo Stratification of Macroglobulinemia and Risk-Adapted Therapy (mSMART) Guidelines and references therein.
Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 330 of 606 (828165)
02-12-2018 12:50 PM
Reply to: Message 329 by Faith
02-12-2018 9:11 AM


Re: Full speed ahead on the Whole Foods Plant-Based way of eating
HI Faith
It's too early for me to worry about the effects of a strict veganism anyway, since just getting to that point isn't going to happen right away. I've done a few days in a row *almost* without any meat or dairy or oil but not completely (some olive oil on the salad, a Tbs of butter to coat the roasted potatoes).
So are you getting rid of vegetable oils as well? I'm not sure it's so healthy to completely remove all fat from your diet. I'd keep the olive oil on your salad (though I am, of course, not a nutritionist).

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 345 of 606 (828935)
02-27-2018 12:23 PM
Reply to: Message 336 by Phat
02-24-2018 2:55 PM


Re: Advice on Supplements
Animals are a great control group as they dont understand what a placebo is, anyway.
But if you're talking about 'calmer livestock and birds'; this is still a subjective judgement. People are looking at their animals and thinking 'hmmm, they look calmer now they're drinking Willards'. That's in no way an objective control of people thinking 'hmmm, I feel better now I'm drinking Willards'.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(3)
Message 416 of 606 (830065)
03-20-2018 5:01 PM
Reply to: Message 415 by Faith
03-20-2018 3:53 PM


Re: A couple of studies
A story that is filmed is more than an anecdote recounted by the subject himself
I think you misunderstand the opposition to accepting anecdotes as evidence. The fact that something is filmed does not mean a great deal. Of course, even a film isn't going to capture all details; but that's not really the point. The point is that we are complicated organisms living in an extraordinarily complicated world.
Let's imagine that the cameras followed the subject around for 24 hours a day and that we all sat here for several years and watched the entire footage end to end. We saw that the subject adopted diet A and had outcome B. Fantastic. This would not tell us that diet A caused outcome B.
You see, over the course of the several years of footage we just sat through - all sorts of things went on. How do we know that outcome B was not caused instead by the new filtering techinques introduced at the local water purification plant? Or because of the fact that the subject took up more regular exercise after buying a dog three months into the experiment? Or because of an improvement in air quality related to his change of address? Or a complex interaction of all these and 467 other factors? How, for that matter, do we know we're not dealing with some weird congenital quirk of the subjects physiology that is not applicable to almost anyone else.
This is what's meant when something is dismissed as anecdote. One story is not convincing evidence of anything when you're dealing with a complex series of interactions - this is why we have statistics and why people want to see the outcomes of studies with lots of subjects.
Having said all this; the diet you're basically advocating does not seem to be controversial; which is what I think Granny Magda was getting at. Diets rich in a variety of fruit and vegetables are good for you. Diets rich in whole-grain foods are good for you. Diets rich in red meat increase cancer risk. These are not wrong, but these are standard dietary advice.
Whether a strictly vegetarian diet is better for you I don't know - but it doesn't seem a silly idea. The point is that we can't establish this by stories. Things like the health impacts of diet have an enormous amount of complicating factors; and so we need correspondingly large studies to overcome this and come to meaningful conclusions. True stories are still anecdotes.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 415 by Faith, posted 03-20-2018 3:53 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 419 by Faith, posted 03-20-2018 5:21 PM caffeine has replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 451 of 606 (830147)
03-22-2018 2:37 PM
Reply to: Message 419 by Faith
03-20-2018 5:21 PM


Re: A couple of studies
Yes I know it's complicated and that was the main point in the post I just wrote. Huge studies also are dealing with too many complications to give a reliable result though. As I said I think we get better information from small controlled studies like Esselstyn's. But I'm still going to defend the single person anecdote.
I think this is the wrong way round. Small studies as well deal with an enormous number of complications; because each individual's physiology, life history and environment is enormously complicated. There are gazillions of confounding factors even in the smallest study.
A large sample size allows us to smooth over many of these confounding factors. Confounding factors we know about can be controlled for statistically; which cannot be done in a single person study. Confounding factors we don't know about can't be - but that is the case in a small study too. If the complications affecting your result are randomly distributed, then they become less important the more people there are in your study. The noise is swamped by signal.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 525 of 606 (830299)
03-26-2018 1:39 PM
Reply to: Message 515 by Faith
03-26-2018 11:36 AM


Re: More on growing gardens
If you had to grow ALL your own food all of a sudden, on infertile land and without water, of course you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd be dead already. But I'm talking about starting gardens as a habit that can be improved and extended over time. Step by step, little by little, as much as CAN be done. A plant here, a plant there, making compost etc. Baby steps.
I have both my Canadian relatives' gardens in mind, that certainly didn't supply everything they ate but probably at least 90% of their fruits and vegetables. And again this woman Annette Larkins who is one of my latest heroes, who grows just about ALL her own food in her yard in Florida. Front and back yards, every inch covered with something edible, plus big pots of edibles on walkway and patio too. She started this decades ago, it didn't happen overnight.
Who'd have thunk it, I actually agree with you for once. We could make a lot of simple changes to boost our own food production at home; with beneficial environmental effects.
However, the majority of people don't own the land to make any significant impact, I think. We like to grow stuff, but we don't have a garden. We do quite well on the herb front, but our annual vegetable output would suffice for about one meal. I don't think we're having any major effect on the world of agriculture,

This message is a reply to:
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