Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

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Dardedar
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Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

Post by Dardedar »

Smacking Cancer woo woo in an exchange on Facebook tonight. This exchange took less than an hour.

***
Johns Hopkins Update
This is an extremely good article.
Everyone should read it.

AFTER YEARS OF TELLING PEOPLE CHEMOTHERAPY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TRY ('TRY', BEING THE KEY WORD) TO ELIMINATE CANCER, JOHNS HOPKINS IS FINALLY STARTING TO TELL YOU THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY .

Cancer Update from Johns Hopkins:

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body.. These cancer
cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have
multiplied to a few billion. When doctors tell cancer patients
that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after
treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the
cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable
size.

2. Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a
person's lifetime.

3. When the person's immune system is strong the cancer
cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and
forming tumors.

4. When a person has cancer it indicates the person has
nutritional deficiencies. These could be due to genetic,
but also to environmental, food and lifestyle factors.

5. To overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing
diet to eat more adequately and healthy, 4-5 times/day
and by including supplements will strengthen the immune system.

6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing
cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells
in the bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract etc., and can
cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc.

[snip... ten more points of dumb]
DAR
"snopes.com: Cancer Update from Johns Hopkins Hospital" http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cancerupdate.asp

The John's Hopkins center has a direct line by line debunk of this article falsely attributed to them, here:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_c ... _hoax.html
even if Johns Hopkins did not send this info out...it is still true information and is good to get it out instead of all the misinformation about the C word"
Some of the good eating nutritional advice is standard material and useful I suppose, but it's not a substitute for fighting cancer with solid scientific methods that have been proven to work. The article is filled with howlers that John's Hopkins would never be associated with.
I'm sorry to tell you, Dar, the success rate of chemotherapy is not very high...about 2%. http://cancercommonsense.com/#/statistics/4538345819
I'm sorry Sandra but your undated anonymous article about chemo is completely, ridiculously, false.

Clicking to their home page I see they peddle claptrap like:
Hydrogen Peroxide therapy
Essiac Tea
Oxygen chamber
PH realignment
Coral calcium

And every quack anti-science therapy ever peddled. It's really bottom of the barrel. If you have cancer and you look to these people for advice, you are doing the same as nothing. You will probably die. My mother had cancer and was following this nonsense. I told her, do you want to live or do you want to die (it was colon cancer, quite treatable and quite fatal if not treated). She decided to have surgery, and live. I've also had cancer and am alive because of well understood scientific methods that represent hard won knowledge.
Nothing at that site you provide is accurate, useful. Quite the opposite, it misinforms people with information that is well known to be completely, utterly, false.
A specific rebuttal to the ludicrous claim that chemo's success rate is 2%, is here: "Does chemotherapy work or not? The “2% gambit”" http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/ ... motherapy/
look, Dar, we are not going to agree...you would take chemo, I won't...that's just the way it is
Again, you are citing anonymous internet garbage. The 2% claim is popular bit of misinformation spread by people who haven't the foggiest idea of what they are talking about.
Before a person takes chemo the can look at the numbers showing the likely hood of living if you take it or not. This has been exceedingly well established and studied for decades. If you take it, your odds of living, are better. That's why people do it even though it's very difficult.
I suppose you would throw out the information offered by Dr. Joseph Mercola, too, in your certainty of the effectiveness of chemotherapy??? Nevertheless, I will offer it as a source for some of the 2008 questioning of the "statistics" that started this little discussion. BTW, I use to believe trustingly in allopathic medicine until I learned of the power of naturopathic and homeopathic, herbal, chiropractic and multitudes of other healing methods that are available. http://www.mercola.com/article/cancer/c ... ptions.htm
Absolutely. He's a quack: "FDA Orders Dr. Joseph Mercola to Stop Illegal Claims" http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/mercola.html

[Further, extensive unpack of Mercola crapola: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola ]
"I use to believe trustingly in allopathic medicine until I learned of the power of naturopathic and homeopathic, herbal, chiropractic and multitudes of other..."
There are methods that have been tested and rigorously proven to work, and then there is all the rest which do not go in that category because they have not been proven to work, or in the case of most of what you have cited to night, are known categorically not to work.
I have studied these things for years and have a good knowledge of them and regularly give public lectures about them at our local library. I could through and explain in depth all of the straightforward factual errors but the links I have provided already do that.
Homeopathy is diluting an ingredient that could provide no cure until nothing remains but water. It's ludicrous pseudo science.
Thank you for your opinions. I am impressed to know somebody who is so sure of himself that he has all the answers and every doctor who disagrees with him is a quack...
I don't have all of the answers, but I do have some of them. And I have conducted investigations on many quacks over the last few decades and exposed them. I don't say this with any intent to be insulting at all but all of the information you have presented here tonight, all of it, is complete, utter, quackery and foolishness and this is very easy to show. And more importantly, it's important to show because people who don't know any better and accidentally follow such completely mistaken and blatantly false information, end up dying needlessly.
you think the scienceblog & quackwatch are better sources??? really? I am done with this discussion.
Better than your anonymous unreferenced stuff? Yes. Your site that says right at the bottom:
"Alternative health solutions are not intended to treat or manage any health conditions"
Yes. My science based information is better. It also happens to be true.
Nothing on the sites you referenced is accurate. That's not as easy to do as you might think. It's all wrong. 100%. That's quite extraordinary. At least this bogus John's Hopkins article (they didn't even spell the name of the hospital right) threw in a couple true things.
***

Then she ran. It's this kind of crap that killed Steve Jobs, and who knows how many other people. A bit more on this Mercola clown, from the rational wiki link above:

"Joseph Mercola, "doctor" of osteopathy, is a popular guru of alternative medicine and a member of the right-wing quack outfit Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. He advocates and provides a forum for many classic crank medical ideas, such as vaccine hysteria and the belief that modern (sorry, "allopathic") medicine kills more people than it helps. His website is a veritable spring of pseudoscience, quackery, and logical fallacies. He is a promoter of the idea of an AMA/Big Pharma/FDA conspiracy.[1]
Despite his claim that unlike real other doctors, he is not interested in profit,[2] he advertises all manner of unproven products, and has a health center that dispenses alternative medicine for a steep price.[3]"

Further reference NIH Cancer factsheet
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Dardedar
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Re: Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

Post by Dardedar »

Stragglers:
Chemo killed my mother when she was 36 yrs old...back in 1968.......I believed back then that there wiuld be better ways of fighting cancer......the bottom line is it is up to us....
hemo completely destroyed her intestines...
I'm sorry you know someone who had a bad experience with chemo Diane. Very often people take it at late stages when there isn't much hope. Very likely 50 years ago it was even a more nasty procedure than now. But then there is this:

"Combination chemotherapy is now standard in the treatment of many cancers and has contributed to increasing survival and cure rates. For example, the introduction of combination chemotherapy that contained the drug cisplatin led to cure rates for testicular cancer of approximately 95 percent. Treatment for this disease has become so effective that 80 percent of patients with metastatic testicular cancer can now be cured. Thirty-five years ago, 95 percent of these patients died, usually within 1 year of diagnosis."
http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/vie ... px?csid=75

Consider those numbers. That's a very big deal and represents thousands of lives saved in just that one category. And there are many examples like that.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

Post by Indium Flappers »

What is your opinion of Thomas N. Seyfried's studies, specifically this video?
"We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."
~ The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
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Re: Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

Post by Dardedar »

Indium Flappers wrote:What is your opinion of Thomas N. Seyfried's studies, specifically this video?
I don't have time to watch the video but from what I quickly looked up about him, it looks like he is doing real, proper, peer-reviewed science, if a bit on the edge. I would suggest he avoid the use of the term "alternative" since that is very much a red flag/dog whistle for the anti-science woo community.

As I often say (picked it up from somewhere), there is science based medicine that has been shown to work, and there is everything else. If something that starts out in the "alternative" category becomes well confirmed, then it gets moved over into the non-alternative category and just becomes regular medicine. The alternative category is rife with quackery, anti-science and silly stuff but that's not to say it's all crap. But it's so bad it's given the entire category a bad name among those who respect the robust scientific method of establishing claims.

He seems to have been working on his ideas for a few decades without much to show for it. But maybe he'll hit on a big discovery and find something everyone else has missed. We need people working on the edge, pushing the boundaries. Nothing wrong with that. There is a common misconception that cancer is one thing and we could/should "cure cancer." It's much more complicated than that. Cancer comes in many varieties and it will require many cures over the years, probably mostly starting with prevention, early detection and vaccines. It's a very tough nut to crack.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Anti-science Cancer Claptrap

Post by Indium Flappers »

Alrighty, thanks!
"We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."
~ The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
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