Regular readers know that, as a cancer surgeon, I become particularly worked up about stories of naturopaths taking care of cancer patients, which all too often end in disaster for the patient. I've lost count of how many naturopaths I've seen, either on their websites, in talks, or in published literature, claiming that they can cure cancer "naturally," using any of a number of unproven methods, an example being the Gerson protocol, a form of quackery involving 13 larges glasses of raw vegetable and fruit juice, around 150 supplements, and five coffee enemas a day, each and every day. Others have claimed that "chemotherapy is for losers," and frequently use alternative treatments associated with a much higher chance of dying of cancer. It's no wonder how alarmed I am that naturopaths have created a pseudo-specialty patterned after medical oncology that they call "naturopathic oncology," complete with an abbreviation (FABNO, or, as I like to put it, "FAB? NO!"). They even pretend that it's a real medical specialty, despite all the pseudoscience and quackery involved, when in reality it's just quacks cosplaying real oncologists. It drives me even more crazy to see doctors who should really know better collaborating with naturopaths and then taking self-righteous umbrage when it is pointed out that they are betraying their duty to patients by collaborating with quacks, mainly because they don't realize that naturopathy is so rooted in pseudoscience that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, which is an integral part of it.
So it was with dismay and anger that I discovered that someone whom I consider a friend and most certainly admire for her ability to admit a huge mistake and change course is being targeted for legal thuggery by a "naturopathic oncologist." I'm referring, of course, to ex-naturopath Britt Hermes, who a few years ago came to the startling realization that she was a quack and actually had the courage to give up her profession as a naturopath and undertake studies to become a real scientist. (Seriously, you really should read her blog, Naturopathic Diaries. It's an insider account that should end all doubt that even "respectable" licensed naturopaths practice quackery.) As a result of her dishing on her ex-colleagues and exposing the pseudoscience in her previous profession, naturopaths really, really hate her. In this case, a prominent "naturopathic oncologist," Colleen Huber, has served her with a cease and desist letter. It's not the first time naturopaths have tried legal thuggery; just a month and a half ago, Bastyr University (a.k.a. the Harvard of naturopathy schools, which is not a good thing, by the way) served her with a similar legal nastygram. It all came about because Hermes came to what looks to me like a reasonable conclusion based on circumstances that Huber had cybersquatted her name by buying up domain names based on her name, setting them up to redirect to the homepage of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians:
The Wix account of BrittMarieHermes.com is registered with an email address at the domain natonco.org, the official website for the Naturopathic Cancer Society and a non-profit organization in Tempe, Arizona run by naturopathic cancer “doctor” Colleen Huber, NMD and her surrogate Hazel Chandler. The organization raises money for cancer patients who desire to use, but cannot afford, expensive alternative cancer therapies such as intravenous vitamins, mistletoe injections, and special diets, which is then funneled to Huber’s clinic Nature Works Best and others.
Hermes had also pointed out how Huber's claims about her success rate were utterly risible, which apparently stung her, but there's no denying it: They are. (I'll get to why in a moment.) First, though, let's take a look at what Huber claims. I perused her website again (NatureWorksBest), having encountered it before. The first thing one encounters on the splash page of her website are these claims:
Nature Works Best is a natural cancer clinic located in Tempe, Arizona, that focuses on natural, holistic, and alternative cancer treatments. Our treatments have proved to be an effective alternative to traditional chemotherapy and radiation, which we do not use in our treatments. Rather, we have developed a natural method of treating cancers based on intravenous vitamin therapy which may include Vitmain-C, Baking Soda, and other tumor fighting agents as well as a simple food plan.
Our team of naturopathic medical doctors have administered over 26,000 intravenous treatments, used for all stages and types of tumors. As of July 2014, 80% of patients who completed our treatments alone went into remission, 85% of patients who completed our treatments and followed our food plan went into remission; 93% of patients in Stage I through early Stage 4 who did all of our protocols went into remission. No other clinic, of any kind, has such a high documented success rate.
Our cancer clinic treats all types of malignancies, at all different stages, often with different co-morbidities, and different patterns of metastases. We have seen patients of all stages do very well with our treatments, with the exception of late stage IV patients.
So many red flags, and I haven't even gotten past the first page! Intravenous vitamin C? It almost certainly doesn't work. Even the most charitable interpretation of existing evidence is that, at best and giving every benefit of the doubt, it has a very, very modest antitumor effect, too weak to be of much use. Basically, there's some in vitro and animal model work that suggests a modest effect against a few tumors, but none of it has been translated into humans. Even if the best possible scenario came out of human clinical trials, high dose intravenous vitamin C for cancer is, as I like to call it, a very long run for a very short slide.
Intravenous baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is another favorite. The first time I ever heard of its being used was by a particularly ridiculous cancer quack named Tullio Simoncini, who claimed that all cancer is in reality a fungus and that the way to cure cancer is to kill the fungus. And how do you do that? By injecting baking soda into it. I kid you not. Simoncini is so divorced from reality that he claims that all cancer is white, like fungus, apparently never having heard of melanoma or other tumors that are a color other than white, or, for that matter, of the many variety of colors of fungi.
Guess what? Huber goes all-in for Simoncini, too, mentioning him in the very first paragraph of her page on intravenous sodium bicarbonate. After reading partway through her ridiculous pseudoscientific treatise on bicarbonate and cancer, I laughed out loud when I came to this part:
As for whether cancer is fundamentally a kind of fungus, the jury is still out. However, it is useful to know that not only does sodium bicarbonate disrupt the comfortable environment of tumors, but it also has anti-fungal effect.[4]
This, after only chuckling a little at this:
Earlier researchers have found a concurrence between cancer and candida. In Dr. Simoncini’s book, Cancer is a Fungus[3] he notes some similarities between the two. Primarily, both are intractable diseases, each very hard to get rid of. Dr. Simoncini notes that each forms a solid mass of low penetrability, unlike the dispersed forms of bacterial and viral infections in the body or body fluids. Dr. Simoncini notes the problem of surface area in addressing these infections. Whereas bacterial and viral infections are dispersed in the solutions of bodily compartments, and likewise, antibiotics and other anti-microbials dispersed in the same solutions have access to each microbe.
No, the "jury" is not "still out." Cancer is not a fungus. It is not a kind of fungus. It is the body's own cells freed from normal regulatory constraints that regulate them into doing what they're supposed to do, growing as much as they need to grow for development and tissue repair and then stopping, and functioning the way they're supposed to function. In any case, at least one patient is known to have died as a direct result of Simoncini's treatments.
Like many naturopaths, Huber takes a germ of a biologically plausible idea and runs her patients right off the cliff with it. That idea is based on the observation that many cancers exist in an acidic milieu. Much of the reason for this is that they often outgrow their blood supply and therefore exist in a hypoxic (low oxygen) environment. Also, because of the Warburg effect, many tumors exist largely on anaerobic (no oxygen) metabolism, which generates a lot of lactic acid. The idea is that perhaps by reversing the acidity the tumors might become less aggressive—or at least more sensitive to chemotherapy. There are even a few studies in mice (like this one, one of whose co-authors I know personally) that suggest treatment with IV bicarbonate can decrease metastases, although the primary tumors appear to grow at the same rate. At least one other alkalinizing agent appears to have similar effects on tumor growth.
The problem is that the studies are all pretty much in cell culture and rodent tumor models. There is no good clinical evidence that alkalinization works against cancer in humans yet. Steve Novella found a clinical trial at the University of Arizona that closed in 2015, but no results have been published yet. I note that this was a phase I trial, which means it wasn't even designed to demonstrate efficacy, just safety and patient tolerance of the regimen. It also involves only oral bicarbonate dosing, which is not what Huber is doing and would be expected to produce a much more limited alkalosis than her protocol. Even if it did, based on the modest effects observed in mice, it is incredibly unlikely that high dose bicarbonate would cure any cancers, which is what Huber claims for her treatments. At best, it might slow down tumor growth, and there are lots of problems with chronic alkalinization of the blood. Thus, I view Huber's claims very skeptically.
Of course, like all naturopaths, Huber claims her treatments are "individualized":
The intravenous nutrients are tailored specifically to each patient’s condition and chosen for their targeted, time tested, and research-documented anti-cancer, or tumor fighting effect. The nutrients we use are different for each patient, but some of nutrients used may include a combination of Vitamin-C, Sodium Bicarbonate, DMSO, in addition to many others. Before we have done a full workup we cannot know which of these nutrients may be used for your treatment, if they are used at all. These treatments are made specifically for each patient, their type and stage of malignancy and may be used exclusively or as a supplement to chemo and radiation.
Of course, who knows how Huber figures out which patient should get which treatment. This is, as I like to call it, the "make it up as you go along" method.
Huber is also very much a believer in the idea that sugar somehow "feeds" cancer. While it is true that, thanks to the Warburg effect, many tumors (but not all) actually do utilize a lot more glucose than normal tissue (if it weren't true, PET scans that use labeled glucose wouldn't be able to visualize tumors), there is no good evidence that sugar "feeds" cancer in the way that Huber and other naturopaths claim or that decreasing sugar intake decreases the growth rate of established cancers and the risk in healthy people of getting cancer, at least if you control for obesity, which does produce an increased risk of several cancers and can, of course, result from consuming too much sugar. It's also true that diabetes appears to be associated with a higher risk of certain cancers, such as pancreatic cancer. However, that increased risk appears to derive from abnormalities in the function of insulin and insulin-like growth factors.
Perhaps the most outrageous bit of nonsense on Huber's entire website is her attempt to do clinical research. On the one hand, I almost feel as though I should give her credit for trying (like a participation trophy to a child), but on the other hand she's just so bad at it. We can see for ourselves in her paper, Cancer Patients’ use of Sweeteners: A 7-Year, Controlled Study, published in 2016 in the International Journal of Cancer Research and Molecular Mechanisms.
First of all, it's one of the oddest papers I've ever seen. The description of the methodology is beyond cursory, and there is basically zero statistical analysis or anything resembling a trial design. It is "controlled" only in the sense that that the letters line up on the page in fully justified paragraphs. Seriously. This is the whole description of her methods:
Mortality vs survival was recorded of sweetened food eaters among outpatients with a cancer diagnosis at one clinic. Since 2006, this clinic has recorded data on consumption of sugar and other sweeteners in cancer patients, and has consistently recommended, but never mandated, avoidance of sweetened foods, except with extracts of the plant Stevia rebaudiana, which does not contain saccharides or sugar alcohol. is clinic has no inpatient facilities and no food service. All patients selected and purchased all of their own food, all of which originated from and was almost entirely consumed outside of the clinic. Data from all 317 consecutive patients with a diagnosis of cancer from outside of the clinic are reported in this interventional study, excluding only those cancer patients who chose to forgo further treatment a er less than two weeks in treatment.
Natural methods such as intravenous nutrients with cancer-disrupting e ect were the only ones o ered, choosing among both oral and intravenous, herbal and nutritional interventions, choosing those that patients found tolerable and that we observed to work synergistically, adjusting for individual tolerances and requirements, in accordance with the naturopathic principle of “Treat the whole person”.
After Huber's most cursory of cursory methods section, the text devolves into commentary before coming around to report Huber's "results":
Achievement of remission was quite different for the following two categories: all patients: 151/317=48% and those who ate sweetened foods: 9/29=31%. The difference between these two groups was much stronger for the cohort of patients who continued treatments until either remission or death. Comparing all patients who were steadfast in the recommended treatments with the sweetened food eaters who were steadfast in all but dietary recommendations, 151/183=83% of all completely steadfast patients achieved remission, but only 9/25=36% of the steadfast sweetened food eaters achieved remission. Remission was defined as no visibly active tumor on MRI imaging of the same area that had previously active tumor growth. Of all patients who were steadfast in the treatments (including the sweetened food eaters), 32/183=17% died while still under the care of the clinic, but considering only the sweetened food eaters who otherwise consistently pursued the recommended treatments, 16/25=64% died.
Several tables are presented, which you can peruse on your own. There's no statistical analysis, no power analysis, no hazard ratios presented, no meaningful analysis of any kind. There is no breakdown of how many patients had what kind of cancer or what stage they were. Wait, that's not quite true. Tables 4-6 break down the cases by stages (I, II, III, early stage IV and late stage IV). I note that we generally don't break down cases in such papers by "early" or "late" stage IV. Stage IV is stage IV. Also, lumping together cases of different cancer by stage is utterly meaningless. After all, a stage II pancreatic cancer is a much different beast than a stage II breast cancer, the former having a low survival rate and the latter a very high survival rate. Different mixes of different cancers per stage could produce very different results without any biological effect whatsoever due to her interventions.
Then there's this:
Many patients voluntarily left our practice, against our advice, primarily for financial reasons, while still having cancer. Of the remaining patients, 175 either went into confirmed, complete remission, which we define by no evidence of cancer remaining in the body on imaging, or have remained in good to excellent wellbeing, as determined retrospectively by prolonged stable health of at least 6 months after leaving our care and needing no other physician supervised cancer care, and as confirmed by annual telephone conversation with either the patient or a family member. Those patients in remission stayed in our care an average of 3.7 months; those who left, 2.7 months, (this data last measured in 2010). Eight additional patients went into remission after leaving our clinic, and while being treated at a different clinic, and it is unlikely that our treatments were the decisive factor in that remission. We were still treating 22 patients at July 1, 2014 plus giving ongoing maintenance treatments to some of those who are still in remission. 44 died while still our patients. Of those 44, 12 died after a significant dietary dispute with us. That is 32 patients died although they received our treatments and complied with our requested diet. 22 more were killed by hospital procedures and/or chemotherapy and/or radiation side effects while still our patients. 45 total patients chose to have chemotherapy while having our treatments. Yet, of the 175 who went into remission, only 12 had chosen to have chemotherapy while having our treatments. Stages 1, 2, 3 and early Stage 4 patients at start of treatment had much better outcomes than late Stage 4 patients in general.
In her paper, she lists 151/317 patients as in "remission or assumed remission." My reaction? You can't "assume" remission. Either the patient is in remission or he isn't. She also lists 20 "iatrogenic deaths in the hospital or by MDs." Really? How do you define "iatrogenic"? Or are these patients who gave up because Huber's treatments weren't working? Who knows? It is known that a high dropout rate is a red flag in any clinical study. Also, over 1/3 of the patients listed in Table 1 received surgery or chemotherapy, leading one to wonder how much of any good results reported was due to actual conventional treatment.
I also noticed while poking around Britt's website that Huber had published her "methods" (such as they are) on her website a couple of years earlier. Funny, but she also left out a lot of this in her paper. She also left out a fair number of patients who received radiation therapy (Table I). Why did she not include these numbers in her published paper? One wonders, one does. I also can't help but mention another analysis by Thomas Mohr, who looked at Huber's numbers and posted his reaction in a comment on Britt's blog about a version of Huber's study posted before the final published version:
The data are difficult to estimate but from the overall table one can conclude that there is complete information for 247 patients (excl iatrogenic deaths, unknown status, etc). Of these 78 died. Of these 13 died in the state of the art treatment arm and 65 died in the naturopathy arm (the numbers are estimated due to the lack of a both surgery and chemotherapy group, I assumed 50 to be in the state of the art treatment arm, accounting for 50% overlap between surgery and chemotherapy).
Putting aside the ethical issues of the extremely bad study design, the lack of ethics committee approval or patients agrrement, a quick n' dirty analysis of the data reveals following odds ratio: 2.1 (95% CI 1.01 - 4.40, p<0.05) in favour of state of the art treatment. I.o.W. patients under natural care only have a more than twofold higher risk to die.
And:
An addendum. If one removes data of questionable quality and takes into account only those with complete data and in treatement resp. died during treatment (i.e. in remission, not yet in remission, died) , the odds ratio gets almost 10:1 in favour of state of the art therapy. This is really nasty.
Indeed it is, also unethical as hell. This paper is so bad that it could be used as an example of how not to do clinical research. In addition, there is no listing of an institutional review board (IRB) approval, appropriate informed consent to patients who filled out her questionnaires, or any of the other usual practices designed to protect patients. Even more despicable is her claim in her "cease and desist" letter to Britt Hermes:
- Huber claims her research has been registered with the Office of Human Research Protections and the FDA since 2013.
- Huber claims her study is a retrospective case series that does not require IRB approval.
- Huber claims her IRB has extensive and definitive policies regarding informed consent, HIPAA laws, and protection of human research subjects.
If the first were the case, Huber could show her IRB approval. Also, an investigator doesn't have to register a human trial with the FDA unless he's seeking FDA approval for the investigational agent being studied. As for the second, Huber is just plain wrong. Retrospective case series do require IRB approval. Period. This is not even a gray area. True, some of them depending on the details, might qualify for an expedited review by the IRB, but from what I can tell Huber's would probably not have qualified because it uses protected patient information. As for her claimed IRB, Britt did a long post for Science-Based Medicine showing naturopathic IRB shenanigans of the Arizona naturopathic IRB formed by Huber and others.
Basically, Huber is unhappy that Britt has been kicking up the rocks and shining light on the quackery practiced by naturopaths and the unethical and incompetent clinical trials being done by them to try to provide a veneer of scientific respectability to their quackery. As a result, she's acted like so many other dubious practitioners and, instead of defending herself with science, has tried to silence critics with legal thuggery.
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published in 2016 in the International Journal of Cancer Research and Molecular Mechanisms.
The publisher in this case, "sciforschenonline.org", is as "International" as the Taj Mahal, hence the Germanic-styled title. Specifically, it's three tech grifters in Hyderabad.
http://domainbigdata.com/nj/MRHvL-AoVuUOdjZBnzWvLQ
It is conceivable that someone might publish through them without being an out-and-out fraud, just not very likely.
In the paper the author only mention
[...]at one clinic. [...] etc. I might have missed it, but i can't find a mention of which clinic it was. Out of curiosity I quick searched on Bell's list for the journal SciForschen. Ofc it was there.
Can someone explain me the reason for choosing these two groups for comparison; [...]two categories: all patients: 151/317=48% and those who ate
sweetened foods: 9/29=31% [...] instead of comparing with a non-sweetened food eating group?
Two bit quack can't stand one bit of criticism.
The criticism may affect Huber's income stream. So sad.
Cancer is the second leading cause of death, and the vast majority of people use allopathic doctors to treat it. That in itself is persuasive evidence that allopathic doctors have very little understanding of cancer. And they have absolutely no interest in trying to figure out why the cancer developed in the first place. Maybe that's why cancer so often reoccurs, especially when coupled with the severe damage chemo does to the body.
It seems naturopathic doctors don't understand cancer too well either--they all have different theories, and nothing seems to work for everyone or for all cancers. Still, it's no surprise that more people are opting out of allopathic treatment. The cancer industry can manufacture all the psyence it wants to make it seem as if great strides are being made--but again, cancer is the second leading cause of death, and the allopathic "success rate" speaks for itself. You'd think a little humility would be in order--but when hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, humility tends to fly out the window.
Really? Because there is evidence that a great deal of work has gone into this.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes.html
Sure, Johnny. I wonder how many cancer doctors even bother to check vitamin D levels, or glyphosate levels in the body.
Thank you herr doktor bimler! I was wondering all through this (and while reading about it at ND blog), “who would publish this crap to begin with?”.
Wow, Ginny, you are obviously totally clueless about cancer.
You write "nothing seems to work for everyone or for all cancers."
Of course not-in part because cancer is *not* a single disease. Even cancers originating from the same primary site-e.g., breast cancer-are not a single disease, because, using the example of breast cancer, there are multiple different forms of breast cancer that respond differently to treatment. For example, some patients have hormone-receptor positive breast cancer and are likely to respond to hormonal therapy (e.g., tamoxifen or, in postmenopausal women, aromatase inhibitors), while other patients hormone-receptor-negative but HER2 positive and may respond to trastuzumab, whereas others have triple-negative breast cancer and will not respond to either hormonal therapy or trastuzumab.
My point is that cancer is not one disease, but many-you seem to be unaware of that.
So Dr. Huber knows what foods these patients consumed how exactly? Self reporting? We know how unreliable that is. Clairvoyance? Possibly better but for the small detail that it doesn't exist.
So I see enough in the "methodology" section to reject the paper, and I'm not even an expert in the subject. I'm sure other readers could find much more.
HDB already explained how this paper got published: the corresponding author found a bottom-feeding journal. Yet more evidence that publication in something titled "International Journal of X" should raise a red flag.
"the allopathic “success rate” speaks for itself."
Indeed. Prior to the development of chemotherapy, acute leukemia was a death sentence. Today the survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia is at least 80% in children. The same is true for Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Many with chronic myeloid leukemia now live long, fairly normal lives which is now a manageable illness in many cases thanks to drugs (imatinib, nilotinib, etc) that target the specific genetic abnormality that is drving force behind CML.
Some patients with metastatic melanoma (Jimmy Carter is a great example) are now living for years without disease after treatment with drugs like nivolumab or pembrolizumab, whereas previously such patients almost always died within a year or two of diagnosis.
Of course, there are still great areas of unmet need, and sadly little progress has been made in the treatment of some cancers (e.g., pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma), but that's certainly no reason to pretend that science based medicine cannot treat cancer.
Florian@2: If you do the arithmetic you find that of patients that supposedly did not eat sweetened foods, the remission rate was 142/288 which is about 49%. Not so different from the total group.
There is something else that doesn't change: the difference in remission rates does not even meet the 95% confidence threshold. For the sweetened foods group, that range is 6 to 15 out of 29. The higher end of that is above the rate reported for the full group, or that I derived for the "unsweetened" foods group.
Ginny, do you know what else speaks for itself? The fact that cancer patients who refuse real treatment and use quackery instead have a far lower survival rate than those who receive real treatment. A recent study confirmed what should have already been obvious to everyone-choosing alternative medicine is often a fatal mistake for cancer patients.
The study found that breast cancer patients who choose quackery instead of are five times more likely to die than those who receive real medical treatment, that those with colon cancer are four times more likely to die if they choose quackery over real medicine, and that those with lung cancer who refuse real treatment and instead choose quackery are twice as likely to die.Of course, this should be common sense-untreated cancer progresses, that's what it does, but I still cited the study below:
Johnson, Skyler B., et al. "Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival." JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute 110.1 (2018).
Wow, anonymous commenter called Jonas Suck, you really are deceptive in how you characterized what I said. Huffing and puffing with hubris about how well you and the cancer industry understands cancer. Maybe you'd sound more credible if it weren't the second leading cause of death.
Ginny, you obviously know little if anything about cancer. You are embarrassing yourself, to be honest. And I take it that you are totally ignoring the findings of the study I cited above.
I'll take non sequiturs for $1000.
It's interesting that Ginny's (unspoken) point can be so very right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Jonas and Johnny: Please do not feed the troll.
Of course, the treatment of leukemias, especially childhood ones, show what a complete liar and idiot NWO reporter truly is.
"I wonder how many cancer doctors even bother to check vitamin D levels, or glyphosate levels in the body."
Uh, even if glyphosate was proven to be a carcinogen (which is not the case), what good would it do for oncologists to check glyphosate levels in the body? Is there a Natural Cure for glyphosatanomas that the medical establishment/New World Order doesn't want us to know about? Coffee enemas? Special Rife frequencies? Don't hold back, reveal the Secret!
@ #5 NWO
You say that as though it were a bad thing.
How do you jump from the first two sentences by NWO Reporter to the third, exactly?
Anyway, good for Ms. Hermes for calling out this person and her dangerous work. I hope she doesn't have too much hassle in dealing with the legal aspects.
Hmph. It looks as though the ICANN UDRP doesn't apply to this case of cybersquatting. From a USian perspective, this is a fine line, as "britthermessucks," for example, would be perfectly fine, but I have no idea what goes in the German legal system.
Sorry, but that statement makes no sense. It does not follow from the fact that cancer is the second leading cause of death that doctors have poor understanding of it: it could simply mean that doctors have a fair understanding of it but that it's really hard to defeat.
Gindo styles herself as a satirist, but this seems to be simple confusion over the meaning of the word. I'd go with "self-parodist," but that might be another barbarous neologism.
Now, that's hilarious. Remember when you were bitchin and whining about "doxing" by vipers, Ginny? Put down the jimsonweed, already.
@viggen:
It could also mean that the main reason that cancer is now one of the leading causes of death is because we've reduced or eliminated a lot of the other causes, but everybody will still eventually die of something.
Ginny, are you actually recommending homeopathy as a front-line cancer treatment, or do you just not understand the meaning of the word "allopath"?
Ginny, when or if you ever have cancer; we'll just make a voodoo doll and stick a pin in the spot with cancer and cure you.
That is at best what homeopathy and naturopathy can do to cure cancer.
The author of this article is the uneducated quack.
"Nature Works Best"
Nope, sorry, we all can see it doesn't. Huber lost me at the URL.
Even If feel we assume Mother Nature had the ability to know and was focused on effectiveness and had a set of values to determine what is best, I'm not sure what's behind the assumption that her idea of "best" is "what keeps humans alive and well."
Seems an awfully humancentric view. Why wouldn't she see less humans or weaker humans as "best" for nature, for example?
How can bicarbonate be used intravenously when blood has a very narrow pH range?
Oh, baby child, you're new here, aren't you?
I do not mean that as an insult, we were all new here at one time. But our host has written many time about how silly bicarbonate is as a cure for, well, anything other than an upset stomach, really.
Up top is a search box. Type 'bicarbonate' therein, and be prepared to read a while. I would post links, but 3 or more links go into moderation, and our host has to spend time approving the post, and there are many more than 3 posts he has written on the subject.
But the one time that discussion of blood pH really stood out for me was a comment made by the MIA poster Krebiozen. He provided a very detailed discussion of what happens when blood pH goes outside of it's normal range. It struck home because it was after my mom died. The call I received (because my sister wasn't available) letting me know that she had been admitted to the hospital, also let me know that her blood pH 'isn't compatible with life'.
I knew what that meant, but I didn't really understand it until Krebiozen's post.
....drs who should really know better collaborating with naturopaths and then taking self-righteous umbrage when it is pointed out that they are betraying their duty to patients by collaborating with quacks, mainly because they don’t realize that naturopathy is so rooted in pseudoscience that you can’t have naturopathy without homeopathy, which is an integral part of it.
That looks like the self serving attitudes of MSM, reminiscent of Wilk. Whatever their flaws, some of the NDs seem to answer serious deficits in conventional practices and MSM's iatrogenic injuries. Again, my direct experience with naturopathic oncologists is limited to two NDs (one a 1.5-2 hr discussion at a public health fair over a decade ago), several discussions with a busy ND consultant; and one "over-the-shoulder" series of an at-risk cancer friend getting cytokine labs sent out and (phyto)chemical extracts, in. AFAIK, homeopathic treatment (e.g. 20C etc) has never come up at all. MSM simply sucks at therapeutic nutrition and literally doesn't seem to know much about even the ABC...s, much less newer stuff.
Intravenous vitamin C? It almost certainly doesn’t work.
You guys don't seem to know much about the subject; I haven't even detected much pulse yet, Kerbiozen being the best. Mostly ust bad mouthing, misdirection and perhaps ignorance/incompetence from my point of view, particularly on the Mayo results. And there is successful clinical experience with surgery, even 60-70 years ago. Surgery wise, sepsis, shock, post-surgical recovery, pain relief, immune function, wound healing speed, strength and fusion quality were greatly improved.
For cancer kill, with the common fatal markers, vitamin C was an additive ("synergistic") adjunct, in my obviously limited experience. I hired a post doc from the leading public ivy with relevant outside lab experience, and had live tissue work done. 5FU alone didn't work, some vitamin-5FU binaries were starting to work, better than the std MSM treatment binaries. A vitamin combo with 5FU beat even the experimental (brutal) MSM combos hands down. The subsequent bloodwork showed several results highly consistent with this.
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If MSM providers were as good as they think/say they are, most NDs might not exist. Perhaps AMA killed off too many legitimate alternative MDs. As for ugly war stories, I think I've seen worse from MSM MDs... at least, no one called them "alternative".
From a patient perspective, separating the wheat from the chaff for both MD and ND can be a serious issue in a voluntary society and fair criticism is important. We the public could probably use more information upfront, with more "truth in advertising" from both. Historically, MDs have had monopolistic tendencies where now, MSM sometimes veers toward police state solutions. Summarily suppressing the NDs is the latter.
I wouldn't jump on Carolyn too quickly, Johnny.
The answer is, no, it can't work for that exact reason. If you somehow did overcome those mechanisms and push the blood pH high enough for an effect, lots of other bad things would happen throughout your body.
prn @34
Not a link in the whole thing.
"We the public could probably use more information upfront, with more “truth in advertising” from both."
It's required in medicine, but not in "alternative medicine." AFAICT, One has the FDA, self-regulation and policing, standards of care, correction with new evidence - the other has NONE of those things.
" Historically, MDs have had monopolistic tendencies where now, MSM sometimes veers toward police state solutions. Summarily suppressing the NDs is the latter."
CITATION NEEDED. One works, the other don't. Easy as that.
Historically, MDs have had monopolistic tendencies
With the crapload of crappy, quacky, fraudulent NDs like Huber here where I live in Arizona, it sure doesn't seem that way.
That was not my intent. I made an effort to make it clear that nothing I said was meant to suggest Carolyn was wrong to ask. If my comment came across as suggesting she was wrong to ask, I say directly to her -
I apologize. Please do not think that asking questions here is wrong, and don't let that interpretation of my behavior drive you from posting, as it was not my goal.
My intended message was that Carolyn was correct that blood pH in living persons is in a narrow range, and that if it is outside that range, you don't live long, and IV bicarbonate is a really stupid idea.
The dearly missed Krebiozen explained this repeatedly.
Thanks, Johnny and Narad.
Do we know anything about the quantity and/or rate of administration of bicarb in Huber's "treatment?" If the rate is low enough, even a large quantity should present little challenge to pH maintenance.
If the tumor itself is susceptible to pH increase, then it would seem to me far more useful to administer a base directly into the tumor or intra-arterially upstream of the tumor, though I have no idea if the latter would be feasible.
An aside on this: I haven't checked to see if it has been resolved, but there was an extreme shortage of sodium bicarbonate for injection across North America a few months ago. The shortage was so bad that many hospitals were considering preparation of solutions in-house.
Hm what does IV vitamin C do to blood pH?
"If we put this ascorbic acid in you, it will kill the cancer! If we put this bicarbonate in you it will make you less acidic and thus kill the cancer! Honest, we know what we're doing!"
Emma Crew :If I recall correctly, most naturopaths think ascorbic acid IS a base. (I've heard it claimed elsewhere that lemons are alkaline. I can't tell if the people claiming that are lying or just that dumb.)
Highly buffered ascorbic acid, ph 5.5 - 7, or else sodium ascorbate are the injectable forms of vitamin C with regard to pH.
The buffered stuff, aka Ascorbic acid for injection or Ascorbic acid, injection USP are the pharma terms used since at least USP XIV (1950), no doubt causing endless confusion amongst the unwashed hoi polloi.
Pgp: I suspect the notion that lemons are alkaline comes from misunderstanding of the difference between citric acid and citrate (rather than the ascorbic acid content).
Lemons contain a considerable amount of citric acid. It is a triprotic acid, meaning each molecule can yield 3 H+. I +don't know what believers in lemon juice magic think happens to those pesky protons, but they don't just fall off and disappear. Regardless of what happens subsequently to citrate, the protons are going to find something basic to react with. I suspect that citric acid remains intact in the stomach, then "consumes" bicarbonate in the intestine (I'm not sure of this - doesn't seem to be a lot of info out there.) So, given the following, the process is rather moot.
If citric acid is reacted with a base (e.g. bicarbonate or hydroxide) the result is citrate (e.g. sodium hydroxide & citric acid react to yield sodium citrate and water). Potassium and sodium citrate solutions are basic as-is (pH around 8). Citrate is metabolized to bicarbonate, which means it really is useful for treating things like acidosis, though not as promptly as IV bicarbonate. Problem is, if you used up bicarbonate to neutralize citric acid in the first place, you don't come out ahead in terms of available bicarb.
The WHO oral rehydration salts formula currently in use includes sodium citrate for just this purpose. Earlier formulas used sodium bicarbonate, but it isn't very stable at higher temperatures and tends to react with the glucose in the formula during storage in tropical climates. Sodium citrate is better behaved. (Little packets of chemicals using the WHO formula save hundreds of thousands of little kids' lives every year.)
Ascorbate from vitamin C isn't metabolized like this. Excess is mostly excreted intact in urine.
Doug: That's really interesting. I highly doubt naturopaths know any of that though.
PRN: You know, you're really failing hard at trying to sell 'natural medicine.' Snarling at us 'unwashed hoi polloi' only reinforces the desire to stay the heck away from naturopaths- and their patients.
I'd just like to know in what bizarro-world sense is this a "controlled" study? Patients who violate protocol do not constitute controls.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "What a maroon!"
PRN: You know, you’re really failing hard at trying to sell ‘natural medicine.’
I'm not trying to "sell" natural medicine. There many things that you have no concept or are so totally misinformed.
Maybe, just maybe, I can change that. And that doesn't mean that I think I know everything "natural" or "naturopathic" either.
Snarling at us ‘unwashed hoi polloi’ only reinforces the desire to stay the heck away from naturopaths- and their patients.
That's fine. My biggest concern is when people interfere.
The idea that 'lemons are alkaline' comes from the quackery of Robert O. Young, who has been the topic of much insolence, respectful and otherwise.
See page 3 for a "sample shopping list helps one to know what kinds of foods typically stock the fridge and cupboard of an Alkalarian", that includes lemons.
http://www.phmiracleliving.com/pdf/alkadiet.pdf
Thanks to doug for that explanation about citric acid metabolism.
It's an article of faith among the woo crowd that citrus fruits are an alkaline food, supposedly resulting in net basic impact - but as you indicate, those H+ ions produced in metabolism to citrate don't just vanish without effect.
Johnny: Oh, wow. I expected hilarity and I was not disappointed.
Not according to one "Marsaan."
Thanks for the link, Narad. I hadn't seen that discussion previously.
Trying to digest that whole discussion is rather more than I want to do at the moment. He and I agree on my sentence which you quoted, but it's far from obvious. His first comment is correct, but to come to that conclusion it is necessary to extract the important point he was trying to make from what the excess of obfuscatory words he actually wrote. (the point being that lemon juice contains both citric acid and citrate salts, and a net positive amount of bicarbonate is produced from the latter but not the former)
PRN: I'm better informed than you on a TON of things, and unlike you, my brain hasn't ossified.
I don't really understand why you're here, except to try and sell your treatments or just to snarl at people. Maybe you should get a hobby- or three.
I wish Google would stop allowing cons like "Dr"Robert Morse (naturopath,diploma mill funded, anti-vacciner,loyal Teump supporter) who pushes the ALLOPATHS DON'T UNDERSTAND THE LYMPH SYSTEM! line and that humans should only eat fruit and fruit and more fruit!!! (While he deals with smokers cough) in his videos. He's all Irisdology is true and tinctures of bull butt and all that.
Or "Dr" Robert Cassar who is "making over the earth terrain vessel", and founder of the Earther Academy, his allopathic home retreat in Hawaii whete people pay thousands to go stay with him and "fast" LOL while taking turns sitting in his sauna and getting they lymph nodes pinched LOL sorry...but yeah, I find it funny...how in the he'll canthey get away with this crap!?...oh, and Cassar periodicially blames people for all their parasites and tapeworms "You did it to yourselves! I just call them demons now. It's like that. It's like you have demons in you and YOU let them in there! Well, I can't get them out for you. You have to do it! Because they're feeding off of YOUR will power because YOU eat that food! That's why I let people come here and make these Earth products. Now, let's get some vodka poured on your skin, into the infared sauna, and get at those lym h nodes!" He also likes to lift his shirt sms point at his abs which may be the result of either synthol or liposuction. Prior to his career in chiropractonaturpathy, he rode his bike up and down the beach with maccaw parrots on his shoulders.
Pgp: I don’t really understand why you’re here, except...
Oh, I do learn things here. Although it's like picking through chicken entrails sometimes. 'Specially since K went MIA.
I’m better informed than you on a TON of things
Must be a ton of degenerate matter. Impress me.
Colleen Huber states in an online article "Why I Became A Naturopathic Physician" that her eyes were opened to the nefariousness of Allopathic Medicine in the 1970s, when Sloan-Kettering quashed investigation into laetrile and it was made illegal.
As counterpoint, there's a recently published case report about a man who took daily apricot kernel extract in an attempt to guard against prostate cancer recurrence, and managed to poison himself with cyanide:
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/man-takes-apricotbased-al…
I found an ND who preaches against taking apricot kernels, and claims that his fellow NDs avoid it too. This ND instead claims success with such things as mistletoe, IV vitamin C and artesunate.
http://yaletownnaturopathic.com/integrative-oncology/
Imagine my surprise to find that ND Huber presented her self-advertisement to OMICS scamferences.
https://www.omicsonline.org/abstract/glycemic-restriction-in-cancer-pat…
http://cancer.global-summit.com/europe/abstract/2015/defeating-cancer-r…
OMICS. It's as if she wants people pointing and laughing at her.
IOW Britt Hermes accused Huber of cybersquatting, setting up websites in her name (BH's) that dishonestly presented her as supporting Huber's grifts.
Huber lost the websites, so the links in BH's accusatory blogpost were broken.
Huber is presenting this to her claque as a victory so that they can forget the whole episode.
This is not the behaviour of someone who believes that she has a strong case of defamation and intends to pay lawyers to pursue it.
Somebody else has posted about this before, but an article had more news. Belle Gibson has been heavily fined by the Courts in Australia.
http://www.news24.com/World/News/australian-who-faked-cancer-fined-for-…
That's going to leave a mark.