chemotherapy

triple negative breast cancer

breast cancer

chemotherapy

Ketogenic diet

neoadjuvant chemotherapy

Thomas Seyfried

But if enough people go online to rate Dr. Seyfried's article highly and he wins a prize, doesn't that mean the therapy is effective? I thought that's how science worked.

Why did they have to go to Turkey?

Sigh. I'd forgotten October was Breast Cancer Awareness month for four blissful days. I'd be happier about it if awareness did any good and wasn't a signal for the grift machines to go into motion.All that fundraising and none of the money goes to research.

Unfortunately, Mercola has been singing the praises of the ketogenic diet as the "key" to "'cancer recovery" since March, 2013; he has additional articles, a book, recipes and a new recipe book ( available November). However much of his woo focuses upon weight loss - which I'm sure is an issue for cancer patients.

So I suppose cancer patients have a choice of woo diets- vegan, keto, raw or paleo dependent upon their guru.

N=1???

They probably couldn't get IRB approval here.

Am I wrong if I consider the words 'normally infective chemotherapy' as a sign there is some quack involved?

ïneffective, of course

Am I wrong if I consider the words ‘normally infective chemotherapy’ as a sign there is some quack involved?

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

"Why did they have to go to Turkey?"
Because they looked at US regulations and turned chicken.
Anyway, they have gotten poultry results, not even enough to goose the statistics. They just parrot the ideas of quacks.
I guess we should give thanks that they won't gull serious researchers.

further research and randomized clinical trials exploring add-on therapies (such as KD, HT, and HBOT)

"We threw all sorts of crap at the wall; the patient improved so now we must invest in testing every sorts of crap."
It is almost as if the clinicians' primary goal was to apply for research grants in crap-at-the-wall-related therapies.

@Sandi #5:

N=1???

Stop bringing common sense into the argument. You'll never make your millions with an attitude like that.

ORD: That post laid a whole nest full of eggs.

Mmmm. I'm hankering for an omelette now.

Let me get this straight: first the patient fasts, then is given insulin until they are lightly hypoglycemic, then get their chemo, then get roasted to 113F, then get squashed in a pressure chamber?
Please tell me it wasn't all on the same day? That sounds like a harrowing regimen.

And they do all that (plus surgery) and the keto diet gets the praise? Do they even know how well the patient complied with the keto diet?

I'd like to see what the professor formerly known as Dr Isis (now at Dreams of Chickens) thinks of this, since she's a physiologist who's also into keto.

Stop bringing common sense into the argument. You’ll never make your millions with an attitude like that.

Keep dreaming of your medical million :)

In the meantime, I'll make do with what brung a full stop to that nomadish tendency of yore and of which, today, Anheuser-busch and company are bringing billions to the table: beer (fabrication that is)...

Alain

Sorry, Alain, but I'm not sure what you're talking about. As far as I'm aware Anheuser-Busch have only brought anything approaching billions to the table when it came to paying lawyers to try to shut down a Czech brewery who had been brewing beer for several centuries prior to the USA being founded. And they failed.

I tried to make a joke; it failed.

That said, I was thinking your comment (make a million disregarding common sense) as an analogy to burzinsky and other medical fraudsters while on the other, I was thinking about my corporative environment that I'll be working on to bring to fruition next year.

I spoke about submitting the diagnostic paperwork to the taxes agencies here in Canada (both Federal one as well as my province one) but this is only a piece of the larger plan which involve the use of the tax credit reimbursement to negotiate the settlement of my personal debts first (guestimated: 15000$ canucks money) and with the rest of the payback, I am entitled to an investment fund called RDSP (registered disability saving plan) for which, once I put in some money (say: 50$), both government fill it up to the tune of 10 000$ and thereafter, for each 1$ that I put into the fund, both government (provincial and federal one) put in 1$ each so, with 15 000$ in, I can net around 55 000$ in the account.

I asked my financial planner if I can get a self-managed RDSP account (answer: yes) and following that information, I will create an holding corporation to hold the investment account for which, I'll be the only client (legally, I'm not yet allowed to manage other people's money so it will be mine, that's it) but which, I will also be the investment manager of that account.

I'm checking up the legalese and also, I am looking up at corporate loan but it seem to me this is a much faster way to bring up cash as opposed to selling snake oil treatment...

I should become an accountant but suffice it to say that the first investment I will be investigating is starting up my own brewery (might require a separate corporation for brewing beer but the brewery will ask the holding firm for financing...)

Alain

@Alain:

I got the joke. Buy I am aware of how Anheiser-Busch has been taking over many local (okay, crappy) breweries in the US.

I'm not dealing with anywhere near as much money as you (no debts, thanks to grants and scholarships and work), but I recently app appealed my disability decision. (I have yet to choose a lawyer. I don't know how to choose a good one.)

In article published few days ago we support ketogenic diets for prevention and therapy for cancer. This inside the reasoning that while fats do not have appreciable effects on the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) or in lactate formation, high carbohydrate diets have significantly effects on both SNS and lactate formation.
The article is entitled “Stress as the Inductive Factor for Increased Lactate Production: The Evolutionary Path to Carcinogenesis”. Positive Health Online, Edition 241, October, 2017 at http://www.positivehealth.com/article/cancer/stress-inductive-factor-fo…

I'm aware of how Anheiser-Busch has been taking over many local (okay, crappy) breweries in the US.

I wouldn't call Goose Island "crappy," offhand. I think Invective also recently acquired Virtue Cider, as well, and I quite like their brut. It all depends on how the deal is structured. (Fun fact: Yuengling actually built a brewery in Tampa because of retiree demand. I had to prove to my dad that it came from Pennsylvania rather than New York.)

^ "Inbev," not "Invective."

@Narad:

I guess I was thinking more of, say, Rainier and Olympia, the stuff we used to drink in college. (Though the old Oly brewery in Tumwater was already in disuse by the time I got to college.)

They got bought out by some bigger brewery, anyway.

And I still like Olympia. I convinced the local store to start carrying it again; cracked one open directly after stacking a couple cords of wood yesterday. (With help from a couple cousins.) My brother and I got the last two cords split and stacked before noon today.

Hot take: cheap beer is good because it's cheap.

I've only had Goose Island in airports and train stations I think; it's just okay. Michigan has better breweries in my opinion.

Hot take: cheap beer is good because it’s cheap.
Also, because it's beer.

Alternative medicine: Deadly for cancer patients

oracknows — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 01:14:20 +0000

Alternative medicine: Deadly for cancer patients

Alternative medicine, by definition, consists of medicine that either has not been shown to work or has been shown not to work. To paraphrase an old adage yet again, medicine that has been shown to work with an acceptable risk-benefit ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply "medicine."

Unlike the case for many conditions commonly treated with alternative medicine, whether or not a treatment works against cancer is determined by its impact on the hardest of "hard" endpoints: Survival. A patient either survives his cancer or he does not. Even the "softer" endpoints used to assess the effectiveness of cancer treatments tend to be much harder than for most other diseases, such as progression-free survival (the cancer either progresses after treatment or it does not) or recurrence-free survival (a cancer either recurs after treatment eliminates it, or it doesn't). Yes, although there are lots of other aspects of cancer treatment to be assessed, such as quality of life and adverse reactions, at the very heart of evaluating any treatment for a specific cancer are the questions: Does the therapy save the lives of cancer patients? Does it prolong survival, and, if it does, by how much and at what cost?

One might reasonably predict that, for alternative medicine and any given cancer, the answer to both questions will be no. However, the question is much harder to study than one might guess if you don't do cancer research yourself. For one thing, it is unethical to do a randomized, controlled clinical trial of a treatment with no evidence of benefit. So, except for very uncommon situations (e.g., the Gonzalez protocol, which was tested in a clinical trial against pancreatic cancer and failed miserably), leaving Nicholas Gonzalez to make all sorts of excuses, we have to use other methods to investigate the effect of alternative medicine use on survival in cancer patients. Yes, anecdotes like that of Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert, who died a horrible potentially preventable death from breast cancer because she chose the quackery of Ryke Geerd Hamer’s German New Medicine and stopped her neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which allowed the tumor to grow back bigger and deadlier than ever, are powerful and very likely representative of what happens, but this is science-based medicine. What are the actual numbers. Yes, I've seen at least a dozen women like Ms. Jakubczyk-Eckert through my career, but what is the effect of choosing alternative medicine beyond my clinical experience and in cancers that I personally do not treat?

Such were the thoughts going through my mind as I was made aware through social media of a study published online ahead of print in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by Skyler et al, entitled "Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival." In it, Skyler B. Johnson, Henry S. Park, Cary P. Gross, James B. Yu, all from the Department of Therapeutic Radiation (basically radiation oncology) at Yale, seek to answer the question: What is the effect of choosing alternative medicine as the primary treatment for a potentially curable cancer on a cancer patient's chance of surviving his or her disease?

The newest study showing that alternative medicine kills cancer patients

The latest study, by Skylar et al, is a good demonstration of how difficult it is to study alternative medicine use in cancer patients. I'll show you why in a moment. First, however, the authors introduce why it is so important to study this:

Delay or refusal of conventional cancer treatment (CCT), when done in favor of alternative medicine (AM), may have serious survival implications for cancer patients (1–7). However, there is limited research evaluating the use and effectiveness of AM, partly due to data scarcity or patient hesitance to disclose nonmedical therapy to their providers (8,9). To address this knowledge gap, we used the four most prevalent cancers (breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal) in the United States (10) from the National Cancer Database (NCDB) between 2004 and 2013 to identify the factors associated with AM selection and compared survival outcomes between AM and CCT.

Yes, there is a paucity of studies evaluating the use of alternative medicine in cancer. (I will cite some of the other studies that exist after I discuss this one.) The reason is clear. It's hard, and data are lacking. This brings me to the National Cancer Database.

There are two very large databases in the US that are commonly mined for cancer outcomes. One, of course, is the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, which is maintained by the National Cancer Institute. The program began in 1973 and consists of cancer registries all over the country that enter data regarding cancer outcomes in a standardized format, which includes patient demographics, primary tumor site, tumor morphology and stage at diagnosis, first course of treatment, and follow-up for vital status. Mortality and patient survival are tracked, with the mortality data coming from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data coming periodically from the Census Bureau. As large as it is, though, because of many gaps in coverage SEER only reports cancer outcomes for 28% of the US population. Still, it is a large database that's been around for 45 years. However, working with it in collaboration in the past, I've found that it has notable oddities and omissions. Often it is behind the times in tracking important variables, such as HER2 status in breast cancer, which SEER didn't begin tracking until 2011 or so, even though HER2 status had been used for at least a decade before that.

That's probably why the authors chose the National Cancer Database, which is a joint project of the American College of Surgeons and the American Cancer Society. It is a clinical oncology database sourced from hospital registry data collected by the more than 1,500 facilities accredited by the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer (CoC). Data cover more than 70% of newly diagnosed cancer cases nationwide and are used to develop quality improvement initiatives and set quality standards for cancer care in many hospitals across the US.

Now, imagine that you want to look at the effect of alternative medicine use on cancer mortality, and you had access to a large database like this. How would you go about doing it? There are a lot of things you have to consider. First, you would want to look at potentially curable cancers, because you want to find out if patients with curable cancers who choose alternative medicine die at a much higher rate than those who use conventional therapy. Thus, you have to exclude patients who had metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. Another important thing you have to do is to choose cancers that have a reasonable rate of cure using conventional therapy. Choosing pancreatic cancer, for instance, wouldn't make much sense, since the vast majority of pancreatic cancer patients, even those without metastatic disease at diagnosis, die of their disease. Even though we know from the Gonzalez trial that patients with pancreatic cancer still do much worse, dying faster and suffering more, than those treated with conventional medicine, such a difference would be unlikely to show up in a database study like this. So the authors chose four common cancers, nonmetastatic breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal cancer.

Similarly, how do you identify patients in the database who underwent alternative medicine treatment rather than conventional therapy? This is a question that is not as easy to answer as it sounds. For one thing, many databases don't include that information. One statewide database with which I worked, for instance, didn't even have a field for alternative medicine (or even "complementary and alternative medicine"), even though it had over 750 elements tracked for each patient. This is almost certainly the reason the SEER database was not used for this study.

Fortunately, the NCDB has data fields that can help:

Patients who underwent AM were identified as those coded as “other-unproven: cancer treatments administered by nonmedical personnel” and who also did not receive CCT, defined as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and/or hormone therapy. Patients with metastatic disease at diagnosis, stage IV disease based on the American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC) staging system (11), receipt of upfront treatment with palliative intent, and unknown treatment status or clinical or demographic characteristics were excluded.

The authors identified only 280 patients who fit the criteria, and noted that patients in the alternative medicine group were likely to be younger, female, and have a lower Charlson-Deyo Comorbidity Score (CDCS, a measure of preexisting comorbidities or of how "sick" the patient is at the time of diagnosis). In multivariate analyses controlling for clinical and demographic factors, the authors found that patients undergoing alternative cancer treatments were more likely to have breast cancer, higher education, Intermountain West or Pacific regions of residence, stage 2 or 3 disease, and a lower CDCS. All of this jibes with the usual impression that patients who choose alternative cancer cures tend to be of higher socioeconomic status and education, as well as healthier than average.

So what were the results? Not surprisingly, the risk of death was higher for three out of the four cancers. Overall, the hazard ratio (HR) for death was 2.5 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.88 to 3.27); 5.68 for breast cancer (CI 3.22 to 10.04); 2.17 for lung cancer (CI 1.42 to 3.32); and 4.57 for colorectal cancer (CI 1.66 to 12.61). The differences observed were not significant for prostate cancer, likely because the survival with conventional therapy was so high to begin with. Prostate cancer tends to have a long natural course, and in this study numbers were small and follow-up too short.

As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are the survival curves (click to embiggen):

Survival curves for (A) all patients, (B) breast, (C) prostate, (D) lung, and (E) colorectal cancers.

Obviously, this study has a lot of limitations. For one thing, the use of conventional medicine is likely to have been under-ascertained (i.e., undercounted or incompletely identified). After all, as I've discussed with other patients, some of those who choose alternative medicine to treat their cancer ultimately realize that it's not working and come back to conventional medicine. Such patients could also have gone to different institutions that aren't covered by the NCDB. However, if such a bias occurred, it would have tended to make the differences in survival between the alternative medicine group and the conventional treatment group smaller, not larger, meaning that if such a bias occurred in this study the harm caused by choosing alternative medicine is likely to be significantly worse than reported.

Other studies

Obviously, this study by Skyler et al is just one study, and the most recent. There are other studies showing similar results, but unfortunately they are relatively few. For example, the first study I remember encountering after I had started blogging about medicine and alternative medicine that addressed the question of the effect of alternative medicine on cancer survival was published in 2006 in the American Journal of Surgery by Chang et al. This study used a different methodology to study the effect of alternative medicine on breast cancer survival. Specifically, the authors did a chart review of patients who refused or delayed recommended treatment of their breast cancer to pursue alternative therapies and compared their survival to that expected in patients with disease of their type and stage.

Even eleven years later, this study remains interesting to me because it's the first one that I can recall encountering that explicitly looked at the outcomes of patients who chose "alternative" therapies as their primary treatment. There are lots of studies out there looking at alternative medicine use in cancer patients, but these mainly look at patients who use it in addition to conventional therapy (i.e., as "complementary" therapy). This study does have one strength, too, compared to most such studies, in that the patient population comes from a community practice, not an academic medical center. Consequently, it can be viewed as more representative of the "real" world situation than many studies done in academic medical centers, where the patient population may be self-selected as people as either motivated enough to seek out tertiary care centers or sick enough that their community surgeons and oncologists refer them.

One thing that was also rather fascinating about the study was the variety of alternative therapies that the study population opted for, including coral calcium, coenzyme Q₁₀, herbs, dietary therapy, high dose vitamins, mushrooms, chelation therapy, poison hemlock (I'm not kidding), and a variety of unspecified therapies. Because of the sheer variety of therapies used and the low number of patients using each individual therapy, it was not possible to "identify particular alternative modalities that were particularly ineffective," as the authors put it.

Who says scientific papers don't occasionally have sarcasm in them?

Basically, the study identified 47 breast cancer patients who opted for alternative therapy, but follow-up information was only available for 33. These were divided into patients who refused surgical treatment altogether; patients who delayed appropriate surgical treatment to pursue alternative treatments; patients who refused adequate sampling of the lymph nodes; patients who refused procedures to ensure adequate local control (additional surgery and/or radiation therapy); and patients who refused chemotherapy. I'm going to concentrate first on patients who refused or delayed surgery, for the simple reason that surgery is what is curative for breast cancer and differences in survival due to adjuvant therapy can be as low as the single digit percentages, depending upon the stage of the cancer.

Of patients who refused surgery, none of the six patients identified were Stage IV (metastatic disease) at initial diagnosis. However, five out of these six patients who returned to the surgeons doing the study had progressed to stage IV, with a median time of follow-up of 14 months, with one death within a year. That's pretty amazing, given that two of these patients were Stage I upon initial presentation. There were also five patients identified who initially refused surgery in favor of alternative medicine, all of whom were Stage II or III. The median time between diagnosis and surgery was 37 months. All five demonstrated progression of their disease, with three progressing to Stage IV disease and one of these dying of metastatic disease. Thus, 10/11 patients who refused surgery experienced significant disease progression, with 8/11 of these progressing to stage IV disease, which is incurable, and 2/11 dying within the short time frame of the study.

Not surprisingly, patients who declined chemotherapy or hormonal therapy fared better because, as I've explained before, for operable breast cancer, the single most efficacious intervention is surgery, and it is not that uncommon for patients with even fairly large tumors to be "cured" with surgery alone. Indeed, the benefits of chemotherapy are fairly modest in many cases, particularly those with early stage disease. In a small number of patients, it was difficult to quantify the effect of choosing alternative medicine over conventional chemotherapy, but the authors were able to estimate that the relative risk of death in 10 years in those who refused chemotherapy was 1.54; i.e., a 54% higher chance of dying within 10 years compared to those treated with conventional medicine.

A few years later, there was followup study published in the Annals of Surgical Oncology examining the same question, this time with 61 patients to study and ten year follow-ups available. Again, a retrospective chart review was performed, with telephone interviews conducted when possible. Again, authors calculated an estimated expected 10-year survival rate and/or 10-year relapse rate of each patient if they used recommended therapy and compared it to what was actually observed in the alternative medicine group. For patients who delayed surgery, the prognosis at initial presentation was compared with the prognosis based upon return presentation.

The results were just as grim. As before, patients were divided into two groups, those who refused or delayed surgery (n=26) and those who refused adjuvant therapy, such as radiation and chemotherapy (n=35). In the group that refused surgery, 96.2% of patients experienced progression of their cancer, and 50% died of their disease. The mean stage at diagnosis in this group was II. The mean stage when patients in this group re-presented after primary treatment with alternative medicine was IV, which is, again, incurable. In the group refusing adjuvant therapy, progression occurred in 86.2% of those in the ASG, and 20% died of disease. Overall, in the surgery group, the expected mean 10-year survival calculated for those omitting surgery was 69.5%. In comparison the actual observed 10-year survival for these patients was 36.4% at a median follow-up of 33 months. For the patients who delayed surgery to undertake alternative treatments, the figures were 73.6% expected 10-year survival versus a 60% observed 10-year survival.

The authors also noted that, for the patients refusing adjuvant chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, the median tumor size at presentation was 2 cm and that the mean calculated 10-year relapse-free survival at initial presentation was 59.2%. Using a commonly utilized online tool to calculate the benefit of chemotherapy based on aggregated clinical trials, the authors noted that, had recommended adjuvant therapy been followed, relapse-free survival would have improved to 74.3%. However, the observed relapse-free survival was only 13.8%. They also noted that, although the patients' intent was to avoid traditional therapy, ultimately, 6 patients in this group started endocrine therapy to control breast cancer recurrence, and 21 had salvage chemotherapy to attempt to control recurrent disease.

Here's a summary of the patients who refused surgery (AWD = "alive with disease; NED = "no evaluable disease," or basically no detectable disease) [click to embiggen]:

You get the idea. This is far worse than what would be expected in patients undergoing standard treatment. As before, this study shows that refusing surgery results in the worst outcomes, which is something that has been known for a long time. For instance, this 2005 study utilizing data from the Geneva Cancer Registry. This study did not look at alternative treatments but rather at just the refusal of patients to undergo surgery for their breast cancer. The results were very similar to what the other studies I discussed showed (click to embiggen):

Another study, this time published in the World Journal of Surgery in 2012 examined women in the Northern Alberta Health Region who declined recommended primary standard treatments and included 185 women who refused standard treatment, resulting in a median delay in instituting effective treatment of up to 101 months. The survival graphs look depressingly the same (click to embiggen):

Both Scott Gavura and I discussed this study in detail when it was published. Of note, quoth the authors:

Our data showed that almost all the patients who initially refused treatment progressed to a higher stage on later presentation at the cancer center. The majority of the patients (57%) in our series initially chose CAM as the primary treatment instead of surgery. Those who had chosen CAM had disease progression with particularly poor disease-specific survival when compared to those who received standard treatment.

Finally, a recent study from Malaysia found a strong correlation between CAM use and delays in diagnosis and treatment in breast cancer patients, although this study also suggested that the reason many women use alternative medicine is because they don't have good access to high quality medical care.

As an aside, I will note that one tendency in some of these studies that drives me up a wall is the authors' tendency to refer to alternative medicine used as primary treatment for a cancer "CAM." It is not CAM. CAM, by definition (you know, the "complementary" in "complementary and alternative medicine") is not used as primary treatment for cancer or anything else. If an unproven or ineffective treatment "outside the mainstream" is being used to treat a cancer, it's not CAM. It's alternative medicine. I don't like the term "CAM," because it was designed as a means to slip unproven treatments into conventional medicine by adding them to conventional therapy when they are unnecessary, but it is the language we have.

Finally, compare the curves above to this curve, which I use frequently. This is from a famous study from 1962 by Bloom and Richardson that calculated the survival of patients with untreated breast cancer. It was carried out long before mammographic screening became the norm, which means that the cancers were detected by palpation and other clinical signs. The point is that survival in untreated breast cancer is longer than you might guess:

Survival of untreated breast cancer.

The authors compared their data with previous studies from the 1920s and 1930s and found that their curve lined up very closely with previous data on expected survival in a group of women, all comers, with untreated breast cancer. Basically, the median survival was 2.7 years. 18% of the patients survived five years; 3.6% survived 10 years; and 0.8% survived 15 years. Of note, it was 19 years before all 250 patients in the study were dead. Notice how the curves above for women choosing alternative medicine over conventional therapy get closer to resembling the curve from the Bloom-Richardson paper. The don't quite get there because we're in a different era, where breast cancers are usually discovered by mammography and were much smaller at diagnosis than in the patients in that paper.

But what about CAM?

I made a point of expressing annoyance over how some authors throw around the term "CAM" when they mean "alternative medicine." This brings up a question. Does CAM use affect cancer survival? Again, there is a paucity of evidence. We might expect that it probably doesn't, at least when used as the strict, "integrative medicine"-approved definition of unconventional therapies used in addition to conventional medicine is followed. Again, there aren't a lot of studies, and most of those seek to demonstrate that a specific set of CAM involving "mind-body" or psychotherapeutic interventions actually improve survival in cancer patients. Unfortunately, they do not, as has been discussed here before.

Other studies have looked at CAM in cancer patients, with mixed and mostly unfavorable results. For example, a study from Norway found a modest negative effect of CAM use in cancers, with a higher death rate over the study period (79% versus 65%), with a hazard ratio for death of 1.30 that just missed statistical significance, leading the authors to conclude that the use of alternative medicine "seems to predict a shorter survival from cancer" and that "the effect appears predominantly in patients with a good performance status" (i.e., the healthiest patients). In addition, a Korean study of terminally ill cancer patients assessed the use of CAM on survival and health-related quality of life (HRQOL), finding that CAM did not provide a survival benefit but did negatively impact various measures that go into calculating HRQOL.

Finally, a large prospective trial known as the Health Eating, Activity, and Lifestyle (HEAL) Study examined 707 patients with stage I to IIIA breast cancer. No associations between CAM use and breast cancer-specific or total mortality were observed. Another study, a pooled analysis from 2012 of four studies conducted in Hawaii in 1994–2003 and linked to the Hawaii Tumor Registry to obtain long-term follow-up information, also found no overall link between CAM use and breast cancer mortality, but did find links between the use of energy medicine use and death as well as finding that Filipino women who used CAM were at a higher risk of death. Those results might have been spurious, but I note that the data did actually show a trend towards a correlation between overall CAM use and death that just didn't reach statistical significance.

What's probably most problematic about CAM is not so much that using it with conventional medicine harms patients. Rather, it's the mindset that leads to strong associations between CAM use and, for instance, refusing adjuvant chemotherapy, as I have discussed in detail before and noted by way of citing a Malaysian study in which CAM use was associated with delays in diagnosis.

The bottom line: Alternative medicine kills cancer patients

There is a surprising paucity of evidence regarding whether the use of CAM in addition to conventional therapy has an adverse effect on cancer survival, but the evidence that we do have is very clear on at least one thing: CAM does not improve cancer survival. Less clear is whether CAM has an adverse effect on cancer survival. There the evidence is conflicting, but there is plenty of reason to be concerned about the use of CAM in cancer, given correlations between CAM use and delays in diagnosis and refusal of adjuvant chemotherapy.

Regardless of what you think of the phenomenon of "integrative" medicine or CAM, there is one thing that the existing medical literature, as thin as it is, indicates, and it's that alternative medicine kills cancer patients. It is basically no different than refusing treatment altogether and much more expensive and troublesome. Given that there is no good evidence of specific anticancer effects from close to all (if not all) alternative medicines, there was never any reason to suspect that the answer would be otherwise. Moreover, as strongly suggested by the Gonzalez trial, alternative medicine use as a primary therapy for cancer often means that patients aren't receiving effective, science-based supportive care for their cancers, resulting in inadequate (or nonexistent) relief of cancer-related symptoms and unnecessary suffering. Use of alternative medicine alone to treat cancer is likely to be a death sentence, or at least to cause delays that make ultimate cancer treatment with conventional medicine more difficult and less likely to be successful.

oracknows Sun, 08/20/2017 - 21:14

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http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-08-20/bbc-comedy-ill-behaviour-has-…

A paper published in a high impact factor journal has proposed active surveillance for low risk breast cancer:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1703787
Maybe they could go further and propose CAM in the meantime ;-)

Sadly, not an unexpected result. Who knew not treating your cancer leads to it not getting any better? I doubt it's going to convince anyone already into woo, but maybe studies like this could be used to point out how CAM-friendly hospitals are endangering patients.

Also, I think you accidentally put the same graph up twice. The one that comes after "Here’s a summary of the patients who refused surgery" should be a different one, right?

@ J
"you accidentally put the same graph up twice"
One is for breast cancer mortality and the other for overall mortality. Not surprisingly they are very similar.

It's chilling to look at the graphs.

I knew that high socioeconomic class was correlated with increased risk for breast cancer, but not with worse outcomes.

This might be a hard question to answer Orac, but what percentage of cancer quacks do you think truly believe their treatments work versus those who are just in it for the money and prestige?

@ Panacea
I would predict that, in the higher socioeconomic class, you will observe two different groups: women who adhere to mammography screening, with higher breast cancer rates, and CAM users, who don't and have worse prognosis.

Panacea@3: This study is probably not statistically powerful enough to prove a causal mechanism for that, but it's plausible. Bear in mind that most CAM practitioners do not accept insurance, because the insurance companies won't pay for most unproven treatments. So patients who seek out CAM practitioners expect to pay cash. Who has the means to do so? People with high socioeconomic status, of course.

@ Eric Lund
This is the explanation for the use of CAM among rich women, but not for higher incidence of BC.

Maybe they could go further and propose CAM in the meantime ?

Why?

@DC: Certain environmental factors, among them diet, are associated with increased risk of certain cancers. Woo-prone types frequently carry this too far, claiming that you can eliminate your cancer risk by eating certain foods (not true) or even cure your cancer by eating certain foods (most definitely not true). And some of those environmental factors, including diet, are associated with high socioeconomic status.

In the case of breast cancer in particular, the risk increases with age. So part of that correlation is that women of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to die of something else before they get breast cancer.

There's a new BBC miniseries called Ill Behaviour about friends of a cancer patient who try to get him to do chemo rather than homeopathy and coffee enemas.

@ Eric
Usually the incidence are age adjusted.
For higher socioeconomic status, factors likely to increase age-adjusted incidence of BC are delayed pregnancy and mammography screening. For lower economic status, obesity.

@ Science Mom
The problem with CAM is the delay in real treatment, isn't it?

Although I think a lot of AM has poor results, I think this does a disservice to AM that works. To me, "AM that works" solves or helps one or more (fatal) problems, where survival requires a series of multimodal steps.

I would include in AM, nonstandard treatments done by legitimate researchers but typically dismissed by clinicians (of a lesser god).

So there is this dr at MSK who uses Hepatic Arterial Infusion on selected, hopeless mCRC patients. Her "terminal" pts typically encounter oncologists' scorn at the mention of HAI, "disproven" in the 1980s/90s and dismissed as obsolete. She has a fantastic record of saves. Is she an AM quack?

In essence, she solves one problem well by AM.

The thing I notice about most AM and MSM (mainstream) failures, is that they fail to solve or combine a series of fatal problems that have already been solved. Like HAI.

The thing I notice about most AM and MSM (mainstream) failures, is that they fail to solve, utilize or combine solutions, for series of fatal problems that have already been solved. Just like HAI, but more broadly.

So there is this dr at MSK who uses Hepatic Arterial Infusion on selected, hopeless mCRC patients. Her “terminal” pts typically encounter oncologists’ scorn at the mention of HAI, “disproven” in the 1980s/90s and dismissed as obsolete. She has a fantastic record of saves.

How are they 'selected', and define 'fantastic'. What's her win/loss record?

The problem with CAM is the delay in real treatment, isn’t it?

That's a problem, sure, along with the fact that CAM doesn't work, and is often very expensive to vulnerable people. Basically, there is no upside.

prn - is this what you're talking about? How is this CAM???

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26830685

AM that works

As mentioned in the OP, this is an oxymoron. "Alternative medicine" protocols that have been shown to actually work cease to be "alternative medicine" protocols, and instead become science-based medicine protocols.

Johnny her patients are largely selected against extrahepatic disease, physical condition, and judgement. She reads extra markers and personalizes decisions. The study appears to be in one of Orac's favorite formats, the observational series with historical patients as controls.

Much like a lot of CAM stuff. Again, largely "disproven" 25 years ago and abandoned.

I would include in AM, nonstandard treatments done by legitimate researchers but typically dismissed by clinicians (of a lesser god).

prn,
Therein lie the root of the issue, we got nothing but your words about dismissal of potentially legitimate treatment. Do you have some evidence, on both side of the coin; namely:

dismissal / acceptance

Either way, I'd love to investigate a bit more but one has to start with some evidence first.

Alain

@ Science Mom
The problem with CAM is the delay in real treatment, isn’t it?

Perhaps I misunderstand but it does not follow that CAM should be recommended for active surveillance of some breast cancers. I couldn't get the full text of your citation so don't know if I'm missing something. It doesn't make sense to me to take the bold step of active surveillance and gob up the results with potentially harmful CAM.

@ Science Mom
Maybe you missed the smiley ;-) at the end of the sentence. You missed the irony toward a reputable journal, which selects very drastically the papers it receives, but publishes a paper proposing to DELAY breast cancer treatment.

@ Eric
I think the term AM is problematic in this sense, because it puts together treatments that cannot work and treatments that will work and are under investigation. Science works in the grey zone of knowledge and there are many CAM treatments that are not in this zone: we simply know they cannot work.

That's exactly what played out in the case of my own mother. She refused adjuvant chemotherapy after having surgery for her breast cancer five years ago and went down the rabbit hole of alternative medicine deep enough that when two years later she eventually conceded defeat and went back to conventional cancer treatment the disease had progressed to Stage IV. She eventually passed away a little over a year ago from septic shock due to an infection that her cancer-weakened immune system could no longer fight off.

Yeah, alternative medicine killed my mother. If I managed to get her to follow through with conventional cancer treatment after surgery she might still be alive today and she might have lived to see her grandson grow to be a young man.

@ Daniel Corcos, thanks for clearing that up. Although I don't see why that study is ironic (again didn't see the full text).

My wife chose conventional all the way to the end, but as a Tony Robbins fanatic, she also embraced alternative, mainly diet and juicing- she thought this would go a long way towards preventing recurrence. I knew otherwise but did not tell her. And did not talk to her about a BC stage 3A diagnosis outcome compared to say, 2A. She just needed to that element of control. But she was smart enough to do conventional and got five good, healthy years.

Alain@21
I'm not sure if you would have to have mCRC liver mets to personally poll the oncologists within a several state radius whether they would refill your HAI pump, to find out.

I doubt the average oncologist will openly take shots at MSK but it is a phenomenon. The majority of patients I know get initial AM type discouragement and no support for filling the pump locally such that they have to travel cross country to NYC everytime.

The majority of patients I know...

How do you know these paiients? Are you a health care professional, and if so, what type? Are you a naturopath?

Jeff@ 27: I'm so sorry to hear about your wife. While I don't agree with taking useless treatments, I understand her need for control perfectly. If that's what she needed, I'm glad she got it.

Johnny: great question. I think prn has tipped his hand.

Informed, proactive mCRC patients and families often discuss things amongst themselves to improve their understanding and chances.

I am on the civilian-patient side of the table with limited direct experience with ND, more alt MD interview time. However, I've read a lot of the nutritional and chemistry related stuff, and know some backstories there. My general technical background was very advanced.

I am on the civilian-patient side of the table with limited direct experience with ND, more alt MD interview time.

Dafuk does that even mean? Anyone have any idea?

Sure, patients and families talk, but why are you privy to their discussions? Who pays you, and for what? What technical training do you have?

"civilian":
Many here signed up for paid positions, "soldiers", in the War on Cancer, at one position, level or another.

I didn't. I never even was interested in medical courses or a career. I once accepted an interview from a large pharma's research group but I wasn't interested despite being a fine trip and tour.

Sure, patients and families talk, but why are you privy to their discussions?
I am "them"

What does "them" mean. Are you saying you have cancer? Or someone in your family? What type?

You didn't answer Johnny's question. What technical training do you have?

I'm glad I'm not the only one frustrated by the non-answers to a coupla very simple questions.

Even 'piss off, it's none of your business' would have been more satisfying.

@prn, #33:

Sure, patients and families talk, but why are you privy to their discussions?

I am “them”

How many "patients and families" do you claim to be, and why?

Hmmm. Interesting.

I for one am certainly glad to have discovered the first true viable "Grand Unified Model" of Tumorgenesis. And I did it after having a small part of my brain respected. God inspired me, He is the ultimate healer. Guard your rogues, all who care to be derisive after reading my comment...I might just not share later and your kid will die from your impudence.

If we all hide, maybe the scary man will go away...

All hail Geoffry's pineal gland!

@Rebecca Fisher: got room in your hiding place for me? I'm not sure *what* Geoffry Feinberg is trying to say, but it's sure weird.

I’m not sure *what* Geoffry Feinberg is trying to say, but it’s sure weird.

This is why we can't have nice things, like a “Grand Unified Model” of Tumorgenesis.

I’m not sure *what* Geoffry Feinberg is trying to say

I think he has been over-using his Tillinghast Resonator.

I wonder if God sent Geoffrey a boat to get him out of Houston.

No, Panacea. He sent Joel Osteen on his yacht to hand him a signed copy of his book. (Snark)

LOL! Funniest thing I've read all day . . . .

Q: What do you get when you cross a spambot with an altie?
A: Geoffry Feinberg.

Although I am rather ashamed to be laughing at hurricane jokes
( but I did)
here's something that's not so funny..

Mike Adams, a self-described Texan, is donating 50%** of all sales made Wednesday and Thursday at his 'store' to various groups who will assist flood victims..

So far he's raised 20 000 USD ( of a 50K goal)

** knowing Mike I'm sure that his markup is so high that this doesn't hurt him at all despite what he may say

So sometimes the issue with complementary actions (in addition to conventional medicine) such as modifying diet is that the proof of effectiveness on disease is not absolute, only indicative or plausible. Significant research has been performed in vitro using cancer cells and in vivo in lab animals to demonstrate the effectiveness of certain nutrients such as curcumin on suppressing cancer cell growth. And one could add population studies too as indicative in some cases. Of course, none of these constitute absolute proof of slowing progression of cancer in humans but they are certainly indicative of the possibility. IMHO ridicule is unwarranted for those making a 'Pascal Wager' based on laboratory indications. A personal choice and In most cases the cost is low and side effects minimal.

Following up on a very old case: Abraham Cherrix is alive and well because he finally rejected alternative medicine

oracknows — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 01:00:23 +0000

Following up on a very old case: Abraham Cherrix is alive and well because he finally rejected alternative medicine

One of the gratifying things about having been blogging so long—nearly 13 years now!—is that you start to see stories that you wrote about a long time ago resurface, allowing you to see the resolution. For instance, I've not infrequently written about people who, mistakenly believing the blandishments of alternative medicine practitioners that they could forego all that nasty chemotherapy and radiation and survive their cancer to live a happy, normal life, made the disastrous decision to eschew conventional medical therapy and pursue alternative medicine. My interest in this topic comes from the tendency of both alternative medicine practitioners and the patients themselves whom they've treated to tout their still being alive as ironclad proof that whatever quackery that was used works, that it can cure deadly cancers without all those unpleasant side effects and potential complications of our existing "cut, poison, burn" (in the quacks' words) regimens. Sometimes, however, possibly more frequently than we suspect, such patients come to realize the error of their choices. Indeed, I discussed one such case in detail just last week.

Here, I'll relate the story of one such young man named Abraham Cherrix, whom I've been writing about intermittently since 2006 (yes, since 2006), but hadn't really thought about for a few years. A week ago, multiple readers sent me a news article about him, and I was very pleasantly surprised, for reasons that you'll soon see. His story is very instructive.

The "alternative cancer cure testimonial"

Before I delve into Cherrix's story, it seems appropriate to provide a little background for newcomers. If there's anything I've hoped to convey it's that these "alternative cancer cure" testimonials are seldom what they seem. Indeed, they're almost never good evidence that whatever combination of coffee enema and eye of newt (I'm surprised I haven't heard of eye of newt enemas yet) used by the cancer sufferer was what cured the disease. I don't have the space (even with my tendency to logorrhea) to go into it in a lot of detail now (read this hoary classic if you want such a discussion), but very often the belief that the alternative cancer cure worked derives from a misunderstanding of the difference between curative chemotherapy used as primary therapy and adjuvant chemotherapy, which is usually administered after surgery in order to decrease the risk of recurrence. Quite often, if you delve into these stories, you'll find that the patient actually underwent some form of surgical resection of their tumor, as was the case with, for example, Suzanne Somers or Chris Wark. People like this then eschew chemotherapy and proclaim that whatever "natural" treatment they used had cured their disease, even though it was the surgery that cured their disease and all they did by not accepting chemotherapy was to increase their chances of recurrence. (Indeed, when discussing these cases, I frequently use an online tool that estimates, based on clinical trial evidence, by what percentage chemotherapy decreases the chances of recurrence and increases long term survival.) Fortunately, because they survived they're still around to proclaim themselves as having "naturally" cured their cancers by bucking the medical establishment and those dogmatic poison-pushing thralls of the pharmaceutical industry (as they frequently like to portray oncologists).

There are other reasons why patients with cancer who choose quackery over conventional medicine can appear to be survivors, adding plausibility to claims that they cured themselves, at least to those without training in oncology. They frequently misunderstand the highly variable course of some cancers. In the case of others, like patients treated by Stanslaw Burzynski, there is a small delayed cure rate due to conventional therapy, and the patients and families frequently misattribute the patient's good fortune to the ineffective treatments the patient underwent after having undergone the definitive treatment. Indeed, in the case of brain tumors, there's a phenomenon after radiation therapy known as "pseudoprogression," where inflammation from the radiation causes the tumor to look as though it's growing on imaging, after which it shrinks and, in a small percentage of cases, disappears entirely. (Guess when the shrinkage occurs. Yes, it often happens while the patient is being treated by Burzynski.) Some cancers have a low (but not so low as to be rare) rate of failing to progress or even spontaneously regressing. Some add less effective conventional medicine modalities to their battery of treatments that kept their disease at bay (which is what Cherrix did, as you will see).

The point is that rarely is there an "alternative cancer cure" testimonial in which the circumstances of treatment allow a cancer physician to attribute the patient's excellent outcome to whatever alternative medicine was being used or where one can rule out some other cause for why the patient is doing well. Then there's the whole issue of a form of selection bias. As I like to say, dead patients don't give testimonials. A corollary to that adage is that alternative medicine mavens don't like to hear testimonials from patients who tried alternative medicine, found it wasn't working, and were saved by conventional medicine. As far as alternative cancer cure advocates see it, such patients might not be literally dead, but they are dead to the alternative medicine community, which quickly forgot that these patients had ever been promoted as poster children for cancer quackery.

Abraham Cherrix: The beginning

I first learned of Abraham Cherrix in 2006 through a news story:

NORFOLK – Fifteen-year-old Abraham Starchild Cherrix never intended to challenge the medical establishment when he refused chemotherapy earlier this year.

He simply believed the treatment was poisoning him, rather than saving him from Hodgkin’s disease. What he wanted was a more natural approach, which he sought through an alternative treatment clinic in Tijuana, Mexico.

That decision has led to a courtroom battle, accusations of parental neglect and the possibility of being removed from his Chincoteague home.

A judge earlier this week ordered Abraham to receive diagnostic tests to determine the status of his disease. On Friday, though, the tall, lanky boy refused to abide by the order. After showing up at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in a crisp white shirt and blue tie, he rejected the test.

“I think my body has taken enough, and it shouldn’t have to take any more,” he said.

Basically, four months before the story quoted above, Cherrix had finished induction chemotherapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma, a very treatable cancer, particularly in children and teenagers, with a five year survival rate of approximately 85%. Unfortunately, his scans showed that he still had residual tumor, for which the treatment was additional chemotherapy and (possibly) ultimately a bone marrow transplant. It was at this point that he rebelled:

That’s when Abraham dug in his heels. He and his father did some research and decided to try a treatment in Tijuana that includes an organic diet and herbal supplements. Soon after, his case was reported to a child-abuse investigator at the Accomack County Department of Social Services, who asked a judge to order that the teen continue conventional treatment.

Abraham no longer uses the "Starchild" middle name, but, consistent with that name, his family was clearly prone to—shall we say?—alternative thinking. Instead of doing what good parents should do and making sure their son received proper treatment, they sought out "alternatives." The alternative cancer treatment they picked out was a doozy, too. They decided to follow treatment recommendations from The Association for Research and Enlightenment, which just so happened to be based in Virginia Beach, which was about a two hour drive from the family's home in Chincoteague. This Association was founded by a psychic healer named Edgar Cayce, who was known for falling into trances and giving readings on topics as varied as Hitler, astrology, the existence of Atlantis, ESP, ancient Egypt, and others. Through Cayce’s Association, Abraham and his father settled on the Hoxsey treatment.

Basically, the Hoxsey treatment consists of herbal concoctions popularized by Harry Hoxsey. Different varieties exist, including an “internal” treatment and external treatments with various pastes made up of some of the components of his treatment (usually used for skin cancers or tumors that can be palpated through the skin). Hoxsey claimed that the formula had been passed down from his grandfather John Hoxsey to his father to him, after his grandfather had mixed together grasses and flowering wild plants growing in a pasture where one of John Hoxsey’s horses grazed daily. The horse supposedly had a cancerous growth that went away, and Hoxsey thought that it was due to the plants upon which the horse grazed. He took plants from the pasture, mixed them together, added some ingredients for home remedies for cancer at the time, and–voilà!–he had what he thought was a cure for cancer. Many decades later, Hoxsey’s grandson described how this remedy supposedly worked thusly:

“It follows that if the constitution of body fluids can be normalized and the original chemical balance in the body restored, the environment again will become unfavorable for the survival and reproduction of these cells, they will cease to multiply and eventually they will die. Then if vital organs have not been too seriously damaged by the malignancy (or by surgery or irradiation) the entire organism will recover normal health.”

He [Hoxsey] also did not claim to know how or why his herbal cancer treatment worked, but he maintained that it “corrects the abnormal blood chemistry and normalizes cell metabolism” by “stimulat[ing] the elimination of toxins which are poisoning the system.”

There’s only one problem. There’s no good evidence that the Hoxsey treatment has any net anticancer activity whatsoever. Although some of the components have been reported to have mild antitumor activity in cell culture and animal systems, others have been reported to promote tumorigenesis. In any case, there is no evidence that the Hoxsey treatment as given has clinical efficacy against any human cancer. Indeed, the NCI investigated Hoxsey’s case series, and, as is frequently the case with such reports, concluded that there was inadequate information recorded to make any conclusions at all. The FDA investigated 400 cases whom Hoxsey claimed to cured and found not a single case of a bona fide cancer cure (Semin Oncol 1979;6(4):526-535). Indeed, in 1956, the FDA Commissioner ordered the posting of a “Public Beware!” warning against the Hoxsey treatment in U.S. Post Offices all over the country. And, as quacks frequently do, Hoxsey went to his grave claiming he was being “persecuted” by the “establishment.”

Until her death in 1999, Hoxsey’s longtime chief nurse Mildred Nelson continued Hoxsey’s legacy and administered his “treatment” in Tijuana, claiming an 80% success rate. Of note, Nelson believed that a “bad attitude” was usually responsible for her “20 percent failure rate” she reported for the Hoxsey treatment, with a patient’s strong belief that the treatment is going to lead to recovery being the best predictor of success. Convenient, isn’t it? Those pesky patients who have the temerity to die in spite of the Hoxsey treatment? Well, it was obviously their own fault! They didn’t believe hard enough!

Not surprisingly, Abraham Cherrix rapidly became a poster child for alternative medicine, with believers in alternative cancer cures castigating the courts for "medical fascism" and "medical kidnapping." Like the case of Cassandra Callender, which I've discussed before, Cherrix was an appealing teen, with a loving family (his father owned a kayak business and his mother homeschooled five children). Unfortunately, even the Cherrixes couldn't resist joining. His father was quoted at the time:

Jay Cherrix echoed that skepticism. He said that while his family would comply with the order of the court, he has trouble imagining a doctor violating his son's wishes.

"I personally don't think there is a Dr. Mengele in the United States who would pump this stuff into a 16-year-old who didn't want that. I personally don't think we've reached that point in our civilization," he said.

In the meantime, Cherrix's tumors continued to grow.

The court battle and aftermath

In July 2006, as discussed by bioethicist Art Caplan, the parents were charged with medical neglect and appeared before the Accomack Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. The judge ruled that the parents should relinquish custody of Abraham, so that the state could make sure that he was treated with the recommended higher dose chemotherapy and radiation as soon as possible. However, right before the order was to take effect, the family obtained a stay from the Circuit Court of Accomack County and regained full custody, pending a new hearing. On August 16, 2006, Accomack Circuit Court Judge Glen Tyler cleared Abraham's parents of all charges of medical neglect. He also announced that a settlement had been reached between the family and the Virginia Department of Social Services in which Abraham would be allowed to pursue the Hoxsey treatment as long as he was monitored by a board-certified oncologist in Mississippi with knowledge of alternative cancer treatments. The court stated it would "keep an eye on Abraham" to make sure that his treatment was reasonable.

Here's the kicker. The doctor in Mississippi chosen by the Cherrixes (agreed to by the court) to oversee Cherrix's care was not exactly what I'd refer to as a reputable oncologist Yes, 11 years ago, I did a little Googling and made a good guess. It turns out that doctor chosen was a radiation oncologist is: R. Arnold Smith, M.D.. Here is the tale:

Smith's clinic employs immunotherapy, an innovative treatment that works to restore the immune system that age and cancer break down, helping the body fight back.

Combined with radiation therapy to debulk cancer, molecular targeted therapies to arrest host defenses, genomic assays, and chemotherapy when necessary, immunotherapy helps patients live a higher-quality, longer life, the oncologist says.

Today, after the short hearing, the judge looked at Abraham and said, "God bless you, Mr. Cherrix."

Dr. Smith offered in his clinic the following treatments:

Dr. Arnold Smith was awarded a method patent for his application of Interleukin 2 to create a factory for natural killer cells. This treatment appears to be a significant innovation and advance. Interleukin 2, when injected subcutaneously, has been known for some time to produce a firm nodule often called an "injection site nodule." These nodules, we believe, are composed of significant colonies of clonally-replicating natural killer cells.

Additional daily injections of Interleukin 2 are best exploited if they are given by injection just on the periphery of the nodule or plaque. Our current policy is to "grow" the initial nodule by progressive injections until a sizable plaque is created, measuring 8-10 cm in diameter. It becomes slightly inflamed, hot, swollen, sore, and red. The plaques are not very painful, but have occasionally contained areas of skin necrosis which have always healed completely.

It may be that use of Cimetidine, antioxidants, and replacement hormones facilitate the production of these plaques to a significant degree. We have seen several patients with lung cancer and colon cancer who have shown progressive decline in Carcinoembryonic Antigen after Interleukin 2. Belly Plaques were created and sustained.

I looked for articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature published by Dr. Smith about this technique, but there was nothing in Medline more recent than the 1990s that I could find and none of it was about IL-2. However, Dr. Smith did list a number of publications on his CV on this technique in a journal I've never heard of before, Bulletin of Urgent and Recovery Medicine, a website for which I've been thus far unable to find. Looking at his CV and publication record, it appears that sometime around 1998 or so his publications stopped being mainstream and moved into this new "immunotherapy" and "anti-aging" medicine.

It is true that IL-2 has been used for melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. It can actually be fairly nasty stuff, with a lot of side effects, including capillary leak syndrome, hypotension, and acidosis. It's also not all that effective, with perhaps a 20% response rate, but, unfortunately, for refractory tumors like melanoma and renal cell carcinoma, it and interferon are about the best we have. Sadly, no evidence is presented that Dr. Smith's method does anything other than raise a really nasty looking wheal on the abdomen.

I also found it rather odd at the time that Abraham picked a therapy that is guaranteed to result in large painful welts on his abdomen using a cytokine that is not without side effects, all because he's so adamant that he doesn't want to suffer the side effects of chemotherapy again, but I've given up trying to understand his thought processes. At the time, I guessed that the settlement was about the best that could be hoped for, given Abraham's age and tenacity. Basically, Dr. Smith let Cherrix go to the Tijuana clinic to receive the Hoxsey treatment and apparently treated him with his own special brand of "immunotherapy."

Not surprisingly, less than a year later, these treatments didn't stop his cancer. By January 2007, Cherrix was undergoing radiation therapy to shrink enlarged lymph nodes under his arms. By June 2007, he had relapsed again with a lesion on his lung. As I said at the time, treating this local tumor on the lung was very unlikely to cure Abraham’s cancer, because the cancer would just pop up somewhere else in his body. Dr. Smith and Abraham were in essence playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with his cancer. It turns out that this could (and did) go on for quite a while. It also turns out that without systemic therapy (i.e., chemotherapy) to kill the microscopic deposits of tumor that are responsible for new tumors popping up, the tumor would never be eradicated. I turned out to be correct, but that's no big achievement. After all, I had a real oncologist (Dr. Craig Hildreth) to explain to me why what I thought was the case was actually the case and, more importantly, why zapping lymphoma tumors with radiation as they pop up is a strategy doomed to fail, referring to such a treatment as the "fallacy of moderation," and concluding:

Thus, my final opinion: Abraham Cherrix should consider high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell support if he wants to cure his Hodgkin lymphoma. However, even this ultra-therapy has no guarantee of success, especially if one factors in his lung disease and his short duration of response to initial therapy.

Dr. Hildreth was correct, as you will now see.

Abraham Cherrix smolders along

Amazingly, Cherrix did fairly well for several years. He turned 18 in 2008 and seemed to be doing well. (Unfortunately, he was also giving talks at medical schools promoting pseudoscience and quackery using himself as a testimonial. Indeed, as I went back through old posts elsewhere while researching this post, I marveled that the last time I had written about him, other than in passing, was in 2013. Unfortunately, Cherrix was not doing that well. Indeed, he had a GoFundMe page asking for money for treatment:

Despite keeping positive and fighting for my life, I find myself in the same position yet again. I learned today that the cancer has returned to my left lung, explaining a long series of events leading up to it (coughing up blood, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, chest pains etc). Now that it’s more aggressive than before, I don’t feel like I have much time. I need to act fast and I’m limited with what I can do.

I have some treatment options that I could pursue and things I could do to improve my condition or even help cure me, but they’re expensive and not covered by my medical insurance (Medicaid/Medicare). I need supplements to boost my immune system, while seeking out doctors country-wide for different treatments and opinions. I need better food that I can’t afford, and I want to move out of my trailer and into a clean house. Most of these costs [sic] thousands of dollars alone… and I’m barely able to afford a ride into town for grocery supplies.

There are actually a few specific treatments I’d love to start with. Heated needle therapy is a good start, and something I’ve been curious about. Studies now are also showing the validity of Hemp Oil as a cure for cancer, so I’m trying to get into one of the research groups. However if I can’t get into these groups, the expense will be monumental and certainly not covered by my insurance.

After that, I hadn't heard much of anything about Cherrix. I had no idea if he was still alive; that is, until last week.

Abraham Cherrix: Alive and well at 27, thanks to real medicine

The article several people sent to me was published on July 27 in the Virginia Pilot. After a recap of Cherrix's 2006 court fight, we learn:

A lot has happened in the decade since then.

Cherrix, now 27, ended up accepting chemotherapy and also a stem cell transplant last year at the University of Virginia Cancer Center because tumors kept resurfacing.

"Honestly, if I had not done this, I would have died," Cherrix said in a telephone interview.

Cherrix, who now lives in the southwestern Virginia town of Floyd, said he's matured and feels humbled in his recognition of the value of scientifically based treatments.

"The other treatments didn't have any hard evidence behind them," he said. "There was no concrete evidence. I know what I am doing now is founded in reality, and I know it's the best choice for me, and it's scientifically based."

Another rather odd thing we learn from the article is Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who treated Cherrix as part of the court agreement, was indicted in 2012:

Smith was charged with capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder in a murder-for-hire case that targeted a lawyer who represented Smith's former wife in the couple's divorce. Smith was found mentally unfit to stand trial and was committed to a state mental hospital in 2014. He was later released to private mental health treatment.

I didn't learn anything in the article that I didn't know, at least not up until 2013. So what most interested me was what brought Cherrix to the realization that he had to abandon the quackery and undergo real medical treatment if he wanted to have any hope of survival. The answer was there. He kept relapsing and undergoing radiation treatment. As predicted, eventually tumors started returning in areas that had been radiated before, meaning that he couldn't receive radiation there again because radiation doses are cumulative over a person's lifetime and the tissue damage they cause permanent. So by 2015, this was his situation. His parents had divorced, and he moved back in with his mother. Then:

In 2015, Cherrix hit a low point. He felt so tired, he was sleeping most of the day, he lost his appetite and began losing weight. A half a sandwich a day was all he could muster. His hair thinned and he felt feverish. He was also coughing up blood, and his back hurt. He went to oncologist Robert Rotche in Blacksburg, who ordered a biopsy and scans that showed a tumor pressing against his backbone.

The doctor began treatment with an antibody drug called brentuximab vedotin, which is used to treat relapsed Hodgkin's. The medication reduced the tumors and symptoms and improved his blood counts. Rotche also referred him to the cancer center at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville for a stem cell transplant.

In 2016, Cherrix underwent an autologous stem cell transplant. Before undergoing high dose chemotherapy and radiation, his stem cells had been harvested and stored, and they were reinfused on August 4, 2016. So far Cherrix has done well and is now taking brentuximab vedotin, which selectively targets tumor cells expressing the CD30 antigen, a defining marker of Hodgkin lymphoma, as consolidation therapy, and has been shown to improve survival.

Cherrix's oncologist, naturally, is a bit vague on whether all the delay in treatment compromised Cherrix's chances of survival. I have no doubt that these delays did, because they delayed his definitive treatment. Clearly Cherrix was very lucky, though. He had disease indolent enough that it did not "break out" and kill him, even during ten years of inadequate treatment with "pinpoint" radiation. Basically, it grew slowly enough and locally enough to allow his life to have been prolonged by nearly a decade using local therapy alone. I remain amazed (and happy) that his disease never blossomed all over his body during that time. If it had, all the "pinpoint" radiation in the world, "complemented" with bogus immunotherapy and the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy, wouldn't have saved him. I'm just very happy that Cherrix's disease was slow-growing enough that he lived long enough to come to realize what a disastrous decision he had made 11 years ago. I also realize that he's not out of the woods yet, as his oncologist explains in the article that he's got to hit the three year mark before he can be considered to be, in essence cured (or at least to have a very high chance of remaining cancer-free). I hope he makes it.

He hasn't entirely disavowed his original decision, though:

Cherrix, while supporting evidence-based measures, said he still stands by his original stance of researching the treatment. His advice? "Question the world and how it works, but also be sensible."

Which is not unreasonable, but I'd add to that: It's good to be open-minded, but don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out. Hoxsey therapy is one of those alternative medicine treatments that's so obviously bogus that putting your life in the hands of a quack in a clinic in Tijuana administering that treatment falls under the category of being too open-minded.

Abraham Cherrix's legacy

It's not surprising that, once it became clear that Cherrix's cancer wasn't going away for very long, news of him in the sorts of websites and discussion boards where believers in alternative medicine tout the latest "miracle" cancer cures rapidly faded to nothing. Nor is it surprising that Cherrix is now a human interest "Where are they now?"-sort of story in a local newspaper. It's true that one part of Cherrix's legacy will be that, after a long flirtation with alternative medicine to treat his cancer, he finally came around to science and thus very likely saved his life. Unfortunately, that is not his only legacy. He left another, far more harmful, legacy:

Cherrix's court case resulted in a Virginia law – known as Abraham's law – that gives teenagers 14 or older and their parents the right to refuse medical treatments for ailments such as cancer. Teenagers and their parents can seek alternative treatments so long as they have considered all other medical options.

When I first heard about the law back in 2006, I thought of it as somewhat disturbing but probably another example of "placebo legislation," a law that makes those passing it feel good but does little or nothing. In cases of a terminally ill child being treated with alternative medicine, the courts would still have had to examine the case and rule on whether or not the treatment, assuming it was carried out in what the parents believed to be the child's best interest, constituted medical neglect. Also, in its original form, Abraham’s Law would have applied only to children with “terminal illnesses.” By the time it was passed and signed into law by the governor, the bill had broadened its reach to children with “life-threatening” condition and changes the definition of an “abused or neglected child” as follows:

Definition of abused or neglected child. Specifies that a decision by parents or another person with legal authority over a child to refuse a particular medical treatment for a child with a life-threatening condition shall not be deemed a refusal to provide necessary care if (i) such decision is made jointly by the parents or other person with legal authority for the child, and the child; (ii) the child has reached 14 years of age and is sufficiently mature to have an informed opinion on the subject of his medical treatment; (iii) the parents or other person with legal authority, and the child have considered alternative treatment options; and (iv) the parents or other person with legal authority, and the child believe in good faith that such decision is in the child’s best interest. Stipulates that this test shall not be construed to limit the provisions of §16.1-278.4 on children in need of services.

Worse, Virginia law now lists as an exclusion in the definition of an abused or neglected child:

However, no child who in good faith is under treatment solely by spiritual means through prayer in accordance with the tenets and practices of a recognized church or religious denomination shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child.

Basically, as a result of Abraham Cherrix's battle, if you’re a child between the ages of 14-18, the State of Virginia no longer protects you from quackery or religious idiocy. Worse, it’s not just limited to children with “terminal” illnesses, where, it can be argued, nothing can save them and taking them away from their parents to have them obtain conventional therapy would cause them undue stress in the precious few remaining weeks or months of their lives. The law includes any child with a life-threatening condition. In other words, it now applies to all children in the State of Virginia with cancer, no matter how treatable the cancer is, because cancer is certainly a life-threatening condition.

Consider the practical import of this bill. Let’s say a 14-year-old is diagnosed with leukemia. Let’s further add that it’s an eminently treatable form of leukemia, with an expected remission and long term survival rate of over 90%, with the proper chemotherapy and targeted therapies which, thanks to science-based medicine, is not uncommon in pediatric cancers. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but under this law, it appears that parents can choose any quackery they wanted, be it the Hoxsey therapy, urine therapy, homeopathy, or whatever, as long as the decision to pursue this quackery was made “jointly with the child.” Now consider this: For a 14-year-old (or even for a 16-year-old or 17-year-old) living with his or her parents, how difficult do you think that it would be for the parents to get the child to agree with them, particularly if, as most believers in alternative cancer cures would do, they frame it as a choice between the horrors of chemotherapy (and, in the case of other tumors, surgery and radiation) versus a “natural” alternative that won’t cause them any pain or symptoms at all? Yes, saying it’s not neglect to use quackery to treat cancer in a child as long as the child agrees to it is the height of disingenuousness, and passing a law that codifies that statement is the height of irresponsibility.

But it’s worse than that.

Consider the case of a 14- to 17-year-old whose parents are Christian Scientists or other religions that claim that prayer alone can cure disease. Naturally, in the vast majority of cases, the child will have been raised in the same religion and will believe in its tenets, as his parents do. If that child gets cancer, it’s pretty likely that he would agree with his parents that prayer and whatever rituals demanded by the religion would be the proper treatment for the cancer and thus would agree with whatever woo the religion prescribes for treatment. As I like to say in cases like this, I support the right of any competent adult to choose whatever therapy for himself that he chooses—or no therapy at all. But children are different, even teenagers. We can argue about at what age a teen is competent to make life-or-death decisions like whether or not to take chemotherapy for a life-threatening cancer, and I did discuss my views on this topic while covering the case of Cassandra Callender, but clearly 14 years old is too young. So is 15.

Make no mistake. I'm very, very happy that I was so amazingly mistaken when I declared after the court ruling letting Cherrix pursue Hoxsey treatment and Dr. Smith's bizarre combination of inadequate radiation therapy and bogus immunotherapy. However, he and his family served as the impetus for a law that basically eliminated the ability of its child welfare services to intervene in the case of 14- to 17-year-olds whose parents decide to pursue woo instead of effective medical treatment, not just for children with terminal illnesses, but for any child in that age range with a serious, life-threatening condition.

Unfortunately, that's part of his legacy as well.

oracknows Sun, 08/06/2017 - 21:00

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It is unfortunate that his case encouraged others to reject conventional treatment - and his original story is still being circulated as a reason to reject Chemo.....

But, thank goodness the man got real treatment. This is another example of how much better Cancer treatments and survival rates have gotten - it isn't perfect, but if someone like this can be helped, certainly does better the odds for someone who starts down the right path from the beginning.

Ten years is a long time to allow others to believe the quackery was working. That could be quite a trail of tears and loss.

...since 2006 (yes, since 2006)...

Goodness, how time flies. This is the story that introduced me to RI. Starchild is, more or less, a local boy, and looking for a bit more information led me here.

I've learned a bit over the years, and had more than a few laughs. Thanks for keeping on keeping on.

I now return you to more on topic posts.

However, no child who in good faith is under treatment solely by spiritual means through prayer in accordance with the tenets and practices of a recognized church or religious denomination shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child.

Two immediate thoughts:

- forget cancer. Let's pick diabetes (type 1), or even more simply meningitis. Following this law, parents can try to pray away the illness, and no-one can interfere, even if the child dies?
Or am I reading too much into this?

- I hope they define somewhere "recognized church(es) or religious denomination(s)". Depending on who you ask, the list could be very long or very, very short.

– I hope they define somewhere “recognized church(es) or religious denomination(s)”.

Another piece of vague law making - "...the child has reached 14 years of age and is sufficiently mature to have an informed opinion on the subject of his medical treatment."

But I've always felt that most of the blame in all this belongs with the parents. If they had told the kid 'shut up, and take your medicine', we wouldn't have any of this mess. But like too many parents I've seen, they wanted to be friends first and parents second. There's time to do that once the kids grow up (and is mostly necessary once they are adults), but while they are still in high school is too early.

This is slightly off-topic, but I thought I'd note that this sentence:"It’s also not all that effective, with perhaps a 20% response rate, but, unfortunately, for refractory tumors like melanoma and renal cell carcinoma, it (IL-2) and interferon are about the best we have." is no longer accurate.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (e.g., nivolumab and pembrolizumab) are much more effective than IL-2 for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. The ORR for metastatic melanoma patients treated with a combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab is 57%, and some of the responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors are complete and durable.

In fact, even in patients treated with ipilimumab monotherapy (which is significantly less effective than combination treatment with ipilimumab and a anti-PD1 monoclonal antibody like nivolumab or pembrolizumab, or monotherapy with an anti-PD1 monoclonal antibody), the 7-year survival rate was 34%, with the survival curve leveling off at around that point, indicating that most of the patients who were alive at 7 years were probably cured of their disease.

And, like I said, nivolumab and pembrolizumab are even more effective than ipilimumab is, for the treatment of metastatic melanoma (and for quite a few other forms of cancer as well, including many that were previously thought to be unlikely to respond to immunotherapy), and the 5 year survival rate for metastatic melanoma patients treated with nivolumab was reported to be 34%.

Plus we have "targeted" drugs like vemurafenib, and the combination of dabrafenib and trametinib, that are effective in the treatment of BRAF V600E mutation-postivie metastatic melanoma (although these drugs tends not to produce the kinds of durable responses that the immune checkpoint inhibitors can).

So I guess my point is just that there are now a number of different treatment options for metastatic melanoma that are much more effective than (and better tolerated than) IL-2. Same is true for patients with metastatic RCC.

I'm so glad to hear he's doing well.

A few years a go I interacted with him right here at RI and I thought him a lovely person.

From the photo, looks like he has had quite a bit of muscle wasting from mantle radiation. I wonder how much he might have avoided with proper up-front treatment.

However, he and his family served as the impetus for a law that basically eliminated the ability of its child welfare services to intervene in the case of 14- to 17-year-olds whose parents decide to pursue woo instead of effective medical treatment...

What if you have only homicidal oncologists in your area? Like Dr. Fata?

What would you recommend when a patient is restricted geographically to a locus of kill-for-profit physicians (like Detroit)?

Go away Travis.

There needs to be a big solid mainstream documentary made and put out there about these cases, including Jess and Sharyn Ainscough, Polly Noble stories, as well as Cherrix, Carissa Gleason, and all who turn back to mainstream treatments after they realise they've been catastrophically mislead by alt med.

I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting herbs (medicinal and culinary) so it was a pleasure today to find a plant I'd never seen before, Hoan Ngoc (Pseuderanthemum palatiferum). It definitely is a good-for-whatever-ails-you herb, as one vendor promises:

"Recommended the amount of consumption by 35 Congress of Science and Technology, Thailand, that this medicinal herb can help in respect of the following diseases when consuming for a period of times:-

Hemorrhoids (7-9 leaves/meal)
Dyspepsia (7-9 leaves/meal)
Diarrhea (7-9 leaves/meal)
Chronic Constipation (7 leaves/meal)
Inflammation of stomach/ intestines (9 leaves/meal)
Skin disease (itchy skin & allergy) (2 leaves/meal, 20 leaves/ meal if chronic condition)
Cancer – Lymph cancer (10-20 leaves/meal)
Diabetes (7-9 leaves/meal – sugar decrease may result)
High blood pressure (10 leaves/meal – sugar decrease may result)
Heart disease (4-10 leaves/meal)
Migraine headache (7-10 leaves/meal)
Rheumatoid (7 leaves/meal)
Inflammation of liver (7 leaves/meal)
Blood vessel disease (7 leaves/meal)
Uterus pain (7 leaves/meal)
Muscle pain (7-9 leaves/meal)
Blood urine (7-9 leaves/meal)
Drunk (7-9 leaves/meal)
Pink eyes (10 leaves/meal)
Inflammation of kidney (7-9 leaves/meal)
Nourish bodies (4-9 leaves/meal – strengthen body, not easily tired)."

The plant label also recommends Hoan Ngoc for liver detox and relieving the deleterious effects of chemotherapy and radiation.

Obviously, this is a remedy Orac can't do without, though it isn't cheap (300 fresh leaves are going for $75 online). I can beat that price once I get propagation going under lights, so in just a few months I should have all that Orac needs for his patients (better act fast, Cleveland Clinic is also interested).

Well, this is interesting, and on topic, too.

Choosing alternative cancer therapy doubles risk of death, study says
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/17/health/alternative-vs-conventional-cancer…

I've heard one of these names before, but just can't place it...

Does chemotherapy work? Chemotherapy vs. "spreading" cancer.

oracknows — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 02:59:13 +0000

Does chemotherapy work? Chemotherapy vs. "spreading" cancer.

Over the last two or three weeks, you might have noticed a disturbance in the alternative medicine force. Unlike disturbances in the Force in Star Wars movies (which usually result from horrors like the obliteration of millions of lives on Alderaan), this was a joyous, celebratory disturbance in the mystical nonexistent energy fields in which promoters of alternative medicine cancer cures and haters of chemotherapy and "conventional" cancer treatment (the two almost always go together) thought that a major study in a reputable journal had put yet another "final nail in the coffin of chemotherapy." Or at least they could spin the study as an indication that chemotherapy is nothing more than an expensive toxic brew foisted on an unsuspecting public by the nefarious shadowy forces of Big Pharma in order to extract maximal resources from third party payers, which, to them, is almost as good. Of course, they do this with any study that suggests chemotherapy isn't as effective as people would like, but this study seemed on the surface like powerful ammunition. It's not. It's actually an interesting preclinical study showing a mechanism by which chemotherapy given before surgery (neoadjuvant chemotherapy) might promote the spread of some cancers. Whether the findings are clinically important remains to be seen.

"Alternative cancer cure" advocates and salesmen rejoice

Although it's an interesting study delivering somewhat of a cautionary note, The study being gloated over is far less of a "black eye" to chemotherapy (as Jeffrey Jaxen put it over at that repository of science misinterpreted to promote alternative or "natural" medicine, Sayer Ji's GreenMedInfo), than advertised. (Besides, Ji likes me. He really, really likes me.) Meanwhile, Chris Wark of "Chris Beat Cancer" (hint: surgery, not the quackery he pursued, took care of his colon cancer) practically exults that "chemo may spread breast cancer and trigger more aggressive tumors." Of course, the real gloating comes from—who else?—Mike Adams, who proclaims the study a "Medical BOMBSHELL" showing that chemotherapy has been found to spread cancer. He also can't help but throw in the lies he's been peddling about me as well.

Yawn. I guess I can expect attacks like this inserted into pretty much any rant against chemotherapy that Adams writes from now on. It's my badge of honor. Oh, well. Word to Mikey: I used to be upset by your smear campaign against me—about a year ago. These days, however, I'm laughing at you, not with you, because your lies are so transparently over the top that no one but your hardcore followers would even have a chance of believing them. I was never a "colleague" of Dr. Fata, who never worked at my cancer center, and that "nipple ripper" name came from Patrick "Tim" Bolen, a man who used to be cancer quack Hulda Clark's most vigorous defender. I also note that it was Adams himself who claimed to have reported me to the FBI (something conveniently not mentioned). That was well over a year ago. Neither I nor anyone I know has been contacted by the FBI or my state attorney general (where Adams also claims to have filed a complaint). I suspect his "criminal complaints," if they were ever filed at all, ended up in the "crank file," where they belong.

Let's get back to what less insane-sounding (but equally mistaken) alternative cancer cure advocates are saying, after which then I'll delve into the study itself and show you why, although it is a reason for some concern, it's not evidence that chemotherapy doesn't work, and, in fact, if validated by further studies, points the way to overcoming what might be a significant problem in cancer chemotherapy. In discussing this study, Jaxen, for instance, lists all the usual suspects of studies trotted out by the anti-chemotherapy brigade every time they feel a rant coming on. For example, he invokes what I like to call the "2% gambit," citing, as all who use this gambit do, a single Australian study from around 16 years ago that left out a lot of chemotherapy-sensitive tumors and willfully confused adjuvant chemotherapy with chemotherapy delivered as primary treatment for curative intent. Basically, he sees the study as "more evidence" of this:

By now, many are beginning to understand that one of the problems with chemotherapy is that it doesn’t address the underlying cause(s) of cancer. Chemotherapy originated from an idea and consciousness that was far from idealistic. The whole generation of chemotherapeutic drugs that are being used today, and there are over one hundred of them, developed from poisonous nerve gas created for warfare. As reported in 2012 by Green Med Info, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the developed world, and yet much of the medical and research communities are still in the dark ages when it comes to treating and understanding it. However, in the age of information, great strides are being made by doctors and researchers who are going against the grain of the failed convention ‘wisdom’ in cancer treatment. In addition, individuals are beginning to take responsibility by educating themselves.

Of course, for all their claims of "addressing the underlying cause" of cancer, alternative medicine cancer cure mavens always fail to show how their favored nostrums do any better on that score, much less that they are actually more effective than conventional treatments—or even that they're effective at all.

Chris Wark chimes in with the same propaganda:

As I’ve said many times, chemotherapy is often only a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

The new study presents evidence that chemotherapy can switch on a repair mechanism in the body which ultimately allows tumours to grow back stronger. It also increases the number of ‘doorways’ on blood vessels which allow cancer to spread throughout the body.

At least Wark admits that chemotherapy can sometimes be at least a "short term solution" to cancer. Again, nothing Wark discusses shows how his preferred methods do anything to "address the underlying cause" of the long term problem of cancer. We know that diet and certain environmental exposures can modulate cancer risk for certain cancers, but once the cancer is already established it's too late for that.

So now that we've seen ideology in action, let's look at science in action.

How chemotherapy is used to treat cancer

Before I get to the study, in order to help readers not familiar with how chemotherapy is used to treat cancer, I feel obligated to provide a brief primer. There are four main ways that chemotherapy is used to treat cancer:

Curative: Chemotherapy can be the primary (and sometimes only) treatment for cancer. This is common in hematological malignancies, like leukemia and lymphomas, where it's usually some combination of chemotherapy ± radiation therapy that is curative. Surgery is rarely indicated. The intent here is to use chemotherapy to eliminate cancer from the body.

Adjuvant chemotherapy: After definitive surgical treatment of the primary cancer, chemotherapy is administered to decrease the chance of recurrence. This is a very common use of chemotherapy, particularly in breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Indeed, the use of adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer since the 1980s, among other factors, has contributed to a decline in breast cancer mortality of around 30% since 1990.

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy: Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is administered before surgery. In general, there are two main reasons to administer neoadjuvant chemotherapy: (1) to shrink a tumor to make a non-operable tumor (e.g., one stuck to major structures) operable for cure; and (2) to make organ-sparing surgery possible. This latter use is common in breast cancer in order to shrink a tumor so that a mastectomy is not required to remove it and breast-conserving surgery is possible. Moreover, in breast cancer, it is known from numerous studies that neoadjuvant chemotherapy results in equivalent results as adjuvant chemotherapy. Overall survival and disease-free survival and time to locoreginal recurrence are the same, whether chemotherapy is administered before or after surgery. The same idea is used in the surgical treatment of low rectal cancer requiring an abdominoperineal resection (APR) to remove. An APR involves removing the anal sphincter and leaving the patient with a permanent colostomy. With neoadjuvant chemotherapy, it is often possible to shrink the tumor enough to make sphincter-sparing surgery possible, something very desirable to patients, the vast majority of whom understandably recoil at the idea of requiring a permanent colostomy.

Palliative chemotherapy: In stage IV disease, chemotherapy is often used to palliate symptoms from growing tumors and can prolong life, although not result in long term survival. This is also a common use of chemotherapy.

The study that the likes of Mike Adams and Chris Wark are crowing over examines neoadjuvant chemotherapy. That's an important point. It does not apply to other uses of chemotherapy. Think of it this way. Adjuvant chemotherapy is quite different from neoadjuvant chemotherapy in at least one way. The primary tumor is not present when adjuvant chemotherapy is administered. All that's left are microscopic tumor deposits that could turn into metastases. Those are what adjuvant chemotherapy targets, because chemotherapy is much better at wiping out microscopic tumor deposits than macroscopic tumors. Contrast that to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which targets both those same microscopic tumor deposits and also targets the main tumor, which is usually large. (Remember the reasons why neoadjuvant chemotherapy is administered.)

Comparatively speaking, there are many orders of magnitude more cancer cells in the neoadjuvant setting than in the adjuvant setting. If spread of tumor due to neoadjuvant chemotherapy were a major factor clinically, we'd expect survival using neoadjuvant chemotherapy before surgery to be worse than using it after surgery. That we don't observe worse outcomes with neoadjuvant therapy is a good reason to be at least a little skeptical of how clinically relevant the results of this study will turn out to be. Indeed, I've never ceased to be amazed that, in breast cancer and most cancers for which neoadjuvant chemotherapy is used, the survival benefit provided by chemotherapy (adjusted for tumor stage and other relevant characteristics, of course) is the same regardless of whether the chemotherapy is administered before or after surgery. Even better, neoadjuvant chemotherapy can give an indication of how "nasty" (i.e., resistant to chemotherapy) a tumor is, based on how much (or how little) it shrinks in response to chemotherapy. Moreover, pathologic complete response (that is, a response so dramatic that the tumor not only disappears clinically but the pathologist can't find any viable tumor cells in the resected specimen) is an excellent prognostic factor predicting favorable outcomes.

Keep these things in mind as I discuss the study.

Does neoadjuvant chemotherapy "spread" cancer?

So let's take a look at the study itself (Karagiannis et al, "Neoadjuvant chemotherapy induces breast cancer metastasis through a TMEM-mediated mechanism"), which was published in a Science journal, Science Translational Medicine by a group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Reading the abstract, I quickly realized—surprise! surprise!—that the findings were considerably more nuanced and interesting than Adams, Wark, and Jaxen presented. I also quickly realized that the purpose of the study was to identify potential problems with how neoadjuvant works in order to find strategies to make it work better. Of course, doing research to make existing therapies better is complex, and the authors noted that increasing tumor cell dissemination could "diminish the clinical benefit" of neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Note the distinction. It is known—sorry, couldn't resist a Game of Thrones reference given that as I write this the season seven premiere is only a few hours away—from numerous studies that neoadjuvant chemotherapy produces a survival advantage for breast cancer patients in addition to the advantages it produces in making inoperable tumors operable or making it possible for women who would otherwise lose their breast to preserve it. Tumor cell dissemination as a result of chemotherapy reduces, not eliminates, that benefit, and it certainly does not "make cancer spread" in such a way that neoadjuvant chemotherapy is worse than no chemotherapy. Yet that's what the cancer quacks strongly imply.

So what is the mechanism being examined here? Previous work has demonstrated one mechanism by which breast cancer cells can gain access to blood vessels and spread. In this mechanism, breast cancer tumor cell spread occurs at microscopic structures dubbed tumor microenvironment of metastasis (TMEM). Each TMEM is composed of three cell types, all in direct physical contact with each other: a tumor cell making a protein that regulates a structural protein (actin) known as Mammalian-enabled (MENA), a perivascular macrophage (an immune cell near the blood vessel), and an endothelial cell (the cell type that lines blood vessels). Vascular permeability due to TMEM has been shown to be localized and mediated by vascular endothelial growth factor–A (VEGF-A) release from the TMEM-bound macrophages, which express the angiopoietin receptor TIE2. Now, I used to do a lot of work with VEGF-A back in the 1990s, when I studied tumor angiogenesis, the process by which tumors interact with their environment to stimulate the ingrowth of new blood vessels. Basically, the macrophages associated with TMEM secrete this factor, which increases vascular permeability, making "holes" through which tumor cells can gain entry to the blood vessel and spread via blood. However, only tumor cells expressing high levels of MENA can take advantage of this. (Note that there are different isoforms—variants—of Mena that are pro-invasion and anti-invasion; when we refer to MENA here, we're mostly referring to the MENA^INV.) Tumors with a high TMEM “score” in animal models have a higher likelihood of metastasis compared to tumors with low TMEM scores.

The authors hypothesized that preoperative chemotherapy could increase the density and activity of TMEM sites in breast cancer, as well as an increase in invasion-promoting MENA isoforms, and thereby increase the number of tumor cells spreading. They based their hypothesis on the observation that one chemotherapy agent, paclitaxel (a.k.a. Taxol), induces an influx of macrophages into the primary tumor and that macrophages are required for TMEM assembly. The hypothesis was tested using a transgenic mammary tumor model in which mouse mammary tumor virus–polyoma middle T antigen was introduced to produce a mouse strain that spontaneously develops mammary tumors at a high rate, patient-derived xenografts (PDXs, which are tumors derived from patients that can grow in mice with defective immune systems), and pre- and post-neoadjuvant breast cancer tissue samples from human patients. There are also all sorts of pretty images from intravital imaging (IVI, which allows imaging of living animals at a cellular level) that a researcher needs if he wants to publish in a journal like Cell, Science, or Science Translational Medicine. I don't mean that so much as a knock on the authors given that the paper is actually good, but rather as a sarcastic aside at what it takes these days to be published in top-tier journals. Besides, several of the authors have an extensive background in imaging research; so I can't really fault them for using it. It is, after all, so much cooler to look at these complexes in living mice than to do what they had to do in humans and test fixed tissue from biopsies and surgical specimens.

The authors addressed their hypothesis using multiple tumor models, including the MMTV-PyMT mice, another mouse strain bearing tumors transplanted from the MMTV-PyMT mice, and two PDX models, (HT17 and HT33, for anyone who's interested). Animals were treated with various chemotherapeutics and compared to controls, with the tumors imaged, levels of various RNAs and proteins compared, and tumors assessed. Key findings were as follows:

Paclitaxel at the dose used delayed tumor growth (as expected) but increased TMEM assembly by as much as three-fold.
Paclitaxel increased the infiltration of perivascular macrophages in the primary breast cancer microenvironment.
Paclitaxel induced TMEM-dependent vascular permeability in breast tumors.
Paclitaxel increased metastatic dissemination of breast tumors (roughly a two-fold difference, although the result wasn't statistically significant for one tumor model—Figure 3I). This was confirmed by examining the lungs of the mice, where investigators found an increase in both microscopic metastases in the paclitaxel-treated mice and single-cell metastases (two-fold increase).
Paclitaxel promotes the expression of invasive isoforms of Mena in breast tumors, and dissemination required Mena.
Levels of circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream increased in response to chemotherapy.
Treating mice with doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide (two other drugs commonly used in standard-of-care breast cancer treatment) produced similar changes in the primary tumors and their surrounding microenvironment.

Finally, when the investigators tested human breast cancer tissue before and after neoadjuvant chemotherapy with paclitaxel followed by combined doxorubicin/cyclophosphamide, they found this:

Areas staining positive for MENA also increased. Pretty striking, I'll agree. However, remember what I said above. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is still quite effective.

More importantly, consider this final result. In the same mouse models, blocking the TIE2 receptor with rebastinib decreased the number of perivascular macrophages and blocked the increase in circulating tumor cells to the level of controls without affecting TMEM assembly. This means that TIE2 inhibition blocks the function of TMEM sites but not their assembly. Fortunately, in these mouse models, that was enough. More importantly, it also suggests a strategy for making neoadjuvant chemotherapy work better in patients, as illustrated here:

How cancer spreads via the bloodstream.

Note that there are multiple points that can be attacked to overcome the stimulation of more invasiveness by chemotherapy.

Putting it all together

If there's one thing that distinguishes science-based medicine (SBM) from the sort of medicine advocated by those promoting alternative cancer cures, it's that SBM is always trying to make things better. When it is observed that, for instance, neoadjuvant chemotherapy might not be having as strong an effect on tumors as it could, scientists look for the reason why. If that reason why happens to be that some forms of chemotherapy might increase the ability of cells from the primary tumor to spread, decreasing the benefit of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, they look for the molecular and cellular mechanisms responsible for that problem and then try to find ways to exploit those mechanisms to overcome the problem. That's exactly what Karagiannis et al did. So when quack-loving entrepreneurs like Mike Adams, Chris Wark, and Jeffrey Jaxen tell you this study "proves" that chemotherapy does more harm than good, they're either ignorant or intentionally misrepresenting the results, because the study doesn't show that at all.

It's not just the quacks, though. Articles in mainstream news sources reported this study with headlines like "Chemotherapy could cause cancer to SPREAD and grow back even more aggressive, new study claims." OK, that's The Daily Mail, which is to science as The Weekly World News is to, well, news. But other stories had headlines like "Chemotherapy could spread cancer cells and lead to more advanced tumours, says study" and "Chemotherapy before breast cancer surgery might fuel metastasis." Far better is a headline like "Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Treatment May Increase Risk Of Breast Cancer Spreading In Some Patients", which more accurately assesses the results of the study. In fairness, I know that editors, not reporters, determine headlines and most of the mainstream articles I mentioned did point out some of the caveats that I discussed, but the impression most people take away comes from the headline, and that impression was only marginally less scary than the headlines coming from Sayer Ji's and Mike Adams' websites.

More importantly, if you're a woman considering neoadjuvant chemotherapy to treat breast cancer, don't let the spin on this study frighten you out of it. The benefits of neoadjuvant chemotherapy include not only improved survival but the possibility of breast conserving surgery, and, as I mentioned before, there is no detectable difference in overall survival whether chemotherapy is administered before or after surgery.

As for the future, research like this could lead the way to better neoadjuvant chemotherapy. For example, a woman undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy might some day have biopsies done part way through the chemotherapy. If her tumor's TMEM score has increased markedly, then I could envision the addition of a TIE2 inhibitor or other inhibitor of TMEM function being added to her chemotherapy to block the increased level of circulating tumor cells and reverse whatever increased risk of metastasis that might be attributable to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in order to produce better outcomes. That's how SBM improves, in contrast to alternative medicine, in which no therapies are abandoned when demonstrated to be ineffective and/or dangerous and no therapies are ever improved upon.

oracknows Sun, 07/23/2017 - 22:59

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"developed from poisonous nerve gas created for warfare"

Nice scare dogwhistling. Also a bit of a research failure isn't it? Relatives of Mustard Gas were (probably still are) used in chemotherapy - but Mustard Gas is not a nerve agent.

OK, so quite a bit of this is way over my head. But let me see if I understand what's going on here.

What we're really talking about with neoadjuvant chemotherapy is a side effect, yes? An unanticipated adverse reaction where the improvements (smaller tumor) come with a cost that can be adjusted for with other therapies.

Someone ought to tell Mikey, "and in other news, water is wet."

@Orac,

You are smarter than the above-average bear when it comes to convincing the masses that the biological mechanism-of-action is always the desired goal of science-based medicine.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Yogi Berra

"Relatives of Mustard Gas were (probably still are) used in chemotherapy"
Spot on - L-phenylalanine mustard, AKA melphalan and a couple of trade names, is still useful in chemotherapy. Unlike many other chemotherapeutic drugs, it can be given in tablet form as well as by intravenous infusion.

Daily Mail
"We are no longer accepting comments on this article."

Bah, too late :'(

But not even "mustard gas" is actually a gas. It has a boiling point of 423 °F.

Nor does not come from mustard; it smells like mustard (allyl isothiocyanate). It is totally synthetic.

And the "nitrogen mustards"—named by analogy to "mustard gas" by substituting N for S—don't even smell like mustard at all. The most structurally analogous N-mustard (chlormethine) has a "faint odor of herring". It should be called "herring gas".

And it has a boiling point of 189° F, making it also not a gas. ("herring liquid"?)

Phenylalanine "mustard" is even further removed from chlormethine (which isn't even a gas and doesn't even smell like mustard.)

It becomes clear that the term "mustard gas" is a highly-enriched, nuclear-grade misnomer. What all of these chemicals have in common is their ability to alkylate tissues through an "epoxide"-type intermediate* as the molecule loses Cl⁻ in water. They can do this twice (once on each end of the molecule) and can crosslink proteins and DNA similar to malondialdehyde (watch out lysine!).

We have found that reaction of bi-helical DNA with nitrogen mustard concentrations as low as 5 X 10⁻⁷ M, which correspond to an alkylation of approximately 0.005% of the bases, caused a discrete change in the denaturation behavior of a fraction of the DNA.

It crosslinks DNA, as shown by changes in viscosity and increased dehybridization temperature.

Inter-strand Crosslinking of DNA by Nitrogen Mustard (Kohn 1966)

Personally, I think we should all call them "epoxide-like alykylation agents" from now on. This "mustard gas" name should be reserved for bischloroethyl sulfide only.

*MJD is going to take this thought straight to the Glue Department at 3M. (I predict we will see "Mustard Glue™" on the shelves in ~7 years.)

You mean* "mustard" isn't already one of the three "M"s?

* ...mister...

aairfccha: "Nice scare dogwhistling. Also a bit of a research failure isn’t it?"

What else should you expect from Green Med Info?

*MJD is going to take this thought straight to the Glue Department at 3M. (I predict we will see “Mustard Glue™” on the shelves in ~7 years.)

That duck will never fly, even with latex wings.

but Mustard Gas is not a nerve agent.

Ah well. "Poisonous nerve gas created for warfare” -- as opposed to all those poisonous nerve gasses created for civilian applications -- is just a string of Worship Words for GreenMedInfo readership.

You mean* “mustard” isn’t already one of the three “M”s?

Abbey Road isn't my favourite Beatles album (Rubber Soul is), but I am quite attached to that song (it's almost as catchy as Maxwell's Silver Hammer).

You could almost say that it has bonded with me.

I think it was Paul, since it adheres very well to McCartney's prior songs. [It couldn't have been Ringo.]

This last Sunday on CBS "Sunday Morning" the whole episode was focused on cancer. I cringed at the start because, in reviewing the history of cancer, it was noted how in the mid-1900's doctors started using "toxic" chemicals to treat cancer. At least I didn't hear "toxins".

Ugh, your blog posts read like trash celibrity stories, throwing the "quack" word around and making tacky insinuations, I cannot stomach it. Can't you just keep it to the point and factual? If your facts stand, they should do the job of exposing quacks just fine (or even: much better).

Here is a suggestion, Maarten: don't read it.

Chris, I will avoid reading it, but at the same time I'm interested in finding a website that critiques the alties in a constructive manner. I don't know if you have some good suggestions, but if you do, I would appreciate it.

"Alties"? That sure sounds derogatory. That doesn't sound very constructive at all to me! After all "alties" is a term I used to use but rarely do any more because it makes fun of the quacks' marks. Perhaps you should be a little less self-righteous.

Maarten: if you think it would work, why don't YOU start one? Instead of b****ing at Orac?

It's OK. He's just a typical self-righteous guy who's more concerned with tone than with the actual harm quacks do. Having personally seen the harms done by quacks on my own practice and heard countless stories over the years of the harm done by cancer quacks, not to mention having had quacks like this try to get me fired from my job, I make no apologies for taking a—shall we say?—insolent tone when refuting them. I really don't care if people like Maarten clutch their pearls when they encounter it.

Also, Maarten is clearly a newbie here. I use a variety of levels of insolence depending on the topic (and my mood). This blog would become mighty boring (both to readers reading it and me writing it) if I were to start writing the way Maarten seems to prefer. I decline.

Maarten: I like Panacea's suggestion @#17. I believe I can provide some 'constructive' advice.
.
First, we need a respectful term. May I suggest 'Medical Charlatans'?
.
Next we need to agree upon some basic facts.
1. Most MC's are spreading their 'knowledge' in pursuit of fame and/or fortune.
2. In general, their 'knowledge' can, and has, harmed people. This harm includes death as an identifiable risk
3. We can conclude from #1 and #2 that they are, in general, potential killers and their victims include people we know.*
.
Sounds like you've got a killer blog on your hands! There's no telling how many clicks you'd get with a blog named
LET'S ALL BE NICE TO THE PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL US
.
* This isn't abstract knowledge. My wife died of cancer last year, and I got used to telling people that I'd check with the oncologist and nephrologist about their suggested 'treatments.' If they inquired again I'd tell them that the 'treatment' hadn't been tested with Multiple Myeloma patients who had kidney failure. Most people dropped it, but those who pushed the issue were sent to check and see if the Medical Charlantry Miranda warning (formerly known as the Quack Miranda warning,) was invoked. That shut them up..

Maarten: "I don’t know if you have some good suggestions, but if you do, I would appreciate it."

Why should I do that for you? Do you own homework. There are plenty of good doctors/scientist blogs that discuss these subjects. Many have been linked to from this blog. Though if you don't like the tone of this blog, you are going to hate SciBabe.

@ Opus:

re:
LET'S ALL BE NICE TO THE PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL US

You're right.

I spend a great deal of time listening to and reading material that endangers health and simultaneously is extremely vicious 'reporting' on SBM and actual health care providers.

I don't think that we should be nice at all.

We should expose charlatans, quacks and cranks as a service to those who are potentially their victims.

Since they eternally harp upon how much money pharma and SBM make, we can easily show that they are not exactly living on Poverty Row
- plus, unlike real meds, BS meds cost little. If you manufacture vitamins for a small sum and then, market them as cure alls at a high price, that's easy to illustrate.

And it's all over the met.

@Orac#16 I think that if I would be searching for an alternative cancer cure, then I would not mind being called an "altie", but you may be right that this word could be derogatory. Still, it's much better than "quack" in my opinion.

Also, I must say that this blog post is much better than the "Pharma hit squads one", which I read first and I found really distasteful (so when this post started with a dubious reference to The Force, I stopped reading because I had enough, where I should have continued to read).

And I know I am self-righteous, but my impression so far is that you are too.

I have a question about your statement, maybe you would be willing to explain:

"We know that diet and certain environmental exposures can modulate cancer risk for certain cancers, but once the cancer is already established it’s too late for that."

How do you know that its not possible through diet to give the body a significantly increased change to beat an established cancer? Saying it's not possible (or that there is no reason to assume that it could be possible) seems quite a claim.

Maarten: "How do you know that its not possible through diet to give the body a significantly increased change to beat an established cancer? Saying it’s not possible (or that there is no reason to assume that it could be possible) seems quite a claim."

How would that work? What specific biochemical processes coming through the gastrointestinal track would affect the abnormal growth of cancer cells?

Very good question Chris - and one that I ask often.

If a person makes that claim that doing "something" to the body will help fight Cancer, I ask - okay, so exactly by what biological mechanism would this "something" help?

It is something that keeps coming up. During one discussion half a dozen years ago I even downloaded a book by a (literally) die-hard fan of food curing cancer, and read it. I found it lacking:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/08/02/rip-david-servan-schreiber…

If Maarten could go over there and find the missing cites that I kept asking for, that would be very nice.

Chris, it's interesting that you use the word "lacking", and not "nonsense" or "hogwash". I will try to make the list of cites you asked for and post it here hopefully soon. I can already say that it's strange to ask for an *exact* biological mechanism just to support my claim that it could be possible that a change in diet significantly increases the bodies ability to heal itself from cancer (if someone is eating poorly and has - for example - chronic headaches that have no direct explanation, wouldn't you advise them to start eating healthier because *maybe* there is a relation between their diet and their headaches?)

it’s strange to ask for an *exact* biological mechanism just to support my claim that it could be possible that a change in diet significantly increases the bodies ability to heal itself from cancer

Postulating a biological mechanism gives a head start on deciding which (of the hundreds) of kinds of cancer you could address with your postulated change of diet. It also gives a clue as to what stage of that cancer it could help with. It would also help predict interactions (and interferences with standard-of-care therapies that will be used with your diet changes.

A claim that it could be possible is useful for only two purposes: (a) preparing for planning of clinical testing or (b) inventing a pseudo-science claim to support (e. g.) advertising for yet another Cancer Cure!!!!! book. "Could be possible" isn't useful by itself in science or in real life; it's plenty for a woo-grifter, though.

Maarten -

As an example: You can dramatically reduce your risk of getting lung cancer by not smoking. However, once you have lung cancer, stopping smoking will not cause it to regress.

Or as an analogy.. I can reduce the risk of fire in my house by insisting on only the bast and safest electrical appliances. However, if my house is on fire, upgrading all my electrics will do nothing to stop it.

It's possible that there is some change in diet that can affect the course of cancer, but it would be a horrendously difficult study to do; you'd be looking at a minor effect (probably) and have to persuade a great many cancer patients to change their diets and stick with the new diet for a considerable period of time. Hard work.

Any food that helps treat an already established cancer will probably also have these side effects.
https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects/treatment-…

Any effect a healthy diet would have on cancer would probably be to help the cancer grow. It would give the tumor cells the resources they need for replication and to build new circulatory networks to keep those resources flowing.

The converse doesn't mean it would hurt the cancer, since tumor cells are very good at appropriating resources for their own growth, which is why cancer patients lose so much weight.

Honestly all diet will do for you is let the cancer kill you more slowly.

Chris, to answer your question: diet may impact cancer growth through its relation to the IGF-1 levels in the body. The reasons to consider this possibility are:

- IGF-1 is directly involved in (tumor and normal) cell growth
- Congenital IGF-1 deficiency is associated with dramatically lower cancer rates
- vegans have significantly lower IGF-1 levels and higher IGF-1 binding capacity (suggesting that the IGF-1 level can be directly influenced by diet)

References to scientific papers are given in these short videos from which I learned these findings:
- https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-plant-based-to-lower-igf-1/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/cancer-proofing-mutation/
- https://nutritionfacts.org/video/igf-1-as-one-stop-cancer-shop/

Based on this information, I would not exclude the possibility that adopting a vegan diet might significantly improve the bodies ability to fight cancer.

Videos? Anyway, as I've mentioned before, my best friend, a 20-year vegan, died of metastatic colorectal cancer at age 40 and never even got to see his second child. This brand of idiocy pisses me right the f*ck off.

ps I just learned that the ketogenic diet is another example of how diet *might* play a significant role in fighting cancer. Perhaps a ketogenic vegan diet would combine the benefits of both?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826507/

Maarten: maybe you shouldn't exclude it but you certainly shouldn't include it.

This website is a prime example of the kind of thing I teach nursing students to avoid when citing sources, or educating patients. The website has an agenda, and that agenda is to sell products, specifically his books and podcasts. Dr. Gerger even has the gall to promote his site as a non profit 501(c)(3). Bascially, he's asking to be paid to promote an unproven point of view as science.

Panacea: if what he says is unbalanced, then which results and papers should he also have mentioned to present a balanced point of view regarding the relation between cancer and diet?

How about this one for starters?

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-gonzalez-trial-for-pancreatic-canc…

Or PubMed links to studies that show a real benefit to nutrition in treating cancer.

As my phone won't display that PMC link, I must simply say that I can't wait to find out what the typical menu would look like on a "ketogenic began diet."

^ Freaking autocorrect: vegan, not "began."

"I would not exclude the possibility that adopting a vegan diet might significantly improve the bodies ability to fight cancer."

Remember to include the reality that adopting a vegan diet has never been shown to improve outcomes for cancer patients. Of course, you can speculate to your heart's content, connecting as many vague and disparate dots as you like.

squirrelelite, the research in that link doesn't involve a vegan diet. Vegetarians and meat eaters have comparable levels of IGF-1, as shown in the graph in the video that I mentioned (https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-plant-based-to-lower-igf-1/)

Also, how would giving *more* evidence on the benefits of the vegan diet correct the supposed inbalance in his view? Isn't this balancing supposed to happen by giving evidence to the contrary?

But in any case, he mentions nutrition research regularly, such as in this video: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/best-supplements-for-prostate-cancer/

@Narad, I'm very sorry about your friend. I strongly oppose any claim or suggestion that vegans will never get cancer. The videos I posted contain clear references to scientific publications (the title and authors can be easily read off the screen).

Video pimp.

Maarten,

The "just look at the video" method of proof offered by your favorite website, and its selective reporting & poor objectivity, has been addressed by Harriett Hall.

Take a look at her critique of Greger's vegan claims.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illness-curable-b…

Elliot, how is "just look at the video" a method of proof? Why is a list of publications written in ascii characters worth more than the same list written as pixels in a series of video frames? If you really care, then I am willing to translate from pixels to ascii, but it seems like a silly exercise to me.

I thank you for the link to the critique of dr Gregors presentation, I will read it with interest and post back here later.

As my great grandfather, an editor at the Washington Post, said: never believe it until you read it in the cold light of print.

What that means is that speech and the spoken word (and video also) use tricks of rhetoric to specifically and deliberately to induce emotions, to cloud rational thought, to baffle and beguile. It forces the listener to move at the speaker's pace, not their own.

If you send me a video I know you've got something to hide.

rs, I object to the word pimp (especially because of connotation with sexual exploitation, yuck!)

Zucchini's can help fight against prostate cancer.

Never use the word "zucchini" and "prostate" in the same sentence...

You might give Maarten the wrong idea.

Oooh, look it is videos! Woot, the type of "evidence" one resorts to when they have no clue how science works. And he even keeps posting to Greger's site even after being told not to! Seriously, Greger is not a reliable source of information:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illness-curable-b…

I only want to see PubMed indexed studies that prove that something passing through the gastrointestinal track causes the abnormal cancer cells to stop reproducing in vivo. So no petri dish studies!

Rats, I skimmed to fast and repeated Elliot's link.

"Why is a list of publications written in ascii characters worth more than the same list written as pixels in a series of video frames?"

Because they are usually peer reviewed for some semblance of accuracy and include references. Of course, instead of making us waste our time watching silly videos, then you watch them and transcribe the PubMed indexed studies that are mentioned. Come back and list those studies. Posting their identification numbers (PMID) is sufficient.

JustaTech, all claims in the video are backed by references (giving the titles and authors of the corresponding papers). I thought that was good enough. If instead of the video, I would give you the list of references cited in the video, without any narrative about why the information in these papers suggests a significant relation between diet and cancer, would you go through them and find out for yourself if such a relation exists?

Also, is a scripted presentation that different from a written blog post? I think it's not. Just as you can critique anything written in a blog post, so you can critique anything said in a video (I assume we're able here to pause the video if necessary and think critically about anything that's claimed). I think it's helpful that people go to conferences, hear inspiring talks, and then ask themselves: is this really true? If nobody tried to create compelling narratives, I think science would progress more slowly.

Chris, the videos contain the references (lots of them). You can just read the titles and authors of the papers right off the screen. I even mentioned this to you in my previous message: "References to scientific papers are given in these short videos from which I learned these findings"

But since everyone is making such a big deal out of it, I will extract the titles of the papers from these videos, tomorrow.

Maarten, have you read any of the papers referenced in the videos you want us to look at? If so, you really only need to point out, say, the top 2 or 3 that most support the idea "that adopting a vegan diet might significantly improve the bodies ability to fight cancer".

If you haven't actually looked at the papers, well, I expect a Gish Gallop.

But since everyone is making such a big deal out of it, I will extract the titles of the papers from these videos, tomorrow.

Why not today? Do you have a zucchini to carve?

Be sure to get the journal reference, including the issue date, while you're at it; although any standard reference will do, like PMID# or NIH link.

Sorry, Sara, I clicked on the wrong "Reply" button.

Maarten: "But since everyone is making such a big deal out of it, I will extract the titles of the papers from these videos, tomorrow."

Good. That will give us a basis to judge Greger's data. Be warned, he is not considered a reliable source of evidence.

You could make the argument that a vegan diet with reduce the chance of getting prostate cancer by lowering IGF-1. Cancers of the breast and prostate are known to responsive to three things: steroid hormones, IFG-1, and eicosanoids.

But a vegan diet could increase eicosanoid production through linoleic acid.

linoleic acid ⟹ arachidonic acid ⟹ eicosanoids

A litany of rat studies from the late 70s and early 80s will confirm than linoleic acid consumption is proportional both to spontaneous cancer incidence and tumor size in chemical carcinogen models.

Eicosanoids work mainly through the PPAR receptors (I know that's a redundant acronym but bear with me). These are nuclear receptors—which interact with DNA directly—that can influence the entire transcriptome, making linoleic acid (through eicosanoid production) on the same level of cellular control as retinoic acid and thyroxine.

Although a dairy-free diet (not necessarily vegan) is bound to lower serum levels of both IGF-1 and steroid hormones (prostate and breast growth factors), it could potentially raise the production of prostaglandins and other eicosanoids. Care must be taken with a vegan diet to limit linoleic acid.

Through this mechanism is how the anti-cancer effect of fish oil (ω−3) is usually explained (free radical explanations fail, since fish oil has a higher iodine value). Omega minus three fatty acids positively interfere with eicosanoid production, likely by acting as enzymatic competitive inhibitors (ligands).

A study from Chapel Hill in the 90s took fat biopsies of confirmed cases of prostate cancer and found enough elevated linoleic acid* levels to calculate risk ratios of about five.

*Care must be taken to distinguish ω−6 linoleic acid with α-linoleic acid (ω−3).

How's the job search going, Travis J. Schwochert?

^ Oh, wait:

Through this mechanism is how the anti-cancer effect of fish oil (ω−3) is usually explained (free radical explanations fail, since fish oil has a higher iodine value). Omega minus three fatty acids....

That's a keeper.

I feel like a vegan ketogenic diet should be called "Kaleo."

“Kaleo.”

;-)

It turns out that the links I posted are supplied with a transcript and list of citations! Just visit the link, and click on "sources cited" in the footer. Looking forward to leaving the discussion about "video as a format" behind now and hearing your reactions on the content.

That’s a keeper.

You're exposing your ignorance Narad. Did you think it was a hyphen like most people?

The only reason I spelled it out was because I didn't want to begin a sentence with a lowercase Greek letter, and "Ω−3" would probably just confuse you further. Besides, most editors would prefer seeing sentences that didn't start with things like numbers or abbreviations. Some style guides even recommend avoiding sentences which begin with acronyms (although this is rife in the literature.)

I'll give you a break since you are obviously foreign.

Maarten, I'm not going to waste my time watching self serving advertisements.

Either YOU, using appropriate citations, explain your point, or you don't.

If you don't then you're admitting it's all BS.

Panacea, if you are unwilling to read dr Gregers transcripts and list of citations, then fine, don't. I won't pretend that I can make the case for a vegan diet better than he can. Maybe someone else here is open minded enough to take a look.

Maybe someone else here is open minded has enough time to waste to take a look.

FTFY.

"open minded enough"

I knew someone like that. His brains had to be mopped up. It didn't take long.

Maarten, then cut and paste the citations here. You are making the claims, therefore you need to provide the PubMed indexed studies of those claims. We are not going watch videos nor wade through transcripts.

Chris, here you go:

Papers cited in https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-plant-based-to-lower-igf-1/:

Allen NE, Appleby PN, Davey GK, Key TJ. Hormones and diet: low insulin-like growth factor-I but normal bioavailable androgens in vegan men. Br J Cancer. 2000 Jul;83(1):95-7.

Ngo TH, Barnard RJ, Tymchuk CN, Cohen P, Aronson. Effect of diet and exercise on serum insulin, IGF-I, and IGFBP-1 levels and growth of LNCaP cells in vitro (United States). Cancer Causes Control. 2002 Dec;13(10):929-35.

Allen NE, Appleby PN, Davey GK, Kaaks R, Rinaldi S, Key TJ. The Associations of Diet with Serum Insulin-like Growth Factor I and Its Main Binding Proteins in 292 Women Meat-Eaters, Vegetarians, and Vegans. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2002 Nov;11(11):1441-8.

Ornish D, Weidner G, Fair WR, Marlin R, Pettengill EB, Raisin CJ, Dunn-Emke S, Crutchfield L, Jacobs FN, Barnard RJ, Aronson WJ, McCormac P, McKnight DJ, Fein JD, Dnistrian AM, Weinstein J, Ngo TH, Mendell NR, Carroll PR. Intensive lifestyle changes may affect the progression of prostate cancer. J Urol. 2005 Sep;174(3):1065-9; discussion 1069-70.

Papers cited in https://nutritionfacts.org/video/cancer-proofing-mutation/:

Guevara-Aguirre J, Balasubramanian P, Guevara-Aguirre M, Wei M, Madia F, Cheng CW, Hwang D, Martin-Montalvo A, Saavedra J, Ingles S, de Cabo R, Cohen P, Longo VD. Growth hormone receptor deficiency is associated with a major reduction in pro-aging signaling, cancer, and diabetes in humans. Sci Transl Med. 2011 Feb 16;3(70):70ra13.

Papers cited in https://nutritionfacts.org/video/igf-1-as-one-stop-cancer-shop/:

Yang SY, Miah A, Pabari A, Winslet M. Growth Factors and their receptors in cancer metastases. Front Biosci. 2011 Jan 1;16:531-8.

Zhang Y, Ma B, Fan Q. Mechanisms of breast cancer bone metastasis. Cancer Lett. 2010 Jun 1;292(1):1-7.

Kleinberg DL, Wood TL, Furth PA, Lee AV. Growth Hormone and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I in the Transition from Normal Mammary Development to Preneoplastic Mammary Lesions. Endocr Rev. 2009 Feb;30(1):51-74.

Salvioli S, Capri M, Bucci L, Lanni C, Racchi M, Uberti D, Memo M, Mari D, Govoni S, Franceschi C. Why do centenarians escape or postpone cancer? The role of IGF-1, inflammation and p53. Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2009 Dec;58(12):1909-17.

Endogenous Hormones and Breast Cancer Collaborative Group, Key TJ, Appleby PN, Reeves GK, Roddam AW. Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), IGF binding protein 3 (IGFBP3), and breast cancer risk: pooled individual data analysis of 17 prospective studies. Lancet Oncol. 2010 Jun;11(6):530-42

Rowlands MA, Gunnell D, Harris R, Vatten LJ, Holly JM, Martin RM. Circulating insulin-like growth factor peptides and prostate cancer risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Cancer. 2009 May 15;124(10):2416-29.

Gronek, Piotr ; Rychlewski, Tadeusz ; Słomski, Ryszard ; Stankiewicz, Krystyna ; Lehmann, Joanna. Insulin-like growth factor 1. Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism. 2005;12(1).

Piantanelli L. Cancer and aging: from the kinetics of biological parameters to the kinetics of cancer incidence and mortality. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1988;521:99-109.
CDC Growth Charts. CDC. 2000.

Papers cited in https://nutritionfacts.org/video/best-supplements-for-prostate-cancer/:

Jacobs DR Jr, Tapsell LC. Food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit in nutrition. Nutr Rev. 2007 Oct;65(10):439-50.

Thompson HJ, Heimendinger J, Diker A, O'Neill C, Haegele A, Meinecke B, Wolfe P, Sedlacek S, Zhu Z, Jiang W. Dietary botanical diversity affects the reduction of oxidative biomarkers in women due to high vegetable and fruit intake. J Nutr. 2006 Aug;136(8):2207-12.

Lansky EP. Beware of pomegranates bearing 40% ellagic Acid. J Med Food. 2006 Spring;9(1):119-22.

Bhupathiraju SN, Tucker KL. Greater variety in fruit and vegetable intake is associated with lower inflammation in Puerto Rican adults. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Jan;93(1):37-46.

Ye X, Bhupathiraju SN, Tucker KL. Variety in fruit and vegetable intake and cognitive function in middle-aged and older Puerto Rican adults. Br J Nutr. 2013 Feb 14;109(3):503-10.

Lansky EP, Jiang W, Mo H, Bravo L, Froom P, Yu W, Harris NM, Neeman I, Campbell MJ. Possible synergistic prostate cancer suppression by anatomically discrete pomegranate fractions. Invest New Drugs. 2005 Jan;23(1):11-20.

Freedland SJ, Carducci M, Kroeger N, Partin A, Rao JY, Jin Y, Kerkoutian S, Wu H, Li Y, Creel P, Mundy K, Gurganus R, Fedor H, King SA, Zhang Y, Heber D, Pantuck AJ. A double-blind, randomized, neoadjuvant study of the tissue effects of POMx pills in men with prostate cancer before radical prostatectomy. Cancer Prev Res (Phila). 2013 Oct;6(10):1120-7.

Chrubasik-Hausmann S, Vlachojannis C, Zimmermann B. Pomegranate juice and prostate cancer: importance of the characterisation of the active principle. Phytother Res. 2014 Nov;28(11):1676-8.

Thomas R, Williams M, Sharma H, Chaudry A, Bellamy P. A double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised trial evaluating the effect of a polyphenol-rich whole food supplement on PSA progression in men with prostate cancer--the U.K. NCRN Pomi-T study. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis. 2014 Jun;17(2):180-6.

Stenner-Liewen F, Liewen H, Cathomas R, Renner C, Petrausch U, Sulser T, Spanaus K, Seifert HH, Strebel RT, Knuth A, Samaras P, Müntener M. Daily Pomegranate Intake Has No Impact on PSA Levels in Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer - Results of a Phase IIb Randomized Controlled Trial. J Cancer. 2013 Aug 29;4(7):597-605.

You’re exposing your ignorance Narad. Did you think it was a hyphen like most people?

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it's a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that's a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

It's a wonder you can even breathe.

It turns out that the links I posted are supplied with a transcript and list of citations! Just visit the link, and click on “sources cited” in the footer.

Great. Do it yourself. I, for one, simply don't bother with such* videos, whether presented by Orac or the commentariat. I read.

* Yes, I'll cop to the occasional musical interlude, but I don't expect anyone to look at those, either.

I can't believe that you people are doubting Maarten. Obviously, lower levels of IGF-1 and steroid hormones would be expected to lower the incidence of prostate cancer.

There are dozens of studies proving how androgens stimulate the prostate. It's even common to refer to some prostate cancers as either "androgen-refractory" or "androgen-resistant".

Milk contains 5α-androstenedione and 5α-pregnanedione, and the concentration of total androgens is significant.

And the rBHG used in modern dairy production has been shown to raise IGF-1 levels fourfold in the amounts commonly employed.

More likely he doesn't have the links because he's never typed them into a browser and read those pages either. Otherwise it'd be a trivial matter to pull them out of the browser's history by typing a few characters of the domain name.

Well, Maarten, I can already see a problem with one of the studies you listed as a citation from the videos you're pimping.

I decided to grab one of the articles at random, and pull it for review. The one I chose was:

So here's my issue with this article. It doesn't actually measure the progression of prostate cancer. It measures changes in PSA, which we know isn't the most reliable marker (it's why the USPSTF no longer recommends routine PSA screening). That's the problem with citing a source that's as old as this one (12 years old). Science can change quite rapidly in that kind of time frame.

The time frame of the study was too short; only one year. It included other lifestyle interventions besides diet which were not controlled for in determining what really affected the PSA. Was it the diet or the yoga? They also dismissed a similar study with negative results because the diets in that study were not "as low in fat" and did not include exercise or stress management.

If the rest of your citations are this bad, then I am very glad I did not watch these videos. That would have been time from my life I never would have gotten back.

Elliot, Chris, I read the critique by Hall, it was interesting. This is my opinion on her points:

CVD:

The author (Hall) critices Greger for quoting an article by Caldwell Esselstyn. Indeed Greger is quoting a conclusion from that paper in the conclusion of his own talk. However, he has not used that paper in his argumentation (he came to this conclusion through other means), so weaknesses in that paper cannot invalidate his argument.

Cancer:

Hall criticises Greger for the same quote from Esselstyn. For the reason already stated, her point is moot.

Inflammation:

Hall criticizes Greger for citing a study (Vogel RA1, Corretti MC, Plotnick GD) that does not use a control group. However, a criticism of a study does not necessary make a criticism of an argument (Greger draws on various studies, and is therefore not necessarily constrained by a limitation in one of those studies). To summarize Greger's full argument: eating meat causes an inflammation reaction that puts arteries in a crippled state (not "cripple" them as Hall misquotes, because that term suggests that they remain in the crippled state, which they don't). This crippled state is caused by endotoxins unique to meat, whose access to the arteries is faciliated by properties unique to animal fat.
If Greger's claim holds that the inflammation is caused by factors present in meat but not plants (and obviously, Hall is free to attack him on this point, but she didn't), then Greger's argument is not invalidated by the absence of a control group in the study by Vogel et al.

COPD:

Greger only makes one reference to COPD in his talk: "Thankfully, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant-based diet, and even treated with plants if you want to check that out." So he encourages the audience to check it out for themselves, but does not try to make an argument for the benefit of a vegan diet on COPD. So it's beyond me why Hall suggests that Greger's argument "relies on a study that measured exhaled NO", as he is not making any argument! In fact, while he briefly mentions COPD, Greger shows a slide from a different paper called "Impact of dietary shift to higher-antioxidant foods in COPD: a randomised trial". If you want to guess about Greger's reason for believing that a plant-based diet can prevent COPD, that paper would have been a better candidate.

Alzheimers:

Hall misquotes Greger by asserting that he said: “We’ve known for 20 years that those who eat meat are 2-3 times as likely to become demented as vegetarians.” He actually used the words "appear between 2 to 3 times more likely". This result is based on a matched study. A different non-matched study found no statistically significant difference. So does the absence of a result in the unmatched study invalidate the claim that "that those who eat meat—red or white—appear between 2 to 3 times more likely to become demented, compared to vegetarians"? I would say it depends on how you interpret the word "appear".

Other claims:

Hall again critizes Greger for flaws in a cited paper, without attacking his full argument. She writes: 'He cites a study concluding “Our results suggest that a decrease in meat consumption may improve weight management.” Suggest, may, decrease. Not veganism.' Attacking the paper only works if the validity of the argumentation hinges on it.

Hall writes: "He compares raw meat to hand grenades, because of bacterial contamination. If you don’t handle them safely, it’s like pulling the pin. Are we selling hand grenades in grocery stores?". It escapes me why the vending place of these items would preclude a comparison, maybe someone can explain. Then she writes: "This is a ridiculous comparison, and it ignores the fact that plant-based foods can be a source of contamination too." I agree there, it's quite ridiculous (I even take this comparison as a kind of joke, not intended very seriously).

What do other studies show about the Benefits and Risks of veganism:

Hall writes: "This study showed mortality from ischemic heart disease was 26% lower in vegans and 34% lower in lacto-ovo-vegetarians (in other words, it’s better not to eliminate milk and eggs)." That's interesting, but I would like to know if the difference of 8 percent points between vegans and vegetarians is statistically significant. The paper itself says:

- The number of vegans was small (n = 753 subjects, 68 deaths), so the analyses in Table 7⇑ were repeated with the inclusion of data from the Health Food Shoppers Study, making the assumptions that all nonvegetarians were regular meat eaters and that vegetarians who reported that they did not consume dairy products were vegans. This increased the number of vegans to 1146, of whom 165 died before age 90 y. However, the numbers of deaths from individual cancers among vegans remained small (range: 3–8). The death rate ratios for the vegans compared with the regular meat eaters from the other causes of death were: for ischemic heart disease, 0.89 (95% CI: 0.65, 1.24; NS); for cerebrovascular disease, 0.51 (95% CI: 0.26, 1.00; NS); for other causes, 1.39 (95% CI: 1.12, 1.72; P < 0.01); and for all causes, 1.06 (95% CI: 0.81, 1.38). However, these death rate ratios should be interpreted with caution because of the uncertainty of the dietary classification of subjects in the Health Food Shoppers Study.

- Mortality from ischemic heart disease among the vegans was slightly higher than among the fish eaters and the vegetarians, but the number of vegans was small.

Hall writes: "Another study showed that the healthiest people in Europe, the inhabitants of Iceland, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, consume large amounts of animal foods." This paper does not study the plant-based diet, so I fail to see the point (if these people are healthier than vegans, then I would be very interested).

Hall writes: "This study found no significant differences in mortality between vegetarians and nonvegetarians.". This paper also not study the plant-based diet. What is does say about vegans is: "In this article, the vegans are included with the vegetarians because there were too few deaths among the vegans to report separately." For some unexplained reason the "death rates of participants are much lower than average for the United Kingdom. The standardized mortality ratio for all causes of death was 52%". So it seems the sample was biased towards healthy people.

"There are risks". Yes, all vegans should take a B-12 supplement.

Confounders:

Hall writes: "The elephant in the room is weight loss. Vegans weigh less than meat eaters, and many of the benefts claimed could be consequences of weight loss, particularly in diabetes. And they could be a consequence of eating more fruits and vegetables, rather than avoiding meat and milk.". I agree, let's find out!

She also writes: "The data he finds most convincing are from the 7th Day Adventist study." Why is that the data that he finds most convincing? Personally, I think he is more excited about the IGF-1 findings.

She writes: "Until we have confirmatory data from other studies in a general population, I don’t think it is wise to hang our hat on these decades-old Adventist studies.". I agree that we shouldn't, and I don't think we hang our hat on this study.

Can diabetes be cured?

Hall writes: "He says it can be cured by a plant-based diet, but the general consensus of medical experts is that diabetes can’t be “cured.”" The general consensus has changed in the past, often.

Other diet beliefs

Hall writes: "If the evidence were really so clear-cut in favor of veganism, we wouldn’t have all these differing approaches." Well, maybe people simply haven't heard the evidence. Many people don't even know what a vegan diet is.

What about the Eskimos?

"Blubber is a staple of the Inuit diet, and it contains large amounts of antioxidants. Atherosclerosis is practically unknown in Greenland. In Uummannaq, Greenland, a population of 3000 residents had no deaths due to CVD in the 1970s."

By all means, let's find out why the people eating blubber have much lower CVD than regular meat eaters. These foods are usually not included when comparing a plant-based diet to a standard diet. Maybe, instead of switching from regular meat to plants, some of us can switch to seal and whale.

Panacea, I'm sorry I made you loose time. You might be right, perhaps the drop in PSA was not indicating a change in the cancer growth, and if it did, maybe it was of some of the other lifestyle changes, not the vegan diet. I won't ask you any further to consider that maybe diet has something to do with it.

The only reason I spelled it out was because I didn’t want to begin a sentence with a lowercase Greek letter, and “Ω−3” would probably just confuse you further.

No, as a remarkably stupid choice versus, say, "Omega-3," like the rest of the known universe writes, it would have been a slight improvement over your usual attempts, Travis.

Besides, most editors would prefer seeing sentences that didn’t start with things like numbers or abbreviations. Some style guides even recommend avoiding sentences which [sic] begin with acronyms (although this is rife in the literature.)

Do tell, Mr. Schwochert, do tell. I suspect that my library access is a tad superior to that in Endeavor, Wisconsin.

Oh, and Travoid? You and the Wikipudlians lose on IUPAC rule Lip-1.16, too. HTH. HAND. FOADIAF.

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn't used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.

So go crawl back in your sari.

The proposed mechanism produces 'signature' succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains...

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

You're wrong Narad. The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn't used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.

So go crawl back in your sari.

The proposed mechanism produces 'signature' succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains...

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

Wrong. The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn't used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.

So go crawl back in your sari.

The proposed mechanism produces 'signature' succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains...

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

You're mind-numbingly stupid Narad. The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn't used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.

So go crawl back in your sari.

The proposed mechanism produces 'signature' succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains...

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

Is this publication any good? It seems to support my earlier claim that IGF-1 levels are a potential mechanism through which diet can affect cancer growth.

"Dietary and pharmacological modification of the insulin/IGF-1 system: exploiting the full repertoire against cancer"

http://www.nature.com/oncsis/journal/v5/n2/full/oncsis20162a.html?foxtr…

(don't worry Panacea, not asking you)

Unbelievable.

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fucklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

Wrong. The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn’t used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.
Review the nomenclature.

The proposed mechanism produces ‘signature’ succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains…

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite? No, Fμcklesworth, only you and some Wikipediot thinks that that’s a minus sign, viz., that working backward of the last letter in the Greek alphabet is an arithmetic operation.

It is an operation. The carboxyl carbon is big delta (Δ), and omega (ω) is the aliphatic terminus. The reason why alpha isn’t used for the carboxyl carbon is because little alpha (α) is generally reserved for naming carbons directly adjacent to carbonyl carbons (see any organic chemistry textbook). No amount of subcontinental apoplectic fury is going to make you right.

Review the nomenclature.

The proposed mechanism produces ‘signature’ succinate metabolites, usually by addition to the
benzylic position in alkylaromatics with C 1-3 alkyl groups, or by addition to the omega minus
two or omega minus three positions in aromatics with longer side chains…

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of complex mixtures of anaerobic bacterial metabolites of petroleum hydrocarbons
Journal of Chromatography A
C. Aitken

No, as a remarkably stupid choice versus, say, “Omega-3,” like the rest of the known universe writes, it would have been a slight improvement...

No. That would have been wrong; a hyphen is not a minus sign. The minus sign sits on the same level as the plus sign and it's longer: (- − +)

Some style guides even recommend avoiding sentences which [sic] begin with acronyms (although this is rife in the literature.)

Do tell

Do you really need an example?

Abstract

15-Deoxy-Δ12,14-prostaglandin J2 (15d-PGJ2) is a bioactive prostanoid produced by dehydration and isomerization of PGD2, a cyclooxygenase product. It was recently shown to activate the nuclear peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ), a critical transcription factor involved in adipocyte and monocyte differentiation. In this report, we show that 15d-PGJ2 is a potent inducer of caspase-mediated endothelial cell apoptosis. PPARα, -δ, and -γ were expressed by endothelial cells, which, when treated with 15d-PGJ2...

Endothelial Cell Apoptosis Induced by the Peroxisome Proliferator-activated Receptor (PPAR) Ligand 15-Deoxy-Δ12,14-prostaglandin J2
Journal of Biological Chemistry
David Bishop-Bailey

You and the Wikipudlians lose on IUPAC rule Lip-1.16, too.

Weird how the rule you cite is in direct opposition to what you are saying, and confirms exactly what I've been trying to tell you:

Lip-1.16. It is sometimes desirable (for example, in discussing the biosynthesis of lipids) to indicate the position of each double bond with reference not to the carboxyl group (always C-1), but to the end of the chain remote from the carboxyl. If n is the number of carbon atoms in the chain (i.e. the locant of the terminal methyl group) and x is the (lower) locant of the double bond, the position of the double bond may be defined as (n minus x). Thus, the common position of the double bond in oleic and nervonic acids may be given as 18-9 and 24-9, respectively. This structural regularity should not be expressed as ω9.

That's not a style guide, Fuckleswoth, and apparently, your reading skills are abysmal.

Sigh. Another day when I was too busy and beat to provide new material and look what happened. I'm definitely going to have to make sure to step up tomorrow.

Wow, not since the days of Sheri Lewis have I seen that level of sock puppetry.

Maarten, oh, showing you how wrong you are is fun. That's easy to do when you provide the actual citations.

It's watching dumb advertising in the form of "educational video" that's the waste of time.

So with your latest link let me ask you this: just what does tinkering with how insulin works have to do with a vegan diet? How does this support your contention that a vegan diet somehow prevents or is useful in treating cancer?

Panacea, my claim is that diet (in general) may somehow prevent or be useful in treating cancer.

I gave the vegan diet as an example, based on the argumentation by Greger, which you rejected a priori (because you already know that analyzing his arguments would be a waste of time).

I offered the publication on the ketogenic diet and the publication in nature as support for my general claim.

ps I would be still interested why you object to his video. To me it's no different from attending a lecture in real life: it's just slides showing highlights from peer reviewed papers, with a voice over. Do you avoid any such presentations in general?

Orac,

Can you do me a kindness? The post #88 is not by me. Some crank has decided to start posting in my identity, as has happened elsewhere.

You can check the IP and email address to see that it isn't me.

What his or her game is, god only knows.

It's gone. It looks like our resident impersonating troll is back. I will try to be more vigilant. It sure was nice the three months or so during which he gave up.

It's probably Travis, Brian.

Good news is, I think the regulars here knew it wasn't you instantly. But yeah the fake post needs to go.

Maarten: what I rejected categorically was watching videos that were clearly advertisements. I went to Dr. Greger's website. Once I realized it is a commercial website (and it is, he's abusing his 501(c)(3) status, I realized the videos would have nothing of substance to offer any discussion.

You provided the citations for the videos as asked, and I looked at one . . . and it doesn't say what it purports to say in its own title. If Greger is using such poorly sourced material to support his claims then it merely strengthens my decision not to watch them.

Hence my "waste of time" comment.

I actually MAKE similar presentations (though likely with lower production values) as I use the flipped classroom model to teach nursing. But videos take far longer to watch than an article takes to read, and my time is valuable. Greger's videos may rely on peer reviewed research (some of which isn't very good), but that doesn't make his VIDEOS THEMSELVES peer reviewed and that's what we demand here in terms of evidence.

Certainly the hypothesis that diet may play a role in cancer prevention or treatment is interesting enough that plenty of people are doing research on it. But the results aren't conclusive, and your original claim acts as if they are.

Let me remind you that the first two things you posted on this thread were complaints about Orac's article. You didn't address the core arguments Orac made. You simply dismissed him out of hand.

So of course some of us (including me) took issue with that. Only when Orac returned the dismissal in kind did you feel stung enough to write this:

Orac (in the article): “We know that diet and certain environmental exposures can modulate cancer risk for certain cancers, but once the cancer is already established it’s too late for that.”

This is a true statement by the way, consistent with what you'll find in any medical (and nursing) textbook on the subject of cancer.

Maarten: How do you know that its not possible through diet to give the body a significantly increased change to beat an established cancer? Saying it’s not possible (or that there is no reason to assume that it could be possible) seems quite a claim.

Answer: because so far no one has ever been able to show an ability to do that. There are lots of folks who have claimed diet was the key they used to beat their cancer. But they all either had convention treatment along with the dietary changes long enough to go into remission (meaning they can't prove it was the diet, and thus it's much more likely the conventional treatment), or they're dead. Orac has written extensively on prominent examples.

Certainly there is continued interest in the impact of diet on successful cancer treatment. We may indeed find such a link. Dr. Greger acts as if we have the answer NOW, and we don't.

Pananea, my general claim was that "it could be possible that a change in diet significantly increases the bodies ability to heal itself from cancer".
In answer to Chris' question about a possible mechanism, I claimed that "diet may impact cancer growth through its relation to the IGF-1 levels in the body", and I gave some reasons (that apply in the context of the vegan diet) to back that up. I also gave reasons why I believe that Harriet Hall's critique of Greger is weak.

So how is my original claim acting [sic] as if the results are conclusive?

And why do you consider his website a commercial activity? Most succesful charities have paid staff, are they also commercial?

Isn't scientific blogging also a form of literature overview that is not peer reviewed? Is that a reason for you to avoid scientific blog posts in general? Or do you give it a chance and decide for yourself if the blogger knows what they are talking about?

Which core arguments did Orac make about my complaints about his blog? He only addressed a few words to me to tell me that I should be a little less self-righteous (he's right about that). Then he complained to you about me (I don't feel obliged to respond to comments about me but not addressed to me).

"Answer: because so far no one has ever been able to show an ability to do that." I think it would have been more accurate to say: because so far no one has ever been able to show ME an ability to do that. But if that answer (I mean the original one, that you gave) satisfies you, then indeed there is not much point for me to discuss about diet with you. OTOH if you want to discuss about other topics, such as charities, or presentation formats, then we could :-).

my general claim was that “it could be possible that a change in diet significantly increases the bodies ability to heal itself from cancer”.

Yes, and the proper response to such a fantasy is can be either "so what" or "ho hum". Such a claim is indistinguishable from a claim that there's an invisible pink unicorn living in my garage, unless and until some actual, credible, empirical evidence is presented for one claim or the other. The diet fantasy is further complicated by lack of any specifics about the kind of diet or the kind of cancer.

(A strict breatharian diet would, of course, demonstrably kill a tumor, since tumors don't survive the death of the host for very long. We'll omit diets of this class.)

I'm going to skip rebutting Travis's seemingly drunken passel of repeat-posted non sequiturs, G—le scrounging, failure to check original sources, and typographic inanity unless anybody else is actually interested.

No need. I'm going to have to go back to doing what I did before and blocking each sock puppet as soon as it's identified and, even better when I can manage it, preventing him from getting new sock puppets in. Methinks a moratorium on approving new commenters might well be in order, as sad as the thought makes me. Travis sometimes sneaks by with a reasonable sounding comment before unleashing the crazy.

What kind of diseased-minded crank goes into my website, gets my anti-spam email address and uses it to pose as me in order to post at this site?

Step forward our friend from Wisconsin Dells, IP 66.206.61.192

I won't give the name now, but this is an individual with a significant personality disorder

Yeah, that's one of his IP addresses. One of many, from VPNs from varying countries all over the world. IP addresses are recorded when someone leaves a comment, and I came to recognize the most common ones used by Travis. Unfortunately, he used a lot of VPNs; so you just can't count on recognizing his IP addresses to identify him.

No need.

I'd still like a plebiscite, if anyone cares to weigh in. I could have sworn there were some chemists in this joint.

Maarten: It's possible it might rain beer some day, too? So what?

Unless you have actual evidence to back up your claims, you're just p***ing in the wind. It's not for me to produce that evidence. That's on YOU. And you haven't been able to come up with more than a "well it's possible."

Well, that's not enough.

And no, blogging is not a form of peer review. Even Orac's blog would not be considered peer reviewed because he does not submit what he writes to experts in the field before he posts.

And Orac isn't trying to create new knowledge here, which is what science does: it creates new knowledge about the natural world. What Orac does is debunk unscientific claims, or express skepticism about borderline claims using knowledge we already have. He cites sources, and he uses the scientific method and logical thinking to explain his point of view to his readers.

That makes what he has to say reliable. He doesn't pretend to always be correct, and he is open to changing his point of view when presented with new evidence . . . as are most of the regular commentors here. The key is, the evidence must be reliable itself.

It took a lot of arm twisting to get you to produce a bibliography to support your contention a bunch of videos were reliable evidence . . . and when those sources were checked, they were found to be wanting.

You haven't proved your claim, not even close. So what you say here is suspect because of that.

Because if you count from the carboxyl end, it’s a plus sign, amirite?

Ya, sure, youbetcha. Omega is always carbon 1 when omega notation is used and the carboxyl is always carbon 1 when "c" notation is used, therefore the symbol sometimes known as a hyphen effectively represents a plus sign for both those notations. Interpreting it as a minus sign would be absurd. If and only if the more meaningful n - x notation is used can it be interpreted as a minus sign, since n actually takes on a specific numeric value. But it is still the value of x, not the solution of n minus x, that is usually of interest. You can consider the symbol to be a minus sign, but that really isn't helpful if you what you want to know is how long the last dangly bit is.

Speculation:
Travis got a job and had a new group of unfortunates to try to dazzle with this all-knowing brilliance.
Travis finally annoyed the unfortunates so badly he was given the boot.
Travis returned to disgrace himself here.

Travis needs a job as a ball gag tester. Every unit subjected to stringent quality control testing!

This structural regularity should not be expressed as ω9.

Notably there is nothing between the omega and the nine. Might that be some sort of hint?

You can consider the symbol to be a minus sign

Of course, then you'd have to set it as one, viz., as "ω − x," like, y'know, in the original IUPAC document (PDF), where n is a number. The archived W—dia comment page puts the discombobulation in stark relief, Travis J. Schwochert's desperate G—ling for "omega minus three" notwithstanding (the lone occurrence of this in Aitken et al. also carries a conveniently omitted cite to Jarling et al.,* where it happily appears as "exclusively omega-2 and to a lesser extent omega-3 activation products are formed," with hyphens; never underestimate what bad copyediting can do).

* ht[]ps://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00880

^ Both links work, despite my failure to properly terminate the first one.

Panacea, if you read the comment history, you will see that from the very start, I said that all claims that Greger puts forward are clearly backed by scientific references that can be easily read right off the screen of his videos. In other words, I gave you the references right off the bat, but you chose not to look at them (because that would entail watching a total of 10 minutes of video, gasp!).

Then I pointed out (on the same day) that these references are also listed directly under the video. When this was still not good enough I copy-pasted them here, all on the same day or the next day. I'm doing what I can to accomodate you, but it's never good enough.

The evidence for my more specific claim (about IGF-1) is compiled and summarized by someone you don't like, in a form that you don't like, namely: a transcript that has not been peer reviewed. In other words: it's not enough for me to present you with peer reviewed evidence, also the overview that summarizes the evidence and draws conclusions from it has to be peer reviewed to be accepted by you.

If you want to believe that you have been willing to look at the evidence, then I will leave you be in that illusion. Maybe for someone else here, the transcripts and citations lists that I posted are good enough to be the basis for a discussion, and I can discuss it with them.

ps with "to be accepted by you" I mean: to be willing to even read it.

ps 2: "He cites sources, and he uses the scientific method and logical thinking to explain his point of view to his readers."

How is that different from what Greger is doing?

ps 3: maybe if you answered my previous question, it would make your position on what presentation formats are acceptable (and which are not) more clear to me:

"I would be still interested why you object to his video. To me it’s no different from attending a lecture in real life: it’s just slides showing highlights from peer reviewed papers, with a voice over. Do you avoid any such presentations in general?"

I can't recall where it is, but something like "this paper is in the Nature family of journals is that good?"

If you had gone to the paper you would realize that
1) It is a speculative review article, not breakthrough clinical trial data
2) Almost all data about IGF-1 is in rodents that are known to be different in humans and rodents.

We never change all of human medicine because something happened in a rat.

also doesn't change that all pseudo-science appears to be well-referenced. Virtually all of the references either do not really back up the assertions (title might even sound somewhat relevant but it really is not or says the exact opposite of what the psuedoscience sales person says it does) of the person promoting the revolution to end all revolutions. Or the data is of questionable value as almost everything in all of scientific history that looks good in the test tube and the rat doesn't pan out, so no one other than the person selling the latest greatest scientific revolution to cure all things and end all death and suffering for all of time and be glorified above all others (which he or she will modestly accept even though they really want the glory more than anything) with any understanding of how science translates from the lab bench to human implementation would act upon it.

Especially because usually there is some in actual human being information that indicates it doesn't work that way.

Part of the problem with the videos is we know of the 100,000,000 just like it 100,000,009 have references that are totally meaningless.

Just because there is a reference it doesn't mean the reference in any way backs up the claim or even when it might back it up some tiny part of the claim, it is the first baby step that probably will never lead where the video dude says it can only go.

Part of peer review is you check the references to ensure it actually backs up the point being made. Sometimes they still over-sell the data, or tie together points that go beyond where you can rationally extrapolate, or cherry pick some but not all so it looks like there is no evidence that says it can't work that way, but at least if the article is peer-reviewed you might trust the long list of references a little bit. Still before making any dietary or medical changes you would want to see that it has been replicated, tested against other things, actually works in humans, etc. Ideally to the point of having systematic reviews or well-powered meta-analysis.

A few references noted in a video is just not the same, it never will be. Even if you copy them here. At least next time look up the PMID or other identifier. It helps the person reading the list find out if the are even real references (and sometimes there are errors that creep in even with the careful..there are some notable cases in the literature, especially for obscure works) and pull them up much easier if it even seems worth the time to figure out if the references really back up what they are supposed to be backing up.

Marteen, the references have to be good. They have to be right. Not all papers published in the peer reviewed literature are quality, that's why the peer review process continues after publication. Sometimes further research corrects previous research which is why the references can't be more than 5 years old (most of yours were way older than that).

You can't points to something and say "See! It has references, so it must be good."

The difference between Dr. Greger and Orac is that when Orac claims something, he's using up to date research, he doesn't cherry pick, and he actually understands what he is referencing. He isn't trying to sell the gullible a bill of goods.

Your boy picks only the references that seem to make his BS look better, which is easy when your viewers are people who don't understand science, but they hear "sciency" words coming from someone with an MD after his name so it must be "good."

And since what Greger says is what they want to hear, it's easy to believe. Real medicine and science aren't like that; it's slow, methodical and doesn't always give you the answers you expect, but it does conform to how the real world actually words.

The problem for you is, since you don't seem to understand the scientific method at all, it is very difficult for you to present any kind of an argument that will convince me, because you don't know biology, you don't know chemistry, you don't know medicine, and you don't even understand the basics of how research works or is presented.

But worse, you're not willing to learn.

Awhile back Chris asked you "I only want to see PubMed indexed studies that prove that something passing through the gastrointestinal track causes the abnormal cancer cells to stop reproducing in vivo. So no petri dish studies!"

Start there, and actually produce this, and we can start a real discussion.

KayMarie, I will ask you the same question as I have asked other people:

To me his video presentations are no different from attending a lecture in real life: it’s just slides showing highlights from peer reviewed papers, with a voice over. Do you avoid any such presentations in general?

In my opinion, a scientific talk (by an MD who devotes his career to nutrition, in this case) is a good starting point for a discussion. The talk can outline the existing evidence and make connections. It's a narrative that draws on evidence. It's not proof, but it doesn't have to be, because I am not here to proof something, but to discuss something.

Since you seem to be asking everyone, I'll give you my answer:

To me his video presentations are no different from attending a lecture in real life: it’s just slides showing highlights from peer reviewed papers, with a voice over. Do you avoid any such presentations in general?

I avoid lectures unless:
1) They're given by someone intimately familiar with the work, like an author;
2) The lecture is a presentation of one or more related papers;
3) I've read the papers being presented;
4) The lecture includes a question-and-answer component that I can participate in;
5) Having read the papers, there still are questions in my mind that the lecturer can address.
Otherwise, the lecture is almost invariably a waste of time.
The video format necessarily misses out on one or more of these criteria, particularly when it's nothing more than a sales pitch, interpreting someone else's work.

Panacea, you refuse to attack Greger on any part of the argumentation that he puts forward (with the weak excuse that you already know it would be a waste of time to analyze it), you only attack his character and his supposed commercial intentions.

It's fine to use an older reference, as long as there is good reason to believe that the reference is still relevant for the claim that one is trying to support.

Your replies have been typical hand-waving ones, so I'm not going to spend any more effort in replying to you.

Sara, sorry, I missed your reply in the stream of other replies. Thanks for responding. I'll make sure to mind my linoleic acid intake (I used to eat a lot of pasta mixed with sunflower seed oil, and already started to substitute for rice since a few months, so I may have incidentically made the right choice).

To the other people here, sorry to have wasted your time, this blog is probably not for me. Best of luck.

ps I said I missed it but actually I failed to give it proper attention (since it was focusing more on linoleic acid than IGF-1), sorry about that. Anyway, goodbye everyone.

Maarten: "To me his video presentations are no different from attending a lecture in real life.."

In real life there is also a text book with references. Plus there is also research reports and sometime lab time to understand the material.

"In my opinion, a scientific talk (by an MD who devotes his career to nutrition, in this case) is a good starting point for a discussion."

Except during this discussion it has become clear that you do not understand the basic science. So we really are not interested in your opinion, but only the actual PubMed indexed studies to support you assertions. If you are going to assert that diet has an effect on cancer then you must produce:

"... PubMed indexed studies that prove that something passing through the gastrointestinal track causes the abnormal cancer cells to stop reproducing in vivo. So no petri dish studies!”

So where is it?

If the foundation is bad, the whole house is in bad shape.

Greger's foundation is very rocky indeed.

So if you can't defend the underlying facts, the videos are worthless. You're the one claiming they're so great. It's not up to me to take up my valuable time watching them. You need to convince me it's worth the time and effort, and you haven't.

If you're not willing to do that, then you're right. This blog might not be the place for you.

Se Habla Espol: "Since you seem to be asking everyone, I’ll give you my answer:"

There is a ScienceBasedMedicine blog entry by Dr. Harriet Hall that was posted twice. Of course Maarten did not like it. Possibly because it has this paragraph:

“If only you would watch this video”
I hear that all the time from people who have been overwhelmed by the information presented in a video that supports their beliefs. They assume that the evidence presented is incontrovertible, and that anyone who agreed to watch it would necessarily be converted to their beliefs. These videos tend to fall into an easily recognizable pattern. They feature a charismatic scientist with an agenda who makes sweeping statements that go beyond the evidence, makes unwarranted assumptions about the meaning of studies, and omits any reference to contradictory evidence. I recognized this pattern by briefly sampling the video, and my initial opinion was only confirmed by watching it in toto.

But, it seems Maarten does not want to be told he is being gullible.

Sometimes further research corrects previous research which is why the references can’t be more than 5 years old

Well, not in real papers; I haven't seen you establish this window as a criterion for the now-flounced Maarten, so I'm wondering whether that's what you meant.

It is what I meant. I alluded it to it with the discussion of the article I reviewed for him; that article was 12 years old.

I don't change my entire scientific world view or lifestyle from a single scientific lecture .

I don't know anyone that asks the audience to do that, either.

I do the same follow up for lectures I would do for any other source of scientific information.

Are the references to preliminary data in rats or test tubes or for systematic reviews of human clinical data?

Are the references selected by cherry picking for the few that seem to go that way even if there are many better and more recent papers that show that line of inquiry did not pan out.

Yes it can be a starting point, but it seems you feel that one lecture is done, deal. Since there are references it must be real, not that maybe you should actually review the references and see if they actually back up the assertions being made. And it is terrible that we question it in anyway. If no one can question it, that isn't a starting point for a conversation that leads to investigation and discovery.

If I make this into a youtube and flash references on the screen would you believe me?

Second time today I'm reading of "attacks" on people.

If I'm getting ready to take out a car from the motor pool and someone points out that I picked the one with the bad brakes, that isn't an attack.

Hitting me over the head and taking the keys away from me, that's an attack.

(the lone occurrence of this in Aitken et al. ...

You're still trying to pretend that you're correct, Narad Rampersad, by writing this off as an exception?

That's so gradeschool.

You had the word "fμcklesworth" in the comment that I was quoting, so my posts were held-up in moderation. It took me a while to figure-out why.

(Orac usually clips those redundancies, but this time had decided to post them to make me look drunk.)

...with hyphens...

Hyphens are wrong. This person does it right: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/79/6/935.full

(And it's⇑ not a bad article. Not a bad way to familiarize yourself with eicosanoids and the carcinogenic potential of linoleic acid.)

Go away Travis Schwochert from Endeavor, Wisconsin.

Fucklesworth, you and your imaginary credentials in both chemistry and typesetting simply aren't worth the effort.

It took me a while to figure-out why.
.nbsp;.nbsp;. .
Hyphens are wrong.

Sometimes.

^ Rats.

In one of your recent blogs about cancer treatments you referenced a web site that you used to enter details of a person's cancer diagnosis and it then output statistics to do with efficacy of surgery, surgery + chemo [ type specific ] and surgery + chemo [ type specific ] + radiation. I thought it was this blog post but can't seem to find that web site reference here. Anyone remember what recent post that was and what the web site url is?

The "war on cancer": We're doing better than commonly portrayed

oracknows — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 05:00:17 +0000

The "war on cancer": We're doing better than commonly portrayed

If you were to rely on much of what you see in the mainstream media and on social media, you probably have the impression that we are not doing very well against cancer. Indeed, a common trope I see in a lot of articles is that we are somehow "losing" the war on cancer. Just for yuks, I Googled the term "losing the war on cancer," and it didn't take long to find a lot of articles, both in the mainstream press and, more predictably, on alternative medicine-friendly websites making just that argument. Indeed, in 2011, which was the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of "war on cancer," I noted that, so common were articles on that event questioning progress against cancer, I fully expected to be fielding similar articles in 2021 for the 50th anniversary of Nixon's "war on cancer"; that is, if I'm still blogging then. (I wasn't blogging in 2001; so I missed the 30th anniversary round of self-flagellation by oncologists.)

To demonstrate what I'm talking about, I picked an article from 2004. The key argument of this sort of article goes something like this:

But it's not. Hope and optimism, so essential to this fight, have masked some very real systemic problems that have made this complex, elusive, relentless foe even harder to defeat. The result is that while there have been substantial achievements since the crusade began with the National Cancer Act in 1971, we are far from winning the war. So far away, in fact, that it looks like losing.
Just count the bodies on the battlefield. In 2004, cancer will claim some 563,700 of your family, friends, co-workers, and countrymen. More Americans will die of cancer in the next 14 months than have perished in every war the nation has ever fought ... combined. Even as research and treatment efforts have intensified over the past three decades and funding has soared dramatically, the annual death toll has risen 73%—over one and a half times as fast as the growth of the U.S. population.

And, six years later in 2010, this:

In 1971, President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. Since then, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort (Kolata 2009b). What have we gained from that huge investment? David Nathan, a well-known professor and administrator, maintains in his book The Cancer Treatment Revolution (2007) that we have made substantial progress. However, he greatly overestimates the potential of the newer so-called “smart drugs.” Researchers Psyrri and De Vita (2008) also claim important progress. However, they cherry-pick the cancers with which there has been some progress and do not discuss the failures. Moreover, they only discuss the last decade rather than a more balanced view of 1950 or 1975 to the present.

I note that this article appeared in Skeptical Inquirer and was written by Reynold Spector, MD. I discussed it in depth before and am merely citing this passage as an example of the sort of argument that I'm talking about. You can read my original deconstruction if you want the details. I also note that what is often forgotten in the media is that cancer is not a single disease, but rather hundreds of diseases, and that it's rather simplistic to discuss "cancer" as though it were a single disease. Yet we do it all the time.

The reason I decided to address this issue is because it turns out that we aren't doing as poorly against cancer as commonly portrayed. I was reminded of this by news accounts of a new report that was recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), which reinforced the findings of the 2017 yearly report on cancer published by the American Cancer Society in January, which I had meant to write about but somehow never did. (Now I have my chance to atone for that.) As you will see, together, these reports show slow but steady progress in bringing down the death rates for most cancers. Also, it shows that the overall picture is complicated, such that referring to "losing" or "winning" the war on cancer is a poor way to describe progress on this front.

Cancer mortality: Declining for most cancers

The American Cancer Society (ACS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) all collaborate to compile data on cancer incidence and mortality. Periodically, they publish reports on trends in cancer incidence, survival, and mortality in the US. That's where the primary data for the JNCI report came from, including the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. The data for the ACS article came primarily from the National Center for Health Statistics and the SEER Program since 1973 and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) since 1995. Given the overlap in the data sources used, the outcomes examined, and even a couple of the authors, I found it most convenient to use both articles as the basis for my post, noting that, despite the overlap, each study examined somewhat different questions.

Perusing the two studies, I find that the ACS study is a bit more useful because it examines mortality trends over a much longer period of time, whereas the JNCI study emphasizes five year survival more than mortality, and, overdiagnosis and lead time bias, while mortality rates are not. An excellent explanation of lead time bias can be found here and here), but the basic concept is that if you detect a cancer earlier but your treatments have no effect on the overall biological progress of the cancer, survival will appear to be better even though the patient dies at the same time he would have died of the cancer anyway.

However, the JNCI study notes in the introduction its rationale for examining changes in survival rates:

In addition to death and incidence rates, survival is an important measure for assessing progress in efforts to improve cancer outcomes (19). As with most disease surveillance measures, the interpretation of survival trends is complicated by changes in screening and detection practices (19,20). In particular, screening may lead to the detection of cases that would not have been detected through clinical manifestation in a lifetime (overdiagnosis) or the detection of cancers that are inherently slow growing (length bias). Screening may also result in earlier diagnosis without changing the date of death, generating apparent improvements in survival without changing the actual course of disease (lead time bias) (21). In this report, we examine temporal changes in overall and stage-specific survival for all races/ethnicities combined and in overall survival by race, and contemporary overall survival by race and ethnicity and state of residence. We interpret these survival statistics in the context of changes in screening, early detection, and treatment.

In terms of overall mortality from cancer, the JNCI found that from 2000 to 2014 mortality has been decreasing at 1.8% per year for men and 1.4% per year for women. This is shown in Figure 1 from the paper:

The authors then looked at mortality rates due to various common cancers in men and women and found that mortality has been steadily decreasing for nearly all cancers:

As you can see, death rates during this period decreased significantly for 11 of the 16 cancers in men, with big yearly decreases in lung cancer mortality, attributable mainly to the decline in smoking. In contrast death rates increased for cancers of the liver and, to a lesser extent, of the pancreas and brain, while rates stabilized for bladder and oral cavity cancers. In addition, in women, death rates declined for 13 of the 18 most common cancer types. For example, breast cancer mortality declined by 1.6% per year, consistent with other studies that I've seen. The exceptions included cancers of the uterus and of the liver cancer, for which death rates increased, and for pancreas, brain, and myeloma, for which death rates remained stable. By comparison, during the same period, cancer incidence rates among women remained stable, while declining among men.

How do these results compare to the 2017 edition of the ACS yearly study that's released every January? Well, let's go to the "money figure," as I like to call it:

As you can see, its results are consistent with what the JNCI study reports, at least in terms of mortality. Mortality from cancer has been falling steadily since the early 1990s, more in men (who still have higher mortality) than in women. You'll note that the curves go farther back in time for this graph than they do in the JNCI study. You might also wonder what that peak in male cancer incidence in early 1990s might represent. Wonder no more. Here is the incidence graph, broken down by cancer type:

Yes, the increase in cancer incidence that spiked in the early 1990s was due to a surge in the detection of asymptomatic tumors as a result of the introduction of widespread use of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test as a screening modality. Notice the further drop after 2010 after the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommended against the routine use of PSA screening because of growing concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment of prostate cancer due to the test.

But what about mortality? The ACS answers the question:

These graphs are informative in that they trace mortality rates all the way back to 1930. If there's a story to tell here, it's the story of the orange line, which represents lung cancer, a disease that went from causing few deaths in 1930 to the number one cause of cancer death by the 1950s for men and by the 1990s for women. As you can see, the death rate from lung cancer peaked around 1990 for men and 2000 for women, after which it began a steady decline. All of this is tracks with the prevalence of smoking, with a roughly quarter century delay. It's also consistent with how men took up smoking in large numbers before women did, hence the 10 year delay between men and women in terms of peak lung cancer mortality.

Not surprisingly, the ACS data also show that the exceptions to the rule of declining mortality are liver cancer and uterine cancer, with little change in the death rate from pancreatic cancer.

What about survival?

I've discussed before how cancer mortality is a better measure of success in combatting cancer than five year survival is. The reason, of course, is that five year survival can be affected by screening in terms of overdiagnosis and lead time bias. However, that is not to say that five year and ten year survivals are not useful measures of progress against cancer. Five year survival rates for cancers which we don't routinely screen, for instance, are far less likely to be affected by such factors. As I noted before, the cancers for which the US has better five year survival rates than European countries are virtually all cancers for which the U.S. screens intensively, such as prostate and breast cancer. Also examining stage-specific survival rates can help mitigate the likelihood that lead time bias is the explanation for an increase in five year survival rather than an actual improvement in treatment.

In the JNCI paper, changes in five year survival were compared between the periods of 1975-1977 and 2006-2012, both for all stages lumped together and among cancers diagnosed as local disease, regional disease, and distant metastasis (spread). The all-stage data were reported in the paper and the data broken out by stage were reported in a very unwieldy table in the supplemental material. Over that time, changes in five year survival for various cancers overall ranges from a relative change of -4% (absolute percentage: -3.5%) for uterine cancer to 428% (absolute percentage 14.6% or from 3.4 to 18.1%) for cancer of the liver and intrahepatic bile ducts. In other words, even though five year survival for liver cancer has gone from utterly dismal to just dismal in 40+ years, more people are dying of liver cancer because its incidence is increasing. In any event, five year survival has indeed increased for breast and prostate cancer, as we would expect for screen-detected cancers subject to the potential overdiagnosis, but the five year survivals for a number of cancers for which we do not screen have increased markedly, such as: non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (from 46.5% to 72.6%); melanoma (from 81.9% to 93.2%); leukemia (from 34.2% to 62.7%); and multiple myeloma (from 24.6% to 50.2%). For all sites, adjusted by case mix, five year survival has increased from 50.3% to 66.4%.

For more advanced disease, it's not surprising that increases in survival have been less impressive but real. For instance, for metastatic breast cancer, five year survival has increased from 18.7% in 1977 to 33.6% in 2012, which is nearly a doubling in survival. Gains have been even more impressive in head and neck cancer, with an increase from 18.5% five year survival to 39.8%. Unfortunately, some of these doublings in five year survival are not so great in absolute terms. For instance, in lung cancer, five year survival for metastatic lung cancer has more than doubled, but that represents going from 1.8% to 4.2%, a result that no one would consider a major advance, particularly patients and their families. Ditto metastatic pancreatic cancer, for which survival has only increased from 0.9% to 3.3%. The problem, of course, is that even though survival for localized pancreatic cancer has increased from 7% to 32.1%, the vast majority of pancreatic cancer is not found when it's still localized to the organ.

Finally, there remain some real disparities in cancer outcomes based on race and region. For example, this figure compares five year survival statistics for Caucasians versus African-Americans for localized, regional, and metastatic cancers:

As you can see, African-Americans with nearly every cancer do significantly worse, particularly for localized and regional cancers, where treatment makes the most difference. Unfortunately, not everyone is sharing equally in the improvements in survival and declines in mortality due to cancer.

Are we winning or losing the war on cancer?

So we circle back to the original question that inspired this post: Are we winning or losing the war on cancer? I know, I know, it's a simplistic question, and I myself pointed out how cancer is not one disease near the beginning of this exploration. I also routinely point out the same thing whenever someone asks the question, "Why haven't we cured cancer yet?" (Mainly because it's complicated as hell.) What the evidence shows clearly is that death rates from cancer are slowly falling, driven by declines in death rates from most of the common cancers. Meanwhile, five year survival rates are climbing for most cancers, even for more advanced disease. Unfortunately, the answer to my question is, like many Facebook relationship statuses, complicated.

Any strategy to combat cancer rests on three legs: Prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Changes in diagnostic modalities can increase the apparent incidence of cancer through overdiagnosis, as well as the five year survival through lead-time bias, but they can also result in a decrease in mortality due to the cancer being screened for. There are many tradeoffs.

There is also little doubt that improvements in treatment have likely played a significant role in the declines in mortality from some cancers and improved five year survivals. Some of this can be seemingly mundane, even though it really isn't, such as improvements in surgery. Indeed, the authors also note that, for cancers for which the primary treatment is surgery that has a significant mortality rate, such as cancers of the stomach, lung, pancreas, and esophagus, decreasing the acute mortality from surgery will improve the five year survival. Indeed, they note that lower surgical mortality may have been achieved through improvements in anesthesia and supportive care, institution of quality improvement programs, and regionalization of high-risk surgeries. Again, it's complicated.

Improvements in chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and other treatments also likely played a role in the declines in cancer mortality:

The survival improvements over time highlighted in this report also reflect major advances in systemic therapies for some cancers, including imatinib mesylate for chronic myelogenous leukemia in the early 1990s (79), rituximab for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the 1990s (80), and combination of chemotherapies for childhood cancers beginning in the 1960s (81,82). In particular, the continued statistically significant improvements in five-year survival rates for most cancers occurring in children—with over 80% of children surviving five years during recent diagnosis years—have been attributed to the systematic conduct of clinical trials assessing the efficacy of multimodal approaches involving combination chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and/or surgery with increased expertise in supportive care in specialized cancer centers (83). Member institutions of the Children’s Oncology Group, a National Cancer Institute supported trials group, care for 90% of children diagnosed with cancer in the United States (61,84).

In this era of increasingly personalized cancer therapy, it is hoped that dramatic progress in treatment and survival will be observed for other cancer types as well. It may not be possible in this analysis to detect the impact of very recent therapeutic improvements on population survival due to the time lag for case reporting and follow-up in cancer registry data; examples include protein kinase inhibitors for non–small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and chronic myeloid leukemia; anti-angiogenics (which inhibit blood vessel growth) for colorectal and ovarian cancers; and immunotherapy for melanoma and non–small cell lung cancer (85). Such improvements may also be difficult to discern in population-based registry data for therapies that apply only to subsets of patients for a cancer site.

However, as good as our tests and treatments can be, we can't forget that tobacco remains the single largest cause of preventable cancer in existence, and the main cancer it causes, lung cancer, is among the most deadly. As noted in the ACS paper from January:

The decline in cancer mortality over the past 2 decades is the result of steady reductions in smoking and advances in early detection and treatment, reflected in considerable decreases for the 4 major cancers (lung, breast, prostate, and colorectum) (Fig. 7). Specifically, the death rate dropped 38% from 1989 to 2014 for female breast cancer, 51% from 1993 to 2014 for prostate cancer, and 51% from 1976 to 2014 for colorectal cancer. Lung cancer death rates declined 43% from 1990 to 2014 among males and 17% from 2002 to 2014 among females due to reduced tobacco use because of increased awareness of the health hazards of smoking and the implementation of comprehensive tobacco control.[41] Tobacco control efforts adopted in the wake of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health in 1964 have resulted in an estimated 8 million fewer premature smoking-related deaths, one-third of which are due to cancer.[42, 43] Despite this progress, in much of the Southern United States, 40% of cancer deaths in men in 2014 were caused by smoking.[44]

The JNCI paper agrees and notes:

In particular, cigarette smoking prevalence among adults over the past 50 years decreased by more than 50% because of public health policies against tobacco and increased awareness about the health hazards of smoking (42). However, there are still about 40 million adult smokers (43), and smoking remains the leading cause of cancer death (42,44–46). These facts underscore the need for expansions of federal and state tobacco control programs and the development of new strategies, such as pricing strategies and plain tobacco packaging to accelerate the reduction in tobacco use (47).

Indeed, a significant fraction of the overall decrease in cancer mortality is being driven by declines in lung cancer mortality due to the decline in smoking over the last 50 years. However, it's not all just smoking. I note that breast cancer is a cancer whose incidence is not strongly influenced by smoking history, but mortality from this cancer has declined over 30% since 1990. Mortality from several other cancers is declining at similar rates. It would seem that we are slowly winning the war on cancer, but, again, it's complicated, and there are warning flags on the horizon.

One such warning flag is the obesity epidemic. My cancer center recently hosted Otis Brawley, the medical director of the American Cancer Society. He noted that, as smoking-related cancers are in decline due to the decline in smoking, obesity-related cancers are on the rise, thanks to the huge increases in obesity since the 1980s. Indeed, the obesity epidemic is likely responsible in part for the increase in mortality from liver cancer:

In contrast, the continued increase in liver cancer incidence rates is likely due to the high prevalence of chronic hepatitis C virus infection resulting from intravenous drug use by baby boomers during the 1960s to 1980s, as well as the obesity epidemic beginning in the 1980s (18). The obesity epidemic also may have contributed in part to the increases in endometrial, pancreas, and kidney cancer incidence rates (14) because obesity is estimated to account for 49%, 28%, and 24% of the total cases, respectively, in the United States (57).

Indeed, the obesity epidemic has yet to show its full effects on cancer incidence and mortality, given that obesity has been linked to at least 13 types of cancer, including a very strong association with uterine cancer and adenocarcinoma of the esophagus and a significant association with liver, pancreas, and gastric cancer. Dr. Brawley noted that it likely won't be long before obesity-associated cancers surpass tobacco-associated cancers as the main causes of preventable cancer mortality. Again, it's complicated, and that's without even going more deeply into the disparities in cancer incidence and survival based on race and region. Cancer is multifactorial.

So, are we winning or losing the war on cancer? I would argue that, contrary to the common perception, we are not losing it. Mortality is declining and survival is increasing for most cancers. It's just that progress is slow. It might have been hubris to think that progress would be anything other than slow, or it might have been overpromising in order to secure research funding. It was probably both. Whatever the case, conquering all cancers is a project that will take more than decades. It will take generations.

oracknows Mon, 04/10/2017 - 01:00

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http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149041

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Orac, thanks to you and the many physicians and researchers like you, we are slowly winning the battle. It is slow going and as you point out, not a simple battle against one disease. My circle of friends and family include a significant number who have suffered through bouts with cancer and are still alive to talk about it, thanks in main to modern cancer medicine and treatments. My hats off to you and I hope you do not get dis-spirited by the multitude of naysayers.

I really appreciate the point about obesity being a factor which may result in a rise in Cancer rates & attendant mortality rates as well.

This is one area in which people can't rely on modern medicine - they really should be taking better care of themselves, if for no other reason than to cut down on risk factors for Cancer in the first place (in general).

I've been hitting the gym for the past few years & even at my age today, I'm in the best shape of my life. I'd like to keep it that way, but if Cancer ever does come calling, I'm opting for the best conventional treatment options out there.

Vaccines prevent cancer ... by causing autism ...

Autism Linked to Increased Oncogene Mutations but Decreased Cancer Rate

As you may know, 75% of ASD patients test positive for folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAA).

And since "Folate receptors are highly overexpressed on the surface of many tumor types.", it should not come as a surprise that ASD patients have fewer cancers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3521101/

Cow's milk contaminated vaccines are the likely cause of FRAA.

Details:

Medical muddles that maim our children with allergies, asthma and autism

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313918596_Medical_muddles_that…

We need to find a better way to protect against cancer ...

"obesity epidemic"

Significant protein sequence alignment between adiponectin and vaccine antigens

Background

Long term persistence of inflammation in children vaccinated with Salmonella conjugate vaccine is associated with augmented Th9-Th17 cytokine

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043466616306160

Balaji et al. above also report decreased serum adiponectin levels.

I checked adiponectin against vaccine antigens for protein sequence alignments.

Method

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310021910_Significant_protein_…

Results

We know that injected antigens typically induce the synthesis of IgE antibodies.

Example:

Influenza Specific Serum IgE is Present in Non-Allergic
Subjects

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3083.2005.01710.x/pdf

Vaccine antigen specific, basophil bound IgE could cross react and bind with adiponectin. Resulting degranulation of basophils may be one mechanism to explain both inflammation and decrease in adiponectin levels. Just as in food allergy, with continuous adiponectin exposure to the immune system, adiponectin specific IgG4 could be synthesized. This could result in adiponectin "tolerance" (avoiding severe inflammation).

The Balaji et al. study used the S Typhi vaccine. But looking at the results below, the same effect is possible with many other vaccine antigens.

Obesity is one possible effect of low adiponectin levels.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12727947

peptidase [Streptococcus pneumoniae]

Sequence ID: WP_054364048.1Length: 2336Number of Matches: 16

See 1 more title(s)

Related Information

Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_054364048.1

Range 1: 680 to 746GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

51.2 bits(121) 7e-06 Compositional matrix adjust. 33/67(49%) 35/67(52%) 0/67(0%)

Query 40 MAGIPGHPGHNGAPGRDGRDGTPGEKGEKGDPGLIGPKGDIGETGVPGAEGPRGFPGIQG 99

+ G G G GA G G GT G KGEKGD G G G G G GA G RG G QG

Sbjct 680 LTGAQGAKGEKGAQGERGLTGTQGAKGEKGDRGERGLTGAQGAKGEKGARGERGLTGAQG 739

Query 100 RKGEPGE 106

KG+ GE

Sbjct 740 EKGDRGE 746

translation initiation factor IF-2 [Bordetella pertussis]

Sequence ID: WP_014905631.1Length: 997Number of Matches: 1

See 2 more title(s)

Related Information

Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_014905631.1

Range 1: 314 to 350GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

30.4 bits(67) 41 Composition-based stats. 14/37(38%) 19/37(51%) 1/37(2%)

Query 30 PLPK-GACTGWMAGIPGHPGHNGAPGRDGRDGTPGEK 65

P P+ GA +G + G P AP +D + G PG K

Sbjct 314 PEPQAGALSGTLHKPAGKPATTAAPKKDAKPGAPGAK 350

transpeptidase [Corynebacterium diphtheriae]

Sequence ID: WP_035099883.1Length: 417Number of Matches: 1

See 4 more title(s)

Related Information

Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_035099883.1

Range 1: 227 to 257GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

27.7 bits(60) 216 Compositional matrix adjust. 15/31(48%) 21/31(67%) 2/31(6%)

Query 206 EVGDQVWLQ--VYGEGERNGLYADNDNDSTF 234

E G QV ++ +YG+ NG+Y DNDN +TF

Sbjct 227 EPGTQVTVKADLYGKDLGNGIYGDNDNSATF 257

hypothetical protein [Neisseria meningitidis]

Sequence ID: WP_049328831.1Length: 69Number of Matches: 1

Related Information

Range 1: 26 to 39GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

25.0 bits(53) 487 Composition-based stats. 8/14(57%) 12/14(85%) 0/14(0%)

Query 182 MLFTYDQYQENNVD 195

++F Y+ YQE+NVD

Sbjct 26 IVFIYESYQEDNVD 39

type I restriction-modification protein subunit M [Haemophilus influenzae]

Sequence ID: WP_048954411.1Length: 673Number of Matches: 1

Related Information

Range 1: 449 to 478GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

25.0 bits(53) 666 Compositional matrix adjust. 13/30(43%) 16/30(53%) 2/30(6%)

Query 207 VGDQVWLQVYGEGERN--GLYADNDNDSTF 234

VGD WL YGEG + L A D++ F

Sbjct 449 VGDTEWLDTYGEGWKKIRKLRASKDSNRDF 478

conserved protein [Saccharomyces cerevisiae ]

Sequence ID: EDN63673.1Length: 791Number of Matches: 1

See 2 more title(s)

Related Information

Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to EDN63673.1

Range 1: 188 to 208GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

24.6 bits(52) 919 Composition-based stats. 10/21(48%) 13/21(61%) 0/21(0%)

Query 150 FHCNIPGLYYFAYHITVYMKD 170

FH IP Y+A I+ Y+KD

Sbjct 188 FHTGIPKEEYWAIAISRYLKD 208

Uncharacterised protein [Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhi]

Sequence ID: CHZ58626.1Length: 49Number of Matches: 1

Related Information

Range 1: 12 to 25GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

23.5 bits(49) 452 Composition-based stats. 7/14(50%) 10/14(71%) 0/14(0%)

Query 149 KFHCNIPGLYYFAY 162

+ +CN P L+YF Y

Sbjct 12 RINCNAPQLFYFWY 25

hypothetical protein [Clostridium tetani]

Sequence ID: WP_039261793.1Length: 100Number of Matches: 1

See 1 more title(s)

Related Information

Identical Proteins-Identical proteins to WP_039261793.1

Range 1: 55 to 67GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

22.3 bits(46) 501 Compositional matrix adjust. 8/13(62%) 10/13(76%) 0/13(0%)

Query 46 HPGHNGAPGRDGR 58

H G+NG G+DGR

Sbjct 55 HKGNNGVHGKDGR 67

polymerase protein [Hepatitis B virus]

Sequence ID: BAF81685.1Length: 824Number of Matches: 1

Related Information

Range 1: 182 to 213GenPeptGraphicsNext MatchPrevious Match

Alignment statistics for match #1

Score Expect Method Identities Positives Gaps

21.6 bits(44) 1485 Composition-based stats. 11/32(34%) 16/32(50%) 0/32(0%)

Query 5 GAVLLLLALPGHDQETTTQGPGVLLPLPKGAC 36

G ++L A D+ Q PG+L P G+C

Sbjct 182 GRLVLQTAKRHGDKSFCPQSPGILPRSPVGSC 213

No matches were found for hepatitis A, measles, mumps, or rubella viruses.

Vinu, do you have anything of substance to add, or just baseless claims and copypasta?

Baseless claims, obviously!

@Vinu:

That's an impressive amount of vomitus. Are you on chemo?

You'll have to excuse vinu...they put too much cow's milk protein into his blood surrogate.

My word salad to English translator is on the fritz. Is Vinu actually saying something, or is he just throwing a bunch of citations against the wall and seeing what sticks?

Are you on chemo at work?

FTFY.

The “war on cancer”: We’re doing better than commonly portrayed
Yes, it's very profitable for some, often with unnecessary sufferiing and disability.

I'm going to pick at one cancer group - colorectal cancer.
First, let me state the most improved category for the last 20+ years: surgery. It is a big deal to CRC patients to find surgeons willing and able to do their (advanced) surgeries.

Surgerons' sins today are mostly conservatism - too quick to label things inoperable that are operable, bad nutrition, and failure to recognize multimodal opportunities. Some of the important ones are only available outside the US.

Oncology I have a few bones to pick. First is that they cripple so many stage II and IIII with oxilaplatin. I think it's often avoidable for many stage IVs too.... Likewise, they wear out mCRC patients with irinotecan so much that death isn't so bad. Patients survival comes at so a great price in quality, damage and disability, often they quit voluntarily or they have to - too much damage.

Second is cost. What a racket, Early on I spotted 98%-99% cost savings in the off label, CAM and international markets, with better cumulative performance. The biggest problem is the FDA types, they and their conies keep disappearing stuff (vitamins and cheap old drugs), This is actually a life threatening situation, repeatedly, that sometimes requires fantastic amounts of work to side step or overcome.

Surgerons’ sins today are mostly conservatism – too quick to label things inoperable that are operable, bad nutrition, and failure to recognize multimodal opportunities.

I'm fascinated about how surgeons' nutritional status is related to surgical outcomes. This seems to be a whole new frontier.

@prn -

Back over in the turmeric thread, I had a few questions that you have chosen to ignore. If you please -

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2017/03/23/an-as-yet-unidentified-hol…

Second is cost. What a racket [...]

Tell me about it. The synthetic chemists want to make their patented drugs, but more efficacious drugs are already available and have been for decades. It's the huge corporate money factory which ridicules the efficacious treatments.

The unspoken rule is: make new drugs that barely work, otherwise, it will put everyone else out of business and when the patent expires it is game over for everyone.

I wouldn't mink their little con game if they played fair, but they don't.

Vinu "We need to find a better way to protect against cancer …"
Don't smoke anything (or breathe a lot of smoke).
Protect your skin from the sun.
Don't work with asbestos.
Eat plenty of leafy green vegetables.
Don't get Hep B.
Don't get Hep C.
Don't get HPV.
Be lucky.

Hey look, there are vaccines for two of those!

And as for your "vaccines cause obesity" suggestion, have you applied Occam's razor? Because I'd look at a 20oz Coke before blaming a vaccine that almost no one in the US gets (typhoid).

I am amazed that anyone is upset that a surgeon is not willing to kill them. Prn some times you boggle my mind.

As for cost, look, a lot of drugs are terribly expensive and that's a real problem. But please realize that one of the things that is sacrificed to make drugs cheaper overseas is quality, in terms of ingredient sourcing, testing, manufacture, packaging, shipping, etc. As an adult you are allowed to roll the dice on that, but please remember that the safety standards exist for a reason, and that reason is often that people died.

Elf @16: Citation needed for those first two.
Given that most people don't have access to benzene, I think that last one is redundant.

And avoid dairy, iron-fortified foods, and don’t drink benzene (I know it’s delicious, but don’t drink it!)

Fuck off, Travis.

... people don’t have access to benzene ...

But Travis J. Schwochert, dipshit, is very fond of slightly substituted benzene and recommends several varieties thereof as vaccine preservatives. Cuz he's so S M R T.

Wow, the PCRM one. Well at least "cherry picking" is still vegan.

Oh, and the other on a pay to publish predatory journal:
http://blog.pokristensson.com/2010/11/04/academic-spam-and-open-access-…

Next time, just post the PMIDs.

Next time, just post the PMIDs.

Next time just blow me you stupid old hag. Mmkay?

Elf, go darn the hole in your sock your travis is showing.

I summoned the ban hammer for Travis a few comments back.

Aw, it looks like Travis Schwochert from Endeavor, Wisconsin is a special snowflake. He lashes out when he gets a teeny tiny criticism. Poor thing.

At least it's taking him longer to break through, so that we have peace for a longer period of time between incursions of sockpuppetry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQ8ZpaAUOA

I had my sister Google Travis Schwochert from Endeavor, Wisconsin using a completely naive browser.

She only had to type Travis Schw before it autofilled, and the first link was
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2017/02/the-fendlesworth-m…

However, that link was all the way at #55 if she searched just Schwochert. Clearly, it needs a little more google-juice.

"Asscancer, boobcancer and titjuice"!
You'll convince sooooooo many more people using such intelligent and professional terminology - not.
A class act - or should I say asscrack?

(Going to fridge for a tall cold glass of milk just to spite Travis.)

Look how sad this baby cow looks! It’s because you humans steal it’s food!!!

Gee, I just see the main ingredient for Jäger-Schnitzel .

He must be very popular with his local dairy farmers.

I just finished reading Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova. It was very interesting learning how butter making has changed, and about all of the different kinds of butter around the world.

Look how sad this baby cow looks! It’s because you humans steal it’s food!!!

Cheese is not food. It is milk's leap for immortality.

Oooh, shitwit Travis J. Schowchert (see here: http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2017/02/the-fendlesworth-m… ) is back again already as as a talking horse's ass. Had to go way back to the archives for that sock.

Perhaps a malleus maleficarum is called for.

Why don't you explain it to use, Travis? You have a few minutes before the poleaxe falls again.

^ supernumerary e

Look at this table and see if you can see a pattern, I bet you cannot

Dear G-d, <a href="Travis, you're waving around functional groups as some sort of fucking mystery? Stick to volatile cleaning solutions.

Yeah, he seems to have found a new VPN.

Some people need iron-fortified foods. I guess anemia doesn't happen in Travis's world.

Also, who drinks benzene? I'm pretty sure that all by itself it's poisonous, and most people over the age of seven or eight don't usually need to be told not to drink poisonous things.

Some people need iron-fortified foods

And yet I cannot find a doctor who will write me a prescription for black pudding. Harrumph.

Also, who drinks benzene?

I don't think anybody drinks benzene on purpose, but a quick Google search confirms my recollection that Perrier had to recall about 160 million bottles of its product in February 1990 because it was contaminated with benzene.

I cannot find a doctor who will write me a prescription for black pudding

That's that "do no harm thing".

hdb, maybe you could hook up with someone with hemochromatosis and arrange to exchange precious bodily fluids.

Maybe those who want to talk on the topic and avoid losing time with Travis should go on your not-so-secret other blog?
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/contrary-to-what-we-are-frequently-tol…

maybe you could hook up with someone with hemochromatosis and arrange to exchange precious bodily fluids.

Or I could absorb less coffee and beer and chilli and stop irritating my gut lining so it leaks less blood. Hmm. decisions, decisions.

The cost issue with cancer is a very real and very serious one, and as more people survive their cancers, the costs actually go up. People who would've been written off as a lost cause fifty years ago may instead go through several years of chemo and survive. The latter is more expensive, but obviously worth it.

We can rail about corporate greed and inconsistent pricing all we like, but if we insist on having a market-driven medical system, it's what we're gonna get. The only solution I can see is single payer health care, assuming it's well managed, which of course is a pretty big assumption. A lot of the disparity in price is driven not merely by the manufacturers' greed but by the fact that many consumers (which is what, in our system, patients end up being) have no real negotiating power. For them, the manufacturers will charge whatever they believe the market will bear. For those with good insurance plans, however, negotiated rates bring the prices way down.

Clearly, the ability to negotiate rates on behalf of a very large pool of clients is beneficial. If we had single-payer health care, like most industrialized countries, that system would have near godlike negotiating power. Oh sure, of course manufacturers will still seek ways to maximize their profits -- that's their job, really. But there will be a far better balance of power.

And while we're at it, we could start making government research grants far more available. One of the biggest limitations to new drug development is cost. A private entity is only going to invest billions of dollars if they think they can get that money back eventually. This is why orphan drugs are so often discarded by manufacturers. If we're operating on the capitalistic system, manufacturers honestly don't have a lot of choice, since failing to turn a profit eventually becomes fatal for the company. So we need to make it easier to develop drugs. Not too easy -- I still want companies to spend their own money whenever possible. But we could help with the products not likely to turn a profit in the near future. There's gotta be a way to structure this that is more helpful. Something like how NASA's Space Act Agreements have turned out to work so well for stimulating the development of a commercial space industry. SpaceX wouldn't be where they are without it, and today they're a very serious contender in the extremely tight launch industry -- even the Russian launch providers are looking nervously over their shoulders at them, and I don't think that would've happened so quickly without that investment. We need to move that model into more areas.

Not easy to do in the current political climate, alas, where there's a fixation at slashing anything non-defense related. But this is what I'm increasingly thinking we need to do.

Calli @45: Another issue of cost are the very exciting cell-based therapies in clinical trials (I'm thinking specifically of the CAR-Ts). The science is outstanding, and might give new treatment options where there currently aren't any, but the costs are crazy.

Every dose of CAR-T is bespoke for that patient and that patient only. Unless some truly groundbreaking advances are made in the automation of cell processing and cloning I really don't see the price coming down under a half a million dollars, even if it is priced at revenue-neutral.

PGP @38: I've heard sort-of jokes about how the reason there are no old organic chemists (as opposed to physical chemists) is because the organic chemists all mouth-pipetted benzene and died.
That one was told by the utterly terrifying chemistry department lab manager at my college, who had a whole range of gruesome stories to tell to remind us what not to do.

JustaTech -- yep, those bespoke therapies sound truly revolutionary, but the cost is prohibitive. We need some kind of groundbreaking technological advancement on par with what 3D printing is starting to make possible for bespoke manufacturing of things like implants and prosthetics. But it'll take basic low-level R&D and probably also some pure science advancements before that will become possible. In the current budgetary climate, I'm not very optimistic about that.

JustaTech@16
I am amazed that anyone is upset that a surgeon is not willing to kill them. Prn some times you boggle my mind.

Forbeit for me to criticize someone if they simply say it's beyond their skill level, expertise or experience - "try someone else". But that doesn't seem to be how the conversation usually goes. Rather declines for inoperability are more (over)generalized as futile, hopeless, and/or risky - said or implied to waste other surgeons' time.

"Inoperable" is often not just surgical risk, like a certain bleedout without R0 result, but rather often includes a perceived lack of benefit or other risks. e.g. "oh those kind of mets are always already so disseminated it's a waste of time." Or "the months off chemo with runaway growth and metastasis would negate any surgical benefit. " There often have been too many pessimistic assumptions, that lag the global art and literature for the industrious, while sending "inoperable" patients home empty handed as hopeless.

As for cost, look, a lot of drugs are terribly expensive and that’s a real problem. But please realize that one of the things that is sacrificed to make drugs cheaper overseas is quality, in terms of ingredient sourcing, testing, manufacture, packaging, shipping, etc. ....but please remember that the safety standards exist for a reason, and that reason is often that people died.
For many cheap, simple molecule, old medicines, this kind of hand wringing is greatly overstated. A lot of the QA would work even with a BA Chemistry without the ACS cert. I see old meds, discount pills in the US change from $9 for 90 retail to $46 for no valid cost based reasons.

Prn @49 "A lot of the QA would work even with a BA Chemistry without the ACS cert"
That is not QA. QA is Quality Assurance. That's the department that checks the paperwork to make sure that everything used was in expiration, that all of the monitored systems were in spec, and generally that the paper trail is solid.
QC are the people who do the lab tests. Quality Control. They do release testing (as predefined) to make sure that the active ingredient is present in the appropriate concentration. Usually there are also tests for specific contaminates. (You can't test for everything so you have to test for the most likely things.)

Here's the thing. Without both good QA and good QC there is real risk of making a product that isn't what it is supposed to be. If you don't check the paperwork on your raw ingredients you could use something that has expired, which may cause degradation that reduces the things you want or introduces things you don't want.

It is known that there are counterfeit drugs in the overseas markets. Just look at the melamine scandal in China a few years ago. That shows that QC isn't always enough.
Heck, even when there is no ill intent at all, sometimes substituting a cheaper supplier for the same product can vastly alter the end product. I've had that problem myself, even when the new supplier swore they were making the same material with the same chemical structure.

You don't like the costs, you go argue with Wall Street. Dollars to donuts the root of your problem is there, with the lesser offspring of PharmBro.

@prn #49: "I see old meds, discount pills in the US change from $9 for 90 retail to $46 for no valid cost based reasons."

Which just goes to show you haven't the foggiest idea what you are talking about.

Here's why the Quality Control (NOT Quality Assurance) is so crucial. When you ignore quality control, you get contaminants into your medication supply. When that happens you get tragedies like the compounded steroids used by neurosurgeons in back patients that led to a string of horrible deaths from Aspergillius infections. Aspergillius is a fungus often found on dead leaves, that give the leaf pile that musty odor. Normally harmless, inject it into someone's back and you get a nasty meningitis.

I had to take care of some of these patients. They did not die pleasant deaths. And it all happened because the owners of the compounding pharmacy couldn't be bothered to keep their facility clean and do good QC . . . because the costs cut into profits.

Quality has a price. So does the lack of quality. So don't sit there and tell me there is no reason for medicines to cost what they do. There is every reason for them to cost what they do.

Combatting the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

oracknows — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 01:46:53 +0000

Combatting the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

It is an article of faith among believers in alternative cancer cures that conventional oncology consists mainly of a bunch of money-hungry surgeons and oncologists who want nothing more than to cut, poison, and burn patients with cancer and charge them enormous sums of money to do so for as long as they can until the poisonous chemotherapy finally kills them. It is an evil and malicious caricature, of course. People don’t endure four years of medical school, three to five years of residency, and three years of fellowship in order to be able to cut, poison, and burn without regard for whether it’s actually helping patients. If making money is what you want to do, there are strategies far less long and brutal to accomplish that end. Moreover, even physicians who are into the money perhaps more than they should be generally still went into medicine to help people and still do want to help people. One really has to wonder what sort of sick, twisted mind can imagine that so many other human beings would be so willing to intentionally harm people. Yes, there does exist the occasional evil doctor. (Dr. Farid Fata, who administered chemotherapy far longer than patients needed in order to defraud Medicare, comes to mind.)

It is also an article of faith among these people who believe in alternative cancer cures that chemotherapy does not work. Well, they might concede that it saves 2% of patients with cancer based on an old, poorly analyzed study from Australia, in a gambit I like to refer to as the “2% gambit.” It’s BS, of course. Chemotherapy does work, and can in some cases works really well. They also routinely confuse adjuvant chemotherapy, which is chemotherapy administered after curative surgery for cancer to decrease the risk of cancer recurrence, with primary chemotherapy, which is when chemotherapy is used as a primary treatment for cancer. This leads to a great many alternative cancer cure testimonials in which the patient underwent surgery but refused adjuvant chemotherapy and now attributes his or her survival to “natural” or “alternative” cancer treatments. In fact it was the surgery that cured the cancer, and these patients were just lucky not to have had a recurrence. The testimonials of Suzanne Somers and Hollie Quinn are examples of this form of testimonial. So is the cancer cure testimonial of Chris Wark, of Chris Beat Cancer.

Wark was unfortunate enough to develop colon cancer as a young man and underwent surgery for it. Because his tumor had spread to his lymph nodes, he was at a high risk of recurrence, and chemotherapy was recommended. Wark refused in favor of naturopathic quackery. Fortunately, he lucked out and survived. Unfortunately, he’s now so convinced of the efficacy of alternative medical therapies that he’s now promoting them and the myths I mention above. It’s belief in those myths that allow him cite something like Groundbreaking study finds half of breast cancer patients don’t need chemo with a snarky “Sorry, big pharma”):

The shocking results of the long awaited MINDACT clinical trial are in. Many breast cancer patients have been receiving chemotherapy treatments they didn’t need, and that made no difference in their survival.

This is thanks to a genetic test called MammaPrint, which determined that nearly half the women slated for chemotherapy based on standard clinical recommendations didn’t need it.

After surgery to remove their tumors, early-stage breast cancer patients (0-3 positive nodes) with a MammaPrint score recommending against chemotherapy had a 95% survival rate, said co-researcher Laura van ‘t Veer, the test’s inventor.
“That’s very high, and we showed that it doesn’t differ between those who are treated and those who are not treated by chemotherapy,” said van ‘t Veer, leader of the breast oncology program at the University of California, San Francisco Diller Family Cancer Center.

Mr. Wark is rather behind the times. The development of genetic tests that predict benefit from chemotherapy is very much a hot area of research right now. Indeed, in breast cancer, we’ve been using just such a test for several years now: The OncoType DX test, which was intended for patients with cancers that have not spread to the axillary lymph nodes yet, have the estrogen and/or progesterone receptor (i.e., are hormone receptor-positive), and are negative for the HER2 protein. While this might sound like a small subset of cancers, it’s actually the most common variety of breast cancer. The Oncotype is a 21-gene test in which—yes—21 genes are measured by PCR and a recurrence score calculated. High recurrence scores definitely benefit from chemotherapy, and low recurrence scores definitely do not. Unfortunately, there is an intermediate range of scores for which the benefit (or lack thereof) from chemotherapy benefit is uncertain, and we expect the results of a clinical trial testing whether there is benefit in chemotherapy for intermediate scores to be reported soon. We also soon expect to know whether the OncoType recurrence score is useful in patients with cancer and 1-3 positive lymph nodes, patients who now routinely receive chemotherapy. The point is, this test is already in use in routine clinical practice; indeed its use is recommended in national guidelines. Until recently, it was by far the most favored test in the US because it could be performed on paraffin-embedded tissue.

The MammaPrint test is similar to the OncoType, except that it uses 70 genes to generate a recurrence score. Now, 70 genes are not necessarily better than 21. Be that as it may, though, the main reason MammaPrint was not favored in the US was because it required fresh tissue, which made it a lot less convenient. Since the test was updated to be used with paraffin-embedded tissue it appears to be gaining popularity. MammaPrint has an advantage over OncoType in that it can be used in cancers that are hormone receptor-positive or -negative.

Now, the MINDACT (Microarray In Node negative and 1-3 positive lymph node Disease may Avoid ChemoTherapy) clinical trial is a multi-center, prospective, phase III randomized study comparing the MammaPrint gene expression signature with a common clinical-pathological prognostic tool that I’ve discussed many time before while discussing alternative cancer cure testimonials (Adjuvant! Online) in selecting patients with negative or 1-3 positive nodes for adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer. The trial was set up this way (note that “C” = clinicopathological criteria and “G” = MammaPrint gene test):

The participants were then divided into four groups: 2,745 were categorized as having low risk of recurrence by both risk-assessment methods (G-low/C-low), 1,806 were categorized as having high risk of recurrence by both risk-assessment methods (G-high/C-high), 592 were categorized as having high risk of recurrence by MammaPrint and low risk of recurrence by Adjuvant! Online (G-high/C-low), and 1,550 were categorized as having low risk of recurrence by MammaPrint and high risk of recurrence by Adjuvant! Online (G-low/C-high).

Patients categorized as G-low/C-low were assigned to no adjuvant chemotherapy while those categorized as G-high/C-high were assigned to adjuvant chemotherapy. Patients categorized as G-high/C-low or G-low/C-high were randomly assigned adjuvant chemotherapy or no adjuvant chemotherapy.

If you look at the abstract, you’ll see that use of the of the MammaPrint led to a 14% absolute reduction in chemotherapy use and patients with unfavorable looking tumors but low G-scores treated without chemotherapy exhibited a 94.7% survival. In other words, this is high level evidence that this predictive gene test recurrence score works and treatment can be guided based on its use.

So, yes, a significant percentage of women who are normally be recommended to undergo adjuvant chemotherapy based solely on clinicopathologic criteria could do just as well without it. This is indeed a great result, and I look forward to the publication of the full paper given that, since I didn’t attend the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting this year I didn’t see the original presentation of the MINDACT results and only read about them later.

So what is the point? To Chris Wark, this is:

However, even if this test says you will benefit from chemotherapy, you should know that the word “benefit” rarely means cure. It typically just means temporary tumor shrinkage. After which, the cancer often grows and spreads much more aggressively. To further educate yourself in order to make an informed decision, I suggest you read these posts about chemo, and download my free guide 20 Questions For Your Oncologist.

Come to think of it, one of these days I’m going to have to examine Wark’s “20 questions.” In the meantime, however, I can say that Mr. Wark is truly clueless here. His gloating reveals a profound misunderstanding of the MINDACT trial and its very intent. For early stage breast cancer, the primary treatment is surgery. There is no tumor left to shrink with chemotherapy. The chemotherapy is administered to “mop up” microscopic tumor deposits that might remain, and it is very good at that, which is why the multimodality chemotherapy regimens have contributed to a decrease in mortality from breast cancer of close to 25% over the last 25 years.

But here’s the real reason why I mentioned Wark’s reporting of the MINDACT trial. What this trial shows is exactly the opposite of the alt-med “alternative cancer cure” view that oncologists exist only to administer chemotherapy. While it is true that there are a lot of women who receive chemotherapy who probably didn’t need it, it’s not because oncologists want to give lots of chemotherapy. It’s because we couldn’t predict which of these women will benefit from chemotherapy. We just knew what percentage of a group of women treated with chemotherapy would survive who would otherwise have died. We couldn’t predict which individuals would benefit or not. Gene tests like the OncoType and MammaPrint are now changing that. We now can predict, albeit not 100% by any means, which individual women are likely to benefit from chemotherapy and which are not. And guess what? Oncologists love it! Fewer women with cancer receive chemotherapy, and chemotherapy use declines. And guess what else? I myself have worked with investigators right here in Michigan to document that the OncoType DX test has led to a decrease in chemotherapy use. We’re working on the manuscript now and hope to publish it by the end of the year.

It turns out that we cancer doctors don’t like the status quo, in which chemotherapy is administered to many more women than benefit from it and are working to figure out ways to reduce that number and make sure only the women who are likely to benefit from chemotherapy receive it. Breast cancer isn’t the only cancer for which we are seeking ways to do this, either.

Imagine that. Certainly, people like Chris Wark can’t.

oracknows Wed, 08/03/2016 - 21:46

Tags

adjuvant chemotherapy

Categories

https://sickofpink.com/2015/10/13/pink-gloves-are-pretty-chemo-fingerna…

Chemofingers!

As a breast cancer patient,following mastectomy,and awaiting the next part of treatment,I appreciate clear and concise information like this.

This kind of post is why I read this blog every day. Sure, I love the polemics, but you can't beat proper well-informed nuanced descriptions of the reality that quacks so blatantly misrepresent.

Many breast cancer patients have been receiving chemotherapy treatments they didn’t need, and that made no difference in their survival.

Also, many people pay for travel insurance, only to find out afterwards that the policies were a complete waste because they weren't injured or robbed while travelling.

HDB@3: Most insurance works like that. You buy it because there is a risk that something bad will happen, and you (or the bank that holds the mortgage on your house) want to make sure the downside risk is covered. (In most US states drivers are required by law to carry insurance, but the principle is the same.) The insurance company ideally sets rates such that they collect enough in premiums to cover the payouts and administrative expenses, with a little left over for profit. They know that bad things will happen to some fraction of their policy holders, but they can't predict in advance which ones it will happen to. All they can do is look at risk factors, e.g., an 18 year old driver will pay more for auto insurance than a 30 year old driver because the former is statistically more likely to be involved in an accident. But some 18 year olds manage to avoid accidents (I was an 18 year old driver once, and I never had one), and some 30 year olds do have them.

Adjuvant chemotherapy doesn't directly involve financial risk, but it is otherwise a sort of insurance against cancer recurrence. In some fraction of patients, such as Mr. Wark, the surgery is sufficient to cure the cancer. But in some fraction of patients it isn't, and doctors cannot always predict in advance which patients will be in which category. In some cases they can identify risk factors, which is the purpose of the genetic tests Orac mentions, but some high-risk patients will not see a recurrence, and some lower-risk patients will see a recurrence.

@ herr doktor bimler

I'm going to respectfully dissent and make the observation with, with insurance, you usually bet against a variety of risks and all you lose is money, while an unneeded chemotherapy is very cancer-specific and may have less trivial consequences.

Now, if you just wanted to lampshade that hindsight is 20/20, I will shut up and go wait in the corner :-)

An acquaintance of mine recently posted a video from an ND talking about how chemo is a scam, blah blah, doctors get paid directly by drug companies if they prescribe 5000 antibiotics a month but chemo is the only drug that they get paid each time they prescribe it, chemo only helps 2% of people, if everyone took selenium supplements the incidence of breast cancer would decrease by 84%, and several other nuggets of nonsense.

I find this personally offensive as he can't see medicine as a scam without including myself and my other half in that, people who are supposedly his friends. On the other hand, it's not news that this guy is gullible AF and full of sh!t. He's always forking out for the latest alt med bollocks for his non-existent medical woes, he even once passed on the offer of a glass of Krug (from us ebil pill-shilling doctors) because his Naturopath had told him he had Candida overgrowth so he needed to avoid alcohol.

I hope that people don't make decisions about cancer treatment based on something they saw on social media, but I still think it's irresponsible to post things like that as though it's true, or deserves to be heard. His caption to the video was "Word..." Humph. Yeah, I can think of a word...

Heliantus @6: gambling is gambling, and utility is utility. Stakes can be high or low, it's true, but just cause the units are not money, does not make a decision inherently different.

I want to add that for people with low risk of recurrence of a cancer, it is not always necessary to demonstrate that additional treatment doesn't help, which is an exception to the usual rule that you need to demonstrate a treatment by risk interaction. Instead, the risk for a low-risk group can be so low (say 3%) that they are not willing to undergo the additional treatment (and it's side effects) even if it does reduce the risk (say to 2%). I await to see what the paper actually demonstrates, cause sometimes what is found is what I am talking about, but the scientists then spin it to claim extra treatment gave no benefit (and it's easy to fail to reject a null hypothesis if the effect is small).

(OT: rork: I've been trying to figure out what your avatar is. Can you explain?)

Few days ago a local chiropractor on some morning radio show lambasted this or some similar study as evidence that "their" idea of "individualized treatment protocols" is gaining traction and how the "standard Western idea of pushing medicine" is reaching it's end...

They mentioned it in passing, while promoting some book or other they had published.

But I think I prefer the nuanced explanation here better, somehow.

(OT, I think rork's avatar is some type of honeycomb mushroom. I could be wrong).

So, just for grins and giggles I tried to look up these 20 questions; I admit I was curious to know what they were and how they compare to the kinds of questions I encourage patients to ask their physicians.

As I suspected, when you go to your page there's a link to a "Get your Free Guide." This invariably means giving personal information that ends up on a mailing list. I suspect Mr. Wark pays for his website by selling email addresses.

Fortunately, I keep a throwaway email address just for this purpose.

The first part I loved was the "No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the
written permission of the publisher" statement. Chris could use a primer on copyright law along with everything else since he makes a big deal on his link that it can be printed by the recipient. IE he gives you permission when he gives you the guide. And I can't imagine anyone but the truly gullible actually paying for this.

I'd also love to sit down with this guy and explain to him what palliative care really means. He clearly has no clue, given his overt hostility to it. The question is couched in such a way that presumes palliative care is bad if it isn't meant to cure you. This is a common fallacy about hospice care, but many people conflate the two and fail to realize that if you're getting Zofran for nausea caused by your chemo (or marijuana) you're getting palliative care. It's just symptom management. And if you get chemo or radiation to relieve a symptom, but without the intent to cure you, that's palliative care as well. I've seen radiation do a lot of end stage lung cancer patients some short term good in terms of being able to breathe. Ditto for a paracentesis for someone in end stage liver failure.

Some of the questions are quite sensible. Asking how long you might live if you do nothing is a reasonable question. Asking about 5 year survival rates is reasonable. I would ask about a one year survival, quite frankly. Asking if you can get a refund if the treatment doesn't work is just preposterous, and damned ignorant. It's not like asking for a refund if your car breaks down.

Asking for the Material Safety Data Sheets just exemplifies the ignorance Chris has about medicine, and he already had questions about side effects.

Oh, and apparently he doesn't seem to think an oncologist who hasn't actually taken the drugs he gives is worth much. Sure, Chris! Let me just hook myself up to this toxic chemical knowing I'm not sick at all, and knowing that chemotherapy generally doesn't distinguish between healthy and cancerous cells just to prove to you that chemotherapy is in fact a necessary treatment for your cancer.

Then he asks for references. Now granted, checking your doctor out is actually a good idea. But don't approach it like you were planning to hire an electrician or a plumber. There are support groups that can better address the concerns he raises with these related questions.

Asking how much money the oncologist makes is just downright rude.

And that's before you even get into his "transcript" of his discussion of the 20 questions.

I've tied up enough of Orac's comments section for one day. Needless to say, these are not the kinds of questions I would ask as a patient.

MI Dawn, I believe rork's avatar is a very large morel mushroom.

It goes both ways. Just recently I explained to my colleague why her elderly mother-in-law with early stage breast cancer just underwent lumpectomy, without any adjuvant radiation or chemo afterwards. My colleague was certain that the hospital was trying to save money, and because chemo is so expensive, they wouldn't give it to the elderly. Fortunately, she seemed to believe my explanation that in women over certain age with early stage breast cancer chemo is now not recommended.

"Few days ago a local chiropractor on some morning radio show lambasted this or some similar study as evidence that “their” idea of “individualized treatment protocols” is gaining traction and how the “standard Western idea of pushing medicine” is reaching it’s end…"

"Individualized treatment" in the world of woo generally means taking a "healing journey" in which you sample individual alt med therapies until you think one works (at least temporarily) for you, you run out of money or death supervenes.

I have heard this described online as "guinea-pigging" oneself.

In the Netherlands, a story is unfolding of 3 victims of cancer quackery. Three terminal cancer patient got an IV with glucose blocker from a quack in Germany by the name of Klaus Ross:
http://www.klausross.com/

The website is filled with the usual garbage from MMS to peroxide treatment and is especially focussed on 'complimentary' treatment of cancer. He claims to use 100% natural, non-toxic treatments and higher effectivity than chemo.

The three patients had complaints of confusion and headache a few day's after the treatment and eventually lost consciousness and past away in Dutch hospitals. The case is currently being investigated. There are rumours the IV's given on a monday and tuesday came from Germany, but the one on wednesday came from USA. A fourth patient is allegedly still admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands.

Just wanted to let you know of this case

http://nos.nl/artikel/2122909-kankerpatienten-duitse-kliniek-kregen-glu…

I am so grateful for all the oncology specialists who have treated members of my family over the years. Why anyone would trust some guy with a web site and no medical training over someone like you, Orac, boggles me. Yet, here in Phoenix, there's a local chiroquacktor who has a Saturday AM radio show where he routinely talks about those cancer doctors who "cut, burn and poison" their patients and then he immediately segues into a plug for a woo-filled "holistic, integrated" medical center in Phoenix. I can't stand this bottom feeder (who I think doesn't see patients anymore, basically making his living off his who (which is one snake oil plug after another)). Ironically, this stupid AF quack goes by the name of "Dr. Bob" (and of course he's got an anti-vaccine page on his web site, too).

Nice to see big pharma going out of their way to fund indoctrinated bullshit propaganda such as this !

My current avatar is indeed a morel. The big one, sometimes called thick-footed, recently renamed Morchella esculentoides. It's from Washtenaw County, MI.

Nice to see big pharma going out of their way to fund indoctrinated bullshit propaganda such as this !

I take you're not the usual Chris commenting here (for example, in #12)...

Did you even read the post or the study? I mean, how utterly awful of them to suggest utilizing tests to reduce unnecessary chemo.

You're obviously one to talk about indoctrination to bullshit propaganda...

Say Dr. Hickie, I've pre-ordered you a copy of Dr. Paul Thomas' "The Vaccine-Friendly Plan" (due to be released later this month.

"Paul Thomas, M.D., presents his proven approach to building immunity: a new protocol that limits a child’s exposure to aluminum, mercury, and other neurotoxins while building overall good health. Based on the results from his pediatric practice of more than eleven thousand children, as well as data from other credible and scientifically minded medical doctors"

https://www.amazon.com/Vaccine-Friendly-Plan-Effective-Health-Pregnancy…

Should be a humdinger!

To all who answered: Thanks! It's obvious that I have no mycology skills. I love to eat them but I've never hunted them in the wild. :)

@DB: Well, it looks a bit woo-ish, with its delayed vaccine schedule, especially when it mentions MERCURY!!! and NEUROTOXINS!!! And ALUMINUM (it's only in the MMR, IIRC). On the other hand, he does claim that all of his children are fully vaccinated. As much as I dislike woo, and the idea that his vaccine schedule is safer than the CDC recommendations, at least he's not telling parents to NOT vaccinate.

You know, if big pharma and oncologists were only interested in making as much money as possible by selling you ineffective drugs, why would they be pushing drugs that are so notoriously difficult to endure? Why would they sell you drugs that "poison" and "burn"? If the drugs are ineffective, just a scam, and they know it, they'd make a lot more money selling people innocuous ones, or even cherry-flavored.

No snake-oil salesman would pick a noxious treatment to push, so that means......that chemotherapy isn't snake oil?

Nah, couldn't be that.

I dunno Garnetstar (@22) - I've heard we know the cod liver oil must work because it tastes so bad.

the drugs are ineffective, just a scam, and they know it, they’d make a lot more money selling people innocuous ones, or even cherry-flavored.

Better yet, find a way to sell people pure water as if it's actually medicine...oh, wait.

Seems biomedical researchers just can't win - when they develop new drugs to treat diseases, they're drug pushers in thrall to Big Pharma. When they develop tests that could help people avoid unnecessary treatments, they're...um...still drug pushers in thrall to Big Pharma, I guess?

"...at least (Dr. Thomas is) not telling parents to NOT vaccinate."

You may be giving him too much credit.

Among other gems, Thomas' website advises parents on the dangers of various aluminum-containing vaccines (TOXINS!) and how to use Oregon's religious exemption to duck out on getting their kids vaccinated:

"Parents who elect to vaccinate differently from the published schedule can check the box for religious exemption based on their beliefs - whatever they may be."

Yeah, no matter what your religion's precepts say, whatever you believe rocks.

Dr. Thomas advises that the only way babies get hepatitis B is if their moms have it (outside of a few cases involving household contacts out of millions). Also this:

"Q: What causes Autism? Why are we seeing so much more autism these days?
A: While there are many theories and no one knows for certain. Dr Thomas believes that in genetically vulnerable individuals, toxins (heavy metals like mercury and aluminum, lead and arsenic), pesticides and plastics along with too many vaccines in the very young (possibly triggering an immune issue or perhaps just simply the toxic load of all the vaccines) triggers autism."

http://integrativepediatricsonline.com/faqs.html

Nope, he's not antivaccine. Nuh-uh.

Anagram for Dangerous Bacon = A Gonads Bouncer

Aluminum isn't a heavy metal.

Aluminum isn’t a heavy metal.

While making this observation has utility as a probe, the actual term is more nebulous than suggested.

Speaking or Morels, I never thought that they were worth the effort.

Portobello mushrooms taste like 5x better and are 10x cheaper.

In the Netherlands, a story is unfolding of 3 victims of cancer quackery. Three terminal cancer patient got an IV with glucose blocker from a quack in Germany by the name of Klaus Ross:
http://www.klausross.com/
The website is filled with the usual garbage from MMS to peroxide treatment and is especially focussed on ‘complimentary’ treatment of cancer. He claims to use 100% natural, non-toxic treatments and higher effectivity than chemo.

So 3-bromopyruvate is "100% natural"?
It pops up in the scammosphere from time to time but was never as popular as DCA. Sounds like it is not suitable for oral administration, but has to be perfused into an artery upstream from the targetted tumour (in order not to kill the patient)... but it's NOT CHEMOTHERAPY.

Goofle tells me that there are alt-med money-extraction centres in the US pimping 3-bromopyruvate treatment. Also that doctors don't want you to know about it. Also that it's not widely available because the pharmaceutical industry can't patent it, or because they have patented it and are now sitting on the patent, or possibly both.
It is strangely amusing that his particular not-a-doctor con-man (Klaus Ross) is recruiting his victims from the Netherlands, but he is taking advantage of the less-regulated regime in Germany to work from a house just across the border in Bracht. Like Tijuana.

the actual term is more nebulous than suggested.

I am no astronomer. Also it causes me physical pain to see arsenic described as a 'metal', let alone as a heavy one.

@Herr Doktor Also it causes me physical pain to see arsenic described as a ‘metal’, let alone as a heavy one.

If that causes you pain, you might not want to look at this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_heavy_metal

You might want to get some Morphine, or some acupuncture needles, before you edit this.

it causes me physical pain to see arsenic described as a ‘metal’

But it is a 'metalloid' --

Arsenic doesn't seem much like a metal in its so called yellow form, but it also has a grey form known tellingly as metallic arsenic.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcast/interactive_periodic_table_tr…

At ambient conditions bismuth shares the same layered structure as the metallic forms of arsenic and antimony, crystallizing in the rhombohedral lattice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth#Physical_characteristics

Is there such a thing as mercury antimony oxide??

metallic forms of arsenic and antimony

FINE let's call hydrogen a heavy metal too, see if I care.

Annabel Lee: Actually, morels ARE free, as long as you know your mushrooms, and can get to the woods at the right time. Do you enjoy being stupid or something?

@PoliticalGuineaPig

Do you enjoy being stupid or something?
Actually, morels ARE free,
For half of the United States during a few months out of the year. http://community.deergear.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Morels.jpg

Tell that to someone who lives in Arizona.

This is what happened to the other Guinea Pig that called me stupid: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZBxZjdG2Cmw/T8m1Oq2s3zI/AAAAAAAABnI/WNUab_iCO…

@ Dangerous Bacon #20--gee, how could you have known how keen I am to read "Dr. Paul" and his anti-vaccine screeds? I don't give a hoot what Paul Thomas claims--he's just as bad as Sears or Gordon in that he enables parents to minimally delay vaccines if not skip some or outright not vaccinate at all. It's hard enough to keep kids on the vaccine schedule without YAQ (yet another quack) coming along to tell parents it's ok not to follow the CDC schedule.

I am amazed how these "I'm not anti-vaccine" pediatricians who really are very anti-vaccine can write books and come up with "schedules" despite never having participated in real research projects or having published a single bit of research in any peer-reviewed journal. To me, it's criminal.

I was sitting here trying to understand why these wackadoodles think a great example of scientific medicine improving itself proves its a fraud, but then I remembered. In the alt med world, it's possible to be 100% right. If you ever change your mind, it means you're either incompetent or lying. Naturopathy is always right and needs no improvement - we just need to figure out what the patients are doing so wrong they die.

This is what happened to the other Guinea Pig that called me stupid: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZBxZjdG2Cmw/T8m1Oq2s3zI/AAAAAAAABnI/WNUab_iCO…

And the ban hammer comes down.

O/T but if anyone is interested: http://www.anh-usa.org/vaccine-science-is-not-settled-a-critical-review…

By our favourite "epidemiologist" (not Jake).

And the ban hammer comes down.

What, now? They're all "Fendelsworth," unless Mitzi Gilberttimmeh discovered some tag-along creativity or managed to create the whole shebang, which differs from the earlier HELP ME BLACK HELICOPTERS AND ASSASSINS noise only in terms of duration.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are under studies for cancer treatment and it seems that the related studies are making breakthroughs smoothly.

Annabel Lee: Tell that to someone who lives in Arizona.

Your problem, not mine. You chose to live with your fellow dingbats. Although, judging from your posts, I suspect you live in Florida. Not a state with a lot of smart people, and boy does it show. Real smart, internet tough guy- that's not even a good threat. I bet you are actually a twelve-year-old boy.
Orac: Really? Thanks, but I was kind of enjoying chewing on 'her.'

My personal beef with Fata is that the very existence of him, and frauds like him, is taken as a gilt edged Get Out of Jail Free Card by every crackpot that I have to deal with. If I am trying to explain how the FDA approval system works, little elenacarlena can sneer "Fata shows us everything we need to know about Big Pharma" and run off to celebrate a smashing victory with her fellow goons.

These people are implacable. I once had a guy lecture me that the Minamata disaster proves that the mercury in vaccines is known to be deadly. That is as logically coherent as "you scientists lied to me about cigarettes, now I can never trust another scientist ever again!" but it seems to be rhetorically effective on its intended audience.

Can't remember my 'nym @7

I always wonder how the alt-med conspiracy theorists explain how that "doctors get paid directly for x amount of y drug they prescribe" lie works in systems such as the UK one, in which ALL NHS doctors are salaried and employed by NHS trusts, and we have rules on gifts so tight that you have to declare a box of chocolates, and folk are sacked for fraudulent over-time or shift allowance claims...

Oh, and anyone who turns down a glass of Krug is automatically untrustworthy (says he looking up at the empty "trophy" Krug bottle from our 20th wedding anniversary).

@DB: Thanks for the additional info about Paul Thomas. I hadn't gone to his website; I only looked at the Amazon page. Serves me right for trusting a publishing blurb.

I ran across his to-be-released vaccine book while checking out the ever-expanding antivax literature. I'd forgotten that Thomas got a mention on RI a couple of years ago.

"The depressing thing about this latest round of antivaccine projection is that it’s all so depressingly the same, a fact made even more depressing by an actual “integrative pediatrician” named “Dr. Paul” Thomas, who in response to the SafeMinds piece chimed in with a spectacularly brain dead blog post in which he proclaims Andrew Wakefield to have been right and not to have committed research fraud."

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/06/12/tactics-and-tropes-of-the-…

@MI Dawn #47: Another tip-off to me that this "book" by Thomas was crap without having to crack its yet-to-be-released cover is his co-author is anti-vaxxer journalist Jennifer Margulis, who pretends to be "pro-vaccine safety" and unlike the subject of today's RI blog doesn't have the decency to simply come out and admit she's anti-vax.

Mr Woo remains firmly entrenched in woo. He continues to insist there are kickbacks, etc.

I have managed to get diabetes numbers firmly in check, but after diagnosis ended up joining several low carb diabetic support groups. The members are almost cult-like, and not only do they proclaim the joys and benefits of the LCHF WOE, anyone asking questions or suggesting some of their recommendations might be dangerous (fasting one to two months without medical supervision) is rapidly attacked by others: "if you do not believe in the WOE, why are you here?", etc.

I have found it fascinating. The one encouraging months without food kept saying, "I follow the science." When I asked for the studies she has read supporting long-term fasting, she sent me to her favorite alternative doctor's website, where I found anecdotes and a small pilot study linked to which studied a diet alternating as much as you want with 25% of calories the next day (only study I have found so far), hardly scientific evidence that drinking nothing but water and eating nothing at all for 30 to 60 days is safe, or that it "rejuvenated" the pancreas.

This blog has taught me a lot. I wish that woo true believers were willing to listen.

@Mrs Woo,

Good luck with your diabetes management.

Is it type 1 or 2?

My wife got type 2 when we had our little girl and we've been working with it ever since. Nonstarchy vegetables are a must (forget the peas and corn, and beans cause problems too.). But sometimes things that should be OK cause a blood sugar spike.

We switched to whole grapefruit (lower K because of a kidney problem) and oranges, but the grapefruit are harder to chew these days.

She spends an hour every day on a recumbent bike and that has really helped her bp and cholesterol.

@squirrelelite: I spend 30 minutes, five days a week on elliptical trainer set for random program and 20 minutes, five days a week, weight training. I avoid everything you suggested and usually have a fasting blood glucose between 65 and 85, and post prandial readings between 86 and 120 (sometimes I give in to the siren call of ice cream).

Type 2, same as Mr Woo. Even with my careful meal planning and exercise example, he continues to web search and try "diabetes cure," and has fasting blood glucose 140 - 200.

Magical thinking must be addictive.

Thank you for the well wishes. I share the same for Mrs Squirrelelite. It is a frustrating disease to manage!

@Mrs Woo,

Thanks! It sounds like you're doing reasonably well.

Her sister has diabetes also and is having more trouble.

Good luck!

Thank you for alerting me to the report of the German cancer clinic. I have followed the development of 3-Bromopyruvate closely for many years and have tried to keep informed about the ongoing research advances. It is probably best not to make guesses of what could have caused the problem at the clinic at this time.

#MI Dawn

Oh Thomas looks antivac all right.

From his blog

So if it’s not the Zika virus, what is it?
…
One theory that you may have read about in the alternative media is that the microcephaly is linked to pertussis vaccination.

@ Sebastian
I thought of bringing up that clinic as well, but didn't, because everything I could find was in Dutch.
Edzard Ernst wrote about it:
http://edzardernst.com/2016/08/fatalities-in-a-german-alternative-medic…

You might find How to Become a Charlatan in 9 Easy Steps at : http://www.science20.com/edzard_ernst/how_to_become_a_charlatan_in_9_ea…
•1. Find an attractive therapy and give it a fantastic name
•2. Invent a fascinating history
•3. Add a dash of pseudo-science
•4. Do not forget a dose of ancient wisdom
•5. Claim to have a panacea
•6. Deal with the ‘evidence-problem’ and the nasty skeptics
•7. Demonstrate that you master the fine art of cheating with statistics
•8. Score points invoking Big Pharma
•9. Ask for money, much money
This is listed as item 9 on Parademic Notes for 160807 at http://parademic.typepad.com/

My favorite "quack" remedy is Radithor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

Eben Byers took so much Radithor, that they buried him in a lead casket!

@Annabelle Lee

Wow. They're really complaining that they can't get mani-pedis!? Good God! If I were in that situation, I wouldn't care what my nails looked like, because I would just be grateful to be alive for another day.

I have noticed that many alternative "cure" e-books cost $27. Some might go as high as thirty. It makes me wonder if there is a "sell your book" alternative guru marketing course out there that has calculated that thirty dollars or less is the amount most desperate marks will shrug off when your miracle recommendations fail to work for them.

I just came across this Hardin Jones guy that says....

"For a typical type of cancer, people who refused treatment lived for an average of 12 1/2 years. Those who, accepted surgery and other kinds of treatment lived an average of only three years!"

http://www.rethinkingcancer.org/resources/magazine-articles/2_1-2/cance…

This guy is from UC Berkeley, the same place where Peter Duesberg says the same thing about AIDS.

So is getting chemo/rad just an expensive way to die faster?

Dr.. Hardin Jones made that claim in a paper published in 1956. Dr. Jones died in 1978. The article Richard Clarke linked to did not happen to mention either of those facts, suggesting that he wrote the article by placing his name in the byline and suggesting that the information was recent. The article does not read like one written by Dr. Jones, as it refers to him in the third person consistently. Naturally, the information is not all that recent. The article provides no links to the source material.

It appears that this article is intentionally deceptive. or deliberate click bait.

Oh, by the way, Snopes has an article on this as well.

Yes. That article looks like an assemblage of quotations.

Did Hardin Jones publish an article on this or go straight to paperback?

I think the Gerson diet is the best diet for cancer.

What would you rather have, a radiation-death beam, or a pineapple?

I would have to go with the pineapple.

... except that you are forgetting one measly factor : what is the most likely to work ? Side-effects come after in the equation.
If there is no evidence of the pineapple curing my type of cancer, I would have to go with the "radiation beam" (or whatever treatment has the most evidence for my type of cancer).
(As an aside, I recently discovered that ultrasounds seem seriously considered as an alternative for some cancers, partly because they may be as effective with fewer side effects.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancers-in-general/treatme… )

A "natural health" huckster offers to help the victims of a cancer fraudster by giving them his supplements for free. It doesn't go so well.

oracknows — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 02:00:19 +0000

A "natural health" huckster offers to help the victims of a cancer fraudster by giving them his supplements for free. It doesn't go so well.

Forgive me, dear readers.

Ever since Mike Adams, the crank who runs and “alternative health” empire and a website with as much traffic as the NIH website, started targeting me two months ago with a series of libelous posts, I haven’t mentioned him much, for the simple reason that I don’t want to drive any traffic his way. Also, after his having posted 25(!) articles targeting me over the last two months, the most recent just this weekend, I realized that addressing him directly is too much like wrestling a pig in mud. You get dirty, and the pig likes it. However, yesterday, Adams outdid himself in a way that I had never seen before and in so doing revealed that families of patients wronged by a different kind of quack than the alternative medicine quacks usually discussed here recognize an opportunist when they see one. Adams’ reaction to these patients’ rejection of his offered “help” provided me with the most deliciously intense sensation of schadenfreude I can recall feeling in a long time.

The “different kind of quack” to whom I refer is Dr. Farid Fata. Dr. Fata, as you might recall, is an oncologist who was caught three years ago scamming Medicare and Medicaid by administering chemotherapy to patients for far longer than they needed it or even by administering chemotherapy to patients who didn’t need chemotherapy at all, some of whom didn’t even have cancer. Incredibly, he pulled in tens of millions of dollars a year with his scam. Fortunately, Dr. Fata was convicted and locked up for a very long time, never to practice medicine again. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of patients who were harmed by Dr. Fata out there, and the legal proceedings on behalf of these patients seeking compensation continue to grind on three years later.

The most frustrating thing about Adams’ tirades against me have not been his actual tirades. After all, that he saw fit to post 25 attacks against me in a little more than two months is something that a skeptic can only view as a badge of honor, regardless of the problems it causes. To be called insane, brain damaged (due to vaccines, of course), and basically the ruler of health topics on Wikipedia (I'm not even an editor there) by Mike Adams is a badge of honor. It means that, over the years, I've really been effective in countering Adams' lies; otherwise he wouldn't bother with me. Even Adams’ explicit attempts to drag my cancer center’s name through the mud in his rants against it, his intent obviously to prod my cancer center leadership into pressuring me into shutting up—to its credit, it hasn't done so—wasn't anything I haven't experienced before, albeit not to this degree. No, what’s been most despicable is that, over and over, Adams has tried to link me with the evil that is Dr. Fata. Never mind that I never met the man, much less worked with him. Never mind that Dr. Fata never had privileges at my cancer center. Never mind that I have nothing but contempt for Dr. Fata for what he has done and publicly expressed that contempt when he was first arrested. Unfortunately, another reason for my contempt is that Fata could not have provided a more useful greedy, chemotherapy-pushing villain for cancer quacks every where to point to if he had tried. Dr. Fata is the living embodiment of everything Mike Adams rants about the "cancer industry"; so it's not a surprise that Adams loves to try to use him to attack science-based medicine and sell his supplements.

Given that I'm not exactly a famous or highly influential figure, I don't know why Adams singled me out for more relentless attacks than pretty much anyone other than Kevin Folta and Paul Offit. Whatever the reason, Adams has been relentless in trying to link my name to Dr. Fata. This, perhaps, will allow you to understand why I found Adams’ latest post, Health Ranger threatened by Dr. Fata chemotherapy victims group after attempting to donate immune-boosting nutritional supplements to its members, so hilarious. I must admit to laughing out loud when I came to Adams' statement, "This is not a satire piece." The story begins 8 weeks ago or so, when Adams, perhaps inspired by me, perhaps not (I don’t know, although at the time he was in the middle of his first, most intensive wave of attacks on me), decided that he would offer to Dr. Fata’s patients his Nutrition Rescue Vitamin C from his Natural News Store in powder or capsule form, which he advertises as “100% non-GMO, China-free vitamin C sourced from Scotland,” all, to “boost the immune systems” of patients “harmed” by chemotherapy. It was an obvious publicity stunt, with Adams claiming that vitamin C would reverse the adverse effects of chemotherapy on the body.

So what happened? This:

File this in the category of "no good deed goes unpunished." After making a nationwide pledge to donate large volumes of immune-supporting vitamin C dietary supplements to victims of Dr. Farid Fata's criminal cancer treatment fraud, I have now been directly threatened by the delusional leaders of the Patients and Families Treated by Dr. Fata group for daring to offer humanitarian assistance to their members.

Over the last eight weeks, since announcing my Nutrition Rescue donation program, myself and my staff have been repeatedly and persistently attempting to donate over $20,000 worth of non-GMO, laboratory verified vitamin C dietary supplements to victims of Dr. Farid Fata, the criminal cancer doctor now serving 45 years in prison for committing massive medical fraud.

Despite my long track record of making huge non-profit donations to victims all around the world (see the timeline and links below), the response to our attempted donations from the self-proclaimed "leaders" of the Dr. Fata victims group has been nothing short of sheer derision bordering on psychopathic lunacy. Today the leaders of the group hilariously threatened to report me to the FBI for daring to try to donate nutritional supplements to them.

Again, forgive me, dear readers, if I can’t help but note the irony here, given that Adams reported me to the FBI and my state attorney general two months ago for...what? Don’t ask. It was incredibly ridiculous. Now Adams is complaining when someone threatened to report him to the FBI? Delicious. I’ve never met any of the leaders of this group, but now I sure as heck would like to. As much as they’ve suffered at the hands of the quack Dr. Fata, they appear not to have lost their appreciation for science- and evidence-based medicine.

Of course, this being Mike Adams, he just can’t leave well enough alone and let it go, even though that's exactly what he should have done. These are, after all, patients and families who have suffered enormously at the hands of a greedy and evil doctor. Some died as a result. In other words, they are exactly the same sort of people whom Adams claims to champion with his "natural healing" advocacy. Even if they refused him, if Adams really cared about them the way he claims that he does, the correct thing for him to do would have been to keep his big fat trap shut. Is that what he did? Come on! This is Mike Adams we're talking about! Let’s just put it this way. Adams brags about his “long track record of year after year of making very large donations of food, nutrition and food education grants to children, expectant mothers, families in developing nations and victims right here in the United States” and how he had “reached out with a sense of compassion, healing and a selfless attempt to help fellow brothers and sisters who had been victimized by a treacherous cancer fraudster,” and then in the same paragraph refers to Dr. Fata's patients, cancer patients who have suffered enormously because of his fraud, the “bedrock of victimhood insanity” and of exhibiting behavior bordering on "psychopathic lunacy." Stay classy, Mike. Stay classy.

Adams isn’t finished, though:

These cancer fraud victims, you see, have been told by some ignorant doctor that vitamin C is worthless. And they've been so brain damaged by Dr. Fata that they still believe whatever medical lies brainwashed doctors tell them. Nobody has told them that chemotherapy strips vitamin C and other nutrients from the body leaving patients in a state of nutritional deficiency. They aren't interested in hearing that. They just want to be victims for as long as possible, it seems, while attacking and threatening anyone who might actually try to help them.

It makes me genuinely wonder: Just how badly did Dr. Fata's illegal chemotherapy damage these people, anyway? (Seriously, that's not a flippant insult. I am genuinely concerned that "chemo brain" side effects have damaged the brains of these people beyond any ability to reason, and I don't know how to help them anymore...)

And keep in mind that if McDonald's had offered to donate $20,000 in Chicken McNuggets to this group, they would have no doubt welcomed it with open arms, celebrating the McDonald's corporation as being "compassionate" to cancer fraud victims.

I’m not that doctor who told Dr. Fata’s victims that vitamin C is useless for the simple reason that I’ve never met any of them. However, if any of them had approached me, I would have told her that Adams was massively overselling any potential benefits of vitamin C and, also, to run, not walk, away from him. Notice, though, how it’s not enough to refer to Dr. Fata’s victims as the “bedrock of victimhood insanity,” but Adams has to say they are brain damaged due to the chemotherapy they received. He is just that narcissistic. He really can’t imagine that someone who isn’t insane and/or brain damaged would turn him down. He really can’t imagine that someone who isn’t insane or brain damaged would see through his offer, which appeared to me to be nothing more than some very obvious self-promotion, a means of promoting himself and his website by attacking the “cancer industry” and doing something that can be sold as doing something good for Dr. Fata’s victims. He really can't believe that anyone who isn't insane or brain damaged would disagree with him in any substantive way.

Of course, it never occurs to Adams that these are people who have been horribly wronged. They trusted Dr. Fata, and he betrayed them. Some have had family members die because of their trust in Dr. Fata. No doubt, since then, they’ve likely been approached by all manner of opportunists and fraudsters with glib promises. It would be not be the least bit surprising (to me, at least) if they were very cautious about people approaching them for anything—even to the point of being a little paranoid, because they don’t want to be victimized again or even just taken advantage of or used as a promotional tool. It would be completely understandable if that were true. One has to wonder how Adams approached them. Reading between the lines, it sounds as though he and his staff were relentless, which to me would send up red flags right there. Also, if you’ve ever seen Adams in his videos, you know he puts out a creepy vibe that instantly makes one not want to trust him. Whatever happened, I’d be very curious to hear the other side of the story.

Not satisfied with calling the victims of a cancer fraudster insane and brain damaged for having had the temerity to turn down his offer, Adams next pivots to urging the members to get rid of the leaders of their group, referring to the victims of Dr. Fata as a cult:

Some people just want to be victims, it turns out. Or they want to rule over victims they can control. It's sick, demented and even cult-like in its influence over whatever human victims can be preyed upon. For whatever reason, the cancer industry seems to attract the most sick-minded victim predators of all, which is exactly why Dr. Farid Fata was able to get away with earning millions of dollars by exploiting innocent patient victims in the first place. Somehow, the cancer industry just seems to attract people who are willing to play an active role in their own victimization... and I really don't get it. Doesn't compute!

And then actively trying to shame leaders of a group of cancer patients defrauded by a greedy cancer quack before lecturing them that they should be thanking him for being such a fantastically generous guy:

To those leading the Dr. Farid Fata victims group, you should be ashamed of yourselves. You are fools -- if not psychopaths -- and you betray the interests of the 1400 victims you falsely claim to be assisting. You have taken 1400 victims of the cancer industry fraudsters and have made it worse for them. Do you have no ethics or morals whatsoever?

Funny, but that’s exactly the same question I’d ask Adams to his face if I were ever to meet him. I'd ask the same thing of Adams' sycophantic followers, most of whom are agreeing with him totally in the comments, one of them even going so far as to write, "I'm thinking they may feel that if they are "cured," they will have no Lawsuit..." (Again, stay classy, there.) Unfortunately, I know what the answer is, given Adams' willingness to attack cancer patients defrauded by Dr. Fata because they appear to have seen through his “generosity.” In fact, it’s hard for me to decide who is worse: Dr. Fata or Mike Adams.

oracknows Tue, 06/28/2016 - 22:00

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Oh how I laughed.

MIke must be struggling to sell his Vitamin C to his marks. This might be because I am able to find an alternative brand of Non-GM Vitamin C for a third of the cost of Mike's.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find any suppliers of GM Vitamin C to compare prices.

it’s hard for me to decide who is worse: Dr. Fata or Mike Adams.

False dichotomy. Adams is just a little more circumspect in who he cripples and kills.

China-free vitamin C
Contains no crockery. That is good to know.

myself and my staff have been repeatedly and persistently attempting to donate
I think that's called "stalking". Also, injury to grammar.

And keep in mind that if McDonald’s had offered to donate $20,000 in Chicken McNuggets to this group, they would have no doubt welcomed it with open arms

When Adams' decisive argument consists of imagining how his opponents would respond in a hypothetical situation, and condemning them for behaviour he imagined, he invites comparisons with a Dollies' Tea Party, where he can be sure of controlling all sides of the conversation.

the response to our attempted donations from the self-proclaimed “leaders” of the Dr. Fata victims group has been nothing short of sheer derision bordering on psychopathic lunacy

It is not clear what Mr Adams intends the word "derision" to mean here... he seems to believe that it means "bewildering, hostile irrationality".
It is almost as if he has been on the receiving end of derision so often that for him it has acquired a negative meaning, far removed from the way the rest of us understand it.

"Non-GMO vitamin C"

C'mon, Mike. Show us the difference between your vitamin C and GMO-derived vitamin C. Apart from the price.

“chemo brain” side effects have damaged the brains of these people beyond any ability to reason

Be it mercury, chemtrails, GMOs or cancer chemo, these drugs seem to have the innate ability to specifically target the brain centers responsible for "seeing that Mike Adams is right" *. The victims are otherwise mostly functional human beings.

* a.k.a. the gullibility center.

I can't help but enjoy the irony of Mike accusing someone else of running a cult.

But, but, Lenny, it was made in Scotland and everything, so it must be the proper good stuff...

“100% non-GMO, China-free vitamin C sourced from Scotland,”

China-free? OK, but is it also Scottish-free?
Does it come with bagpipes, plaids, rocks from the LHC (Large Hadrien Collider), or European treaties?

he invites comparisons with a Dollies’ Tea Party

The tea party I have in mind is the one involving the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.

It is not clear what Mr Adams intends the word “derision” to mean here

I wonder if it is a malaprop for (or Autocorrect's interpretation of his mangling of) "delusion". The insanity reference supports this idea. But I can't rule out a case of "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

How is he still a thing? How do people read this type of self-serving shit and still support him? Jesus.

I am fairly sure Adams would be right about the low levels of vitamin C since it is a water soluble vitamin and needs to be replaced regularly. And since (in my limited experience) chemo receiving cancer patients are, as a group, less likely to be eating anything, they may indeed need vitamins.
.
But wait. Is there a science based way to determine the need? Why yes, there is.
.
And if Adam's states his vitamins are lab certified, do you suppose he means his lab? With all that equipment he clearly doesn't know how to use? Lab certified to make him wealthy.

As I mentioned in a comment in another thread, I think this was more than a NonCompos News publicity stunt. It was part of a familiar pharma tactic of giving out "free" samples in hopes of drumming up future business* - the very same tactic NN has condemned.

*from the sort of people who can be flimflammed into thinking it's worth paying a big premium to get "non-GMO" vitamin C tested in Mr. Proficient's Super-Duper Laboratory (with real glassware and everything).

@ MikeMa

chemo receiving cancer patients are, as a group, less likely to be eating anything, they may indeed need vitamins.

That's true, but the people on the receiving end of Mikey's gifts*are former patients of Farid Fata and the patients' relatives.

I suppose those who did really have cancer may still be under chemotherapy today, but unless I missed something (e.g. lingering effects of Fata's chemo courses, like loss of appetite), most of these people aren't anymore on chemo, and thus would likely have resumed a normal diet with all the vitamins they need.
(I hope?)

* Timeo Adamo et dona ferentes

I am fairly sure Adams would be right about the low levels of vitamin C since it is a water soluble vitamin and needs to be replaced regularly. And since (in my limited experience) chemo receiving cancer patients are, as a group, less likely to be eating anything, they may indeed need vitamins.

Well, assuming a chemo patient requires vitamin C I'd wager there are better ways than what Mike provides. Say few organges or maybe lemons if you are into that? Or some other fruits/veggies rich in the stuff. And that'd be even better, since those are natural!

Ah. Sorry for double post, but I realize I was unclear. I meant that lack of vitamin C can be provided from foods now, that they are done with curation, since as Helianthus rightly points out Mike's marks are former chemo patients/families.
Please pardon the blunder.

Well, that was a disgusting thing to read about.

Is narcissism a non-GMO vitamin C injury?

Shame on Adams for thinking that cancer patients are weak, mind or body. Or that their support systems are simple-minded fools flailing at any quack remedy thrown their way.

Adams' history of successful predatory marketing seems to have hit a wall. Good.

I wasn't going to respond to any of his attacking, however I want EVERYONE to know he NEVER approached our group! We happen to come across it 1 day. We NEVER threatened him either.
That's all I am going to say about this @##!!

I'm someone that may be called a 'leader' in the Patients and Families Treated by dr fata. That article written by Mike Adams is riddled with lies and the contempt he spewed for victims standing up and not allowing themselves to be victimized by more scum was shocking and appalling. He is the lowest of scum. We are fortunate to have a friend in our Attorney General's office who has been a liaison in communicating with this self-proclaimed health ranger.

sheer derision
Presumably while expressing their scorn and contempt for Mike, they were laughing (metaphorically) in his face?

Oops missed closing quote.

Sounds like I have a new market for my patented magic rock that is guaranteed to keep Orac and friends away. I should send him an offer to donate this wonderful magic rock, a $15,000,000,000.00 value, to him for only the shipping costs.

There is truly no depths some folks won't stoop to.

So, for the want of a mailing list of those who were mistreated by a quack with chemotherapy, Adams has gone asscorbic. And he has the gall to offer something without any clinical evidence of a definite clinical benefit to those he seeks to target. Reminds me of those accounts of missionaries and others who, for one reason and another, duped the indigenous tribes of the Americas. After the Indians realized the falsehoods of the claims, it seldom ended well for the perpetrators.

That man gets more charming with every post doesn't he? How sad for him that his act of selfless compassion was met with derision and rejection. Clearly there is something very wrong with these so-called victims who don't even want to get well if they reject Mike Adams as the messiah of natural health. Or perhaps he's just the messiah now given his forays into political postings?

If the vitamin C is from Scotland though then he should really give it back given their stereotypically famous lack of fruit and veg.

I'm sure the Fata victims group rejected Ranger's Vitamin C immune system booster because, well, nothing really good comes for free, and they're all already purchasing the much, much better immune booster Truehope OLE™. Tony Stephan's been giving them a 'Health Freedom Activist' discount.

Speaking of Truehope, Mike Adams might want to invest in some EMPowerplus Advanced.

If you suffer from symptoms of a mental illness or a mood disorder and you want to address the cause effectively rather than "cover up" the symptoms with medication, Truehope EMPowerplus Advanced™ can help.

I think we should reward Mike's attempt at a good deed by offering to donate a couple bottles of EMPowerplus Advanced™ to him as a humanitarian gesture. After all, the guy's a victim, having been driven to serious mental illness by the devious, mysterious all-powerful Orac, who's attacks are enough to drive anyone stark raving mad.

(with apologies to Vogon poets everywhere)

The Health Ranger's plans went awry
when Fata's victims he did shrewdly espy,
for having learned of his ill repute
his offer they did dispute,
having well learned that once burned, twice shy.

Sayeth the goon:

For whatever reason, the cancer industry seems to attract the most sick-minded victim predators of all, which is exactly why Dr. Farid Fata was able to get away with earning millions of dollars by exploiting innocent patient victims in the first place.

The truth value of this statement can be somewhat enhanced by exchanging the word 'cancer' for 'supplement' and 'Dr Farid Fata' for 'Mike Adams'.

Naturally (see what I did there?), Mr. Adams, great, modest humanitarian that he is, when confronted by the obstinacy of this group's leaders in their refusal of his generous donation of his own products, quietly offered to give them $20,000 in cash for their cause. I am sure the check is in the mail.

" ... was able to get away with earning millions of dollars by exploiting innocent patient victims in the first place. Somehow, the cancer industry just seems to attract people who are willing to play an active role in their own victimization…"

Oh, the irony.

some of whom didn’t even have cancer

This link doesn't seem to address the claim. I'm wondering because this Detroit News item reports that "despite Maunglay's belief that Fata likely treated other healthy patients for cancer, only two are known: Flagg and another patient, who sought a second opinion after Fata's arrest in 2013."

Geraldine & Donna (#19 and #20):

That's Mike Adams' MO. He attacks. One of his favorite things to do after a celebrity dies of cancer is to write a rant about how it was actually the chemotherapy that killed the celebrity, and if that celebrity had just undergone "natural therapies" he or she would be alive today. He did it after Patrick Swayze's death. He did it after Tony Snow's death. Oddly enough, he didn't do it after Robin Gibb's death. (Robin Gibb consulted a naturopath before the end.) As for me, he has been posting a string of downright libelous articles about me (and my cancer center) since April.

For whatever reason, the cancer industry seems to attract the most sick-minded victim predators of all, which is exactly why Dr. Farid Fata was able to get away with earning millions of dollars by exploiting innocent patient victims in the first place.

I can think of a few other names that could replace Dr. Fata's in that sentence and it would be at least as true. Stanislaw Burzynski comes to mind.

Of course, Adams is in a business where he scams a bunch of money (I'm sure his revenue if not his profits are in the millions) from innocent patient victims, so this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Bob B.:

If you really want to give up all hope on humanity, read the comments after any NN posting by Mikey, especially this one. It's packed with readers saying "you go, Mike" and several who have tried to "counsel" family and friends on "natural cures" for cancer but NOBODY WILL LISTEN and instead they line up to obediently take the mustard gas chemo and nukes their murderous doctors insist upon, so said doctors can pay fort their yachts and mansions.

One especially frightening comment is from someone with a basement full of Rife machines, oxygen concentrators (that's a new one on me) and other gadgets and gizmos that all cure cancer but he can't convince his loved ones.

Yeah, but of all the comments there the one that disgusted me the most was the guy who said that the reason that the victims of Dr. Fata won't take Mikey up on his offer is that they don't want to get better because then they couldn't sue and collect a big payout. Then, after that comment, others agreed and went even further! It's enough to make the baby Jesus cry.

Oh, of course there are always tons of conspiracy nut job comments on ANY subject on NN. Or it's a false flag. Everything is filtered through the same distorted lens.

You're right though: that "insurance payout" line of thinking is especially disgusting and offensive. I haven't seen many of the follow-ups (I only looked at comments once, fairly early on after it was posted) but I'll put a hazmat suit on and venture into the cesspool later.

I hope the two commenters above from the Fata victims group publish some kind of public statement or rebuttal to Mikey's rantings, similar to what they posted here. Just to set the record straight.

This one's pretty rich:

In 2014, the Natural News Store made a series of donations to the Organic Consumers Association, the Cornucopia Institute, the Autism Media Channel and several other compassionate organizations that help those in need.

I take it that the final nine words are meant to be read in isolation despite the construction without "as well as."

" That's Adams' MO." - Orac

Right.
Since I also follow the other sickening ghoul ( @ prn) I should add that he does the same with the added insult that
if a celebrity is reported to be ill - and not just with cancer but ANYTHING whatsoever-
he asks if anyone in his IMMENSE audience knows the person or his/ her family/ workers personally so he can assist them and give them life-saving information/ protocols.

Usually, as a follow-up ( or when the person in question dies) he notes that he offered help but s/he refused because the regime was too intense or that s/he enjoyed bad food/ drink/ habits too much to embark upon the path of purity and wisdom ( or s/he was controlled by others).

Most recently the name of Ali was mentioned and previously, singers like James Brown and Prince and athletes like Arthur Ashe were as well. Many.many actors and other celebrities too.

re Mikey-
did you notice how he claims that he's a Native American? That connects to another rant wherein he says he should claim special racial status or suchlike to get ADVANTAGES like black people do.

^ Oh, and it appears that $88,000 doesn't actually buy much LivingFuel "superfood." I have half a mind to drop a line to the Hays County Food Bank to see how Mikey's promised donation went over.

^^ Perhaps best of all (emphasis in original):

"Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians."

Yes, descendents.

If you really want to give up all hope on humanity, read the comments after any NN posting by Mikey

NN is hardly alone in this regard. Many comment sites, particularly newspapers but many others as well, are wretched hives of scum and villainy that make Mos Eisley look like a high-rent district. Most of these don't descend to the level of the "insurance payment" comments on Mike's post, but it happens often enough that yes, you need a hazmat suit to read the comments.

Which is why I'm glad other people here read those comments so I don't have to. My low tolerance for internet idiocy is enough of a problem as it is. A man's got to know his limitations.

Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians.

Then why is he wasting his time on supplement scams and the like? Since he apparently has a time machine, there are plenty of ways he should be able to make real money in ways that are both easier and more ethical.

they don’t want to get better because then they couldn’t sue and collect a big payout

Who's left to be sued? Fata's assets have been liquidated into the victim compensation fund.

Readers interested in the quality of Mike's commenters should read those under his recent screed about ' 50% surviving'

“100% non-GMO, China-free vitamin C sourced from Scotland,”
I live in Scotland, but I can't recall seeing any vast spreads of orange groves anywhere around here. So I went a-googling, and discovered that I live just an hour's drive from the Western world's only ascorbic acid factory. Full of rosy-cheeked Scottish peasants cheerfully juicing organically-grown Scolttish fruits, no doubt.

Based on what I learned in my disaster management course, if Mikey sent supplements to developing countries (and that's a big if), they probably ended up with a lot of the other useless stuff that gets donated by people with good intentions: in a garbage heap.

Also, doesn't vitamin C degrade in the presence of oxygen? Wouldn't supplements go bad pretty quickly?

If you accepted this donation; this probably would have been part of the language:

By accepting this generous donation you agree to: a monthly subscription of Vit C (only $29.95) and a tube of our non-GMO lube (sourced from O'Reilly's down the street) for only $19.95. You will also be charged $9.95 shipping and handling for each bottle or tube delivered. Please provide your credit card information below.

We all know what the lube is for.

the Organic Consumers Association, the Cornucopia Institute, the Autism Media Channel and several other compassionate organizations that help those in need.

Hey, lobbyists and astro-turfers may only be writing themselves pay-cheques, but they have needs too, which they are helping themselves with.

We all know what the lube is for.

Slippery-slope arguments?

"Also, doesn’t vitamin C degrade in the presence of oxygen? "

Yup. It is a reducing agent. The oxidation rate will be low for firmly-pressed tablets kept in a closed bottle at moderate humidity. Since most of these vitamin C "supplements" are in pills that are vastly in excess of a useful dose, there's lots of room for degradation. I discovered a few 250 mg vitamin C tabs in a nearly empty bottle in the back of my kitchen cupboard. They were probably 10-15 years old and just a bit yellowed at the surface, but still distinctly acid. I also discovered it is now apparently impossible to find C in tabs of less than 500 mg.

Given that it has been almost two years since Fata entered his plea, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that anyone he treated is still vitamin C deficient as any real or imagined result of the treatment.

@ Justatech #46

Also, doesn’t vitamin C degrade in the presence of oxygen? Wouldn’t supplements go bad pretty quickly?

As a dry powder, various forms of vitamin C seem stable enough. Ascorbic acid itself seems stable over 3 years at room temperature (25°C). Source: efsa

Once in water, and/or if heated, vitamin C is indeed going to oxidize very rapidly. The same powder mentioned above last only one year if put at 40°C.

tl;dr: If the vitamins, the excipient and the packaging are of a good quality, shelf life should not be an issue.
Now, given the high level of quality control of the food supplement industry, I'm sure there is no need to worry...

Oh, double post. Doug beat me to it.

Although it might be ridiculous, I would like to know what the HR reported you to the FBI for. And yes, he spouts a lot of nonsense.

Dammit Denice#44, I went and read that article and its comment section. The stupid, it burns.

Though I do love seeing all these idiots insist that when (not if) the world falls apart, they will be amongst the lucky few to survive. I guess a survivalist version of Dunning-Kreuger.

@loslofutura:

See:

http://bit.ly/295KCho

http://bit.ly/20g6lVf

WOW, that is the strangest press release/legal complaint I have ever seen. Yep, flat crazy and malicious. Thank you for providing the links.

Narad, #40:
I think they meant to say "decedents".

After looking in on the pages of the Death Ranger, I found I needed several doses of Scottish-sourced Vitamin ETOH to recover.
I think our friend the Wealth Ranger has probably overdosed on the same.

"Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians."
There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

Adams is a person of color

If Saruman is to be believed, white is all the colours.

Orac: "@loslofutura: See:"

Adams has done a redirect and/or replaced both links with "The Top Ten Scientific... whatever" page he has. I managed to get to one of the intended pages, I don't know how long that will last:
http://www.naturalnews.com/053751_David_Gorski_conspiracy_allegations_F…

Obviously Adams does not stand strongly behind what he wrote.

I think this is a lot simpler than avoiding a huckster or medicine versus quackery.

The Dr. Fata Patients Support Group is a support group, a legal support group. If it has an office, it is not a warehouse. "Health Ranger" offered to donate a thousand (or more) bottles of vitamin. That's at least two hundred cases. Where does one store all that? How does one distribute that?

A support group is not a drug store. Let "Health Ranger" go lick his narcissistic wounds.

"Your comment is awaiting moderation."

Of course it has, it included an actual NN site. The TinyURLs provided for NN sites were redirected by Adams to his "The Top Ten Scientific... whatever" page, which is obviously nonsense.

I managed to get to one of the sites that Adams was trying to hide. He hid it for good reason, because he knows that the folks who frequent RI would immediately know he is an idiot, and would wonder if they wandered into a1990s GeoCities website. It is seriously that bad.

If Saruman is to be believed, white is all the colours.

Well, D'ur:

"Check out my photo at the top of this article. See my forehead? It's RED. That's how my skin appears all the time because I am a person of color, of Native American Indian heritage."

"I managed to get to one of the sites that Adams was trying to hide"

And the second one showed up due to Google's "autofill" feature. Woot! Adams is an idiot who believes in demons only generated by his demented mind.

It is almost entertaining, until you realize how many deluded fools actually believe what he writes... and sells.

I managed to get to one of the sites that Adams was trying to hide.

I have no idea what your last two comments are about, but there is this thing called the "Wayback Machine."

Narad, it has to do with with Adams realizing both TinyURLs were getting traffic to two very embarrassing websites. So he used his "skills" to redirect them elsewhere.

I only notice because I am on the West coast and noticed. The guy is an idiot who cannot stand by what he wrote. So he took the two websites in Orac's comment and redirected them to a really self serving stupid website.

Also, not everyone knows about the "Wayback Machine" accessible through archive.org (by the way Adams knows how to bypass that).

Sorry about the bad grammar, it is bedtime.. and Narad, you are two time zones earlier than me!

AAArgh... corrected version... "and Narad, you are two time zoneslater than me!"

It is 11pm (bedtime) here, and should be 1am for you on the next day! Are you a vampire?

Narad, it has to do with with Adams realizing both TinyURLs were getting traffic to two very embarrassing websites. So he used his “skills” to redirect them elsewhere.

I think you are giving Mike Adams too much credit. I am not sure he has enough awareness to feel embarrassed by anything he writes.

After a while he re-directs incoming traffic to certain pages on his website, regardless of where that traffic is coming from. Over the years it has been to a variety of pages that seem to have only one thing in common: they are promoting some activity of Mike Adams that he thinks he can make money from. For the last couple of years, these have been to pages about his various 'scientific' adventures.

There seems to be little rhyme or reason to this as far as I can tell. Eventually traffic to most of articles Adams writes will be re-directed.

“Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians.”
There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

This statement by Adams is pretty funny.

I suppose it would only serve to make him a martyr, but I believe those articles deserve legal action... I have no knowledge of US law, but here the stuff he wrote would be enough to press criminal charges against him or to sue.

Also I am awed by Morton's Demon in action here. How come his fans don't see discrepancy between articles full of ad hominem and calling Orac "mentaly ill", "psychopatic monster" while at the same time painting Mike as victim of a cyber bullying... It is beyond me.

Of course it has, it included an actual NN site. The TinyURLs provided for NN sites were redirected by Adams to his “The Top Ten Scientific… whatever” page, which is obviously nonsense.

I managed to get to one of the sites that Adams was trying to hide. He hid it for good reason, because he knows that the folks who frequent RI would immediately know he is an idiot, and would wonder if they wandered into a1990s GeoCities website. It is seriously that bad.

Use Archive.com or Google cache to get from those links from here. I forgot about the redirect and should have provided such a link. No time now. Gotta leave for work. Maybe later.

Adams has done a redirect and/or replaced both links with “The Top Ten Scientific… whatever” page he has. I managed to get to one of the intended pages, I don’t know how long that will last:
http://www.naturalnews.com/053751_David_Gorski_conspiracy_allegations_F…

Obviously Adams does not stand strongly behind what he wrote.

Here they are:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160421120016/http://www.naturalnews.com/0…

https://web.archive.org/web/20160511173230/http://www.naturalnews.com/0…

I used Archive.org links from the Wayback Machine, to bypass the redirect thing. Apparently Adams has some sort of redirect set up for any incoming links from this site. I had forgotten about that.

I suppose it would only serve to make him a martyr, but I believe those articles deserve legal action… I have no knowledge of US law, but here the stuff he wrote would be enough to press criminal charges against him or to sue.

Criminal charges? Nope. Libel? I thought about it and did consult lawyers. Here's the problem with that. It would be very difficult (and expensive) to win, and Adams is very rich. Moreover, there's the Streisand effect to think about. But that's not all. From other sources of information and his showing on my not-so-super-secret other blog with a one word comment ("discovery"), I've become very suspicious that Adams has been trying to provoke me to sue him and that's what he wants. Never be like Jon Snow in "Battle of the Bastards" and do what the enemy wants you to do. Don't let yourself be provoked into taking rash action.

"I’ve become very suspicious that Adams has been trying to provoke me to sue him and that’s what he wants."

That's pretty obvious. It would also be unusual for someone to try this on without first taking action to try to safeguard his own assets and render himself "judgment-proof" in the event things went pear-shaped in court, as they often do. Adams boasts that:

"Those who threaten to sue me also soon discover that I am not an easy lawsuit target, for a variety of reasons that shall remain undisclosed in a public forum."

This is not a matter to try to settle through the vagaries of defamation law, and I suspect the FBI would be rolling their eyes at Adams' complaint. But hopefully other agencies such as the IRS are taking notice.

Mrs Grimble@45: "Full of rosy-cheeked Scottish peasants cheerfully juicing organically-grown Scolttish fruits, no doubt."

Rubbish. Nothing grows in Scotland that's not embalmed in old sheep guts and pre-used Tennent's. I'm sure Mikey's Soylent C is no different.

As for what else the Scots have given the world:

Deep-fried Mars Bars
KKK
… I believe that's the lot. (After last week we're keeping all the Malts.)

…so possibly not his best sales pitch either, all things on balance.

Perhaps our gracious and magnanimous host (tm) will not have to worry much about Mikey's derisive articles because the Health Stranger is now going after Whole Foods!

Interestingly, his own bio ( @ healthranger.com) says that he isn't much involved in the social scene but he can be spotted in Austin's Whole Foods.

@ has:

And they produce cashmere scarves for Burberry.

Hang the Mars bars.

As for what else the Scots have given the world:

Irn-Bru!

I just read SD Wells's article of the 25th ( if that is the one about him that Orac meant ) and does he get it wrong!

In 2012, a commenter ( eventually corrected by the minions) suggested that sceptics pretend to be anti-vaxxers or suchlike and write wacky ideas**.
The writer is mis-identified as Orac.
It wasn't.
I was there.
Orac didn't like it.

I suppose Mikey's crew imagines that their audience will never check up on their stories.

I really 'enjoy' how the sources quoted are mostly Mike with a real one tossed in for variety.

** actually, wackier than is the norm for them

Maybe a polite request for a retraction would be respectfully entertained.

And maybe a raccoon will reveal to me the secret of eternal life.*

*one that has an odd resemblance to Kary Mullis.

herr doktor bimler@79:

As for what else the Scots have given the world:

Irn-Bru!

Technically we didn't give it; it's just what comes out naturally after all the Tennent's.

In 2012, a commenter ( eventually corrected by the minions) suggested that sceptics pretend to be anti-vaxxers or suchlike and write wacky ideas**.
The writer is mis-identified as Orac.
It wasn’t.
I was there.
Orac didn’t like it.

Yep. I thought about deleting that comment after Adams picked up on it, but then I realized that leaving it alone would be better because any person not drinking the Natural News Kool Aid would see right away that I didn't say that and that I most definitely did not approve.

I actually have one more legal question (the explanation why our gracious host won't be pursuing any action himself was along the lines of what I was expecting).

Assuming that the alleged denunciation of Orac to FBI happened. Are there any consequences Mike can suffer for filing frivolous complaint? I mean anything that could happen ex officio.

I suppose he's cunning enough to submit his allegations in a way that would avoid any such consequences, but this still boggles the mind. Where I'm at we have article in penal code that penalizes false accusations of a crime. Could one hope that he slipped and will get slapped by something similar?

Since I don't read the tabloids or loon website "news" very much, is it a common tactic to dump an unattributed quote into the middle of an article denouncing someone, in hopes of deluding readers into thinking their target said it?

Maybe the authors of such sleaze think they've libel-proofed themselves by doing that, but when piled on top of outright lies, you'd think that such insinuation would just be adding fuel to the fire.

@ Dangerous Bacon:

I've noticed that woo-meisters mix up quotes, data, attributions, dates, names, conclusions and just about everything else. Then they purely confabulate.

For excellent examples, go to prn.fm which features anti-vax articles by the Woo-meister General.
-btw- the spoken recitatives are even worse than the written.

"Are there any consequences Mike can suffer for filing a frivolous complaint?"

Whether or not this violates some law, the FBI probably gets dozens of those a day, and does nothing about any of them, as they have higher priority uses for the available time of their agents. Just because something illegal is reported to the authorities doesn't mean they do anything. The U.S. Postmaster General's office, for example, doesn't investigate mail fraud unless/until a certain (high) level of $$ is involved. (I found this out the hard way after being bilked for over $3K on an eBay auction back in the Meg Whitman days. Even though several other buyers fell for the same scam, running the total take to well over $10K, this wasn't even close to getting the feds attention.)

Just a heads up for our host: there was another nasty, libellous smear piece in NN today where he was called a murderer, mentally deranged, etc. but the post included his employer's information with an appeal to NN readers to flood the hospital with calls to get Dr. G. fired:

"We here at Natural News demand an investigation by those who employ this psychopathic, schizophrenic surgeon who is still operating, while taking breaks to blog hate crimes on the internet. If you would like to help end this madness by this multiple personality medical doctor, let your voice be heard and make contact by email or phone at the following:

info@karmanos.org
Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute
4100 John R Street
Detroit, MI 48201
(313) 966-8527
1-800-527-6266"

A question for the US-based legal beagles (I"m looking at you, Narad): at what point does free speech end and harassment begin? I'm sure the busy, hardworking dedicated staff at Dr. G.'s hospital have much better things to do than deal with Mikey's lunatic flying monkeys...

Woo Fighter:
While I am by no stretch of the imagination an attorney (Let's just say I've been told by one that I have a too-creative interpretation of statute.), it looks to me to be libelous, and actionable, since the intention is to cause actual harm. Since our beloved box of blinking lights would probably qualify as a public figure or limited-purpose public figure, the threshold of what constitutes defamation is higher. It needs to be shown that the person accused acted with actual malice, meaning that it's either intentional falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth.
However you slice it, Orac, if you're not already talking to an attorney, you should be.

Well, we know he's still reading RI.*

*while getting dedicated staffers to explain the big words to him.

A question for the US-based legal beagles (I”m looking at you, Narad): at what point does free speech end and harassment begin?

You're referring to some line between criminality and civil liability? Not happening. I recommend this as a backgrounder.

"...the post included his employer’s information with an appeal to NN readers to flood the hospital with calls to get Dr. G. fired"

Unbelievable. This isn't politics. However if it were, I would be happy to email his employer to let them know what I think of his work on the web.

Regarding the free speech issue. Is his plan to let one of his minions take the fall if they choose to start making ridiculous calls/emails to his employer. At some point that could become harassment, no?

A timely and possibly relevant article:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3295/why-haven-t-tabloids-been…

Pretty sure Hulk Hogan bodyslammed/sued Gawker to death, no?

Dinosaurs also had cancer.
http://www.health24.com/Medical/Cancer/News/dinosaurs-got-tumours-too-2…

On the benefits of a healthy lifestyle:
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/bob-mankoff/cave-cuisine
Especially recommended is the first illustration.

Because this is the most recent supplement related post, I'll note this here.

The September 2016 issue of Consumer Reports has a cover article on Supplements A Complete Guide to Safety.

It's actually reasonably good, talks about the problems of the DSHEA, and lists 15 supplements to avoid:
Aconite
Caffeine powder
Chaparral
Coltsfoot
Comfrey
Germander
Greater Celandine
Green Tea Extract Powder
Kava
Lobelia
Methylsinephrine
Pennyroyal Oil
Red Yeast Rice
Usnic Acid
Yohimbe

Risks include:
paralysis, heart problems, possibly death
seizures, cardiac arrest
kidney problems, liver damage
exacerbate Parkinson's and depression
nerve damage
hair loss

etc.

It mentioned a 2015 NEJM article that weight-loss supplements were responsible for 25% of supplement related emergency room visits.

From 2008 to 2011, the GAO found the FDA received 6307 reports of health problems including more than 1000 serious injuries and 92 deaths.

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/earliest-cancer-ever-discovered-…

Johannesburg – Cancers and tumours plagued human ancestors for millions of years, challenging the assumption that they are caused by modern lifestyles, new research has shown.

The discovery of a foot bone approximately 1.7 million years old, with definitive evidence of malignant cancer, pushed the oldest date for this disease back from recent times into deep prehistory, the University of the Witwatersrand said in a statement on Thursday.

Mike Adams is an unmitigated Con artist, which are typically sociopaths, and since he has buckets of money from the gullible he bilks he can afford to be a major wanker and reap no repercussions. He is the poster boy for the damage that can be done by allowing the supplement industry to continue completely unregulated.

Cassandra Callender, the teen who refused chemotherapy, has relapsed

oracknows — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 01:36:35 +0000

Cassandra Callender, the teen who refused chemotherapy, has relapsed

I hate these stories, because they so seldom end well. Unfortunately, this one is more messy than even the usual messiness of the typical story of this type. The type of story I’m referring to, of course, is one that I’ve told from time to time ever since near the first year of this blog’s existence, that of the child or teen with cancer who, for whatever reason, refuses curative chemotherapy in favor of some sort of quackery. The litany of names depresses me to contemplate: Katie Wernecke, Abraham Cherrix, Sarah Hershberger, Daniel Hauser, Makayla Sault...the list goes on. In the vast majority of these cases, the child has a highly curable lymphoma or leukemia. Not infrequently, the child undergoes one or two rounds of chemotherapy, and the child and/or parent, alarmed at the side effects, decides that the child doesn’t need the rest of the chemotherapy course. This seems to be more likely to happen if the child has a great response to the first round or two of chemotherapy and goes into complete remission. Unfortunately, the chemotherapy regimens for childhood leukemias and lymphomas are long for a reason. Oncologists don’t give up to two and a half years of chemotherapy because they like poisoning children. Decades ago, they learned that if they didn’t give such prolonged courses of chemotherapy, the cancer was likely to return, even if it had gone into remission after only one or two courses of intensive chemotherapy. Unfortunately, that reality has led too many parents who, understandably, can’t stand seeing their children suffering chemotherapy effects to go along with prematurely stopping the chemotherapy.

As I’ve discussed many times before and reiterated yesterday, competent adults have the right to decide their own medical care. They can choose science-based medicine; they can choose no treatment at all; they can even choose quackery. Children, however, depend upon their parents to provide them with the best medical care, because they are not considered competent to make life-and-death decisions. There is, however, as I’ve also discussed before at various times, a bit of a “gray area.” Upon reaching the age of 18, a person is legally considered an adult. But what about 17 year olds? 16 year olds? For purposes of law, a cutoff age has to be decided on, but people are more complicated than that.

All of these issues informed my discussion of a teen named Cassandra Callender, whose case achieved some notoriety and national press coverage last year because the State of Connecticut ordered her to undergo chemotherapy for her Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a treatment that her doctors estimated to have approximately an 85% chance of curing her. What made Callender’s case different is that she never received a single dose of chemotherapy before refusing. Ultimately, the court ordered her to undergo chemotherapy.

Regular readers know that I invariably come down strongly on the side of making sure that children in these situations receive treatment for their cancer. However, Callender’s case was different, because when I wrote about it Callender was 17 years old and would be 18 a mere eight months later. IN other words, she was so close to being an adult that, even though she wasn’t legally an adult, I had a bit more of a difficult time supporting in essence locking her up in the hospital and forcing her to undergo chemotherapy. I also understand that not all of my readers shared my ambivalence about this court decision. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons why seeing and answering recent attacks on me cracked me up in a way; I’m not as ridiculously hard core as the quacks attacking me seem to think. Of course, it could just be that I’m soft on this issue.

Be that as it may, Callender unfortunately somehow found her way to Ty Bollinger, the cancer quack responsible for the misinformation-filled The Truth About Cancer video series. It is an unfortunately very popular video series that has a demonstrated ability to lead people with cancer to pursue quackery instead of real medicine. Indeed, when I wrote about one such patient seduced by Bollinger's series, it, along with my writing about VAXXED and Robert De Niro, provoked a sustained series of online misinformation-filled attacks against me, including one from Bollinger himself.

The result last August, mere weeks before Callender was to turn 18, was an interview in which Callender repeats alternative medicine misinformation and rails against chemotherapy. Unfortunately, in that interview, there was a portent of doom that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to at the time but has become very relevant now. In the interview, she referred to a PET scan that she had last July that “didn’t look good” and how she was waiting for new scans at the time, leading her and Bollinger to express disgust about how “they” forced Cassandra to undergo chemotherapy that might not have completely eradicated the tumor. Of course, no treatment is 100% effective, but if there’s one thing we know about quacks, it’s that they are fond of black-and-white thinking.

Now, eight months after her interview with Ty Bollinger, we learn that Callender’s cancer is probably not gone:

A teenager who was forced by the courts to undergo chemotherapy for her cancer says a new mass has been found in her lungs.

Cassandra Callender, of Windsor Locks, disclosed the news Saturday on her Facebook page, posting an image of a CT scan dated Friday.

"This is the mass that is now inside of my lung," she wrote. "I've known about this for a while, but it's been hard going public with it. But this is why I fought so hard against chemotherapy. I am so sick of being treated like number and how everything is based off of statistics. I am a patient not a number."

Obviously, this is bad news, but Callender’s illness is far from terminal, her situation far from unsalvageable; that is, it would be far from terminal and far from unsalvageable if she were willing to undergo conventional chemotherapy. Given that she was declared to be in remission last year, it appears that what she has now is a recurrence of her cancer. As bad as that is, her life can still be saved. It requires a difficult and arduous treatment, however. In general, the treatment of choice for relapsed or refractory Hodgkin’s lymphoma is salvage chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation In other words, the patient’s bone marrow is harvested for stem cells, after which the patient undergoes high dose chemotherapy that wipes out her bone marrow and then has her bone marrow reconstituted by the harvested stem cells. It’s hard to predict the likelihood of success because I don’t know enough about Callender’s clinical situation, but salvage therapy of this type yields five year overall survival rates in the range of 40-60%.

That’s admittedly not great. It’s horrible indeed to be 18 years old and facing a future of high dose chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant whose chance of saving letting her live five years is probably around 50-50 and of rendering her cancer-free for that time is around one in three. But you know what? Assuming that lung mass as shown on Callender’s GoFundMe page is indeed lymphoma (as it appears), that’s a better chance than she has with alternative cancer treatments, which is basically zero. I don’t know what specific alternative cancer treatments that Callender wants to undergo. Her previous interview with Ty Bollinger suggests that she was interested in “natural and homeopathic” treatments. I know what homeopathic treatments are, obviously, but “natural” can mean almost anything.

Callender, of course, exhibits magical thinking on the same scale that we’ve seen time and time again in cancer patients who’ve chosen quackery over real medicine. For instance, in her last interview, she said:

Either way I’m still doing something for my health. A lot of people in media have misinterpreted, saying that I wanted to die of cancer instead of treatment, but that’s not true. I simply didn’t want the chemotherapy, something that was less harmful to your body. Cancer is harmful enough to your body. Why would you want to add more to that?

Later, she says:

I never wanted to die. I wanted another way to live.

Of course, she doesn’t want to die. No cancer patient who decides to forego chemotherapy She just doesn’t seem to understand that her choice to forego salvage therapy virtually guarantees that she will die, and die unpleasantly. Unfortunately, part and parcel of the magical thinking that leds people like Callender to choose quackery over medicine also tends to lead them not to understand that death from cancer is anything but dignified and free of suffering.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen that movie too. I know where this story is going. Callender will likely feel fine for a while. She’ll seek out “natural cancer treatments,” and it wouldn’t surprise me if she features in the next update of Ty Bollinger’s Truth About Cancer series or some other pro-quackery propaganda documentary. For a time, she’ll be a celebrity among the alternative cancer cure crowd, featured at various quack conferences as a "success story." Then, sadly, sooner or later her cancer will progress. She will die a horrible death and she will be quickly forgotten by the very people who used her to sell their pseudoscientific world view and thereby facilitate their sale of cancer quackery. If they acknowledge her death at all, they'll blame the chemotherapy she had last year for "weakening her immune system" or some such nonsense instead of the failure of whatever quackery she is using now.

Then they’ll just move on to the next mark. Unfortunately there is never a shortage of new marks.

oracknows Wed, 04/27/2016 - 21:36

Tags

Homeopathy

Quackery

Categories

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Ty Bollinger needs to be thrown in prison for a looooong time for all the people he has killed and made money from in the process. He's up there with Burzinski in terms of loathesomeness.

And of course once she dies, the reaction will be "if only she wasn't forced into chemo against her will she'd be fine". Same old, same old...

You should consider amending the end of the article to a more realistic scenario. They will not forget her, they will use her. They will say that she underwent natural treatment for her cancer but they didnt work because her body was already ravaged by the toxic chemotherapy that destroyed her immune system. Also good to remember that if the state hadnt forced her to undergo this toxic therapy, she would be alive today because of beri beri extract or (insert random herbs and enemas here.)

When chemotherapy fails (because as you note, nothing is 100%) then its because chemotherapy is bad. When natural therapies fail, its ALWAYS chemotherapy or the patients fault.

This type of story lets them hit it out of the ballpark with every point they love to make.

-chemo doesnt work
-chemo destroys immune system and health
-natural treatments cure cancer
-natural treatments didnt work because of the chemo already taken
-doctors and science are lying because they said she would be cured from the chemo and wasnt
-government overreach turned her in to a prisoner
-She would still be alive if they listened to them/bought their products

Bingo.

The sort of denialism that leads people to eschew SBM in favor of alt med because the don't like the treatments available infuriates me to no end. Sometimes it's the side effects or there just isn't an effective therapy yet, but quacks can go ahead and just say they have something better and people actually believe it and suffer for it. If I had my way all the quacks would get their posteriors tossed in jail.

What I don't get is their reasoning when it comes to why SBM would still recommend "nasty" treatments such as chemo if the stuff the quacks promote works just as well (if not better!)..?

SBM would be all over that shizzle, fo' sure. The only problem is... it has to actually work...

The artical you wrote is a story worth telling. Is it, however, so necessary to include such a high level of bias. In addition to poor form that bias reporting brings, it's just unpleasant reading the words written in that tone.

Of course this is a dreadful outcome.

I see these things from two perspectives. One side has many unsophisticated consumers, even innumerate or technically illiterate, who often have great expectations and little sense of the risks and resource requirements. But not all.

Another group has riders that often are exhorbitantly expensive, prefunctory and insufferable in their often obsolete and incomplete attentions. Some of the latter group want absolute control of minors, sometimes with obvious avarice and forseeable, unnecessarily adverse or catastrophic results with little real regard for the individual or the parents, like Justina Peltier.

From my position, I do want the diagnosis and advice of several doctors. But the interference by a hungry hospital on therapeutic choice shouldn't be countenanced in a number of situations.

Again and again, I'v seen where several technical choices are possible, some entirely unknown to the doctor(s), and the standard of care is still a death warrant.

My question:
How do at least some parents establish their competence to choose or direct in controverted medical situations without the MD? science and specific study hrs x IQ ?

Of course this is a dreadful outcome.

From my position, I do want the diagnosis and advice of several doctors. But the interference by a hungry hospital on therapeutic choice shouldn’t be countenanced in a number of situations.

Again and again, I’ve seen where several technical choices are possible, some entirely unknown to the doctor(s), and the standard of care is still a death warrant.

My question:
How do at least some parents establish their competence to choose or direct in controverted medical situations without the MD? science and specific study hrs x IQ ?

From my position, I do want the diagnosis and advice of several doctors. But the interference by a hungry hospital on therapeutic choice shouldn’t be countenanced in a number of situations.

Again and again, I’ve seen where several technical choices are possible, some entirely unknown to the doctor(s), and the standard of care is still a death warrant.

My question:
How do at least some parents establish their competence to choose or direct in controverted medical situations without the MD? science and specific study hrs x IQ ?

Amethyst@5: The flaw in your line of reasoning is that you are applying logic to a conspiracy theory. In the woo-pushers' minds, a surefire cure really does exist, but "they" don't want you to know about it, usually but not always because SBM doctors are shills for Big Pharma. Oh, and that surefire cure is no longer surefire once you have tried an SBM protocol--that means you didn't believe hard enough.

You can't reason people out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

Chemotherapy may someday be seen as the modern equivalent of blood-letting leech "therapy". Ok, thats an exaggeration, but if I am correct even in part, the change will come from science not alternatives. Modern genomics indeed treats each person as an individual and as it advances will allow each person's cancer to be screened gene by gene with treatment designed for the individual. It is already leading to new treatments.

@Eric - But Doctors still recommend chemo for loved ones, heck, even themsleves if they catch the Big C... Ugh, I guess you're right. There is no reasoning with the unreasonable.

@Kames - What tone? You mean the empathy Orac displays towards this poor young woman who has been taken in by a discpicable human being intent on abusing her for promotion/making money of/on his quackery until she inevitably dies and he tosses her aside? Yeah I can see how that tone would be unpleaseant. NOT.

You should consider amending the end of the article to a more realistic scenario. They will not forget her, they will use her. They will say that she underwent natural treatment for her cancer but they didnt work because her body was already ravaged by the toxic chemotherapy that destroyed her immune system.

Well, yes and no. Usually what happens when people who use alternative cancer cures die is that no mention is made of it. Indeed, usually their testimonials remain, like zombies, all over alternative medicine websites with no mention that the cures didn't work and the cancer patients died. The reason is simple: Quacks don't like to remind their marks of any deaths of cancer patients taking using nostrums. It's bad for business and it goes against the miraculous cure rates that quacks claim.

Now, if someone brings up the death of a patient like Cassandra Callender, then they will use the excuse about chemotherapy and other conventional treatments having "destroyed the immune system" or "weakened the patient" so that even their miraculous quackery couldn't save her. Then they will use her as an example of government overreach having prevented her from curing herself "naturally."

From Cassandra Callender:

I am so sick of being treated like number and how everything is based off of statistics. I am a patient not a number.

*sigh*
We have read or heard variations on this theme so many times (a favorite one: "you can not be sure what the procedure will do to me/that there is zero risk")

Taking a step back, I realize I have a bias as a trained scientist: I am used of thinking in terms of statistics, so I don't see anything wrong about telling people "this procedure has helped 60% of those receiving it".

But maybe it's a little unfair to expect layman people to take it in stride and not feel like they are just another number on the survival chart, especially in such stressful situations.

OTOH, providing odds of success is about the only honest information a doctor could provide to his/her patients, for them to decide to try a treatment, or not.

This is the opposite of that quacks do. They promise unconditional success and deliver none.

What tone? You mean the empathy Orac displays towards this poor young woman who has been taken in by a discpicable human being intent on abusing her for promotion/making money of/on his quackery until she inevitably dies and he tosses her aside?

Obviously, it's my tone in describing the quacks out there who lure desperate cancer patients like Cassandra Callender to forego a chance at survival in favor of their quackery that Kames doesn't like. I make no apologies.

Taking a step back, I realize I have a bias as a trained scientist: I am used of thinking in terms of statistics, so I don’t see anything wrong about telling people “this procedure has helped 60% of those receiving it”.

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. R. Lawrence Moss gave a great grand rounds at my institution in which he spoke about this very issue in the context of physicians (who, after all, are human too and prone to this kind of thinking as well). Basically, he pointed out that our inherent bias is to confirm, rather than refute hypotheses; how our cognitive structures need "rules" to explain the world. Most importantly, he described how human beings have deterministic minds in a probabilistic world. We think in black and white in terms of cause and effect ("if X then Y happens") and have a very difficult time thinking probabilistically ("if X then there is a 60% chance of Y happening"). It's true.

This deterministic thinking does indeed make it very difficult to relate outcome probabilities to patients, who might understand superficially but, because our brains think deterministically, don't really internalize this thinking. Thinking probabilistically goes against human nature. The same is true of doctors, of course, too, which is part of the reason why it's often hard to get us to change practice in response to new evidence.

Also, anecdotes almost always trump statistics. That's why anecdotes are more persuasive to patients. It's also, by the way, why a surgical disaster (a patients with a really bad outcome) so powerfully affect surgeon behavior when the next patient with the same diagnosis presents.

In late March of this year Ty Bollinger posted a video of Cassandra undergoing alternative "treatments" at the Hope for Cancer clinic in Mexico. Lots of playing in the surf and swimming with dolphins:
https://vimeo.com/user19574245/review/159381007/0e159c60d8

One month or so later Cassandra posts a CT scan (with a late April date) showing a mass in her lungs. On her facebook page one of her most recent posts was "What now?"

Obviously, it’s my tone in describing the quacks out there who lure desperate cancer patients like Cassandra Callender to forego a chance at survival in favor of their quackery that Kames doesn’t like.

Ah yes, of course. How silly if me. *rolls eyes*

If anything, you are far, faaar too respectful in your insolence towards these ghouls (especially considering the vitrol that gets spewed back at you).

@Amethyst

What I don’t get is their reasoning when it comes to why SBM would still recommend “nasty” treatments such as chemo if the stuff the quacks promote works just as well (if not better!)..?

Easily explained. They have a couple of options. First, Big Pharma™, or so they say, makes money by keeping people sick. If they actually cured people's cancers, they would lose money. Second, also tied to making money, is that the alleged cancer cures are "natural" and therefore could not be patented. If Big Pharma™ can't patent the cure, then they can't make money from it, or something, so they don't bother. Never mind the number of pharma companies that sell vitamins and dietary supplements, none of which can be patented.

It's well known that young people often don't really understand that they're mortal, accounting for some of their penchant for high-risk behaviors. I'd bet that's contributing to her decision-making.

Is there a defined logical fallacy that describes this particular way of thinking? The idea that in any given scenario (such as a cancer diagnosis), an ideal or perfect outcome MUST exist and be attainable. It seems like many of the woo-prone folks I encounter think this way without realizing it.

Why do those who choose the altie route even bother with physicians to begin with? If Cassandra mistrusts doctors so much, why rely on them to provide her with diagnostics?

I am curious about Bollinger's preferred method of 'patient farming.' There are a number of ways in which quacks can extract money from patients and I thing the farming analogy works at some levels.
1. There's the Burzinski method, which corresponds to harvesting old-growth timber: there's only one cash-extraction event. Dr B knows his patients won't be breathing long and that their money will run out, so he maximizes profit quickly.
2. There's the Mike Adams method, which corresponds to growing fruit. The fools are carefully cultivated and tended for years, with cash extractions on a frequent basis. Fertilizer, in the form of 'news,' is applied frequently.
3. There's the gardening method, which produces one crop per year and usually requires crop rotation. Someone invents something 'new,' gets it discussed on Dr Oz or some other similar form of quackery-advertisement, shears the marks and moves onto another crop when people realize that it's hokum.
4. Then there's the the industrial farming method, which recruits thousands of fools and extracts a small amount from each one.
5. Finally, there's briefcase farming, in which the quack doesn't sell products, just books/advice telling others how to grow their own quackery garden.

I realize this analogy is only partially valid, since some 'farmers' do all of the above. However, I don't know much about Bollinger - how does he work?

One of my gentlemen has a much older brother- who lives far, far away- named Peter, a perfectionist who is highly sensitive to changes in his daily routine. He already had heart issues and an aneurysm that was being watched when he discovered a lump that was diagnosed as Hodgkin's Lymphoma stage 2b (IIRC).

He was prescribed 12 ABDV treatments IIRC and 12 radiation treatments and did terribly with the chemo, losing weight, having GI problems etc. He decided to stop the treatments halfway through and was given additional radiation treatments instead. After a while, he was declared free of the illness.

He got better eventually but had to be operated upon because of the aneurysm which was quite traumatic and a long lasting impediment to his activity but he survived that too. The cancer treatments were over 10 years ago and I think he is now about 80 years old and living quite independently, driving a car and being active.

@Scotty

The closest I can think of is the "Nirvana Fallacy"

It is often countered by the cheeky comment that "Just because airplanes sometimes crash doesn't mean magic carpets work." which I quite like. Replace airplanes with any kind of woo or quackery and it works just the same! :)

Crap-crap-crap!

Of course I meant replace airplanes with SBM and magic carpets with woo and quackery!

/facedesk

@ Opus:

"There's the Mike Adams method, which corresponds to growing fruit"

Hilarious but true.
HOWEVER he is now, being the altruist he is, donating his new super vitamin C to "victims" of Dr Fata.

-btw- the other idiot persists in fruit and vegetable worship and sells their dried, powdered essences and vitamin C.

If you'd like to really get into the mindset of an adult "Cassandra," visit this site.

thevibrantlife.org and Jennifer Rose on FB.

It's really astonishing- and so very sad- how these people buy into the alty BS hook, line and sinker. Every single one.

#22 Ahh, thanks Amethyst. That actually clarifies my understanding of that fallacy. Pervasive one, that is.

"We think in black and white in terms of cause and effect (“if X then Y happens”) and have a very difficult time thinking probabilistically (“if X then there is a 60% chance of Y happening”)."

I think some of this comes from a misunderstanding between randomness and probability. A hidden or unobserved process can be deterministic (or stochastic with a random variable playing a minor role) yet appear entirely random.

This is why it is useful to understand probability as a measure of our knowledge of a system. There may be a fully deterministic process that results in a cancer (genes, eating a hamburger, then stepping outside to get hit by a meson from the particle shower of a cosmic ray collision in the upper atmosphere followed by inhaling a virus), but we can't know this. Hence statistics.

Yet our psychological makeup tells us there must be a reason, and perhaps there is, while doctors quite sensibly rely on population and treatment statistics. It's often the best that can be done.

Bollinger's body count is only going to grow.

The unassailable arrogance of your position is saddening. You actually think you possess the only valid world view as to how to live and die. How truly small you choose to remain is your decision, but do refrain from foisting your fascistic medical certainties on others. It'll bite you back one day.. and soon, we hope.

@Loraine
Really? That's all you've got?
Arrogance and evidence against smug ignorance. I'll go with arrogance every time, thank you.

@Lorraine
I assume this is directed at our esteemed host. Did you even read the article? Why not say why you think he's wrong and provide evidence for your assertion? Just spewing venom is rude and unproductive. As a single example, how is quantifying potential survival rates of young cancer patients a "fascistic medical certainty"? I assume you're a fan of alternative medicine. Do tell, what are their survival rates... if they even maintain a relationship with their victims? Most of the time they just take the money and run, leaving the real medical professionals to try and palliate their victims before they die. You ought to reserve your anger for the quacks, and not turn it on people who do their best for their patients, like Dr. Gorski.

Kames@6 Are you suggesting that false equivalency is preferable? Facts are not biased, they are facts. Presenting nonsense as if it is legitimate, just to sooth the feelings of the proudly ill-informed, would be biased.

@29 You are directly wishing ill on another human being for not agreeing with your worldview, but calling him an arrogant fascist? (Non)Physician, heal thyself.

In the human body, it's estimated that the ratio between resident microbes and human cells is likely to be one-to-one wherein red blood cells dominate our total cell count by number.

http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-bust-myth-that-our-bodies-have-mo…

Q. Is there as psychological need for some individuals to protect their resident microbes using natural cancer-therapies in place of chemotherapy.

Maybe it's time to start talking about chemotherapy as the most effective means of prolonging this symbiotic relationship.

In simplification, we share our bodies with many life forms and SBM has shown to be the most effective approach for good health.

Have you seen this author's list of blog entries? They're all hit pieces. Every. Single. One.

Kinda reminds me of Jess Ainscough and how Gerson treated her, Their reply tweet to me was ..... "We were very sad to hear of Jess's passing. She discontinued GT 3 years ago, but we were still big fans of hers."..... They obviously still are as her photo is still used in advertising on their web site.

Have you seen this author’s list of blog entries? They’re all hit pieces. Every. Single. One.

OMG NO WAI!!!1!1!!111 How did you find that out dude?

@ opus

Fertilizer, in the form of ‘news,’ is applied frequently.

It's true that Nat. News have a high manure content.

Facts do not depend upon anyone's worldview. Facts just are, like the weather. They're bits of this world that we share.

In science there are processes for sorting facts from other things like speculation, guessing, hopes, etc. That process involves publishing evidence in journals that are reviewed by others working in the same field. It is not a perfect process, but over time our understanding of how the world works advances.

Have you seen this author’s list of blog entries? They’re all hit pieces. Every. Single. One.
Orac tells people when they are spreading misinformation. He uses evidence and good arguments to back up his statements. That is the right thing to do.

It would be great if people said, "The facts are on your side, Orac. So I must concede." But instead they go, "Orac you are a mean person being mean!"

What is the right response to someone who ignores the evidence presented so he can pretend valid criticism is persecution? I am not sure but I think WTF is one of the things you say.

Jeffm, I think it's telling that thevibrantlife.org homepage offers a quote from someone called E. E. Cummings, who, as we know, was an inferior sort of poet often mistaken for the incomparable e.e. cummings.

Loraine, your use of the word "fascistic" is almost incontrovertible evidence that you wouldn't know a fascist if one walked up and kicked you with a jackboot.
Prove me wrong - tell me what you think fascism is.

Chris Morse: "Have you seen this author’s list of blog entries? They’re all hit pieces. Every. Single. One."
Does that include his posts against Holocaust denialism?

They’re all hit pieces. Every. Single. One.

Really? Even a long, thoughtful discussion of subtleties of cancer diagnosis such as this one?

The author is an excellent scientist and a passionate and compassionate physician who knows what he is talking about.

Some others, perhaps, not so much.

What so many don't understand is that oncology is in a position roughly analogous to that of surgery circa 1900. The natural history of diseases and of injuries inside the abdomen, chest, and skull were fairly well known and understood, but tools and techniques had not evolved to the point where success in any procedure in those areas was virtually a given, unlike today, when a Denton Cooley can grind out fifty coronary bypasses in a day. Any solid successes that they had were only around the fringes; surgeons were not yet capable of reliably dealing with the big killers or providing assurance that surgery could represent the only real chance of cure.

Pongo "You are directly wishing ill on another human being"

Do you believe that thoughts are transmitted from the mind of one person to the body of another? By what mechanism-the vital force?

"The unassailable arrogance of your position is saddening."

Clearly this poster doesn't know the meaning of the word "unassailable", as she just (attempted to) assail Orac. Together with her lack of understanding of facism, I don't hold out much hope for anything she says being accurate.

@ mho, knowing how many woosters think, perhaps she is one of them who thinks she can directly wish ill on people by simply wishing it, a la The Secret et al. But even if she doesn't think along those lines, she is hoping for Orac to suffer medically, however it actually comes about, and soon, at least going by her own words. The latter is how I personally read pongo's post, but it is possible that through his use of the word directly, he was inferring her belief in the former.

"Have you seen this author’s list of blog entries? They’re all hit pieces. Every. Single. One."

So true.

Most notorious was this hit piece on Jesus:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/07/01/jesus-sure-has-a-strange-w…

It'll come back to bite Orac one day soon, when kudzu starts growing up his leg.

Opus:

I am curious about Bollinger’s preferred method of ‘patient farming.’ There are a number of ways in which quacks can extract money from patients and I thing the farming analogy works at some levels.

Your farming analogy is quite excellent and I think does a great job of illustrating not only the methods but also the way quacks regard their patients, especially the big quacks. They see them as a source of funds, nothing more.

"perhaps she is one of them who thinks she can directly wish ill on people by simply wishing it, a la The Secret et al."

We, too, can use The Secret to wish health and long life to Orac. I wonder who'll win? More likely The Secret will become very annoyed at all of us and leave to go infest some other planet.

@rs, if only it takes all those who in any way shape or form promote woo with it when it leaves.

It's unfortunately still so that with many cancers an honest doctor can only deal in probabilities. The quacks, though, only seem to express themselves in terms of certainties. In the stress of their illness I guess some patients can't recognize that the person talking about probabilities is more likely to be telling the truth than the guy who claims to be certain.

@Peter Dugdale, it has nothing to do with cancer quacks or desperate patients. People prefer certainty. As Mark Twain may have said, "All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure."

Stories like this upset me beyond words. Yes, chemo is taxing and hard. But right now, it's the most effective treatment, and despite all it's failings, it gives you a shot at survival. There are numerous drugs specifically aimed at Hodgkin’s lymphoma, like http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/drugs/ABVD and http://rxed.eu/en/a/Adcetris/ that have a high response rate. Yes, the side-effects are dreadful, but I'd take any kind of discomfort for even a smallest chance of living.

But she definitely won't be quickly forgotten by the blog that decided to share the story of how *we were SO UNFORTUNATELY right and she was wrong* right? I'm sure everyone reading and sharing this post will send her money for treatment or at least their good wishes, and maybe send her family kind words after her funeral. Because exploitation is something only The Quacks do, not people who collect examples of how right they were.

This young woman's response to her diagnosis is absolutely irrational and not proactive, but she's not just believing that her cancer will go away by magic - she's scared, and frozen. Anyone who hasn't dealt with cancer or some kind of chronic illness or disease doesn't understand the type of energy - not just physical, but mental - that it takes to keep fighting and moving past the body horror and the loss of the life you could have had, which you still mourn all the time. Not everyone can do that. I defy anyone to be in a situation like that and be able to definitely say how they would react. She also has a definite point about feeling dehumanized and like a statistic. As much as she is being conned, this treatment - featuring a case like this on a blog with an agenda at all, tbh - is just lacking in empathy.

Whoa Now!!! I really do not see an issue with someone with cancer refusing treatment. If only my mother hadn't grasped at straws, her death would have been A LOT less horrid, but she let them radiate her when she has been previously told, they had nothing for her. She found a docter, found a hospital, Yale no less, to radiate her brain. At 83 years old, that was a most disgraceful act and the dr that ordered it, should be hung. She was done after that. When I asked the dr why in the world they would do such a thing to her, knowing the outcome, at her age, she told me "We just keep going until they quit". "And they do quit " she said. No you keep going so you can cg=harge the insurance outrageous fees is what she should have said. I have lost faith in traditional medicine after the lies I have listened to and the garbage treatments I have witnessed. Is it any wonder people are sick of a profession thats treatments havent progressed in 100 years??

@Cocktails

Can we meet on a secluded avenue and have that for two?

On a more serious not, the reason this case is so ambiguous is because Cassandra was almost old enough to choose for herself to refuse treatment.

That makes it legally impossible to force to undergo the complete treatment even if it were 100% effective.

That doesn't mean however that she made a good or smart choice.

And, as a matter of fact, many of us on this blog are thoroughly sick of claims being made for treatment methods that haven't progressed in 100 years such as homeopathy, chiropractic, TCM, Aruvedic medicine, and quite a few others.

That's why I"m glad that the science based standard of care has reduced cancer mortality by 1.4-2% per year for the last 10 years or so.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/04/19/another-young-woman-with-c…

This case was in my home state and we did NOT support the state in it's decision to force this girl to have chemo. Obviously it did NOT benefit her and actually could have caused the "new" cancer as does radiation therapy and chemo. If the best you can offer is 1.4% then we aren't doing to well for all that wasted money that is being spent or should I say wasted, on Big Pharma and the medical professions salaries. Keep drinking the Kool Aid my friend. It will kill you.

@cocktails,

I'll take a 1.4 % improvement in cancer survival every year for as long as possible. We'll never get to 100%, but we keep getting closer.

Chemotherapy is unpleasant and imperfect, but at least we have good information to evaluate how well it works. That's a lot more than we can say for any of the methods Ty Bollinger espouses.

Keep drinking the Kool aid Folks. They said the same thing about antibiotics, and washing your hands before surgery. They called it quackery. It's ALL about the money at this point in medicine. If you think they give a rats behind about you, your family or anything, you are sorely mistaken. Remember "First do no harm". That would close down all the docters and hospitals in this country if that had to be followed. My point is, they KNOW they are killing people and yet they do not care. Money is a horrible motivator.

I really do not see an issue with someone with cancer refusing treatment.

It's as though you didn't even read this post or the previous one.

She found a docter, found a hospital, Yale no less, to radiate her brain. At 83 years old, that was a most disgraceful act and the dr that ordered it, should be hung.

So, that whole "personal autonomy" thing goes out the window when it goes against your prejudices?

Oh and 1.4 % improvement is not PER year, it is per 10 years (by the medical communities estimations), so that can be discounted.

Ms. Spaziani: "My point is, they KNOW they are killing people and yet they do not care. Money is a horrible motivator."

So does Ty Bollinger give away his DVDs for free? Do Brian Clement and Robert Young give away free stays at their spas that offer "cancer treatment"? Does Burzynski give away his antineoplastons for free?

How much better are their treatments for cancer than actual medical treatments?

From what we have seen, these guys seem to live pretty high on the hog. So until those guys actually cure cancer without emptying bank accounts, your argument is totally pointless and hypocritical.

@Raina Spaziani,

I stand corrected. I misread the report.
Nevertheless, that is a real, measurable improvement in results. I'll take that every time over the vague, "we sort of think this ought to work" claims made by Ty Bollinger and the people he cites in his video series.

Which of the methods in his videos has been tested in treating Hodgkins Lymphoma and would you please provide the Pubmed reference?

I don't think narcissists are objective enough to be credible. When people give testimonies that are so similar about how they beat cancer with over the top consumption of vegetables, Laetrile, cannabis oil and more, a reasonable brain without agenda recognizes the pattern. Hmmmm. The reason narcissists become so mean (to their patients, even) is because they look stupid. The fact that you have such strong opinions about personal al health CHOICES should make you ask why you are such a tool. There is no reason to be bullies except you have to let go of your test tube.

@Michele,

I don't see any beautiful flowers growing her by the waterside, but seeing a pattern like that is often the beginning of a scientific discovery.

But science is a process of testing whether what we think is happening is really happening.

And so far, vegetarian diets, cannabis oil and laetrile have all failed that test.

@squirrel

There is proof. Lots of it. in the same way that Donald Trump has been able to pull back the curtain on the Political Machine, there will be someone who does the same in the medical and pharmaceutical machine. And if cannabis oil was some inert substance, why is GW scrambling to patent synthetic cannabis (Sativex)? Oh, I remember, it's because you can't patent leaves, you have to make the fake stuff in order to "own" it and make millions.

@Michele,

It was my understanding that Sativex is a cannabis extract, and not synthetic cannabis. If you have data to the contrary, please share.

What is the most compelling evidence you've seen that, say, cannabis oil is effective at curing cancer?

'When people give testimonies that are so similar about how they beat cancer with over the top consumption of vegetables, Laetrile, cannabis oil and more, a reasonable brain without agenda recognizes the pattern."

Yes, there certainly is a pattern.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of alternative cancer cures have been promoted, including special diets, "energy" cures, spiritual/mental remedies, plant-based cures and various decidedly unnatural-sounding chemicals which are accepted in the world of woo because mainstream medicine frowns on them. Plus there are hybrids and amalgams of various of these therapies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_tre…

If any of these worked, drug companies would have been all over them to produce and patent refinements and improvements, and physicians and their families would have jumped on them to treat their own cancers.

This hasn't happened because they don't work, testimonials notwithstanding.

You might also ask yourself - if any of these are such fabulous anti-cancer remedies, how come there are so many of them? Wouldn't a relative handful of these supercures suffice to save everyone?

Instead, they exist and proliferate to take advantage of the desperation of cancer patients and the profiteers who exploit them.

Michele needs to pull back the curtain on her own striking naiveté.

@mephi

Ask the pharmaceutical company about the use of cannabis to treat cancer. It's in the patent application. The ratios are what allows them to "own" and profit and control the use of it.

Filed in 2009, GW’s patent application lists Otsuka Pharmaceutical as a collaborator and initially claimed the invention of the “use of a combination of cannabinoids in the manufacture of a medicament for use in the treatment of cancer.”

@Bacon

Since there is lots of proof, I'm sure you can cite some studies from Pubmed about how effective cannabis is for curing cancer (not just alleviating side effects like nausea).

Children, however, depend upon their parents to provide them with the best medical care, because they are not considered competent to make life-and-death decisions.

The larger issue is how parents can establish themselves as reasonably competent in the face of an adversarial institution. I will stipulate that I might not consider 90% of parents "competent" in some areas, and maybe 50/50 in others.

My view of science and technology is that often there are lots of unused technologies lying around for the asking by the perceptive. Outside medicine, often what we view as the industry leading technology might only be 3rd or 4th with a more omniscient view of current knowledge.

However, I also assume that many/most drs, including specialists are:
(1) not globally aware of techniques and technology even in their own field;
(2) often 20-50 yrs behind on important but little recognized facts and experimental results;
(3) are still subject to human foibles;
(4) are economically targeted and conflicted by several sources.

What combinations of technical proposition, parental education, experience, planning, monitoring and warning seminar, would be acceptable to face down medical institutions on a judgement call?

@Michele - can I assume that means you don't really know?

@mephi

Someone told me the sun rose this morning. I can see it myself, but I can't prove it happened. I accept things to be true when I see it myself, and I respect that others have the same cognitive abilities that I do and they have truths. I don't care what you believe. I have no intention to dance with your brain. I simply believe that doctors should stop insulting and belittling patients who choose their own course of treatment. And have the nerve to ridicule them when they share their personal experience with others. Sone people simply believe that doctors don't know what they aren't incentivized to know.

Here!! Here!! I too am so sick of Dr's double talk. If you disagree, they change the answer, forgetting that they already told you something different. It is insulting to a person's intelligence. They are NOT God's and we really need to hold them to task and take that power away. A person has a lot more time then a docter does to do research, when it is their life on the line. A Dr will just run the bill until you aren't around anymore and then they just move on to the next. It is up to each of us to be pro active in our care. No one else is going to do it, least of all, dr's.

@Raina: I'm sorry you are such a negative, cynical person. I know a lot more quacks (Gerson, Burzynski, Gonzalez) who run up the bill and then move on to the next mark than I do HONEST MDs. I'm not saying all doctors are perfect. But most doctors don't make any money selling supplements, homeopathic crud, and other silly things to their patients. Most doctors don't believe they are gods.

You can always research on Google U. The issue is *understanding* what you've read. All my doctors have been willing to discuss any new research I've found, and the pros and cons (or asked me to come back if it's really new to them, so they could do some research on their own.) But then, I'm willing to know what I don't know, unlike many who are great examples of Dunning-Kruger.

MI Ask your Dr what type of stipends and kick backs he gets from the different drug companies. He won't tell you, but he does so don't say they don't make money pushing what they make money off of. I'm not negative, maybe cynical... I feel my Dr may have even caused my cancer by prescribing thinsg she KNEW increased my cancer exposure by 25% (onco admitted this) and subjecting me to countless Mammos when she KNEW they could not see a dam thing due to the nature of my breast cancer, again increasing my cancer risk by 2% PER mammo x's over 10, another 20% or more. How could I possibly avoid it??
Was that right???? I'll take a more gentle approach going forward and whne I do die from what they have inflicted, it will be on my terms, not to line their pockets. At $700 an office visit at 3 minutes a visit, I'll stay home and do more research thanks.

Raina @ 84: You don't have to ask your doctor; thanks to the Sunshine Act companies are required to publish the names of doctors who work for them and how much they are paid (speakers fees, etc). It's called the Open Payments Program and it's run by CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).

I think shes talking about the perks and personal kickbacks. Golf club memberships, cases of wine, etc.....The stuff you can't really find out.

Cocktails @86: I'm pretty sure all of that is reportable. Based on the excruciatingly dull presentation I have to watch about what you can and cannot do as a drug sales rep, you can't even bring lunch to a doctor's office. Bagels, maybe. And nothing with the company or drug's name on it (any more). There are mountains of rules about that kind of thing now.

And it's a good thing! (I'm not a drug sales rep, just for the record. I couldn't sell water in the desert.)

Ask your Dr what type of stipends and kick backs he gets from the different drug companies.

Somehow, I don't think there are many kickbacks to be had for checking the "may substitute" box.

Cocktails: "The stuff you can’t really find out."

Like how much money Bollinger, Young, and Burzynski make off of their marks patients? Or the rate of actual efficacy of their scams "treatments"?

Ask the pharmaceutical company about the use of cannabis to treat cancer. It’s in the patent application. The ratios are what allows them to “own” and profit and control the use of it.

Sweet Jesus, I hate argument from patent. It shares the same traits of "almost guaranteed failure" and "intellectual sloth" with argument from aphorism, but it's much more of a pain in ass to deconstruct when some slob barfs one up.

This, as suggested here – and I'm not wasting any more time on a random assertion – is the UK version of the core Sativex patent. "The ratios" are an afterthought (see "the invention is intended to encompass, but is not limited to, the following embodiments").

Someone told me the sun rose this morning. I can see it myself, but I can’t prove it happened. I accept things to be true when I see it myself, and I respect that others have the same cognitive abilities that I do and they have truths.

That's odd, because I don't require direct or indirect observation to accept that the sun rose this morning (assuming I'm not sufficiently north or south to make a difference). There is a long history of reliable observations that lead to the conclusion that the sun rises every morning, whether observed or not. There is negligible evidence that there are mornings when the sun doesn't rise. In fact, failing to have a sunrise would be precluded by astrophysics without either a massive change in physics or a catastrophic change to the Earth. We can predict that in some distant future there will, in fact, be no more sunrises on Earth; until then we are able to accurately predict a daily sunrise within fractions of a second on every point in the Earth.

I also don't necessarily accept that something has happened just because I've seen it myself. I have seen some things which, as it turns out, were deception and not reality. Some were intentionally deceptive; in some cases I've deceived myself.

Just because you have drawn a conclusion based on your observations, that does not make it "truth" by any meaningful definition.

I don’t care what you believe. I have no intention to dance with your brain.

There's no reason you should care about my beliefs. When dealing with medical treatments, though, you should care about what's proven effective and what isn't.

"There’s no reason you should care about my beliefs. When dealing with medical treatments, though, you should care about what’s proven effective and what isn’t."
VERY true and current modalities are NOT working, they are actually killing people. "First do no harm." is a statement that drs have lost sight of this.

Cocktails: "VERY true and current modalities are NOT working, they are actually killing people."

Prove it. Provide the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers that current treatments for Hodgkin’s lymphoma are killing more people than that disease did before the 1970s.

What Chris said. If someone has a non-standard treatment for large B-cell lymphoma that is proven a) more effective withb) fewer side effects than the current standard of care. I ask not for me, but for a relative.

Note the word "proven" above.

Sigh, my second sentence above should end "please let me know and include links to the PubMed indexed studies." I said that all in my head.

Sorry for your relative's trouble. This Life Extension article probably represents a substantial portion of middle intensity complementary nutrition a la 2013. Their references are on the last page.

The Oasis of Hope had some of its treatment description books onllne 5-6 years ago. They offer a free phone consultation and a preliminary plan in 24 hr. OOH apparently has recommendations which cancers are best treated combined with chemo too.

Riordan Clinic (published best case) and Keith Block Integrative might be integrative sources with better reference materials. Sorry I can't fulfill your specs better.

I think you missed the word "proven" in MO'Bs request. Linking to Oasis of Hope, a Tijuana quack-house, is more than a bit of a fail on that score.

In addition, the Life Extension article mentioned by prn lists a bunch of supplements and dosages, but when you click on the particular supplement it goes directly to product purchasing information, there is no reference to any evidence to support use or recommended dosages, and on the bottom of the page is the quack miranda warning. The site exists, not to inform, but to scare victims to buying supplements which probably won't help and may be harmful.

JDK@98
...I think you missed the word “proven” in MO’Bs request. Linking to Oasis of Hope, a Tijuana quack-house, is more than a bit of a fail on that score.
I did not miss it. MOB is represented as a highly educated individual. I waited a while to see if anyone wanted to comment. I felt he set the bar too high garner any useful response here. So, on the off chance he does more thorough investigation, I gave him two quick, easy and free sources for familliarization, and two US medical facilities that might entertain his questions.

MOB is perfectly free to reject any or all of it.

cloudskimmer@99
... not to inform, but to scare victims to buying... which probably won’t help and may be harmful.
I've found LEF low key and helpful. This would be a great understatement about the insurance company's oncologist.

prn @100: Are there any conditions for which you would choose SBM for treatment? If so, would you care to explain your reasoning?
It's just that you are so very negative about all forms of SBM, and frankly it's a little wearing to constantly have my entire field of study presented in such a negative light.

prn @100: Are there any conditions for which you would choose SBM for treatment?
I tend to choose things when they are best, most cost effective or cheapest. Preferably more than one of these, I like to be eclectic. So I chose generic medicine part of the time. Surgeons have been the most highly rewarded in my part of the medical universe.

...you are so very negative about all forms of SBM,
I am a natural critic and a very science oriented experimentalist perfectly willing to work at N=1 if I am not satisfied with current answers.

and frankly it’s a little wearing to constantly have my entire field of study presented in such a negative light.
Sorry I wouldn't have guessed. This is a pretty rough and tough board, and I think I get a ***lot*** more ---- than I give back. Often I am trying to open people's eyes about things that they know nothing real.

Cannabis Oil WORKS

On bicycle chains? Cam shafts? Dry skin? Calamari?

Calamari?

I'm reminded of a Bundt cake that may well still live in infamy among certain people. It resulted from a giant amount of leaf that emerged from my (well past the statute of limitations) hobby efforts at home cultivation.* At least the extraction was food-grade, rather than half-assed dorking around with real solvents.

* Much better than numbers stations, when you get right down to it. Note: Cats will readily fall asleep in an ebb-and-flow table under a 400–W HPS lamp, with the usual consequences.

Narad: You mean the kind of solvent-messing that kept blowing up houses in my area? (One of the good things to come from legalization; now the extraction is done safely by sober professionals in industrial areas, not people goofing off in rental houses that burn to the ground.)

I am a natural critic and a very science oriented experimentalist perfectly willing to work at N=1 if I am not satisfied with current answers

Ignoring scientific results you don't like in favor of anecdotes you do is the exact opposite of "science oriented."

Marishka @103 You should read these http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/08/18/medical-marijuana-and-the-… http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/03/25/medical-marijuana-and-the-…

Orthodox so-called cancer treatments are in my opinion lucrative but useless modern day quackery and there is NO WAY I would submit to such barbarism.

Enforcing such quackery on a patient or a minor against that patient or that child's and/or its parents' wishes is a direct violation of personal sovereignty and the Nuremberg Code which says that the patient's informed consent is essential.

The medical tyranny and medial fascism and particularly the medical junk science needs to be exterminated.

We have no way of knowing, Ellie, if the women with BC survived becaus of treatment or in spite of it. Any "good" doctor will tell you they just do not know. They do NOT have all the answers and that their treatments ARE toxic but MAY help. Since they have not improved in over 100 years, the odds are not good as to any type of cure.

@Erwin Albert,

Does medial fascism involve requiring people to have a medial facetectomy whether they need it or not in one of the state approved businesses?

More to the point, this case is particularly awkward precisely because undergoing the recommended treatment would have shifted Cassandra from a minor whose care was the responsibility of her parents and indirectly the government To being an adult responsible for her own decisions.

In this case, the doctors are Athens real Cassandra, condemned to tell the truth and not be believed.

None of which prevents us from regretting her relapse or continuing to hope she can be cured.

Wrong side of the Aegean, but gotta love that auto correct!

I can't wait to tell a friend, #109, that the treatment (starting with surgery) that she had for breast cancer 15+ years ago, was useless quackery. She is laboring under the delusion that it has given her a chance at a longer life. Silly woman.

"Orthodox so-called cancer treatments are in my opinion lucrative but useless modern day quackery and there is NO WAY I would submit to such barbarism."

Oh, looky, we have been graced with clueless comment by Erwin Alber, also known at the world's worse person.

"She is laboring under the delusion that it has given her a chance at a longer life."

Has a study been done to show life expectancy versus degree of belief in woo? Unless it's all just talk there must be a statistically measurable effect on these people (and their dependants).

Orthodox so-called cancer treatments are in my opinion lucrative but useless modern day quackery and there is NO WAY I would submit to such barbarism.

Here's hoping that you get to put this into practice soon, Errwyn.

Welcome back, Cocktails!

It seems we've been back and forth on this blog post already.

From your reply to Ellie, it seems you are like many of my customers in my two very different jobs over the years. They want to know WHY this happened and get upset when I can't give them an immediate, definitive answer.

But our bodies, the medicine we use to treat them, and the world in general are not that mechanistic. So an honest doctor will admit that they don't know precisely why a cancer recurred or whether the patient would have been the lucky one who survived even without treatment.

That is what really distinguishes them from the people on Ty Bollinger's laundry list.

We have no way of knowing, Ellie, if the women with BC survived becaus of treatment or in spite of it.

No, actually. This is a commonly held false belief that comes from the fallacy of composition, "what is true of individual parts must be true of the whole."

If we look at any one individual breast cancer patient, we may not be able to say "That is someone who survived because of treatment, rather than someone who would have survived even without treatment." But if we look at the entire set of breast cancer patients, who received treatment and who survived statistically longer than patients who did not receive such treatment, to assert that we don't know there to be among them those who survived because of the treatment is nonsensical.

@110

And a space station is clearly nonsense, since the sky is a carpet, painted by God, and what are they going to do? Hook the station onto the carpet?

Sorry if that's not a "to the point" response to your statement. It still fits.

Sarah A@107
prn: I am a natural critic and a very science oriented experimentalist perfectly willing to work at N=1 if I am not satisfied with current answers

Sarah: Ignoring scientific results you don’t like in favor of anecdotes you do is the exact opposite of “science oriented.”

Sarah, I don't just "ignore scientific results". I 'm doing my own research with my own skills, advantages and opportunities.

Google Fu is not research.

Unless you are in a lab studying biochemistry and the like, you're not doing research. At best you're reviewing the research others have done.

Panacea: Unless you are in a lab studying biochemistry and the like, you’re not doing research. At best you’re reviewing the research others have done.

Sounds like you don't have much familiarity with research processes. Some of the work has been done at private or university research labs. One set was done by a postdoc from one of the "#1 rated" depts that everybody would recognize.

So she's done for anyway no matter what she does?

Most of the people on this blog are a bunch of ignorant snobs and egomaniacs who are slaves to the pharmaceutical industry. You care nothing of the people who are suffering torment every day because the real cures are being suppressed by a greedy and corrupt pharmaceutical/medical establishment. This girl will have less of a chance of a cure because she had the chemo forced upon her. Everyone knows, even all of you who think you know everything, that once it returns it is much deadlier than before treatment. The fact that it was against her will is traumatic enough even without the poison ravaging her body. If you like chemo so much, have at it, but don't force others to do it. She and her parents had a right to choose alternative treatments. You disgust me with your phony intellectualism that cannot hide your complete lack of integrity and competence. Perhaps you fear your patients may realize that you destroyed their lives or killed their relatives and may hold you responsible? There is just too much hatred and obvious lack of caring for this girl in your responses, that ultimately lead me to believe you are afraid of being found out.

Most of the people on this blog are a bunch of ignorant snobs and egomaniacs who are slaves to the pharmaceutical industry. You care nothing of the people who are suffering torment every day because the real cures are being suppressed by a greedy and corrupt pharmaceutical/medical establishment. This girl will have less of a chance of a cure because she had the chemo forced upon her. Everyone knows, even all of you who think you know everything, that once it returns it is much deadlier than before treatment. The fact that it was against her will is traumatic enough even without the poison ravaging her body. If you like chemo so much, have at it, but don’t force others to do it. She and her parents had a right to choose alternative treatments. You disgust me with your phony intellectualism that cannot hide your complete lack of integrity and competence. Perhaps you fear your patients may realize that you destroyed their lives or killed their relatives and may hold you responsible? There is just too much hatred and obvious lack of caring for this girl in your responses, that ultimately lead me to believe you are afraid of being found out.
Just realized the moderator seems not to want to put my comment thru. This is the second time I am posting.

Most of the people on this blog are a bunch of ignorant snobs and egomaniacs who are slaves to the pharmaceutical industry. You care nothing of the people who are suffering torment every day because the real cures are being suppressed by a greedy and corrupt pharmaceutical/medical establishment. This girl will have less of a chance of a cure because she had the chemo forced upon her. Everyone knows, even all of you who think you know everything, that once it returns it is much deadlier than before treatment. The fact that it was against her will is traumatic enough even without the poison ravaging her body. If you like chemo so much, have at it, but don’t force others to do it. She and her parents had a right to choose alternative treatments. You disgust me with your phony intellectualism that cannot hide your complete lack of integrity and competence. Perhaps you fear your patients may realize that you destroyed their lives or killed their relatives and may hold you responsible? There is just too much hatred and obvious lack of caring for this girl in your responses, that ultimately lead me to believe you are afraid of being found out.
Just realized the moderator seems not to want to put my comment thru. I guess this blog is totally fixed. No wonder there seems to be so many people in favor of chemo on this blog.

KMiller Thank You for expressing what so may of us also think. Funny that these people that have all this faith in the poisins of medicine, scream and rant how fabulous it is. Okay if that is so true then have at it but don't force others too partake in the madness. Lets face it, there's no money in herbal suppliments and natural cures for the pharmacutical industry, so they have no interest, but the fact is, many of these curs work and there are many people, and the numbers are growing, to support this. I could care less that they demand "proof". Show me how well the medical industry has fared over the past 100 years in cancer cures. It hasn't. The only hope is to prolong the agony with traditional cut, burn and poisin regimes. A "real" docter will tell you they just do not know and its a bit of science, a bit of luck and a real crap shoot who survives and who doesn't..

This girl will have less of a chance of a cure because she had the chemo forced upon her.

Meanwhile back here in reality there are plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary.

Science. It works, bitches.

The fact that it was against her will is traumatic enough even without the poison ravaging her body..

... can I have a "cut" and "burn", too? I've almost got a full row here at AltTroll Bingo!

There is just too much hatred and obvious lack of caring for this girl in your responses, that ultimately lead me to believe you are afraid of being found out.

You must obviously mean "hatred and obvious lack of caring for the quack Tyl Bolinger. Nothing but sympathy towards the girl.

Perhaps you fear your patients may realize that you destroyed their lives or killed their relatives and may hold you responsible?

So you're saying that just letting cancer going it's course without intervention of any kind has a higher rate of survival than chemo? Because that's what you are implying with such an argument. Also, once again back in reality this is demonstrably false. Science, works, bitches ect.

RE: kmiller
"lack of integrity and competence"
...says the one who has yet to name or provide a shred of evidence to explain what 'alternative' comes even close the 85% cure rate of modern medicine...
Give name to your magic!

"the real cures are being suppressed by a greedy and corrupt pharmaceutical/medical establishment."

Don't forget, members of that pharmaceutical/medical establishment who get cancer, also keel over and die for lack of "the real cures".

We just can't help it, the money from cut-poison-burn is just too good to admit that alt cures work.

@Don't Drink the Kool Aid: Lets face it, there’s no money in herbal suppliments and natural cures for the pharmacutical industry, so they have no interest, but the fact is, many of these curs work and there are many people, and the numbers are growing, to support this.

No MONEY? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, you're SERIOUS???? HahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaHahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaHahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

You think the companies that make supplements are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and giving them away? Or are you going out into nature and harvesting your own?

And yeah. I'd rather have a real doctor tell me when they don't know something, than a fake doctor (cough cough ND cough) or chiro tell me they can cure me no matter what's wrong.

No money for the pharma companies, but I shouldn't have to explain that to you, you already knew that now, didn't you????
Too each his own. You must have stock in Pfizer. Let the rest of us alone with your closed minded view.

"No money for the pharma companies, but I shouldn’t have to explain that to you, you already knew that now, didn’t you????"

So you are for all those with type 1 diabetes trying a "natural" approach? Plus no pain meds for anyone during dental procedures!

Yeah, we really should listen to you.

Just realized the moderator seems not to want to put my comment thru. I guess this blog is totally fixed.

If you hadn't just dropped by expecting immediate gratification, you'd be aware that all first-time posters are automatically shunted into the moderation queue.

Too each his own. You must have stock in Pfizer.

Is that the Cluephone I hear ringing?

^ Blockquote fail, I take it, is obvious.

@DDTKA: I can't honestly say I don't have stock in Pfizer. It's perfectly possible that one of my 401K retirement funds managed by my employer purchases some. I can honestly say it wouldn't make any difference. I've been known to talk very negatively about medicine, health insurance, pharmaceuticals and health care professionals. And yes, my employer falls within one or more of those categories.

In case you weren't aware of it, as Narad linked an example in #135, most pharmaceutical companies also make the supplements you buy in your favorite health food stores. They don't care if you buy only single vitamen supplements. It's all profit, whether it's to the pharmacy division or the supplement division.

To give them credit, at least they have quality controls in place. Unlike many smaller manufacturers where you don't know what you are really getting. If I'm going to buy a supplement (and yes, I've used some in the past), I want my money to purchase the actual item, rather than just the words.

Don't Drink the Kool Aid @127:"Show me how well the medical industry has fared over the past 100 years in cancer cures."

How about the fact that, with modern medicine, the survival rate for children with cancer (all types) is 80% in the US?
Cancers that used to be fatal.
And what about bone marrow transplants? Those aren't pills. They're not 'cut burn poison'. Bone marrow for transplantation is freely given, with no hope of monetary repayment.

But if you want to go back to treatments available in 1916, that is your prerogative.

Don't Drink The Kool Aid, (oops too late, you already have) and M Killer. I really wish you lot would bother to do even a modicum of research before you start your drivel here instead of the boring old pharma shill gambit.

In the UK alone over the last forty years, survival rates across all cancers when averaged out have doubled using conventional medicine. Admittedly, some of the very aggressive and quick developing types of cancers, e.g. the pancreas, show only modest increases but others, like lymphoma and testes cancer, now have survival rates of >75% and >90% respectively. Care to show actual evidence for any survival figures at all for your claimed alt-med cures. BTW, YouTube and/or blogs and/or books written by woosters don't count as real evidence, neither does anecdata.

This Ty Bollinger should be arrested for serial homicide, imo.

I guess this blog is totally fixed.

"Happy conviction that one is the victim of a campaign of persecution" is one of the warning signs of asshat crankery.
Another is the use of a slogan for a pseudonym.

#128 Science, works, bitches

OMG. That should be the slogan for every Oncology Ward.

We could have it embroidered on all of the lab coats:

Herr Bimler, MD
Science Works Bitches

I would love to claim credit for any of that, but I am not a medical doktor.
Nor am I xkcd.

OK to all those that think the poison of chemotherapy and radiation are such great treatments, what should one do when after spending almost $100,000 on the prescribed treatments (chemotherapy) which almost bankrupted us, then to be told sorry that hasn't worked. So what does one do now?? there is no other offer of treatment form the medical people, and where did that $100,000 go, to whom?? and now what are our options, there are none, so wouldn't you try anything you can, how do you know that one of these "cures" wont work. After all they have worked for quite a few and if you do your research you will find the documentations. If you are on this journey then you have a voice but if you are not then keep your opinions to yourself. Surely everyone is free to make choices for themselves.

"Therefore, for every 100 non palpable cancers found through mammography alone, 54 would presumably have gone away (174 / 324 × 100 = 54%). The foregoing studies highlight the dynamic nature of breast cancer 2. Of course it is impossible to say which particular cancer will disappear without treatment, and so all must be treated." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3320224/

'German New Medicine' (GNM) hasn't even been mentioned in all the comments here, which is amazing to me because it's the only theory about disease that makes real sense. It's handed over by doctor Hamer as a post doctoral thesis to the university of Tubingen (Germany) in 1981 and they've refused to officially test it up to this day (although there's a court order telling them to test GNM, but they still refuse to do so). I found out about GNM in May 2009 and it saved a loved one from undergoing mutilating surgery and dangerous chemotherapy (which is after all just injecting people with poison in the hope it will kill cancer cells before it kills the person him/herself - very sophisticated science indeed). To this very day I'm very grateful for stumbling onto GNM more than 7 years ago as it gave me great insights into the subject of 'disease' and allows me to live a fearless life (not only regarding disease, because there's also the placebo/nocebo effect - and law of expectation - which gets enhanced by knowing and understanding GNM. Anyway, I hope some people will study GNM (and placebo/nocebo, the latter being most commonly triggered by traditional medicine with its fear based propaganda and diagnosis system) and better their lives by doing so. Cheers

If there is anything not making any sense at all, it is GNM. Doctor Hamer is a very dangerous quack.
Read for instance here:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/10/27/your-friday-dose-of-woo-th…
Or here:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/10/14/biologie-totale-the-quacke…
You can also find things on other blogs, like here:
https://anaximperator.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/marion-lost-her-father-t…
Or here:
https://anaximperator.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/what-hamer-doesnt-tell-y…

it gave me great insights into the subject of ‘disease’

Surely you meant "dis-ease".

@Ronald

They should wait until the tumors are palpable for the simple reason that they are more fun to diagnose that way.
☞☉☉

‘German New Medicine’ (GNM) hasn’t even been mentioned in all the comments here, which is amazing to me because it’s the only theory about disease that makes real sense.

Sure. The "Germanic" alternative to combat the nefarious international Jewish conspiracy to kill non-Jews through modern medicine inflicted cancer makes some real sense, surree...

...but if one were to believe all that, wouldn't it make more sense to adhere to "Jewish Old Medicine"?

German New Medicine has been the subject of an article.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/10/27/your-friday-dose-of-woo-th…

German No Medicine, you mean.

Just looked up Orac's German New Medicine article. Wow. I suppose this is really another variant of the "power of positive thinking" nonsense, which is so cruel. How on Earth do you become so deluded that you ignore the amazing advances of "conventional" medicine? Honestly, if anything could make homeopathy seem plausible by comparison, this would be it.

It's very hard to make some top 10 of worst alternative cancer-therapies, because they are all equally bad, but if I had to choose one, I suppose GNM would fit the bill, because it blames the victim and it's surroundings and adds a heavy dose of anti-semitism on top.

Ms. Gyde: "Surely everyone is free to make choices for themselves."

Just as long as you provide the verifiable evidence that you choice is a better one. Just making it up doesn't cut it around here.

there’s a court order telling them to test GNM, but they still refuse to do so

Don't leave everybody hanging with that teaser, Ronald, cough it the fυck up.

@Cheryl Gyde,

OK to all those that think the poison of chemotherapy and radiation are such great treatments, what should one do when after spending almost $100,000 on the prescribed treatments (chemotherapy) which almost bankrupted us, then to be told sorry that hasn’t worked.

Different people react in different ways. Some cry. Some become more religious. Some become less religious. Some focus on maximizing the quality of their remaining time.

This is not intended to be flippant, as I empathize with your situation and understand the desire to believe that there is another, better answer.

how do you know that one of these “cures” wont work. After all they have worked for quite a few and if you do your research you will find the documentations.

Which ones have worked? For how many people have they worked and how many have they failed? How do you know they've worked?

If you are on this journey then you have a voice but if you are not then keep your opinions to yourself.

Thanks for your opinion.

Surely everyone is free to make choices for themselves.

Sure they are. I don't recall anyone saying they're not (unless we're talking about minors or wards of the State). However, if the someone is promoting bogus, unproven, or disproved treatments to the gullible it is not a kindness to keep silent.

Cheryl Gyde
New Zealand
July 24, 2016

OK to all those that think the poison of chemotherapy and radiation are such great treatments, what should one do when after spending almost $100,000 on the prescribed treatments (chemotherapy) which almost bankrupted us....

Public-sector health care in New Zealand doesn't cover chemotherapy?

Doctor Hamer is a very dangerous quack.

I think the vile gobshite has been stripped of every title.

Public-sector health care in New Zealand doesn’t cover chemotherapy?

It covers most treatments, except a few cutting-edge monoclonal antiibodies that are still massively expensive, or not shown to work, or both. At any given time there are patient-support groups, which may or may not have been astroturfed by pharma companies, lobbying to have their drug of choice added to the publicly-funded treatments while it still works.

That said, there are private-sector hospitals for people who are impatient, or are determined to spend money.

Renate (and others with similar opinions on GNM), in 2009, after getting rid of cancer simply by using the knowledge presented by doctor Hamers German New Medicine (yes, he's still a doctor, meaning he knows what other doctors know, but not the other way around) I discussed 'my case' on https://anaximperator.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/german-new-medicine-hame… It soon became clear, however, that it was useless trying to convince the leading posters on that side of the validity of German New Medicine (and the nonsense of poisonous traditional medicine). So, after a while I packed it in and moved on. A similar thing happened at 'Breast cancer org', where after a while they not only blocked my access to their side, but also deleted all my posts, which were more than just a few... Last year I tried to post an update on 'anaximperator wordpress com', about my ex-partner still being in great health, but even after multiple attempts these updates were never published. In a last posting I told 'Beatis' that it was now very obvious who was the 'liar' out there (because that's what she tried to make me out to be earlier on in 2009)... To those who are convinced that cancer almost never goes away by itself (something completely in liine with GNM, due to the fact that many biological conflicts get resolved automatically, for instance when you find a new partner after an ugly divorce/breakup, or when you find a new job after getting fired unexpectedly, etc.), what you think of this: "Therefore, for every 100 nonpalpable cancers found through mammography alone, 54 would presumably have gone away (174 / 324 × 100 = 54%)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3320224/ Anyway, unless there's some serious replies to the theory of German New Medicine and not just some silly remarks/attacks regarding the inventor of this theory, doctor Hamer, I will just leave this blog in the knowledge that I (once more) left the present and future visitors here enough information regarding the real nature of disease to start them off on the road to real healing. Cheers

there’s a court order telling them to test GNM

No details? Just a complete fabrication?

So does Dr. Hamer have an explanation for prostate cancer?
Does this happen after losing a gay lover?

Testicular cancer was first noticed in chimney sweeps in England. This was an occupational cancer back then.

Thyroid cancer is linked to radioactive Iodine and Kaposi's Sarcoma is linked to nitrites.

How does one know which cancers are psychosomatic, and which are instigated by toxins?

@Ronald,

Yes, some cancers do go away on their own. Noone commenting regularly on this site thinks otherwise.
But the theory of GNM is worthless without results.

Can you cite any pubilshed studies on the 5 year survival rates of breast cancer patients treated with GNM exclusively?

Otherwise, it's just "pig in a poke" medicine.

Before I spend money on that, I'd at least like to know how many bratwurst I'll get from it.

And I'll add my name to Narad's and HDB's request.

I remember the Beatis thread very well: Ron submitted all kinds of dubious (faked?) reports about his supposed girlfriend's breast cancer that were discredited by a real pathologist. He was also caught in several outright lies.

I was using a different 'nym back then (a reference to Burzynski's former PR person) and posted this comment below about Biologie Totale, a clone of German Non Medicine:

"There’s a series of BT workshops scheduled in the New Year in Poland, Russia and Israel. From their website, here’s what you learn in only THREE DAYS–you can cure three kinds of cancer!!! And MS!!! And this is only level one of BT, which is almost identical to GNM. Three days–who needs med school?

Main themes developped in Total Biology Level I :
•Dr. Hamer’s findings.
•Sources of the Total Biology of the Living Creatures.
•Law of Reality Ambivalence (duality).
•The Iceberg analogy in Total Biology.
•Everything is a survival program mode.
•The three level rocket.
•Disease: the brain’s best solution to stay alive as long as possible.
•The ways we get sick.
•The brain, a breaker box.
•DHS (Dirk Hamer Syndrome).
•Biological Invariant.
•Stomach cancer.
•Real, Imaginary, Symbolical and Virtual.
•Digestive biological invariants.
•Multiple Sclerosis.
•Resolving the conflict(s).
•Liver cancer.
•Two phases to disease.
•Four keys to the piano of biology.
•Embryology layers.
•Programming and Triggering conflicts.
•Breast cancer.
•Felt experience (the ways we experience a trauma: some examples).
•Mini-Maxi Schizophrenia.
•Conflict of the diagnosis/prognosis.
•Conditions for healing.
•Biological cascade.
•Project-Purpose.
•Genealogy: circulation of the family memories.
•Stages of grief."

... there’s a court order telling them to test GNM ...

Beatis also does a great job debunking this lie and explaining what the court order really meant.

German New Medicine = 💩

Anyway, unless there’s some serious replies to the theory of German New Medicine and not just some silly remarks/attacks regarding the inventor of this theory, doctor Hamer....

Fυck Hamer; it's you that I'm spitting on.

I wonder what sort of emotional traumas cause a cat, or a mouse, or a shark to develop cancer.

Though some neoplasms may have a psychosomatic element, there is a problem with overgeneralizing this:

☠. Some cancers are caused by toxins
☢. Some cancers are caused by radiation

How would Dr. Hamer distinguish a psychosomatic cancer from a non-psychosomatic cancer?

"I will just leave this blog in the knowledge that I (once more) left the present and future visitors (a trail of fetid droppings)".

Well thanks. Keep up that positive frame of mind, and remember - when you do get really sick, it'll be your fault for not having been able to resolve festering psychic conflicts.

Wow... That didn't take long :-)
Bye bye clan...

Do stick the flounce this time, Ronald.

Ronald,
I see you're still trying to push your vile and repulsive brand of hateful, antisemitic, antiscience breast cancer quackery anywhere you can get a word in. What do you gain from this?

I know you're pretending to flounce again but when you inevitably come back, here's a tip: try to keep your sockpuppet names straight. Breastcancer.org actually (unfortunately) only deleted *some* of your forum posts. Perhaps you're forgetting that you posted under multiple 'nyms, eg. AliceinWonderland, Hooponopono, etc.

How do you face yourself in the mirror?

The quacks are the medical lobby that destroy the immune system to cure an illness. How stupid is that? If chemo worked, she wouldn't have relapsed, now would she?

God has given us everything we need to heal our illnesses. The cures are found by strengthening the immune system, not destroying. I feel sorry for people who think we need a medical gestapo. In the Land of the Free, anyone who dissents is treated as a criminal.

Under Protest-THANK YOU!!! It's about time we stop drinking the Kool Aid and realize it is an assembly line of mistreatment!

@Animal Support

Thank you! Oncochemotherapy is a joke.

Cancer can easily be stopped dead in its' tracks by a fat-free, raw vegan diet.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9359807

Treating Cancer with radiation is like putting out a fire with white phosphorus.

Give yiurselves a big pat on the back.

A 20 year old survey of 15 patients with melanoma at a clinic in Tijuana tells us just what about how to treat Hodgkins' Lymphoma?

I'd observe that it's curious for "Animal Support" to be replying to "Under Protest" using a method that only works with notifications on were it not for the tedious extension of the sockpuppetry.

Narad, salesmen for Onco drugs..maybe???

You are not suggesting that they should be poisoned with nucleoside analogues are you?

That would be ridiculous. I'll take the fruit juice over the DNA-chain-terminators and radiation-death-beams anyday.

All these oncochemotherapy patients are poisoning the water table with their radioactive and poisonous urine. I have to buy San Pelligrino now thanks to the chemical industries.

Cancer can easily be stopped dead in its’ tracks by a fat-free, raw vegan diet.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9359807

Come now. You could at least look up the Gerson diet. People will suspect that you're not really taking this seriously.

OK. There was raw liver juice.

I forgot.

The flaxseed oil is a new addition, and it wasn't used by Dr. Max.

Cancer can easily be stopped dead in its’ tracks by a fat-free, raw vegan diet.

I presume the meals have to actually be left on the tracks to derail the train. One can but hope that the locomotive doesn't have a pilot.

Narad, salesmen for Onco drugs..maybe???

I find it a nuisance to have to update my killfile multiple times per day.

Narad
Funny you guys fight soooo hard for conventional treatments and disregard any and all alternatives. Why would you even care or get so nasty to those that don't support your thoughts UNLESS you had a financial interest? It shouldn't matter one little bit if we think you are wrong...or right for that matter.

The title of this one caught my eye, so I thought I would share it just as a counter example to the claim that every sensible person should not just walk, but run away from the horrors of chemotherapy.

https://forthesomedaybook.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/tomorrow-is-oncology…

If chemo worked, she wouldn’t have relapsed, now would she?

**looking at post title**
"who refused chemotherapy"

Well, I guess a good treatment is supposed to work, even if you don't take it in its entirety. Just being in the same room as the bottle should be enough, I'm sure.

I will talk to my dentist about this revolutionary theory for my next root canal surgery. Just drill one root out of the four, and don't bother filling it.

I thought I would share it just as a counter example to the claim that every sensible person should not just walk, but run away from the horrors of chemotherapy.

The immediately preceding post (and I'm going to omit links just to try to lower the cross section) is also well worth a read.

Thanks, Narad.
I saw the flaming tuba guy in the email notice but didn't have time to open the blog, so I missed the context.

Actually, Animal Support, I'm from Kansas so think of me as close to a Missouri skeptic.

I'm quite willing to believe there are effective treatments for different cancers that aren't currently in the standard of care. I'm participating in a little fund-raiser in a couple months to raise money to find out what some of them are.

But you have to SHOW ME the evidence that treatment X works for cancer C1. One patient who's still alive is not sufficient evidence. Your word alone is not either.

But, as a rhetorical exercise, which of the methods discussed by Bollinger is most effective in treating Hodgkins Lymphoma?

Pubmed citations, please.

"However, Callender’s case was different, because when I wrote about it Callender was 17 years old and would be 18 a mere eight months later. IN other words, she was so close to being an adult that, even though she wasn’t legally an adult, I had a bit more of a difficult time supporting in essence locking her up in the hospital and forcing her to undergo chemotherapy. I also understand that not all of my readers shared my ambivalence about this court decision"

Ambivalence? :You supported a pack of greedy doctors who used the court system under the pretext that she wasn't a "legal" adult to recapture their cash-cow aka PGU (Profit Generating Unit, how people are usually referred to on health-"care" financial ledgers/business opportunities).

Once they had their grasping claws on that court-order, they sent 12 cop cars full of "Hartford" finest" PLUS an FCP goon squad to Cassie's home who surrounded this obviously "dangerous" criminal' (why such force?) terrorized her, then dragged her from her home at GUN-POINT and handcuffed cover of darkness, delivering her to the House of Pain (Island of Dr. Moreau allusion intended) >> Why does the word "Gestapo" come to mind (they were "just following orders" right?)

Now forcibly imprisoned and under armed guard, her conscience-free torturers proceeded to slice-n-dice her, slamming in a drug port into her chest AGAINST her will, then raping her repeatedly for months with their obscenely over-priced poisons,coercing her "cooperation" by threatening her with starvation and isolating her from any meaningful human contact (how would YOU like someone to do this to YOU, Dr. Orac?)

FACT: These drugs are POISONS which is why the body reacts so violently to them. The only hope for the PGU is that the drugs kill the cancer before fatally poisoning the PGU, who suffers the agonies from hell that go with being shot up with such poisons.

FACT: Does "poison/slash-n-burn" work to "cure" cancer, YES (with wildly varying "success rates"). But as has been pointed out now that her cancer's returned the doctors would savage her body with your "salvage chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation" (what a horror...you first, Dr. Orac!).

This brings up your other point, Dr. Orac, that people who die of cancer suffer, but why should they suffer ever? The reason is doctors use their monopoly on palliative care to blackmail their PGUs into suffering through their "therapies" first, IOW if you aren't under a doctor's "care" for the cancer, you're completely cut off from pain meds/other care . So tell me WHY Cassie should have to die in agony from cancer, Dr. Orac, other than to make an example of her agony to frighten others into submitting to doctors first?

Regarding the above, there's no reason for anyone to ever suffer IF he/she was allowed to end his/her life when faced with the inevitable slow, painful death, something I could do for any suffering pet, but am NOT allowed to do for myself.
But wait, if a PGU is "allowed" the dignity of such a decision, then it's not possible to keep them "alive" (if one wants to call painfully prolonged DEATH being alive) long enough to fully pillage their bank-accounts/insurance resources and even put their survivors into debt to them for life.

In short, IMO, these doctors were evil beasts who simply trampled all over the rights of another human being to make a buck, making this "joke" all too true"

"What's the difference between God and a doctor? Why God doesn't think He's a doctor!"

POINT: All the people involved in brutalizing Cassandra AGAINST HER WILL are completely beneath contempt (the judge, the cops, those evil doctors/their equally conscience-free minions!) and I can only hope they literally at some point "get a dose of their own medicine" (The 1971 movie "The Hospital" comes to mind...sweet!)

Chemo kills 97% of the patients! I refused chemo and mastectomy 6 years ago and did natural treatments only. I was told by my quack doctor that I would die in 2 months without both because I have invasive lobular cancer. I am still here. I have to stick to a regimented diet and herbs or it does come back but it will go away. You people who are brainwashed by CHEMO and too ignorant to see it's just a huge money maker, go get your chemo when you get cancer and live the few months after you get it because it destroys your entire immune system. GOD put all of the good food and herbs on this EARTH TO CURE US!!! you are ignorant!

Why did God also give us invasive lobular carcinoma?

Lobular carcinoma commonly is a low-grade tumor, often multicentric, and is not eradicated (temporarily or permanently) by herbs and diet.

Get some competent medical followup, Tracie. Your life could depend on it.

[chemo]’s just a huge money maker

Glad to hear that you get your regimented diet and herbs and natural treatments for free.

GOD put all of the good food and herbs on this EARTH TO CURE US!!!

Exept those, that are able to kill us, give us cancer or just are generally not really healthy.

I refused chemo and mastectomy 6 years ago and did natural treatments only. I was told by my quack doctor that I would die in 2 months without both because I have invasive lobular cancer. I am still here.

Just a few questions:
Was your cancer diagnosed on an excisional biopsy or lumpectomy? If so, that is probably why you are alive today. See numerous articles at this site.
If your doctor was a quack, why did you believe him when he told you that you had cancer?
Were you really told you had 2 months to live? That is so out of line, I don't believe it (unless your doctor really was a quack!).
Sorry, you are absolutely wrong to say that chemo kills 97% of the patients. An exclamation point doesn't increase the veracity of your statement either.
And, to echo the other commenters, God causes cancer.

When someone talks about all the wonderful things God hath made, I feel like bursting into a Monty Python song -

::singing::

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Amen.

::/singing::

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitress.

I was told by my quack doctor that I would die in 2 months

That's nothing, mine told me I was turning into a NEWT!!*

*I got better.

Another young woman with cancer, lured into quackery by Ty Bollinger

oracknows — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 02:06:18 +0000

Another young woman with cancer, lured into quackery by Ty Bollinger

It sucks to be diagnosed with cancer at any age, but it especially sucks to be young and diagnosed with cancer. The prompt application of science-based cancer treatment is important for anyone with cancer, but it’s especially important for young people with cancer, because they have the most life-years to lose if they dawdle or pursue quackery. That’s why I get particularly perturbed about young people with cancer whose parents choose (or who themselves choose) quackery over science-based medicine, and it’s why I become the most perturbed of all when I learn of stories of children being subjected to alternative medicine instead of effective cancer treatment. Examples have, unfortunately, been fairly common over the years, and include children such as Sarah Hershberger, teens such as Abraham Cherrix, and young adults like Jessica Ainscough, a.k.a. “The Wellness Warrior.” Add to that credulous stories in the media these people who reject conventional therapy in favor of whatever woo has attracted them, and it’d enough to infuriate a cancer surgeon.

Unfortunately, here comes another one

This one comes from Down Under, and it’s about a 22 year old woman named Carissa Gleeson, who hales from Western Australia and, as is so often the case, is portrayed as the picture of health. (Actually, before getting cancer, she was the She and her partner own a farm; she does lots of outdoorsy things. Before her cancer was diagnosed, she did a lot of farm work. Now she has a GoFundMe page to raise money for the quackery she has chosen to use. Meanwhile, I learned of her story in—where else?—The Daily Mail, although subsequently I found a more in-depth story on in Sunshine Coast Daily, a local paper, entitled Cowgirl chooses alternative therapies to treat cancer, complete with a photo of Gleeson and her partner looking like, well, a cowboy and cowgirl.

Over the last decade-plus, in assessing these alternative medicine cancer cure testimonials, I’ve learned what to look for and how to read between the lines. Those skills came in handy looking at Gleeson’s testimonial as told in these two sources and her GoFundMe page, as you will see. First, let’s take a look at how the Daily Fail presents her story:

A young woman, 22, who works at a cattle station, is trying to beat cancer by taking high doses of Vitamin C and using an infrared sauna daily.

Doctors told Carissa Gleeson, from outback Western Australia, chemotherapy would give her a 50 per cent chance at surviving five years of synovial sarcoma in her lower back, a rare cancer of soft tissue.

She had visited the doctor with a lump on her back, and was diagnosed with the rare cancer in March last year, when she was just 21-years-old.

Let’s just start out with this presentation. Glesson had a lump on her back. We don’t know how large it was. (At least, I haven’t been able to find out anywhere, and that includes both news stories, Gleeson’s GoFundMe page, and her blog My Journey Back to Health.) The reason it’s important will become clear in a moment. Notice how above it says that chemotherapy would only give Gleeson a 50-50 chance of survival. First of all, most sarcomas require a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to be treated effectively. One wonders why she didn’t mention surgery. Elsewhere, on her GoFundMe page, Gleeson states that she “decided against chemotherapy and radiation as I did not like what they had to offer” her.

So what does this tell me? Well, the primary treatment for most sarcomas is surgery. Usually, if surgery can be done first safely and without too much disfigurement, it is. Certainly this is the case with synovial cell sarcoma, whose cell of origin is not clear, where wide excision with a negative margin of 1-3 cm all around is the standard of care, and frequently postoperative radiation is administered to decrease the chance of a local recurrence of the tumor in the excision bed. The use of chemotherapy, either before surgery (neoadjuvant) or after surgery (adjuvant) is somewhat controversial and only contributes slightly to survival, which is, roughly, 50-60% at five years and 40-50% at ten years, survival rates that assume successful excision of the cancer.

The relevance of these observations is as follows. The fact that nowhere does Gleeson mention that she would need surgery tells me one of two things. Either she has already undergone surgery to excise the cancer and she is being offered adjuvant chemotherapy. Personally, I hope this is what’s going on, because then at least Gleeson would have had the tumor excised and therefore might have a chance of long term survival close to what I mentioned above. The second possibility is that her tumor is too large to excise and she was being offered neoadjuvant chemotherapy to shrink it and make it possible to remove. This would be a much worse possibility, and I hope that’s not the case. I tend to favor the first possibility as the most likely explanation of what’s going on because if she had a mass so large that it couldn’t be removed on her back it would be difficult to hide and likely now, a year after her diagnosis, very symptomatic. Also, I doubt the oncologists would have quoted her a 50% five year survival if she still had her primary tumor in place, because her odds of surviving that long with a completely untreated high grade sarcoma. (Synovial cell sarcomas are nearly all high grade.)

As usual, though, I’m speculating. It’s an educated speculation, but speculation. I just can’t know because, as is the case with pretty much all of these testimonials, the information released is too little to make more definitive predictions and conclusions.

What is provided in great detail, though, is a breathtakingly inapt analogy:

Carissa uses a simple analogy to explain why she walked away from traditional chemotherapy.

"If you walk into a restaurant, and they only have three things on the menu but you don't like any of them, you are going to walk out and find another restaurant.

"When I say three things, I am referring to chemotherapy, radiation and surgery because they are the only three things offered by conventional medicine when you have been diagnosed with cancer."

"There is a lot more out there that can be more effective, every caner is different but you have to find what's right for you. And you have to believe and trust in what you are doing."

Sigh. Medicine is not a restaurant. The reason there are only three treatment modalities for Gleeson’s tumor on the menu is because those are the only three treatment modalities that are efficacious. That’s the cold, hard reality of the situation. When you’re facing a life-threatening disease and your options are all bad options, it’s entirely understandable to want to reject those bad options and look for something else. It’s human nature, and there’s no doubt Gleeson got a raw deal to have been diagnosed with a cancer with a 50-50 chance of cutting her life short within five years. Unfortunately, nature is not forgiving. Sarcomas don’t care about what you want. They care about getting nutrients from their host, growing, and ultimately spreading. It’s what cancers do, and all the wishful thinking about other miraculous treatment options in the world won’t change that.

And when I refer to “miraculous,” I should have said “magical.” Just look at some of Gleeson’s treatments:

In the last 12 months I have made some huge dietary changes, followed a strict supplement routine & done emotional healing. I have also done a lot of cleansing including juice / water fasting, infrared saunas, colonics and hyper baric chamber. We have managed to slow everything down with all of this but we are in need of stronger treatments to start killing off the cancer cells and reducing the tumour size.

I am now doing 3x weekly intravenous treatments including high dose Vit C, ozone therapy, UV blood cleaning, bi carb, polyMVA, glutathione and emotional healing. I am now working along with an amazing team of doctors both in Aust and the U.S and have 100% faith in what I am doing.

None of these treatments are effective, and some are potentially dangerous, such as ultraviolet “blood cleaning” and IV ozone therapy. The first involves treating the blood with UV irradiation, either through withdrawing it from a vein or doing it “transcutaneously” (through the skin). Often for the first, just a few millileters of blood are withdrawn, irradiated, and reinjected, an amount too small to be plausible as a means of producing a major therapeutic effect even if irradiating blood did all the magical things its advocates claim. Actually, it’s been known since 1970 that UV blood irradiation is ineffective against cancer. Ozone therapy involves mixing of the ozone with various gases and liquids and injecting this into the body, including the vagina, rectum, intramuscular, subcutaneously, or intravenously. The result when ozone is mixed with an aqueous solution is hydrogen peroxide. There is no evidence that it is effective against cancer. Nor is there any evidence that infrared saunas, like the one Gleeson is photographed lying in, have any healing effect on cancer.

Then there are, as usual in these cases, many, many bogus lab tests:

These past few weeks I have done a whole range of different tests for a variety of different things. A few weeks ago I done a really important and quite expensive blood test which was sent to a lab in Greece. Here they are able to take malignant cells out of my bloodstream and grow them out in different dishes over a period of a few days. They can then test the sensitivity of the cancer cells against different therapies and also find out if they are resistant to any therapies. This is extremely important as we can then personalise my protocol a lot more with different therapies and supplements which are shown to have an effect on my type of cancer. (and also take away different things that are shown to have no effect.) Good news is the infusions I am currently doing showed different levels of effectiveness in killing the cells. ?? The cells are also sensitive to hyperthermia.

Last week I received my results back for a food intolerance test which is also done via a blood test. This is really important as I need every system in my body working correctly and to also keep inflammation in my body as low as possible. Different foods can cause severe inflammation in the body and different foods can also drastically reduce inflammation in the body. My test showed that I had an intolerance to 26 different foods including nuts such as almonds, Brazil, hazelnuts and peanuts. Also broccoli, white cabbage, sunflower seeds, chicken eggs and a range of dairy products. I was quite surprised with the results as I consumed a LOT of broccoli, almonds, brazil nuts and white cabbage. I did suffer from bloating before and since cutting out these foods I have not had any bloating after eating meals. ??Depending on the severity of my intolerance to the food it will need to be cut out of my diet for a minimum period of 2 -12 months. After this time frame I can slowly reintroduce and see how my body responds.

Many have been various tests that take tumor cells from the primary tumor and test them for sensitivity to various chemotherapeutics to guide therapy. They have all thus far been disappointing in their ability to identify effective chemotherapy regimens “personalized” to the patient. These days, companies have been offering tests that purport to isolate and test a patient’s circulating tumor cells for sensitivity to various drugs. These tests suffer from the same problems and shortcomings as tests examining cells from the primary tumor plus the added problem of whether the lab knows what it’s doing when isolating actual circulating tumor cells. These are the sorts of tests that are particularly loved by functional medicine quacks. As for the food tolerance tests, there is no evidence that cancer is due to food intolerances or that an “antiinflammatory” diet can treat an already established cancer.

So where did Gleeson learn about these quack treatments? Apparently, while “doing her own research,” she came across the video series by Ty Bollinger, The Truth About Cancer. We’ve met him before, and his video series is a cornucopia of cancer quackery credulously presented. It’s a load of pure nonsense. In retrospect, I’m now regretting that I didn’t expose myself to the series when it was available for free, the better to write a series of blog posts taking it down, but it just seemed like too much work, even for me, at the time. I might have to rectify that situation the next time Bollinger updates his series.

Be that as it may, here is the danger of quackery propaganda movies and video series. They persuade desperate cancer patients like Gleeson, desperate for another way other than conventional treatment, that there does exist a way of curing their cancers without pain, without the need for toxic drugs or potentially disfiguring surgery. Would that it were true! It’s not. But videos like this can lead cancer patients to believe that it is true and thereby lure them away from their one best shot at surviving their disease onto a path where they will not survive. Even worse, that path is very, very expensive. On her GoFundMe page, Gleeson informs us that her treatments alone average $5,000 a week, and that cost doesn’t even include the supplements that she is taking. When I read that, I wondered just what the heck could cost over $20,000 a month? A lot of conventional chemotherapy regimens don’t cost nearly that much, the greedy depredations of big pharma notwithstanding. What on earth are these quacks selling that costs that much, or is it, as I suspect, that their markup would make Martin Shkreli hesitate and exclaim, “That’s highway robbery”?

Stories like Gleeson’s saddens me. She’s yet another in a depressingly long line of young cancer patients lured by quacks to throw their lives away unnecessarily. It is not, however, Gleeson who angers me. She is a victim, as clueless as her statements to the press have been. What angers me are the quacks who seduced her with their siren song of a no-pain cure for her disease and the press, which, despite its perfunctory and obligatory quoting of cancer experts saying how ineffective these treatments are, presents stories like Gleeson’s in a glamorous light. It’s a combination that kills.

oracknows Mon, 04/18/2016 - 22:06

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synovial cell sarcoma

Ty Bollinger