laetrile

Skepticism/Critical Thinking

Quackery

https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/laetrile.html

Categories

Social Sciences

Recipes for apricot-seed pesto, egg nog, and marzipan...

Gotta love that marzipan taste! You drink benzaldehyde every time you drink DiSarrono™, or almond extract. The bitter almond has laetrile, but in about ½ to ⅓ the amount of apricot seeds. The bitterness was bred-out of most almonds over the past few thousand years.

I think they are good. There is a strong resemblance between apricot seeds and bitter almonds. I stuff them inside of dates (get your mind out of the gutter people.)

What I found bizarre about the whole deal is that the laetrile proponents actually put-out an old-school promotional video in Technichrome, where they actually made the bold claim that "cancer is a laetrile deficiency", made manifest by switching from a natural raw plant diet to a cooked diet. (Tell that to the mice given 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene.)

But apricot seeds are unlikely to kill you with cyanide before the bitterness gets overwhelming.

It would be interesting to see if it actually accumulated in cancer cells (some molecules are actually known to do this) like they claim. But I don't foresee any ¹³C-amygdalin studies in the near future, so I'll probably never know.

One patient, however, challenged with a large intake of raw almonds, had transient symptoms of cyanide toxic reaction with escalating blood cyanide levels. This small study indicates that amygdalin in the doses employed produces few clinical side effects. A definite hazard of cyanide toxic reaction must be assumed, however, and possible long-term side effects remain unknown.

A Pharmacologic and Toxicological Study of Amygdalin
JAMA,
2.13.1981

"You’re either with me or against me." and "America, Love It or Leave It" have to be two of the most famous false dichotomies of all time, although I'm sure there are others.

Ah yes, I remember the good old days of Vitamin B17. Scientific studies showed that: The claims that laetrile or amygdalin have beneficial effects for cancer patients are not currently supported by sound clinical data. There is a considerable risk of serious adverse effects from cyanide poisoning after laetrile or amygdalin, especially after oral ingestion. The risk-benefit balance of laetrile or amygdalin as a treatment for cancer is therefore unambiguously negative.

But who cares about science when you can do this?

"In quackery, be it cancer quackery or quackery used for other diseases, no treatment, no matter how ineffective and even toxic, ever disappears." Some do:
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm

When the elder Richardson was arrested in 1972 (on charges that were dropped), it prompted his fellow members of the John Birch Society, the far-right conspiracist group of the era, to start a lobbying group to legalize laetrile.

The John Birch Society never went away, either. It has taken over the Republican Party. You may have heard of the Koch brothers, billionaires who bankroll the Republican party. Their father co-founded the John Birch Society.

The "theory" here (I use that term very loosely) is that if the free market were able to decide things, we would have effective and affordable cures for any and all diseases. The real world doesn't work that way. Somebody has to pay for the research, and has been mentioned in other posts, only about one in ten prospective new drugs make it through the process. Meanwhile, people are free to ignore the research that shows that treatments like "vitamin B17" are ineffective at best. Libertarian economics assumes that people are rational actors. Many are not, especially when they are ill.

By any measure, John ("the elder") Richardson made a huge amount of money off laetrile. From the Quackwatch article about the rise and fall of laetrile (the fall part seems to have been premature):

"In 1974, he reported that his medical practice had grossed $783,000, with a net income of $172,981. By charging patients $2,000 for a course of Laetrile, Richardson managed to increase his net income 17-fold in just two years. According to his income tax returns, Richardson grossed $2.8 million dollars from his Laetrile practice between January 1973 and March 1976. The actual amount of money he received may have even been higher. In Laetrile Case Histories, he claimed to have treated 4,000 patients, with an average charge of $2,500 per patient. Culbert states that by 1976 Richardson had treated 6,000 patients. If these figures are correct, Richardson would have grossed between $10 and $15 million dollars during this time."

The marketing of this peach pit snake oil completely feeds into the "look how wide awake I am by doing my own research" attitude of their typical customer who has to believe that the FDA/government/Big Pharma are all suppressing this miracle cure. Suppressing it so much that you have to be oh-so-clever to even find it on line. In a sick, killing-cancer-patients-without-a-shred-of-humanity, it is ingenious.

What's sickening is that Richardson Jr. pops up in the comments of that story to defend himself and state repeatedly that he never claims to cure anything.He's only selling a healthy food that we all need and are lacking in our modern diet.

Of course he's so deep in denial that he doesn't realize that other a$$hats like Mike Adams, Ty Bollinger, Ralph Moss and Eric Merola (among many others) do all his marketing for him. They drive business to his website, desperate people hoping to cure their cancer because Ty Bollinger says it works. It's all "nudge nudge wink wink but Richardson is fully complicit and knows exactly what's going on.

I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up here too to refute/market.

Oh, and another Bollinger shill in the comments claims his daughter cured her cancer TWICE, both times 30 days from death (how would he know?) by eating Richardson's pits.

From Richardson senior

“[N]ature’s mechanism will not work if one fails to eat the foods that contain this necessary vitamin, which is exactly what has happened to modern man, whose food supply has become further and further removed from the natural state.”

Because the Ancients (tm) had a daily access to apricot seeds?
Oh, I get it, it's just the same storyline as "live food". Modern food is depleted of nutrients, so you need to eat multivitamin pills instead. With extra selenium.

Meanwhile, in UK, a man was hospitalized this week after eating 3 cherry stones. Yep, cyanide poisoning.
B17 doesn't sound that necessary for life, finally.

@ Woo Fighter

his daughter cured her cancer TWICE, both times 30 days from death (how would he know?)

There is this little countdown-running clock above everybody's head, didn't you notice it?

Oh, and another Bollinger shill in the comments claims his daughter cured her cancer TWICE, both times 30 days from death (how would he know?) by eating Richardson’s pits.

In addition to the logical flaw you spotted, there is the problem of why someone whose cancer was supposedly cured would have a recurrence. I suspect she stopped her treatment a little too soon the first time around. And how would this guy know that his daughter wasn't also (or instead) getting science-based treatment?

Oh, she's showing up in the comments now too. Here's the short story: she takes the pits, her tumours go away. She stops taking them and the tumours come back. They disappear within days of starting the pits again. Both times she was "30 days from eternity."

So 'Vitamin B17' is rearing it's ugly head again. I have a book from the 1970s that covers a whole range of health fads, from Organic Food to various strange concoctions guaranteed to cure all ills and of course 'Vitiamin B15' (Pangamic Acid)...

"an explanation for why there was no post tomorrow."

Sorry for being pedantic, but I think you broke the space-time continuum ;-)

WF@11: OK, that clarifies some things, but it leaves unanswered the question of how she knew that she was within 30 days of death. Did that evaluation come from a competent doctor, or was it accompanied by words along the lines of, "...unless you take these pills."? For that matter, who is evaluating the progression/remission of her tumors? The whole thing smells like an apocryphal anecdote to me.

...if you can call the revival of dangerous quackery a “renaissance”

How about a "regrowth"? Like how a tumour not successfully excised will come back to plague us again.

It smells like something else to me, Eric. The kind you need hip waders to walk through.

It is both impressive and inevitable that Alt-Med cancer-vulture fraudsters will pimp multiple Infallible Cures for Cancer. So it was no surprise to find Amanda Mary Jewell (who normally peddles GcMAF) promoting the laetrile scam as well:
https://healingoracle.ch/2017/06/09/doctor-categorically-claims-that-wh…

Apricot pits have cyanide in them. Cyanide! One of the big scary poisons everyone has heard of!

I really, really don't get it. How can a person say 'I'm scared of chemo, it has chemicals in it, so I'm going to eat cyanide"?

I think I'm going to have to put my head on my desk for a minute.

Indeed, no quackery ever disappears, no matter how soundly it is rebutted.

Last weekend, I went with my family to the Science Museum of Minnesota. They inherited the superlative quackery collection of the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, which occupied a storefront in Minneapolis for many years until its owner decided to retire. The Science Museum has been steadily adding to the collection, and improving its visibility. It is now the first thing you see when you arrive on the middle exhibit floor, which as it is also the floor for special temporary exhibits, is one a lot of people will see. You can sit in a vibrating Kellogg chair, try on a phrenology tester, or sit in a replica orgone accumulator box. (They also have a vintage box on display.) What astonished me was to see a new addition to the orgone display -- they acquired a brand-new orgone accumulator blanket, retailing at $200. Given that orgone is total bunk, that's a hell of a nifty markup for a pretty basic flannel blanket.

I was stunned. I always thought of orgone as a great example of how kooky and crazy people were back in the heyday of patent medicine. I had no idea it was still being hawked today. Damn. If *orgone* is still around, I don't know that there's any hope for squelching other medical nonsense.

That said, if you're ever in the Twin Cities, do visit the Science Museum. The quackery exhibit alone is worth the price of admission, in my opinion. The upper floor, where you enter, also has a great exhibit on vaccination. You might wonder why they put that up on the top floor (which is dedicated to the natural history of Minnesota), but it's actually very shrewd -- the vaccination exhibit is right next to a massively popular exhibit where kids can sit at a pretend news desk and read a teleprompter and pretend to be news anchors. It's the first thing you see after you show your wristband, and kids will line up and wait for their turn. While they're waiting, the closest entertainment is educational displays about vaccination. ;-) It's brilliant, and I hope it helps. They use a ball and stick game to teach herd immunity. There is a plexiglass tube with little figures of people painted on each end. Some balls represent infectious disease, and when you start, the balls are all at one end, infecting those people. The middle of the tube has a lot of holes in it, through which you can insert plastic sticks which represent vaccination shots. The challenge is to stick enough in at the right angles that when you turn the tube over, none or very few of the disease balls fall to the people on the other end of the tube. There's also a variation on the labyrinth game with more educational content related to vaccines and infectious disease. You mainly see parents playing with these exhibits, while their kids wait to be pretend news anchors, and I think that's the goal.

It kinda makes sense, since laetrile is glucose-conjugated. Thus, Griffins "bait" analogy might have some plausibility.

But once you read this, it makes no sense at all:

However, cecal contents of conventional rats, exhibited both amygdalin- and prunasin-hydrolyzing activities. The resulting mandelonitrile dissociates spontaneously into cyanide and benzaldehyde. Therefore, our findings indicate that metabolism of amygdalin to prunasin occurring in the proximal part of jejunum is apparently mediated by enzymatic beta(1-6)glucosidase activity of the gut wall. In contrast, the toxicity of amygdalin due to the release of cyanide obviously requires microbiological activities of the gut flora.

Intestinal first pass metabolism of amygdalin in the rat in vitro

This, and the human studies showing elevated cyanide levels, would certainly indicate that this molecule disintegrates before it can reach cancer cells (except for maybe enterocytes.)

(Although Ernst Krebs was a biochemist, it should be noted that the Kreb's Cycle was named after someone else entirely. It was named after Sir Hans Adolf Krebs (no relation). Part of Laetrile's popularity could be explained by his last name, as it allows him to "ride on the coattails" of the notoriety of Krebs proper (the Nobel-winning Krebs) by either confoundment or subconscious association.)

JustaTech - but it's NATURAL cyanide from nature..

From Calli Arcale@#19

What astonished me was to see a new addition to the orgone display — they acquired a brand-new orgone accumulator blanket, retailing at $200. Given that orgone is total bunk, that’s a hell of a nifty markup for a pretty basic flannel blanket.

Gee, so that's what Linus van Pelt has been doing after Charles Schulz passed away! Not content with the Great Pumpkin, he has gone into orgone woo!

Calli Arcale@#19

What astonished me was to see a new addition to the orgone display — they acquired a brand-new orgone accumulator blanket, retailing at $200. Given that orgone is total bunk, that’s a hell of a nifty markup for a pretty basic flannel blanket.

Gee, so that's what Linus van Pelt has been up to after Charles Schulz passed away! Or did Lucy put him up to it? It sounds like precisely the sort of thing Lucy would make poor Linus do.

I always thought of orgone as a great example of how kooky and crazy people were back in the heyday of patent medicine.

No, no, the Orgone accumulators were rolling well into the '70s. I seem to recall some Hawkwind fans around here, to whom I will defer.

I was stunned. I always thought of orgone as a great example of how kooky and crazy people were back in the heyday of patent medicine. I had no idea it was still being hawked today. Damn. If *orgone* is still around, I don’t know that there’s any hope for squelching other medical nonsense.

What Doctors Wouldn't Tell You Even If They Were Blind Drunk And Taking The Piss (or whatever it's called) have been hawking Orgone nonsense in their latest spam.

And for Narad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fJ0P1f0Ys0

I would totally recommend reading Adventures in the Orgasmatron for a history of the descent of Wilhelm Reich into orgone madness. The sCAMsters rely on the ignorance of history of enough people to make the con work.

Narad -- yeah, I know that now. But it ain't just the 70s -- the blanket they purchased for the exhibit was acquired at retail price in 2015.

Actually, that's one of the more interesting things they've added to the original collection: modern examples to go with the vintage quackery. It's not just the orgone blanket. Magnets, electric stimulation, remote diagnosis and treatment via radio (and today, the Internet), colored light therapy..... They haven't added anything for homeopathy yet, but it's probably only a matter of time. The collection started out as exclusively medical devices, and today has just a few patent medicines on display. Hopefully they'll expand into that area later -- it's certainly a rich field to mine.

re blasts from the past

Today, Mercola lauds the work of Seyfried and ketogenic diets for cancer; the post includes standard swipes at chemotherapy, the Komen Foundation, mentions Warburg etc as well as paypal where you can donate money to research.

Yeah. I saw it. Given that there seems to be a disturbance in the quack force resulting in a lot of the usual suspects resurrecting praise of Seyfried and ketogenic diets, at some point in the near future I might have to update my post from three years ago on the topic.

Cool. I know where to go ever I ever visit the Twin Cities :)

My sister gave me a medical device for the treatment of hysteria that dates back to the early 20th Century.

It's essentially a vibrator LOL

Oh, and Ernst Krebs was never a biochemist. He flunked out of school . . . multiple times. He called himself a biochemist, but that doesn't make him one.

Well, yeah. The "treatment" for female "hysteria" used to be old psychiatrist and doctor dudes basically diddling the woman's bits until she reached orgasm.

What astonished me was to see a new addition to the orgone display — they acquired a brand-new orgone accumulator blanket, retailing at $200. Given that orgone is total bunk, that’s a hell of a nifty markup for a pretty basic flannel blanket.

A good friend of mine in college actually made an orgone blanket as part of a project for an academic program we were in. It was actually a brilliant bit of satire, and somehow he got credit for it.

The blanket itself was pretty simple; apparently the idea with "orgone accumulators" is to sandwich layers of inorganic material between layers of organic material, so he basically made a wool (or flannel?) blanket filled with, I think, steel wool.

There's also something called DOR, or "deadly orgone," which I assume does the reverse of whatever orgone is supposed to do. I believe it is supposed to emanate from electronics, etc.

"Feel anything yet?"
"Nope."
"Yeah, it's probably all the DOR around here."

Trevor kept a journal of all his blanket sessions, but filled the entries with increasingly elaborate dreams and visions (he read these entries out loud during his presentation) until he got to the revelation: "I... AM... LOKI!"

Our friend Derek, who lives in Madison now, still has the blanket, for some reason.

JP - you can now buy yarn that has a stainless steel core, wrapped in either wool or silk. It's interesting from a fiber arts perspective because you can make fabric that holds specific shapes. If the yarn itself weren't so expensive and knitting weren't so time-consuming (and one was unburdened by scruples) I could imagine a cottage industry selling orgone accumulator scarves or hats!

If *orgone* is still around, I don’t know that there’s any hope for squelching other medical nonsense.

Well, I'm not tossing out my Kate Bush CDs... Here's why you can hope to squelch other medical nonsense: Orgone is less medical nonsense than something like aesthetic expression meets 'alternative' spirituality/philosophy. I don't think it's something that many people ever took seriously and literally at the same time. Reich's madness is just interesting whether you buy into it in any sense it or not...

Speaking of 'don't miss' museums, if you're ever in Baltimore, make sure you check out AVAM, The American Visionary Art museum. A lot of the art there was made by crazy people, some of them institutionalized-crazy, some religious crazy, some utterly idiosyncratically crazy. People who build massive apocalyptic Biblical allegory sculpture gardens out of bottle-caps and broken glass... stuff like that. Taken literally it's all nonsense, but it would be incredibly sad if everyone squelched things that are so expressive and oddly beautiful.

Anyway, most medical nonsense is sorely lacking in aesthetic/philosophical value. No one as cool as Kate Bush will ever write a lovely song about reflexology or coffee enemas. Once those things are as debunked as 'orgone science', there's no other reason for anyone but the quacks to want to keep them around.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw&w=560&h=315]

When I was in Thailand, I visited the Golden Triangle. There is a strange museum there: Museum of Opium. And no they don't sell any.

#25 - JDK,

Yep.

It is very interesting that two of the most notorious crackpots of the 20th century - Wilhelm Reich and Immanuel Velikovsky were both psychiatrists / psychoanalysts.
Velikovsky's & Reich's scientific ignorance was astonishing, but that did not stop the terminally credulous from embracing their delusions.

(The above is not meant as a general swipe at psychiatry / psychology as I believe they are very important.)

Callie: I have three days before I leave the city. Why do you have to recommend that book NOW? I guess I'll have to wait a couple of weeks. (Yes, I could buy it, but hardcovers are expensive. Also, I think I'm at the limit of 'acceptable number of books.'

Emma Crew @33: I have a friend who knitted himself a shirt and his wife a tunic from that stuff. It's a nightmare to work with (very hard on the hands) and at least the pieces he knitted were more air than material. I don't know if that was a decision based on cost, weight, or aesthetics, but the idea of trying to knit a whole blanket -shudder.

I could imagine a cottage industry selling orgone accumulator scarves or hats!

Not to be used for the treatment of brain tumors, though, per the Orgonics web site:

Orgone accumulator devices should not be used on brain tumors because the brain is encapsulated by bone and any edema or breakdown products from the tumor can create too much pressure inside.

Actually, the whole "CAUTIONS" section is frikkin' comedy gold. Behold:

Can you sit and use a flatscreen computer while using an orgone device?
I don't recommend it because the keyboards of these high-powered laptops give off strong electro-magnetic fields; especially don't sit with one of these in your laps as it can affect your reproductive organs.

You should not use an orgone device within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. If there are rolling hills or mountains between you and the nuclear plant, 25 miles distance is sometimes adequate. If you are unsure, try a small orgone pad first and see what the charge feels like in your environment.

"I’m knitting it into a pair of socks. Nothing fits better nor wears longer than solid wire socks."

Justatech I have some, which I vaguely planned to put into a weaving project, or else knitting it on huge needles in rows alternating with something else to create something moldable without killing my hands - knitting cotton is bad enough! I understand you can also use it over short distances to connect LED sequins for wearable electronics. The furthest I've gone on that path is incorporating some EL wire in a bag, though.

#29 Orac
Please do update your takedown of the ketogenic miracle. Mercola is promoting the hell out of his fat for fuel book and his metabolic mitochondrial therapy. All disease especially cancer is poorly fed mitochondria, the poor things choking on a high-carb, non-organic western diet.
Unfortunately, I have a copy of the book and the list of people offering praise and support include Mark Hyman, Seyfried (of course), Perlmutter, and many others from the crankosphere.

Mr Woo actually went to the doctor Monday (he quit authorizing refills; it had been 18+ months). I think it was because his betasitosterol was not shrinking his prostate and he finally decided blood glucose in the 200s meant his Dr Whittaker's "GlucoGold" was no longer adequate to manage his T2 diabetes.

He might live to 75, after all...

As long as he doesn't get anything else. The woo is strong in this one.

Unfortunately, I have a copy of the book and the list of people offering praise and support include Mark Hyman, Seyfried (of course), Perlmutter, and many others from the crankosphere.

You would think that the increasing market penetration would bother Hyman?

The FDA cracks down on bogus cancer "cures." Will this be the last time this happens until after Trump?

oracknows — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 05:00:29 +0000

The FDA cracks down on bogus cancer "cures." Will this be the last time this happens until after Trump?

I was going to write about this yesterday, but seeing a family of a child with terminal cancer seduced by the siren call of Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplaston quackery distracted me and I had to blog about it. It's actually an appropriate lead-in to this story, which was based on an announcement by the FDA that it was sending warning letters to 14 companies for selling products that they claimed were treatments for cancer:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters addressed to 14 U.S.-based companies illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure cancer. The products are marketed and sold without FDA approval, most commonly on websites and social media platforms.

“Consumers should not use these or similar unproven products because they may be unsafe and could prevent a person from seeking an appropriate and potentially life-saving cancer diagnosis or treatment,” said Douglas W. Stearn, director of the Office of Enforcement and Import Operations in the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs. “We encourage people to remain vigilant whether online or in a store, and avoid purchasing products marketed to treat cancer without any proof they will work. Patients should consult a health care professional about proper prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.”

It is a violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to market and sell products that claim to prevent, diagnose, treat, mitigate or cure diseases without first demonstrating to the FDA that they are safe and effective for their labeled uses. The illegally sold products cited in the warning letters posted today include a variety of product types, such as pills, topical creams, ointments, oils, drops, syrups, teas and diagnostics (such as thermography devices). They include products marketed for use by humans or pets that make illegal, unproven claims regarding preventing, reversing or curing cancer; killing/inhibiting cancer cells or tumors; or other similar anti-cancer claims.

Given the current mania of the Donald Trump administration for deregulating basically everything, especially the FDA, for which the rationale is the fantasy that removing the "heavy hand of government" will unleash a flood of cures from the free market, I can't help but wonder if this sort of action is a dinosaur, at least for now. Be that as it may, as I mentioned yesterday, Stanislaw Burzynski is about as perfect example as I can recall of a major failure by the FDA. After all, he's been peddling his unproven cancer treatment for over four decades now, most recently under the guise of experimental therapy, and neither the FDA nor the Texas Medical Board has been able to stop him. From my perspective, this failure is on the FDA and the Texas Medical Board. The FDA has the tools to shut Burzynski's clinical trials down, given that he has published next to nothing in nearly 20 years and regularly flouts human subject protection regulations and basic clinical research requirements under the law, but thus far it has failed.

In fairness, other failures are not of the FDA's making, but rather defects within the law that the FDA must function under. Indeed, that's what makes this latest announcement so encouraging; this sort of crackdown is, by law, difficult for the FDA to carry out—and intentionally so. The reason is the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994, a law that greatly weakened the FDA's ability to regulate dietary supplements, as I've written about in the past. Basically, the DSHEA created a new class of regulated entities known as dietary supplements and liberalized the sorts of information that supplement manufacturers could transmit to the public. The end result was:

It [the DSHEA] also expanded the types of products that could be marketed as “supplements.” The most logical definition of “dietary supplement” would be something that supplies one or more essential nutrients missing from the diet. DSHEA went far beyond this to include vitamins; minerals; herbs or other botanicals; amino acids; other dietary substances to supplement the diet by increasing dietary intake; and any concentrate, metabolite, constituent, extract, or combination of any such ingredients. Although many such products (particularly herbs) are marketed for their alleged preventive or therapeutic effects, the 1994 law has made it difficult or impossible for the FDA to regulate them as drugs. Since its passage, even hormones, such as DHEA and melatonin, are being hawked as supplements.

Since the passage of the DSHEA, the supplement industry has become very clever at getting around even this law. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act defines "drug" as any article "intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease" and "articles (other than food) intended to affect the structure or function of the body." (Medical devices fall under a separate category.) These parts of the statute give the FDA the power to FDA to ban the marketing of products with unsubstantiated "drug" claims on their labels. The DSHEA doesn't change that, but it makes it easier for companies to evade bans for drug claims as long as they can couch their claims as a "structure-function" claim, usually vague, such as "supports the immune system" or "boosts prostate health" and remember to tack on what Peter Lipson so famously coined as the "Quack Miranda warning" with words to the effect that “these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration" and "this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” Of course, companies get around these prohibitions by playing it straight on their websites and official publications and behind the scenes encouraging more—shall we say?—grandiose claims.

So basically, as long as they append a Quack Miranda warning, supplement companies have to go pretty far in their claims for the FDA to be able to take action. One example of how bad the situation is was the marketing of OSR#1, an industrial chelation agent, as a treatment for autism under the rationale that it's a supplement, which went on for quite some time before the FDA finally stepped in. There are numerous other examples in the archives of this blog. It's not for nothing that I've asked on more than one occasion, "Will the government ever regulate dietary supplements?"

So, out of curiosity, I perused some of the warning letters to see what sort of claims triggered the FDA to act. For instance, there is this letter to Amazing Sour Sop, Inc. about its products Sour Sop Capsules, Sour Sop Tea Bags, and Sour Sop Leaves. Examples include:

On the product label of Sour Sop Leaves & Sour Sop Tea Bags:

“Sour Sop known to many as graviola or (Spanish guanabana) has been known for ages for its medicinal uses and properties. Research has proven it to be 10,000 times stronger than the chemotherapy drug Adriamycin. Recently there has been an increase in the demand for Sour Sop (Graviola) leaves…which studies suggest to be effective in helping with prostate, lung, breast, colon and pancreatic cancers. It is also said to be used in the treatment for tumor, arthritis…bladder infections, high blood pressure, high cholesterol…and protection of your immune system to avoid deadly infections.”

“Testimonials has suggested it helps with infertility, impotence…etc.”

Then, on social media:

In an August 26, 2016 Facebook post which links to the blog authored by Dennis Grant and accessible at http://amazingsoursop.blogspot.com/ titled, “Health Benefits Of Sour Sop amazingsoursop.com” that includes a link to your website, www.amazingsoursop.com:

“Soursop Leaves Benefits:…[B]lood & organ disorders, cancer…insomnia, arthritis and more”

“Guyabano, or the soursop fruit, came into limelight when researchers found its ability to cure cancer.”

Under the subheading, “Is soursop really a cure for cancer?”

“Many would be surprised to know that soursop has miraculous cancer cell killing properties, almost 10000 times stronger than Chemo.”

You get the idea, although in this case Sour Sop appears to have so far as to actually make these claims on product labels, rather than just on social media.

Another manufacturer, Hawk Dok Natural Salve, ran afoul of the FDA because of these claims:

Skin Cancer Treatment

“Hawk Dok Natural Salve is used to treat skin cancer.”

“attacks and destroys abnormal tissues and dose [sic] not harm the surrounding healthy tissue.”

“If there is a virus in the wart of skin tags and moles then the salve will attack it and if not it will harm your skin.”

“the herbs pull out the virus and cancer . . .”

“It cleans cancer out of the body.”

“It also helps with PMS and menopause.”

“It pulls out bad cells, it helps draw out inflammation and pain.”

Then there's Oxygen Health Systems:

Liposomal Vitamin B17 Amygdalin

“Laetrile (i.e. Vitamin B17) therapy is one of the most popular and best known alternative cancer treatments.”

Laetrile? Seriously? That's so...1970s. Indeed, it's a quack cancer treatment that was shown well over 30 years ago to be neither effective nor safe. Notice, though, how laetrile has been renamed to "vitamin B17" or "amygalin" and sold as a "supplement." I have seen this myself in my own practice, where I've encountered patients taking "vitamin B17," with no idea of its prior history as laetrile.

Although my main emphasis has been on the DSHEA and various supplements with claimed cancer-preventing or -curing properties, there's also one letter about a diagnostic test that I've written about before, namely thermography, marketed by Nature's Treasures:

However, your firm’s promotion of its thermographic camera provides evidence that the device is intended for diagnostic screening for detection of breast cancer, including as a sole screening device. Examples include:

On the webpage titled “Breast-Cancer-Awareness”:

“[A]ll women 25 and older should get annual Thermography screenings…”

On the webpage titled “Mammography Vs Thermography”:

“[T]hermography looks for the body’s physiological response to cancer cells. These changes can often occur 8-10 years before the cells are large enough to be seen by a mammogram.”

“Thermography can detect the possibility of breast cancer much earlier…”

“Breast Thermography has: 99% Sensitivity, 90% Specificity, 90% Accuracy.”

“Thermography is far more sensitive than mammography.”

“Thermography benefits all women. They may be particularly useful for young women who want to monitor their breast health should start as early as possible.”

On the webpage titled “What is Breast Thermography”:

“As more and more women become knowledgeable in thermography they choose not to do mammography.”

“I myself have not done mammography since 2006, but have gone through the procedure of ultrasound twice.”

As is the case with most quacks marketing thermography, Nature's Treasures uses a bit of a dodge in the language to claim that its system is FDA-approved when it is not:

Furthermore, you also state on your website www.mynaturestreasures.net/thermography/what-is-breast-thermography/ that “Digital Infrared Thermal Imaging is approved by the F.D.A.” This statement is misleading in accordance with 21 CFR 807.97 because such statements create an impression of official approval of a device due to clearance of a premarket notification submission. Telethermographic systems have only been cleared by FDA with an intended use as an adjunct to other clinical diagnostic procedures in the diagnosis, quantifying, and screening of differences in skin surface temperature changes. Thermography can be used to visualize, document temperature patterns and changes. FDA has never approved any telethermographic system for sole diagnostic screening a class III device under 21 CFR 884.2980(b).

I've discussed why thermography is not an effective screening modality for breast cancer (or any cancer) in my usual inimitable way with my usual ridiculous level of detail before.

Most of the people writing about this latest FDA crackdown appear not to realize that it is nothing new. In searching for information on the FDA and its regulation of supplements whose manufacturers claim to be able to treat or cure cancer, I came across an old post, Can it be real? The FDA brings the hammer down on bogus cancer cures. It was 2008, and instead of 14 bogus cancer treatments, the FDA sent warning letters to 23 U.S. companies and two foreign individuals marketing 125 products. In its press release, it pointed out red flags for bogus cancer treatments:

"Treats all forms of cancer"
"Causes cancer cells to commit suicide!"
"80% more effective than the world's number one cancer drug"
"Skin cancers disappear"
"Target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone"
"Shrinks malignant tumors"
"Avoid painful surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or other conventional treatments"

Same as it ever was.

In fact, recalling the 2008 effort by the FDA to crack down on bogus cancer cures, which was larger than this week's flurry of warning letters, I can't help but be pessimistic. Over the last 9 years, apparently little has changed. Indeed, the only thing that appears to have changed is the cleverness and political power of the supplement manufacturers, not to mention the regulatory atmosphere given the new Donald Trump administration and its seeming commitment to deregulate, well, everything. On the one hand, I'm glad that the FDA has taken this action. I wish it would do this sort of thing more often, because I know that the 14 companies targeted this time are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. yet, even so, I have a hard time not thinking that now, more than ever, the supplement manufacturers and woo peddlers are winning. After all, it is estimated that by 2022 supplement manufacturing will be a $220 billion industry.

oracknows Thu, 04/27/2017 - 01:00

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http://eusa-riddled.blogspot.com2016/12/its-back-brain-stimulator-its-c…

Then there’s Oxygen Health Systems:

Michael Carroll (of www.oxygenhealthsystems.com) is a particularly busy little beaver. He operates five different webstores, not just the three that the FDA pinged him for. He sells TrueRife machines, Cold Corona Ozone Machines, LiveO2 personal oxygen tents, Organic Pure Sulfur (where "pure" is a term of art that translates as "Methyl sulphonyl methane"), and of course every antioxidant imaginable, to counteract the toxic effects of all that oxygen. He will sell you widgets to acidify your water, and alkalinise it, ionise it and deionise it, and generally hydrate it, as the ordinary non-hydrated water that comes out of taps is not capable of sustaining life.

At one point he was running a GoFundMe appeal for moneys from suckers to help him with a Holistic Organic Cure for his self-diagnosed lymphoma, because grifters gotta grift.

Borked link. Should be
http://eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2016/12/its-back-brain-stimulator-its-…

“80% more effective than the world’s number one cancer drug”

I bet whoever came up with that copy was telling the truth. The question is, 80% more effective at what? At wasting people's money? At risking their lives? At not causing unwanted side effects (because it doesn't do anything)?

Organic Pure Sulfur (where “pure” is a term of art that translates as “Methyl sulphonyl methane”)

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, this is a usage of "pure" or which I was previously unaware.

80% more effective at what?

Good question. That claim manages to simultaneously be specific enough to draw the FDA's attention (because it claims to be a treatment for cancer) and vague enough to mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. Undoubtedly their lawyers will point to the latter in defense of their client. Whether the judge falls for the obvious BS is another question.

Note Laetrile (Aka Vitamin B17) again!

I have a book from the '70s that debunks both that and another quack cure that went under the name of 'Vitamin B15' as well as one or two other 'wonder cures'.

I thought that one had been relegated to the quacks dustbin, but obviously I was wrong. Mind you I've also stumbled across a video recently taking down someone else who was promoting Laetrile online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoZIfvDckw

"Everything old is new again," the mantra of the quack universe.

If it was effective swindling people 100 years ago, it should do just as well today.

Left Brain Right Brain pointed out OSR1 is still being developed:

https://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2017/04/05/remember-the-fake-suppleme…

These are incredibly blatant. Let's see what happens. I'm not sure Gottlieb would be opposed to this, by the way.

Orac cites,

It is a violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to market and sell products that claim to prevent, diagnose, treat, mitigate or cure diseases without first demonstrating to the FDA that they are safe and effective for their labeled uses.

MJD says,

Most of these questionable products have registered trademarks (i.e., ®).

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) often mistakenly bestows a certain credibility to such products.

In my opinion, the USPTO is an important and willing player in this "perfect storm" of woo-peddling pseudoscience.

I thought [Laetrile] had been relegated to the quacks dustbin, but obviously I was wrong.

Many pseudoscientific ideas are as hard to kill as the villain in a horror movie franchise. This phenomenon is not limited to alt-med scams (it comes up frequently among creationists and global warming denialists), but that field is particularly susceptible.

Laetrile is, as you correctly note, so 1970s. It was found at the time to be a scam, famously enough to be included in a Doonesbury plot line (Uncle Duke was persuaded to invest in a nonexistent avocado ranch in California). But since then an entire generation of potential suckers who haven't seen the debunking has been born, and scammers are just as eager today as they were 40 years ago to separate them from their money.

Hey, Eric Merola (of Burzynski infomercials) did an entire film just last year about laetrile and Ralph Moss, its leading proponent.

Oops, Merola's laetrile ilm was more like three years ago and was deconstructed in typical fashion on our host's other blog:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/eric-merola-and-ralph-moss-exhume-the-…

"(Uncle Duke was persuaded to invest in a nonexistent avocado ranch in California)"

A different one from "Dr." Young's pH Miracle Ranch?

DB@12: It turns out I misremembered: it was apricots, not avocados. But it was a straightforward case of land fraud perpetrated by one Tony Placebo, who had a previous conviction for similar activities. The link goes to a LanguageLog post explaining why that particular strip is so memorable, 40 years later.

True, Robert O. Young was running a scam, but his did not involve real estate fraud (at least, that I know of).

FDA is nothing but a schill for big pharma. Big pharma needs to control it's competition...and there Are many alternatives to BS chemo. Cancer is a trillion dollar industry that knows No cures. There have been many cures. But you won't hear of them since they can't replicate the molecule of the compound. Codex is a wet dream for control. Won't happen.

famously enough to be included in a Doonesbury plot line (Uncle Duke was persuaded to invest in a nonexistent avocado ranch in California).

APRICOT ranch. Do not make me scan and upload the sequence of strips. Was it California or Nevada?

FDA is nothing but a schill for big pharma. Big pharma needs to control it’s competition…and there Are many alternatives to BS chemo. Cancer is a trillion dollar industry that knows No cures. There have been many cures. But you won’t hear of them since they can’t replicate the molecule of the compound. Codex is a wet dream for control. Won’t happen.

Well Plaid.

@BOB

Why manufacture a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer, when pharma can just make big bucks off the treatment and palliation of cervical cancer?
Why manufacture antivirals that cure hepatitis C infections, when pharma can just make big bucks off antivirals that chronically suppress hepatitis C viral levels?

@BOB: I have two questions for you:
1. What are you smoking?
2. Where do I get some?

@ 18 Eric Lund
I would not trust Bob's supplier. He probably uses moldy apricot pits.

Poor sour sop. It's such a nice fruit, and now it's been tainted by woo-peddlers. The times I've eaten it (in Costa Rica) no one said anything about any "medicinal properties".
It is a bit hard to eat, with the slimy and the stringy and the seeds the size of your thumb. (Texture wise it's somewhere between a very ripe mango and a very ripe peach. The flavor is nothing like either, but not particularly sour.)

And here's the thing: woo-pushers always emphasize the nasty side effects of chemo. But then they say that this stuff is 1000 times more powerful. Why wouldn't that mean that the side effects are 1000 times worse too?

>side effects are 1000 times worse too?

Homeopathic Math...

I would argue that the FDA letter should have been more specific with its advice that patients to seek the advice of "a health care professional". How about make it "a medical doctor"? Not a "Not a Doctor", not a "Doctor Chiroquacktor", but an actual medical doctor.

“Everything old is new again,” the mantra of the quack universe.
If it was effective swindling people 100 years ago, it should do just as well today.

"Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science" was published 60 years ago. Of the alt-med scams that Gardner described there, are there *any* that the grifters have abandoned?

@JustaTech #20, never tried the fruit. But, it sounds about as much work as tamarinds, which I love to eat.

I think the question is more like "will there be any follow up on these warning letters under Trump". For all we know, whoever was responsible for this at FDA will get their knuckles whacked and there'll be an apology issued to all those fine entrepreneurs who were unfairly chastized by those nasty regulators.

@JustaTech #20: "Poor sour sop"? The FDA is currently investigating sour sop (Annona muricata) for potential neurotoxicty. At the same time, partly if not largely based on the popularity of the tree as a supposed cancer cure, human clinical studies on its anticancer effects are presently underway in SE Asia. More commonly known in commerce as "graviola", sour sop was promoted and marketed for the treatment of cancer on the basis of research in the U.S. by Jerry L. McLaughlin, PhD, a respected American pharmacognosist who chose to leave Perdue University or be fired for advocating the use of crude extracts of a related tree commonly known as "American paw paw" (Asimina triloba) in the treatment of cancer. The fact both trees contain acetogenins showing activity against various tumor cell lines was apparently enough for promoters to market graviola in place of the more obscure and difficult to obtain twigs from varieties of American paw paw containing the active acetogenins. But whether crude extracts of any part of graviola are as potent as the varieties of American paw paw that McLaughlin identified in his research is doubtful.

After leaving his position as a professor of medicinal chemistry, McLaughlin, a former President of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, entered an agreement with an American dietary supplement company to manufacture the crude extract of American paw paw twigs which is sold in the U.S. to this day. The fact that not one of the active acetogenins were developed as a treatment for cancer may be due to a number of factors, starting with a lack of funding.

And oddly, not a single, solitary study has proved effective against the diseases they were thought positive against.
Yet, somehow, tea works. Magic!

Go think of the most negative way something should be forcibly shoved up your anus, then double it.
Better yet, drink some drain cleaner, just to clean up the gene pool a bit.

HDB@23: I think they have abandoned Reich's orgone theory. But I'm not 100% sure, because the Wooniverse is large.

As Albert Einstein said: "Only two things are infinite, the Universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the Universe."

I wouldn't be surprised if cranks in the porn industry still subscribed to it.

It gets a mention in several GURPS products. I had a character whose superpowers were based on it.

Fun times :)

Lighthorse @26: That's so odd. In Costa Rica it's generally called guanábana and it's just a fruit. Maybe the neurotoxicity is in the leaves or stems?

(Clearly it doesn't cure cancer in any way shape or form. But once people think there's something special about a fruit the markets get weird and if it's not already a cultivated fruit there can be major ecological damage. That's why I said "poor", as in, a perfectly good fruit's reputation ruined by weirdos.)

@Nancie #3: That would be from in vitro tests.

@JustaTech #30: Known by various local names, the tree grows in many parts of the tropical Americas. The potential of neurotoxicity stems from the observation of subjects in Guadeloupe who developed symptoms like those of Parkinson's disease after regularly consuming the fruit. The potential for neurotoxicity has been shown in animals from ingestion of the fruit juice. If you dig into the subject, you'll find the fruit is more toxic than the leaves. Try Annonaceae AND neurotoxicity as a search phrase in PubMed to see what I mean.

"Jerry L. McLaughlin, PhD, a respected American pharmacognosist who chose to leave Perdue University or be fired for advocating the use of crude extracts of a related tree commonly known as “American paw paw” (Asimina triloba) in the treatment of cancer. "

Cite for the claim that McLaughlin was forced out of Purdue (that doesn't involve undocumented allegations on alt health websites)?

"After leaving his position as a professor of medicinal chemistry, McLaughlin, a former President of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, entered an agreement with an American dietary supplement company to manufacture the crude extract of American paw paw twigs which is sold in the U.S. to this day."

I'm glad he wasn't in it for the money, unlike those Pharma lickspittles.

"The fact that not one of the active acetogenins were developed as a treatment for cancer may be due to a number of factors, starting with a lack of funding."

...which may be due to factors such as lack of convincing results from early research, lots more promising avenues for useful drugs from other sources and so on.

I do think paw paw fruit is quite tasty, and hope my two trees will bear well this year.

"And here’s the thing: woo-pushers always emphasize the nasty side effects of chemo. But then they say that this stuff is 1000 times more powerful. Why wouldn’t that mean that the side effects are 1000 times worse too?"

No, natural cures don't work that way. Another example - advocating consumption of "oleander soup" as a cancer remedy. The pro-oleander folks may mention that users could experience signs and symptoms like nausea and diarrhea, but that's never to be compared with similar effects of chemo. It's a minor thing until you become accustomed to the therapy, represents the toxins being purged from your body or some such.

"And oddly, not a single, solitary study has proved effective against the diseases they were thought positive against."

A watched pot never boils. Or something.

@33 Oleander soup?? I'm a bit confused. One of my favorite movies (because I'm a GeneTierney fan) is Dragonwyck. To be fair, the villain puts oleander in cake, not soup...still...

@JustaTech #32: No, not from an alt-med site. I may have the document laying out the episode of McLaughlin in my paper files. Since I have recently moved, it would take some time to dig it out, but the choice he was given at Perdue is well known among older pharmacognosists in the U.S. Coupled with his conviction that the crude extract of American paw paw twigs was sufficiently active to be useful in the treatment of cancer, he knew how long it would take for an anticancer drug to be developed from any of the active acetogenins it contained.

As potential leads for the development of anticancer agents, interest in the acetogenins of Annonaceae among pharmacologists continues to this day (search PubMed for "acetogenins AND cancer" and clinicaltrials.gov for "acetogenins" to see what I mean). But then so does concern for the potential of neurotoxicity from their ingestion, including paw paw fruit as the source.

Uh, Lighthorse, 32 wasn't me, it was Dangerous Bacon.

Alternative Fake medicine endangers another cancer patient's life

oracknows — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 07:06:03 +0000

Alternative Fake medicine endangers another cancer patient's life

Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with one major kind of blog post that I've done periodically ever since the very beginning of this blog, and that's the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, particularly breast cancer cure testimonials, but also testimonials for a wide variety of cancers allegedly "cured" by a wide variety of quacks. It started with Suzanne Somers and Lorraine Day, whose stories I deconstructed and showed not to be indicative of a cancer cure due to the quackery they were pursuing and continues to this day. Another, related category of post are early alternative cancer cure testimonials, in which a recently diagnosed cancer patient is featured in the newspapers, usually in a credulous story that frames her (and it's usually a breast cancer patient) as "bravely" going against the establishment. I detest both of these variants of alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, but I particularly despise the latter, mainly because a cancer patient's best shot at a cure (or long-term remission) is the first shot. Anything that might influence new cancer patients to try quackery instead of effective medicine enrages me. I make no apology for that, because people can die from delaying their treatment.

I heard about just such a story the other day, as I was perusing my e-mail after getting out of the operating room after a long day operating on breast cancer patients. At first, I thought about whether I wanted to take it on. After all, this is the sort of crappy, credulous news story that I can practically deconstruct in my sleep after 12 years of doing this, and I've done many of these. So I didn't do it for yesterday's post. But, then, the social media furor over fake news and the particularly apt term inadvertently coined by President Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conaway, "alternative facts," and I got to thinking about the similarities between "alternative facts" and alternative medicine. No, I'm by no means the first to think of this parallel, and I'll have more to say about it either tomorrow or next week, either here or at my not-so-super-secret other blog. (Sometimes some concepts need a few days to percolate, even for the blog.) However, the other thing that Conaway's dissembling and lying reminded me was that, just as alternative facts can lead to "American carnage" (couldn't resist), alternative medicine also leads to death and suffering. That led me to examine this case in my usual inimitable fashion.

In this case, the woman's name is Sarah Valentine; the cancer is breast cancer; and the story appeared in the Mirror and entitled Mum-of-four battling breast cancer turns down traditional NHS treatment in favour of vegan diet: Sarah Valentine, whose youngest child is aged just one, says she is "100 per cent sure" her breast cancer is "emotional":

A mum-of-four with breast cancer plans to cure her illness with an alkaline-based vegan diet after turning down conventional NHS treatment.

Sarah Valentine noticed an indentation on her left breast as she danced naked in front of her mum Annie Herbert's mirror on December 3 last year.

The 36-year-old was later diagnosed with cancer and offered either a full mastectomy or a lumpectomy, and radiotherapy, on the NHS.

However, she defied medical advice by declining both options.

Yes, this story checks all the irresponsible boxes of these stories. Appealing subject? Check. Valentine is young and attractive? Check. Appealing family? Check. (Complete with photos of her holding her toddler and with her husband There's even the angle of how she found her cancer, dancing naked in front of a mirror, to add some titillation. There's even a photo of her breast, looking all purple and green for a bit of shock value. Yes, it looks bad, but a breast surgeon (like me) knows that this is no big deal. Sometimes there's bleeding into the tissues after a needle biopsy, leaving a hematoma and bruises that look quite nasty. It's a known potential complication of core needle biopsy. The photo, of course, only adds to the sympathy for Valentine being stoked by the article with all the subtlety of Breitbart News.

Being a breast cancer surgeon, I always go straight to whatever information I can find about the diagnosis that lets me know the stage and prognosis, even before I look at the quackery being indulged in. First, here is the timeline:

Sarah discovered her lump after stepping out of the shower and dancing in front of a mirror at her 60-year-old mum's home in Bermondsey, south London.

“I thought I’d lost weight, so was dancing around a bit,” she explained.

“It was then I noticed the lump.”

Two days later, on December 5, Sarah headed to her GP, who referred her to the breast clinic.

On December 19, at Buckland Hospital in Dover, Kent, she was examined.

Concerned, the doctor referred her to Kent and Canterbury Hospital, Canterbury, for an ultrasound, needle biopsy and mammogram.

But it was not until December 30 at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, that Sarah's cancer was confirmed.

“I knew already,” she recalled.

“As soon as I saw the indentation and felt a lump, I realised.”

This is not an atypical timeline in the US. Here I found:

Sarah said she hopes her extreme measures will reverse the progress of her currently Stage 1 cancer, which is made up of two tumours measuring 2.1cm by 1.7cm and 1cm by 1cm.

The surgical pedant in me can't help but point out that that is not stage 1 cancer. By definition, stage 1 cancers only go up to 2 cm in diameter. Valentine's cancer is stage 2, stage 2A to be more precise, although the stage could be higher if it's spread to her lymph nodes. We don't know whether it has or not because normally the way we find out if the lymph nodes are involved is to sample them using a procedure known as sentinel lymph node biopsy at the time of lumpectomy or mastectomy. I also wish I knew what the tumor markers were. Tumors that make the estrogen receptor, for instance, can be treated with anti-estrogen pills like Tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor. Tumors that don't almost always require chemotherapy. Tumors that make the HER2 protein require Herceptin. I can figure out a lot about potential prognosis and treatment from that information. Frustratingly, that information is rarely included in stories like these. There isn't much more in Valentine's video, but there is some:

For instance, she says her tumor is grade 1, which is good. That means it is well differentiated (i.e., looks more like normal breast tissue). Notably, this was shot before she decided not to have surgery.

In any case, this is a more unusual version of the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial in that Valentine has refused all treatment right out of the gate. Usually, these testimonials take the form of a woman refusing chemotherapy and radiation after undergoing surgery. As I've explained more times than I remember, in such cases, it is the surgery alone that was probably curative. Radiation and chemotherapy are adjuvant therapies, which means that they are not the primary therapy. They basically "mop up" microscopic tumor cells that might have been left behind, thus decreasing (but not eliminating) the chances of tumor recurrence. In this case, there has been no surgery, just a biopsy.

I also can't help but comment on a disconnect. In the story, Valentine recounts all the things she's done to stay healthy and avoid cancer. The story recounts how she only ate "free-range eggs, well-sourced meat, and good quality butter," and how she was also careful not to take hormones in her food and favored natural producgts. She also did this:

“I used bicarbonate of soda instead of deodorant, never had any hormones in pharmaceuticals or food, ate healthily and breastfed all my children,” she said.

“I couldn’t believe that I got ill.”

How often do we hear this refrain? "I can't believe I got ill. I did everything right! How can this be?" People prone to beliefs like Valentine's tend to have a vastly inflated view of the power of diet to prevent cancer. Everything is probabilities, and nothing is anywhere near 100% preventative, even diet. No, strike that. Particularly diet. Diet can decrease the risk of breast cancer, as obesity is a risk factor, but the strength of these risk factors is dwarfed by risk factors that are not under a woman's control, such as family history. That's not to say that it's not worth altering diet to decrease the risk of breast cancer. After all, altering diet and lifestyle to lose weight has so many more health benefits, although the reduction in breast cancer risk is modest. Yes, you can "do everything right" and still get breast cancer. I note that in one story about Valentine it's noted that her mom had cancer, but it is not mentioned which cancer. I'd bet it was probably breast cancer, given Sarah's diagnosis of breast cancer under the age of 40.

Be that as it may, this is what Valentine is doing:

Instead, Sarah, from Kent, says she plans to cure her disease through a combination of healthy eating, bitter almonds and purified water.

She has overhauled her diet to eliminate meat and dairy - and says she is "100 per cent sure" that her breast cancer is "emotional".

“I’ve chosen the natural way to show cancer the door, pronto,” she said.

"Healthy eating," unfortunately, does not cure breast cancer. No doubt she is eating almonds as a source of amygdalin (also known, incorrectly, as "vitamin B17" or Laetrile), but Laetrile is long-discredited quackery that's never been shown to have any anticancer activity, although it can cause cyanide toxicity. I also note that the claim that cancer is "emotional" is a common strand in cancer quackery. In particular, it is the basis of New German Medicine or its bastard offspring, Biologie Totale, a particularly vile form of quackery that posits that cancer is due to emotional trauma, sometimes unappreciated.

What she plans to do is described on her GoFundMe Page. Of course:

My treatment through the NHS will cost a minimum of 30k. But I want to do this as natural as possible and that's where I need your help. I need to get vitamin C drips, suppliments, a water distiller, thermo imaging to check tumour shrinkage, hormone testing reports, and generally taking the weight off my shoulders financially as my regular job was night work and that meant not sleeping properly so I've had to give it up while I kick start healing and get as much rest as I can.

Did really love to get 'Shake your tits' trending as we should all be shaking, massaging, feeling our way around to spot any changes in our breasts as soon as possible.

Hmmm. £30,000 doesn't go as far as it used to, given that, as of last night, £1 = $1.26, which is way down from when I traveled to London in the fall of 2015. (Hmmm. Maybe I should go back soon.)

Actually, Valentine's GoFundMe page is somewhat vague. Thermal imaging is thermography, which has never been shown to be a useful means of screening for breast cancer or following a cancer's response to therapy. Naturopaths love it, though. Drinking only filtered water won't cure cancer, either.

Other stories revealed a bit more detail. For instance, she plans to buy a vitamin C and sodium sultanate drip. I've encountered high dose vitamin C quackery, but I've never encountered sodium sultanate. I wasn't able to find much about it other than that it's an emulsifier and that it might be used to remove heavy metals.

Also:

Sarah takes Golden Paste – a product made up of turmeric powder, water, oil and pepper – daily and has invested in a £300 water filter, which she attached to her tap, to purify all her water.

Turmeric extracts and various compounds from it do have anticancer activity, but it is modest at best, and the bioavailability is questionable.

OK, none of this stuff is likely to have any effect on Valentine's cancer, meaning that she is, in essence, going untreated. What is the likely outcome? What is the natural history of untreated breast cancer? This is not easy information to come by, because it's unethical to leave breast cancer untreated. We do, however, have some data from 100 years ago that is helpful. Basically, in the pre-mammography era, the median survival of untreated breast cancer was 2.7 years. 4% survived ten years. These are not good odds. Of course, it's hard to compare data from the 1800s to 1930 to today for the simple reason that all of them presented with palpable masses, not mammographic masses. We also have no idea about the grade or hormone receptor status of any of the tumors. It's likely, given her grade 1 tumor, that Valentine probably is on the more favorable end of the scale. Even so, without treatment, sooner or later Valentine will almost certainly die far earlier than she would have without treatment. And it won't be pleasant. She could well wind up like Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert. Alternative medicine kills dead.

I also can't help but note that there are different levels of irresponsibility in publishing this story. The Sun, for instance, doesn't include a skeptical voice. METRO, on the other hand, at least quotes Cancer Research UK.

The other day, I discussed the phenomenon of fake news. There is also fake medicine, currently known as alternative medicine. Both endanger lives. There are more parallels, but that is a topic for another day.

oracknows Thu, 01/26/2017 - 02:06

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https://bioaccent.org/cancer-sciences/cancer-sciences25.pdf

In this Metro article I see no sign of her being advised by any CAM artist. At least I see no names. It looks like it's 100% self-taught cancer "treatment".

Later I'll check out the Sun article as well. I don't want to be seen opening that website that in a public/work place :p

This is such a trainwreck of a story. Her family has a history of cancer but she can't figure out how this could happen to her. She also claims she will re-think her treatment if her dodgy self-treatment doesn't work. I think we all know from reading here how that ends up.

I got to thinking about the similarities between “alternative facts” and alternative medicine

Of course Conway was rightly ridiculed for that, because it is obvious to even the most casual observer that "alternative facts" is another term for "lies". That's a lot harder to disguise than "alternative medicine" as a synonym for "quackery".

“I can’t believe I got ill. I did everything right! How can this be?”

As you note, there are steps you can take to reduce your risk, but you cannot reduce the risk to zero. And I could obey all of the relevant traffic rules on my walk to or from work and be mowed down in a crosswalk by a driver who isn't paying attention--I live in a pedestrian right-of-way state, so motorists are supposed to give way to me when I'm in a crosswalk, but I could be dead right.

Did she have lumpectomy? This is not clear for me.

A few more details on the medical advice she's been given (= get treatment!) are here: http://www.kentonline.co.uk/tenterden/news/cancer-mum-in-clean-food-die…

Thank you for being a voice of educated reasoning!! When I saw that article the other day it absolutely enraged me!
My sister was one of the unfortunate women who died of breast cancer at 30yrs old despite chemo, mastectomy, radiotherapy and more chemo. She fought it with everything available to her and still lost the battle.
For anyone to think that they can "cure" their breast cancer with diet and as you rightly say "quackery" is sickening to me.
What disgusts me more is that there are many people who will donate to her cause which she will take as further support of her quackery!!
The reporting of such lunacy just feeds into the cycle of more people believing in the "alternative".
Why is it that we never see reports when these people die??

It is odd that she says"My treatment through the NHS will cost a minimum of 30k." as any treatment by the NHS is free at point of use (it's paid for through our taxes). In the case of cancer patients they don't even pay for prescriptions or carparking during treatment.

Alternative medicine kills dead.

Those harsh words need to be used often.
I've known the truth of this for many years, from reading Insolence and others, but sitting through the Lovett trial hardened my attitude substantially. I now take the position that I will use the harshest language I think I can get away with in comments I make on blogs or news sites with regard to alt-med.

I was suspicious that "sultonate" might be some sort of weird corruption of "sulfonate." From Wikipedia "Cyclic sulfonic esters are called sultones." Not all that helpful, but a small clue.

@ Jazzlet, Yah I didn't get that and makes me wonder if there's a scam afoot.

Jazzlet@4: Good catch. Of course, it's her alternative "treatment" that is costing her GBP30k. Presumably NHS wouldn't pay for that, any more than US insurance companies would.

I'm not sure, but would that 30k be the minimum costs for the NHS, if she would have chosen a treatment that would be paid for?
Even if the NHS would pay for a treatment, it still costs money.

Someone claiming to be Sarah Valentine commented on Debunked Denialism, saying: "Hi I am sarah valentine and you are reporting falsely I have not denied all treatments and surgery I have just asked for some time. Amazing debunking youveeally could have come to me to fact check and get a real interview rather than manipulating a press association interview ❤️"
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2017/01/25/woman-with-treatable-breast-c…

Renate #11

I think you are are halfway there. I think her pitch is "I am saving the taxers 30k by getting treatment through the NHS so give me money."

taxers should be taxpayers.

The fact that newspapers *publish*, this garbage, and do so uncritically, would give me cancer, if, indeed, anger and "bad attitudes" caused cancer. The smug, sanctimonious, preaching of various vegan and raw food cultists is equally insufferable. I did everything "right" my whole life, had zero family history, and still was diagnosed with cancer, the day after my 39th birthday. I had a shitty attitude. Who wouldn't? (That is a rhetorical question. I don't want to hear about all the "inspiring" cancer patients other people have known.)
Medicine cured me, not quackery. People think that, armed only with a computer, a belief in conspiracies, that anyone can read about vitamins on the internet and cure cancer.

For some odd reason, people never wonder why alternative cures are so well known even though "they" don't want you to know. How is this superior knowledge so easily accessible that a high school student can find it on the internet? Why is "alternative medicine" so expensive, when it's "Ebil Big Pharma" that is only in it for profit? Strange how many people think that they are capable of "doing their own research" and yet never notice the glaring flaws in their on logic.

I wish there was a way to send the quacks to jail and make selling alternative BS a crime, punishable by jail.
That woman's children will grow up without a mother. And to add insult to injury, she and her fellow woonatics will blame her for being insufficiently pure and positive.

Eric Lund (#3) says,

...it is obvious to even the most casual observer that “alternative facts” is another term for “lies”

MJD says,

It's my opinion that Physicists are to blame. Society in general hold Physicists in high esteem for their acquired intelligence and creativity. Theories, and empirical evidence, about how the Universe works is sometimes filled with alternate facts.

For example, light can be a particle and/or a wave.

Can the Uncertainty Principle create alternative facts?

If alternative facts exist in the current understanding of the Universe, can't they also exist in Medicine?

She mentions "NORI" institute here: http://www.kentonline.co.uk/tenterden/news/cancer-mum-in-clean-food-die…

NORI approach was earlier touted by Candice Marie-Fox, who is "Belle Gibson" style entrepreneur, building a business by exaggerating her cancer story. She did have thyroid cancer though, but a very survivable stage II papillary type, definitely not terminal, and she also had full standard treatment - surgery and radioactive iodine. She claimed that NORI protocol, pineapples and fruit were the only cure. The same blogger who started writing about Gibson, also covered her case: http://realitybasedmedicine.blogspot.de/ (you have to go a few pages back to see those articles, e.g. http://realitybasedmedicine.blogspot.de/2015/04/a-thyroid-cancer-surviv…).

We're not going to call them "alternative facts" anymore. They're "integrative facts".

I have not denied all treatments and surgery I have just asked for some time.

Uh huh. In other words she is catching flak and is back-peddling. She absolutely denied any medical intervention until she is convinced her "emotions" and woo can't cure her cancer. She sure didn't need more time to set up a GoFundMe page.

I too have been thinking a lot about fake news, alternative facts, alternative medicine, alt med , alt media et al.

Interestingly, Alex Jones seems to be well known to all . I first ran across his drivel via Mike Adams; I understand that DJT is aware of him. InfoWars is crap but frightening crap.

Another connection is RT - the Russian English language news source- quite a few anti-vaxxers followed their coverage of the usual nonsense such as the Whistleblower.
DJT appeared on RT I believe.

As I've mentioned previously, both Null and Adams have ventured into providing 'news' and non-health related content at prn.fm and Natural News respectively. Lately, even their own contributions have veered away from health related material ( which might actually improve their readers' health) into politics and other topics like AGW ( Null) and societal breakdown ( Adams).

They deliver histrionics along with spurious 'research' to excite their followers who perhaps might then be motivated into buying their over priced and largely useless products.

I sometimes envision their audiences as vast collections of low information, credulous lonely people who are trying desperately to fit into a rapidly changing social scene by identifying with 'winners'. Often, like Trumpians they embrace the nostalgia of the beautiful, simple past which had none of the problems we're concerned with today- at least to their view. It was an idyll**

** an idyll reeking with sexism, racism, homophobia, simple minded solutions to complex problems, poverty, lack of education etc.

Hate to bust in here,but has everybody heard about the upcoming March for Science?
http://mashable.com/2017/01/25/march-for-science-washington/#u4sLNjlogi…
https://twitter.com/ScienceMarchDC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
One of my scientist friends on Facebook suggested everybody make Schroedinger's Pussyhats.

Society in general hold Physicists in high esteem for their acquired intelligence and creativity. Theories, and empirical evidence, about how the Universe works is sometimes filled with alternate facts.

For example, light can be a particle and/or a wave.

Can the Uncertainty Principle create alternative facts?

You should really stick to better rehearsed failure.

she is “100 per cent sure” that her breast cancer is “emotional”.

So if curing cancer is a simple matter of restoring one's emotions to positivity (and, apparently, switching to a special-snowflake diet), I have to admit that receiving umpteen thousand dollars for SFA would do a lot to improve my emotional state.

NORI approach was earlier touted by Candice Marie-Fox, who is “Belle Gibson” style entrepreneur, building a business by exaggerating her cancer story.
ht_tp://metro.co.uk/2015/03/29/woman-says-she-beat-cancer-by-ditching-her-husband-and-eating-pineapples-5126117/

There's a real lemonade-out-of-lemons story. "I was going to get better anyway so I did what I really wanted to do, called it therapy, and invited creduous numpties around the world to send me money for my bravery."

woman-says-she-beat-cancer-by-ditching-her-husband-

When she said she had a malignant lump removed, she was referring to her husband?

We’re not going to call them “alternative facts” anymore. They’re “integrative facts”

Not "complementary facts"? I am disappoint.

#23 @herr doktor bimler

There’s a real lemonade-out-of-lemons story. “I was going to get better anyway so I did what I really wanted to do, called it therapy, and invited creduous numpties around the world to send me money for my bravery.”
-----
She is also training to be a naturopath. Although her marketing is nowhere near Belle Gibson's skill level, I hate to think how many people with a lot more serious cancers might have been and will be inspired by her.

There’s a real lemonade-out-of-lemons story.
Also, if life gives you mascara, make masquerade.

I was intrigued to see that Candice Marie-Fox had cottoned on to the pineapple scam, which seems to be increasing in popularity among naturopath grifters -- it came up here in a story last year.

It turns out that the "pineapples cure cancer" story was fabricated by Nieper and Taussig, where Nieper was an German fraudster-fantasist in the tradition of Hamer and Rudolf Steiner, and Taussig was a professional pineapple pimp... it had never occurred to me that this could be a job title.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/05/19/naturopaths-and-supplement…
http://eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2016/05/i-couldnt-help-it-i-saw-third-…

Sufficiently advanced grifting is indistinguishable from sincere derangement, and vice versa.

It’s my opinion that Physicists are to blame. Society in general hold Physicists in high esteem for their acquired intelligence and creativity. Theories, and empirical evidence, about how the Universe works is sometimes filled with alternate facts.

For example, light can be a particle and/or a wave.

Can the Uncertainty Principle create alternative facts?

Drivel that was hypocritically written on a device that utilizes those very principles.
There's a whole lot of quantum mechanics behind every computing device in use today.
Meanwhile, you conflate, in your incomprehension, the difference between scales of the quantum mechanical realm and the macroscopic realm of medicine.

So, I'm with Narad, "You should really stick to better rehearsed failure.".

MJD demonstrates that his knowledge of physics is as extensive as his knowledge of medicine.

Depending on the design of your experiment, light can be viewed as consisting of particles or of waves. So can electrons. These experiments have actually been done, and the results match the theoretical predictions within our ability to measure (which for some of these experiments can be quite precise). These are not alternative facts, but alternative interpretations. And there is nothing wrong with alternative interpretations as long as they are consistent with the known facts. In fact, this is how the forefront of science advances: you do an experiment where two possible interpretations (usually specific enough to be called "theories") consistent with previous experiments predict different results.

To take a specific example: the heliocentric and geocentric models of the solar system were equally good at explaining observations made in the pre-telescope era. However, once Galileo started looking at Venus, he found that sometimes more than half of the disc was sunlit. The geocentric model predicted that Venus would never have more than half of its disc sunlit. So Ptolemy was wrong and Copernicus was right.

It's true that quantum physics predicts many phenomena that are counterintuitive to somebody with no experience of the microscopic world. But it does correctly predict the result of experiments. And if the system you are working with is big enough, quantum theory gives the same results as classical theory.

Did really love to get ‘Shake your tits’ trending

Error code 80085
https://i.imgur.com/Llvx6Cj.gifv

"Alternative medicine kills dead."
Since following the Lovett trial with doug, I've been thinking that the greatest threat of fatalities comes not from any sort of office-visit quacks, but DIY quackery. I was also thinking that cancer quackery was the exception, given the trail of bodies quietly shuffled out of The Hippocrates Health Institute. So the lesson of Valentine's story may have less to do with cancer than what I take to be an increasing trend in the 'natural cures' realm – an exaggerated sense of "only I know what's right for me" total reliance on home remedy choices gleaned through Google. Pretty much everywhere, we now see 'regular folks' show distrust of experts and authority figures and at the same time feel tremendously 'empowered' by their ability to "do their own research" on the Web. 'Empowerment' is a highly ideological term, since it means only feeling some increase in self-determination, not actually getting any.
__________

This story in The Mirror is an example of what journalism scholars mean by 'news that is really olds'. That is, stories that appear over and over in the press, over long periods of time, all following the same template, but with different names and minor changes in the wording of both quotes and reportage. (see http://jclass.umd.edu/classes/jour698m/darnton2.pdf, beginning on p. 188) This happens for a variety of factors acting together: from the ability to generate readable copy quickly with minimal effort to the power of certain mythologies within newsroom subcultures. It's highly unlikely there's any conscious effort to boost alt-med or undermine conventional medicine at work – it's just a kind of automatic instinct. But this type of news-generation process is really irresponsible when it comes to stories like this, not because of 'bad science' (news isn't science), but because it's so oblivious to history as recorded in the publications' own morgues.

As cancer cures, "healthy eating, bitter almonds and purified water," have been around forever, been ballyhooed by valentine-type patients in countless stories over the years. They've been tried often enough now, that if they 'worked' there'd be a record. But if the reporters did check their own databases for follow-ups, they'd find the vast majority of the few that exist follow the tragic fate of Jess Ainscough.

If we shift the noun in Mark Thorson's joke from 'facts' to 'truth', the history and theory of propaganda pose a possible stumbling block for the Trumpers. 'Alternative truth' has never worked over the long term as a form of social control. What has worked repeatedly is 'integrative truth' a mixture of true facts, BS spin, and a limited quotient of 'alternative facts'. The more truth you tell, the better the propaganda works, and it's easy enough to get the true/false mix to point to the same conclusions you'd otherwise advance with outright lies.

Trump shows no hesitance at all to reject even the littlest bit of integrative truth that irks him, and go completely 'alternative' with everything. If he gets away with it long-term, that will be a first. Which is not to say there won't be truly horrible consequences in the meantime.

Eric Lund writes (#29),

MJD demonstrates that his knowledge of physics is as extensive as his knowledge of medicine.

MJD says,

I apologize for responding off topic but Eric Lund's insight into both physics and medicine earns him a chance to answer the following question:

How can the immunity "uncertainty principle" be explained away and end this autism/vaccine tug-of-war.

My mother is currently in theatre having a mastectomy and I am extremely grateful for the advances in medicine that give her such a good prognosis. Keep up the good work

I was cheered to see that the majority of the commenters to the article I read a few days ago seemed to think she was an idiot.

Sarah takes Golden Paste – a product made up of turmeric powder, water, oil and pepper – daily

I would be happy to take this daily too, just as long as it came with chicken, ginger and garlic. A few almonds wouldn't go amiss either. And some saffron for the rice.

With even more saffron for tea, to accompany the fine meal. :)

One of my scientist friends on Facebook suggested everybody make Schroedinger’s Pussyhats.

As a knitter, I'm trying to conjure up what a Schroedinger's Pussyhat would look like.

@shay simmons #34. As someone who is not a knitter, I have no trouble envisioning dickhead hats, the opposite of pussyhats, but the Shroedinger hat is bit perplexing.

I would distinguish between simple hearsay, wishful thinking and alternative medicine. I think she represents mostly the first two.

Although I think there are nutrient treatments that probably could do her some good, I can also be a little hawkish about curative surgery, or even some chemos. Hawkish, more aggressive than the average surgeon - been there (mentally) bending fingers until the better ones agreed.

Let's say she was "successful" with some shrinkage and even some long term stability. Instead eradicating all the cancer cells, she' has a lot of risk she'll have some immune equilibrium with residual disease that can be broken by infectious diseases or inflammatory events.

I'd vote for a curative surgery with some CAM er, integrative medical applications.

Isn't the Sun a right wing, working class newspaper? The owners would like nothing better than to "do their bit" to help dismantlenew nonfiction at the library the UK National Health Service by encouraging their readers to believe that they could cure their cancer and other health issues with spices, condiments and an attitude readjustments. Justify health care cuts and then a cut in business taxes. Just like in the US.

How can the immunity “uncertainty principle” be explained away and end this autism/vaccine tug-of-war.

I can refer anyone even semi-seriously asking this question to one of three places:
1. Deepak Chopra. He fancies himself the world's leading "expert" in quantum medicine. His site is thataway ---->
2. The seminal article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Alan Sokal, published in 1996 by the journal Social Text. You can find it over there <----
3. If the first two options don't satisfy you, then I can refer you to the reply in Arkell v. Pressdram.

I'd make a Shroedingers hat out of a cardboard box, with knit ears poking out. Perhaps a tail as well.

Jane@41

Class has nothing to do with it. The Sun is a borderline racist comic, read by arseholes. I know some very posh arseholes who read it.

It's one step above the Daily Hate Mail and anything published by that vile dickhead Richard Desmond.

@Eric Lund (#42),

Humorous but hurtful...

@Orac,

In continuation (#42), is it considered "respectful insolence" when vulgarity in a reference is intentionally re-directed toward a semi-minion with disrespect? e.g., Arkell v. Pressdram.

Without malice, I kindly request that Eric Lund be placed on auto-mod for a considerable but unspecified length of time.

Best Regards,

MJD

This woman has identical breast cancer to me. I had stage 1, grade 1 and my tumour was just under 2 cm. I was really really lucky and this kind of breast cancer is highly treatable. I too was not statistically likely to get cancer but stuff happens - the risk wasn't zero. I had a lumpectomy, radiation and hormone therapy (though I stopped the hormone therapy 1.5 years after taking it because the side effects were too much to handle; happily my surgeon and oncologist were okay with this given my grade 1 status).

What really bugs me in cases like this is this woman is so lucky right now! She has all these treatments available to her and she got her cancer early! Yet, she is avoiding this treatment to potentially experience a slow, agonizing illness and death. If she snaps out of her delusion, it could be too late to receive treatment that is easier to manage now. It just makes me nuts! Think of all the women diagnosed with stage IV metastasized breast cancer who didn't have a choice!

Without malice, I kindly request that Eric Lund be placed on auto-mod for a considerable but unspecified length of time.

Good grief please put your big boy underpants on. No one is forcing you to read here and Eric's response to your absurd question was far more polite than many would have been. Mine included.

Without malice, I kindly request that Orac provide me with a pony.

Would you be okay with an alternative pony? It's just like a real pony except for all the differences.

Like those of Ponypark Slagharen?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-xxis7hDOE
The ponys will go away.

As a matter of perfunctory charity, let me assume that MJD, despite our differences of opinions, has at some point made a worthwhile comment here.

Regardless, all comments in my working memory are empty bullshit and sniping, providing not even dubious propositions to consider and argue. Not even wrong, just noise.

Modifying his last paragraph:
Without malice, I kindly request that MJD be placed on auto-mod for a considerable but unspecified length of time.

I would not go hanging around Popehat with this talk of ponies.

Ponies spell our doom. Ponies never misspell it. Ponies are the cute, non-threateningly-ethnic, but somehow vaguely unsettling cherubic spelling-bee-winners who never falter, Juda, and the word they are spelling is apocalypse. We need to tell the people. All of them, even Belgians. We need to tell them, Juda, and we need to make money telling them so we can tell more of them, possibly with pop-up advertisements and auto-play videos that are very difficult to close because it is human nature to turn your eyes away from a weeping weal upon our collective soul if you possibly can without clicking madly for ten minutes and shouting obscene gerunds. I'm not talking about the band now because I would watch weeping weals upon them all day, obviously. In fact maybe that can be part of our advertising. "Ponies will kill your grandchildren. And it will be horrible, not like watching Collective Soul be trampled to death, like this. In fact quite the opposite. Do not conflate the two." That's a little wordy but I'm not in advertising, Juda, you are, and I rely upon your skills for the precise nomenclature.

@ shay simmons:

What would a Schroedinger's pussyhat look like?

I would take a look at Todd W's vax blog where he features woo-meister action figures where- IIRC- the Deepak one has a half dead' half alive Schroedinger cat illustrated hilariously.

I wanted one of those.

Without malice, i kindly request that sceptics, minions and their like provide me with dinner invitations for the next year - one at a time, please!

Without malice, i kindly request that sceptics, minions and their like provide me with dinner invitations for the next year – one at a time, please!

I just made cheddar broccoli soup and am about to start on some crusty French bread. Simple, but good.

You should come over when I make shrimp gumbo and beignets.

Last night, I made a roast leg of lamb, mashed potatoes, brussel sprouts and beets.

Tonight, it'll be a roasted chicken, mixed asian vegetables and potatoes.
I always make a bit extra, just in case we get unexpected company and besides, it makes a good lunch at work.

RJ writes,

Regardless, all comments in my working memory are empty bullshit and sniping, providing not even dubious propositions to consider and argue. Not even wrong, just noise.

MJD says,

As a polite reminder to my friend RJ, I recently shared a cancer review that was published in BAOJ Cancer Research & Therapy.

In comparison, when was the last time Denice Walter placed a therapeutic intervention for cancer in the public domain?

Denice Walter's use of respectful insolence, p*ssy hats, and open-ended dinner requests are not therapeutic interventions under any circumstance. :-)

@Orac,

When will you tire of reading every MJD response? Please release me from auto-mod and trust the henceforth.

@ JP:

*Merci beaucoup*.
Unfortunately, I live further away than Portlandia-
in [redacted]

Believe it or not, I have been trying to 'eat better' ( without going down the woo-begone pathway to non-SB obsessiveness) and have been including more vegetables, fruits and EVEN drinking juices! ( the stuff in a litre container that includes both which isn't half bad).

I promise I will not become a health nut ( perish the thought!) but I am also avoiding drinking since December as I got rather ill drinking wine one night.

AND I am using a TENS unit on my leg which is helping.

BUT because I am not woo-fraught I MAKE SURE that I eat something *bad* each day ( i.e. that which would frighten away the woo-besotted) so cheese as well as French or Italian pastry is a good idea.
( Actually, it probably isn't bad at all because I eat rather lightweight meals and no red meat).

AND also I do manage to get someone or other to take mne for dinner at least half the time. Moistly Japanese, Chinese.

As for soup, I suggest you try to make a winter squash soup. There was a b!tching example made by an organic soup company ( small company- I forget their name) Just pureed squash, butter and spices.

That's MOSTLY-
although it can be moist.

and ME.

Oh, winter squash is a staple around here. I do like to go all out when we have company, though.

I am also avoiding drinking since December as I got rather ill drinking wine one night

Anecdotally, some people have trouble with the sulfites that are added to many wines, particularly wines from California. My mother is one of these people. She has no issues (other than the usual "don't drink too much") with wines from her home state, or wines from my home state, but she has noticed a reaction when she drinks California wines.

I don't know if there is a medical basis for it, or if it's just a spurious correlation she noticed (similar to my avoidance of eggs, which started when I felt queasy after eating scrambled eggs for breakfast one morning over a decade ago--I'm not actually allergic, and can deal with food where eggs are a minor ingredient, but I have avoided egg dishes since that day), but it's something to look out for.

I seldom drink California wines either, but for a different reason: at least compared to other wines I can buy in this part of the US, California wines (especially Napa wines, but it's also true of Sonoma and mid-coast) generally aren't as good at a given price point. For $10-15 a bottle I can get local, European, or South American wines that are as good or better than a Napa wine costing $20-25. And sometimes I can enjoy varietals (e.g., Torrontés or Seyval) that you can't get from California vineyards at any price.

Has anyone noticed that anytime JP's, MJD's and Denice Walter's responses coincide this hat trick instantly shuts down any further discussion.

Any theories on why this happens?

I respectfully request that Orac post an address to which I can send a roll of wooden nickels to pay for the whaaaambulance in which MJD will be permanently carted away from these precincts.

Sulfite sensitivity (not an allergy) is a real thing.
It is known to cause contact dermatitis in people who are sensitive to it (an issue with many photo processing solutions that use great gobs of sulfites and for textile arts people who use sulfite to neutralize chlorine bleach). Sulfite, as a solution of sodium metabisulfite, used to be a common treatment for lettuce & some other things for salad bars. As an antioxidant, it would prevent the lettuce from turning brown. In many places it is now banned for such use because there are people who are sensitive to it. It is still permitted for things like raw potatoes that are cooked before serving. Epinephrine solutions usually are preserved with a sulfite. This would seem to create a problem when epi is used for emergency allergy treatment (e.g. EpiPen), but any reaction to the sulfite is trivial compared with death from failing to administer epi.

I have no idea of the mechanisms surrounding sensitivity to sulfites.

... even Belgians

Is Ken somehow making reference to the fact that ponies from all over the world wind up of the dinner tables of Belgians?

Without malice, I kindly request that herr doktor bimler be placed on auto-med for a considerable but unspecified length of time.
Islay whisky is my prefered medication but I will settle for akvavit.

May I suggest a nice Irish whiskey, such as Black Bush?
Although, I'm also partial to Arak, which doubles in cooking as an anise extract.

I'm partial to beer, myself. (The therapist and NP have approved the occasional tipple.)

Lagunitas makes an Imperial Stout that's to die for.

Kracherl for Bimler until he starts commenting at SBM.

@#38 Shaysimmons. use shadow knitting- you will see or not see the cat depending on the angle of view

I'll try to avoid getting too personal - I'll talk about this guy as a specimen and won't pretend that he is any serious intellectual adversary. Rather, this is simply to try to establish more detailed patterns of quack behavior.

Being neither a doctor, a biochemist, nor any kind of bio-medical researcher, I am not competent to judge the worth of MJD's publication. Though like anyone familiar with journals, I'd be very wary of anything published in an open-access bio-medical journal.

Even if that paper is brilliant and groundbreaking, a concession I'd be willing to make for the sake of argument, it's totally irrelevant to anything that has been discussed in this posting, and certainly to any reasonable person's estimate of the relative merits of MJD and others as contributors to discussion on Respectful Insolence.

Other things take considerably less competence to judge - just basic literacy. The earlier 'physics' comment is so breathtakingly inane that I wonder how someone could type it and maintain self-respect. I'd have to type a page to describe what is wrong with each sentence.

No reasonable person will care whether MJD's critics have, do, or ever will publish in biomedical or any field of research. It's just so insanely irrelevant that it is surreal a grown-up needs it explained.

This is not a place to discuss therapeutic interventions as such, but to discuss what should be our attitude towards pseudoscience as presented by our moderator. And sometimes to have some fun with Internet-acquired acquaintances. This is not a journal.

Perhaps this person does brilliant work elsewhere. But he does not do any here; what's more, the insanely compounded levels of fallacy and faux-polite sniping constantly on display lead me to believe, likely not. Who knows though; people compartmentalize.

Mr. Lund's discussion of wine has roughly 1.34 x 10^8 times the value of that goofy 'physics' comment. Is there an English word for the opposite of wisdom?

@RJ (#70),

Please understand that It is not my intent to distract, confuse, or irritate the many like-minded participants here at RI.

Asking an ignorant question or veering off topic now and then is part of the RI experience and is often allowed by the moderator.

The constructive criticism often expressed here at RI is valuable and appreciated.

In this context, please critique the following introduction to a science book that I'm ready to submit.

Healing the Mind
Alzheimer’s Disease
Thinking Patents (1983-2007)

Description of work for marketing purpose:

The brain is a masterpiece that defines your uniqueness. As you age, though, your brain may be susceptible to a terrible disease. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia among older adults. It is considered an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly erases memories and thinking, and eventually eliminates the ability to carry out the simplest of tasks. Alzheimer’s disease may rank third, just behind heart disease and cancer, as the leading cause of death for elderly people. Medical science continues to make progress in the search for therapeutic interventions and a cure. Since 1983, hundreds of Alzheimer’s-related patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in an effort to eradicate this deadly disease. To better understand these inventions, Michael J. Dochniak has written this book to provide an easy-to-read, and brief, summary of such patents. Within the summaries are Inventor-Profiles and News Articles that are insightful and relevant. Impactful inventors include a Nobel laureate, a Soldier, and an Ex-convict. Pioneering inventors include George Glenner, Barbara Cordell, Birinder Boveja, Joseph Buxbaum, Dale Schenk, and Vivian Hook. At the beginning of several Chapters, you’ll discover a personal story about Alzheimer’s disease. Most important, the book Healing the Mind - Alzheimer’s Disease -Thinking Patents (1983-2007) is about keeping your brain healthy as you age.

Patricia, that was going to be my suggestion as well. Now I have to design one.

@ Eric Lund:

I actually go to California and drink their wines without effect-
or I HAVE done so in the past.

Here's my tale
in early December I was invited to a holiday party over in Poshtown by one of my gentlemen- the hosts seem to have enjoyed my repartee previously. I met an interesting drug rep ( who hates woo) and her husband and drank and talked with them. After several drinks, I felt oddly and later was nauseous over night and throughout the next day.

I didn't even want to have ANY drinks since then.

I venture that perhaps the anti-inflammatories I was taking might have had something to do with my reaction.

About sulfites: I know someone who is acutely sensitive to these which hampered her dining experiences- she was invited out frequently and learned what to avoid - wines, salads as doug mentions.

@ RJ:

I agree.
As you may know, I often work counseling people who want to change careers/ go back to university/ fit into a new culture- so you can imagine my internal reactions which probably match many of your own
.I must often evaluate/ critique potential students' written productions. I studied these methods/ tests in grad school/ institutes of therapy, etc.
I also assist a writer in his life's calling. All reality based.-btw-

Ri is a place to comment on the OP, bring in similar material for others' edification and interact with our compatriots in the great international struggle against woo, SIWOTI syndrome and now, fake news. As sceptics, we benefit from a sense of solidarity because it is a harsh, cruel world of whimsy-based speculation and spurious research constantly being thrown in our faces. Although I do not personally do book reviews, I often alert readers to new entries that merit our attention because they emit altie nonsense at high levels.

"Anything that influences new cancer patients to try quackery instead of effective medicine enrages me. "

Me, too. These stories kill me. I would have given my life for my wife to have had even a 2A diagnosis. She was 3A. She did conventional then tamoxifen. But also changed her diet and juiced. But she did get four good healthy years.

Unfortunately, the power of social media and false anecdotes pull the patient to quackery and an untimely demise. And it's getting worse. And it makes me sick to my stomach.

Lagunitas makes an Imperial Stout that’s to die for.

Their pils is quite nice, BTW.

On more crafty side, I don't know if you ever visited that Binny's on 53rd, but they're moving to 47th and clearing out some fantastic stuff at half-price and under. I'd be stocking a (possibly short-lived) cellar if I had the dough. I'm trying to get a friend of mine to grab all the Bordelet 2014 Poiré Granit at $12 a bottle. Bonus: It's biodynamic!

@ JeffM:

Somehow saying "I'm sorry" for what you and your wife went through seems hopelessly inadequate, but I can't think of anything else better right now. You remind us why this matters.

I hope you won't mind a few questions of clarification. I will absolutely understand if you choose not to answer.

Did/do you consider the changed diet and juicing to be quackery? What did her doctors say about them? Was your wife drawn to them via something like social media or false anecdotes? Did she, at any point conventional treatment was still in order, forego it in favor of the diet and juice? Or were they just, "well, it couldn't hurt" additions to the prescriptions of real oncologists? If so, was that still a kindling of cruel false hope, or did it have some psychological benefit in recuperating feelings of defeat and helplessness more or less symbolically 'at least we're doing something, even if it's silly'?

@ Samar

Diet and juicing....In the case of preventing recurrence, yes, I do consider this quackery. My wife followed the plan put in place by the surgeon, plastic surgeon and her oncologist to a tee. However, she was a big fan of Tony Robbins. That should answer your questions.

That afternoon driving home after we received the results of her ct scan...three mets- liver, lung and spine- she said to me, "I thought I did everything right."

Well, a regular review of one's diet is always a good thing. We can sneak "cheats" in, to levels that can become unhealthy.
Juicing, well, I happen to quite enjoy juices of various mixtures. I loathe cleaning the juicer strainer even more than I like the juice so, so it's a bit of a wash.

The problem is when one expects magic, when simple healthy, scientifically backed evidence is absent.
I enjoy various herbal teas, to the point of having a literal cabinet filled with various sorts. None with Saint Jack's warts, but plenty of others that some claim medical benefits from, I like them for their flavor.
Well, flavor and additional hydration. I've noticed a tendency to not drink enough water, to ascertain from spot checks on the specific gravity of my urine and its color, which also corresponds well with the measured value.
I spot check the urine due to kidney damage from a heat stroke, which causes me to throw a bit of protein out in the urine and hence, I monitor if for worsening, to report to doctor. I might have something to report beyond the initial report in a decade or so.
Monitoring the urine color though, that was something I advise all to do in hot climates. That advice lowered how many normal saline IV's I had to administer in the field to soldiers.

Were I to be diagnosed with cancer, I'd ask my oncologist for advice on nutritional needs under chemotherapy, to adjust electrolytes and any specific vitamins that might be necessary to replace, but I'd not expect any specific information for most agents that I've heard of.
If I were told to juice and modify my diet in radical ways, that specialist would be terminated for cause and a competent replacement sought. I'd also report the woo wooing to the insurance company.

Condolences on your wife, frankly, that specific loss would likely destroy me.

I've seen a lot of failures for straight oncology that would seem easy fixes earlier in the game if other known technologies were applied. I've seen pure alternatives fail, some after conventional medicine had quit earlier. Far and away, the most successful I've seen were those few that could diligently use both systems.

Wzrd1: Were I to be diagnosed with cancer, I’d ask my oncologist for advice
I've seen a lot of nutritional advice from oncologists that was wrong - in conflict with literature and simply reproducible phenomena, or at least severely suboptimal. I look for outside consultants that specialize in oncological nutrition. Their views vary based on their research, clinical experience and literature base.

If I were told to juice and modify my diet in radical ways, that specialist would be terminated for cause and a competent replacement sought. I’d also report the woo wooing to the insurance company.
We are or should be, free to choose our advisors. The insurance company should be welcome to choose their network or conditions if well understood and independently reviewed and described. The insurance company as policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury as to "fraud" is a form of fascism.

The insurance company as policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury as to “fraud” is a form of fascism.

So, insurance companies are now nationalistic, authoritarian governments?
I think that you need a new dictionary.

MJD@72: Please do Alzheimers sufferers everywhere an enormous fuckıng favor and switch to the toilet paper business instead.

prn@81: Nobody here cares what you've seen, only what you can prove; and all you ever prove is that you're completely full of it. Please do MJD a huge favor and go be his product tester: you'll make a wonderful team and finally manufacture a product worth caring about.

JeffM@79: “I thought I did everything right.”

You did. You all did. Sometimes today the best achievable outcome is a few extra years of quality life and a pain-free passing surrounded and supported by love ones throughout. A hundred years ago, cancer victims could only have dreamt of such an outcome. A hundred years from now, who knows what will be achievable, as long as those other killer human malignancies—dishonesty and corruption—continue to be cut, burned, and poisoned to non-existence with the absolute rigor and compassion demonstrated by our host and others every day of our lives.

I wish you and your wife could have had more—I know how incredibly fortunate my own family has been in early detection and effective treatment, and thank Dog each day for inventing us oncologists—but long and happy life is not a thing the universe automatically hands us, but a goal we must all work with and for each other to achieve. Your story is part of this, the heart of this. Thank you for sharing it.

has writes (#82),

MJD@72: Please do Alzheimers sufferers everywhere an enormous fuckıng favor and switch to the toilet paper business instead.

MJD says,

Never give up, never give in - Learned helplessness is a disorder that kills creativity, innovation, and discovery.

Therefore, we should ask the question:

Do the toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of toilet paper affect the incidence of rectal cancer?

http://myilifestyle.com/beware-your-toilet-paper-may-be-toxic-heres-how…

@ has (much to offer),

Hope your despair is temporary my RI comrade!

MJD@84: No despair, just can't stand dangerous fucking tools like you. Get psych help already. Other people's lives are not your personal plaything, no matter what your fixed delusions tell you.

has: been, dementia
prn@81: Nobody here cares what you’ve seen, only what you can prove; and all you ever prove is that you’re completely full of it.
Thanks. "Proof" is a luxury at the frontiers,which of course requires substantial support. You remind me why some at this site need a few fresh cues about reality vs a distorted, expensive, interfering formalism.

* It's biodynamic!*

Narad, I've heard quite a bit of woo-tinged advertisement about wines ( mostly from Mendocino- which is - btw- also part of the Emerald triangle) that are biodynamic, sulfite free, organic and/ or green ( that is, carbon-neutral).
There's another appellation that's similar but I forget what it was.

@ has:

Agreed.
You have good sense.

*Lagunitas* products are listed as being from Petaluma

RI has a friend, Draconis, who often hangs out in Petaluma.
BUT where is he now?

MJD:Never give up, never give in – Learned helplessness is a disorder that kills creativity, innovation, and discovery.

No, what Has is asking you to recognize is that you know NOTHING about anything you've ever vomited out of your mouth and to please shut up and stop preying on people. Seriously, dude, did you skip high school and college until the last day? Did you ever even pass sixth grade? Have you ever cracked open a medical textbook or even a journal and understood it? Or did the words just bounce around that hollow skull of yours?
Creativity is one thing, scamming people is another thing entirely. Learn the difference bub. And while you're at it, please shut your yap trap for a while and stop trying to fling poo at your betters. I realize that it hurts that a lot of women are smarter than you are, but deal with it.

PGP writes,

Creativity is one thing, scamming people is another thing entirely. Learn the difference bub. And while you’re at it, please shut your yap trap for a while and stop trying to fling poo at your betters.

MJD says,

Smart people are a dime a dozen (e.g., Orac's minions, excluding Denice Walter :-) ). Creative people are one in a million (e.g., Inventor's that I'm writing several fantastic books about).

@PGP,

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and MJD, are blind to gender and one's resume. Creativity, novelty, and usefulness, unselfishly placed in the public domain, are the governing dynamics of our constitution.

has writes,

(#86) No despair, just can’t stand dangerous fucking tools like you.

(#87) “Proof” is a luxury at the frontiers,which of course requires substantial support.

MJD says,

Who are you?

My name is Michael J. Dochniak, anyone can do a Google search and learn about my full background and intentions.

I'm not seeking "substantial support" from anyone and provide full disclose.

@ Orac's minions,

What is gained by speaking loudly while hiding under a rock?

MJD: Creativity, novelty, and usefulness, unselfishly placed in the public domain, are the governing dynamics of our constitution.

You don't have any of those three qualities. And generally speaking, applying creativity to political pursuits tends not to be a good idea. Liberterianism, and every Communist regime ever, for example. And people tend to forget that democracy and voting weren't invented by our founders and that by today's standards, their idea of democracy falls far short. (To say nothing of the electoral college, which was a stupid idea then and an idiotic vestige now.)

MJD: Creative people are one in a million (e.g., Inventor’s that I’m writing several fantastic books about).

Judging from the quality of your writing here, I'm going to have to side with Has. Writing skills are just another of the many, many skills you lack. I can only hope you're doing e-publishing.

MJD: I’m not seeking “substantial support” from anyone and provide full disclose.

It's disclosure, first of all. Secondly, you are trying to scam people, no matter what you try to dress it up as. I'm beginning to wonder how many mustelids were in your family tree. You really enjoy weaseling.

@PGP (#94),

Thanks for pointing out the error!

Over each of the last five years, I've made new year resolutions to make 2 or less grammar and/or spelling errors per year

This recent mistake is upsetting in that 2017 has just begun and I'm half way to my limit.

What standards do you set for yourself PGpig?

@Orac: Post #87 is NOT by me. At a guess, prn has trouble spelling hir own 'nym right.

MJD@93: I'm nobody. Anyone can read my posts here and weigh them on their own merits and faults.

Micheal said:

Do the toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of toilet paper affect the incidence of rectal cancer?

I doubt it, but I know that buttsex with mineral oil does.

We should warn ORAC....

In other ( fake) news..

AoA finds respite from obits and honoraria when Anne Dachel decries the quality of the media.

-Reporters never deviate from the 'storyline' on vaccines
- media fraud is rampant
- the press is corrupt: "They write what they're told"
- Big Pharma rules
- Trump is right

So, a contributor at one of the most unrealistic, gossip-driven, conspiracy-mongering websites that exist at the dim and dusty outer edges of the cybersphere opines that it's the REST of the world that's off of its rocker.
Does anyone else see a parallel to our current situation at RI?

Seriously, folks!
I should note that other alt media 'editors' similarly waste millions of electrons smearing the mainstream and warn their audiences about how untrustworthy most media outlets and newspapers ( which STILL exist -btw-) are.

Don't trust THEM, trust ME!

I've been reading this swill since the early aughts.
The irony never gets old though.

MJD: It's not just the errors. You're one of the most boring people I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. You also appear to lead a fact-free life.
My standards: Offline, I try to be polite and write a few hundred words a day about anything.I also don't let the crazy online follow me home. Too bad you're stuck with the crazy.

*Lagunitas* products are listed as being from Petaluma

Indeed, they are, as well as a few other locations. The have a brewery there, with a nice beer garden. The beer is fresh and good, the food is fair, and they bring in a band on occasion. The brewery tours are only fair, and if you've ever been on about any other brewery tour, I'd say you could skip it.

https://lagunitas.com/taprooms/petaluma

I've not been to any of their other taprooms.

In this context, please critique the following introduction to a science book that I’m ready to submit.

Not wanting to loose my place on the MJD enemies list, what I noticed is that nowhere in the description is there a hint that the worth of the patents is explored. No hint that effectiveness, or even plausibility, is discussed.

I could make a box with blinker lights and a headband, claim that it helped, well, anything, and get a patent. That doesn't mean that it works.

Not that MJD would be qualified to make any such determinations, about Alzheimer’s or any other medical condition, but at least he recognized his limits, and, it sounds, that he just printed out the results of a patent search, and added some fluff.

PGP writes (#99),

You’re one of the most boring people I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. You also appear to lead a fact-free life.

MJD says,

When I was in grade school my mother frequently gave me a spoonful of honey before the real academics started. She said it would stop me from getting sick. I trusted and believed her completely.

Today, I want to believe that some harm-less alternative medicine is provided in a "I care for you mode" at a reasonable price.

In this example, let's call it "feel-good medicine" instead of "fake medicine".

These are the facts of life PGP.

Johnny writes (#100),

...nowhere in the description is there a hint that the worth of the patents is explored. No hint that effectiveness, or even plausibility, is discussed.

MJD says,

In simplification, once a patent is granted it's in the patent assignee's best interest to make it work ASAP and gain financial reward.

The inventions commercial viability may take years to implement.

Alternatively, others can attempt to discover an alternative best mode, me-too effort, and thereafter seek patent protection.

Thus, patents are like a catalyst for continuous improvement.

@Johnny,

You can't patent your spaghetti sauce recipe unless you've discovered a new end-use (e.g., foot detoxification?).

Johnny writes (#100),

MJD,

This is beyond doubt the best book review I've gotten here at RI.

If Lilady was still alive, she'd have you killed.

@Johnny,

Of course you realize once I have a thorough understanding of the art, a new medical hypothesis on a cure for Alzheimer's disease will follow.

I'm hopeful it will be in time to help herr doktor Bimler's great grandchildren.

MJD: Today, I want to believe that some harm-less alternative medicine is provided in a “I care for you mode” at a reasonable price.In this example, let’s call it “feel-good medicine” instead of “fake medicine”.

No wonder you're such a prick, Momma's boys are always insufferable. Here's the thing: the things you're trying to peddle are, I can tell right away, basically useless, and take the place of help that would actually benefit people- and you're charging a really high price for them, money that people'd be better off spending (or saving) elsewhere. Also, you're weaseling again.

Alzheimer's is not a harmless disease, and people need fact-based, real medicine, not snake oil. Sure, I resort to honey and citrus when I have a cold, but that's because I know that whatever I do, the cold's going to run its course, and I might as well indulge myself. You, however, are coldly sizing up your next prey, and that's something I can't stand.

#80: I’ve noticed a tendency to not drink enough water, to ascertain from spot checks on the specific gravity of my urine

I was going to borrow Wzrd1's hydrometer to measure my home-brew's OG, but then I changed my mind.

Well, a visual check is a field expedient. ;)
For a more accurate measure, I go with these (although, with a supplier in my own country).
https://www.promed.ie/shop/catalog/product.aspx?categoryid=2578&serveri…

PGP writes,

... the things you’re trying to peddle are, I can tell right away, basically useless, and take the place of help that would actually benefit people- and you’re charging a really high price for them, money that people’d be better off spending (or saving) elsewhere.

MJD says,

Are you referring to the science books that I've written?

The chances of this message getting past Orac is about 73 million to one. I have a better chance of winning the lottery.

One of the books, which Orac has written about, is on sale at Walmart for $5.04.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Vaccine-Delivery-and-Autism-the-Latex-Connec…

MJD: Are you referring to the science books that I’ve written?

You mean your nonsensical ramblings? No, I was under the impression that you'd made some dubious device to go along with your waste of trees. Or made some essence of nightshade that you were peddling as an Alzheimer's remedy.Somehow, patents and copyrights got tangled up in that thing you call your brain. Also, dude, science does not come from your lower intestine. You're about as scientific as Ken Ham.
And as far as your 'book' goes, for $5 at some bookstores, and sales I could get three or four books, maybe more, of far better quality and written by better writers than you on your best day.

PGP writes (#108),

Also, dude, science does not come from your lower intestine.

MJD says,

Autism symptoms improve after fecal transplant, small study finds.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170123094638.htm

@PGP,

You never know?

Wow, that's twice you've sent the same link on fecal transplants.
Once, in reply to someone suggesting you consume it, suggesting an oral route.

You *do* know fecal transplants are administered, yes?

MJD: Have you ever been formally diagnosed as bipolar/psychotic or other condition for which grandiose and fixed delusions are recognized symbotoms? Cos I've been mentally ill for a quarter-century and it's obvious to me that your head is far more fcuked up than even mine is.

If you are even capable of perceiving this, please ask for help—even just a health check—if not for your own sake then then for the good of all those who know and love you. Cos the one thing that's worse than being mentally ill is being mentally ill and a danger to others' health or even lives because of it, and you're weaving all over that line as it is.

Autism symptoms improve after fecal transplant, small study finds.

In other words: behave or you'll go eat sh!t...What a nice way to treat an human being.

Alain

And Alain wins the comment thread!

Well, I do recall reading some studies that suggest promise for recurring C. Diff infections.
I also read some rather dubious references to German soldiers observing Bedouins consuming camel dung to treat diarrhea. I don't thing I'd suggest that treatment, considering MERS, not to mention potential parasites.

Although, camel, sheep and goat dung did make an excellent compost, with high calcium carbonate, saline soil, peat moss and clay (from cat litter). Loads of moisture, aerate it at least daily and in a month, excellent soil resulted. At had a veritable garden of Eden in my yard, scaled down, of course. ;)

MJD: Fecal transplants are also dubious science, considering that they're founded on Wakefield's "studies." Wakey's another person who fails to understand science, no wonder you like him. And again, please look up the difference between patents and copyrights.

Has: I think Mr. Dochniak just has a bad case of the stupid. Although the poo-flinging at specific commentators is new, but maybe he thinks it's okay now?

@PGP, not really. Wakefield's worshipers tacked that nonsense on. There are prior works and historic works on fecal transplants for recurrent C. Diff infection and much older, far more dubious works discussing it for diarrhea.

PGpig writes, (#112),

Although the poo-flinging at specific commentators is new, but maybe he thinks it’s okay now?

MJD says,

I'm going to start complimenting Denice Walterrrrrrr in an attempt to help reduce the dangerous tension.

Here I go.....

@ Denice Walter,

Your the standard of respectful insolence for every one of Orac's minions. :-)

Hi Alain! Good to hear from you.

Yes, good to hear from you, Alain! Do let us know how you're doing if you want to.

And I agree with Orac about winning the comment thread. :-)

If MJD @85 is worried about his TP ("Do the toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of toilet paper affect the incidence of rectal cancer?") then perhaps he should consider using "family cloth" instead.

(And why only rectal cancer? Why not vulval cancer or nasal cancer?)

Brilliant, Alain! Glad to see you back.

the incidence of rectal cancer?”) then perhaps he should consider using “family cloth” instead.

Or a communal sponge on a stick, as the ancient Romans did. (An old friend and I were hanging out recently and somehow the subject of what people used before toilet paper came up... Early American settlers used corncobs. Ouch.)

Bon Jour, Alain!

Decent verbal joking that's truly excellent for an ESL/EFL person like you.
Woo hoo!

@ PGP:

You know, sometimes you can't get through to particular people despite valiant effort like your own. I know someone who tried to convince a delusional person that the plots/ actions he believed to be against him were not real
It didn't work.

HOWEVER your endeavors will be read by others and are therefore useful.

In other anti-vax news...

Now that Dan is gone, Kim appears to be taking the helm at AoA.

So, a contributor at one of the most unrealistic, gossip-driven, conspiracy-mongering websites that exist at the dim and dusty outer edges of the cybersphere opines that it’s the REST of the world that’s off of its rocker.

What's worse is that the Dachelbot's spew is so half-assed that she can't even format it readably. I suppose it has something to do with this:

"Please understand that my life is so centered on what’s happening to the health of our children that I don’t have a lot of time to explode [sic] political questions."

^ Oh, wait, the best part is the wrap-up to this senile screed:

Either way, after two decade of failing to honestly report on a subject so vital to the our children’s health, NO ONE IS LISTENING TO YOU.

An old friend and I were hanging out recently and somehow the subject of what people used before toilet paper came up… Early American settlers used corncobs.

Indeed. My father, as a youn'un, growing up on a farm in Oklahoma back in the day, also talked of using the Sears catalog, and that it was a sad day when there was nothing but the slick pages left.

For a full listing and discussion, I'd recommend
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/572/what-did-people-use-before…

...the things you’re trying to peddle are, I can tell right away, basically useless, and take the place of help that would actually benefit people- and you’re charging a really high price for them, money that people’d be better off spending (or saving) elsewhere.

Are you referring to the science books that I’ve written?

The chances of this message getting past Orac is about 73 million to one. I have a better chance of winning the lottery.

One of the books, which Orac has written about, is on sale at Walmart for $5.04.

Well, I admit that I don't understand why our host allows you to spam your books, but, hey, his house, his rules.

And you do realize that what our host wrote about your book was far from a positive review, and that your book is a prime example of a waste of money "people’d be better off spending (or saving) elsewhere."

Not all publicity is good publicity.

Fecal transplants are also dubious science, considering that they’re founded on Wakefield’s “studies.”

PgP, with all that aside, I'd still not call such a relationship 'dubious'. Consider how medications( and I don't just mean antibiotics) that affect the microbiome is related to disbiosis leading to diabetes and weight gain. I don't think the gut-brain hypothesis should so lightly be discounted soley because Wakefield embraced it.

Johnny writes (#124),

Not all publicity is good publicity.

MJD says,

The "About the Author" section in the book titled, Healing the Mind-Alzheimer's Disease-Thinking Patents (1983-2007) is as follows:

Michael J. Dochniak received a BS degree in Psychology/Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. Michael enjoys Science Blogs™ Respectful Insolence. Learn more about Michael at https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-j-dochniak-4363104

@ Orac's minions,

I'm only referring to Orac's posts. The comment section at RI is often mismanaged.

MJD, you seem to be making some argument about the relationship between the number of patents for objects to address a condition and the prevalence of that condition.

By that logic then people only engaged in "self-harm" during the Victorian period, and never before or since.

I'm back home after 5.5 month of intensive therapy but the new laptop (ivy bridge core i7, Nvidia Quadro K2000M, 18 GB RAM and a 250GB SSD) still need 80 Linux packages to compile until it's ready for me to post a ton more often here. Give me a few hours.

Alain

Wow, but the computer fairy was good to you!
I only got a dual Xeon, 64 gig RAM, 8 TB RAID server - dropped delivered on my foot.

Glad you're back among us Alain and look forward to your comments. Feel free to email me if you want to chat.

DW: Are we sure Dan Olmsted's dead? Any idea where his grave might be? (And no, those aren't tap shoes behind my back, why would you *ever* think that?)

Gilly: I don’t think the gut-brain hypothesis should so lightly be discounted solely because Wakefield embraced it.

It's not solely because of Wakefield. When anything achieves popularity in alternative medicine circles, the scientific community should be extremely skeptical about it. Heck, I'm still pretty sure oxytocin is made up because of the way the anti-sex crowd swoons over it.
And it's kind of rich, coming from you, since I haven't seen a conspiracy theory you don't believe in.

Justatech: Oh, I'm pretty sure there have been a number of patents since the Victorian age in the 'self-harm' industry since humans are industriously devoted to getting their socks rocked.

The gut-brain hypothesis is not entirely hokum. It's certainly true that toxins (like, serious, honest-to-organic-chemistry bacterial endotoxins) have a better time crossing from the gut into circulation in some guts than others.

It's also true that when you induce gut permeability in mice, you get interesting neurological effects that depend on the microbiome. Look up the work of Sarkis Mazmanian to see this sort of research done in a rigorous manner.

I've always found Sarkis' post-docs a little overenthusiastic about what they'd discovered, but Sarkis is quite well grounded, and he's not the only PI doing serious research on this topic.

None of this validates the work of Wakefield or any other doctor offering to treat "leaky gut syndrome".

Have you looked into the casomorphin hypothesis?

I know that these exogenous pseudo-opiates are purportedly biologically active, but they are not chemically similar to Opiates and for just that simple reason I am having a hard time accepting this.

Does Naxolone antagonize casomorphin? Have you read studies?

Perhaps I will look into this and share my findings. A peptide chain is not something I would expect to act like an opiate.

But I will say, that eating cheese and wheat has that effect on me. Try to stop dairy for a few weeks and see what happens. I always just thought it was the hormones.

And beer seems to make people a bit stupider than wine for some reason. I am not sure why this is, but it could gluten peptides I suppose....

Who Knows!

Cheese and wheat? I happen to greatly enjoy cheese, bread and wine. Add a dried, cured meat, I'm in heaven!

JustaTech writes (#130),

MJD, you seem to be making some argument about the relationship between the number of patents for objects to address a condition and the prevalence of that condition.
By that logic then people only engaged in “self-harm” during the Victorian period, and never before or since.

MJD says,

Seek clarity using well placed words in a coherent sentence, preferably in the form of a question. Important, it is proper to placed a symbol (i.e., ?) at the end of a sentence when help is needed.

Hope your next effort using the question-format described above earns a reply. :-)

And beer seems to make people a bit stupider than wine for some reason. I am not sure why this is, but it could gluten peptides I suppose….

Beer doesn't make you fat, it makes you lean... against tables, chairs, and other people...

LOL!

I think it's due to delayed affects- because beer has so much more stuff in it, the alcohol takes a while to hit the system. Also, people drink beer faster than wine. No one chugs wine. They nurse a glass, and then they get another one.

Yes Tommy, I like cheese too. But there may be something to this opiate peptide business. I think I might dive into the scientific literature on this. I am seriously curious how they will attempt to attribute opiate-like pharmacology on a peptide?

I mean, these are not chemically related. If you look at psychedelics, the all have planar conjugated pi-bond systems and are usually indoles.

And now proteins are allegedly this powerful? As powerful as opium?

And only certain protein sequences have this power?

Bizarre. I'll track down the original paper on this. I know there are anecdotes of gluten-free casein-free people who have progressed from autism, but there are other things in cheese and bread that could be responsible for this: like hormones and added reduced iron.

And Gilbert's favourite food demon: synthetic folic acid!

Why do trolls like me? Is it just that I'm so personable?

I do want to chat. The buildup is done. gnome-light, chromium, libreoffice and wxmaxima...for now, plenty sufficient for most of my needs but I do plan to add a few other applications.

Alain

What distro are you using? Or are you rolling your own, floor, walls and ceiling?
I started years ago with slackware, went RH, SuSE (back before Novell screwed it up), Debian and currently gravitate toward Ubuntu.
Along with some *BSD specialty devices.

JP, I'm not a troll and I like you :D beside, who could hate you?

No one chugs wine.

You do not know my people.
Faecal transplants are a perfectly cromulent form of research & therapy (though I would be surprised if it made much difference to autism).

I am surprised that so far no-one is offering designer transplants yet, from the celebrity of one's choice. That will be the script of my next SF movie.

I used to have green poop. Now, with faecal transplants, I can choose the color.

Green poop is so boring, I prefer plaid.

Ever play "slap the bag" with Franzia?

Wine-in-a-box. Take the bag out of the box and you have wine-in-a-bag.

Drink from the bag like Tom Green on a cow's utter, and slap it!

Do it! Do it! Do it!

Don't bother with the expensive fecal transplants, just host a sodomy party. That's what I do!

Really good way to diversify the lower intestinal biome, and you'll have fun doing it. Just don't forget the Vodka and Queen CD's!

hdb: Chugging wine seems really unfrench.

MJD: The point of Just aTech's comment seems to have sailed over your head. Why don't you go away for a few days and think about it?
While we're at it, can someone remove the twelve year old edgelord?

PGpig writes (#150),

The point of Just aTech’s comment seems to have sailed over your head.

MJD,

Remember I don't think like an Orac-minion.

Although I have a friend, of a friend, of a friend who is an Orac-minion having half a brain.

MJD: Dude, you barely think at all, you just mistake those echoes in your skull for thoughts. Justatech's point was that the number of patents relating to a condition are not an indication of the condition's prevalence, it just indicates that someone has found a new way to make money off that condition.

PGpig writes (#152),

Justatech’s point was that the number of patents relating to a condition are not an indication of the condition’s prevalence

MJD says,

Thank you for the clarification.

Please relay this message to JustaTech, in pig language I'm sure, that when a medical condition increases (e.g., ASD) the efforts to solve said condition also increases (i.e., Patents).

so far no-one is offering designer transplants yet

Introducing mostly-new, partly-natural, enteric-gilded celebrity Butt Crust. You can buy Butt Crust in the bright green box with a picture of some gilded Butt Crust on the front or in the generic brown paper bag with the stain which indicates freshness.

Alain writes (#145),

JP, I’m not a troll and I like you ? beside, who could hate you?

MJD says,

I like JP more than you do and I'll defend her with my martial art skills when necessary.

@JP,

It's time to chose, is it Alain or MJD?

re # 134

I think that she mixes up me with another commenter

PGP: eep eep epp, eep eep! (The language of the guinea pig does not translate well to the screen.)

MJD@153: You said " that when a medical condition increases (e.g., ASD) the efforts to solve said condition also increases (i.e., Patents)."

And what I said in my comment is that, by your logic, until there is an increase in patents, there is not an increase in a given condition. And if you follow that logic, an examination of Victorian-era patents would lead you to conclude that until the Victorian era, no one ever masturbated, because it was not until the Victorian period that there were many devices patented to prevent masturbation.
You may have mis-understood my comment because I used the period term "self-harm".
Obviously this is not true (people have touched themselves for pleasure throughout history), so therefore your logic about patents is incorrect.

MJD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig

Learn something, weasel.

Again, the increase in patents has nothing to do with prevalence. It has to do with people seeing a niche to exploit and the knowledge that most kids who are autistic usually have older parents who have a lot of money. Do you not know how an economy works? Heck, you're trying to scam those parents too.
Also, Alain's much nice than you, and I bet you have no 'martial arts skills' to speak of. Those who have skills don't need to brag.

JP: " Why do trolls like me?"

You're personable AND
you have an ability to express yourself clearly like a writer or something.

Hilariously, I sometimes attract them myself. ( non-existent) Lord knows why

*Nicer*

@ PGP:

Right about patents and products

Amongst the woo-fraught, many products are created to address unrealistic needs. Check some of the 'stores' at woo-ful websites to see what I mean.

@Just-a-pig (#157 and #158),

Let's not keep on about this gentlemen, I've read both of your opinions and wish you the best of luck in your patent strategies.

@JP,

If we're getting together please consider wearing a different pair of boot. :-)

Alain
JP, I’m not a troll and I like you ? beside, who could hate you?
I suspect that JP's observation was directed at the ingratiating comments from Fendelsworth's current instantiation -- before he reverted to scatological form.

eep eep epp, eep eep! (The language of the guinea pig does not translate well to the screen.)
The language of the guinea-pig is called "wheaking". I learned that from BoingBoing.

The language of the guinea-pig is called “wheaking”. I learned that from BoingBoing.

Ah, but what are their young called?

HDB @162: "wheaking" - that's brilliant! An excellent onomatopoeia. :)

Ah, but what are their young called?

Adorable.

Or pups.

I prefer adorable.

Ah, but what are their young called?
Snacks.

Gaist: They really are. I accidentally purchased a male and female, and of course the usual happened. The babies are born fully furred and ready to run, and they don't mind being handled, as long as mom is with them. I had to separate the male from them, as mom was getting aggressive toward him.

hdb and justatech: They also coo when really happy.

MJD: I wasn't arguing with you, I was simply mocking you. You're not worth arguing with, you'd have to learn how to think first.
If I invent anything it's going to be useful. Also, I suggest you, again, look at the difference between copyrights and patents. And what's wrong with punk boots?

And what’s wrong with punk boots?

I remember them as "jump boots". A bit higher maintenance than I ever preferred.
http://www.corcoranandmatterhorn.com/Item.asp?Style=1515&CategoryID=28&…
http://www.corcoranandmatterhorn.com/Item.asp?Style=1500&CategoryID=28&…

Traditionally, the toe box gets polished to a high shine.
Personally, I liked Danner's "Fort Lewis" boot. Wore like iron, Vibram soles and well insulated.

I suppose it depends on context. I admire them, though I'd never wear them. (Too many laces, and some of the more fashionable shoes do not fit my feet or they pinch too much.)

I still have a pair of the Danner boots around somewhere, I think they're in my storage unit.
If they degrade, the company can rebuild them, which is an additional plus. They're a bit heavy though.
They did great in both European snow and desert, due to the insulation.

Wzrd1,

Funtoo. I had tried to build linux from scratch but the attention it require to have a gnome enabled desktop was a bit too much and I needed something ready soon (I'm just coming back from an interview at the Montreal University affiliated hospital center downtown and needed to fact-check a few things). Can't install the full gnome desktop either (some package need an X & opengl enabled cairo library while other package conflict with these settings) but I'm still building some pieces (next in line is R to do these courses: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science and https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics).

Alain

I've started getting lazy, Ubuntu loaded on most boxen here, with Mythbuntu on various TV frontends and a Dell PowerEdge 2950 to run MythTV.
My only Windows device was recently stolen in a burglary, along with my MacBook Pro (fortunately, I do have a Time Machine backup, should I ever manage to afford to replace that machine).

Furthermore, I plan to roll my own distro in the next 6 months based on LFS & BLFS; I plan on developing a build infrastructure for it which will be hosted on a colo server or one of the VM based approach.

Alain

In other news, Justice Eidsvik's judgement in the case of the death of Ryan Lovett due to his mother's failure to provide the necessaries of life and criminal negligence causing death is finally up at
http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2017/2017abqb46/2017abqb46.html

Doug: Yowza. I'm surprised the computers didn't catch fire while they were typing it out. Also, I didn't realize how quickly a strep infection could go bad. I had strep throat and a rash when I was about the same age Ryan was, but I got anti-biotics. It's kind of chilling that it was luck of the draw that I lived and he didn't.

@PGP, while group A Strept infection isn't that uncommon and usually rapidly responds to antibiotics, when it moves systematically, things can get bad.
Here's strept A with rash, the bacteria itself infected with bacteriophage T12:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_fever
Here's strept A in the heart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatic_fever

PGP: Strep throat is pretty common and easily treated with good old penicillin as long as treatment isn't delayed too long. A reasonable parent will note their child's suffering and seek professional help, as your parents did. Tamara Lovett failed to do what a reasonable parent would do an so was convicted.
Ryan probably could have been saved if he'd had proper treatment even as late as a day or two before he died. That late in the game he probably would have required IV antibiotics and intensive care. He got dandelion tea.

I expected Tamara to be convicted on the "failure to provide the necessaries of life" charge. One rather pointed question from the judge to Tamara's lawyer during the latter's summation made it pretty clear she was very likely to convict on that charge. She also sent the lawyer away to read a recent case during the lunch break on the day of summations. I took that as saying "you're going to lose and the judgement in that case will make you see why." I think that case was related to the criminal negligence charge. (I had difficulty hearing what Tamara's lawyer was saying during most of his summation, which made it hard to follow.)

As I said in my comment at #8, sitting through that trial hardened my attitude to those who flood the internet with bad advice on "alternative" medicines.

Although Tamara won't be sentenced until June, I wonder if her case will be cited by the prosecution at the appeal of the sentences of the Stephans for their failure in the death of Ezekiel (the Crown is appealing for stiffer sentences, the Stephans are appealing the conviction). That appeal will be heard in a little over a month. Orac discussed that case several times. The original sentencing judgement is here.

Another US family let their son die through preferring prayer, medicinal honey and "doing their own research on the internet" to antibiotics. Currently fugitives from justice in New Zealand. Would you like them back? No-one here wants them.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/89019249/american-couple-accused-of-kil…

I'm sure that the good people of Minnesota would be quite glad to have them back, to keep a prison cell warm for a long, long time.
May I suggest that the Kiwis retain custody of the children until such time as the parents are released from prison? The care that they'd receive would be far superior, considering our current governmental situation will likely allow.

Pancreatitis is agonizing!

Wzrd1,

It isn't laziness, I must say that gentoo or funtoo flavor roll-your-own is riddled with conflict about features to include in software we usually use, thus, the LFS approach which I really enjoy except the constant attention given. This the reason I want to roll my own. LFS and BLFS doesn't get in the way but it's hand crafting all the way down.

Mine will be simple, cmake based recipe using an usb key with the necessary stuff to boot & run the graphical front-end of cmake as a configuration wizard and then, it output a makefile to automate the buildup.

Alain

I personally am lazy. I just use Ubuntu, although I have experimented with Bodhi Linux and other distros.

Periodically, I'll go on a distro sampling, checking out the latest and greatest distros out there in a Virtualbox VM.
Most end up in the dustbin, although I do keep a few around to play with (including the latest open source offerings of Solaris).

Regarding speed bump, I just ordered a pair of 8GB GSkill Ripjaws stick for the laptop. it'll get a memory upgrade to 32GB total.

Alain

Science mom,

I would have posted my email address since I don't remember yours but given the current issue wrt fendlesworth, I'll refrain from doing so.

Alain

Don't quit there, quitter. Tell us which alternative you believe to be efficacious. Citations will be appreciated.

"For Cancer:

Bromopyruvate
Methylglyoxal
Gerson
Rife"

Oh my! About those citations...?

quitter:

You forgot Burzynski. And Hulda Clark (Rife revisited). And Tulio Simoncini. And Robert O. Young.

They're ALL curing cancer.

(Seriously, how can Gerson AND Rife BOTH be correct? They have completely opposite "theories"!)

rs:

Ya wanna' bet the "citations" are YouTube, websites and books
(In other words, advertising)?

Hey quitter,

You forgot cannabis! Research Rick Simpson-he's curing cancer!

And what about the cottage cheese/flax oil thing: Budwig, I think? That cures cancer!

Rene Caisse cured cancer a million years ago with plants and herbs she found in Ontario. You can buy the stuff on Amazon (to my chagrin).

Wow, why do so many people have cancer with all these famous, readily available cures on YouTube?

You forgot Burzynski. And Hulda Clark (Rife revisited). And Tulio Simoncini. And Robert O. Young.

No I didn't.

(Seriously, how can Gerson AND Rife BOTH be correct? They have completely opposite “theories”!)

Elaborate please.

You forgot cannabis!

No I didn't.

Wow, why do so many people have cancer with all these famous, readily available cures on YouTube?

Because they are kept in the dark by cocksucking propagandists like you.

I suspect another Fendelsworth sock.

I bow to my benevolent host Lord Draconis Zeneca for the power to influence and direct medical research according to our wishes.

Alain

You forgot cannabis! Research Rick Simpson-he’s curing cancer!

Quite.

UK drugmaker GW Pharmaceuticals announced Tuesday it has achieved positive results in the second phase of a clinical study on Glioma, a cannabinoid-based therapy aimed at treating an aggressive form of brain cancer.

https://www.leafly.com/news/health/cannabis-drug-extend-lives-brain-can…

"We believe that the signals of efficacy demonstrated in this study further reinforce the potential role of cannabinoids in the field of oncology and provide GW with the prospect of a new and distinct cannabinoid product candidate in the treatment of glioma,"

http://fortune.com/2017/02/07/gw-pharmaceuticals-marijuana-brain-cancer/

JP:

Thanks, in that case I won't bother to engage.

I thought he only showed up on vaccination threads.

Because they are kept in the dark by cocksucking propagandists like you.

Always a curious choice for an attempted insult.

(Seriously, how can Gerson AND Rife BOTH be correct? They have completely opposite “theories”!)

I am always impressed by those Alternative Cancer Conferences where sales-reps from Burzynski and Gerson clinics and Gonzalez and Laetrile and CanCell get together to promote their various scams in an atmosphere of collegial comity and professional courtesy, unconcerned by the mutually-incompatible nature of their views on human physiology.

I guess they agree on the main thing, i.e. the importance of persuading potential customers away from mainstream oncology. After that a customer may go first to a rival quack, but there is always the chance that he or she will come to you later, for there is the reassuring knowledge at these conferences that none of the snake-oils work.

I know! I once speculated about the conversation they would have around the bar (organic juice bar, most likely) at one of those conventions.

Of course quitter would say they all have different means of accomplishing the same thing, i.e. removing the "toxins" that cause cancer. Whether through a Radio Shack e-meter that "zaps" them or flushing them out by shooting coffee up the wazoo.

But Hulda says it's a fluke and Simoncini says it's a fungus and the New German folks say it's all stress and past traumas.

Given the level of paranoia in woo-land about cellphone radiation, electromagnetic pollution, chemtrails etc., I'm always amazed that people feel comfortable zapping themselves with Rife rays.

Have they considered the dreadful possibility that vengeful neighbors who have their own Rife machines are secretly targeting them* with frequencies that encourage the growth of Morgellons critters and Demodex**?

*the federal government does this too, in vehicles cleverly disguised as mail trucks.
**I have exchanged pleasantries online with a guy who believes his body is infested with Demodex and employs an amazing array of supplements to combat them.

Narad: "Always a curious choice for an attempted insult"

It is par for the course for Travis Schwochert, the troll from Wisconsin. That is how that window washer rolls.

Dangerous Bacon,

Another contradiction I've found amusing is the alties' rabid fear of anything acid (i.e. the alkaline myth), yet their cure for everything is massive doses of vitamin C, i.e. ascorbic ACID.

I honestly had no intention of irradiating my neighbours with my mis-tuned Hulda Clark Zapper.
It was a fluke accident.

@Dangerous Bacon, #200

Have they considered the dreadful possibility that vengeful neighbors who have their own Rife machines are secretly targeting them* with frequencies that encourage the growth of Morgellons critters and Demodex**?

Actually, you're closer to the truth than you may think. As an electronics/biomedical expert, I am sometimes consulted by people who think they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and that their neighbor is deliberately exposing them to 'radiation', causing a whole gamut of sometimes debilitating symptoms. On several occasions, I visited these people to show them that they are in fact not sensitive to electromagnetic fields at all, using a broadband RF power meter -- a simple, cheap device that reliably shows the presence and strength of any electromagnetic field in a very wide frequency range.
Yet even when I gave these people their own RF meter, so that they could check for days on end whether the onset of symptoms correlated with the presence of EM fields (which, of course, usually wasn't the case), they would more often than not still hold on to their belief that 'cell phone radiation' had something to do with their symptoms.
And at least two of these people actually moved home in order to get away from the neighbor they thought was making their life a misery with his nefarious radiation-related activities -- after which, of course, they claimed to be feeling a lot better...

I'm still thinking how these people could have been helped in a better way.

I wonder how many of those who moved and their condition improved may have just had garden variety allergies or a sensitivity to things like carpet adhesive?

I don't know if this ovarian cancer patient's "journey" through the world of alt-oncology (after rejecting chemotherapy) has been discussed here, but it seems drearily familiar.

"I chose to do different therapies rather than just go with one therapy," she said."

"I did juicing, carrot juice, kale, celery, pomegranate ... basically vegetable juices. I did the coffee enema. I did the black salve."

"The treatments didn't make her feel any better and her tumour markers, a sign of cancer activity, kept rising consistently. But Desiree believed her alternative health practitioners when they reassured her."

"They told her the rising tumour markers were a sign her body was responding to the treatment. The worsening wound in her abdomen, where she was applying the corrosive black salve ointment, was a good sign."

"But the cancer never responded to these alternative therapies, the blood test results never improved and the tumour was never expelled. Instead, Desiree was left with a gaping wound in her abdomen."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2017-02-12/illness-in-the-family-desi…

I wonder if the alt-cancer cure folks will use this case as an example of improved quality of life through avoidance of mainstream medicine.

Poppa was a Rolling Stone...who likes homeopathy?

oracknows — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 02:00:08 +0000

Poppa was a Rolling Stone...who likes homeopathy?

Old fart that I am, I’ve been a fan of The Rolling Stones since the mid-1970s, when I was in junior high school. Over the years, I’ve accumulated pretty close to all of their studio albums—and even bought multiple remastered versions of classics like Exile on Main Street and Beggar’s Banquet—and got access to the rest when I discovered the joy of streaming through Apple Music. Granted, the Stones went through a rough patch, creatively speaking, in the 1980s (the less said about Under Cover and Dirty Work, for instance, the better) and nothing they’ve done since the late 1970s has lived up to their glory days, but, damn, if I wasn’t surprised that their latest album of blues covers Blue & Lonesome released on Friday is really good.

Ron Wood: This is the "picture of health" due to alternative medicine?

Of course, all of the members of The Rolling Stones save Ron Wood are now well into their 70s, and one wonders how they manage to keep going. Touring, for instance, is very hard work, and I couldn’t imagine traveling the world like that for many months in a row when I’m in my 70s. Keith Richards, in particular, has famously abused his body with all manner of substances, licit and illicit, over the years. So it was that I happened across an article in—where else?—the Daily Mail that asks: "How has Ronnie Wood's drink and drug-addled past not affected his health? His model daughter Leah says it's all down to alternative medicines." I groaned as I read:

At the ripe age of 69, Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood still manages to tour the world, raise his baby twin daughters and keep up with a third wife who is half his age.

His drink and drug-addled past appear to have no effect on his health. How does he do it?

According to his daughter, model and personality Leah, the family secret is healthy eating, happiness and alternative health remedies.

In an exclusive for the MailOnline, Leah reveals that the Wood family are big supporters of complementary medicines and will not see a doctor if they can find a natural alternative.

Yes, when I saw this article, I knew I had found a topic for the blog, something straightforward and annoying to me: Another celebrity know-nothing whose belief in pseudoscience and quackery is promoted credulously in a tabloid. Unfortunately, Edzard Ernst beat me to my best snark in one point. Wood claims that alternative medicine and healthy living kept her father young. Now take a look at a photo of Ron Wood. At 69 years old, he’s the youngest member of The Rolling Stones, and he looks every minute of it.

Mick Jagger: Lookin' good, too.

If anything, Ron Wood looks possibly even older than Mick Jagger, who’s 73, but maybe not older than Keith Richards, who will turn 73 in a couple of weeks.

Keith Richards: You'd look like this too, if you lived the way I did for all those decades.

OK, OK, I know. Just because Ron Wood doesn’t appear younger than his biologic age (and arguably appears a few years older) doesn’t mean that he isn’t as healthy as his daughter claims. Snark aside, I also have to point out that, contrary to what Prof. Ernst says, Leah Wood never actually said that her father looked young, just that his long history of smoking, drinking, and using illicit substances in his younger days doesn’t appear to have affected him and also:

'Dad is superfit, but he has to be with the two new babies. There's no great secret to it, as a family we always try to laugh and be happy, even though things can be tough.'

Leah, who is Ronnie's eldest daughter, says that the family preoccupation with alternative medicines means that they have shunned conventional medicines in the past.

All of which is great for Ron Wood, if true. If, as his daughter claims, he gets regular exercise and eats a healthy diet, that’s great. So is his quitting smoking this year after 50 years, comically angering Keith Richards, who says Wood looks ridiculous because he has switched to e-cigarettes instead. It’s also good that Ron Wood has given up drinking and drugs. It’s never too late to clean up your act, and the health benefits of giving up smoking and drinking are clear, even if you’ve been abusing them for five decades. Unfortunately, his daughter Leah goes beyond that to credit more than a newly healthy lifestyle, free of health-damaging indulgences like tobacco and alcohol. She credits the woo along with the lifestyle changes:

'As a family we have always been bought up with alternative medicines and homeopathy and have been taught the importance of eating well,' Leah says.
'You are what you eat.

'I try and stay healthy, I go to the gym, I run, I take vitamins. You can often heal yourself through diet and lifestyle.

'I think it is important not to overmedicate. I use homeopathy a lot with my kids and alternative remedies.

And:

Leah, who is Ronnie's eldest daughter, says that the family preoccupation with alternative medicines means that they have shunned conventional medicines in the past.

Given my readership, I find it hard not to emphasize yet again what we all know. Homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All. Of all the quackery out there, with the possible exception of reiki, homeopathy is the one that is most obviously quackery, to the point that it’s one of the easiest forms of quackery to educate people about. Its two main “Laws” are so clearly pseudoscience that you’d think it incredibly unlikely that anyone would fall for such nonsense, but fall for it they do. Indeed, most people think that homeopathy is nothing more than herbal medicine.

I’ll briefly show you what I mean. That I can do so this briefly should show those unfamiliar with homeopathy how ridiculous it is. All I have to do is to describe the Two Laws of Homeopathy. The first is the Law of Similars, which states that to relieve a symptom you must use a substance that causes that symptom. Not only does this law make no sense on an intuitive level, but there is no biological or medical basis for it. Of course, the Law of Similars doesn’t really matter, because the second law of homeopathy renders it completely irrelevant. The Second Law, the Law of Infinitesimals, states that diluting a remedy makes it stronger. That’s not nearly enough pseudoscience, though. Because of this law, homeopaths often dilute remedies to, in essence, nonexistence. For example, a typical 30C dilution (where C=100) means thirty 100-fold dilutions, which, if you do the math, you’ll find to be a 10^-60 dilution. Avogadro’s number is only on the order of 6 x 10²³, which means that a 30C dilution is at least 10³⁶-fold higher than a dilution where we’d expect to see a single molecule of the original substance; that is, if you start with what chemists call a mole of starting compound. No wonder homeopathy is considered the king of pseudoscience, and that’s not even considering that some homeopathic remedies (like Oscillococcinum, the infamous homeopathic flu remedy) use starting ingredients like extract of duck liver and heart—and at 200C (10^-400), yet! Not surprisingly, rigorous clinical trials show that homeopathic remedies do not work better than placebo.

Unfortunately, odd quirks in the history of regulation of homeopathy have led to its acceptance and continued existence despite its being completely vitalistic pseudoscience. In the UK, certainly, the popularity of homeopathy among the royal family and its support by Prince Charles in particular have contributed to its continued acceptance. In the US, although homeopathy is not as popular here, baked into the 1938 revision of the law authorizing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a provision that defined anything in the Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS) as a drug. Unfortunately, the FDA has always interpreted that to mean that anything in the HPUS didn’t need to go through rigorous testing to be approved, although that might be on the verge of changing. The FTC, for instance, recently came out with new regulations on the advertising of homeopathic remedies that in essence tells manufacturers that they have to tell customers there is no scientific evidence that such remedies do anything for any medical condition. What the FDA will do after having begun the process to revamp its regulations with respect to the approval of homeopathic treatments remains to be seen.

It wasn’t Leah Wood’s promotion of homeopathy, though, that irritated me the most. Homeopathy is dangerous, yes, when used instead of real medicine to treat serious medical conditions. However, Wood also took the opportunity of her interview to promote dangerous cancer quackery, complete with an anecdote about her mother:

She even discloses that her mother, TV personality Jo, helped her Grandmother beat cancer with apricot seeds.

And, more:

She explains to MailOnline:

'Nan had breast cancer and mum, who is a big proponent of alternative medicine as well, said "mum, we are going to help you so let's investigate and get some advice".

'Nan had different treatments and ate an organic diet including apricot seeds and cured herself.

'She had chemotherapy once and that's when mum said "no more, we can do this ourselves", much to the dismay of the doctors.

'Conventional chemotherapy just breaks down your immune system and makes you weaker so I don't understand the point.

'You should be building up your immune system and fighting the cancer.'

Yes, we’re talking a really old form of cancer quackery, Laetrile, here. Now, here’s a test for regular readers who’ve read a few of my discussions of alternative cancer cure testimonials. What is the first question that comes to mind after reading the story of Leah Wood’s grandmother and her rejection of chemotherapy for her breast cancer? Come on. You should know by now. That’s right! Did she have surgery for her breast cancer?

As I’ve explained since very early on in the history of this blog, one of the most common forms of alternative medicine testimonials involves cancers that can be cured by surgery alone but are treated with adjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiation in order to decrease their chances of recurrence. Breast cancer is very often treated this way, with the local excision of the tumor ± lymph nodes under the arm, later followed by chemotherapy and/or drugs that block estrogen action, depending on whether the tumor is estrogen-sensitive or not. So, me being me, I immediately started Googling to see if I could find out what sort of treatment Leah Wood's grandmother underwent. It didn’t take me long to find this interview with her mother Jo Wood from 2015:

In the past year alone, however, Wood has lost her mother (“a few weeks ago, which was very sad but it was her time”) and been helping her little sister Lize through breast cancer. Which is why when Breast Cancer Care asked her to join Asda’s Tickled Pink campaign to raise awareness and funds for the charity, Wood immediately pledged her support. “When they asked whether I had experienced any breast cancer in my family, I told them my grandmother and mother had had breast cancer (although after a lumpectomy my mother was clear for the rest of her life) and that my sister had had a double mastectomy earlier this year. So it couldn’t be more personal and important to me.”

Yep. Leah’s grandmother had surgery. The chemotherapy was being used in an adjuvant manner, in order to decrease the chance of cancer recurrence. In other words, the surgery is what cured Leah Wood’s grandmother (Jo's mother) of her disease, and she got lucky that she didn’t have a recurrence after chemotherapy. That means that, not only is Leah Wood peddling dangerous cancer quackery through testimonial that, whether she realizes it or not, is deceptive, but she is also making videos like this to “free the world from pharma control” and promoting changing the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in order to allow more “natural” medicines and, of course, “health care choice,” otherwise know to skeptics at the freedom to choose quackery:

To be honest, I was rather shocked at just how bad Leah Wood was at reading cue cards for a video like this, given how long she’s been in the public spotlight. Be that as it may, her statement is riddled with common pro-alternative medicine and anti-pharma tropes. One charge that she makes, in particular, is that there are pharmaceutical executives on the MHRA board. That seemed to me to be an easy enough claim to check out; so I did more Googling and quickly found a list of the MHRA board members. I didn’t find anyone who currently works for pharma, although there were a couple of members with pharma experience; e.g., Dr. Ian Hudson, who worked in the pharmaceutical industry in clinical research and development between 1989 and 2001, and Stephen Lightfoot, who is a former general manager of GE Healthcare’s global medical diagnostics division, managing director of Daiichi Sankyo’s UK pharmaceutical business and commercial director of Schering Healthcare’s UK pharmaceutical business. That’s two out of nine members with some pharmaceutical experience, and only one with any recent experience. None of them are currently “big pharma directors,” nor is any evidence presented on the Reform MHRA website that pharma has undue influence in MHRA.

Another thing that neither Leah Wood nor the Daily Fail tell you: The group backing this “reform” effort (the National Health Federation) is, as Prof. Ernst puts it, a lobby group for alternative medicine. Indeed, on its website it declares in its “Declaration of Health-Freedom Rights” the rights “to receive alternative medicine and treatments (such as those provided by chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopathic doctors, massage therapists, and clinical nutritionists) without government restrictions” and “to supplement our diets with vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids, and enzymes without government restrictions.” It also proclaims the “right of alternative medical practitioners to determine and use those treatments best suited for their patients without government restrictions.” In other words, it’s another “health freedom” group, where “heath freedom” really means the freedom from pesky regulations and laws restricting the ability of quacks to fleece their marks. Indeed, the most recent issue of its quarterly magazine, Health Freedom News, features antivaccine articles, articles promoting fear mongering about fluoridation, the “latest methods of alternative healing,” and, of course, mercury fillings woo.

As a Stones fan, I’m happy to see the boys (now old men), including Ron Wood, still doing well and hanging in there. I was happy to fire up Apple Music on Friday as I worked on my grant in my office and hear that the Stones could still tear it up through some tasty old blues numbers. I’m not, however, happy to hear that Ron Wood is into alternative medicine or to see his daughter promoting dangerous quackery like Laetrile and homeopathy, as well as donning body paint to promote the cause of a quackery-promoting “health freedom” organization.

oracknows Sun, 12/11/2016 - 21:00

Categories

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4023008

This blog seems too quick to equate the homeopathy quotes with pure water rather than re-labeled nutrients without more careful investigation.

As for many utilities of high potency nutrients, this blog is famous for its gross misunderstanding on many subject areas. Just because the unwashed, the brainwashed and various forms of ignorant don't know how to do them correctly doesn't make it crazy, or many here, any less ignorant.

prn

Is it a ploy of yours to mash together some verbiage which doesn't make sense? You're trying tire out the opposition with figuring out what you could possibly mean, without having to deal with a serious point yourself?
Or are you really incapable of logical thought, and of expressing yourself in coherent English?

prn,

The reasoning in your comment is too dilute to detect. Try shaking your device vigorously to see if it helps.

The business of celebrities claiming "homeopathy cured X" in support of some homeopathy, etc cause and the reality turning out to be different has been documented in several places.

Well, of course homeopathy is real!
Why, water stays in cubic form in my ice cube trays after I remove them from the freezer for a few hours, all due to water memory.

Oh, wait...

Mssrs Wood, Jagger and Richards are perhaps even worse off than they presently appear because they are wealthy celebrities with ALL of the advantages that medicine, plastic surgery and expensive skin care provide.

Don't think that they shy away from such vain procedures:
- they were/ are married to models who know this stuff
- they have had expensive dental care ( unlike in their youth)
- they have expensive haircuts and dye jobs.
- they're all achingly thin ( which usually betrays effort)

I imagine that Richards is the most natural looking of the trio.

"Just because the unwashed, the brainwashed and various forms of ignorant don’t know how to do them correctly"

Oo, this is one of my woo favorites.

Quackery is never quackery, it's that You Did It Wrong. ;)

Yes, the Daily Mail seems to have declined over the past five years or so since they lost their core focus on lesbians, Tesco, and Suri Cruise. About all that's left of the old Daily Mail is their enduring fever in all things Hitler. On the plus side, they've cultivated an intense interest in female American schoolteachers having sex with teen boys -- something which apparently doesn't happen in the UK but is rampant here.

"Try shaking your device vigorously"

Please do this in private.

Mick Jagger just had his eigth child.

Mark @10: You'll forgive me for being less than impressed that a man has become parent to an 8th child. It's not exactly the same amount of work as it is for the mother.

Really, is this the best the Mail can do? A spokeswoman for an Alt-Med lobbying group whose credentials are the DNA of a guy who became second guitarist for the Stones after they stopped mattering (i.e. well after "Exile on Main Street") and had become a nostalgia act top 40 hit machine ("Miss You" "Beast of Burden", "Emotional Rescue' "Windows '95") and haven't charted a top ten single since 1989?

What tossers those Brits are at pseudo-science. No way they can compete with us. We have an ex-General incoming head spymaster who thinks Hilary Clinton just might have been running a child-sex-slave-ring operating in catacombs under a pizza parlor named Comet Ping Pong. We've got more climate change deniers than we can keep track of entering Interior, EPA, Energy, State... And we're going to have a SeaSteaer Renwick running the FDA!!

Ron Wood's kid is all you've got, UK? C'mon! Get with the program. Tell you what, we'll take pity on you. We'll trade you a crazy ex-General and a climate-change-denier to be named later (you can pick!) for Leah Wood. We'll make her Secretary of Defense. (The NSA is too secretive for a Mail favorite like Ms. Wood). If we're going to send troops to help our new BFF Vlad swat down those terrorists in the Ukraine, we might as well have a Pentagon who''ll look good in camo body paint, testifying before Congress on The Fox News Channel.

Oh, come on, sadmar, the UK has an actual prince, mangled royal DNA and all, who believes in homeopathy and sold a line of herbal products that were cited for misleading advertising by his government's regulatory agencies. I believe his line is called something like "Douchey [sp?] Originals (but if it isn't, it probably ought to be).
Incidentally, if you want evidence that the royals are not shape-shifting space lizardonians, just look at their faces. If you could look like anyone in the world, would YOU choose to look like Prince Chuckles?

Oh no, it wasn't homeopathy, it must have been some combination of drugs they did in the seventies that changed their epigenetic programming. They all look the same. Homeopathy ? No way.

Go on then, prn #1, enlighten us about homeopathy actually does whatever it is that it does...I'm all ears...

It is obvious that homeopathic pills which are diluted versions of, er, something or other have about as much effect on the body as a butterfly sneezing on the other side of the planet. Claiming that the molecules in the tiny pills, having undergone a 100-fold dilution somehow remember what things were like back in the good old, undiluted days is plain silliness.
However it has been demonstrated that the nature of the patient / practitioner relationship can have a tremendous impact on how the patient feels.
Since serious homeopathic (forgive the oxymoron) practitioners begin their treatment with a lengthy consultation, between 1.5 and 2 hours, it is unsurprising that some patients start feeling better, probably because swallowing the pills daily has the Lourdes effect. Lighting a candle in Lourdes means that you can light a candle, say a prayer, and for as long as the candle continues to burn, the prayer in prolonged while you go away to watch a match.
Each pill is a reminder of the time that somebody took an interest in you for 90 uninterrupted minutes.
You can check my book, "Help! OK." for an explanation of how this all works. Once the critical thinking faculties hard-wired somewhere in the prefrontal cortex are by-passed, all kinds of weird and wonderful things can happen. Feeling better is one of them.
Sometimes.

Actually, I don't entirely despise British royals. The late Queen Mum was a bit of a character. Elizabeth and some of her young friends also in uniform sneaked out to celebrate VE Day in the streets, though it was probably her last act of rebellion ever. HRH Prince Phillip has a little quirky streak of rebellion that pops up from time to time; as an example, his trip to Israel for his sister's funeral despite HM Government's disdain for most things Jewish.
They're also pretty good about ;putting on the uniform and acting as high-priced cannon fodder.
Beyond that, there's not much else to praise. The royal record on Hitler and the Nazis during the '30s was dismal, movies about speech therapy notwithstanding.

ORD: You have to remember that Edward inherited the throne, originally, and he was a slimeball.

ORD

The late Queen Mum was a bit of a character.

I think you misspelled odious fascist - she was BFFs with Oswald Mosley

PGP & Militant Agnostic:
I did bring up their record of Nazi sympathizing.
Edward was far from the only one. George was just as bad, the world having the misfortune of having him on the throne in 1939. He was involved in creating the wartime government, and strongly favored Lord Halifax, another Nazi appeaser before the war, but he was in the House of Lords, therefore unelected to Parliament. The king abhorred Churchill ("The King;s Speech" movie notwithstanding) but Churchill had been elected to Commons and if a unified wartime government was to be chosen, at least it would have a leader who had been elected (apart from a lot of other reasons why he was a better choice).

It's good to see that apricot seeds are still in the Woo Materia Medica. It must be 45 years ago that you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing someone extolling the virtues of laetrile, or to give it its 'scientific' name, vitamin B17.

I'm expecting psychosurgery to make a come-back too.

John Owen, I am always amazed how teh internets echo all of the nonsense my aunt used to tell me forty five years ago. It included the Trilateral Commission, laetrile and having a daily tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. ;-)

In Memoriam: Wallace Sampson, MD

oracknows — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 01:40:42 +0000

In Memoriam: Wallace Sampson, MD

I have some sad news for my readers today. It's even sadder given that it's only been two and a half weeks since I last had to mourn the passing of one of our own, a champion of science-based medicine, a regular commenter of five years, lilady. Unfortunately, this time around, it is my sad duty to inform you that Dr. Wallace Sampson has passed away at the age of 85. I knew about it late last week, but I wanted to wait until official obituaries were published, such as this one in the Mercury News.

I first encountered Wally (as his friends called him) through his writings deconstructing various forms of quackery on websites like Quackwatch and warning how unscientific medicine was worming its way into medical academia. Indeed, his 2003 article on the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, now known as the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, was one of the earliest articles I read that convinced me that this sham of an abomination of a waste of taxpayer dollars must be defunded. It is a classic that applies today every bit as much as it did 12 years ago. It was something that I had a hard time believing at first, but his writings and warnings both alarmed and educated me. They were a major influence on my development as a skeptic. Later, when my not-so-super-secret other blog was formed, I found myself having the opportunity to work with Wally as one of the founding bloggers there. Although he had a bit of difficulty adjusting to the style and culture of blogging, I did my best to help teach him the ropes. In turn, he served as the voice of experience, the man with the in-depth personal knowledge of history that we needed. Even though it's true that we butted heads on a couple of occasions, I never doubted his dedication to science-based medicine. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, Wally had problems with his health and keeping up with a weekly publishing schedule; so unfortunately he could no longer provide regular material.

Wally Sampson was an inspiration whose efforts predated mine by decades. He made his name in the anti-quackery movement back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager. Long before his tenure at Science-Based Medicine, he was the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and a founding member of the Bay Area Skeptics. He edited a book, Science Meets Alternative Medicine: What the Evidence Says about Unconventional Treatments. What's little known about him is that he was one of the earliest skeptics involved in showing that laetrile was ineffective, even testifying in front of the FDA, and he stated that there is no dichotomy between "Eastern" and "Western" medicine long before I ever started saying it. There's even a PBS special, A Day with Wally Sampson, where he discussed alternative medicine.

Sadly, Wally spent the last three months of his life in the hospital after complications from heart surgery. I learned from one of his family members that eventually after his long hospital course he realized that he wasn't getting better and would probably never leave the hospital; so he asked for palliative care only and died on Memorial Day. Truly, a giant of medical skepticism has left us. We will not soon see his like again. The best I or anyone else can do is to try to carry on and hope that we can accomplish in the time we have left half of what he did.

oracknows Sun, 05/31/2015 - 21:40

Tags

Skepticism/Critical Thinking

laetrile

quackery

science-based medicine

Wallace Sampson

Ref: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/05/20/why-do-doctors-deny-evolut…

What sad and shocking news! Wally was a friend as well as a healthfraud guru to me. For a number of years I've tried to arrange a lunch or dinner meeting with him (and, occasionally, Rita) on my annual trips to the San Francisco Bay area. This always resulted in an informative, frequently humorous, discussion.

No doubt many who knew him longer and more intimately than I will have much to say about this terrific guy over the next days and weeks. For now, I wish to express my own grief and to extend my deepest sympathy to Rita and the rest of Wally's family.

I only met this freindly man once, but I admired him greatly and like Orac enjoyed his attack on the NCCAM and on Pubmed, selecting so may altmed journals but rejecting the SRAM, thoroughy.

Deepest condolence to the Orac and, of course, the minions. Sad also that the Nash family met with tragedy. Well spoken tribute nonetheless; though I disagree that "we will not soon see his like again," as we already are.

I did not know this. Thanks for posting this tribute. I have missed his contributions to Science Based Medicine the last few years and wondered about him from time to time. I always looked forward to his articles there. They were uniquely informative and entertaining. This is a great loss.

My condolences, Orac, and all those who knew him well. A nice tribute that gives just a glimpse of all that he did. Hard coming on the heels of lilady's passing.

I'm sorry to hear this.
His writing influenced my beliefs about alt med greatly.

Wally was a great friend and a perfect advisor to Bay Area Skeptics on medical matters. He is greatly missed.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

We lost a dear friend as a result of stent surgery recently. My heartfelt condolences to all those touched by Doctor Sampson's loss.

This is very sad news indeed. Dr. Sampson sounded like a wonderful advocate for SBM. I'm sorry I never got to meet him.

On a happier note . . .
Kerri Rivera, lieutenant to ex-Scientologist and Genesis II Church leader Jim Humble and promoter of bleach cures for autism, has erased her Facebook profiles and shut down her e-mail and websites. This follows the conviction of Daniel Smith of Spokane, WA for selling the same bleach cures last week, as well as critical news coverage. The admins for her book's official Facebook page insist that Kerri is taking time off, even though her actions of abandoning her social media seem a bit drastic.

I had great respect for Wally too. His knowledge and experience will be missed.

May he rest in peace.

Did Dr. Sampson ever talk much about how his career would have been impossible without a belief in evolution?

My condolences to you and all the other contributers to SBM.

I read all the early postings there, although I haven't been able to keep up lately, and I very much appreciated his scholarly and well written contributions.

See Noevo: "Did Dr. Sampson ever talk much..."

Try clicking on the blue letters in the article, they will lead you to much of what he wrote. In other words: read his stuff, and don't expect us to spoon feed it to you.

Here is a link to a video featuring Dr. Sampson (hosted by Alan Alda) dealing with alternative medicine.

Click link and scroll down to episode 10, "A Different Way To
Heal." Dr Sampson first appears @ 2:00.

http://chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season12.html

I'm sorry to hear this. I always enjoyed his posts at that other blog I read from time to time. He was a good man and a credit to the fight against quackery and woo. My condolences to his family and friends.

I'm disappointed in you, Orac. Don't you know it's possible to never be sad, never be depressed, always feel good -- and all through the power of quantum physics and epigenetics?

Am I doing this right yet?

Wally and Quack Watch launched me on a dedicated journey to apply critical thought to medicine... First as a spectator and then, as a patient. A founding father, if you will. Between losing lilady, someone who taught me so very much, and now this sad loss, we know we have a legacy to continue, online but also in our own spheres, whatever they are. RIP

Laetrile: Everything old is new again, or at least Eric Merola hopes so

oracknows — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:09 +0000

Laetrile: Everything old is new again, or at least Eric Merola hopes so

Remember our old buddy Eric Merola? He's the guy who made two—count 'em—two crappy, conspiracy-laden, misinformation-ridden, astonishingly bad bits of "great man" propaganda disguised as documentaries about a Houston cancer doctor peddling unproven cancer treatments and charging his patients tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being under his care while receiving this magic elixir, known as antineoplastons. Believe it or not, this post is not going to be about Stanislaw Burzynski, although it will be about Eric Merola's latest project.

Over the last several months, ever since he unleashed Burzynski: The Sequel on an unprepared and uninterested world, Merola has been hinting about his next project. Given Merola's involvement in Zeitgeist: The Movie and his primary role in throwing together two hack propaganda pieces that were so blatantly worshipful of Burzynski that Leni Riefenstahl, were she still alive and able to see them, would have told Merola to cool it with the overheated hero worship and portrayal of his movie's subject as a god-man a bit, I knew his next movie would be more of the same. I also knew it would not be about Burzynski. What it would be about, specifically, remained a mystery, however.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, the YouTube channel for Merola's movie, Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering dropped four (!) trailers on an unsuspecting (and even more uninterested) world. My first reaction was: Did I read that right? Laetrile? Seriously? That's so...1970s! My second reaction to reading that was...was...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I really must thank Mr. Merola for the best laugh I've had all week. I've been really, really busy working on grants this week, and it's been really frustrating to try to get all the paperwork and sections from co-investigators together. I needed that. I guess Merola must need a new conspiracy, his having so totally had his posterior handed to him over and over and over again over Stanislaw Burzynski. One wonders if Burzynski is about to lose his very own personal Leni Riefenstahl. Hey, if Burzynski and Merola can Godwin the skeptics critical of Burzynski, I can return the favor, at least in jest. Besides, the comparing Merola to Leni Riefenstahl does a profound disservice—to Leni Riefenstahl. After all, Leni Riefenstahl had serious talent, as vile as the cause to which she dedicated her talent was. Eric Merola? Not so much.

But let's take a look at the trailers. I must admit, Merola's production values are a bit better than they were. At least that robotic-sounding announcer doesn't appear to be there anymore, although the cheesy music is, as are the annoyingly artificial, film school artsy camera angles, overcooked for straight documentary interviews, are still there. In the first one we see:

Is that who I thought it was? Yes, yes indeed it is! It's Ralph Moss, for whom no cancer quackery, it seems, is too quacky. He's also known as the foremost promoter of Laetrile. He's been pushing it since the 1970s, complete with an obviously nonsensical conspiracy theory about how the leadership at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), where he worked as a medical writer. Back then, Laetrile was the biggest cancer quackery going, way, way bigger than anything Stanislaw Burzynski had done, bigger than just about any bogus cancer therapy I can think of. You can see it from the NEWSWEEK cover from the period at the beginning of the clip, which proclaims that perhaps 70,000 Americans with cancer had crossed the border to Mexican quack clinics (well, it didn't use that word, but it's accurate) to get Laetrile.

At least Merola got it right to describe Moss as a science writer at MSKCC. Depending on when he's telling it, Moss has—shall we say?—inflated his credentials. For instance, in his book The Cancer Industry, Moss apparently represented himself as assistant director of public affairs, implying that that executive-level position made him privy to the innermost workings of MSKCC. It turns out that he was nothing more than, as Merola reports, a science writer, being employed at MSKCC from 1974 to 1977 and receiving a "summary discharge." (In other words, he was fired. In fact, he was fired the day after Second Opinion was trumpeted to the public, as this summary of the incident from 1977 published in Science describes.) His position was characterized as "ranked at the lower end of the pay scale." In other words, it strains credibility to believe that he could really have known much, if anything, about the high level machinations he claims to know about. None of this stops him from spinning a tale of suppression of research by the powers-that-were at MSKCC to hide evidence that Laetrile was active against cancer, going so far as to say that all the leaders of MSKCC who stated that there was no evidence that Laetrile (or, to be more scientifically accurate, amygdalin) had significant anticancer were lying, accusing them of a cover-up. Why would MSKCC want to cover up evidence of a highly effective cancer treatment? As is the case with Burzynski, it's never explained convincingly.

In any case, it's claimed that Moss and a group of employees from MSKCC "leaked" documents "proving" that Laetrile/amygdalin, who supposedly wrote a report "blowing the whistle" about the coverup. If these clips are to be judged, it's going to be another hilarious bit of paranoid conspiracy mongering. Particularly amusing is this clip:

What was your reaction when you watched this? (Seriously. Watch it. It's less than 2 minutes.) First, we have the unlikely tale of Moss meeting with all the top administrators of the Sloan-Kettering Institute to find out their views on Laetrile. Next, we're treated to a bizarre story in which Moss claims to have met with Lloyd J. Old, MD, the vice-president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute at the time. Dr. Old is claimed to have said to Moss: "You want to know where we get all of our new ideas?" Old supposedly handed Moss a book, saying, "Here, this is the Bible." That book, allegedly, was the American Cancer Society's book, Unproven Methods of Cancer Management. (Sadly, it's a book the American Cancer Society no longer publishes.) Basically, it was a list of cancer quackery, a compendium of brief articles the ACS published in its journal from the 1950s to the early 1990s describing modalities considered to be cancer quackery (although even then the ACS didn't use that word), with brief explanations and reviews of the evidence showing why they were quackery.

My first thought was that Moss was full of crap. But then I wondered. Is it possible that Dr. Old might have been having a little fun with a clearly gullible young science writer who had probably by that time developed a reputation around MSKCC for believing in Laetrile, that he might have been pulling a credulous young writer's leg, and messing with him a bit? I wonder. Certainly the story doesn't sound particularly convincing, but if something like that did happen, I can totally picture Moss falling for a prank like that hook, line, and sinker. Who knows? As an aside, I happen to have collected quite a number of articles from the ACS Unproven Methods list. Some of this stuff I hadn't heard of before. One of these days I'll have to march through parts of the list. However, I did find the last entry on Laetrile in the list, published in 1991, to be most helpful for this post.

Next up is another clip:

Now it's not enough that Moss claims to have been buddies with the vice president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. According to him, he was also buddies with Robert Good, MD, the president of the Institute himself. If Moss is to be believed, he was discussing writing a book with Dr. Good. Whether you believe this or not, Moss tells of an incident of scientific fraud that occurred that Dr. Good had to deal with, in which a researcher named William Summerlin working for him. This was a very famous case of scientific fraud in the 1970s, in which Summerlin convinced people that he could transplant skin from black mice onto white mice. If true, this would have been a major breakthrough because of the difficulty in getting transplants from genetically unrelated organisms to "take." Supposedly, Summerlin accomplished this feat by culturing the skin in special solutions. In reality, he used black ink markers to darken the fur. It's hard to believe anyone could get away with a trick that simple and obvious, but for a while Summerlin did, all while working for Dr. Good, who, impressed with his work, became his mentor and saw to his promotion. Ultimately Summerlin was found out, and the story made national news. (Indeed, an excerpt from a news report on the incident by Walter Cronkite himself is included in the clip above.) Moss says that this scandal broke the same day he learned he was getting a job at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. I suppose he tells this story to imply that Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center played fast and loose with science at the time. He denies it, and maybe Moss didn't intend it that way, but you can be sure that Merola did.

So why, according to Merola, did Moss go on to become a Laetrile warrior and hardcore promoter of unproven "alternative" medicine? (Excuse me, that's redundant.) Here is the blurb:

One of his first assignments was to write a biography about Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, one of the Center’s oldest and leading research scientists as well as the original co-inventor of chemotherapy.

While meeting with this iconic scientist to pen a biography on his 60-year career at Sloan-Kettering, Moss discovered that Sugiura had been studying this “quack remedy” in laboratory mice, and with unexpectedly positive results. Shocked and bewildered, Moss reported back to his superiors what he had discovered, only to be met with backlash and denial from Sloan-Kettering’s leaders on what their own leading scientist had found.

Fueled by respect and admiration for Sugiura—Ralph W. Moss attempted to publicize the truth about Sugiura’s findings. And after all diplomatic approaches failed, Moss lived a double life, working as a loyal employee at Sloan-Kettering while also recruiting fellow employees to help anonymously leak this information to the American public—through a newly formed underground organization they called—“Second Opinion”.

There's no doubt that Dr. Sugiura was a pioneer in chemotherapy research. (His obituary was published in Cancer Research, and, trust me, they don't do that for just any cancer researcher.) Were it not for his involvement in Laetrile research in the mid-1970s, people like Moss and Merola would revile him as one of the people who contributed to the "poisoning" of patients.

Here's also where other sources were useful, because a lot of what's on Merola's website is the same old sorts of misinformation that he previously used in the service of Burzynski. The negative clinical trials were rigged not to work. He claims Laetrile "tested positively" in preclinical studies but that those results were covered up. Dr. Sugiura's work was claimed to have been suppressed, causing Moss to form his "Second Opinion" group, which ultimately got him fired from Sloan-Kettering. At least, it sounds as though he were fired; it's not clear. Whatever the case, it's the same old conspiracy tropes that one finds swirling around Burzynski and his unproven cancer treatments. No wonder Merola was attracted to the topic. Of course, Laetrile was studied. It didn't work.

So what about the "positive" results?

First, what is Laetrile, which is often interchangeably called amygdalin or "vitamin B-17," even though it's not a vitamin? Basically, "Laetrile" is the trade name for laevo-mandelonitrile-beta-glucuronoside, a substance allegedly synthesized by Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. in the 1920s. It's chemically related to amygdalin, a substance found naturally in the pits of apricots and various other fruits. Again, most proponents of Laetrile for the treatment of cancer use the terms "Laetrile" and amygdalin interchangeably. Apparently amygdalin was tried as an anticancer agent as early as 1892, but was abandoned because it was ineffective and toxic, because it can break down into glucose, benzaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide. (Yes, that cyanide.)

Like a lot of cancer quackery, the rationale for Laetrile has shifted over the decades. In the 1950s, Kreb claimed that cancer tissues are rich in an enzyme that causes amygdalin to release cyanide, which would destroy the cancer cells. Supposedly noncancerous tissues are protected by another enzyme. (Yeah, right.) Later, Krebs claimed that Laetrile/amygdalin is a vitamin (B17) and, of course, cancer is due to a deficiency in that particular vitamin. Other claims have shifted, from Laetrile being a cancer cure to being able to "control" cancer to being a cancer "preventative." I see this in Merola's website, where in one passage he claims that the reason the clinical trial in the 1980s showed no anti-cancer activity due to Laetrile is because it arrests cancer growth and shouldn't be expected to work in advanced cancer. (Funny, the quacks in Tijuana never had any problem claiming Laetrile could cure advanced cancer.) I also note a great similarity with how evidence for antineoplastons is presented. For example, check out this story from the article on Laetrile on Quackwatch about Dr. Ernesto Contreras, one of the most—shall we say?—most active Laetrile doctors in history who ran a clinic in Tijuana in the 1970s:

By 1974, Dr. Contreras stated that he was seeing 100-120 new patients per month, with many more patients returning to obtain additional Laetrile. Patients typically were charged $150 for a month's supply. Contreras acknowledged that few of his cancer patients were "controlled" with Laetrile. While admitting that 40% of the patients displayed no response, he claimed that 30% showed "most definite responses" to the drug. However, these statistics may not be reliable. In 1979, he claimed to have treated 26,000 cancer cases in 16 years. Yet when asked by the FDA to provide his most dramatic examples of success, Contreras submitted only 12 case histories. Six of the patients had died of cancer, one had used conventional cancer therapy, one had died of another disease after the cancer had been removed surgically, one still had cancer, and the other three could not be located [5].

The National Cancer Institute carried out a retrospective case review of case records of patients treated with Laetrile by practitioners all over the country in 1978. There were 67 case records submitted as "best cases." Of these, the NCI could find evidence of a possible complete response in only two patients and of a partial response in four. Other reviews of case histories presented as the "best evidence" for Laetrile (such as this one) found no convincing evidence that it might have anticancer activity in humans.

The final nail in the coffin of Laetrile (unfortunately not the final nail in the coffins of Laetrile patients) was a clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1982, along with an accompanying editorial. Merola, not surprisingly, doesn't like this trial and disingenuously criticizes it:

As explained in “Chapter 4″ of the “DVD Extras” of this project, the human clinical trials conducted were not designed based upon standard protocol by designing the human trials around the previous successful animal studies, which showed that Laetrile prevented cancer, stopped it’s ability to spread, and relieved pain. Instead, they chose patients who had exhausted all previous forms of therapy, and gave them Laetrile. The average survival time for these patients in the Laetrile studies was only 4.8 months.

They also did not conduct a randomized trial, instead they conducted a non-randomized Phase II study, with no basis for comparison to see how Laetrile fared against chemotherapy and/or radiation. Given that chemotherapy and radiation were unable to help these patients, it would be highly unlikely that Laetrile would have had any positive effect, since Laetrile was only proven in lab studies to prevent cancer and keep it from spreading, when administered in the early stages of cancer. Therefore, it would make sense that Laetrile would be ineffective within a group of late stage cancer patients.

Yes, this was a non-randomized phase II trial, but it was done that way because given the politics of the time it almost certainly couldn't be done any other way, as the accompanying editorial noted that the trial had to "pick its way through a minefield of formidable obstacles." It couldn't be controlled, randomized, or blinded. As Dr. Arnold Relman described:

It avoided ethical objections by giving Laetrile to all patients (with fully informed consent, of course), but selecting as subjects only those for whom there was no known effective treatment or in whom standard treatments had already failed. On the other hand, it blunted the anticipated criticism from the Laetrilists by selecting patients only in good general condition and by including fully a third who had never received chemotherapy or radiotherapy and therefore might be considered particularly good candidates for Laetrile.

Yes, this was very much like trials of quackery like the Gonzalez Therapy, ten years before the founding of the office that would later become the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and 20 years before the travesty of ethics and science known as the Gonzalez trial. In any case, 175 patients with advanced cancer were treated with Laetrile plus a "metabolic" therapy commonly used with Laetrile at the time. To blunt criticisms of the Laetrilists that the investigators weren't using high enough doses, the investigators treated patients with a "standard" Laetrile dose and what they referred to as an "extremely high dose program." The end results showed only one patient who met the criteria for a partial response to therapy, and that sounds as though it wasn't real. The patient had stable tumor size for five weeks, then moved to another location, where his initial tumor measurements met the criteria for partial response. His tumor then progressed. Thus, this was a questionable, transient response. There was no evidence of prolongation of life based on historical controls and no evidence of tumor response, but there were several cases of cyanide toxicity. The bottom line was that there was not a hint of a whiff of any evidence that Laetrile had antitumor activity.

But what about the mouse studies by Dr. Sugiura? Our good friends at the American Cancer Society point out, at least a dozen sets of animal experiments were performed at seven institutions with a variety of transplantable tumors treated with Laetrile from different sources, including from the key organization at the time promoting Laetrile, the McNaughton Foundation. In all experiments that were properly blinded and used objective tumor measurements, there was no evidence of anti-tumor activity due to Laetrile. Then:

In 1975, Laetrile advocacy groups claimed that positive results had been obtained at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. These experiments were not blinded and were based on visual estimation, rather than quantitative measurement, of metastatic growth. Further double-blind experiments that used an objective bioassay for metastatic growth were negative.

That would be this study, which concluded, "we do not have evidence to support taking amygdalin to clinical trial, although other considerations may require that one be conducted." Those "other considerations" were pro-Laetrile activists.

Science published a news/opinion article about Laetrile at MSKCC in 1977 that laid out the history of MSKCC's testing of Laetrile. Some key passages:

Stock makes clear that he does not say Sugiura's results are wrong. But he and Good believe that an important test for choosing between Sugiura's results and his colleagues' was a blind experiment in which the mice were injected by others and Sugiura, who did the pathology, was not told which mice were treated with laetrile and which were the controls. Although the system was the same as that of Sugiura's first six experiments, in this case laetrile turned out to possess no anticancer activity.

If the inference is made that the results with the 14 tumor systems are more likely to be true, Sugiura's results are an anomaly. No immediate explanation is available, but perhaps none is necessary: anomalies are a common feature of the scientific landscape and there is only time to resolve the most interesting.

This is very, very common. Even the best scientists forget that animal experiments should, ideally, be blinded, just as clinical trials are, particularly if measurements are being made that are the least bit subjective, such as a human being counting and estimating the volume of metastases. These days, we have much more objective systems, such as imaging systems that can calculate tumor volume based on volumetric estimates, which make blinding not always as critical. Still, many of these systems rely on humans to judge where the edges of the tumors are; so even then blinding is important. Here's another telling passage, quoting the scientist whose records the Second Opinion Group managed to get a hold of:

Second Opinion charges that Sloan- Kettering has suppressed some results favorable to laetrile. The group has obtained certain data from the files of Elisabeth Stockert, a member of the Sloan- Kettering team, and claims that they show a positive anticancer effect for laetrile. Stock says he did not suppress the results, because he didn't know about them, and would not have included them if he had because they are uninterpretable. Stockert agrees; the study, she says, was not a proper experiment but a preliminary investigation which had to be abandoned when she went to Paris for 5 months.

In other words, Second Opinion cherry picked some preliminary experiments that, according to the Science article, were "uninterpretable," and ignored all the negative experiments.

The bottom line is that our old buddy Eric Merola has once again yoked his horse to a scientific and medical loser, an even bigger loser than Burzynski has been. Laetrile was discredited a long time ago. His complaints about the lack of a randomized clinical trial are, as usual, whining. To get to a good randomized clinical trial, one needs convincing preclinical evidence in the form of cell culture and animal models, for which none existed for Laetrile, and a preliminary clinical trial. Well, the preliminary clinical trial was done, and it was negative. When that happens, in the normal course of drug development, the drug is abandoned; it is not taken to a larger randomized clinical trial. In fact, given the spectacular failure of Laetrile in animal studies and the NEJM clinical trial in 1982, it would be unethical to do another trial.

I do see one purpose that Merola's resurrection of the rotting apricot-scented corpse of Laetrile. Burzynski is currently trying to duplicate the political activism of the Laetrile supporters of the 1970s. Let's hope he doesn't succeed, because the Laetrile activists like Moss came the closest of anyone to persuading Congress to legalize cancer quackery—at least before Senator Tom Harkin persuaded Congress to create NCCAM.

oracknows Wed, 02/19/2014 - 19:00

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So... Never published, non-randomized (pre?)clinical trials of Burzynski are enough to call him a brace cancer Maverick, but the Big Cancer is so conspirational for NOT doing the proper trials of Laetrile?

How about making a documentary about Antineoplastons and how they require the properly done and publishedtrials before pushing for the right to administer them to patients?

I wonder if Mercola thinks he is doing his buddy Burzynski a favour, by promoting an entirely different form of quackery which he thinks is even more effective than antineoplastons.

Dear Herr Doktor,
I wonder if Mercola thinks at all!

Other than of making money, of course, because he doesn't seem to think of ethics.

Oh, and BTW, "Krebs" in German means cancer - no wonder that Mr Krebs dedicated his time to cancer research. Too bad he didn't succeed - but then Krebse = crabs are known for going sideways, not forward.

Well that's amusing. laetrile was thoroughly discredited back in the 80s, and here it is again. I guess it's true, everything old is new again. Or, Quackery is Unkillable, it just pops up somewhere else.

As an English teacher's kid I feel compelled to point out that "disinterested" is a synonym for "unbiased", not "apathetic". As I understand it, "disinterested" means "having no direct stake in the outcome" - it's used a lot by law talking guys.

You probably want "uninterested".

I will now return to my regular programming of bad jokes and the occasional real comment.

But wait, I thought ANPs were the "holy grail" of Cancer cures?

Isn't this a conflict of interest?

@lawrence

Where's the "like" button on this thing?

Totally OT - but when I come to this site atm the sidebar ad is:

maybe its scientifically based (you tell me!) - but it looks lurking on this site has made google (or whoever) decide I might want to buy some woo! (ironic huh?)

Re: Comments that consist of nothing more than grammar, word usage, or spelling flames.

You do know how much pedants and grammar and writing Nazis annoy me, don't you?

Laetrile was so much in the news in the 1970s that Doonesbury did a story line in 1977 in which Duke and Zonker went to California to buy an apricot farm from a guy named Tony Placebo. It turned out Mr. Placebo had last been seen in that vicinity perpetrating a land fraud, and the alleged apricot farm Duke bought turned out to be nothing but desert.

Point being that when even a comic strip is making fun of your quackery, you should perhaps take that as a sign that you have gone too far. But that was 37 years ago. Maybe Merola didn't remember (or never saw in the first place) that strip. But when Laetrile pops up every now and then, I remember that story line.

Palindrom - as the scientist who usually gets stuck proofreading the papers, I feel your pain...

Ernst T. Krebs, Jr - no relation to Hans Krebs of the Cycle, I suppose?

Thanks for the link to Unproven Methods of Cancer Management - if only that were still an active project...

OT but are earth-shattering revelations by bragadocious pseudo-scientists ever truly OT @ RI?

Today Mikey says:
Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply engineered to end life, not nourish it.

He discovered this in his lab.

Thanks for the link to Unproven Methods of Cancer Management – if only that were still an active project…

You should compare articles in the Unproven Methods of Cancer Management series, published periodically over the years, to what the ACS says about CAM now. It's very sad.

Ernst T. Krebs, Jr – no relation to Hans Krebs of the Cycle, I suppose?

Or Maynard G., I imagine.

@Denice #12:

He discovered this in his lab.

It had fallen down the back of the sofa?

Doonesbury did a story line in 1977 in which Duke and Zonker went to California to buy an apricot farm from a guy named Tony Placebo

I remember that series of strips. "Maybe you could irrigate it, Duke." "Perhaps. But first I gotta go remove Placebo's lungs."

Of course there are strips from the same period making fun of Jerry Brown as Governor of California.

Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply engineered to end life, not nourish it.

He discovered this in his lab.

And how does one discover something like this in one's lab?</rhetorical>

Orac, as a longtime reader, I do know how much posts that are nothing but "grammar, word usage, or spelling flames" annoy you, and for that reason II tried to leaven my comment with at least a little wit, and not to make it into a flame.

I wrote because I have tremendous respect and admiration for what you do. Using a word incorrectly can cause some people to give less weight to what you actually have to say. I wrote with the aim of helping you refine your already formidable writing skills, in order to make you even more effective.

global food supply engineered to end life, not nourish it.

It only remains to discover that the entire scheme was planned by Ra's al Ghul in one of his attempts to depopulate the planet.

Mikey wrote:

Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply engineered to end life, not nourish it.

I can't but reflect that if the global food industry is trying to kill humanity off, they're doing a spectacularly bad job.

I've often wondered why conspiracy nuts never notice the contradiction in assuming your shadowy enemies are simultaneously devilishly clever and dumb as nails, but I guess if you did see a problem with it you wouldn't become a conspiracy nut in the first place.

Krebs? No relationship to Krebiozen treatments offered by quack doctor Ivy...or to our esteemed colleague here?

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/krebiozen.html

Ralphie has been offering "telephone consultations" about cancer treatments:

http://cancerdecisions.com/index.php?main_page=phone_consultations&zeni…

"...Could you or a loved one benefit from speaking to an experienced guide who can help you negotiate the rough waters of cancer therapy? Dr. Moss offers phone consultations for 60 minutes for $500. Follow-up consultations to past consultees is 30 minutes for $250. Basically he tries to get to know you as a person, to learn your needs, and what medical experiences you have had. He may then inform you about treatments of which you are unaware, or evaluate decisions you have already made. During your conversation he will help you to narrow your choices to several credible options. His personal knowledge of many of the key practitioners in this field may prove invaluable to you.

Cancer care can be very expensive and patients and their families frequently spend tens of thousands of dollars on treatments. While such money is often well spent, sometimes it is expended on invalid or even fraudulent approaches. Dr. Moss can give you insights into various treatments and their practitioners, in the US and abroad, and can thus provide you with a valuable sounding board on a wide variety of conventional and alternative treatment options. From that perspective, a consultation can save you a considerable amount of time and money...."

A friend who used to work as a Customs Agent at the Mexican border saw the carnage the laetrile clinics in Mexico caused and said it angered and saddened him.

Ernst T. Krebs, Jr – no relation to Hans Krebs of the Cycle, I suppose?

Or Maynard G., I imagine.

Why do I visualize a cross between Maynard G. Krebs and Ernest T. Bass?

palindrom: "Orac, as a longtime reader, I do know how much posts that are nothing but “grammar, word usage, or spelling flames” annoy you, and for that reason II tried to leaven my comment with at least a little wit"

"for that reason II tried"? Are there two of you in a Roman sense?

This is an example of Gaudere's Law, which states that posts critical of spelling or grammar errors will themselves inevitably contain spelling or grammar errors. :)

“for that reason II tried”? Are there two of you in a Roman sense?

Perhaps palindrom is a Rastafarian, and is using an abbreviation for I-and-I.

Mikey, it appears, has discovered the root cause of the decline and fall of western civilisation- heavy metal
( insert obligatory Metallica joke HERE).

Yes, he's looked at over 1000 foods and supplements and has found that "substances have been intentionally formulated into dietary products to *drive consumers mentally insane* while causing widespread infertility, organ damage and a loss of the ability to engage in rational, conscious thinking".

(Like he'd know what that is).

Bread has yoga mat chemicals for no apparent reason; vitamins have massive amounts of copper which will cause psychosis ( their manufacturers are owned by pharma); foods from China have lead ( and you know what it does).
Leaving people weak, stupid and malleable. Unlike their ancestors of a century ago.

"Is there a covert heavy metal war being waged against America by China?"

He goes on and on: it's truly one of his looniest rants.

#20 "I’ve often wondered why conspiracy nuts never notice the contradiction in assuming your shadowy enemies are simultaneously devilishly clever and dumb as nails, but I guess if you did see a problem with it you wouldn’t become a conspiracy nut in the first place."

Its because they are supervillains. supervillains are always very stupid. this also explains why MSKCC revealed all to the guy above- they were explaining their evil plan to him. probably ha him strapped to a laser table at the time, from which he escaped with the help of the supervillains girlfriend Sufficient Vulva.

Something else struck me as I was reading this post: the stranger-than-fiction names of some of the Sloan-Kettering physicians that Mr. Moss claimed to have known. Exhibit #4271 for why I do not try to make a living writing fiction: Dr. Old and Dr. Good. I have no reason to doubt that those actually were their names, but any fictitious characters with those names in those roles would get a manuscript permanently banished to the slush pile.

Could we stop hitting on palindrom? You have to be really talented (and sneaky) to get a pedant remark past Orac. :-)

-lilady (Undisputed Queen Of The Run-On...and On Sentence)

Listen closely to the music in the audio track of the third video clip, and see if you can characterise the emotions each part suggests.

The first music track begins one second into the video.
The second begins at 2 minutes 07 seconds.
The third begins at 2 minutes 49 seconds.

The music provides cues for how Merola wants the viewer to react to what's being presented. Use of music to suggest emotions and attitudes is common technique in film, TV, advertising, and so on, and a common propaganda method.

The pictures of the Merola brothers on the chapmancentral.co.uk site frankly remind me of two-bit petty crooks, though it may only be the two vertical bars behind Eric, that suggest a prison cell. So they were involved in propagating 9/11 conspiracy theory, eh? Surprising, yet not surprising.

Manipulative bottom-feeders, both of them. 'Bulls---: With Colons' indeed.

Dangerous @24 - My post wasn't critical of grammar or spelling, which I agree are trivial. It was about usage, which is arguably less so.

to *drive consumers mentally insane*

It could be worse; the substances could be driving consumers *some other kind* of insane.

@palindrom: You're digging yourself in deeper. My advice: Just stop now.

Just wondering, if Merola is now touting Laetrile as
The Best Thing Evar for cancer, why isn't he on his buddy Burzynski's case for not using it? For that matter, why isn't he getting on Moss's case for not promoting The Other Best Thing Evar, Anti-Neoplastons? Why isn't Merola promoting the Gonzales protocol? Or megadose Vitamin C?

Maybe I shouldn't give Merola ideas.

Ralphie has been offering “telephone consultations” about cancer treatments:

According to Quackwatch, Moss's PhD is in Classical Studies. If you want to know how the Ancient Greeks and Romans cured cancer, he's your man!

The Science article I cited in my post confirms that Moss's PhD was not in any biological science, but classical studies.

Maybe I shouldn’t give Merola ideas.

Indeed. Next up: A film about Linus Pauling, orthomolecular medicine, and high dose vitamin C for cancer...

Raise your hands if you are looking for another chew toy

I just invited "eggman2" to come and post some comments about Ralph Moss' Laetrile cancer cures:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/vaccine-exemptions-state…

I don't like chewtoys.
Those hanging bags you use for kick boxng are another story.

I prefer The Walrus, myself.

Orac @33 -- I'll go away, though I don't see that I was digging myself into anything. Words mean things. People judge you by words. I was trying to help. I really don't deserve this.

So, I took a late dinner break and I was unable to bring a chew toy, hanging bag or walrus to the party, from the Mother Jones blog.

Our colleague "notation" is having fun with Mr. L. Hubbs on that blog.

@ palindrom: There's really no need to depart. :-)

There's a possible mumps outbreak at Fordham University in a fully immunized group of students.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/fordham-faces-mumps-outbreak-…

@ Denice

vitamins have massive amounts of copper which will cause psychosis

OT, sort of.
One of the approved fungicide treatment in organic agriculture is bouillie bordelaise, essentially a solution of copper sulfate.
It tends to be used in massive amounts. I mean, after application orchards and wineyards are painted blue.

But apparently, in this context all of this copper is OK and non-toxic.

Remember, swallowing a U.S. one-cent piece only became a serious health concern after they stopped making them out of solid copper.

@DW

Bread has yoga mat chemicals for no apparent reason

Assuming "yoga mat" is not some autocorrect borkage on your part:
My organic chem is a bit rusty so I must ask - WTF are "yoga mat chemicals"?

The Great Gazoogle assures me that " yoga mat chemicals" are A Thing.

Azodicarbonamide, used for bleaching flour.

Lilady, who is Eggman?

Re. the Mother Jones story: Last year I came across an interesting proposal, can't remember where I read it.

For each locality, allow only as many nonmedical vaccine exemptions as add up to 1/2 of the level at which herd immunity begins to decline, minus the quantity of medical exemptions required in the locality. Then either:

a) Require applications for the nonmedical exemptions, that would be evaluated and acted on in a manner similar to pacifism exemptions from the military draft (keyword 'draft board,' context 1960s USA Vietnam war), or

b) Auction them off to the highest bidders, possibly with some percentage reserved for low-income persons on a first-come/first-served basis. Once the available yearly quota of exemptions has been used, no more for that year.

Otherwise, if we're to allow religious exemptions to public health rules, we should also allow exemptions from local bylaws governing refuse and sewage, and the portion of the rates that support the cleansing department. 'Only God will protect me from rats, flies, and cholera!' Right! Next up, religious exemptions to Newton's Laws of Motion!

"Yoga mat chemicals" could be anything, which makes it my most favorite kind of guilt by association.

Fun when anti-vaccine memes go all out with "____ [chemical] which is used in ___ [name unrelated and kind of scary practice like embalming, lethal injection, pesticides]" and it works equally well with harmless things (water, used in torture; atoms, used in bombs). It's kind of like Mad Libs for the stupid.

“You want to know where we get all of our new ideas?” Old supposedly handed Moss a book, saying, “Here, this is the Bible.” That book, allegedly, was the American Cancer Society’s book, Unproven Methods of Cancer Management.

This one got me thinking since I read it this morning. You have to admire the story. There is this book full of "suppressed" cures. Room for everybody and their dog. Vitamin C next to laetrile, antineoplastons, and Hilda Clark deworming device.
If it was a prank on Moss, I can see he still didn't get the joke.

However, he should have, because there is one little inconsistency (for a big enough value for "one"): if this book is where Big Bad Pharma is getting "all of their new ideas", it means:
- one, "suppressed" cures are sometimes released, so it should be possible to track a few of the current mainstream drugs back to the original inventor (the brave maverick doctor tends on the vociferous side, so there should be records of his rants). Like, I don't know, old timers like antineoplastons or laetrile. Oh, these aren't mainstream. Guess it's still not the time yet for their release. Or maybe they are really not working.
- two, if these suppressed-by- and then co-opted-by-Big Pharma cures are working, then a few of Big Pharma drugs are working. That, or these "suppressed" cures are indeed all useless.

Alternative explanation: Big Pharma is using these unproven methods because it knows they aren't working (cue the usual alt-med meme of drugs not curing the patient).
But in this case, if they pick these non-working methods from this big book, where things like laetrile and ANP end up, that does it say about the alleged effectiveness of any of the listed "cures"?

Meh. Over-analyzing stuff, as usual. Occam's razor, it was a joke.

@ Lurker: Eggman2 posted am off-topic comment on the Mother Jones blog (about vaccine exemptions), touting Ralph Moss' Laetrile cancer cure.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/vaccine-exemptions-state…

Now, I have to apologize for posting the possible mumps outbreak at Fordham University on this thread. I should not post comments in the wee hours of the morning.

I've heard about the restriction of personal belief/religious exemptions and awarding those exemptions to a very limited number of parents in each state. I'm probably in the minority here.

IMO, most people who propose that exemption lottery, have not had the life experiences I've had (an older cousin left with permanent neurological sequelae from measles and a childhood chum who died from polio). Most people haven't worked in public health investigating cases of V-P-Ds.

I strongly believe in the social contract of protecting our most vulnerable members of society by instituting a no-exemption-from-vaccines policy that is the law in West Virginia and Mississippi, in each of the 48 States that do permit personal belief/religious belief exemptions.

Helianthus, I'm disappointed. "Bouillie bourdelaise" sounds so delicious.

@Helianthus and Shay,

Was Vicky Leandros singing about her love of the vine when she sang, "L'amour est bleu"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_is_Blue

palindrom
Words mean things. People judge you by words. I was trying to help.

As a one-time proofreader I share the pain. I am waiting for someone to write a Firefox add-on which automagically corrects the apostrophe use in websites.

@herr doktor bimler - Did you mean "website's"?

Cue the appropriate XKCD cartoon on Big Corporations not using / selling pseudoscience: http://m.xkcd.com/808/

[Yes, I know that a lot of con artists are making a killing (in both senses) selling their quackery, but it's not on a billion dollar corporate scale in most cases, Boiron being a notable exception.]

@palindrom

I totally appreciated not only your usage comment, but your follow up explaining your rationale--which was exactly the way I took it. ORAC is way too touchy sometimes and doesn't seem to give a fig about telling off a longtime fan and frequent commenter. He misreads you in the extreme. I have only lurked here occasionally (and skip his day on the other blog) since he did something similar to me a couple of years ago. His ego seems to get weird sometimes.

Orac, I am a newcomer here and, while awed by the level of intelligence and knowledge of your followers, I have to speak up in defense of palindrom, regardless of the consequences. He is correct as to the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested." You can dismiss this as fluff and nonsense, but it's no less important than the differences you find crucial in the sciences, when meaning is important. Don't simply dismiss it as "just grammar," unless you are prepared to have others dismiss your quibbles as "just science." Words DO matter, in both literature AND science.

notation, it is just a quirk. Orac writes long detailed posts and there will be grammatical errors. So we have learned to ignore them if they are minor (though corrections to ones the imply something that is opposite of the meaning are appreciated... though that is rare).

It is Orac's blog, so it is his rules.

From my one experience I know it takes a lot of work to put out so much content. Especially one without any grammatical mistakes. No one is perfect, and we all appreciate this one sane corner of the internets. Plus, this is not a peer reviewed journal paper, nor a news article. It is blog article.

So just make comments on the content, not the grammar. Tone trolling is frowned upon.

Thanks, Chris. I have no problem with ignoring quirks. I have plenty of my own. I simply care about language as much as others care about science, and take it no less lightly.

However, if that's the way things are run here, so be it.

I'm a little surprised that he doesn't simply have one of his minions serve as a grammatical editor, or word minion.

I'm pretty sure someone would volunteer to do it; then those little fiddly things would be fixed and Orac wouldn't have to fuss with them either.

Ha! Like that plexiglass box with the blinking lights would take direction from mere humans.

Or he composes these in the evening while relaxing and sets them to post a few hours later, and there is no time to get someone, even one the west coast, to correct grammar.

Just learn to deal with it. It is not a big deal.

It's not a big deal to some people, no.

To other people, it is a livelihood.

"To other people, it is a livelihood"

But not Orac's.

He really does not get paid much for this, which is his hobby. Let him deal with the grammar gremlins on the grants he needs to write to fund his real work.

Stop stressing or a blog. Again, it is not a journal article nor is it a news article. It is a personal blog.

Ugh, now this is where wording can be a problem. Obviously I did not press enough keyboard keys, but:
"Stop stressing or a blog."

Should be:
"Stop stressing overr a blog."

Though, when I think about it... so whose livelihood is dependent on Orac's grammatically correct blog articles? This intrigues me, who are these people and if their livelihood is dependent Orac having perfect grammar why aren't they begging him to let them proof his blog on a moment's notice late at night in the USA Central Time Zone?

Seriously?

No one's livelihood is dependent on Orac's blogging. However, my livelihood is dependent on grammar, so it can be a little hard to see mistakes one can't fix. It's the internet, so I ignore it.

I'm not the one who complained about it; I was simply offering a helpful suggestion. At least I had meant it to be helpful.

I'm growing weary about this discussion and I think Chris stated it correctly (she is, after all, one of our most senior posters on this blog).

I would suggest that if any of you feel the need to correct anyone on this blog, that you critique my posts. Don't forget that lilady is the Undisputed Queen Of The Run-On…and On Sentence.

I’m growing weary about this discussion

Yah, and I am an editor. I've but once felt compelled to suggest a correction in the comments, obliquely, with one word on each end. It worked just fine.

"Both these answers are incomplete. Put it all down."

When I first arrived here on RI ~ three years ago, I thought that Orac was using voice activated computer typing program, because of his voluminous output. He doesn't use that software. (One of the bloggers on the Skeptoid blog, stated last week, that he does use that software).

Lately, as I peck away on my laptop, I find myself typing "now" instead of "know"...for some reason. I suppose I could type my comments on a Word document and transfer them over to RI for better clarity, but it doesn't make sense to me, because it is a blog and not a formal letter.

Dammit...

"I thought that Orac was using ^ a voice activated computer typing program, because of his voluminous output."

I'm often astonished at not only Orac's output but also that of the principle minions. How do you find the time to post on multiple comments sections? I see a plaintive request for assistance on AoA or something pop up every now and then. Reminds me if that other xkcd comic - "Are you coming to bed dear?", "No, someone is wrong on the internet".

I can't help a cringe though, when I see ambiguous phrasing. Not because it's not understandable but because it will be pounced on by wooites.

and then comes the heavy sigh. 'No, that's not what it means, it means this....'

and then comes theavy sigh. 'No, that's not what it means, it means this....'

I'm just glad that there are experts like Orac and others who spend the time educating us engineers and the like.

I suppose I could type my comments on a Word document and transfer them over to RI for better clarity, but it doesn’t make sense to me, because it is a blog and not a formal letter Word is an abomination.

Just a suggestion.

I’m growing weary about this discussion and I think Chris stated it correctly

So am I and so do I.

Let's put it this way. My normal response to grammar/usage pedants who post comments that are nothing more than a grammar flame without any substantive comment about the post or a topic that came up in the comments is—and, make no mistake, that's exactly what the original post that set off this completely unproductive tangent in the comment threads here did—to delete the comment without, well, comment and, if I deem it appropriate, to correct whatever grammar/usage mistake or peccadillo that set the pedant off in the first place. Or not. The only reason I didn't do that this time is because the pedant making the comment does happen to be a longstanding respected commenter. So, out of respect for his status, instead I opted to post yet another reminder what my feelings are about this sort of nitpicking. In retrospect, I now realize that that was a mistake. I should have hewed to my usual policy and will do so in the future, no matter how longstanding the commenter.

I'm going to be blunt here. It's not as though I haven't had this discussion many, many more times than I can remember over the last nine years. It's also not as though long time regular readers don't know how much usage/grammar/spelling pedantry irritates me. This entire discussion should be more than enough reason at least to suggest to the disinterested (usage intentional) why I detest such comments.

Finally, it's not as though I haven't heard the defense before in which the pedant protests, "But I care so much about RI and words and don't want the quacks to be able to attack you for bad usage/spelling/grammar." To them I say to ask themselves this: Do you really think a quack or quack apologist cares if I misused "disinterested" instead of using "uninterested" and will try to discredit me somehow over that? Really? Most quacks and quack apologists don't even know the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested." If the answer to this question is yes, you don't really know quacks very well at all. If the answer is no, then you just refuted your own argument.

If I offended anyone, well, I'm only slightly sorry. Apparently what I just wrote needs to be said periodically. Maybe I should create a page about commenting and put this sort of comment there permanently.

Word is an abomination.

It is for anything having anything to do with HTML, which is why I compose my posts in BBEdit before copy/pasting them into WordPress. It's OK for scientific writing, though.

NumberWang:
"I can’t help a cringe though, when I see ambiguous phrasing. Not because it’s not understandable but because it will be pounced on by wooites."

If that was the only problem... As a non-native English speaker, I find texts with ambiguous meaning (like disinterested used for uninterested) a bit malaise-inducing, because I never really know if it's just me being ignorant, or some typo or brainfart on the part of the author. In doubt, sometimes, I'll try to politely ask for clarification ("do I have it right, did you say X"), and hope the author won't think I'm tone-trolling. Oh, well.

"Word is an abomination."

I'll be sure to forward your comments to my daughter. She ordered my laptop and ordered the Microsoft Office Word 2007 program. :-)

Hey everybody -- thanks for the sympathetic comments. But I do think we have more important things to worry about.

One last remark: Orac, it's good to remember that there's another audience you write for -- peer reviewers. The stronger and cleaner your writing is, the less it distracts from the case you're trying to make. The quacks won't care, and most of your minions won't care, but some of the NIH panelists or journal reviewers will notice. Style points shouldn't count, but they undoubtedly do, at some level.

Huh?

Apples and oranges.

Blogging is not the same thing as NIH grants and manuscripts submitted to peer-reviewed journals, and I act accordingly with a much more stringent level of proofreading for my grant applications and journal submissions. (Why do you think I can't just whip those out in a night?) I can assure you that I have never gotten a complaint from peer reviewers about language, grammar, or spelling in my blogging—or ever even had evidence or an indication that anyone who's ever peer-reviewed one of my grants has actually read my blogs, much less that my blogging has had any effect whatsoever on the review of a grant or manuscript. I suppose it might if I were ever to submit a grant to NCCAM, but in that case grammar/spelling/usage would be the least of my worries.

She ordered my laptop and ordered the Microsoft Office Word 2007 program

Well there's your problem right there. You should get a MacBook Air. :-)

Personally, I miss Lotus Ami-Pro for word processing. But that is going back a long time ago, before there was an internet.

If you submitted to NCCAM, you'd really have to watch your P's and Q's, because based on the standards of evidence to which they seem to adhere, there would be no actual framework by which to establish that you had a valid case!

All they'd have to go on would be your grammar.

It’s OK for scientific writing, though.

Only where trivial mathematical and tabular content is involved. I have a separate bone to pick with publishers who think LaTeX is a replacement for a dedicated typesetting system, but it's vastly better than Word.

It's been all downhill since Text/360.

Narad @85 -- Someday it'd be interesting to hear what your gripes are about LaTeX. For math, at least, it's pretty decent.

Someday it’d be interesting to hear what your gripes are about LaTeX. For math, at least, it’s pretty decent.

My main gripe is with publishers who think installing LaTeX is an "enterprise solution" and routinely churn out utter monstrosties.

As for LaTeX itself, offhand, nightmarish font management. Contortions required to obtain bf math ital. Inconsistent sup and sub placement, both horizontal and vertical. Autosizing fences. Thousands of band-aid packages. Absolute necessity of mixing typographical and content markup. The unforgivable injection of Knuth's nightmarishly bad calligraphic face into the literature. I could go on.

It's created a legion of blind snakes who fancy themselves keen-eyed typographic dragons. Just head over to Stack Overflow for examples.

Narad @88. Thanks for the reply!

In my own field, the LaTeX is the starting point for the journal, which auto-converts it into whatever and then proceeds to set it up with something better. But, for better or for worse, the arXiv posting of the article, in the form of a PDF produced from LaTeX, is usually the only thing that most people read.

I feel your pain on the fonts. Also, although Knuth is described by some as the greatest computer scientist who ever lived, the TeX book is a "wholistic manual" -- you pretty much have to read the whole thing to make use of any part of it. Ugh.

In my own field, the LaTeX is the starting point for the journal, which auto-converts it into whatever and then proceeds to set it up with something better.

There's no direct mapping to journal, but anyway, I know your field. Believe me, Brother, I also know a whole lot about the current and past of the production side of that which Chandra gave away, as well as its sisters. It's a few scripts and a few guys in the subcontinent amateurishly breaking display equations, nothing more.

It’s a few scripts and a few guys in the subcontinent amateurishly breaking display equations, nothing more.

That does not surprise me in the least.

My own papers are pretty simple-minded when it comes to math, so I tend to have very few display equations:

We fit a straight line to the data in the form
$$y = mx + b,$$
where $m$ is the slope and $b$ is the intercept.

Well, not quite that elementary, but almost.

That does not surprise me in the least.

It hasn't always been this way, but there are only so many ways to drive down page charges. Typesetting is obvious, and manuscript editing is next, although pretenses exist to tell societies that it's actually still there (Oscar Sierra Alpha is being grievously swindled by Papa Mike Golf).

The main reason for the death of the latter is that it was next to impossible to retain competent people at the wages generally offered, so the "service" was generally as likely as not to simply represent a headache for for something that's supposed to already be in the can. However, what's left is mediocrity enforced by the mediocre – I've been chastized by India Oscar Papa for queries on Alpha Papa Juliet that had the temerity to suggest that a canonical cite had been omitted (think 2MASS or Schlegel et al.)

But I digress.

My own papers are pretty simple-minded when it comes to math, so I tend to have very few display equations:

We fit a straight line to the data in the form
$$y = mx + b,$$
where $m$ is the slope and $b$ is the intercept.

Well, that's something that wouldn't merit a display in the first place, but the LaTeX police would be all over you for using the "deprecated" '$$'. And you probably want 'b\,,' to be safe, 'cause there ain't much of anybody who's going to nice it up.

^ (I'll drop this sideline to the actual topic, but on the "headache" front, you don't want to have to handle the reaction when a humanities major changes 'pixelated' to 'pixilated'. At. All.)

Ah, yes, humanities majors copy-editing scientific manuscripts can lead to some real hilarities.

And I'm revealing myself as an ancient greybeard who started out with plain TeX and never really internalized LaTeX.

I even know that the final "X" is pronounced sort of like the "cchhh-chhhh" sound Bart Simpson makes when Homer tries to strangle him.

"I have a separate bone to pick with publishers who think LaTeX is a replacement for a dedicated typesetting system, but it’s vastly better than Word."

ok i dont have to put much maths in my papers but LaTex is an abomination in the eyes of god and man. I dont know what its meant to be- its a terrible way to write anything as what you see bears no resemblance to what you get. I literally cannot read latex documents as my students try to give them to me because all the gibberish that surrounds the text makes it impenetrable. LaTex is one of the least user friendly "programs" ever. Its basically a word processor kit-car as i understand it. sure you can eventually use it to write documents but you have to write your own word processor first using it as a starting point. Unless you can read the matrix unaided.
I can understand that if it is the only thing that could give you a way of writing what you need that you would be forced to use it, but it isnt better than anything. Its one step down from using a crayon.

Most of this is beyond me. I'll just say that I really miss WordPerfect.

@Mi Dawn,
I miss WordPerfect too!
It was my favor DOS/Windows 3 word processor.
But then, I did my MS thesis on my electric typewriter with some hand written equations thrown in.
I didn't have many opportunities to do writing about real science after TeX/LaTex started to come into use :(

I said I would desist, but....

I dont know what its meant to be- its a terrible way to write anything as what you see bears no resemblance to what you get.

Oh, sweet Jesus. It's not supposed to (although on-the-fly parsing isn't impossible). You know what else bears no resemblance to "what you get"? Word processors, unless you remember the days when monographs were issued by photographing typewritten copy. One of the most grievous failings of M$ Word, aside from its ever-worsening interface, is that it pretends to be a DTP platform.

It is such a pain in the ass to convert .doc files of any complexity (and some people won't touch .docx, meaning OLE equations are out) into a format suitable for production that there are shops in India that specialize in rekeying them into LaTeX, from which getting SGML/XML, which needs to be the format of record if one wants a dual-purpose PDF/(X)HTML output stream, is at least relatively straightforward. (Try reading raw MathML sometime.)

If you're going to "author" in LaTeX, you need to be able to run (pdf)LaTeX. Why on earth would you try to read such student papers from source? It's akin to trying to do the same thing with a Word document, albeit vastly simpler, because Word's file format is binary. Even worse, .docx is a zipped binary of an idiosyncratic, proprietary XML wrapper that nobody anywhere ever asked for or needed, like Knuth's calligraphic (and Michael Spivak is with me on the latter).

If you're writing for professional publication, less is always more, so long as you're dealing with a real typesetter. Nowadays, outside of books publishing (which is pretty damn spotty for technical material, given the usual pedigrees of acquisitions, developmental, design, and production* types), you're probably not. LaTeX is the next best option for anything far beyond almost straight prose.

* I once took galleys of a volume of a multivolume set of reprints of a fellow who was apocryphally caught with his Nobel around his neck when emerging from a bathroom stall. The "production editor" had carefully made a single-character change in the entire typescript before sending it to the typesetter. Even they gave up after the fourth galley page. "Books" is almost invariably worse than "journals."

@Narad,

I heard about Latex and Lyx but I also carefully read your exchange. What would be a good publishing platform on any of the 3 major OSes (prefs goes to OS X and Linux tho)?

Alain

I heard about Latex and Lyx but I also carefully read your exchange. What would be a good publishing platform on any of the 3 major OSes (prefs goes to OS X and Linux tho)?

Depends on what you mean by "publishing platform." Let's take it to E-mail.

palindrom: "And I’m revealing myself as an ancient greybeard who started out with plain TeX and never really internalized LaTeX."

I never used TeX, but I did use LaTeX for a professional organizations newsletter for a couple of years. It meant going to the computer lab in the basement of the medical school where the organization rented time to compose it on a non-graphics computer. And in those days there was on "What You See Is What You Get." It was "You'll see it when the guy behind the window hand you the printout."

squirrelelite: "But then, I did my MS thesis on my electric typewriter with some hand written equations thrown in."

Just before I was introduced to LaTex in the mid-1980s we still had typists to translate our hand written documents to something professional (internal company technical reports look very similar to those in journals, only with words like "Confidential" or "Secret" in red letters). It took me a bit to get them to actually use the font wheel with the Greek letters. They were making me hand write them in, until I noticed the wheel in its holder. I think they got Wang workstations a bit later, or it was an earlier Wang word processing system.

Pretty soon we're going to have someone chiming in with "It was really hard to carve symbols into stone with bronze tools, so when cylinder seals and clay cuneiform tablets came along, it was like a revelation!"

;-)

Oh, wait, I meant: :-p

Vaguely related to the digression, as well as an impending resurgence of the Greenberg "gambit," courtesy of PLoS One: Don't do this.

@ Narad #98

I not only remember the days of photo-ready publishing i prepared several papers that way using letraset for the molecular diagrams. I am that old :)

But as for the rest of it- what interest would I have in using a program that makes it insanely difficult for me to write or read a document simply so that a typesetter has an easier time of it?
As i say i come from a relatively maths-lite discipline but we do embed equations and such like. I have no issues producing a document in word that i am satisfied with, have never had any formatting issues after submission and frankly i find it all easy to use and easy to read. Sure sometimes things roam around a little but only if you are such a noob as to insert figures etc before you finish writing the text. As i grew up doing photo-ready i wouldnt do that.
This is the thing, word has some irritating things, most of which i turn off. But for me LaTex is....well it has no point. it doesnt do anything for me, its considerably harder to use than word is and it defaults to gibberish.
Maybe when i find out what its for then I might appreciate it.
But meantime its not the preferred format for submission fr any journal i author for, so im not forced to suffer from it.

incitatus -- I think Narad's point is that LaTeX is not intended to be read in raw form -- you must process it to make it legible. Next time a student hands you raw TeX, just tell them to convert it to PDF or something.

Although I joke about how little math I use in published papers, class notes can be another matter -- there can be lengthy mathematical developments in those. And that's where TeX/LaTeX really shine -- they were designed primarily to typeset complicated mathematics so that it comes out looking really good (which enhances comprehensibility quite a bit).

Sure beats the cuneiform. And don't get me started on those Roman numerals.

Narad -- that is one Bud Tugley graph.

#108 thanks for that. as i say if i really needed it i might understand- i never need more than 1 or 2 equations so equation editor is fine for me.
But it begs the question if ou cant read it till you convert it how do you know what you are writing when you write it?

incitatus @110 -- What I do is sit there with a plain-text editor in one window, and something like a PDF viewer in another. Every so often I save the LaTeX file, run the typesetter, and redisplay the PDF. I can see what I have in a couple of seconds. It may seem cumbersome, but once you learn how to code math expressions in TeX it's probably 10 times faster than doing it with some God-awful mouse-driven GUI, and the results look vastly better.

I'm sure that there are tools to do this automagically, analagous to integrated development environments for various programming languages, but I'm a troglodyte.

my god that sounds painful. yay for no maths

In the 1970s an oncologist gave us a vial of Laetrile one of his patients had gone to mexico to buy and asked for a chemical analysis.

It was lactose ... $1500 a vial for LACTOSE!

...but anyone else remember being excited over the original Franklin Acewriter?

@palindrom
"carve symbols into stone with bronze tools"
=VI
"cylinder seals and clay cuneiform tablets"
=WordStar

Used them both!

Imr90, what was handwriting it and then handing it over to a typist?

Then in the late 1980s they decided that engineers should type their own papers. Except they they did not put word processing software on the VAX and larger Cyber we were using for finite element and other analyses.

Of course this was the same place where the facilities guys took the requirements that there be drafting boards to read large CAD drawings (several feet wide and long), and computer terminals to access the computers... and put the computer terminals in top of the drafting boards to save space.

Making them useless for both.

Except they they did not put word processing software on the VAX and larger Cyber we were using for finite element and other analyses.

No *roff? (Troff still attracts a smattering of die-hard comments.)

Narad, see the paragraph on facilities. Sometimes the administration thinking is terribly warped.

I only ever saw text or code editors on the systems, no word processors. Remember, the computers were supposed to be used for engineering analysis, and there were typists with Wang systems. I have never heard of that word processor.

It was just when the administration bunch got the early PCs with word processors, they thought all systems were so equipped. One of them thought I could use one of the new screen editors on a Tektronix funky green graphics monitor.

Tsu Dho Nimh:
At least, simple lactose was unlikely to hasten the patient's death, unlike other kinds of snake oil :/
Though it highlights another issue with the alt-med world: that the product advertised is actually in what you buy.

Chris,
I don't remember anyone doing word processing our any of our mainframe computers either. Although, a few years later, I used a WordStar clone that was written to run on the Windows Basic interpreter so it certainly could have been done.
But, since the IT department was funded by selling mainframe time by the hour to users, it was much cheaper budget wise to just buy a word processor. The IT guys allowed that but refused PCs for a few years before giving up.
I also briefly used a slightly later Tektronix that had a cpu board added and could run Basic programs that were stored on a cassette player. But, we soon got IBM PC clones, so I didn't really use that much.

"But, since the IT department was funded by selling mainframe time by the hour to users, it was much cheaper budget wise to just buy a word processor."

Not where I worked. Though that changed as PCs became more powerful.

Back then someone who worked in another section of the company did tell us the joys of the Lotus spreadsheet, something we did not know about.

Now, for the same company, spousal unit has a company supplied laptop where he does his work, plus it does have word processing, and access to a database that controls a database affecting a factory function (which he can reset from home... where he works once a week). Much has changed.

Oh, and in the early 1980s I was given a calculator that ran Basic with a tape printer. I wrote a program on it to assess a dynamic frequency issue for our product (with equations from an engineering journal). My final report included the program, plus graphs from its two inch wide four pen color plots. :-)

It was fun.

Sorry late at night and the redundancy department is on shift: "and access to a database that controls a database affecting a factory function"...

should be: "and access to a database affecting a factory function."

Good night.

Try again: “But, since the IT department was funded by selling mainframe time by the hour to users, it was much cheaper budget wise to just buy a word processor.”

Did I mention typists at Wang work stations? Those were actually glorified typewriters with computer terminals. Essentially the paper was composed on a computer, and then sent to computer controlled typewriter. The issue the users had with it was that when Greek letters, or any other font, was called for was that a piece of hardware (font wheel) had to be inserted.

Oh dear what a disappointment.

Orac is an apple fanboi.

Oh well, never mind, I still like the writings of the old plexi-glass box of blinking lights :) Hell I even like the odd grammatical error, it makes Orac sorta human ;)

You're right Chris. Those days were fun.

In a small way, I was reminded of them when I had to dig out a TI graphics calculator for my son to use for his college statistics class.

I used Lotus a little bit, but had a certain fondness for SuperCalc!

imr90 -- I still use vi, in the form of its descendant vim -- it's completely hard-wired into my fingers by now.

Context highlighting is the greatest invention since vaccines.

Context highlighting is the greatest invention since vaccines.

That depends on what you're doing. I have vim set to behave like straight vi, which was actually a bit of a nuisance.

I first hand experienced the following: someone I was very close with was diagnosed with malignant cancer (biopsy). Her oncologist made it clear that she needed to undergo surgery (mastectomy) and chemo therapy and probably some radiation therapy too. To make a long story short, she started taking B17 (apricot kernels and Amygdalin) and went for an ultrasound 3 months later, at the same hospital where the mammogram was taken, that lead to the for mentioned diagnosis. The result was: the two tumors were still quasi the same. When I looked at the CD they gave us and compared those images with the ones taken three months earlier, it seemed to me that the tumors were smaller! Weird. So, three days later, we went for another ultrasound in another town. During the three days in between the two ultrasounds, she increased the doses of both the apricot kernels and the Amygdalin pretty drastically (well, it was me who told her to do this, actually I found out about B17 and another theory about disease, the night before she was supposed to undergo a mastectomy) The doctor/radiologist at the radiology center in the other town couldn't find any trace of cancerous activity at all. When I showed him the ultrasound images from three days earlier, he repeated the test and could only stumble: 'I don't understand what happened, but it IS gone...'. That was five years ago... The thing that always gets me is this: B17 is supposed to be poisonous, but I've been taking it for years (as a precaution for cancer - which I stopped doing, since I learned more about the cause for 'disease', but I won't bother you clever guys with this any further) and never had any problems with it - only made me feel better and I like the taste; the thing is that chemo is toxic, you cannot get around that fact, but still they want to protect people from apricot kernels??? What a crazy business :-)

B17 is supposed to be poisonous, but I’ve been taking it for years [...] and never had any problems with it – only made me feel better and I like the taste

People would say the same thing about whiskey.

Citation seriously needed for your tall tale, a few things don't add up.

Alternative medicine as religion

oracknows — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 01:00:42 +0000

Alternative medicine as religion

Over the years, I've often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It's not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can't be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have to believe in the therapy, dedicate yourself completely to it, in order for it to work. Of course, as I've also mentioned before, it is that insistence on belief and total commitment shared by religion and alternative medicine that provides quacks with an "out" when their treatments don't yield the promised results, their frequent excuse being to blame the patient. He didn't believe hard enough. In a reverse of The Secret, which states that you can bring good things to yourself by simply wanting it, in alt-med world, it's all too often implied (or even more than implied) that you bring calamities on yourself through bad diet, bad lifestyle, and bad thoughts. After all, what is the German New Medicine, other than the claim that cancerous tumors are not the disease, but rather a manifestation of buried emotional traumas that cause the "protective" mechanism of a tumor to result?

I was reminded of these things as I perused the copious comments of yesterday's post, which, as you might recall, was about the utter quackery that is naturopathic cancer treatment. More specifically, I was reminded that the similarity between religious thinking and quackery can lead to situations where religion facilitates belief in quackery. It began rather rapidly and early in the comments when someone named Steffanie England leapt into the fray with statements like:

ALLOPATHIC THINKING: Why sell GOD MADE medicine when you can’t make money off of it? Why not extract one or two components of an herb, a fruit etc. and PATENT IT!!! Discover what effects it has on the body. Then make more money prescribing drugs to counter the side effects!!! Brilliant!!! (NOT) Why not use the medicine GOD prescribed. “Let FOOD be THY MEDICINE”.

England then goes on to remonstrate with me:

Do some REAL research! Be brave enough to tell the TRUTH – like Dr. Judy Seeger!

Whenever I see the word "truth" in all capital letters, I'm reminded in what seems to be a nigh unbridgeable gap between our methods of thinking, because in science we do not speak of the "truth" (or the "Truth" or even the "TRUTH"). We speak of evidence, experimentation, and what the evidence shows. All conclusions are provisional, subject to revision as new evidence comes in. In contrast, Stephanie speaks of The Truth, and her "truth" includes antivaccine views, cancer quackery, and many, many more irrational views, proclaiming that the "truth is simple."

It wasn't long before another commenter arrived expounding similar ideas about God and how doctors are supposedly so "arrogant." I'm referring to someone named Tamara St. John, who apparently runs a website called Optimum Health Through God's Pharmacy. Tamara was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and claims to have "healed herself" of cancer without the use of drugs or surgery. Given that I'm an aficionado of cancer cure testimonials (indeed, perhaps the earliest substantive post I wrote for this blog was about cancer cure testimonials), and it's a topic I've revisited on this blog many times, Tamara's story caught my attention. Breast cancer, as I've pointed out before, is a disease that has a highly variable clinical course, which can range from indolent, slowly progressing disease to rapidly progressing disease that kills within months. Indeed, it is possible that more breast cancers either fail to progress or even spontaneously regress than we thought.

All of this is why I'd need to know a lot more about Tamara's case to make an educated judgment regarding whether there's any chance that her anecdote represents a true treatment effect. Most likely, it does not. Indeed, I wouldn't be too surprised if her case resembles that of Kim Tinkham, who tried to heal herself using Robert O. Young's quackery and, alas, ultimately saw her cancer progress and kill her. Of course, Kim Tinkham appeared to do well for nearly four years. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, Tamara provides information completely insufficient to make even an educated judgment, probably because she is currently writing a book and looking for an agent and publisher.

All I could find out about her story came from this interview, in which she says she had a lump in her breast and that the cancer spread to her lymph nodes. No mention is made of how the cancer was diagnosed, or even if there was a tissue diagnosis from a biopsy. In a more detailed discussion of her story, no mention is made of a biopsy. At the time, apparently Tamara was uninsured and couldn't afford medical care; so she decided to "just pray." The story Tamara relates is that she had a lump in her breast that was "painful to the touch" and that she developed enlarged lymph nodes under the arm and that the nodes were painful, all of which sounds a lot more like an inflammatory process than cancer. Don't get me wrong. It's a myth that if a breast lump is painful it can't be cancer. It is, however, true that most breast cancers don't hurt. In any case, Tamara claims to have healed herself using what can be best described as pure quackery, namely the Budwig Protocol, laetrile (yes, laetrile—how 1970s!), "enzyme" therapy, and juicing, not to mention "detoxification," up to and including coffee enemas. She also spouts what can best be characterized as pure nonsense about how the illness she experienced while "detoxing" must have indicated that she had the epidermal growth factor receptor in her cancer and that she was shedding it.

Nowadays, Tamara is running a consulting business that appears to me to be, in essence, practicing medicine without a license, her Quack Miranda Warning notwithstanding. No doubt God is helping her fleece unsuspecting cancer patients.

It's not just cancer quackery, however. I've often discussed how much the antivaccine movement resembles religion as well, a religion in which vaccines are Satan. I was reminded of this, perhaps serendipitously, when, as I was contemplating writing about the religion of cancer quackery, I came across a gem of a post on yet another wretched hive of scum and quackery, that temple worshiping the arrogance of ignorance, the completely misnamed Thinking Moms' Revolution by a contributor named B.K. The post is entitled Christianity and the (False) god of Modern Medicine. B.K. begins with some hand-wringing about how worried she is that her post would be controversial and she doesn't really want to write it but feels compelled to (no doubt because Jesus is telling her to).

Every bit of B.K.'s language is steeped in the language of belief. For instance, the next part of her preface is all about how much she used to "believe" in conventional medicine and science:

But before my son’s autism, I was a hard-core believer in the system… the medical system, that is. I believed in vaccines. I believed in doctors. I believed in the CDC. I believed in Tylenol. I believed in prescription meds. I believed in it ALL. I trusted in doctors and vaccines to protect me before — so I didn’t get sick — and I believed in doctors and prescription medicines to make me well when I actually did get sick. I believed that pretty much everyone in medicine, from the top researchers, to pharmaceutical companies, on down to the receptionists at your pediatrician’s office, wanted to make us all well and keep us all well. It was all about health and wellness. And so, I trusted them. I believed them. And I handed my child over to them without even thinking about it. And, appallingly, I handed him over without even praying about it.

What on earth does praying about it have to do with deciding whether science supports a treatment? Absolutely nothing. It's not about faith; it's not about "belief." It's about evidence, and the evidence does not support the antivaccine views promulgated by the (Un)Thinking Moms, nor does it support the biomedical quackery that many of them subject their autistic children to. After her child was diagnosed with autism, B.K. suddenly had an "awakening" or an "eye-opening" experience, which was intensified by her hearing a sermon from her pastor about how man has "dethroned God" and "exalted Man," or, as she puts it, "Instead of praying and asking God to help us, we are handing things over to men to handle it. We think if the right man gets the job, our problems will be over. Man can fix things! Man can do it!"

You probably know where this is going, and it doesn't take B.K. very long at all to get there. She talks about how each baby is "perfect," created in God's image, but arrogant humans try to "improve upon God":

Let me ask you a question. If we are truly created in God’s own image, do you not believe that we are given the immune system that God wants us to have? Do you not believe that He perfectly planned the human immune system? Or do you think that God was “holding back” on us?

When we vaccinate our children, we are attempting to improve upon the immune system that God has given us. Plain and simple. We are trusting that man knows better than God how to keep us healthy. Therefore, we get only MAN’S best instead of God’s best. So where is that getting us? We are trading diseases that we once had that were TEMPORARY, such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, etc, for diseases that are usually PERMANENT, such as autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma, and the countless number of other chronic illnesses that we see today, including increased rates of childhood cancers. And as the number of vaccinations that each child receives grows, so does the number of chronically ill children (and adults).

What in the world are we DOING?

What we are doing (or trying to do) is to rely on science rather than faith. B.K. doesn't like that and proceeds to rant about how we live in a "fallen" world, with a corrupt medical system, all corrupted, of course, by Satan (with a little help from pharmaceutical companies, natch) and complain about how doctors have been elevated to "god-like" status and how often people comply with doctors' orders without even praying about it. (The horror!), concluding:

What I submit to you now is that we have lifted up modern medicine to the status of a god. That is something we need to repent of, and ask forgiveness, and ask God to show us how to trust him more fully with our health. When we get sick, pray first, seek wisdom, do some research into some alternatives, pray again, and then go where HE leads you. And stop blindly trusting fallen man to save us.

B.K.'s entire post is not a post describing how one rationally looks at the evidence, decides that one was wrong about something, and then changes course based on science, evidence, and experimentation. It is, in essence, a conversion story. Although she did not change her Christian religion, she did use it to facilitate a conversion from one religion that shouldn't be a religion but was to her (science-based medicine) to another religion (antivaccinationism and alternative medicine), that she now follows based on faith rather than reason. Her description of medicine is very much like the fall of man as described in The Bible. Now, to her, modern medicine is no longer God but Satan, and she made that religious conversion without so much as a single shred of scientific evidence.

The longer I study alternative medicine and alternative medical systems, the more it becomes clear to me that they show far more similarity to religion than they do to science. It's true that alt-med apologists dress up their beliefs in language that sounds scientific, but when you scratch the patina of scientific language off, it doesn't take long to find the religious imagery, often facilitated by the more conventional religious beliefs (i.e, Christianity) of the believer. We see the same thing with respect to evolution denial. So why not with denial of scientific medicine? A nonscientific world view that is based on faith in things that can't be seen is often not confined to church.

oracknows Tue, 08/14/2012 - 21:00

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