If you juice, use supplements, take vit C and adjust your diet, your chances of “healing” rubella are overwhelmingly good.
On average it’s a benign viral illness which will resolve on its own (well; technically b/c the immune system takes care of it fairly easily).
So, good news there, and great news if you choose alternative medicine as an approach to healing it, because now you can propter hoc the post hoc.
I keep hearing about “juicing” and it seems absurd on it’s face. Why is putting an orange and a banana in a blender better for you than eating an orange and a banana?
Claims for “juicing” largely revolve around the recommendations of Max Gerson and his cancer treatment protocol (for instance, the one offered by the Gerson Clinic in Tijuana).
Instead of eating an immense volume of fruits and vegetables to “detox”, Gerson proponents say you need to drink an immense volume of juice from this produce, prepared in a special type of juicer, supposedly for better absorption. From the National Cancer Institute’s analysis of Gerson therapy:
*The diet is strictly vegetarian for at least 6 weeks and consists of specific fruits and vegetables, eaten either raw or stewed in their own juices. No animal protein is allowed. Some whole grains such as oatmeal are included. Flaxseed oil is allowed only because it aids in the body’s use of vitamin A.[2] No other fat such as cooking oil and no salt or spices of any kind are allowed. A glass of freshly prepared juice from vegetables and fruits must be consumed every hour for 13 hours throughout the day. The vegetables and fruits used on the diet are very high in potassium and very low in sodium.
Food preparation is also controlled. Food may be prepared only in cast-iron pots and pans; no aluminum cookware is allowed. Juices must be prepared using a specific type of juicer that crushes the fruit or vegetable rather than grinding it into pulp. Gerson advocated organically produced food, with all fruits, vegetables, and grains grown and raised in soil free of pesticides and contaminants and enriched only with natural fertilizers.[2]
The protein and dairy restriction may be lifted to include buttermilk; however, this restriction may continue through the entire course of the therapy, depending on the individual patient. Some changes in the original diet have occurred over time, but the initiation phase of the diet has always been a vegetarian diet.[2]
Taking specific vitamin and mineral supplements plus pancreatic enzymes is the second component of the regimen. Although there have been additions and substitutions to the basic list of supplements, there have been few changes since the 1940s. The typical range of supplements includes the following:
Potassium solution
Lugol’s solution (potassium iodide, iodine, water)
Injectable crude liver extract (no longer used) with vitamin B12 (substitution: coenzyme Q10 and vitamin B12)
Vitamins A, C, and B3 (niacin)
Flaxseed oil
Pancreatic enzymes
Pepsin*
In addition to drinking the 13 glasses of juice every day, patients are supposed to have 5 coffee enemas daily and down handfuls of supplement pills. Apparently it is beneficial for patients to spend a substantial part of every day on the toilet.
Also, this protocol doesn’t come cheap. The Gerson people say you should buy a special juicer for $2400, a hydraulic press for $600 and spend an estimated $4000/year for supplements (this is in addition to the $11,000 for two weeks at the Gerson clinic, plus other costs, including buying a second refrigerator to store all the produce, hiring someone to help you prepare, store and administer all this stuff etc.) And you may be required to follow this protocol for up to ten years, if you survive that long without evidence-based care (not likely).
All this cost and the toll of this miserable lifestyle would be worth it if it actually cured or substantially arrested cancer. But it doesn’t.
A clinical trial of Gerson-type therapy was recently concluded. It involved patients with pancreatic cancer. The outcome was that the patients who underwent coffee enemas and round-the-clock intake of supplements died faster and had poorer quality of life than those on evidence-based cancer therapy.
Well we can all agree to disagree on this one.
Loach already summed it up pretty well in his note, but just a small one to add:
Let’s try to keep on topic in threads then. if a big enough hijack happens that can’t be easily stopped (like what happened in the Rubella thread), this is usually what mod action is taken.
There are people who have gone to various religious shrines and been spontaneously healed of their maladies. Some people have prayed for healing and received it, seemingly. Some people have crushed up the finger bones of supposed saints and used those for miraculous healing. People have sat under wire pyramids or used crystals and been healed. So, no doubt all these people you know who have healed their cancer via juicing or whatever are on a par with these others.
But, here’s the thing…sometimes people with cancer or other seemingly terminal diseases just go into remission without doing anything. I have a friend who has a very rare and deadly cancer. He was giving 6 months to live. This was 10 years ago. His big solution was to go riding on his Harley more often. That’s it. So, is riding a Harley (or maybe it’s riding that specific Harley) a cure for cancer? Nope. He’s just lucky.
So, all that stuff you are talking about you know folks did? As far as I know there is zero clinical evidence that doing those things, like riding a Harley more or mashing up the finger bones of a saint, visiting a shrine, eating the balls off a tiger or the other myriad other things folks do, will cure cancer more often than doing nothing at all. And that’s why you wouldn’t use them to cure other diseases…because unless you are one of the lucky ones who would just live regardless, it wouldn’t help.
Unless you want to present some clinical evidence that juicing or whatever has a measurable effect on a given disease of course. Anecdotal evidence of a few folks you claim to know isn’t going to really be any more meaningful than my own about my friend…it just adds some color to the discussion.
That’s because many people, like those here, cannot wrap their minds around utter falsehoods.
Senselessly? No madam, you are telling stories with no basis in fact, which makes the response you’ve received richly deserved. This is no place to find sympathy or support for murderous bullshit.
It is now.
It is now.
You are confusing disagreement with attacks.
Miss Spaulding, do you think you are the first person ever to make such claims on SDMB (or anywhere else)? Do you realize that we’ve seen it all before, and you are just the latest one to the party? Many posters here have done far, far more research, in both armchair form and as professionals, that you seem to have. Do you think perhaps it would be wise to listen? To learn from experts?
And for Miss Spaulding’s benefit alone, I will repeat a riddle we all know. What do we call alternative treatments that can be proved to work? Medicine.
If you met someone saying that they cured their cancer by eating an acidic diet, which had some mumbo jumbo health effect that they claimed, and then you also met a person who said they cured their cancer by eating an alkaline diet, the opposite, how would you decide which treatment actually worked? Would you assume that opposite treatments to the same disease would work? Why?
Could you imagine a scenario in which you would think someone’s health claim were ridiculous? If they said “I cured my arthritis by having someone wake me up with a loud bullhorn every day at exactly 5:44am”, would you be skeptical of that claim? What’s the difference between that to you, and an equally arbitrary claim that makes sense to you?
“You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? - Medicine.”
― Tim Minchin
I’m an immunologist and I disagree with that one.
Also, alternative medicine that works is just called medicine. Have an alternative that you think is efficacious? I have no problem with the claim that such a remedy works. But, if I want to claim that my medicine works, I run clinical trials and look at the p values. If an person peddling alternative medicine is unwilling to do such a trial, then their claims are worth absolutely nothing until they do.
thanks, I was curious about that, too.
Thank you for that, it was immensely informative and a much more complete answer than I was expecting!
Another point: Science doesn’t actually demand that we understand how something works. If clinical studies conclusively proved that sitting under pyramids really did on average improve outcomes for some disease, then doctors (the real one, who are trying to cure people, not just swindle them) would advise patients with those conditions to sit under pyramids. We would, of course, spend a lot of effort on trying to figure out why and how pyramids worked, because understanding that might lead to the development of more effective pyramids, or ones with fewer side effects, or whatever… but that would be secondary to showing that it worked at all. The important point is demonstrating that it works, and by definition, this has never been done for alternative medicine.