What would you say to a family member or friend who says they’re seriously foregoing approved treatment and instead, taking Ivermectin?
Do they have terminal cancer or treatable cancer? Not all cancer is treatable, sometimes the best you can hope for is a few extra weeks or months with treatment.
My understanding is surgery and some chemo will be involved.
Where im.havinf trouble is the Ivermectin.
Where does this come from?
Even the famous can go for quack treatments; remember Steve McQueen:
Frankly, in that era the prognosis from using standard radiation and chemotherapy for mesothelioma wasn’t appreciably better than ‘quack treatments’. There are fortunately better options today but it is still a tough row with generally poor outcomes with a five year survival rate in the single digit percentages.
Stranger
There is some research on ivermectin as an agent to help treat cancer, but I have no idea on what kinds of cancers it works on or how far the research has gone.
I’m not aware of the kind of cancer.
The outcome for meso is still pretty grim, and fairly fast. If my friend with meso wanted to try quack therapies, i probably wouldn’t discourage them.
Most cancers are fairly treatable these days, though. And I’d try to steer my friend towards standard medical treatments.
Ivermectin is a useful treatment against parasites. Scabies, some worms… As far as i know, that’s all it’s helpful for. It was conclusively shown not to be helpful against covid, except in communities that had a high background rate of worm infection. The worms may make it harder to fight off other stuff.
But poking around pubmed, it looks like there is interest in testing ivermectin as an anti cancer drug in convert with other chemotherapy. So maybe your friend is in a clinical trial. Or maybe their doctor is using it off-label. So long as they aren’t foregoing proven treatments, and are being treated by a legit doctor, it might be a reasonable course of treatment.
It appears to be at the “we have a plausible mechanism, but no successful clinical trials” stage. Many more treatments reach this stage than ever actually are found to be useful. But ivermectin isn’t terribly toxic. And it can be good for your mental health and quality of life to feel like you are trying all you can. So even if it turns out not to be useful, it might be worth trying now, so long as they aren’t using it instead of treatments known to be effective.
“Can I have your stuff?”
Tee hee. I’m ashamed to say I went there initially, as well.
I didn’t want to jump down some rabbit hole because I really don’t know this person.
I knew where to ask.
Remember Steve Jobs. If he’d immediately gone with the approved regimens instead of the quack ideas he chased, he’d likely still be alive today.
Right now Ivermectin is the darling of the crackpot RW conspiracy theory folks.
There’s a big difference between some weak evidence of possible usefulness against some cancers that’s been legitimately studied and the full-throated “Ivermectin is the miracle cancer cure that Big Pharma has been hiding from us all along” CT.
If your friend is foregoing approved treatment, then they’ve almost certainly bought into the CT.
At which my response is: “You are going to die sooner, and worse, because of your shitty decisionmaking and reliance on lying liars grifting. Don’t come crying to me later if/when you realize your mistake.”
Oh, yeah, i somehow missed that they are foregoing proven treatments.
What I’d say would depend on how close i am to the friend and how likely they are to be influenced by anything i say. If “i really don’t know this person”, I’d say nothing unless they asked me, advise them to also get traditional cancer treatment from an oncologist of they asked me, and post about it on the Internet either way.
Yeah, LSLGuy nailed it. Probably anyone who owns livestock is familiar with Ivermectin, and has seen it work wonders on difficult health issues. And hey, thousands of people swear that it cured their covid, which goes to prove you can’t trust the medical establishment. So, it probably cures cancer too
Last year I helped a friend from college by driving him to medical appointments. Stage Four metastasized prostate cancer. He was getting treatment from an osteopathic doctor from France, who administered multi-hour infusions. Eventually I learned that one of the components was green coffee extract, and figured out it was ‘alternative’ medicine. And since it wasn’t approved by his insurance, he was paying for it himself. Not cheap.
One time I accompanied him to an actual hospital for some tests. He was examined by a soft spoken doctor who read the list of medicines he was receiving from the French osteopath, and gently explained that none of the treatments had been shown effective in double-blind testing. The doctor told him that he could chose his own treatments, but to at least consider entering into a medical testing program so that his experiences might help others.
The reason he went for alternative medicine:
My friend told me that when he went to his first hospital appointments, his oncologist didn’t seem to personally care about him. That there was no emotional involvement, unlike the French osteopath… who seemed deeply empathetic while filling him with green coffee extract.
This.
We’ve gone from ivermectin being promoted relentlessly (and falsely) as a Covid preventative/cure to claims that it and another antiparasitic drug, fenbendazole are big-time cancer cures. Some of this fantasy comes from a former Canadian nuclear medicine doc who touts himself as an “oncologist”, William Makis, who’s also falsely spread stories about Covid vaccines causing “turbo cancer” and causing many to “die suddenly”.
Given that the evidence of these drugs being effective cancer-fighting tools is very weak, their popularity seems tied to medical establishment rejection (“they” don’t want you to know 
) and persistent altie belief that all cancer is due to parasites.
Dangerous nonsense.
At the very least, I’d try to persuade them to join a clinical trial of whatever snake-oil that they’re choosing to bet their life on. That way, at least when they die, others will learn something from it (most likely, “don’t rely on that snake oil”).
My first thought was this whack job is believing some RW CT.
I wonder if they believed “injecting bleach” was good advice, as well?
Anyway, like I said, I don’t know this person. It’s someone in my DILs extended family.
My advice to her was stay out of it.
But it got me thinking.
“Cancer can be a scary thing and it is natural to look for effective treatments. Since cancer is really many different diseases in many different locations, each with different treatments, and because the research and clinical use of more effective treatments is improving all the time, it would be important to follow the advice of a medical professional who has devoted decades of their life to this subject.”