healing, dying, quackery, faith, belief

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is going to be all over the place, I’m trying to sort a bunch of stuff out. Thanks for bearing with me. Over the last 15 months or so, there’s been quite a bit of death hangin around my immediate family, but no one in what I would call close proximity, or not close enough, to me to cause me a great deal of pain. My aunt, my wife’s aunt, my BIL’s father and another of my wife’s aunt (although she was divorced from her uncle) have all died from cancer.

My aunt had kind of a rough life, but worked hard overcame some obstacles and a raised a bunch of good kids. My cousins eulogy was the best thing I’ve ever heard and i hope one day my kids will think even half so highly of me. She was a lifetime smoker, got cancer (breast then bone) and died in a little more than a year.

My wife’s aunt was rather elderly and was fighting her third or fourth bout of cancer and just couldn’t hang on any more, but she did fight it for a good 18 months.

My BIL’s father was also a lifetime smoker, and was diagnosed last summer and died shortly after the new year. He did make it to my BIL wedding, which was a big gift for everyone.

My wife’s second aunt was just diagnosed a week or two ago, and was not given much hope, although she is fighting hard. She is at home and is being visited my a friend whom my wife described as a “healer”, and I was immediately skeptical. When she described the treatments, I was even more skeptical. I can’t remember the treatment because I was so aghast at the end result. At the end of the treatment, she coughs up some “black stuff”, and then the healer coughs up black stuff too. As if the healer were sucking the sickness out (I imagine the scene from The Green Mile at this point, where Tom Hanks is cured of the bladder infection). Um, sure.

My BIL and his family bought al kinds of homeopathic and natural medicines for his father, just to “try anything” that would help. His father is dead, do you think they helped any?

I told my wife that I think I’ll beg off the healer, and I don’t have any belief in homeopathy, and her response is “Wait till you’re on death’s door.” And I think that is exactly my problem with all this. If your father/mother/spouse/child etc is dying, wouldn’t YOU try anythinng that might help? Even just a little bit? And even if it makes you or the patient feel a little better, why isn’t that enough? Just a little more time? That’s all we want! Frankly, I think it’s despicable. She has bought some Homoepathic remedies and they are not cheap, in fact, they are rather expensive, compared to over-the-counter drugs, anyway.

And all this worries me because my parents are getting on, although they are in excellent health, and are in better shape than I am. My in-laws are younger, but cancer has been circling around me for a while and I feel like it’s going to hit someone close by. And that’s scary. And my father will probably be all over these stupid “natural” treatments cause doctors are tools of the drug companies, which are just evil and out for your money. And I don’t want to have to try an explain to my kids why grandma or grandpa or mommy had to die.

Mostly, I just look for things to worry about.

2

My mother is dying of cancer, and is taking chemotherapy to prolong the process. She is also taking daily exposures of some quackery called the “Vibe Machine” that supposedly cures every illness ever contracted. It’s a fascinating array of copper wire and glass tubes. Anyway, she freely admits that it probably doesn’t work, but hey, it’s free and gets her out of the house and maybe it’ll make her feel better by placebo.

Can’t hurt. :rolleyes:

3

The thing is, IMHO, that most, if not all, of these “remedies” lack any objective indication that they do anything beneficial, except to the wallets of the peddlers. It’s a waste of the family’s resources.

And my sympathies for all your recent losses.

4

My grandma is fully convinced she healed a neighbor who had cancer with her aloe juice, carot juice vinegar and honey concoction that she urged him to drink every day. He did, and he got better, but, as I’ve pointed out to her, he was taking chemo at the same time.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with holistic medicine when it’s used in conjunction with medical therapies (and won’t interfere with them.) As Giant_Spongess says, it can’t hurt, and if it has a bit of a placebo effect which makes people think they feel better, then good for them.

There’s probably not much you can do for an adult relative who ignores medical treatment in favor of holistic therapies. The only thing you could really do is to try to see to it that they are really informed (as in debunking certain types of treatments), but I certainly wouldn’t let it go so far that it ruins the time you have left with them.

As for explaining it to the kids, explaining sickness and death is never easy. Try explaining to them why Granny or Auntie made the choice she did. If you present it that your relative would have certainly lived if they had just done this or that, it will seem bizarre and incomprehensible to them, almost like a suicide.

Instead, explain that while no treatment is 100% effective, medical science is much more reliable, but some people chose to use other methods because of their beliefs or that they don’t want to endure the side effects. All choices have consequences, however. Maybe [relative] would have lived if she had taken other treatments, but we can’t know that for sure.

5

This is a tricky question. Ideally, treatments for cancer have been well studied and have been shown to benefit some people with cancer of a given type and stage. When this happens, the risks and side effects of the medicine can be weighed against the benefits.

Radiation, cancer surgery and chemotherapy often but do not always meet this test. Cancer is obviously a fast changing specialty and a specialist should be involved to help the patient make these difficult decisions by providing them with current and accurate information.

Alternative medicines is a broad umbrella that includes a lot of quack remedies as well as some that may have benefit. Many doctors are not completely closed to alternative treatments, but the evidence that homeopathy works, for example, is effective is very much lacking using reasonable standards of judging evidence.

There is indeed an ethical problem with offering “false hope” to patients with sham treatments and serious diseases. One does not want patients to lose hope, of course. However, patient’s should not always be expected to get better (severe pancreatic cancer does have a poor prognosis) and the patient should not be made to suffer additional guilt because when the sham treatment works they are told that they lack the positive energy or willpower to make themselves better. The problem is not just the high cost of some sham treatments, which have some potential for harm even when free. Alternative treatments are not different from “conventional” ones in the sense that one must sometimes keep one’s expectations in check dspite hoping for the best.

6

A bit of a nitpick - the placebo effect can do more than that, it can do genuine, measureable good.

Which brings me to my father, who is convinced he can cure cancer. All of it. All of the time, except when “those doctors” poison his patients with chemotherapy - in his mind it’s the chemo that’s killing them of course.

What’s hardest to take is that he used to be a man of science but threw away all intellectual integrity when he got cancer and his wife died of it. I can understand that causing a re-evaluation of all sorts of things, but that kind of deathbed conversion is so, I don’t know, convenient and plainly due to fear of death rather than racionation that I just hate it. I also hate the thought of the false hope he gives his “patients” and especially those who love them. But what to do? He will not be talked out of it.

7

[QUOTE=AskanceWhat’s hardest to take is that he used to be a man of science but threw away all intellectual integrity when he got cancer and his wife died of it. I can understand that causing a re-evaluation of all sorts of things, but that kind of deathbed conversion is so, I don’t know, convenient and plainly due to fear of death rather than racionation that I just hate it. I also hate the thought of the false hope he gives his “patients” and especially those who love them. But what to do? He will not be talked out of it.[/QUOTE]

Deep down, he may know that the doctors didn’t kill his wife-- cancer did. But maybe it’s easier to deal with having someone to blame, somewhere to direct his anger.

8

My grandfather died when I was 3 (stomach cancer which he’d had for over 5 years). He had the lousiest aim, too, dude went and died on his daughter’s birthday. For the longest time this aunt was the only relative whose birthday I remembered. Grandma was… oh Lord how to describe her properly… I just can’t. She was one of the most no-nonsense people I’ve ever known; she had one of those round tables with the coal burner underneath and a glass cover over the tabletop. She kept pictures under the glass, one of the few times she’d interact with us “babies” for any decent length of time was when she’d pick us up into her lap and start asking us who this is and who that was. We found her stories fascinating; I remembered my fascination when I first realized the existance of “family likeness” (I was 4 or 5), those cousins of my Dad’s who looked like him and his eldest brother were all from Gramps’ side of the family, while those who looked like my other two uncles were from Grandma’s.

To me Death has been a part of Life ever since I can remember. Shitting’s a part of life, too :rolleyes: and it’s another part of life that a lot of people would rather never mention but which, unavoidably… we all have to do.