Other than the fact that I am here and not there (:)), I concur with you. That is not to say, mind you, that there is good evidence to show that a “positive outlook” improves outcomes. Rather, I am agreeing that no doc would “blow it off” or discourage it.
As an aside, and just for academic interest, I’ll see if I can dig up the paper that showed no benefit (in breast cancer, IIRC) with a positive outlook.
Not quite what I had in mind, but it will do for now. A well-done study showing no survival benefit in women with breast cancer despite receiving “supportive therapy” (presumably including “pep talks” and an emphasis on having a positive outlook).
Actually, it does. At least if taken at 100% face-value. There’s is something to be said for a small dose of cynacism.
[QUOTE=KGS]
For starters, he’s already had the surgery/radiation treatment, so no one can claim he was cured by alternative methods alone. More importantly, though, he’s gone from a state where he was a perceived victim, and merely following orders of whichever doctor was treating him at the time, not to mention having his uncle’s situation to compare himself with – but now he’s taken control of his own treatment, and is forging his own path.
[/quote]
Where in the fuck did you get this “perceived victim” crap? I can find no mention of brooklynn saying he ever felt like a victim and just “following orders.”
[QUOTE=KGS]
THAT ACT ALONE grants a significant boost to his self-confidence, his sense of normalcy, and by extension his own immune system.
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Just try and find me studies that link self-confidence and a “sense of normalcy” to an increase in the immune system.
[QUOTE=KGS]
Never underestimate the power of positive thinking. Sure, it may just be a placebo effect, but that’s still an EFFECT, despite all attempts by rich doctors and deluded scientists to blow it off as meaningless coincidence.
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You have a large misunderstanding of the placebo effect. No study has ever shown the placebo effect to be effective at anything other than 100% subjective results, such as pain. The placebo effect is as good as doing absolutely nothing in regards to objective findings, such as cancer remission, bacterial infections, etc…
[QUOTE=KGS]
Naturally, it doesn’t work for everyone (most people are stuck in the herd mentality anyway) – but if it works for one person, then it clearly has SOME value that needs to be explored further, doesn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
So we’re all sick because we are merely in the herd mentality? And no, working for one person doesn’t mean it has any value. First off, we don’t know for sure that it DID work. As someone said to you in the GQ thread, correlation does NOT equal causation. Just because brooklynn got better after eating an all-natural diet (oh, and BTW he also got extensive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy,) doesn’t mean the all natural diet cured him.
Is it worth looking into? Sure, why not? Oh, but it has…lots of times. Thousands of studies have been done by drug companies, universities, hospitals, etc… on the “wonders” of all-natural cures. What did they find? Most of the time, nothing. At best, they find some foods and herbs might help prevent cancer, but they don’t cure it. A lot of these studies don’t even get published, because they have no results. It’s known that most journals have a bias towards positive correlation studies, because 1) it’s more exciting, and 2) it’s harder to prove a positive correlation than a negative one.
It’s not that hard to make a study that proves a given treatment doesn’t do anything for a given disease. Hell, I can go do a study that proves eating paperclips does nothing to cure AIDS, doesn’t mean it will get published in the New England Journal of Medicine, though. So just because you don’t find a study about someone looking at naturla cures, doesn’t mean no one has done it.
Emphasis added.
But you haven’t proved that it was the herbs/positive thinking/alternative medicines that cured the person in that instance. You need to do a controlled experiment. There are so many different variables in the instance that brooklynn talked about that we can’t tell that it was his diet that cured him.
Well, that doesn’t mean all chemo or doctors are bad. Doctors evaluate their patients and if they think that chemo won’t do any good but buy a few more months, they usually tell the patient that and give them the option of making the patient comfortable in their last months without chemo or of trying the chemo to the end. They’re not all evil, cackling villains–most of them want to help their patients recover or, failing that, die with dignity.
Depends on the herd. Sometimes, it’s what makes you get better. Other times, it’s the negative mentality of the herd which gives you the sickness in the first place – especially if you’re in a family with a history of sickness. The herd (and the individual) simply believe that sickness is an inevitability, be it cancer or diabetes or bipolar disorder, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Yes, I know that genetics plays a part. That’s not what I’m talking about here.)
That’s EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Each individual case is different; there’s no way to tell for certain which part of the treatment turned the tide. But I do think it’s faith in whatever therapy, alternative or otherwise, which plays a huge role in the outcome. Problem is, faith is something that’s impossible to quantify, so it’s not going to show up on those precious peer-reviewed studies which everyone seems to worship so dearly.
If someone is saying that all natural foods can kill cancer, she misunderstands what alternative medicine advocates. So does the person who thinks it’s about auras and crystals.
If alternative medicine meant “unscientific,” I would be in total sympathy with those of you who shun it. But most medical schools now have courses in alternative medicine. Alternative medicine includes such things as nutrition, meditation, yoga, and acupuncture. There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m not a medical person. To dump all of it as being useless goes against the science. I think that it was at Johns Hopkins’ website that I read about how it is a growing trend in medical schools and hospitals.
And I do remember that multiple Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling was a strong advocate of the use of vitamin treatment – the intravenous use of vitamin C in particular. This was really controversial for a long time despite his being a very distinguished scientist. Now progress is finally being made in early stages of testing vitamin C against cancer.
But this is a far cry for just eating natural foods.
From the GQ thread:
Yeah, the last thing Big Pharma would ever want to do is cut down on the incidence of a sexually transmitted virus that leads to a sickness that, in the cases it’s not rapidly lethal, requires expensive treatment and long term monitoring. Especially with a vaccine that would probably only be marketed to the population of highest risk-- heck, I bet there’d be moral backlash from the Religious Right against such a shot, making it even less profitable.
And that’s why there’s no HPV vaccine.
OH WAIT.
Given the medical history he posted, I rather think he’s desperate and suffering from confirmation bias.
All snarkiness aside, I hadn’t even considered that point. You may not remember, but during the early days of the AIDS crisis there was quite an outcry from conservative Christians who saw this disease as God righteously smiting sinful queerboys, and sneered at any attempt to cure or even humanify people who suffer from the virus. We’ve come a long way since then (and rightfully so), but that’s mostly because AIDS has been flying under the radar with little to no new innovations beyond the “cocktail” invented ten years ago – but if an AIDS vaccine was suddenly discovered tomorrow, you better believe these “Moral Majority” retards would come crawling out of the woodwork, and it would be 1983 all over again.
Hmm…does the fact that you (and several others) have no reasonable counter-argument beyond ad hominem attacks allow me to claim moral victory in this thread? Yes…yes, I think it does. 
Remember that Pauling won neither of his Nobel Prizes in medicine. He won for chemistry and the peace prize. He made a study that showed vitamin C to be effective against cancer. His results could not be replicated by the Mayo Clinic. And he died from cancer. All I could see is a premilinary study beginning on the treament. But that just goes to prove KGS wrong. There are people working on these things and there is not a conspiracy to stop it.
Jon Edward.
John Edwards has been doing a whole different crossing over.
no, no it doesn’t.
You can’t use reason to remove someone from a position that they didn’t use reason to get themselves into.
Just because something is popular, doesn’t make it valid. And I wouldn’t qualify nutrition as alternative medicine, since it’s well known that having a healthy diet leads to a healthier life. But I would call it alternative when claims of diet alone doing things like curing cancer, infections, etc…
“Alternative” therapy means “use this instead of what the doctors recommend.”
We already saw that Sloan Kettering has an Integrative Medicine Program. So does M D Anderson Cancer Center. Its Mission:.
Efforts include research into Traditional Chinese Medicine, conducted with doctors in China. (As opposed to the Chinese & Chinese-American doctors already working over here, using “Western” medicine.) Also included–looking at yoga & acupuncture to help deal with the effects of cancer & cancer treatment.
All of this is “in concert with mainstream care.” The idiots who whine that all of these methods are being ignored are–idiots!
First, acupuncture is pure woo, isn’t it? They did a study fairly recently where they had three groups to which they did “proper” accupuncture by a trained accupuncturist, random needle sticking where they just stuck needles all over the body, and fake needles where they used a device that pinched the skin and felt just like a needle, but didn’t actually penetrate the skin - and all three methods had the same result. It’s purely placebo. It’s vitalism woo.
I don’t see how “nutrition” is alternative medicine - it’s probably one of the most commonly discussed things between primary care physicians and their patients. A lot of research and effort goes into the science of nutrition.
Yoga and meditation? I can accept those as things that don’t follow within the typical notion of scientific medicine and still be useful. But you have to wonder - the “alternative” in alternative medicine kind of suggests something you’d do in place of scientific medical treatment, right? So if you’ve forgone antibiotics in lieu of yoga you’re certainly not helping yourself.
The other thing is that if yoga and meditation do have postive results, it can be tested scientifically. If they work, there’s no reason they couldn’t become part of what’s considered science-based medicine.
The funny thing about eastern medicine is that people in China who are becoming middle class and gaining some wealth are grateful that they can now see doctors who practice real scientific medicine. The poor in China still get stuck with traditional treatment simply due to the lack of supply of quality medical care. They must think we’re stupid - we’re awash in actual effective treatment and a lot of us instead choose to chew some bark because it’s an ancient Chinese secret. They’re probably laughing at us.
Just a few things:
First of all, vitamin C is not an especially promising treatment for cancer. Studies have been going on for years, but all we know is that in extremelhy high (intravenous) doses, there is some toxicity to tumor cells in culture, maybe in lab animals, and no convincing evidence at all that it’s a good antitumor agent in humans.
It’s wrong that KGS is the subject of this pitting when Alex Dubinsky is an equally annoying moron. Alex keeps regurgitating crap like “they can make money only on patentable things” when it was pointed out to him in the altie cancer thread (and has no doubt been emphasized to him on other occasions) that there are numerous plant-derived drugs, including chemotherapy drugs like Taxol, that have come into wide use despite altie hand-waving about “Natural Things Can’t Be Patented, So No One Investigates Them!!”. And I’m still waiting for Alex or another of the woo-drones to explain how for years, Stevia advocates complained that a natural sweetener derived from this plant could never be commercially marketed because it wasn’t patentable - only now we see commercial versions like Truvia reaching grocery store shelves. Gee, how could that possibly happen?
Just wait until the full-scale wooist campaign begins to get altie treatments for cancer and other serious conditions covered by federally-mandated health care. We’ll shell out big bucks both for ineffective therapies, then when the patients inevitably worsen, pay again for mainstream treatment to rescue them.
This may not be the best analogy for your cause. It seems that the delay that stevia had to suffer through to get into the US market was indeed influenced by companies like nutrasweet. Stevia may be one of the few examples where a superior product was kept out of the market due to corporate interests. It wasn’t kept out of the US market because it was unpatentable, but because the FDA wouldn’t approve it as a food additive, saying that there was no proof that it was safe when there actually was.
This is my concern too.
Already we’re getting too much government-mandated coverage for therapies that have not been proven effective, like chiropractic.
But politicians respond to voters, not to scientific evidence.