Not to hijack my own thread, but since we seem agreed on the merits of treating cancer with dietary changes, what do you make of my arguing technique, that of asking my friend to select the strongest of his “millions” of websites promoting dietary treatments, rather than looking through all of them myself (as if that were possible), and then scrutinizing that one website carefully myself?
To me, that seems both efficient and respectful but my friend dismisses it as laziness on my part. Or something–I’m confused why he doesn’t accept my response as valid, so I’ll ask if you see a problem with that that I’m not seeing.
Your friend is waving his arms and insisting that his views are correct through sheer supporting volume. No one has sufficient time (or inclination) to wade through tons of online crap, so he “wins” by default.
If he is unwilling to summarize what these sites are saying or point to a comprehensive review of them that backs him up, then he’s the lazy one.
Once your friend has decided that fact-free copycat advocacy for [whatever] in the name of personal profit constitutes valid evidence that [whatever] is true, your friend has decided to quit thinking critically, and simply to believe whatever is most comforting to his tastes.
You can’t argue with that; it’s not an arguable situation. You can accept it silently then walk away, or loudly laugh and point then walk away. But for your own sake, walk away before the nuttiness infects you too.
Well, he thinks he logicked himself into it, but maybe we should end this hijack here, maybe open up a separate thread in MPSIMS dealing with my old pal’s conundrum, since this subject doesn’t seem very factual. Thanks for the feedback.
Colds will absolutely go away if you eat nothing but french fries.
On a more serious note, when my brother was receiving chemotherapy for brain cancer, they wqrned his wife that certain helthy foods (I forget what) contained substances that would neutralize the poisons in the chemo.
I don’t have a problem with this thesis, apart from “Who sez?” and “Which ones?”, though I’d still argue that mitigating side-effects of cancer treatments is not cancer treatment. Otherwise, morphine would be considered a treatment for cancer.
Probably for the same reason that you shouldn’t eat grapefruit with many drugs - it affects the processing of the drug in the small intestine:
Many drugs are broken down (metabolized) with the help of a vital enzyme called CYP3A4 in the small intestine. Grapefruit juice can block the action of intestinal CYP3A4, so instead of being metabolized, more of the drug enters the blood and stays in the body longer. The result: too much drug in your body.
Let’s make sure we’re communicating accurately. Your comment makes me suspicious that you’ve misunderstood @Hari_Seldon’s point.
His post says that there are some chemotherapy meds that are rendered unusually ineffective by certain foods taken concomitantly.
That does NOT make those food cancer treatments. It makes them anti-treatments that sabotage actual scientifically proven-to-be-effective standard treatments.
That also does not make those foods cancer promoters as such. Absent concurrent chemotherapy, you can eat them without effect pro- or con- on your tumors. But by sabotaging certain administered cancer inhibiters, the net effect can be that they help cancer progress towards worse in the face of attempted treatment.
Well, I took “the poisons” to mean the stuff in chemo that you DON’T want, not the stuff you do. Usually, “poison” has a negative connotation and “medicine” a positive one.
A large fraction of chemotherapy drugs are discovered as simply a matter of looking for poisons that are slightly more deadly to fast reproducing cells than the others, and then working out a dose that is just short of killing you, in the hope that, in the margin, the cancer cells die. Hence how brutal chemo can be. It is a very fine line to work out how to target those cells in you that are your own cell line, but have just gone off the rails, versus the healthy ones. Things like antioxidants taken with chemo in an effort the feel less beaten up may simply help the cancer cell ride out the onslaught. In a curious way, the worse the side effects of chemo, the more good it may be doing. Not that I would use that as a metric of success.
There are more nuanced drugs that are a bit more targeted, but the overall principle is usually pretty much the same. There are more fine tuned drugs, but the cancers they target are also much more fine tuned. You might be lucky and such a drug is useful, but the blunderbuss approach is still where a lot of treatment is at.
Anecdotal:
A friend, MD, said that medical treatments haven’t really changed all that much, apart from antibiotics and vaccines, throughout history - poison or cut away the thing that is bad. Modern medicine has better knives and better poison, but the general approach is still the same.
Where would immunotherapy fit into this? Or medications and treatments that stimulate cellular growth, sensitize cells to particular substances, or release/regulation of hormones or other endogenous substances?
ETA: That said, cancer treatment seemed very “stone knives and bearskins.”
Re: changing pH of body. AFAIK, the only situation where that works is right inside your stomach - for a very short time, and your bladder.
For example taking large amounts of Vitamin C - ascorbic acid - it’ll go straight through into your urine, making it much more acidic.
Can help against bacterial infections, I’ve read.
(OTOH, the reason why lab mice got cancer when stuffed full of saccharine apparently was that their urine is so acidic that the stuff crystalized and constantly cut the cells, so maybe you shouldn’t turn your pee acidic for a long time…)