Feh, I am hardcore “no-sugar, careful carbs” in my day to day life and (aside from the coke), I don’t think it’s an awful start for a hospital lunch. A wrap and apple is a fine lunch for someone of normal dietary needs, though I’d hope there were veggies on the wrap or otherwise available.
But including a cookie? When you’re in the hospital for cancer, there are more important things to worry about than one or two hundred junk calories. Morale matters tremendously when fighting an illness, and for good or ill, most people feel a lot better about eating an unfamiliar cafeteria lunch if there’s a treat along with it. Heck, even keeping soft drinks on hand as an option makes some sense to me-- someone who enjoys them in their “normal” life might well be comforted by being able to have them in the hospital.
There are some hospitals that have truly assinine dietary oversight, but while the basic description doesn’t sound like super fighter-camp power health lunch, it also doesn’t sound especially worthy of condemnation, especially since it’s going to be served to people who may well be dealing with nausea and anxiety and who just want to pick at something yummy and familiar.
Anecdotally, the human body is more mysterious than maybe western science gives it credit for. IIRC there are studies where just a positive minset can make for faster recovery times.
Not that I entirely subscribe to wholistic healing, either. Some of that stuff about the balance of humors is a little too pre-Enlightenment hand-wavy for me.
I subscribe to the pragmatic school of medicine - I’ll be popping my vitamins, burning my incense, aligning my crystals, and sending up prayers to any sympathetic deities, but if my doctor writes me a scrip for something then I’m gonna be taking that, too (and if he says that I’d better stop any of the above to minimize bad drug interactions then I’m listening to him first; after all, he went to medical school and I didn’t!).
Personally, I’m just looking for the Whole Foods Market that is as cheap as normal grocery stores. Around here it is literally (yes, I mean that word) 1-1/2 to THREE times as expensive for the same natural stuff as Trader Joe’s.
That may be, but it’s even more mysterious than what “eastern science” gives it credit for. I don’t know why people seem to think that just because a treatment is “old,” or “Chinese,” or “used by the natives people of [blank],” that is is somehow automatically more valid than modern medicine. (and why is modern medicine always called “western medicine/science?” It just really grinds my gears that people will force real science and medicine to jump through as many hoops as possible to prove its efficacy, and even then is looked at with a suspicious glance, while anything old, ancient, and from the far east is given a free pass and considered perfectly fine to use.
Actually, I don’t think there are. In the pit thread I linked to earlier, KarlGrenze linked to a study that showed no positive correlation between “good vibes,” a cheery disposition, etc…
Okay, let’s see…the AIDS cocktail costs $10,000 to $12,000 per year. The typical AIDS cocktail patient can survive for…20 years? 30? 50? Who knows? The disease isn’t that old yet. But AIDS generally afflicts young adults, so we’re talking a potential lifetime of consistent income.
An AIDS vaccine would cost…how much? $50 to $100 would be my guess (any more than that, and the drug companies would be accused of price gouging.) Plus you’ve got the very loud & obnoxious anti-vax crowd to deal with, so you’re NOT going to get 100% sell-through…perhaps only those people at high risk for catching the illness, and maybe not even all of them. Sure, you’ll get moral props for eradicating one of the most feared and deadliest viruses in human history, but that sort of accolade doesn’t always prop up the bottom line. From the viewpoint of a multinational corporation in a capitalistic economy, the numbers don’t add up – it’s clear which procedure produces maximum profit.
Are you aware that there are other sources of funding that pharmaceutical compagnies ? What about your NIH, for instance ? Here in Europa, a lot of research projects are funded by the European admisnistration. These are generally 5 millions euros projects, and no industrial applications or patents are expected.
For the anecdote, I remember having dinner with one ‘project manager’ for the European comission, who was monitoring our own project and was partially responsible for funding us (Yes, I was in such a project, it was about the brain, it never produced anything but totally basic research, and we got two times 5 millions). The wife of this person was the typical only-bio-food-no-chemistry-alternative person. He would obviously have been delighted to provide tenths of millions to someone who could prove that a miraculous alternative cure to cancer exists.
You can criticize doctors and the scientific method and the evil drug compagnies as much as you want, but come on ! You can’t have a miracle treatment curing tenths of thousands of people without anyone noticing it, or with everyone closing their eyes. A formal scientific proof requires carefully controlled trials which are difficult and expensive to perform in humans, indeed. But if you have a pool of 10.000 miracle healings, don’t worry, you WILL be able to publish it. Not as a proof, but as an observation (scientists don’t spend all of their time making controlled trials, they do also sometime go in the field and look at what happens around. If they come back with something interesting, they publish it).
And if you can find all of these people on yahoo, then it means that any student can gather evidence and publish it in a matter of years, which means that you don’t need 20 millions but a simple PhD grant. And there are countless little fundations that would finance this without an hesitation.
So, please don’t stick to the image of the monolithic, totally close minded, half blind and money-dominated scientific community. This is not how things are.
Sure. I’m even sure that they have a miracle pill which makes you immortal and disease-free forever, and which costs $10. But they wouldn’t tell, would they ?
By my count, brooklynn, your new treatment has had you cancer-free for less time (a few months) than your initial round of radiation and surgery (4 years). You have a very odd way of measuring success, it seems.
Float over to the Pit thread and you’ll find my valuable essay explaining why you are missing the concept…
The concept you are missing is that it’s much more lucrative for Corporation A to own a vaccine or a cure than it is (from Corporation A’s standpoint) for Corporation B to own an ameliorating drug. There is no backroom cabal of evil people controlling who develops what; it’s dog eat dog in the corporate and academic worlds, and every single one of them has tremendous financial and glory incentives to find effective vaccines and curative medication.
Please stop propagating utterly unsubstantiated drivel in GQ. If you just have an opinion of how “multi-national corporations” are thwarting a cure for AIDS to produce “maximum profit” post it in IMHO unless you have some facts. I find it exceedingly annoying to come to GQ and find this sort of distracting nonsense posted here. I don’t care if your personal world-view is driven by movies and conspiracy paranoia, but it doesn’t belong here.
Some folks are so wedded to their hypotheses that their minds are impervious to evidence. They become quite frustrating to engage. Kudos to you and KarlGauss and others for holding forth on the actual evidence out there, to counterbalance the claims of conspiracy.
That sort of drivel doesn’t belong in GQ. There are plenty of other forums here where one can carry on with that sort of thing.
One of the big problems with this kind of argument is that it assumes things that aren’t reasonable.
Oncologists, and their families, and their friends, get cancer too. In order to believe in this theory that there is an easy, cheap, “all-natural” cure for cancer that works better than conventional treatment, one has to believe that all the oncologists are allowing their families, and friends, and themselves, to die of cancer just so the big pharmaceutical companies can make money. And keep it all a deep, dark secret.
Does this sound reasonable to anyone? Would you do that?
Although he has a point in that if company A did have a very profitable cocktail for long term treatmant, they might not want to compete with themselves in developing a vaccine. However, there is no reason why their competitor “B” would not want to develop said vaccine and thus make more $ for themselves. B has no motive to see A keep making big bux.:rolleyes:
brooklynn,here’s a cancer cure you’ll love. “Doc” Simoncini says it’s only a fungus, can be cured with baking soda, and he has testimonials to prove it. But since baking soda is cheap (except when Simoncini administers it), no one is told about it. Guess Arm & Hammer doesn’t have much of an ad budget.
But now that you know, I’ll have to run for my life.
I thought I’d put in my 10 cents worth. I’m a believer of both science and natural healing, hey, some of the best “new modern medicines” come from natural substances (Im thinking bread fungus/ penicilin)
I have 2 main points:
Point 1.
Arguing that anecdotal evidence is somehow a “bad evidence” is flawed. People in the 16th century (and even in ancient times) believed that chewing the bark of the Willow tree cured their headaches… It wasn’t until modern times that scientists found a similarity in acetylsalicylic acid (in the bark) and aspirin. Not agreeing with the OP wholly rejecting modern science, but maybe these alternative treatments have some “unfound” grounding.
Point 2.
This regarding doctors being “paid” to prescribe medicines for ailments. Well, at least in Australia untill a few years back, doctors were giving patients prescriptions to medicines from companies that sponsored them - this medicine was almost always more expensive than the cheaper generic medicine. This practice was common (it’s been documented), untill the goverment made it law that chemists had to ask if a patient wanted the cheaper generic medicine.
This is an interesting point, and contrary to what Chronos accuses me of “bragging about committing suicide and publicly urging others to do the same”, I would actually recommend that anyone with either of those cancers go get the standard treatment, as it appears to work for most people. In my case however, it obviously did not work as is evidenced by the cancers return, and then this new cancer.
Something to note on this topic though is that all these cancers ‘have a high success rate’ until they don’t. Ie. since your oncologist has nothing at his disposal besides the big three (radiation, chemo and surgery), if your cancer does not ‘respond’ the same way other people with similar ‘high success rate’ cancers, they simply give you more and more treatment, even though it’s clearly not working - until you die.
That is exactly what happened with my uncle: he had the same ‘high success rate’ cancer as me (thyroid) but for whatever reason it just didn’t have the high success rate. So they gave him more radiation, more surgery… until he died.
As for the delayed effect, I suppose anything’s possible, though it’s not typically how chemo works - there’s a 5 day injection cycle, and then it has 21 days to do it’s magic, then they do it again.
Musicat
I don’t understand what your asking for here? You want me to submit my case to some doctors and then when it gets published I should post a link to it?
Again, if doctors believe what I’m saying, there would be no thread!
Pharmaceutically produced, peer reviewed, clinically tested drug are routinely yanked from the shelves of your local Rite-aid because that process is a bunch of BS too. Including many high profile ones with a death count numbering in the thousands. When Pfizer is paying for the holy ‘clinical review’ they usually get exactly what they’re looking for - this fact too has been researched and proven.
This happens all day long, so basically, when people discover some herb that’s been curing people for a thousand years, just because nobody can patent it and thus did not sponsor a $200m clinical study, it does not mean it’s bogus - and the inverse - just because some drug company with billions of dollars paid some researchers to ‘study’ the drug it doesn’t mean the drug is worth shit either.
Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor
I did do the basics first, and they did not work.
And trust me, there’s nothing I’d rather be eating then a porterhouse and fries washed down with a coke.
detop
I to have had some pretty shady experiences with alternative therapists which is why I opted to figure it out myself.
Just on a funny note, sorry, real funny, turns out that snake oil is actually an extremely potent and powerful anti-cancer agent that’s only now being discovered! Maybe if all of us wouldn’t have been laughing at them all this time because the doctors said so, we’d have some real treatments sooner!
Chief Pedant
First off, thank you for being of the level-headed people in this discussion.
You have a great point about the specifics of my timeline and all that, but obviously, this discussion is more in the abstract. I did not learn these ‘witches brews’ and such from my local shaman, I read it from books and research that have been gathered from all over the world. Almost all of the alternative therapies, and there are many, have specific instructions that are in fact very easily implementable and have thousands of people that used it successfully, this is why they have a following and they are used all over the world.
It’s really easy to say ‘well since they’re anonymous posters on some yahoo group’ or their ‘cases haven’t been peer-reviewed so it’s only anecdotal’, in reality, I find it hard to believe that all these people that have followed these protocols are misguided and their cancers disappeared spontaneously.
The reason my regimen looks the way it does is because pause believe it or not, I’m a bigger skeptic then all of you (which is why I subscribe to the Straight Dope) and so I couldn’t decide which of these I was less skeptical of … so I did all 8 top contenders at once!
This is simply not true: as I said before, since they won’t listen to anything that’s not clinically proven, and un-patentable alternative medicines have nobody to sponsor their trials. It is very likely that there are thousands of substances that are known to cure a plethora of diseases that simply haven’t been clinically proven yet so doctors don’t acknowledge them!
Out of the 100+ chemo drugs, quite a few are actually based on what was ‘alternative’ medicine – until someone did clinical trials and then they became ‘chemo’. So if we were having this conversation about one of those chemo drugs 20 years ago, what is now a ‘chemo’ drug, would be ‘alternative’ and it would be shunned by oncologists everywhere the same way what I am presenting is being shunned now!
And a note about doctors, I know everyone loves lumping me in with every quack alternative hippe whole foods shopping stereotype, I do not have anything negative to say about doctors - I have tremendous respect for people that dedicate their lives to helping others - misguided or not. I have friends that are doctors and they are not brainwashed - they are simply ‘educated’ a certain way.
And finally, there are a lot of doctors, and most are noble people - but there are many, many, many cases of doctors being influenced and bribed successfully for the will of industry. After all, they are just people.
First of all, congrats! How long’s it been?
Second, the regimen I posted is not simply ‘eating a balanced diet’, there’s mountains of science to each and every aspect.
I never meant to imply some vast conspiracy, I do not believe that, they simply have not been trained to deal with anything that’s not approved by the ACS.
Alex Dubinsky
Thank you… though I went through just about every argument on this post with… I don’t know… just about every friend and family member when I started on this path… even got the suicide shpeil once or twice
This is absolutely true: hydrogenated oils were a miracle of science – until years later when science caught up to itself and realized that it’s actually extremely dangerous (somehow it’s still in food). This is a neverending cycle - The human body is such a complex system that narrowing food down to calories and a drug’s efficacy to ‘clinical trials’ is ridiculous.
You want proof: the more scientific our food supply and medicine becomes the fatter and sicker we all get. Look around you, how many people do you know under 50 with diabetes, with cancer.
Chronos
Bravo! Excellent post… a little irony, some bold words… great job!
Bump
I believe this will be the case soon as cancer incidence continues to climb - but so far, the insurance companies can cover all these costs, and they just listen to the doctors, and the doctors only listen to clinical studies… and the cycle continues…
Sugar creates insulin which feeds cancer: coke has what, 34 grams of sugar a can? When your recovering from a disease, your body needs more vitamins and minerals to counteract the damage that the chemo is doing and certainly doesn’t need fried meat to be keeping their digestive system churning. That lunchbox might be ok for a normal person - but not someone who has an IV getting metal salts in the other arm.
I only mentioned it as one of the many indicators I observed that tipped me off to ineptitude of the cancer care industry - and because someone mentioned that doctors give nutritional advice (apparently not to their catering department)
Wendell Wagner
I said in my initial post ‘I’m a 27 year old male dealing with cancer since I’m 21’, I’m sorry if I haven’t been bedridden and hairless for the last 6 years, but I’ve been fighting cancer nonetheless.
Your assessment is right, however, one of main differences in the alternative vs. western approach is that all cancers are essentially the same - this is why the regimen I used is not specific to any type of cancer. From what I understand, western cancer treatments are tailored to specific cancers because they ‘trick’ the cancer into killing themselves as opposed to the my regimen which strengthens the bodies own system to the point where it can wrestle back control.
And voila, this is the crux of my thread: I understand why the treatment is the way it is, but then in my case, since they see it is not responding they should have discussed alternatives, and they didn’t.
You say by luck, I say, by following tried and true treatments that many others have found success with.
(which is why I subscribe to the Straight Dope) and so I couldn’t decide which of these I was less skeptical of … so I did all 8 top contenders at once!