Medicine can cure cancer. It can’t cure all cancers and can’t cure everyone who has any type of cancer, but some cancers have become very treatable. So that’s not accurate. Nutrition is an important factor in health, but I think Kolga’s comments were more directed at people who talk about modern medicine as some kind of dangerous conspiracy to poison everybody. Better nutrition has helped people live longer and so has medical science and simple things like sterilized medical equipment.
You’re saying that medicine cannot cure cancer? Tell that to friends of mine cured of leukemia, breast cancer, etc by chemotherapy.:dubious:
What is the problem that people have with anti-depressants? I finally ‘came out’ to my family about being on them and they were quite concerned.
You know what? I am better now. Good enough that I can actually go to therapy to deal with underlying causes so I can eventually be this normal without the meds.
Without them, life had no joy. Nothing was enjoyable. All I wanted to do was sleep. I didn’t want to be around people. I cried a lot.
But now that I am not in the full grips of my depression, I realize that my life is really good and lots of things are fun. I have remembered how to laugh. I have a full range of emotions again.
I know others have said it before but depression is not being sad. It is not having a negative experience and reacting to it. It is not being able to function. At all. Often for no reason at all.
Yeah, the drugs are a crutch but would you deny a person with a sprained ankle a crutch until they could start healing? They are just another tool.
Absolutely not. Of course good nutrition contributes to longevity. Based on the OP’s posts, however, and given my conversations with others like him, I am assuming he’s one of those “all you need is good food, medicine is irrelevant!” anti-doctor, anti-Western-medicine folk.
Nutrition can’t cure everything, nor can it prevent everything.
Again, I’m not dismissing its role in good health, or its role in longevity. I AM dismissing the claims that Gershon (referenced in the OP) makes which is that conditions such as cancer can be treated completely by raw foods. I am also questioning the claims that the OP is making which is that medicine is 1) overused and 2) unnecessary.
Medicine doesn’t cure cancer? What? Do you mean chemotherapy is not effective in treating cancer, resulting in remissions that are long enough to be labeled “cured”? Seriously, what is YOUR point with this statement? Because it seems to be oddly…inaccurate…given what we know about the history of cancer treatment.
Gershon (referenced in the OP) has a treatment that claims to eliminate cancer completely by only the use of raw foods. That’s what started this whole discussion. The OP was using Gershon in his original post, and Gershon’s treatment is focused on cancer. The OP used the example of Gershon to go on an anti-medicine rant, and later posted that better nutrition was a better treatment than medications. You brought in sanitation in relationship to my statement about longevity.
Thank you, that is indeed my point. Modern medicine is not a plot by “Big Pharma” to get us all hooked on pills instead of eating right and exercising, and the OP’s continued insistence that “doctors NEVER talk about healthy eating and exercise and ALWAYS prescribe pills for EVERYTHING OMG!!!1eleven” annoys me whenever I hear/read it. It’s simply not an accurate statement to make.
Like it or not, there is still a stigma surrounding mental illness. Sometimes have to deal with comments like, “suck it up” “you’re just being dramatic” “there’s nothing really wrong with you” or the notion that depression=weakness or mental illness=crazy. It was something that wasn’t talked about for a long time, and even now some people have a hard time talking about it. I find it a heck of a lot easier to write about it on a message board than to talk about it with people IRL.
My family history is full of alcoholics, addicts, depression and anxiety. They seem to go hand in hand. Instead of becoming an addict or an alcoholic, I chose therapy and medication. Even on the medication, it took a long time to get to the place where I felt good enough about myself to actually confront what my issues were.
For me, the medication was a tool I used until I learned coping skills and how to deal with life without having a emotional meltdown. I have some friends (one with OCD and one with depression/anxiety) who swear they will never go off the meds because they can’t go back to the way they were. Some people will always need a crutch, it’s not my place to determine their needs.
YES! I always hated that metaphor – “oh, those drugs are just a crutch!” How so? Crutches are a legit medical device, right? If you saw a man using crutches for a broken leg, would you yank them away and scream, “WALK ON YOUR OWN!!!” No, of course not. So, in this case, medicine is merely another type of crutch.
And diet and exercise alone, while important, aren’t a treatment for various ailments. Epilepsy, asthma, hemophilia, diabetes (sometimes, not always), schizophrenia – all of them require some kind of medical intervention. Most of them are genetic, and can’t be prevented by diet and exercise, except for some forms of diabetes. (Type 1, can’t from what I understand)
Where would we be without things like vaccinations? We don’t even bother vaccinating for smallpox anymore because it’s so freaking rare.
Or polio – the school nurse at my high school worked with Jonas Salk when he first started vaccinating people for polio. I met people who had polio – one of my professors had had it as an adult, and another was a classmate from Rwanda. He was the same age as me, and yet he had had polio as a child. That’s practically unheard of here.
I had two great-uncles who died as children – one from tetanus after stepping on a rusty nail, and the other from whooping cough. How many people die from tetanus nowadays?
I wonder if the OP has ever had a seizure. If so, he might think twice about his anti-med status.
Well, if you’re going to say that, then I have to say that nutrition cures some cancers too. Some cancers disappear on their own, without medical intervention as a result of being handled by a healthy body’s natural defenses. This has especially been noted with prostate cancer. The PSA test has been deprecated because it led to too many unnecessary surgeries.
Seeing as its true, I am going to say it. Do you have controlled clinical studies showing that nutrition is responsible for some cures in prostate cancer?
I think that’s because many prostate cancers are slow growing and may not require urgent treatment, not because nutrition is better than surgery and radiation at treating them.
I’ve never stated that nutrition is better than surgery. I’ve never stated that nutrition is responsible for curing prostate cancer. The original poster never stated that traditional medicine is useless either. He said, in part “Granted I know some medications are necessary. However I know there are so many natural cures out there but if a doctor dare go against the medical board and practice alternative medicine”
I grant the the OP did not choose the best example to support his position, but I agree with the basic position that American medicine has become overly focused on pharmaceutical treatments and has ignored or ridiculed other simpler, more natural alternatives.
I say American medicine, because places like Germany have a more integrated approach to medicine. In Germany there is book called The Commission E Monographs. It’s a guide to herbal medicines for physicians. It’s the herbal equivalent of the Physicians Desk Reference here. A doctor in Germany can legally prescribe any substance listed in the monograph. This is in stark contrast to the attitudes towards herbal medicines in America. They are all derided as hippie, new age nonsense.
I tend to agree with the view that American medicine has been hijacked by the pharmaceutical companies. I don’t place blame on doctors. I think most doctors are intelligent, well educated professionals who sincerely want the best for their patients. I think the doctors over time have become unwitting victims. They place their faith in a body of knowledge that is no longer a product of unbiased scientific inquiry. It is mostly information funded by the pharmaceutical companies. It has been noted that there are a lot of negative research results that are “missing” from the general body of medical research. This has been determined through statistical analysis. These results are missing because pharmaceutical companies don’t publish them.
So, no. I don’t think doctors are corrupt. I can’t say the same thing about pharmaceutical companies. And I think if you are intelligent and open minded, as many who hang out here impress me as being, you will take greater responsibility for your own health. Which includes a degree of independent research and thought. At least, that’s what I do.
Oh, and that thing about “controlled clinical studies” (double-blind, of course), those studies cost millions of dollars and are typically funded by pharmaceutical companies to support the marketing of a potential billion dollar patented drug. No one would do this for non-patentable things like common herbs. I also think it’s a mistake to totally discount common experience and observation over time. These are thing that scientists are trained to label “anecdotal evidence”. It makes it sound like we should never trust the evidence in front of our face.
You said “nutrition cures some cancers, too,” and I asked for evidence. I’m asking again now.
Drug studies tend to be very expensive, yes. There is nothing inherently expensive about clinical trials. They don’t have to be huge (and in the case of drugs they often are not), they don’t have to be worldwide, and they don’t have to involve expensive products.
They would if they thought there were money in it. And you can patent all kinds of medicines that are based on nature (though you can’t patent an entire naturally growing plant), so this appears to be simply wrong.
You know what they call herbal medicine that’s been proven to work? Medicine. The rest is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri. (Dara O’Briain, can’t link from my phone).
Fact is that lots of herbal medicine just doesn’t work. And I, too, would like some proof that some cancers have been cured with food.
Oh dear me.
If a drug company could show that club moss, ground up and made into pills, had a clinically significant effect on any disease, they would patent the preparation techniques and sell the stuff. And create advertising that they have refined and calibrated the active ingredients, so there is no point in making any club moss tea to treat your gout, because it won’t work as well or as predictably as Clubifex ®.
Where do you think drugs are discovered from?
What is responsible for “spontaneous self remission”? You know, where no drugs have been administered and the cancer just disappears?
I’m not talking about derivatives. Most drugs are derived from something that occurs naturally. I’m talking about whole, natural herbs, plants, etc. Because they are commonly available, and unpatentable, there is no money in it (at least not on the scale that pharmaceutical companies consider worthwhile.
It’s not clear what causes those cases, and unfortunately, they are rare. Are you asserting that diet is responsible for all of them? Some? How do you know?
Yes, there is money in it. Extracts and altered concentrations and genetically modified plants and chemical delivery systems are all patentable.
Fact is that lots of pharmaceutical medicine doesn’t work. It’s been shown that some of the latest anti-depression drugs don’t work any better than a placebo.
Cholesterol lowering drugs don’t affect heart disease (at least not because they lower your cholesterol).
I won’t clutter the post up with citations, but if you can’t find them on your own, I’ll be glad to supply some.
Somehow, these things are still called “medicine”, even when they don’t work. Why is that?
You have no idea how small an amount of money an pharmaceutical company could consider “worthwhile.”
Statins certainly do reduce the risk of heart disease. The data on them is excellent in showing they make a real difference in not only improving the quality of life, but extending it too.
Other cholesterol lowering agents such as niacin & fibrates have not been demonstrated to be effective, and may even be associated with a rise in morbidity and mortality, despite lowering cholesterol.
But the evidence for statins being extremely beneficial is very strong.
[
](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2009/07/alternative_medicine_spending.html)
$33.9 Billion a year in faux placibo medicine yet they won’t do real medications because there is no money in it?
Yes, there is a long and troubling history of this stuff. That doesn’t say much about the effectiveness of plants and herbal medicines, though. Especially when apparently they can’t be studied. :rolleyes:
Shown by who, Mister Rogers? :dubious: