http://www.topicalinfo.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1302
:eek:Make sure to scroll down for the pictures, and people are telling her good job! Later one she starts taking the toxic black salve internally and ends up in the ER, after it burned off her nose so badly she needs reconstructive surgery.
:eek:
What the hell kind of quack site is that?
One of their forums, with a description:
Sounds like somebody who started out having cancer and actually managed to make it worse.
I was compelled to read the entire first page, especially after the first pic was posted. I have mixed feelings. The nose was biopsied after the thing fell off and the edges granulated in somewhat, and the carcinoma was gone. Yes, she’s still crazy and still needs reconstructive surgery, but the cancer was gone. I don’t know what to make of it. Still, crazy woo, IMO, but what really happened??
Sweet jumping Jesus :eek:
Looks like the salve theoretically is supposed to burn off/out the tumor instead of going to a doctor and having him cut the tumor out/off. Can I say OUCH!
I really don’t understand people who want to treat stuff like that without going to see a doctor.
That’s what’s so nutso about the OP of that thread, though. She did see a doctor, and had the nose biopsied and diagnosed properly, and had a history of another carcinoma on her lip that she had gotten proper medical treatment for. And she still opted to use this stuff on her nose instead. Plus a lesion on her forehead that she didn’t get biopsied at the same time as the nose (why wouldn’t a sane person test both??) and assumed it was another carcinoma she decided to treat herself at the same time.
But still, after disfiguring herself, the carcinoma was indeed gone, at least as far as followup biopsies could tell. What the hell.
And who are these people with multiple recurrences of carcinomas? Are they just prone to them after the first one or are they ignoring further sun damage prevention?
It could be they’re just prone to them, no “after the first one” about it. You don’t get any type of cancer without having the genes linked to it; someone who has had carcinoma once is known to have a carcinoma-linked gene, but has no more probability of getting one than before he got the first. Also, it may be that they were actually different types of carcinoma (which may be linked to the same gene or not).
And worse still: the carcinoma on her lip left her a tiny, barely visible scar, while the “black salve” dissolved her nose. Next time, she says, she’ll just use a little less.
The world does not contain enough :smack::smack::smack:
Truly stomach-turning. The cognitive dissonance to post a picture of the gaping open wounds on your face, and say “note the (little bitty) scar on my lip before I realized there were alternatives” boggles the mind…
And somehow that chemical/drug is natural, but the doctor’s chemical/drug is suspect?
“Black salve” containing bloodroot is actually quite popular with a subset of alt med advocates who disdain “allopathic” medicine. In accordance with the principle of crank magnetism, devotees typically embrace other forms of quackery. For instance, the Australian (Anti-) Vaccination Network was ordered by government officials to stop promoting black salve on its website and to post a retraction (which it failed to do).
Promoters of this stuff claim it only burns away cancerous tissue and leaves healthy tissue alone (clearly untrue - it destroys all tissue - for more horrific photos if you have the stomach for it, see the Quackwatch entry on black salve).
While the disfigurement people inflict on themselves is highly troubling, even worse is that people using black salve have no way of knowing if they’re burning off all the tumor, or leaving behind microscopic bits that can recur or metastasize (such problems have been reported in the scientific literature for tumors including melanoma). There’s a reason surgeons submit biopsies for frozen section or other pathologic evaluation - if skilled practitioners can’t tell if they’ve removed all the tumor, how are people Burning Off Cancers At Home In Their Spare Time supposed to know?
You can’t convince the pro-black salve crowd of the risks they’re taking (and I’ve tried in online discussions). They think they’re putting one over on mainstream medicine. But whatever money they save on simple excisional biopsies is likely to be made up many times over by physicians who have to do plastic surgery repairs of self-disfigurement, or more complex surgical and medical interventions to treat those whose cancers have recurred or metastasized.
Sort of like cutting off your nose to spite…doctors. Yikes.
Oh, yeah, let’s rub something highly corrosive into facial skin, that couldn’t possibly go wrong… Sure, it killed the cancer, it killed everything it touched!
Looks like she could buy most of what she needed at her local grocery store. Kind of like John Connor making pipe bombs in Terminator 2, and we all remember how that turned out for him.
Yep, it’s like getting small burn on the tip of a finger and amputating the whole hand rather then running it under cold water for a while.
In the 19th Century and earlier this sort of stuff made some sense, it was the only treatment they had for skin cancers and the like, but holy shit it leaves burn scars! Even back then, you were probably better off with a doctor applying it, the doc being a more objective third party and hopefully having some experience with how much to use and how.
These days? Go for allopathic medicine. For basal cell skin cancers the cure rate is better than 95% and they’ll cause a lot less scarring.
Does black salve also makes you stoic? Because there’s no way I would have had the state of mind to write all those posts and take those photos.
I wonder if they were really her. In theory she could have grabbed them from another site and post her own made up story.
She just seemed to nonchalant about the whole thing.
The logic- that black salve only worked on cellulose (like a plant cell wall) and since cancer cells were like fungus, which is kind of like a plant, regular cells wouldn’t be harmed- just made my head spin.
So much wrong- from cancer not being like a fungus and even if it was, fungal cell walls aren’t made of cellulose… arggh.
The picture on the Quackwatch page about black salve is even worse!
Here are a couple of grim case histories involving people who treated themselves with black salve.