There is no time to wait for alternative cancer therapy to work err… fail

The reason that this blog came to be is the existence of cancer quackery, sometimes called alternative cancer treatments.

Many websites including this blog explain what is wrong with alternative cancer treatments and why they are dangerous and there are horrible examples of what happens to patients who chose to forgo conventional treatment and opt for some kind of alternative treatment instead. But the internet is littered with testimonials touting the successes of miraculous alternative cancer cures that are often claimed to be suppressed. Such testimonials can be very persuasive, especially if the reader/video viewer is afraid and not aware of what to look for, so it is no wonder that people get confused.

Health Ranger Mike Adams And The Death of Steve Jobs

As was to be expected, it didn’t take Mike Adams long to inform the world of the cause of Steve Job’s death. It was of course, as it always is, conventional cancer treatments – chemotherapy and radiation in particular – and not cancer, for in Mike Adams’s world-of-miracles-that-never-happen, there is no such thing as dying from cancer.

The Curious Case Of Hollie Quinn And Her Miraculous Cancer Cure

Through a tweet by Blue Wode, who runs the brilliant website ebm-first, I learned of Hollie Quinn and her miraculous cancer cure.

At 27, Hollie Quinn was pregnant with her first child when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an article on the Huffington Post we are told that Hollie Quinn decided to decline conventional cancer care and treat her cancer with alternative treatments only. And successfully so, for she is still alive and healthy to this day, eight years later. To inspire other cancer patients, she and her husband wrote a book about her extraordinary experience.

Extraordinary indeed. 

Letting Go – What Medicine Should Do When it Can’t Save Your Life

In an important article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes about what medicine should do when it can’t save your life:

Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.

In his article, Atawande asks the most important question of all: when is enough enough?

Studies find that although doctors usually tell patients when a cancer is not curable, most are reluctant to give a specific prognosis, even when pressed. More than forty per cent of oncologists report offering treatments that they believe are unlikely to work […..] We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something.

Read Letting Go

Do Doctors Refuse Chemotherapy On Themselves?

While there is no truth in the claim that doctors refuse chemotherapy on themselves, on almost every website dedicated to the promotion of alternative cancer treatments it says that most – if not all – doctors on principle would refuse chemotherapy on themselves because of its high toxicity and ineffectiveness. Yet these same doctors are said to be perfectly happy to pour this poison into their patients – merely for profit, as is the standard insinuation.

The basis for these shocking and deceitful allegations is this excerpt from a book by Philip Day:

Cancer Metastasis According to the Gospel of Tony Isaacs on Curezone

Doll made of liver cancer cells

Many proponents of alternative medicine claim that surgical removal of cancer is very dangerous because it will cause the cancer to spread. Therefore, they strongly advise against any kind of surgery in case of cancer.

On Tony Isaacs’s Curezone, a forum member is asking advice on how to treat advanced liver cancer. The patient in question – the forum member’s mother – has previously undergone surgery. But according to Tony Isaacs it is precisely surgery that causes cancer to metastasize:

Science and Compassion: Compassionate Use for Cancer

Through my twitter I came across an article in the New York Times about a problem that many mainstraim doctors and patients are faced with.

The article is about doctors bending the rules of clinical trials in order to get patients enrolled in clinical trials for which they would otherwise not qualify.

Stephen Serenelli’s Scientology Cancer Diet Experience: Read It And Weep

On October 26, 2004, Stephen Serenelli died of bowel cancer.

Initially he was treated conventionally, but under the strong influence of his wife Eileen and Ian Shillington, a naturopathic doctor and Scientologist, he decided to follow alternative treatments only.

The alternative treatments made him feel weak and miserable and resulted in his tumour becoming inoperable. This almost certainly shortened his life considerably and seriously compromised his quality of life. The fact that the alternative treatments wore him out so much may have decreased his survival time even more.

Shortly before his death, Serenelli wrote a letter to his ND Ian Shillington. Serenelli also kept a diary during his illness.

Psychological Trauma, Stress, Cancer and German New Medicine: Time to Move on, Mr Hamer!

De-licensed German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer claims he can cure cancer without surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.

He states that cancer is always caused by an (unexpected) emotionally traumatic event – which he calls a “biological conflict” and the only way to cure it is by solving this “conflict” through a special protocol of his own invention.

It isn’t exactly rocket science to establish that he is very wrong, both about the cause of cancer and the best way to treat it.

If  Hamer is right, then cancer and emotional trauma are always causally related. But science shows that this is not the case:

ECCO (European CanCer Organisation) Conference: results

The ECCO is Europe’s oldest and largest scientific conference on cancer and currently the ECCO 15 – ESMO 34 in Berlin is in full swing.

Here’s a short overview of some of the main highlights.