121–130 of 151 posts
A family member of mine was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and told to get her affairs in order. She went on a strict no sugar diet. 5 years later, she has no sign of cancer. Of course, she also had standard surgery and chemo. But I wouldn't be in the least surprised if the no sugar diet slowed the cancer down enough for the chemo/surgery to be more effective.
Ketogenic diets have only proven beneficial for certain brain tumors. What kind of cancer did she have?
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The problem is that medical science today isn't equipped to prove/disprove this kind of medicine. All that would happen if they could convince anyone to even believe the story, which I highly doubt, is one study would be conducted. The scientists would ignore all the diagnosis and individual examination the shaman did, and the study would probably have the participants take a specific amount of a single specific herb…
Exactly. We need a new kind of science that works for living systems. "When you kick a stone the energy for its resulting movement comes from your foot. When you kick a dog..." Complex living systems with scads of "free" energy are not susceptible to the same formal method that revealed and is still revealing Physics. We need a new science.
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So the only kind of "science" that could prove this works is to layer on so many confounding effects and other variables that it'd be impossible to tell what, if anything, is happening. Gee, I wonder why rational people are skeptical of that. And to answer your question, no, I do not believe that alternative health systems "developed" over thousands of years work. If they work, then they're medicine. We only use the…
We have to come up with something rigorous to deal with these sorts of things. Whether you call it "science" or not we still have to come to grips with "weird shit". I know a guy. He's a healer. He can do things that Western science has absolutely no idea about. In point of fact several people who were diagnosed with cancer have worked with him and afterwards were no longer diagnosed with cancer. This is factual. Yet…
Well, no, it's not. From my perspective, this is yet another random anecdote from the Internet. It's no different to me than someone saying they can turn base metals into gold, hear the voice of God directly, or travel to alternate dimensions.
And even from YOUR perspective, you have no idea what's fact and what's not. Apparently this healer is so powerful that your family need not worry about cancer. But I suspect you have little hard evidence of any actual healing, no proposed mechanisms that make any sense, and no ability to reproduce any of this.
The amazing thing about the scientific method is that it gives us a framework to separate claims from reality. If you have a better framework then please share it. But there seems to be little value to a framework built on "I know a guy, trust me." We had that for thousands of years. Health care under such a framework was pretty rough.
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Ryan, there is no magical herb. The gist of treatment was fasting. I have no idea what kind of diet it was. Do you want to know more? I can ask her details and the other guy who survived by sticking to the same diet.
I want to know whether they're dedicating their lives to winning a Nobel prize and saving billions of lives with this magical cure. If not, why not? They had fatal cancers cured in just a few months with no treatment, and then just went back to work and forgot about it? Also, if the essence is fasting, why did they need to go see a shaman in Peru?
I have a feeling that the _magical_ Peruvian cure is based on eating blister beetles, which is a popular treatment in Chinese medicine. Apparently, chemicals these bugs make could be beneficial in treating certain kinds of cancer. There are a few researches going on on that front.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24733674
http://www.academia.edu/1279793/Antitumor_Activity_of_Mylabr...
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Interesting. I ate a can of tuna fish salad a while back. They changed something in the recipe, something made me feel sick in weird and deep ways. For a year, the sight of a similar enough can would trigger nausea back, with cold sweat fear.
As a child I ate some sweet potatoes and not long after was vomiting (some sort of bug), for the next 15 years I felt sick at the thought of eating sweet potatoes and similar vegetables and did not eat any. Now I enjoy them just fine and cook with them, but every time I see one I still remember throwing up as a child.
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Not only that but it is very easy to create a very strong food aversion to whatever you have recently eaten. Your brain connects the very bad nausea that results from the chemo with whatever you last ate. This effect can be so strong that people can never eat that food ever again.
This happens with alcohol, too. I couldn't drink tequila for years after getting so drunk, and so sick from it.
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My mother had lung cancer which spread to other parts of her body. Throughout her sickness, she ate very little, then almost nothing as the disease progressed. By the time of her death, she was practically just skin and bones. "Starving the cancer" didn't seem to work in her case. Then again, chemo also seemed to have zero effect. Cancer just spread, more and more, with each passing month.
That sucks, and I'm sorry. But: chiming in to clarify: it's not "stop eating to starve cancer"; its, "change diet to route energy through metabolic pathways that cancer is disadvantaged for".
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As a child I ate some sweet potatoes and not long after was vomiting (some sort of bug), for the next 15 years I felt sick at the thought of eating sweet potatoes and similar vegetables and did not eat any. Now I enjoy them just fine and cook with them, but every time I see one I still remember throwing up as a child.
I had the same experience with leaf parsley as a kid - my aunt made a broth with a bit more parsley than I was used to, and something - probably unrelated - made me almost vomit then. My brain "connected the dots". From then on, pretty much just seeing leaf parsley would make me nauseous, and I was quite a PITA for the family over that. 10-15 years later, something "clicked" in my head, and now I actually like it in…
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Can you give an example of a disease that responds equally to the same treatment in all people?
I'm not talking about across different people; I'm talking about different types of cancer. The causes and treatments for lymphatic cancers are different from lung cancers are different from breast cancers are different from prostate cancers are different from brain cancers are different from liver cancers, ad infinitum.
That is clearly something that can be targeted in principle (and not the only thing). Whether the "causes" are different is irrelevant. Whether the treatments are different is a choice made by people, and also irrelevant.
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Well there must be some things they all have in common. Anaerobic environment I thought, is that still the case? No transport of oxygen via iron possible, in my layman's memory?
Like saying suffocating in vacuum and suffocating from oxygen substitution in an enclosed space (like by inert gasses) is equal. The causes are different enough that different solutions are necessary.
Anyway, this whole "cancer isn't one disease" meme is best depicted by the bottom right panel of the second section of this comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162
It looks just like the "string theory landscape", next you will be told that we need to stop worrying about comparing predictions to evidence when it comes to cancer research. Just wait a few years/decades.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philo...