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Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

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Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#221

Post by taxicabjesus »

kerkeslager wrote: post #133

Sorry to hear about your friend. Here's a joke: Q: What do you call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine. Seriously though, "bio hacks" are no different. If these things worked, it's very likely they'd just be normal practiced oncology. Oncology isn't a subfield of medicine where researchers are overly cautious about risks. The patient is practically guaranteed to die, so even if your research has a chance of…

The author of this Ask HN is asking because conventional cancer medicine is not good enough. I think cancer dissidents say the screening programs for early treatment makes the doctors look better by increasing the number of non-fatal cases that are “diagnosed”. But most people who die after a certain age all have non-fatal tumors in their bodies…

> Q: What do you call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine

Medicine that doesn’t work is grandfathered in to be called Medicine to. I don’t know how standard harmful treatments get retired from active use.

I mentioned your joke in a comment on a submission about stents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14722748

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#223

Post by RamblingCTO »

y33t wrote: post #183

Don't bother, if you're in a position to do so, help them find a first-class brain surgeon. Get them into Sloan Kettering, Mayo, Duke or OHSU or whoever. Help them look for clinical trials to get chemo past the blood-brain barrier (I've heard some promising things in this area, though I'm not sure if it's being tested on humans yet). If they have a family that's taking care of them, offer to help them. Even just a gr…

Agreed. Maybe look into end of life LSD therapy (https://www.webmd.com/palliative-care/features/facing-death-...) and work on the bucket list. That should be priority #1. #2 can be to try a lot of "out there stuff", but don't forget to live.

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#224

Post by throwaway290 »

adamredwoods wrote: post #179
threeseed wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand unreasonable positions like this. Nobody is saying that people should stop "real" treatments or that diet must be the primary or sole focus for treatment. But given that a change of diet (a) costs nothing, (b) has no downsides, (c) potentially may work it seems strange not to do it.

And yet it is a highly focused topic and cancer rates have not gone down.

Are keto diet/lifestyle changes/etc actually used by doctors for cancer treatment? Even if those were effective you can't expect cancer rates to go down until they get deployed massively

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#225

Post by aetherspawn »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #182
aetherspawn wrote: post #24

My mother has “frozen” breast cancer for 15 years using oral bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis). To give you the short version of the story about how it works for HER: taking bloodroot causes the cancer to shrink too small to take a biopsy, but not go into remission, and when she stops taking it per the doctors advice, it gets very large and they start talking about surgery. Nobody really understands how it works and…

About Sanguinaria canadensis, Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanguinaria Although limited laboratory research indicates potential for sanguinarine to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, there are no supportive clinical studies, and its use is discouraged due to adverse effects and potential toxicity.

It has been used by native Americans to treat cancer for a very long time but YMMV. It has worked for us.

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#227

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mllev wrote: post #213
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> guess hope can be false now "Hope is false if it is based on ignorance of the correct assessment of the probability that a desire is fulfilled or on ignorance with regard to the desirability of the object of desire. Hope is justified—realistic—when the hoping person knows and accepts experts’ judgement about the probability of hope fulfillment. However, I argued, what matters for evaluating a person’s hope is not o…

I agree that the probability of a desired outcome is valuable information. But to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language. Hope is hope. It’s quite proven that believing a certain outcome is likely increases the likelihood of that outcome.

> to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language

False hope is still a form of hope in the same way a red car is still a car.

And it’s useful to delineate it. Hope is rooted in expectation. When we watch a film about a fraudster, the dramatic irony arises from the audience knowing the rube is being played even while the rube is quite hopeful. We may conclude it’s better for the victim to live in false hope. But again, it’s useful to understand it’s a hope that’s false (and that someone is making that decision for them).

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#228

Post by d--b »

y33t wrote: post #183

Don't bother, if you're in a position to do so, help them find a first-class brain surgeon. Get them into Sloan Kettering, Mayo, Duke or OHSU or whoever. Help them look for clinical trials to get chemo past the blood-brain barrier (I've heard some promising things in this area, though I'm not sure if it's being tested on humans yet). If they have a family that's taking care of them, offer to help them. Even just a gr…

See the problem with this disease is that the general treatment is shit.

With two inoperable tumors the chances that chemo and radiation alone do anything more than giving him a week or two are zero.

So in that respect, going to a first-class brain surgeon is no less a moonshot than any other bio hacks I can find online.

You're just recommending the "most-accepted" moonshot.

Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?

#230

Post by youngtaff »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #191
lambdaphagy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a practical example, grapefruit juice contains some compounds that inhibit CYP3A4, a metabolic enzyme that influences the metabolism and absorption of many drugs, which is why many prescriptions tell you not to drink it while taking a given medication. This interaction was not discovered until 1989, and not reported until two years after that. So before 1991, a simple dietary intervention that affected like h…

Is it juice specifically that should be avoided? What about grapefruit in solid form? Pomelo?

All grapefruit… my wife has clear instructions on this for her heart meds
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