Purely physical fitness is not the only parameter natural selection optimizes for. If it were, human babies would be born functional, like most other creatures.
There’s a relationship between r/K type[1] and body size, resting heart rate, length of gestation cycle, length of time from birth to reproduction, parental rearing duration or presence, and more. Very interesting to me, though it doesn’t say much about humans relating to other humans. I also believe this theory has been criticized, and I don’t mean to advocate for it, but to raise awareness about how statistics give power to test our science as well as our intuitions, when it is used properly.
No, one cannot. Modern medicine is part of our environment. Failure to make use of it is a failure to adapt to the current environment which lessens the disadvantage of individuals with higher risk of cancer, who may have other advantages letting them thrive in this environment.
I hate these cynic comments. There are always people involved that knew about his situation lied to him, took his money for fake cures and fake diagnosis. Every one of them should face charges and be forbidden to see patients. This quack bullshit is insanely huge here in Germany and while it's true that in the end it's up to the patient to make the call, most of these quacks build up a relationship and gain trust and then sell their bogus cure with a huge margin. I had a roommate in her 20ies spending 5000+ euros because one of them told her she had heavy metal poisoning - I told her to see a regular doctor and she likely couldn't talk to me if that would be the case (she was fine, just gullible).
Fuck everyone that does this. These are plain criminals in my view. There are tons of problem with the medical system and pharma biz, I'm not cheering for them but the alternative is often way worse and outright dangerous for a lot of people.
It was a revelation to me to hear also about homeopathy being followed in Germany. Forgive the generalization, and perhaps the usual mistake of stereotyping, but I thought Germans prided themselves on logic and efficiency. Are there reasons or demographic aspects to this buy-in?
I don't know about reasons, but I don't think it's a "the people are stupid" thing. My private insurance covers homeopathy, the public ones do not. I asked them to just drop that and save me 10 bucks, but they wouldn't and said they don't claim it works, but many of their members do like it, and those were mostly civil servants, lawyers, journalists etc.
A friend of mine in medicine had a different perspective on it, his stance is basically that as long as they redirect the actual cases to the actual doctors, homeopathy is fine. It keeps the people who really just want somebody to talk to out of the doctor's offices and they will find help there, because the real doctor doesn't have time to do psycho-therapy light with them. At least from personal experience (my mother believes in it as well), it works. She knows very well what problems call for a doctor and what are okay to try homeopathy on.
I can only give you my take on it and I might be quite a bit off with it but here we go:
It's good buisness and that's why it's popular. In germany (at least in the west, in the GDR no such thing existed) there is a special job below a physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilpraktiker
These are hugely popular, you can become one pretty fast with just taking a test (they basically test that you are able to know when to call the real doctor) and all of them I've known make their money with quack cures.
Pharmacies also making good money selling and advertising that stuff because of higher margins.
Also real physicans have very tight budget limits since a few years back - if you have a problem that's not a broken leg the physican can't get money for talking with you - or it's something like 20€/3months without further diagnosis. So people - especially middle aged, rather high educated (not scientists but usally buerocrats, teachers, etc.pp) are very prone to this. Also the anti-vaccination movement is i.e. popular not in the poor parts in Berlin but instead where the well educated, good earning people are living.
Take the rise of the internet where you can read up almost everything and convince yourself that you have superiour knowledge and probably a healthy dose of skepticism against anything "non natural" whatever that means...
But there are real economic incentives that make this popular and even major parties are in support of this (Green pary for example).
There is a movement to fix the payment of doctors and reform the medical system to better accomendate for the patients and forbid this insanity but it works well enough as it keeps patients aways from physican offices.
But the quack theory spreads and not everyone recognises their own limits and delegates patients to real physicans.
It's something that should be fixed but it's working well enough for everyone involved that it's seen as the lesser evil. As you can imagine I think it's a huge mistake but voices like mine are really a minitory.
> There are always people involved that knew about his situation lied to him, took his money for fake cures and fake diagnosis.
Probably, but I'm not at all sure how many. People believe in the weirdest things, and some make a business out of it not to exploit the gullible, but because they actually believe in it as well.
When I talked to Feng Shui consultants I never got the faintest hint of them suppressing laughter and about to burst out what a great gig it is and how stupid the clients are. I see no reason why that shouldn't be similar in the "alternative medicine" field. There are certainly some that exploit it, but I'm absolutely not sure that they are the majority or even a sizable minority. People believe in the weirdest things.
Enrolling others in a belief system is one way of confirming to the "enroller" the validity of their belief. People want other people to agree with them. That's the basis of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes. The new clothes sure look nice, don't they. Why yes they do, excellent look for his majesty.
BBC Three is aimed at the 16 - 34 year old demographic. The article talks about someone who went all in on alternative therapies and declined mainstream treatment available on the NHS.
I know people that have gone through chemotherapy. Since this was his 2nd cancer diagnosis, I can understand why he wouldn't want to go through it again. I can understand why he would so desperately want an alternative.
If I were to be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I don't know what I'd decide for myself. Of it depends on the diagnosis, if it was just a small skin cancer they could just cut out, sure, let's do that.
But if it was something more pernicious, like the Hodgkin lymphoma, I might refuse chemo. I may prefer to just get my affairs in order while not going through chemo, and just trying to appreciate what days I have left. And being able to appreciate the days I have left, because chemo can really knock you out. What's the point of getting more months of life, if you can't do anything?
I wouldn't put any of my hopes in an alternative medicine cure, but I've been studying science in various forms for a long time. I have a reasonable knowledge of what might work and what wouldn't.
In the beginning, chemo can actually give you a couple days per week of normality before it knocks you on your ass. I remember chemo saturday, sleep sunday, mon/tue/wed were pretty good, thur/friday decline, chemo again saturday. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It can give you an extra few months of normality, even if you end up dying at the same time.
But in this case he didn't really have a choice. His attempt at an "alternative" therapy at best didn't have any effect, and by the looks of it it didn't really give him good quality of life either as his health was deteriorating.
Preferring quality of life to heavy-handed treatments is perfectly acceptable to me, but the article doesn't read like that was the intent here. "Sean" was not looking to let nature run its course.
> What's the point of getting more months of life, if you can't do anything?
I sympathise with the way you feel, but here he did not refused treatment to better live the time he had left but chose "alternative medicines" instead. The discourse in those online communities is not that you should appreciate the time you have left but that they can heal you.
Those are two very different situations and while the outcome is sadly identical, they should not be conflated.
> The discourse in those online communities is not that you should appreciate the time you have left but that they can heal you.
The sedatives and painkillers, are the biochemical discourse that you feel like you heal / healed.
When my father was dying from cancer, the doctors said his treatment was curative not palliative, which is essentially the same discourse you are offended with.
I'm not offended, I'm pointing out how the situation differs.
If doctors gives inaccurate information, it's an important problem that needs to be discussed.
> the doctors said his treatment was curative not palliative
In the present case, it seems like it was not the case: "At the time, Sean’s doctors told him he had at least a 50% chance of long-term survival if he underwent chemotherapy", while the alternative medicines gave false information: "Sean also relied on "thermographic scans" - heat images of the body" or "I’d use words like, 'oh no it’s the Herxheimer’s reaction'".
It seems to me like we are preaching for the same thing, which is to give the correct information to the patient and let him decide.
From the article the doctors estimated his long term survival at 50%. So he wasn’t just trading chemo for a few months. He could have lived a long life.
I would say chemo and cancer is very individual, you and doctors will look at the statistics and be pessimistic, they because they don't want to give you false expectations, since setbacks are probably harder to fight than no progress. And you because you don't have the personal experience with cancer yet.
You have X chance of Z time, etc.
But that's statistics, you as an individual will often fall in the normal range in your stratified group. Except when you don't.
27 Years old, I was dying of cancer really bad, it is worse than chemo, I didnt know it, but I was dying very bad. It felt like the worst flu ever, with constant cold symptoms, fatigue and night sweats, it was so bad I had to change several times a night. It was terrible.
When I was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer with secondary cancer in my liver, I thought that was it, I have screwed up bad and should have gone to the doctor earlier.
The first meeting with my oncologist he said the chemotherapy is to give you time, it is not a cure. I didnt ask how long, it is nothing I want to know. He said he will throw what ever he can at me, since I am fit and young. Even though there was no reassurance, I felt much better after this.
So chemo, it sucks, I was on a 2 week cycle routine, which meant usually, go to the clinic on Thursday, get 3 different drugs over 3-4 hours. Some are fine, like oxaliplatin (and quite interesting when its cold outside), others hit you right in the head like irinotecan (this one sucks bad, kicks you in the head hard and make you feel sick), and finally 5fu which is much milder than irinotecan. The 5fu I would get as a pump which administered it over 46 hours or so at home.
So Thursday, on the day I feel bad when administered, would say a 3 when irinotecan hits. Afterwards mby a 6 or 7. I would have energy to work this day if I wanted.
Friday, did go to work some days with my pump. Feeling probably a 5-6, energy a 7.
Saturday, pump disconnected and the fatigue starts to hit, Feeling probably a 5, energy a 5.
Sunday, Feeling probably a 4, energy a 3.
Monday, Feeling probably a 3-4, energy a 2-3.
Tuesday, Feeling probably a 4, energy a 4.
Wednesday, Feeling probably a 5, energy a 5.
Thursday, Feeling probably a 6, energy a 6.
...
It would improve until the next Thursday where I would be feeling probably a 8, energy a 8-9.
So by the time you go back for more chemo you would feel quite good. So on average I worked one week every two weeks.
Now, as soon as I started chemo, much of my cancer symptoms started to melt away, no more gut wrenching pain in my bowels, no more regular night sweats because my liver is shutting down, not feeling like having a flu, this is after 2-3 cycles of chemo. Chemo can make your quality of life better, it did it for me. Chemo sucks and I was lucky that I found ways to eat, keep my weight and stay healthy and positive.
In the end, I managed to have liver surgery and bowel surgery and am now cancer free. My oncologist didnt think that I would survive until surgery, and was lucky my chemo was soooo effective. 1 year from diagnosis to cancer free, I am lucky.
But of course, this is an individual experience, but I would say, dying of cancer suck more than chemo, for me.
> I can understand why he wouldn't want to go through it again
Especially after having gone through the broken NHS system once. If I was in his position I too would do anything to avoid them, although I admit that if I were him I would rather move to a country with a better healthcare system than use weird snakeoil magic cancer curing items.
It's not fair to say it cost him his life when his survival chance was 50% to begin with and the first chemotherapy failed to cure him. Nobody can say whether the outcome would have been better with a second chemotherapy or perhaps with no treatment at all.
The first chemo gave him six more years. The 50% estimate was for long term survival, which is generally considered to be 10-15 years or more. It doesn’t say what his short term survival odds may have been. Somewhere between 51-99%.
I'm sure a lot of the attention he got was from people already digging their own grave, but the same way he got into it in the first place (by looking at others' stories with alternative "therapies" and the encouragement they're getting) will unfortunately also con others into this dangerous scam.
Also, fb likes/interactions/celebrity tend to reinforce the professed views. I'd say there were few people telling him to stop believing the snake oil and thousands saying 'you can beat this! <insert emoji>'.
Should alternative therapy posts and advertising have unlimited distribution on fb/instagram?
This is why I'm advocating for strong laws around unproven medical claims/advice and harsh penalties.
Celebrities (or frankly any social media idiot without relevant medical credentials) should not be making medical claims, otherwise we get things like Goop, bullshit essential oils and magic rocks to protect against 5G.
Any platform that amplifies the reach of these posts should also be held liable.
The term 'meme' was coined in the 70s and means an idea that spreads from one person to another. It comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene; the idea is that memes are subject to selection just like genes.
It resembles "gene" but has an independent origin:
meme (n.)
"an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene.
Ready assimilation and apprehension, resulting in rapid propagation. Memes fare poorly against any significant selection criterion based on epistemic validity, but compensate by simply breeding like mad.
This applies similarly to low-truth-valence ideologies and belief systems, for which current and pending crises may prove strong checks.
The whole concept of memetics is anti-intellectual pseudoscience. The analogy between idea and gene is an extreme stretch, and the pop understanding of this speculation loses whatever more subtle context might be there.
The pop understanding robs ideas of their context in systems of ideas, rendering them isolated sound bites with no integration or higher level thought. It promotes a kind of Orwellian "duckspeak" and the utmost short attention span culture.
I don't think it's a coincidence that meme culture dominated forums originate all the worst ideas and culture on the Internet. I am looking at Twitter with its ideological lynch mobs, 4chan, and the popular Reddit forums.
Richard Dawkins originated the concept, and for him it was only a speculation anyway. In any case Dawkins has never impressed me. He's not the greatest thinker in evolutionary theory by any measure, and he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no idea why he is so high profile.
You don’t believe that ideas reproduce (transmit between people), mutate (get re-interpreted during transmission), and then compete against other ideas (fail or succeed to transmit further/persuade)?
That’s essentially the extent of the analogy to genes and is basically self-evident.
Cars move down paths, run on energy transport molecules, and carry other objects. Therefore cars are the same thing as cell transport proteins and roads are the same thing as cellular cytoskeletons.
The coarse structure of known space resembles brain tissue when rendered in a certain way, therefore the universe is a giant brain.
Maybe you ought to re-read The Selfish Gene. It first distills evolution down to first principles: there are classes of chemicals that tend to construct copies or near-copies of themselves; the chemicals that do not do this but consume raw material from the same finite pool will gradually decrease in frequency; meaning over time chemical variants/combinations that are more successful at duplicating themselves propagate while those who fail to secure resources do not propagate.
At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.”
The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment).
This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
I have read that book. His first principles explanation of evolution is not bad. Then he just takes that template and moves it over to ideas because analogy. You can't just glibly do that. What he does there is only a few steps above stoners saying space time looks like a big brain maaaaaaaan. Duuuuude... (bubble bubble) it's like a reflection of the mind of god (bubble bubble).
To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy.
I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored.
Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
While a culture is just a collection of memes, I think considering it as memes and not a static/permanent “culture” gets you a lot more leverage to think about the world.
For example, if you just say, “that’s our culture,” it’s very tempting to accept it as an intrinsic property of your society/company/team. If you say, “that’s the collection of dominant memes for this particular environment at this particular time,” it gives you some avenues to start 1) decomposing a monolithic culture into its component pieces and 2) explore why those particular memes are so dominant in the particular environment.
The latter route, IMO, will expose many more levers for you to play with if you were to want to, say, modify a culture.
The problem isn't so much the /concept/ of memetics as how it's implicitly used to sweep details under the rug.
Consider a mathematical "culture" where proofs are generated by some AI, propagated between nodes, and each node that receives a proof checks if it seems valid before propagating it to the next node.
What kind of proof survives that kind of culture has a lot more to do with the nature of mathematics and the proposer AI than it has to do with the dynamics that every replicator system has in common.
In other words, it's very easy for pop memetics to go back and forth between a position where "it's all replicators, the memes are just using you to replicate themselves" and where "obviously, the objective content of the idea matters more than their replicability".
How much the spread of ideas in a society is one compared to the other depends on parameters that differ from system to system. Treating them all alike does a big disservice to the grand variety of systems that exist, and using the concept of replicator dynamics to pretend that the intellect is always a servant to the system is worse still.
It may be the case that a phenomenon is real but the extant field of inquiry into that phenomenon is pseudoscience. For an example, consider alchemy. Alchemists were observing real phenomena, but their methods and theories weren't sound.
api is right that memetics as a field is in disrepute, considered pseudoscience by many. That doesn't mean the premise of ideas propagating through the population, surviving or dying based on various criteria, is totally bunk. But you have to be willing to distinguish the concept of memes from 'memetics as a science.' I think it's a useful analogy, but it has limitations.
One hazard of memetics mirrors a common hazard in discussions about genetics. Anthropomorphizing genes by saying things like "the gene wants to replicate" or "the gene is selfish" is common for obvious reasons, but you have to be careful to not take it literally. When you make the analogy between genes and ideas, that habit of anthropomorphization comes along for the ride, and in the process ideas are given agency of their own. Saying that the idea has agency of it's own, that it self-replicates, is in some sense tantamount to questioning the agency of the humans participating in the spread of the idea. In brief, memetics steps on the third rail of free will.
Dawkins may have coined the term, but memes predate him. A substitute teacher of mine was fond of the "Kilroy Was Here" meme, popular among american soldiers during WWII. He was a kind and gentle soul, and I only understood the depth of this expression as an adult: he survived the trenches, and still cherished a happy memory that carried him through the experience. Today, I propagate that meme in honor of him, even though I've forgotten his name.
A meme is any thought pattern that can spread and replicate, so of course they pre-date Dawkins! They've been around as long as there have been humans with the ability to communicate them. Thousands of years.
The opposite can be just as dangerous * . "Medlife Crisis" has an [informative video][1] that explains some of what can happen.
* Edit: I shouldn't have equated the dangers here. This was a bad take. I still believe there are good bits of info provided in the video, but the relevance to this thread is less than I considered and I should have thought more about what I was sharing.
Edit 2: I didn't mean to link to a specific timestamp of the video in the original link. That has been removed.
I clicked on his COVID-19 video[1] on a whim and while I have not watched it yet, my god is the comment section alarming. Is the YouTube comment section always like this when it comes to this topic?
Yes that seems to be typical. YouTube comment sections tend to be of poorer quality when the topic is popular or if the channel has a large enough audience.
Why is this article so bend on blaming the meme, as they obviously got the majority of the false information on forums?
I don't believe anyone does this based on memes.
I think that's fundamentally misrepresenting what the article is saying. They are saying that the memes shared in these communities serve to reinforce and spread the ideology.
Before “meme” implied GIF or JPG it was just the idea of self replicating ideas that propagate from brain to brain. Text is a medium for meme propagation. The meme itself is independent of the medium. One could catch QAnon from a GIF and pass it on to someone else verbally. Calling the GIF a “meme” is just a colloquialism.
Their decision to pursue "alternative therapies" reduced that 50% chance to a guaranteed 0% since at best these therapies don't have any beneficial effect.
It's very powerful against a subset of problems, usually the kind of things that are affected by perception of severity, would heal themselves over time anyway etc etc.
It's far less of an effect, if what I've read is to be believed, when measured against things like terminal cancer.
50% chance (assuming doctors were correct about survival rate) that your life would be better if you didn't go through chemo.
Sum % positive reasons of not doing chemo:
n% chance that you'd recover without doing anything
n% chance that these naturopathic cures do somehow cure you
n% chance that the treatment would actually make things worse
It's a garden of forking paths. You can't just reason about this with one number. Choices are hard. People die. Just a matter of order.
She didn't lose her boyfriend to conspiracy theories, she lost her boyfriend to the pervasive system of beliefs that prevents people from confronting their assumptions when it really matters.
Belief in conspiracy theories is the specific issue from a whole class of problems: what is the most important thing you believe, how do you know it's true, and is that good enough or do you need to take additional action in case it's false?
> Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos
it seems that he first decided not to undergo chemo, then clinged on whatever he could.
The conspiracy theory is a pretty necessary part, because the ideology needs to be able to dismiss the medical status quo, and it’s simpler to claim that the whole system is a conspiracy rather than attempt to address any actual medical or scientific claims.
When my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer she refused medical treatment. She did not want to go through the therapy, the medical process was a worse outcome than death for her. She seemed to just decide that she was done, resigned to her fate.
My uncle offered her some kind of herbal tea as a solution to her cancer. Grandma had a worse view of alternative medicine than the actual medicine she had already refused. I had never seen her so upset with my uncle. Her reaction has stayed with me.
I find it admirable that she was able to be accepting of her fate. I wish I could be that strong, although perhaps it comes with age ("I've lived a full life, I am ready").
I don't believe in naturopathy either, but I wonder if it still has a positive impact for those whom believe in it, ie. the placebo effect.
Her husband, my grandfather, had died some 30 years prior. She was alone for a long time, more than anything I think she wanted a partner but never seemed to find the right one. She may have felt like medicine was only a temporary solution and not worth it for a relatively short time more.
I think being informed helps too. I have a couple of extended family members who made this choice. While both were older, they were also both doctors. I imagine that having a clear picture of what treatment looks like can clarify the decision.
2 of them said, after beating it, that they would have chosen to die if they could do it over. One of those people was treated with modern immune therapies, which still left him permanently messed up. My other friend with cancer isn't around to tell me his thoughts on it.
At this point in my life, 45 with no kids and good life insurance, I would not choose to fight cancer if I developed it.
2x cancer survivor here. It's not a binary choice. The melanoma was chopped out and I was closely monitored for 10 years. Would have killed me in a year or two if I did nothing. The colon cancer was chopped out through an 18" resection and I've ridden 10 centuries in the three years since. Spent two weeks in the Canal St. Martin neighborhood of Paris with my partner. Had a bunch of other lovely trips, remodeled the house, cooked a thousand lovely meals. Nope, I think if/when the crap comes back, I fight it again.
That's exactly it. It all depends on what cancer and how far it has spread. Making informed decisions under that kind of pressure is hard. Congrats on your status, and those bike trips are very impressive.
Medical treatments, especially cancer treatments, are not always successful. You could suffer through the treatment and still not be cured. It seems reasonable to say "No thanks. I've had enough."
I had a bone marrow transplant in 1989. 1 year mortality was 95%.
It's a fucking terrible way to die. FWIW, the AIDS patients down the hall had it as bad or worse.
It took me a long time to think the effort was worthwhile. And if people like me didn't get fed into the meat grinder of progress, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
Your grandma is amazing. So many people get sucked into the 'fight the cancer' thing. I've seen it near several times now in the last year and every time the outcome is the same, but the road there is just horrendous. Adding a few weeks, months at best, to a life with terrible quality of life does not seem worth it to me.
It all depends on the cancer and the prognosis of course but undergoing all kinds of radical treatments with low chances of success ends up robbing you of those last weeks better spent on seeing the people dear to you.
Yep. Same thing is happening to me now. My dad got thyroid cancer in 2006. In 2018 it spread to his lungs, and in 2019 to his brain. My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it.
I was there almost 10 years ago. My dad's cancer had metastasized, conventional treatments were failing, and a "monk" wandering the cancer ward offered meditative therapy to the tune of $30,000, up front, no refunds. My brother and I begged them not to waste their money. The charlatan sustained his sales pitch for nearly a month before my parents eventually refused him. My dad lived for another year, and my mom still regrets not "trying" the snake oil.
> My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it.
It is the ability to not let go - we don't want these things to happen. We want to have hope that something out there can save - and these emotions are abused. It makes it all the more dastardly.
an interesting aspect of this is the aversion to traditional therapy caused by experiencing it the first time and how much it made him suffer, I wonder how much of the motivation was due to that versus how much was due to the "false hope"
I also wonder if this is a argument for there being value in investing in ways of making chemotherapy less traumatic even though it wouldn't be making it more effective, just less psychological damage
Coronation Street - a popular TV soap in the UK had a storyline about this last year [0]. As the storyline played out, the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life.
I think it was quite brave of a soap to tackle that, & hopefully it's made people think if they were considering alternative 'solutions'.
It may be that Jobs shortened his life with his rejection of mainstream treatments, but pancreatic cancer also has relatively poor prognosis even with optimal treatment. Good thing it's rare.
> In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.[158] The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor;[159] Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.[158]
Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[160] instead relying on alternative medicine to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death". Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that."[161] Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[162] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."
By 'insufficient diet' they mean that he decided to eat only fruit. High sugar intake combined with the pancreatic cancer likely did him no favors and may have taxed his pancreas even more. Such a shame, I'd have liked to see him grow older and wiser.
> > the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life.
> Isn't this the same story as Steve Jobs?
While much of the news media characterized Jobs' death as partly due to conventional cancer treatment coming too late, such a view is reductive given the nature of Jobs' "rare form of pancreatic cancer, called an islet cell tumor or gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET)" [0].
Not much conventional medical literature exists regarding the treatment of GEP-NETs (presumably due to their rarity) and Jobs and his care providers had to make choices without much evidence to guide them. Quoting from the above-cited article:
> [W]hat many journalists failed to note is that the evidence supporting any specific conventional treatment approach (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy) for GEP-NETs comprises a slim literature, and the evidence base for use of CAM [complementary and alternative medical] therapeutic approaches for GEP-NETs is virtually non-existent. After a delay of nine months after diagnosis, in 2004, Jobs opted for surgery. He died 7 years later. [0]
Reminds of of the "fasten your seatbelt" campaign. I can't find a source, but I remember that line being inserted into movies before action sequences as a bit of a PSA. There's a lot TV shows and movies can do to educate people about things, to the point that the way diseases are shown in media should be researched and taken seriously.
Ultimately, individuals are responsible for their choices in "free societies." I don't want to live in a world where all information is regulated by the government.
This is a good story about poor choices made by an individual, but I hope it is not fodder for any attempt at regulating what free people choose to do with their lives. I think we need to do a better job at educating people on the dangers of freedom...what do you guys think? Perhaps we need some sort of "media literacy" education at the primary school level that trains people in evaluating sources of information ( which seems to be reserved for the university level in many cases, unfortunately ).
My thoughts are with the family of this man.
Edit: Wow, I'm surprised at the negative response to my comment. What is so controversial about my views here?
I don't think there is any argument at regulating what free people do. The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available as well as eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk.
This is not an argument for regulating information, you are still free to peddle quack as long as you don't make false or unproven claims, and if you are sure your "quack" is actually legitimate you are free to do research, studies and tests just like the supposedly-evil "big pharma".
> I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information."
Either that or government-approved websites (like the NHS is providing in the UK). It is in the government's best interest to keep you alive for as long as possible (if nothing else, just so you can pay tax longer), and while they aren't always perfect (like the current covid-19 response from some countries) I would still trust them more than some random people playing doctors on social media.
> What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like?
Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law?
> Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree
Perfection will never be achieved, but if we take all the effects of "big pharma" (both good and bad, across all diseases) and compare it to the effects of backyard quack medicine, who wins? I'm willing to bet good money that big pharma wins by a large margin, so I'd be willing to trust them until there is enough evidence that says otherwise.
> Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law?
Would faith based approaches fall under your definition of "unproven medical claims?"
I get what you are saying, but if someone wants to take their chances on some "quackery," shouldn't it be their right to do so? Obviously this individual knew that he was engaging in alternative medicine that is not recognized by the mainstream.
I don't believe in this particular alternative medicine, but I don't believe established science understands everything in this world and believe individuals should retain the right to explore alternative perspectives.
> Would faith based approaches fall under your definition of "unproven medical claims?"
Yes, I don't see why it shouldn't.
> I get what you are saying, but if someone wants to take their chances on some "quackery," shouldn't it be their right to do so?
The problem is that quackery being around puts people at risk like this man. This man didn't outright decide to do quack, he decided based on unproven claims made by the quack peddlers that this alternative treatment would somehow work and be better than the conventional, modern medicine.
Furthermore during his alternative "therapy" he not only did it for himself but attracted a large following online, claiming that this treatment was working and thus encouraging other people to go down the same path.
> I don't believe established science understands everything in this world and believe individuals should retain the right to explore alternative perspectives.
Established science has never claimed to understand everything. Established science adjusts its understanding of the world based on evidence and is constantly doing new research to further that understanding. I find it very unlikely that someone playing doctor on social media would do better than a multibillion-dollar industry.
>Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law?
This is extremely dangerous. The complexity of human biology and our ethical standards don't intersect in a way for any treatment to be 'proven'. There is just statistical evidence of efficacy for some subset of humans who's condition is materially in the same vicinity of any given patient. However, any given patient has zero control over what testing has been done on any given intervention, and therefore may have a perfectly viable treatment left legally outside of their reach because we just haven't got to test their case yet (and may never).
50% of long-term cancer survival is high. He probably should have took it.
Alternative treatments don’t guarantee higher success than modern medicine. However, if modern medicine puts the chance of survival at < 5%, it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches.
Modern science aims to create a standardized approach for categorized diseases. Controlled experiments aim to find a magic bullet, but are these experiments really “controlled”?
Everyone eats differently; everyone shits differently. Different air quality; stress levels; sleep; metabolism. Not to mention, the body and its disease are both is ever-changing systems over time. Until we have nano-machines, we won’t know the true cause and effect of all these variables.
Therefore, the holistic approach* is to use intuition, adaptation, and nonstandard ways to deal with this recognition. The downside of this approach is the amount of information and the ability to determine the credibility (eg. random social media), especially for a layman. However, if one was knowledgeable enough to read thousands of academic papers, from various fields (outside of oncology) -- one could develop a more tailored plan for the individual that accounts for these other factors.
*Holistic approach does not mean disregard of science. It does not mean rejecting standard protocols. It means that one should consider a wider-range of factors, in addition to standard protocols. It is an approach that places more value on breadth.
Fringe approaches would not be considered "fringe" if they were proven to have an effect. Even if it improves your survival rates by merely 1%, it would be still used as part of modern medicine if there was nothing else.
The problem is that the quack makes you believe that it will work, so you're still wasting time trying the "treatment" and potentially suffering its side-effects (not to mention the financial impact). It's worse than not doing anything, since at least the latter means you've accepted your fate and can enjoy whatever time you have peacefully instead of being busy with a quack treatment.
Furthermore, modern medicine isn't inherently hostile to "alternative medicine". If you think about it, all the potential treatments being researched in labs right now (including for covid-19) are still at the "alternative" stage, and if they end up being proven to work they simply become "medicine". What modern medicine is hostile to is unproven, or proven not to work treatments.
If you think you actually have an "alternative" theory that isn't quack, you are welcome to do your research on it to at least rule out any existing reasons why it couldn't work (using existing medical literature), and if the theory still stands by then you are free to engage with the mainstream medical community or study, become a researcher and then test your theory in a safe and controlled environment so the outcome is actually valuable (and will influence further research even if this particular theory doesn't work) and not just anecdotal evidence.
Some treatments are considered "Fringe" because there are other [political, structural] hurdles at play that prevent them from going through proper scientific process. Some people don't have time to wait 10 years for government approval, so they'd rather take the chance now.
This may be true in your experience or elsewhere, but it's patently false in my experience. There's 'standard of care', very narrowly scoped clinical trials, and everything else is "fringe". Some treatment proven effective for cancer? OK, but it wasn't proven effective for this cancer. Oh, it was proven effective for this cancer? OK, but it hasn't been proven effective after partially effective cytoreductive surgery. Oh, it was proven effective there? Yes but it hasn't been proven to be effective after disease recurrence. Oh, it was proven effective after disease recurrence? Ah, but it was only proven effective in germline mutations. Oh it was proven effective on somatic as well? Sure but not after immunotherapy has been tried...
On and on and on and on. The decision tree is so deep and patient communities sliced into smaller and smaller subgroups that we don't have enough people on the planet to 'prove efficacy' for them all (as if such a task is even possible, the most we usually get is evidence of efficacy in similar cases).
Testing things is different than practicing things.
You cannot test many things. You also cannot prove many things. Look at nutrition. Determining the cause and effect of a substance on a human body is difficult.
Science is aimed at proving things. Sometimes, in life, that luxury is not available.
You can't test/prove everything, however my understanding is that at least a large part of these quack treatments (if not all of them) have already been proven not being able to work (or being actively harmful) in existing medical literature.
If someone had an effective treatment for cancer, why would they be peddling it among charlatans on social media instead of selling it to mainstream medicine?
The holistic perspective is that there is no one singular effective treatment for all individuals. It is a craft.
Perhaps curcumin works for one , not another. Perhaps the same curcumin works now, but not later. Or perhaps you'll never knows if it works at all. Being able to measure it is difficult. Welcome to the game.
It is a process that combines both thinking and feeling. (Intuition). Perhaps one day you step in shit. But the next day you find a flower. There is no right or wrong answer.
I do believe there are "charlatans" -- if that's what you want to call it -- who are attuned to this type of flow, or practice.
so the methods work, but we just can't tell if they're working? I imagine that would be quite financially convenient for people selling methods that don't work.
if it's a game you can't measure if you're winning, it's a casino game. and casino games always favor the house.
In holistic approaches, sometimes, the treatment works, but the cause and effect cannot be pinpointed. Oftentimes, it's not repeatable. That is because the state of the body is different from one point to another.
"Selling" these techniques or drugs complicates the matter. And this is why [alternative] therapies have a negative taste in scientific communities.
"However, if one was knowledgeable enough to read thousands of academic papers, from various fields (outside of oncology) -- one could develop a more tailored plan for the individual that accounts for these other factors."
Have you done so? Has anyone who follows "non-standard" approaches? (Yes, I'm aware that a few instances have; they generally become the "standardized approach", too.)
If you have someone in your life who is thinking like this and you can get them to read it I highly recommend "The Emporer of All Maladies".
It's not a debunking book. It doesn't even address alternative treatments at all. It is a kind of biography of cancer.
I think it can help because it puts faces to some of the people who have developed cancer treatments over the years. And it really demystifies the work pharmaceutical researches have done to develop chemotherapy.
The problem is that reading an entire book takes effort, and the whole reason why these quack treatments thrive is because people can't be bothered to do effort (and if they did they would have a very high likelihood of disproving the quack just based on reading existing medical literature) and want a quick and easy solution.
I'm "quick to anger" when quackery is involved, but I don't think this is correct. Often the conspiracy people think they're well informed. And they are, but only informed by misinformation.
No. I have to agree with the person who says they want a quick and easy solution. I am in a totally different area where I think people are mistaken, but if I suggest let's do the math or let's do some experiments to see the results the excuses start thick and thin.
The fact is these people are too busy doing "magical thinking" when they know they are smarter than the average person and know something that the general "sheep" do not know.
But the one thing they refuse to do is test their beliefs in such a manner that if they are wrong that they will be proved wrong. When they do show effort it is more do only the things that can prove them right, failure is not an option for them.
So you're saying that conspiracy theorists don't obsessively research? That's kinda their thing.. I would definitely say that they think they're well informed
“Research” is much easier when there’s no accountability mechanism for the claims you’re encountering. People may spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos, but that’s closer to binging a TV show than actually researching treatments.
They "research" for anything that will support their belief, while discounting or ignoring anything that disproves it.
This can be seen very clearly on that flat earther documentary. When experiment results don't show what they want, they ignore them or explain them away and are off to find the next experiment that will "prove" their theory. There is no result that can cause them to question their theory.
The power of propaganda is that it's easily digestible. Spending 8 hours reading propaganda requires far less effort than the 1 hour to read something informative or challenging.
A number of very effective and non patentable treatments exist. Many of these cancers release a substance called Negalese which cleaves the vitamin d binding protein responsible for forming gcMAF, which activates macrophages in the presence of cancer and other diseases. Dr. Bradstreet popularized the treatment of administering gcMAF purified from blood and administering it to those afflicted with cancer. The results were startling and tens thousands were treated successfully and reversed their cancer. These people have testified on video to their recovery. However this came to an end when Dr. Bradstreets clinics were raided and shutdown. Three days later Dr. Bradstreet would be found floating in a river with fatal gunshot wound to the chest. It was declared a suicide. The Wallstreet Journal would run an article calling him a quack despite the mountain of patient testimony who had been successfully treated.
Another treatment is called vitamin B17, found in particular high concentrations in bitter apricot seeds. This substance has a cyanide component that only unlocks within cancer cells due to the presence of the enzyme Beta-glucosidase. Jason Vale was a cancer patient and arm wrestling champion who discovered that apricot seeds would shrink his tumors. He did this three times (cancer kept on coming back). He then promoted the anti cancer effects until the FDA raided his house and ended up throwing him jail arguing that since he claimed apricot seeds were treating cancer, the apricot seeds were actually classified as drugs.
The wikipedia articles about these substances have been scrubbed by the poisoning corruption of big pharma which has billions at stake if the public wakes up to the fact that many cancers can be treated without the use of chemo therapy.
Additional the FDA itself did a story on the B17 substance in the 1970s and committed a horrific act of scientific misconduct which saw the results of the cancer study inverted and drew protests from the research who declared the FDA had committed fraud against the public. Despite this the synthetic version of B17 called laetrile was banned by the FDA. However it’s still legal in mexico and very well tolerated. Today however you will see wikipedia article declare that B17 is dangerous and will cause cyanide poisoning, which is contradicted by the many people take high doses of this drug every day across the world without issue.
Another treatment is a dog dewormer called fenbendazole. Despite its efficacy on cancer, no one can get it in the USA for this purpose, they must get it for their pet and take it themselves.
The BBC and the MSM won’t talk about these three major alternative treatments that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Also, as the Google Whistleblower I exposed the YouTube blacklist that included as terms “cancer cures”, which was used as input to for Google’s bit twiddled search re-ranking system. You can find this disclosure to the public at website:
www.zachvorhies.com
And look for the blacklist section on the front page.
The scale of corruption is mind boggling. Shame on the BBC for running such garbage propaganda in favor of big pharma.
Because it's a lot of wild claims without a single link to a reputable reference.
Anyone can say anything on the internet, what reason do you have to trust anything they said is remotely true? Because it sounds science-y and you don't yet understand it? I mean, how do you even know of not just someone literally making all this up on the spot for a laugh? Why are anonymous strangers more trustworthy than anyone else?
It's all just appeals to the idea that there's some powerful, shadowy entity that doesn't want you to know this stuff, but they know the truth and you can be special too if you just listen to them. There's zero actual substance, just lots of unverifiable claims. Maybe the real conspiracy is that big pharma's medicine does work but people want to still you stuff that didn't work just to make money? Isn't simple greed a simpler explanation than some grand conspiracy?
If I told you broccoli cured my cancer, would you believe me?
"i don't even know if you're right, but all the sudden I want to learn about macrophages on a saturday afternoon"
how do you know he's wrong? why is your instinct to reject anything that challenges commonly held beliefs. i literally said i was grateful for his input and i have no reason to believe it, but it inspired me to look into it further. please exercise critical thinking skills
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
In short; we don't. Science is not about who's right and who's wrong. Science is about carefully formulating plausible theories, and then proving or disproving those through rigorous research, experimental results, referencing previous verifiable research work, and thorough peer review. Even then not a single research paper will claim to be absolute truth; there is always room for doubt, criticism and altering views based on followup research. It's a slow learning process based on a lot of trial and error.
What was posted above were a lot of wild claims flying directly in the face of broadly accepted knowledge accumulated by decades of diligent cancer research. The lack of any reliable sources to back up those claims makes it more than likely to be just misinformation and not to be taken seriously. Besides, the way the post read and how quickly such a long epistle was posted felt more like it was simply copy-pasted from some conspiracy theorist's manifest, rather than written by someone genuinely interested in taking part in the discussion.
> It's all just appeals to the idea that there's some powerful, shadowy entity that doesn't want you to know this stuff
That might be a good refutation if such a thing never happened, if pharmaceutical companies didn't lobby, if companies had never spread misleading information downplaying the harm of their products, or covered up problems, or had reputations for being honest and trustworthy earned by actually being honest and trustworthy.
> There's zero actual substance, just lots of unverifiable claims.
Are they? "Many of these cancers release a substance called Negalese" sounds verifiable. Is there such a substance? Are some cancers proven to release it? "Dr. Bradstreets clinics were raided" that should be a verifiable fact, no? "Apricot seeds contain high concentrations of B17 compared to other seeds". "the FDA itself did a story on the B17 substance in the 1970s". Even "these things cure cancer" should be verifiable by trying it.
Is it any less verifiable claims than "depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain"? That sounds verifiable, except people can't seem to verify which chemicals are imbalanced and how that's measured, or why a measured imbalance isn't the diagnostic criteria for depression in the first place.
You're throwing around "unverifiable" and "no substance" as insults rather than honest descriptions.
> Maybe the real conspiracy is that big pharma's medicine does work but people want to still you stuff that didn't work just to make money? Isn't simple greed a simpler explanation than some grand conspiracy?
If I told you that greed is the grand conspiracy, would you
You picked the technical details that might be verifiable and goose over the grander claims:
> The results were startling and tens thousands were treated successfully and reversed their cancer.
If someone can verify this I'll eat my hat. Surely something as startling and revolutionary as that would have been well documented and explained being any shred of doubt. Of course, it would also be hard to market your ineffective treatment to desperate people by doing that, so I won't hold my breath. Better to play the victim of big pharma. Some individual details might be verifiable, but it's the brooder claims themselves that I am dubious about.
I'm on my phone so it's a pain to reference the original post while writing this one.
Here's my theory, no conspiracy necessary: Greedy pharmaceutical companies have developed cancer treatments that are moderately effective on most cancers. Cancer being what it is, however, there are many people for whom those treatments are not effective. Facing the prospect of a terminal illness, they seek alternative treatments, lest they do nothing at all. Greedy quacks develop their own "treatments", which conveniently, for one reason or another, they can never prove the effectiveness of. They always have an excuse, never the possibility that it just doesn't work.
So yes, you're correct, the grand conspiracy is greed. The pharma companies are greedy and use underhanded tactics to sell the treatments they hold the patents for, and the con artists selling bleach to cancer patients are also greedy and blame the former for why they can't demonstrate their "treatments" are effective.
I think for lots of people it's more comforting to imagine that there's some big conspiracy out there trying to keep effective care from them than the idea that there's just nothing that will save them from their terminal illness.
> Surely something as startling and revolutionary as that would have been well documented and explained being any shred of doubt
Against the claim of thousands of people documented as cured, you argue that such a documentary can't exist because if it existed there would be documentation?
I'm not asking you to believe onion juice cures cancer based on an unverified claim that it does, but what you're doing is pre-deciding that it can't and then refuting the claim that thousands of people were cured because if they were, there would be thousands of cured people. Your logic is bad, and unscientific.
But even then - would it be? You'd think if the Catholic Church was systematically abusing children on a massive scale, it would be well documented and chased by the police. But they were, and they were covering it up on a massive scale too. What about the tobacco companies misleading people on the harms of tobacco so badly they agreed to indefinite $10Bn/year payouts, or the 1971 Ford Pinto with a fire risk where Ford calculated that paying out for burns victim lawsuits would save them $70M over fixing the cars and then buried that in mountains of Department of Transport paperwork ... surely that can't be happening, if it was there would be evidence - and there was. The VW emissions scandal? Coverups do happen.
"It's not happening" until it is happening, then "of course it was happening, everyone knew it".
> Greedy quacks develop their own "treatments", which conveniently, for one reason or another, they can never prove the effectiveness of. They always have an excuse, never the possibility that it just doesn't work.
That ineffective quack treatments exist is not evidence that all treatment claims are ineffective quack treatments.
> I think for lots of people it's more comforting to imagine that there's some big conspiracy out there trying to keep effective care from them than the idea that there's just nothing that will save them from their terminal illness.
It's plausible that America's largest killer - heart disease - is preventable with dietary and lifestyle changes, and maybe curable/reversible[1]. A test for non-invasively measuring calcium buildup in the heart as a proxy for atheroscletoric plaque and diet and lifestyle changes which improve that value. Claims that the mainstream medical view is that it can't be done. Maybe he's wrong, maybe he's right, but if you decide that he's wrong because if he was right it would be mainstream, there's no way for your reasoning to allow any change.
I will disagree with everyone. The "fact" is that none of you know what other people are thinking. It certainly seems like you do, but that is an illusion.
Inferring the beliefs of others from a tiny amount of (questionable) data is yet another kind of magical thinking. To start to get a more accurate estimate of what other people (conspiracy theorists in this case) are actually thinking requires one to exert the necessary effort in particular actions, the end result hopefully being the ability to more accurately glean what they are thinking from the words they actually write. But it seems no one is willing to put in that effort, perhaps because they want a quick and easy solution.
> When they do show effort it is more do only the things that can prove them right, failure is not an option for them.
Indeed. Such is the nature of the human mind, as well as networked collections of them. This very thread, like many others, is chock full of similar thinking, but the nature of the mind seems to render people unable to realize it.
I'm fond of the phrase "confirmation shopping." People can do a lot of "research" and consider themselves very well-informed, but they don't know how to discern good information from bad. At least on that topic.
Yeah, I'm picturing the only situation where this might work is one where you're dealing with someone you have a really good relationship with, who is genuinely curious and who you can influence over a long period of time. But I've grown pretty skeptical of my own powers of persuasion and tend to think this is the only kind of situation I can change anyone's mind in.
This certainly isn't the cure-all for conspiracy beliefs but if you know someone reasonable who is just on the edge I think it could really help.
The problem is, Hacker News is silencing dissent. I posted a fact based rebuttal showing three alternative cancer cures and HN flagged it within 5 minutes.
Two friends are lost in the woods. One is experienced in fieldcraft, the other is not. The experienced friend consults a map, a compass, the position of the sun and some known landmarks and says, "we must go this way." The inexperienced friend complies and walks for hours with the experienced friend.
Suddenly the experienced friend stops and takes their map and compass. "No reason to worry just double checking everything, we are getting closer." But the inexperienced friend sees no sign of progress. This cycle repeats several times over. They walk for hours. Stop to check. No sign of progress. Reassurances. Again and again. Finally the inexperienced friend says, "I recognize this place and I think I know the way back. Let's go this way."
The experienced friend knows this is the wrong way and insists they go a different direction. After half an hour of arguing they part ways. In a few more hours the experienced friend finds their way out of the forest while the inexperienced friend remains hopelessly lost. The experienced friend finds a ranger station. A ranger there asks, "were you alone?" The experienced replies that they were not alone but it does not matter as their companion did not want to be saved.
> The experienced friend knows this is the wrong way and insists they go a different direction. After half an hour of arguing they part ways.
In the argument, the experienced outdoorsman explains how the map works, how the sun rises and sets as it does everyday - he explains the compass always points north, and the map is from the national park service.
The other says "no, I'm right, because I feel right. In my heart, I know this is the right way, I KNOW I've seen this tree before."
The outdoorsman was exasperated. He had spent time arguing with a man who knows nothing of being outdoors, insisting that he was correct. When he went back to the ranger and a search party formed, it occurred to him that, no matter how much logic and reason he assaulted his former friend with, nothing would shake his faith and the argument would have gone on until they had both died, or he had run off.
They eventually found the other man - hours later. The other man was rescued and immediately saw how wrong he was, but it took something else to show that to him - true fear and failure.
The point of his analogy was not to create sympathy for the inexperienced friend but rather to demonstrate one can both go wildly off course and simultaneously want to be saved. In fact to so desperately want to be saved that it becomes the very thing which puts one off course.
> The point of his analogy was not to create sympathy for the inexperienced friend but rather to demonstrate one can both go wildly off course and simultaneously want to be saved. In fact to so desperately want to be saved that it becomes the very thing which puts one off course.
The point of "not wanting to be saved" is, no matter how much you try, you can not save them, and you must move on with your life. Perhaps they will learn, perhaps not.
Or simply, stop wasting your time, when you know you can't bring the change they need.
because sometimes these people have children or relatives too. A good friend of my mother also believed in quack medicine and died of breast cancer because she was trying to treat it with some kind of plant extract. She left behind two sons and an alcoholic husband. Needlessly to say they had a difficult upbringing.
I think there is good intention - but what it becomes is people arguing online, saying things "what about their children."
But rarely is action taken. We've convinced ourselves that merely voicing an opinion is a heroic activity - while it remains an important one, it lacks the power of action.
I think this is where we are talking about two different things. Arguing with random people online is unlikely to change their mind, especially when visiting those forums which are frequently in conflict. Everyone has entrenched.
But in my daily life I have encountered people dabbling in conspiracy theories but not fully indoctrinated. Having long term conversations with them has helped in some cases. By long term I do not mean hours long arguments. I mean occasional conversations over the course of months.
More useful would be actionable advice on deprogramming cult followers, probably tied back to some psychological trauma.
My SIL just died as a consequence of her faith in alternative medicines. Magnetic blankets, some herbs, some homeopathic nonsense, faith healing, etc.
More disturbing to me is that my brother went along with it. Transmuted from aspiring to be the next Jacques Cousteau to full throated fundie (young Earth, creationism, own the libtards, COVID hoax, gold bug, etc). FWIW, we were raised Lutheran.
As kids, my brother held my hand during a bone marrow transplant. At some level, he knows the truth. But he and my SIL simply could not consider rational options. Not for lack of trying. Many, many people in my SIL's social circles and church tried to intervene. She simply ghosted most of them. And threatened to divorce my brother over it.
Being an unwilling participant in their self-destruction (caring for my nephews), seeing them in action on their own turf, I finally realized the root cause is almost certainly unaddressed trauma. My SIL talked about chemotherapy like anorexics talk about food. And I'm fairly clear why my brother is a basket case.
In conclusion, thank you for your suggestion. But ignorance isn't the problem. At least these two people who reject science are motivated by other reasons.
Sounds to me like he was holding on to some sense of control while he was struggling with losing control to cancer. He'd survived it once already, and had been given a coins' toss chance at long term survival; in medical terms, that's a decade and a half more of life. Faced with painful chemotherapy and likely years of pharmacological interventions that have their own side effects, he ... took a different path.
I'm thinking it's a safe bet that there's a deficiency in the NHS' delivery of counseling and mental health services for those facing mortal crisis.
IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream before passing from pancreatic cancer.
I find it's hard to blame people when there's such a storm of information surrounding these things. It's easy to see how even very intelligent people can pick the wrong remedy.
Also I used to think it was clear cut, but I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.
> IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream
Yes, he did. Then again, pancreatic cancer, even the "milder" form he had, does not have a great prognosis, and he lived another 8 years after the diagnosis.
> I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.
If you go on amazon and choose just about any "apricot kernel" product page, the comments invariable mention people consuming them to treat or prevent cancer.
In fact, as I typed "apricot kernel" into the search bar, Amazon suggested "apricot kernels bitter seed for cancer". That seems dangerous to me.
edit: (I say all this as a sick person who was bed-bound for years. I was able to reverse the course of my illness after studying the work of biochemists that is considered "alternative")
The attitude in this thread is ableist.
Sick people are intelligent. Sick people are capable. Sick people can feel what is happening in their bodies. And they have a right to seek treatments they deem best.
Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer, or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure.
When it gets to this point it makes sense to strike out on your own. Some have success. Others do not. But it's a battle that has to be fought unless you want to just give up and lose the life you had.
I really struggle to understand why healthy people are so hostile towards sick people who are just trying to survive. Yes, it's sad to watch sick people desperately seek for effective treatments. But just imagine how hard it is to be that sick person desperately searching for effective treatments while your peers treat you like you're crazy, and then simultaneously refuse to provide any reasonable alternatives.
> or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects.
One of the foundational principles I use to reason is "if there was a free-lunch (i.e. a higher-ROI solution—more reward for less risk), then anyone truly motivated to solve the problem would have switched to it, or at least added it to their offering as an extra hail-mary on top of their current approach. Given that they didn't, the free lunch must either not be free (i.e. no less risky), or not be much of a lunch (i.e. not rewarding.)"
Yes, in this case, you've got a system with mixed motivations; the FDA isn't motivated to solve problems, so there might be some beneficial drug that isn't on the market. But that doesn't mean that your doctor in particular—someone who is motivated primarily to solve your problem—won't still tell you about such drugs, and help you to acquire them through grey-market channels. Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc. They also will just tell you to eat a certain food or take a certain supplement as your "prescription", if doing that is a higher-ROI solution than any drug.
If doctors are only offering you treatments with devastating side-effects, that's because those are the highest-ROI treatments that exist. Doctors always prioritize safety over benefit[1]; the only time they offer unsafe treatment is when there is no safe treatment—or at least no safe treatment that pays for the costs of going through it by actually having a non-zero likelihood of helping you.
[1] For example, doctors use known placebo-equivalents as the first-line treatments for many psychiatric conditions, because placebos have no potential risks; so even if the likelihood of remission from placebo is low, as long as it's higher than zero (which it usually is in psychiatric conditions), doctors want to first make sure you aren't someone who would go into remission from placebo, before moving onto trying to treat you with drugs that actually do something (and therefore have risks.)
I've seen about 50 doctors. I have extensive first hand experience, and what you're saying is not common at all. This is in the USA, although I have many European friends with similar experiences. Universal health care doesn't cover anything but the most basic (read: ineffective) treatments.
Are you sick? Because millions of sick people disagree with you. You can't read about our experience in a book and tell us how things actually work. You have to live it.
And if you work in healthcare, well, you only see the sick people who have the time and financial resources to navigate your tyrannical bureaucracy. And you won't see any sick people with an illness you don't understand, because we learn to stop wasting our time and money with you quickly.
"Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc."
Maybe a small small percentage of doctors. Finding them and affording them is not something most sick people can do.
Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer
He had the option of chemotherapy with a 50 / 50 chance of long term survival.
The article is not about seeking alternative treatments as a last resort, it is about disregarding well proven science in favour of unproven (and in this case ineffective) alternatives.
I agree that we should generally support the terminally ill in their efforts to seek alternative therapies. However, the point of the article is to highlight the rampant misinformation available online. Conspiracy theories about the medical industry neither provide useful solutions nor palliative care to the terminally ill. These theories are often propagated by perfectly healthy people preying on the vulnerabilities of the sick and their despondent relatives.
Are you discussing the article or specifically folks reactions in this thread? Per the article, he had reasonably good odds of recovery had he taken a traditional route. I think it's absolutely fair to say that, if your end goal is living on (it's fair if it's not that), you should generally trust doctors and medical science in aggregate over the internet, though there are certainly times when modern medicine fails.
If it becomes ableist to critique those who follow fake medical advice from the internet, how would we reduce the this happening? If people are dying as a result, that's a public health issue and it deserves attention.
> This is ableist because it claims that sick people are incapable of determining what is good advice and what is bad advice.
But that's exactly what happened here, the sick person was taken in by charlatans. How is that ableist? Not-sick people are also taken in by charlatans all the time, we blame the charlatans, the scammers, the frauds and the snake-oil salesmen for preying on people.
It's not your place to decide whether Sean was "taken in" by charlatans. It's Sean's. And there is not one quote in the entire article from him. And that he didn't want to see his girlfriend while dying does not give me confidence that she is someone who really speaks for him.
This article and Hacker News thread is largely comprised of healthy people trying to control what sick people think, feel, and say. And on top of that, you're trying to censor their discussions using government-backed violence. That is the conclusion of this article and many of the comments in this thread. I am sick and I fight against these authoritarian policies every day to get the information and medicine I need. I live in excruciating pain every minute of every day and then I have to argue with a bunch of clueless healthy people about what I can and cannot do with my own body.
You are at the very least advocating for others to attack me. Using government backed violence to prevent me from accessing the information or medicine I want _is_ an attack.
If the medical industry is so correct, then why aren't they curing people?
Why is the work of biochemists ignored in the health care industry? (in many ways they understand the human body better than doctors do)
Why do I have 1000's of people I've connected with online who have successfully treated/cured their illness? Do you think we're just making this all up for attention? Because the attention we get is far from positive. We are excluded by civil society. We only survive by hiding what we really think. The purpose of this hacker news account is to build up karma and then burn it in order to say these things. I can't just say them without paying a cost.
Sick or well does not matter. The general public is not capable of determining what is good advice and what is bad advice on complex topics. That is why experts exist.
(If you want to trade insults, your argument is anti-intellectual.)
"The general public is not capable of determining what is good advice"
I strongly disagree. Making choices for other people is tyranny.
Edit:
If you're referring to the term "ableist" as in insult--it is not. It is a technical term that accurately describes the logical conclusion of many of the arguments being made in this thread.
"The general public is not capable of determining what is good advice" because "experts" is not an argument. It's a belief. If you want to have an intellectual argument you've got to form an argument that I can respond to.
The attitude I'm seeing in this thread is less victim blaming and more attacking the scammers and frauds that kill people with their unethical behavior through selling quack cures to vulnerable patients. This article mentions the doctors thought with chemo, there would be a 50% chance of survival. Especially considering how advanced have made the prognosis for hodgkin's better, theres a good chance that he was denied effective treatment and his life by conspiracy theorists and quack doctors when they sucked him in with their conspiracies and lies. If it's a cancer with a 99.99% death rate and herbal teas makes them feel better in their last months, or they willingly turn down chemo with the understanding that they know it means they'll pass on, except with less pain, that's different. He had a chance and his ability to make an informed decision was robbed from him by misinformation.
I'm going to assume that you've never been in a situation where someone was offering you a course of treatment that had a chance of being 50% successful. Those are absolutely terrible odds. To act like it's the obvious choice is incredibly insulting to anyone who seeks alternatives. 50% is not "advanced". It's medieval.
Yes, there are quacks, but there is also cutting edge science that is not widely understood. You are blaming the people the victim chose to listen to, and therefore, you are blaming the victims choices, claiming that they were a "conspiracy theorist". You are blaming the victim.
The case that comes to mind for me was a very close friend who faced a disease with one in five odds of long-term survival, three decades ago.
They were among the other four.
I've monitored progress on medical knowledge and treatment of the condition over the ensuing decades. What I've learned is that:
- It's now possible to directly detect the genetic marker of the condition. We have improved detection and precision of Dx.
- The actual therapy ... is effectively unchanged. The chemo and radiation therapies they'd received were essentially unchanged over the preceding two decades, and were based on chemicals and mechanisms already in use in the 1950s (though dosing, quality, and side-effects mitigation are somewhat improved).
- The compounds themselves date to World War One, poison gas, and human experiments now considered crimes against humanity. History is interesting....
- These treatments remain largely unchanged in the decades since my friend's death. And five-year mortality for the condition remains about 80%.
That's the science: fifty to seventy years of effectively no progress. Not for want of trying.
From a point of view of assuaging Past Me that we'd pursued and received not only the best of all possible treatment, but hadn't missed out on any late-breaking developments, this information is comforting. Operating in the ultimate domain of uncertainty, of what the future might bring, we'd made the best decisions.
And yet at the time, in an era pre-dating the Web (though I did at the time have access to the pre-Web Internet), "helpful" people offerred various "nontraditional" therapies, the most frequent revolving around "laetrile" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdalin#Laetrile), acyanide-based compound repeatedly demonstrated to have no therapeutic effectiveness, and multiple risks, since the 1960s. Despite this, treatment "clinics" had sprung up, notably in the Caribbean and in Mexico, offering the "treatment", at a steep fee. (Actor Steve McQueen is among those who'd fallen prey to the scam.)
I ran interference for those closer to my friend by intercepting, assessing, and discarding any such literature. In the heat of fear, uncertainty, confusion, doubt, and guilt that are the hallmarks of dealing with grave illness, adding more useless malicious and fraudulent bullshit to the informational mix would have been actively harmful, both medically for the patient and psychologically for them and all caregivers.
I'm sorry you lost your friend. It sounds like that was a long battle and it has weighed on you ever since. I am glad you were there to support them. I know from personal experience how obnoxious it can be to be bombarded with this-and-that alternative therapy.
But this lack of progress is what I find so frustrating, along with the hostility towards anyone who is trying to change that. Many sick people are willing to take a risk to progress the science. The insistence on 100% safety and unpractical clinical trials that only allow for patent-able medicines is ultimately killing more people by stalling progress. We haven't really cured a major disease in over half a century. That needs to change.
If a sick person claims that some sort of alternative therapy cured them, then there is absolutely _something_ there. It cannot always be explained away by the placebo effect, as the placebo effect is temporary. You're not going to cure a chronic disease with the placebo effect. These are important data points that need to be discussed. And a sick person should be able to discuss it regardless of their credentials. Their first-hand experience is valuable and contains objective truth.
But I agree that to claim that since an alternative therapy cured one it must cure all is irresponsible. Often times we do not even know what the root cause of an illness is, and until you do, just because two people have the same symptoms does not mean they have the same disease. There's also the issue of co-morbid diseases. There is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach (and it's seriously unfortunate that modern medicine insists that one treatment must work for everyone, otherwise it's quackery).
There are numerous attempts, and risks, being taken to advance the science. Sometimes the problems are simply hard, and solutions, if they exist at all, extraordinarily elusive. In recent years, genetic engineering advances such as CRISPR do put the possibility of a direct cure within realm of possibility, though of course that may also prove a false hope.
Other close friends have worked in the pharmaceutical and clinical trials sectors, I've a strong awareness of what goes on there.
There are numerous avenues which have been, and remain to be, explored. My friend themselves participated in several novel therapies once established protocols proved insufficient. We pursued all clinically plausible options, to the point of exhaustion (treatments themselves are often tremendously debilitating), even where not yet proven.
The hostility is not towards "anyone who is trying to change that". There is all the encouragement on Earth for such efforts. Watching masses of growths grow and consome someone you've held quite dear is not easily forgotten.
But those who exploit, possibly innocently but all too often with sheer uncaring deliberateness, the fear, ignorance, guilt, grief, and desperation of patients and thei loved ones beyond all hope is the one thing I've seen uglier than those growths.
The laetrile pamphlets I intercepted and burned 30 years ago went to great lengths to justify their clinics' and promoters' opposition to structured clinical studies, on the grounds that this would deny ssome patients (the control group) useful therapy. But this omits two key facts:
1. There've been numerous studies of the compounds and there is no clinical sign that of medical benefit. For nearly 60 years now.
2. Refusing to certify and demonstrate the compounds withholds the treatment, if beneficial, from vastly more beneficiaries. Of course, as the treatment is a fraud, this harm is fictional, but it. utterly undermines the fraudster's arguments. Their overwhelming insincerity aand self-serving aims are manifest.
There are several other common fallacies in your response I won't bother addressing, save to say in balance you're accomplishing far more harm than good here, and if you have the least bit of sense or decency you'll stop.
I have had my own frustrations with traditional medicine, so I understand where you're coming from. And I have effectively used "alternative" medicine, like skullcap for anxiety, which has actually shown to be effective in studies.
The problem is when people advocate treatments that are completely unproven, when a more effective treatment is available and hasn't been explored (I realize that he'd already tried chemo, but he was in remission from it previously, so it was definitely effective). That's what happened here - he had a 50% survival rate, which became 0% because of misinformation people shared with him online.
I get wanting to be understanding of what these people are going through, but I’m not going to support the spreading of quack medicine. It’s unhealthy for society. Ethics don’t go out the window just because science can’t provide someone easy answers.
If the goal is the avoid all suffering, like the suffering of chemo, there's much less painful ways to kill yourself than going through the agony of dying of cancer.
If the goal is to survive, then you do what works best. Chemo, radiation, and whatever else the doctor says will give you the best chance at survival. No one says it'll be fun, but you maybe get to live.
The problem is that we are all fallible. We are all gullible. And when we are at our most vulnerable, these snake oil salesmen are at our doors ready to sell us a fake solution to both the problem of suffering and death. And they're liars. The suffering won't be avoided, nor the death, but they'll have your money. It's murder and robbery at the same time.
> Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure.
Actually mostly I'm railing against the crazy conspiracy theorists who prey upon sick people and sell them snake oil.
The sick people themselves have been misled by charlatans.
He was given a 50% chance if he went the conventional route, but due to the actions of utter arseholes who peddle conspiracy theories, he turned down the conventional treatment and died.
It's not him that is the target of anger. It's those that preyed on him.
I've seen stuff like this a number of times. Someone gets their opinions horribly warped by well-crafted YouTube videos and graduates to spending a lot of time with like-minded peers on Facebook groups, subreddits or discord, reinforcing those beliefs.
I used to watch a talented gamer on twitch who goes on rants about how covid is a liberal scam, constantly advocates an all-meat diet ("there's no proof vegetables are healthy"), and shares YouTube videos on stuff like that. Trying to tell him otherwise only reinforces his beliefs, and he'll parrot talking points from videos. Completely soured me on his content and it's just really sad to see.
When someone lacks the scientific training or education to know whether something is a conspiracy theory, they can really get pulled in by charismatic YouTube personalities espousing nonsense. Social media is really poisoning some peoples' minds.
In theory no, if you have developed critical thinking.
I wonder if critical thinking works like a muscle that we have to train.
I personally check opposite opinions on youtube, but it's scary how youtube algorithm wants to brainwash me with recommendations on any direction I take, I use the option of "not interested" a lot, to clean up recommendations.
That and the evident radical polarization, scares me.
Theory and practice are often very different things. It's not hard at all to find intelligent, educated people, skilled in critical thinking, who believe very wacky ideas, because those ideas strike some emotional chord with them, which leads them to simply not see contradictory evidence.
The weakness with critical thinking is the old adage- the effort required to refute (or in this case question) bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the effort required to create it.
Basically, a tidal wave of bullshit overwhelms your ability to think critically about what you are hearing.
> the way otherwise intelligent people are corrupted scares me.
This is because of appeals to emotions. Our intelligence emerged from the animal - which we still are.
It isn't a question of intelligence. Intelligence can be easily manipulated if you manipulate emotions, which is what most content does. Look at how easily marketing works - these things work on intelligent and unintelligent people.
The problem isn't critical thinking - that is why intelligent people argue without any progress against these people. It isn't about intelligence. It's about emotion, animal desire, and manipulation. The way to not fall into the trap is to be aware.
Take a look into Chinese and Uighurs and Tabetains. Look into Scientology and other cults. Look into ISIS and radicalisation. Brainwashing is definitely a thing that works and a lot of energy is put into making it happen. It is indeed scary.
This is sort of off topic, but I wonder about the validity of the "carnivore diet". People will talk about Inuits and ketogenic diet and such.
I eat very little meat myself, due to health beliefs, but things like food beliefs are very difficult to scientifically defend. I know of all these "plant protein" studies and the China Study but finding cause and effect with something like diet is near impossible.
Upon reflection I have the tendency to want to be right and to feel superior because of some esoteric knowledge.
That puts you in pretty good company, including the parent post. Could be worse, at least you're self aware enough to see it.
The only alternative that makes any sense at all is use your brain to lay your own puzzle.
That may well put you in a position where you disagree with respected authorities/public opinion, but the alternative is blind faith which never ends well.
There's a very common form of reasoning that humans tend to do. I'll call it reductionism. You can also call it abstraction, or simplification. This is our drive to find a one size fit all solution, a clever trick, something really easy and simple that consistently works.
We all have this tendency, it manifests itself due to the limits of our own intelligence. As humans, we're not intelligent enough to understand, reason, and keep track of complicated things.
Understanding the limits of your understanding and intelligence is really hard, and in my opinion, that's the true sign of knowledge. It is very rare to find someone knowledgeable enough to have a good grasp on those limits.
Diet is not something we are smart enough to understand. Most people will not understand the complexities related to dieting and understanding it. That's why you'll have people parroting simple solutions grounded in beliefs only. It's too complicated to explain why it works, and too complicated to experiment with. So we can neither understand the principles of diet, nor can we try things and see if they work or not.
This is the current state of dieting. Like I said, all complicated things we try to find simple solutions that consistently works. So what can be more simple than say... limiting ourself to a particular food group? Try cutting out all meats. Try only eating meats, maybe cut out all sugar? Maybe eat only natural fats? Or don't eat any fat? Etc.
And the sad truth is, the limits to our intelligence is why people will believe in all kind of stupid things. Until someone actually figures it out, the folk tales will keep coming and the battle of beliefs and idiocy will rage on.
What smart people generally do when faced with limits such as those, is they turn to math and computers to help us reason about things that are out of reach of our own abilities. And until clear breakthrough are made, they take a statistical approach, where you do what at any given point seems to be the most likely model, knowing that it could be completely wrong still, but that's the best you can do to win the odds.
Inuits get by, but were they particularly healthy?
IMO we simply don't understand diet enough to prove what you should do. Instead, the best we can do is identify the people with the best outcomes, and try to emulate their lifestyle & diets. Essentially what Blue Zones did. You risk cargo-culting, but it's the best we can do.
It would help a lot if popular alternative treatments were studied thoroughly (including testing on big numbers of human volunteers - every person who chooses to exercise their right to deny conventional treatment should be convinced to contribute by letting scientists observe him while he is treated alternatively) with intention to identify and dissect every humble positive effect they might cause in any particular kind of patients.
A statement like "there is no credible evidence that thing helps" really can't convince an alternative treatment enthusiast to give his idea up. "Obiviously" there is no evidence because nobody no scientist for it.
We need to be able to tell them honestly: "we have tried hard, hundreds different people were studied thoroughly for this particular treatment, it really doesn't help or only helps slightly a particular kind of patients you don't fit, please go and get treated the way proven efficient".
The problem is that there are an infinite number of 'alternative' treatments to any illness. How many of these should be taken seriously and tested? Typically, if enough people take an alternative seriously, someone eventually tests it.
Having had 5 others in my life die from traditional cancer treatment I can certainly understand why people look for alternatives. I've seen brain, skin, blood cancer as an adult and I'm not sure what other cancers relatives had while I was growing up.
I've always worried if I would have the strength to fight or cave.
Treatments, side effects, and recovery rates vary tremendously among types of cancer. Some are eminently treatable with virtually no downsides. Some progress so slowly that treatment is all but unnecessary in most cases. And some remain tremendously aggressive, treatments themselves debilitating, and spread or recurrence all but assured.
Cancer is not s single disease, with a common origin, treatment, or outcome. It is a common characteristic --- malignant cell growth --- with multiple distinct manifestations, causes, prognoses, and treatments.
Knowledge of what specific condition is being faced makes a huge difference in response options.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Fuck everyone that does this. These are plain criminals in my view. There are tons of problem with the medical system and pharma biz, I'm not cheering for them but the alternative is often way worse and outright dangerous for a lot of people.
A friend of mine in medicine had a different perspective on it, his stance is basically that as long as they redirect the actual cases to the actual doctors, homeopathy is fine. It keeps the people who really just want somebody to talk to out of the doctor's offices and they will find help there, because the real doctor doesn't have time to do psycho-therapy light with them. At least from personal experience (my mother believes in it as well), it works. She knows very well what problems call for a doctor and what are okay to try homeopathy on.
It's good buisness and that's why it's popular. In germany (at least in the west, in the GDR no such thing existed) there is a special job below a physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilpraktiker
These are hugely popular, you can become one pretty fast with just taking a test (they basically test that you are able to know when to call the real doctor) and all of them I've known make their money with quack cures.
Pharmacies also making good money selling and advertising that stuff because of higher margins.
Also real physicans have very tight budget limits since a few years back - if you have a problem that's not a broken leg the physican can't get money for talking with you - or it's something like 20€/3months without further diagnosis. So people - especially middle aged, rather high educated (not scientists but usally buerocrats, teachers, etc.pp) are very prone to this. Also the anti-vaccination movement is i.e. popular not in the poor parts in Berlin but instead where the well educated, good earning people are living.
Take the rise of the internet where you can read up almost everything and convince yourself that you have superiour knowledge and probably a healthy dose of skepticism against anything "non natural" whatever that means...
But there are real economic incentives that make this popular and even major parties are in support of this (Green pary for example).
There is a movement to fix the payment of doctors and reform the medical system to better accomendate for the patients and forbid this insanity but it works well enough as it keeps patients aways from physican offices.
But the quack theory spreads and not everyone recognises their own limits and delegates patients to real physicans.
It's something that should be fixed but it's working well enough for everyone involved that it's seen as the lesser evil. As you can imagine I think it's a huge mistake but voices like mine are really a minitory.
Probably, but I'm not at all sure how many. People believe in the weirdest things, and some make a business out of it not to exploit the gullible, but because they actually believe in it as well.
When I talked to Feng Shui consultants I never got the faintest hint of them suppressing laughter and about to burst out what a great gig it is and how stupid the clients are. I see no reason why that shouldn't be similar in the "alternative medicine" field. There are certainly some that exploit it, but I'm absolutely not sure that they are the majority or even a sizable minority. People believe in the weirdest things.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
If I were to be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I don't know what I'd decide for myself. Of it depends on the diagnosis, if it was just a small skin cancer they could just cut out, sure, let's do that.
But if it was something more pernicious, like the Hodgkin lymphoma, I might refuse chemo. I may prefer to just get my affairs in order while not going through chemo, and just trying to appreciate what days I have left. And being able to appreciate the days I have left, because chemo can really knock you out. What's the point of getting more months of life, if you can't do anything?
I wouldn't put any of my hopes in an alternative medicine cure, but I've been studying science in various forms for a long time. I have a reasonable knowledge of what might work and what wouldn't.
I sympathise with the way you feel, but here he did not refused treatment to better live the time he had left but chose "alternative medicines" instead. The discourse in those online communities is not that you should appreciate the time you have left but that they can heal you.
Those are two very different situations and while the outcome is sadly identical, they should not be conflated.
The sedatives and painkillers, are the biochemical discourse that you feel like you heal / healed.
When my father was dying from cancer, the doctors said his treatment was curative not palliative, which is essentially the same discourse you are offended with.
I'm not offended, I'm pointing out how the situation differs.
If doctors gives inaccurate information, it's an important problem that needs to be discussed.
> the doctors said his treatment was curative not palliative
In the present case, it seems like it was not the case: "At the time, Sean’s doctors told him he had at least a 50% chance of long-term survival if he underwent chemotherapy", while the alternative medicines gave false information: "Sean also relied on "thermographic scans" - heat images of the body" or "I’d use words like, 'oh no it’s the Herxheimer’s reaction'".
It seems to me like we are preaching for the same thing, which is to give the correct information to the patient and let him decide.
You have X chance of Z time, etc.
But that's statistics, you as an individual will often fall in the normal range in your stratified group. Except when you don't.
27 Years old, I was dying of cancer really bad, it is worse than chemo, I didnt know it, but I was dying very bad. It felt like the worst flu ever, with constant cold symptoms, fatigue and night sweats, it was so bad I had to change several times a night. It was terrible.
When I was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer with secondary cancer in my liver, I thought that was it, I have screwed up bad and should have gone to the doctor earlier.
The first meeting with my oncologist he said the chemotherapy is to give you time, it is not a cure. I didnt ask how long, it is nothing I want to know. He said he will throw what ever he can at me, since I am fit and young. Even though there was no reassurance, I felt much better after this.
So chemo, it sucks, I was on a 2 week cycle routine, which meant usually, go to the clinic on Thursday, get 3 different drugs over 3-4 hours. Some are fine, like oxaliplatin (and quite interesting when its cold outside), others hit you right in the head like irinotecan (this one sucks bad, kicks you in the head hard and make you feel sick), and finally 5fu which is much milder than irinotecan. The 5fu I would get as a pump which administered it over 46 hours or so at home.
So Thursday, on the day I feel bad when administered, would say a 3 when irinotecan hits. Afterwards mby a 6 or 7. I would have energy to work this day if I wanted.
Friday, did go to work some days with my pump. Feeling probably a 5-6, energy a 7.
Saturday, pump disconnected and the fatigue starts to hit, Feeling probably a 5, energy a 5.
Sunday, Feeling probably a 4, energy a 3.
Monday, Feeling probably a 3-4, energy a 2-3.
Tuesday, Feeling probably a 4, energy a 4.
Wednesday, Feeling probably a 5, energy a 5.
Thursday, Feeling probably a 6, energy a 6.
... It would improve until the next Thursday where I would be feeling probably a 8, energy a 8-9.
So by the time you go back for more chemo you would feel quite good. So on average I worked one week every two weeks.
Now, as soon as I started chemo, much of my cancer symptoms started to melt away, no more gut wrenching pain in my bowels, no more regular night sweats because my liver is shutting down, not feeling like having a flu, this is after 2-3 cycles of chemo. Chemo can make your quality of life better, it did it for me. Chemo sucks and I was lucky that I found ways to eat, keep my weight and stay healthy and positive.
In the end, I managed to have liver surgery and bowel surgery and am now cancer free. My oncologist didnt think that I would survive until surgery, and was lucky my chemo was soooo effective. 1 year from diagnosis to cancer free, I am lucky.
But of course, this is an individual experience, but I would say, dying of cancer suck more than chemo, for me.
Especially after having gone through the broken NHS system once. If I was in his position I too would do anything to avoid them, although I admit that if I were him I would rather move to a country with a better healthcare system than use weird snakeoil magic cancer curing items.
This is a major problem; not only did this stupidity cost him his life but he also put others at risk.
The kid survived cancer at 17 and then had it again. This shit will fuck up your whole world. He was freaking out and afraid of dying.
Should alternative therapy posts and advertising have unlimited distribution on fb/instagram?
Celebrities (or frankly any social media idiot without relevant medical credentials) should not be making medical claims, otherwise we get things like Goop, bullshit essential oils and magic rocks to protect against 5G.
Any platform that amplifies the reach of these posts should also be held liable.
"Memes" on Instagram and other social media platforms disguised as misleading and inaccurate health advice is the actual problem.
Looks like the word "Meme" in 2020 is now totally different to when it was used in 2006.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1229817-vault-7-leaks
meme (n.)
"an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene
Saying "meme came out of gene" is a perfectly reasonable statement.
This applies similarly to low-truth-valence ideologies and belief systems, for which current and pending crises may prove strong checks.
The pop understanding robs ideas of their context in systems of ideas, rendering them isolated sound bites with no integration or higher level thought. It promotes a kind of Orwellian "duckspeak" and the utmost short attention span culture.
I don't think it's a coincidence that meme culture dominated forums originate all the worst ideas and culture on the Internet. I am looking at Twitter with its ideological lynch mobs, 4chan, and the popular Reddit forums.
Richard Dawkins originated the concept, and for him it was only a speculation anyway. In any case Dawkins has never impressed me. He's not the greatest thinker in evolutionary theory by any measure, and he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no idea why he is so high profile.
I have no context here. What do you mean?
That’s essentially the extent of the analogy to genes and is basically self-evident.
The coarse structure of known space resembles brain tissue when rendered in a certain way, therefore the universe is a giant brain.
I could go on forever.
Reason from first principles, not by analogy.
At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.”
The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment).
This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy.
I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored.
Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
In practice now, memes are exactly what the GP says: manifestation of simpletons communicating on the Internet.
For example, if you just say, “that’s our culture,” it’s very tempting to accept it as an intrinsic property of your society/company/team. If you say, “that’s the collection of dominant memes for this particular environment at this particular time,” it gives you some avenues to start 1) decomposing a monolithic culture into its component pieces and 2) explore why those particular memes are so dominant in the particular environment.
The latter route, IMO, will expose many more levers for you to play with if you were to want to, say, modify a culture.
Memetics, or whatever you are willing to call it, is not. Mostly a way for people with frog avatars to sound important.
Consider a mathematical "culture" where proofs are generated by some AI, propagated between nodes, and each node that receives a proof checks if it seems valid before propagating it to the next node.
What kind of proof survives that kind of culture has a lot more to do with the nature of mathematics and the proposer AI than it has to do with the dynamics that every replicator system has in common.
In other words, it's very easy for pop memetics to go back and forth between a position where "it's all replicators, the memes are just using you to replicate themselves" and where "obviously, the objective content of the idea matters more than their replicability".
How much the spread of ideas in a society is one compared to the other depends on parameters that differ from system to system. Treating them all alike does a big disservice to the grand variety of systems that exist, and using the concept of replicator dynamics to pretend that the intellect is always a servant to the system is worse still.
api is right that memetics as a field is in disrepute, considered pseudoscience by many. That doesn't mean the premise of ideas propagating through the population, surviving or dying based on various criteria, is totally bunk. But you have to be willing to distinguish the concept of memes from 'memetics as a science.' I think it's a useful analogy, but it has limitations.
One hazard of memetics mirrors a common hazard in discussions about genetics. Anthropomorphizing genes by saying things like "the gene wants to replicate" or "the gene is selfish" is common for obvious reasons, but you have to be careful to not take it literally. When you make the analogy between genes and ideas, that habit of anthropomorphization comes along for the ride, and in the process ideas are given agency of their own. Saying that the idea has agency of it's own, that it self-replicates, is in some sense tantamount to questioning the agency of the humans participating in the spread of the idea. In brief, memetics steps on the third rail of free will.
* Edit: I shouldn't have equated the dangers here. This was a bad take. I still believe there are good bits of info provided in the video, but the relevance to this thread is less than I considered and I should have thought more about what I was sharing.
Edit 2: I didn't mean to link to a specific timestamp of the video in the original link. That has been removed.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNzQ_sLGIuA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ts8X3HDtPE
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with naturopathic solutions, but people seem to lose the ability to reason about probability after the fact.
This is not to make light of the situation, but more to say "don't beat yourself up" about a bad thing that happened.
It's far less of an effect, if what I've read is to be believed, when measured against things like terminal cancer.
Sum % positive reasons of not doing chemo: n% chance that you'd recover without doing anything n% chance that these naturopathic cures do somehow cure you n% chance that the treatment would actually make things worse
It's a garden of forking paths. You can't just reason about this with one number. Choices are hard. People die. Just a matter of order.
Belief in conspiracy theories is the specific issue from a whole class of problems: what is the most important thing you believe, how do you know it's true, and is that good enough or do you need to take additional action in case it's false?
> Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos
it seems that he first decided not to undergo chemo, then clinged on whatever he could.
My uncle offered her some kind of herbal tea as a solution to her cancer. Grandma had a worse view of alternative medicine than the actual medicine she had already refused. I had never seen her so upset with my uncle. Her reaction has stayed with me.
I don't believe in naturopathy either, but I wonder if it still has a positive impact for those whom believe in it, ie. the placebo effect.
I have a family member with lung cancer and when they felt traditional options have been exhausted, they went full alternative. TCM and such.
2 of them said, after beating it, that they would have chosen to die if they could do it over. One of those people was treated with modern immune therapies, which still left him permanently messed up. My other friend with cancer isn't around to tell me his thoughts on it.
At this point in my life, 45 with no kids and good life insurance, I would not choose to fight cancer if I developed it.
Sorry for the ignorance, but what does that expression mean? I've never seen it before.
It's a fucking terrible way to die. FWIW, the AIDS patients down the hall had it as bad or worse.
It took me a long time to think the effort was worthwhile. And if people like me didn't get fed into the meat grinder of progress, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
It all depends on the cancer and the prognosis of course but undergoing all kinds of radical treatments with low chances of success ends up robbing you of those last weeks better spent on seeing the people dear to you.
It is the ability to not let go - we don't want these things to happen. We want to have hope that something out there can save - and these emotions are abused. It makes it all the more dastardly.
I also wonder if this is a argument for there being value in investing in ways of making chemotherapy less traumatic even though it wouldn't be making it more effective, just less psychological damage
I think it was quite brave of a soap to tackle that, & hopefully it's made people think if they were considering alternative 'solutions'.
[0] https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/06/coronation-street-spoilers-si...
Isn't this the same story as Steve Jobs? I recall reading that on this forum
It’s hard to know how much impact his delay had, but it’s possible his focus on alternative medicine killed him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Jobs&mobile...
> In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.[158] The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor;[159] Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.[158] Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[160] instead relying on alternative medicine to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death". Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that."[161] Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[162] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."
> Isn't this the same story as Steve Jobs?
While much of the news media characterized Jobs' death as partly due to conventional cancer treatment coming too late, such a view is reductive given the nature of Jobs' "rare form of pancreatic cancer, called an islet cell tumor or gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET)" [0].
Not much conventional medical literature exists regarding the treatment of GEP-NETs (presumably due to their rarity) and Jobs and his care providers had to make choices without much evidence to guide them. Quoting from the above-cited article:
> [W]hat many journalists failed to note is that the evidence supporting any specific conventional treatment approach (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy) for GEP-NETs comprises a slim literature, and the evidence base for use of CAM [complementary and alternative medical] therapeutic approaches for GEP-NETs is virtually non-existent. After a delay of nine months after diagnosis, in 2004, Jobs opted for surgery. He died 7 years later. [0]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4924574/
Reminds of of the "fasten your seatbelt" campaign. I can't find a source, but I remember that line being inserted into movies before action sequences as a bit of a PSA. There's a lot TV shows and movies can do to educate people about things, to the point that the way diseases are shown in media should be researched and taken seriously.
This is a good story about poor choices made by an individual, but I hope it is not fodder for any attempt at regulating what free people choose to do with their lives. I think we need to do a better job at educating people on the dangers of freedom...what do you guys think? Perhaps we need some sort of "media literacy" education at the primary school level that trains people in evaluating sources of information ( which seems to be reserved for the university level in many cases, unfortunately ).
My thoughts are with the family of this man.
Edit: Wow, I'm surprised at the negative response to my comment. What is so controversial about my views here?
This is not an argument for regulating information, you are still free to peddle quack as long as you don't make false or unproven claims, and if you are sure your "quack" is actually legitimate you are free to do research, studies and tests just like the supposedly-evil "big pharma".
I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information."
> eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk.
What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like?
> the supposedly-evil "big pharma"
Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/?
Either that or government-approved websites (like the NHS is providing in the UK). It is in the government's best interest to keep you alive for as long as possible (if nothing else, just so you can pay tax longer), and while they aren't always perfect (like the current covid-19 response from some countries) I would still trust them more than some random people playing doctors on social media.
> What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like?
Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law?
> Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree
Perfection will never be achieved, but if we take all the effects of "big pharma" (both good and bad, across all diseases) and compare it to the effects of backyard quack medicine, who wins? I'm willing to bet good money that big pharma wins by a large margin, so I'd be willing to trust them until there is enough evidence that says otherwise.
Would faith based approaches fall under your definition of "unproven medical claims?"
I get what you are saying, but if someone wants to take their chances on some "quackery," shouldn't it be their right to do so? Obviously this individual knew that he was engaging in alternative medicine that is not recognized by the mainstream.
I don't believe in this particular alternative medicine, but I don't believe established science understands everything in this world and believe individuals should retain the right to explore alternative perspectives.
Yes, I don't see why it shouldn't.
> I get what you are saying, but if someone wants to take their chances on some "quackery," shouldn't it be their right to do so?
The problem is that quackery being around puts people at risk like this man. This man didn't outright decide to do quack, he decided based on unproven claims made by the quack peddlers that this alternative treatment would somehow work and be better than the conventional, modern medicine.
Furthermore during his alternative "therapy" he not only did it for himself but attracted a large following online, claiming that this treatment was working and thus encouraging other people to go down the same path.
> I don't believe established science understands everything in this world and believe individuals should retain the right to explore alternative perspectives.
Established science has never claimed to understand everything. Established science adjusts its understanding of the world based on evidence and is constantly doing new research to further that understanding. I find it very unlikely that someone playing doctor on social media would do better than a multibillion-dollar industry.
This is extremely dangerous. The complexity of human biology and our ethical standards don't intersect in a way for any treatment to be 'proven'. There is just statistical evidence of efficacy for some subset of humans who's condition is materially in the same vicinity of any given patient. However, any given patient has zero control over what testing has been done on any given intervention, and therefore may have a perfectly viable treatment left legally outside of their reach because we just haven't got to test their case yet (and may never).
Alternative treatments don’t guarantee higher success than modern medicine. However, if modern medicine puts the chance of survival at < 5%, it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches.
Modern science aims to create a standardized approach for categorized diseases. Controlled experiments aim to find a magic bullet, but are these experiments really “controlled”?
Everyone eats differently; everyone shits differently. Different air quality; stress levels; sleep; metabolism. Not to mention, the body and its disease are both is ever-changing systems over time. Until we have nano-machines, we won’t know the true cause and effect of all these variables.
Therefore, the holistic approach* is to use intuition, adaptation, and nonstandard ways to deal with this recognition. The downside of this approach is the amount of information and the ability to determine the credibility (eg. random social media), especially for a layman. However, if one was knowledgeable enough to read thousands of academic papers, from various fields (outside of oncology) -- one could develop a more tailored plan for the individual that accounts for these other factors.
*Holistic approach does not mean disregard of science. It does not mean rejecting standard protocols. It means that one should consider a wider-range of factors, in addition to standard protocols. It is an approach that places more value on breadth.
Fringe approaches would not be considered "fringe" if they were proven to have an effect. Even if it improves your survival rates by merely 1%, it would be still used as part of modern medicine if there was nothing else.
The problem is that the quack makes you believe that it will work, so you're still wasting time trying the "treatment" and potentially suffering its side-effects (not to mention the financial impact). It's worse than not doing anything, since at least the latter means you've accepted your fate and can enjoy whatever time you have peacefully instead of being busy with a quack treatment.
Furthermore, modern medicine isn't inherently hostile to "alternative medicine". If you think about it, all the potential treatments being researched in labs right now (including for covid-19) are still at the "alternative" stage, and if they end up being proven to work they simply become "medicine". What modern medicine is hostile to is unproven, or proven not to work treatments.
If you think you actually have an "alternative" theory that isn't quack, you are welcome to do your research on it to at least rule out any existing reasons why it couldn't work (using existing medical literature), and if the theory still stands by then you are free to engage with the mainstream medical community or study, become a researcher and then test your theory in a safe and controlled environment so the outcome is actually valuable (and will influence further research even if this particular theory doesn't work) and not just anecdotal evidence.
On and on and on and on. The decision tree is so deep and patient communities sliced into smaller and smaller subgroups that we don't have enough people on the planet to 'prove efficacy' for them all (as if such a task is even possible, the most we usually get is evidence of efficacy in similar cases).
You cannot test many things. You also cannot prove many things. Look at nutrition. Determining the cause and effect of a substance on a human body is difficult.
Science is aimed at proving things. Sometimes, in life, that luxury is not available.
Sounds like a great way to get scammed by charlatans, and potentially interfere with the treatment you're receiving from medical professionals.
Perhaps curcumin works for one , not another. Perhaps the same curcumin works now, but not later. Or perhaps you'll never knows if it works at all. Being able to measure it is difficult. Welcome to the game.
It is a process that combines both thinking and feeling. (Intuition). Perhaps one day you step in shit. But the next day you find a flower. There is no right or wrong answer.
I do believe there are "charlatans" -- if that's what you want to call it -- who are attuned to this type of flow, or practice.
"Selling" these techniques or drugs complicates the matter. And this is why [alternative] therapies have a negative taste in scientific communities.
Have you done so? Has anyone who follows "non-standard" approaches? (Yes, I'm aware that a few instances have; they generally become the "standardized approach", too.)
In the end, it comes down to intuition.
It's not a debunking book. It doesn't even address alternative treatments at all. It is a kind of biography of cancer.
I think it can help because it puts faces to some of the people who have developed cancer treatments over the years. And it really demystifies the work pharmaceutical researches have done to develop chemotherapy.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z...
The fact is these people are too busy doing "magical thinking" when they know they are smarter than the average person and know something that the general "sheep" do not know.
But the one thing they refuse to do is test their beliefs in such a manner that if they are wrong that they will be proved wrong. When they do show effort it is more do only the things that can prove them right, failure is not an option for them.
This can be seen very clearly on that flat earther documentary. When experiment results don't show what they want, they ignore them or explain them away and are off to find the next experiment that will "prove" their theory. There is no result that can cause them to question their theory.
Another treatment is called vitamin B17, found in particular high concentrations in bitter apricot seeds. This substance has a cyanide component that only unlocks within cancer cells due to the presence of the enzyme Beta-glucosidase. Jason Vale was a cancer patient and arm wrestling champion who discovered that apricot seeds would shrink his tumors. He did this three times (cancer kept on coming back). He then promoted the anti cancer effects until the FDA raided his house and ended up throwing him jail arguing that since he claimed apricot seeds were treating cancer, the apricot seeds were actually classified as drugs.
The wikipedia articles about these substances have been scrubbed by the poisoning corruption of big pharma which has billions at stake if the public wakes up to the fact that many cancers can be treated without the use of chemo therapy.
Additional the FDA itself did a story on the B17 substance in the 1970s and committed a horrific act of scientific misconduct which saw the results of the cancer study inverted and drew protests from the research who declared the FDA had committed fraud against the public. Despite this the synthetic version of B17 called laetrile was banned by the FDA. However it’s still legal in mexico and very well tolerated. Today however you will see wikipedia article declare that B17 is dangerous and will cause cyanide poisoning, which is contradicted by the many people take high doses of this drug every day across the world without issue.
Another treatment is a dog dewormer called fenbendazole. Despite its efficacy on cancer, no one can get it in the USA for this purpose, they must get it for their pet and take it themselves.
The BBC and the MSM won’t talk about these three major alternative treatments that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Also, as the Google Whistleblower I exposed the YouTube blacklist that included as terms “cancer cures”, which was used as input to for Google’s bit twiddled search re-ranking system. You can find this disclosure to the public at website:
www.zachvorhies.com
And look for the blacklist section on the front page.
The scale of corruption is mind boggling. Shame on the BBC for running such garbage propaganda in favor of big pharma.
i don't even know if you're right, but all the sudden I want to learn about macrophages on a saturday afternoon
i learned more in this post than i have from every thread on this whole site today
edit - HAHAHAAHHHA wow took 5 min for you to get flagged. keep burning books HN
Anyone can say anything on the internet, what reason do you have to trust anything they said is remotely true? Because it sounds science-y and you don't yet understand it? I mean, how do you even know of not just someone literally making all this up on the spot for a laugh? Why are anonymous strangers more trustworthy than anyone else?
It's all just appeals to the idea that there's some powerful, shadowy entity that doesn't want you to know this stuff, but they know the truth and you can be special too if you just listen to them. There's zero actual substance, just lots of unverifiable claims. Maybe the real conspiracy is that big pharma's medicine does work but people want to still you stuff that didn't work just to make money? Isn't simple greed a simpler explanation than some grand conspiracy?
If I told you broccoli cured my cancer, would you believe me?
i said:
"i don't even know if you're right, but all the sudden I want to learn about macrophages on a saturday afternoon"
how do you know he's wrong? why is your instinct to reject anything that challenges commonly held beliefs. i literally said i was grateful for his input and i have no reason to believe it, but it inspired me to look into it further. please exercise critical thinking skills
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
In short; we don't. Science is not about who's right and who's wrong. Science is about carefully formulating plausible theories, and then proving or disproving those through rigorous research, experimental results, referencing previous verifiable research work, and thorough peer review. Even then not a single research paper will claim to be absolute truth; there is always room for doubt, criticism and altering views based on followup research. It's a slow learning process based on a lot of trial and error.
What was posted above were a lot of wild claims flying directly in the face of broadly accepted knowledge accumulated by decades of diligent cancer research. The lack of any reliable sources to back up those claims makes it more than likely to be just misinformation and not to be taken seriously. Besides, the way the post read and how quickly such a long epistle was posted felt more like it was simply copy-pasted from some conspiracy theorist's manifest, rather than written by someone genuinely interested in taking part in the discussion.
That might be a good refutation if such a thing never happened, if pharmaceutical companies didn't lobby, if companies had never spread misleading information downplaying the harm of their products, or covered up problems, or had reputations for being honest and trustworthy earned by actually being honest and trustworthy.
> There's zero actual substance, just lots of unverifiable claims.
Are they? "Many of these cancers release a substance called Negalese" sounds verifiable. Is there such a substance? Are some cancers proven to release it? "Dr. Bradstreets clinics were raided" that should be a verifiable fact, no? "Apricot seeds contain high concentrations of B17 compared to other seeds". "the FDA itself did a story on the B17 substance in the 1970s". Even "these things cure cancer" should be verifiable by trying it.
Is it any less verifiable claims than "depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain"? That sounds verifiable, except people can't seem to verify which chemicals are imbalanced and how that's measured, or why a measured imbalance isn't the diagnostic criteria for depression in the first place.
You're throwing around "unverifiable" and "no substance" as insults rather than honest descriptions.
> Maybe the real conspiracy is that big pharma's medicine does work but people want to still you stuff that didn't work just to make money? Isn't simple greed a simpler explanation than some grand conspiracy?
If I told you that greed is the grand conspiracy, would you
> The results were startling and tens thousands were treated successfully and reversed their cancer.
If someone can verify this I'll eat my hat. Surely something as startling and revolutionary as that would have been well documented and explained being any shred of doubt. Of course, it would also be hard to market your ineffective treatment to desperate people by doing that, so I won't hold my breath. Better to play the victim of big pharma. Some individual details might be verifiable, but it's the brooder claims themselves that I am dubious about.
I'm on my phone so it's a pain to reference the original post while writing this one.
Here's my theory, no conspiracy necessary: Greedy pharmaceutical companies have developed cancer treatments that are moderately effective on most cancers. Cancer being what it is, however, there are many people for whom those treatments are not effective. Facing the prospect of a terminal illness, they seek alternative treatments, lest they do nothing at all. Greedy quacks develop their own "treatments", which conveniently, for one reason or another, they can never prove the effectiveness of. They always have an excuse, never the possibility that it just doesn't work.
So yes, you're correct, the grand conspiracy is greed. The pharma companies are greedy and use underhanded tactics to sell the treatments they hold the patents for, and the con artists selling bleach to cancer patients are also greedy and blame the former for why they can't demonstrate their "treatments" are effective.
I think for lots of people it's more comforting to imagine that there's some big conspiracy out there trying to keep effective care from them than the idea that there's just nothing that will save them from their terminal illness.
Against the claim of thousands of people documented as cured, you argue that such a documentary can't exist because if it existed there would be documentation?
I'm not asking you to believe onion juice cures cancer based on an unverified claim that it does, but what you're doing is pre-deciding that it can't and then refuting the claim that thousands of people were cured because if they were, there would be thousands of cured people. Your logic is bad, and unscientific.
But even then - would it be? You'd think if the Catholic Church was systematically abusing children on a massive scale, it would be well documented and chased by the police. But they were, and they were covering it up on a massive scale too. What about the tobacco companies misleading people on the harms of tobacco so badly they agreed to indefinite $10Bn/year payouts, or the 1971 Ford Pinto with a fire risk where Ford calculated that paying out for burns victim lawsuits would save them $70M over fixing the cars and then buried that in mountains of Department of Transport paperwork ... surely that can't be happening, if it was there would be evidence - and there was. The VW emissions scandal? Coverups do happen.
"It's not happening" until it is happening, then "of course it was happening, everyone knew it".
> Greedy quacks develop their own "treatments", which conveniently, for one reason or another, they can never prove the effectiveness of. They always have an excuse, never the possibility that it just doesn't work.
That ineffective quack treatments exist is not evidence that all treatment claims are ineffective quack treatments.
> I think for lots of people it's more comforting to imagine that there's some big conspiracy out there trying to keep effective care from them than the idea that there's just nothing that will save them from their terminal illness.
It's plausible that America's largest killer - heart disease - is preventable with dietary and lifestyle changes, and maybe curable/reversible[1]. A test for non-invasively measuring calcium buildup in the heart as a proxy for atheroscletoric plaque and diet and lifestyle changes which improve that value. Claims that the mainstream medical view is that it can't be done. Maybe he's wrong, maybe he's right, but if you decide that he's wrong because if he was right it would be mainstream, there's no way for your reasoning to allow any change.
[1] https://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2017/11/reduce-heart-scan-sco...
Inferring the beliefs of others from a tiny amount of (questionable) data is yet another kind of magical thinking. To start to get a more accurate estimate of what other people (conspiracy theorists in this case) are actually thinking requires one to exert the necessary effort in particular actions, the end result hopefully being the ability to more accurately glean what they are thinking from the words they actually write. But it seems no one is willing to put in that effort, perhaps because they want a quick and easy solution.
> When they do show effort it is more do only the things that can prove them right, failure is not an option for them.
Indeed. Such is the nature of the human mind, as well as networked collections of them. This very thread, like many others, is chock full of similar thinking, but the nature of the mind seems to render people unable to realize it.
This certainly isn't the cure-all for conspiracy beliefs but if you know someone reasonable who is just on the edge I think it could really help.
Look: https://twitter.com/perpetualmaniac/status/12845536772361297...
Suddenly the experienced friend stops and takes their map and compass. "No reason to worry just double checking everything, we are getting closer." But the inexperienced friend sees no sign of progress. This cycle repeats several times over. They walk for hours. Stop to check. No sign of progress. Reassurances. Again and again. Finally the inexperienced friend says, "I recognize this place and I think I know the way back. Let's go this way."
The experienced friend knows this is the wrong way and insists they go a different direction. After half an hour of arguing they part ways. In a few more hours the experienced friend finds their way out of the forest while the inexperienced friend remains hopelessly lost. The experienced friend finds a ranger station. A ranger there asks, "were you alone?" The experienced replies that they were not alone but it does not matter as their companion did not want to be saved.
In the argument, the experienced outdoorsman explains how the map works, how the sun rises and sets as it does everyday - he explains the compass always points north, and the map is from the national park service.
The other says "no, I'm right, because I feel right. In my heart, I know this is the right way, I KNOW I've seen this tree before."
The outdoorsman was exasperated. He had spent time arguing with a man who knows nothing of being outdoors, insisting that he was correct. When he went back to the ranger and a search party formed, it occurred to him that, no matter how much logic and reason he assaulted his former friend with, nothing would shake his faith and the argument would have gone on until they had both died, or he had run off.
They eventually found the other man - hours later. The other man was rescued and immediately saw how wrong he was, but it took something else to show that to him - true fear and failure.
The point of "not wanting to be saved" is, no matter how much you try, you can not save them, and you must move on with your life. Perhaps they will learn, perhaps not.
Or simply, stop wasting your time, when you know you can't bring the change they need.
But rarely is action taken. We've convinced ourselves that merely voicing an opinion is a heroic activity - while it remains an important one, it lacks the power of action.
But in my daily life I have encountered people dabbling in conspiracy theories but not fully indoctrinated. Having long term conversations with them has helped in some cases. By long term I do not mean hours long arguments. I mean occasional conversations over the course of months.
My SIL just died as a consequence of her faith in alternative medicines. Magnetic blankets, some herbs, some homeopathic nonsense, faith healing, etc.
More disturbing to me is that my brother went along with it. Transmuted from aspiring to be the next Jacques Cousteau to full throated fundie (young Earth, creationism, own the libtards, COVID hoax, gold bug, etc). FWIW, we were raised Lutheran.
As kids, my brother held my hand during a bone marrow transplant. At some level, he knows the truth. But he and my SIL simply could not consider rational options. Not for lack of trying. Many, many people in my SIL's social circles and church tried to intervene. She simply ghosted most of them. And threatened to divorce my brother over it.
Being an unwilling participant in their self-destruction (caring for my nephews), seeing them in action on their own turf, I finally realized the root cause is almost certainly unaddressed trauma. My SIL talked about chemotherapy like anorexics talk about food. And I'm fairly clear why my brother is a basket case.
In conclusion, thank you for your suggestion. But ignorance isn't the problem. At least these two people who reject science are motivated by other reasons.
I'm thinking it's a safe bet that there's a deficiency in the NHS' delivery of counseling and mental health services for those facing mortal crisis.
I find it's hard to blame people when there's such a storm of information surrounding these things. It's easy to see how even very intelligent people can pick the wrong remedy.
Also I used to think it was clear cut, but I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.
Yes, he did. Then again, pancreatic cancer, even the "milder" form he had, does not have a great prognosis, and he lived another 8 years after the diagnosis.
> I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.
Hope you ran out on them as well…
In fact, as I typed "apricot kernel" into the search bar, Amazon suggested "apricot kernels bitter seed for cancer". That seems dangerous to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883134
The attitude in this thread is ableist.
Sick people are intelligent. Sick people are capable. Sick people can feel what is happening in their bodies. And they have a right to seek treatments they deem best.
Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer, or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure.
When it gets to this point it makes sense to strike out on your own. Some have success. Others do not. But it's a battle that has to be fought unless you want to just give up and lose the life you had.
I really struggle to understand why healthy people are so hostile towards sick people who are just trying to survive. Yes, it's sad to watch sick people desperately seek for effective treatments. But just imagine how hard it is to be that sick person desperately searching for effective treatments while your peers treat you like you're crazy, and then simultaneously refuse to provide any reasonable alternatives.
One of the foundational principles I use to reason is "if there was a free-lunch (i.e. a higher-ROI solution—more reward for less risk), then anyone truly motivated to solve the problem would have switched to it, or at least added it to their offering as an extra hail-mary on top of their current approach. Given that they didn't, the free lunch must either not be free (i.e. no less risky), or not be much of a lunch (i.e. not rewarding.)"
Yes, in this case, you've got a system with mixed motivations; the FDA isn't motivated to solve problems, so there might be some beneficial drug that isn't on the market. But that doesn't mean that your doctor in particular—someone who is motivated primarily to solve your problem—won't still tell you about such drugs, and help you to acquire them through grey-market channels. Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc. They also will just tell you to eat a certain food or take a certain supplement as your "prescription", if doing that is a higher-ROI solution than any drug.
If doctors are only offering you treatments with devastating side-effects, that's because those are the highest-ROI treatments that exist. Doctors always prioritize safety over benefit[1]; the only time they offer unsafe treatment is when there is no safe treatment—or at least no safe treatment that pays for the costs of going through it by actually having a non-zero likelihood of helping you.
[1] For example, doctors use known placebo-equivalents as the first-line treatments for many psychiatric conditions, because placebos have no potential risks; so even if the likelihood of remission from placebo is low, as long as it's higher than zero (which it usually is in psychiatric conditions), doctors want to first make sure you aren't someone who would go into remission from placebo, before moving onto trying to treat you with drugs that actually do something (and therefore have risks.)
Are you sick? Because millions of sick people disagree with you. You can't read about our experience in a book and tell us how things actually work. You have to live it.
And if you work in healthcare, well, you only see the sick people who have the time and financial resources to navigate your tyrannical bureaucracy. And you won't see any sick people with an illness you don't understand, because we learn to stop wasting our time and money with you quickly.
"Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc."
Maybe a small small percentage of doctors. Finding them and affording them is not something most sick people can do.
He had the option of chemotherapy with a 50 / 50 chance of long term survival.
The article is not about seeking alternative treatments as a last resort, it is about disregarding well proven science in favour of unproven (and in this case ineffective) alternatives.
If it becomes ableist to critique those who follow fake medical advice from the internet, how would we reduce the this happening? If people are dying as a result, that's a public health issue and it deserves attention.
"If it becomes ableist to critique those who follow fake medical advice from the internet..."
This is ableist because it claims that sick people are incapable of determining what is good advice and what is bad advice.
But that's exactly what happened here, the sick person was taken in by charlatans. How is that ableist? Not-sick people are also taken in by charlatans all the time, we blame the charlatans, the scammers, the frauds and the snake-oil salesmen for preying on people.
You are taking one case where the patient chose to follow bad advice, and using it to suppress the voices of hundreds of thousands of sick people.
I'm condeming those that peddle false information and profit from the sick as they do so. It's a shame you take that as an attack, but that's on you.
This article and Hacker News thread is largely comprised of healthy people trying to control what sick people think, feel, and say. And on top of that, you're trying to censor their discussions using government-backed violence. That is the conclusion of this article and many of the comments in this thread. I am sick and I fight against these authoritarian policies every day to get the information and medicine I need. I live in excruciating pain every minute of every day and then I have to argue with a bunch of clueless healthy people about what I can and cannot do with my own body.
You are at the very least advocating for others to attack me. Using government backed violence to prevent me from accessing the information or medicine I want _is_ an attack.
If the medical industry is so correct, then why aren't they curing people?
Why is the work of biochemists ignored in the health care industry? (in many ways they understand the human body better than doctors do)
Why do I have 1000's of people I've connected with online who have successfully treated/cured their illness? Do you think we're just making this all up for attention? Because the attention we get is far from positive. We are excluded by civil society. We only survive by hiding what we really think. The purpose of this hacker news account is to build up karma and then burn it in order to say these things. I can't just say them without paying a cost.
Yes, it is. He was taken in by people peddling false information. We know it's false information.
Your weird equivocating about this and demand for it to be taken as some sort of personal offence is ridiculous.
> If the medical industry is so correct, then why aren't they curing people?
You might have fallen down the rabbit hole, please be careful down there, it can do more harm than good, as this article shows.
(If you want to trade insults, your argument is anti-intellectual.)
I strongly disagree. Making choices for other people is tyranny.
Edit:
If you're referring to the term "ableist" as in insult--it is not. It is a technical term that accurately describes the logical conclusion of many of the arguments being made in this thread.
"The general public is not capable of determining what is good advice" because "experts" is not an argument. It's a belief. If you want to have an intellectual argument you've got to form an argument that I can respond to.
Yes, there are quacks, but there is also cutting edge science that is not widely understood. You are blaming the people the victim chose to listen to, and therefore, you are blaming the victims choices, claiming that they were a "conspiracy theorist". You are blaming the victim.
They were among the other four.
I've monitored progress on medical knowledge and treatment of the condition over the ensuing decades. What I've learned is that:
- It's now possible to directly detect the genetic marker of the condition. We have improved detection and precision of Dx.
- The actual therapy ... is effectively unchanged. The chemo and radiation therapies they'd received were essentially unchanged over the preceding two decades, and were based on chemicals and mechanisms already in use in the 1950s (though dosing, quality, and side-effects mitigation are somewhat improved).
- The compounds themselves date to World War One, poison gas, and human experiments now considered crimes against humanity. History is interesting....
- These treatments remain largely unchanged in the decades since my friend's death. And five-year mortality for the condition remains about 80%.
That's the science: fifty to seventy years of effectively no progress. Not for want of trying.
From a point of view of assuaging Past Me that we'd pursued and received not only the best of all possible treatment, but hadn't missed out on any late-breaking developments, this information is comforting. Operating in the ultimate domain of uncertainty, of what the future might bring, we'd made the best decisions.
And yet at the time, in an era pre-dating the Web (though I did at the time have access to the pre-Web Internet), "helpful" people offerred various "nontraditional" therapies, the most frequent revolving around "laetrile" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdalin#Laetrile), acyanide-based compound repeatedly demonstrated to have no therapeutic effectiveness, and multiple risks, since the 1960s. Despite this, treatment "clinics" had sprung up, notably in the Caribbean and in Mexico, offering the "treatment", at a steep fee. (Actor Steve McQueen is among those who'd fallen prey to the scam.)
I ran interference for those closer to my friend by intercepting, assessing, and discarding any such literature. In the heat of fear, uncertainty, confusion, doubt, and guilt that are the hallmarks of dealing with grave illness, adding more useless malicious and fraudulent bullshit to the informational mix would have been actively harmful, both medically for the patient and psychologically for them and all caregivers.
And I remain glad I did.
But this lack of progress is what I find so frustrating, along with the hostility towards anyone who is trying to change that. Many sick people are willing to take a risk to progress the science. The insistence on 100% safety and unpractical clinical trials that only allow for patent-able medicines is ultimately killing more people by stalling progress. We haven't really cured a major disease in over half a century. That needs to change.
If a sick person claims that some sort of alternative therapy cured them, then there is absolutely _something_ there. It cannot always be explained away by the placebo effect, as the placebo effect is temporary. You're not going to cure a chronic disease with the placebo effect. These are important data points that need to be discussed. And a sick person should be able to discuss it regardless of their credentials. Their first-hand experience is valuable and contains objective truth.
But I agree that to claim that since an alternative therapy cured one it must cure all is irresponsible. Often times we do not even know what the root cause of an illness is, and until you do, just because two people have the same symptoms does not mean they have the same disease. There's also the issue of co-morbid diseases. There is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach (and it's seriously unfortunate that modern medicine insists that one treatment must work for everyone, otherwise it's quackery).
Other close friends have worked in the pharmaceutical and clinical trials sectors, I've a strong awareness of what goes on there.
There are numerous avenues which have been, and remain to be, explored. My friend themselves participated in several novel therapies once established protocols proved insufficient. We pursued all clinically plausible options, to the point of exhaustion (treatments themselves are often tremendously debilitating), even where not yet proven.
The hostility is not towards "anyone who is trying to change that". There is all the encouragement on Earth for such efforts. Watching masses of growths grow and consome someone you've held quite dear is not easily forgotten.
But those who exploit, possibly innocently but all too often with sheer uncaring deliberateness, the fear, ignorance, guilt, grief, and desperation of patients and thei loved ones beyond all hope is the one thing I've seen uglier than those growths.
The laetrile pamphlets I intercepted and burned 30 years ago went to great lengths to justify their clinics' and promoters' opposition to structured clinical studies, on the grounds that this would deny ssome patients (the control group) useful therapy. But this omits two key facts:
1. There've been numerous studies of the compounds and there is no clinical sign that of medical benefit. For nearly 60 years now.
2. Refusing to certify and demonstrate the compounds withholds the treatment, if beneficial, from vastly more beneficiaries. Of course, as the treatment is a fraud, this harm is fictional, but it. utterly undermines the fraudster's arguments. Their overwhelming insincerity aand self-serving aims are manifest.
There are several other common fallacies in your response I won't bother addressing, save to say in balance you're accomplishing far more harm than good here, and if you have the least bit of sense or decency you'll stop.
The problem is when people advocate treatments that are completely unproven, when a more effective treatment is available and hasn't been explored (I realize that he'd already tried chemo, but he was in remission from it previously, so it was definitely effective). That's what happened here - he had a 50% survival rate, which became 0% because of misinformation people shared with him online.
If the goal is to survive, then you do what works best. Chemo, radiation, and whatever else the doctor says will give you the best chance at survival. No one says it'll be fun, but you maybe get to live.
The problem is that we are all fallible. We are all gullible. And when we are at our most vulnerable, these snake oil salesmen are at our doors ready to sell us a fake solution to both the problem of suffering and death. And they're liars. The suffering won't be avoided, nor the death, but they'll have your money. It's murder and robbery at the same time.
Actually mostly I'm railing against the crazy conspiracy theorists who prey upon sick people and sell them snake oil.
The sick people themselves have been misled by charlatans.
He was given a 50% chance if he went the conventional route, but due to the actions of utter arseholes who peddle conspiracy theories, he turned down the conventional treatment and died.
It's not him that is the target of anger. It's those that preyed on him.
I used to watch a talented gamer on twitch who goes on rants about how covid is a liberal scam, constantly advocates an all-meat diet ("there's no proof vegetables are healthy"), and shares YouTube videos on stuff like that. Trying to tell him otherwise only reinforces his beliefs, and he'll parrot talking points from videos. Completely soured me on his content and it's just really sad to see.
When someone lacks the scientific training or education to know whether something is a conspiracy theory, they can really get pulled in by charismatic YouTube personalities espousing nonsense. Social media is really poisoning some peoples' minds.
It makes me wonder what would happen if I watched YouTube videos every day that were misleading but well produced.
Would I eventually end up the same way?
How damaging is just repeated exposure and reinforcement to this kind of stuff? Is everyone vulnerable?
Even being scientifically minded and trying to be a good rational thinker, the way otherwise intelligent people are corrupted scares me.
It makes me extra cautious with what information I choose to expose myself to.
I do take some comfort that I was able to throw religion away even while growing up surrounded by it as a child.
I hope that means there’s a way to be more resilient to misinformation.
In theory no, if you have developed critical thinking.
I wonder if critical thinking works like a muscle that we have to train. I personally check opposite opinions on youtube, but it's scary how youtube algorithm wants to brainwash me with recommendations on any direction I take, I use the option of "not interested" a lot, to clean up recommendations.
That and the evident radical polarization, scares me.
Basically, a tidal wave of bullshit overwhelms your ability to think critically about what you are hearing.
This is because of appeals to emotions. Our intelligence emerged from the animal - which we still are.
It isn't a question of intelligence. Intelligence can be easily manipulated if you manipulate emotions, which is what most content does. Look at how easily marketing works - these things work on intelligent and unintelligent people.
The problem isn't critical thinking - that is why intelligent people argue without any progress against these people. It isn't about intelligence. It's about emotion, animal desire, and manipulation. The way to not fall into the trap is to be aware.
I eat very little meat myself, due to health beliefs, but things like food beliefs are very difficult to scientifically defend. I know of all these "plant protein" studies and the China Study but finding cause and effect with something like diet is near impossible.
Upon reflection I have the tendency to want to be right and to feel superior because of some esoteric knowledge.
The only alternative that makes any sense at all is use your brain to lay your own puzzle.
That may well put you in a position where you disagree with respected authorities/public opinion, but the alternative is blind faith which never ends well.
We all have this tendency, it manifests itself due to the limits of our own intelligence. As humans, we're not intelligent enough to understand, reason, and keep track of complicated things.
Understanding the limits of your understanding and intelligence is really hard, and in my opinion, that's the true sign of knowledge. It is very rare to find someone knowledgeable enough to have a good grasp on those limits.
Diet is not something we are smart enough to understand. Most people will not understand the complexities related to dieting and understanding it. That's why you'll have people parroting simple solutions grounded in beliefs only. It's too complicated to explain why it works, and too complicated to experiment with. So we can neither understand the principles of diet, nor can we try things and see if they work or not.
This is the current state of dieting. Like I said, all complicated things we try to find simple solutions that consistently works. So what can be more simple than say... limiting ourself to a particular food group? Try cutting out all meats. Try only eating meats, maybe cut out all sugar? Maybe eat only natural fats? Or don't eat any fat? Etc.
And the sad truth is, the limits to our intelligence is why people will believe in all kind of stupid things. Until someone actually figures it out, the folk tales will keep coming and the battle of beliefs and idiocy will rage on.
What smart people generally do when faced with limits such as those, is they turn to math and computers to help us reason about things that are out of reach of our own abilities. And until clear breakthrough are made, they take a statistical approach, where you do what at any given point seems to be the most likely model, knowing that it could be completely wrong still, but that's the best you can do to win the odds.
IMO we simply don't understand diet enough to prove what you should do. Instead, the best we can do is identify the people with the best outcomes, and try to emulate their lifestyle & diets. Essentially what Blue Zones did. You risk cargo-culting, but it's the best we can do.
A statement like "there is no credible evidence that thing helps" really can't convince an alternative treatment enthusiast to give his idea up. "Obiviously" there is no evidence because nobody no scientist for it.
We need to be able to tell them honestly: "we have tried hard, hundreds different people were studied thoroughly for this particular treatment, it really doesn't help or only helps slightly a particular kind of patients you don't fit, please go and get treated the way proven efficient".
you are not testing the treatment, you are testing the development of the cancer in the patient, regardless of which treatment they get.
simply test everyone diagnosed with cancer on a regular basis just like they get tested when they do the recommended treatment.
in other words, if someone refuses the treatment, don't let them refuse the tests as well.
I've always worried if I would have the strength to fight or cave.
Cancer is not s single disease, with a common origin, treatment, or outcome. It is a common characteristic --- malignant cell growth --- with multiple distinct manifestations, causes, prognoses, and treatments.
Knowledge of what specific condition is being faced makes a huge difference in response options.
https://ibb.co/CVTw7pT