[jesus_of_suburbia]

http://m.pnas.org/content/99/7/4592.short

Remember a guy named Lance Armstrong? Prior to the use of cisplatin, metastatic testicular cancer was only survivable in about 5% of cases. Today, it has over an 80% survival rate. Actually, the study I just posted was from 25 years ago. Survival might even be better today.

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/chemotherapy-doesnt-work/

[onlooker]

http://www.mercola.com/article/cancer/c ... ptions.htm
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')r. Moss' position on chemotherapy is supported by many major students of the study of cancer treatment.
Dr. John Cairns, a professor of microbiology at Harvard, published his view in Scientific American in 1985, "that basically the war on cancer was a failure and that chemotherapy was not getting very far with the vast majority of cancers."

As far back as 1975, Nobel Laureate James Watson of DNA fame was quoted in the New York Times saying that the American public had been "sold a nasty bill of goods about cancer."

In 1991, Dr. Albert Braverman, Professor of Hematology and Oncology at the State University of New York, Brooklyn, published an article in Lancet titled "Medical Oncology in the 1990s," in which he wrote: "The time has come to cut back on the clinical investigation of new chemotherapeutic regimens for cancer and to cast a critical eye on the way chemotherapeutic treatment is now being administered."

Dr. Braverman says that there is no solid tumor incurable in 1976 that is curable today. Dr. Moss confirms this and claims that the greatest breakthrough in the objective study of chemotherapy came from a biostatistician at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Ulrich Abel. His critique focused on whether chemotherapy effectively prolonged survival in advanced epithelial cancer. His answer was that it is not effective. He summarized and extended his findings and concluded that chemotherapy overall is ineffective. A recent search turned up exactly zero reviews of his work in American journals, even though it was published in 1990. The belief is that this is not because his work was unimportant -- but because it's irrefutable.
Dr. Moss' work documents the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy on most forms of cancer. However, he is fair in pointing out that there are the following exceptions:
Acute Iymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, and nonseminomatous testicular cancer.

[ennui2]

Attitudes about food and medicine are not that far off from religion. This is why people fall for the fluoridated water conspiracy theories, for instance. Ultimately people fall on their own personal fears/superstitions when it comes to these things and there's no changing their minds on it.

Go ahead and place your bets. Avoid fluoridated water, vaccines, regular checkups, and rely on herbalism and the power of positive-thinking.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

Onlooker, I like that the source of your evidence arguing chemotherapy is simply a non-effective, profit-driven scam by big Pharma is from mercola.com, a website dedicated to shilling it's natural health products. CAM is a multi-billion dollar industry, only with less regulation and less evidence supporting it's effectiveness. This article also provides absolutely no citations backing its claims on both chemotherapy and its proposed alternative treatments.

How's that saying go? If alternative medicine actually worked, it'd just be called medicine.

Let's also examine Dr. Moss, from his own website:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')alph W. Moss, PhD, is not a medical doctor. He holds a doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree from Stanford University, and has been a medical journalist for over 40 years.

[ennui2]

Onlooker never checks his sources when he appeals to authority. That's his modus operandi.

As long as someone is putting forward a conspiracy-laced narrative, Onlooker is inclined to believe it on face value, because...illuminaughties.

[onlooker]

Well I guess some people wish to ignore the nature of the world we live in, how ubiquitous and pervasive corruption and deceit is among and within our establishment institutions like government, corporations and major religions. So continue asleep, I hope your awakening is not too abrupt or traumatic

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'W')ell I guess some people wish to ignore the nature of the world we live in, how ubiquitous and pervasive corruption and deceit is among and within our establishment institutions like government, corporations and major religions. So continue asleep, I hope your awakening is not too abrupt or traumatic

[jesus_of_suburbia]

@onlooker

You can't just subjectively decide which institution's corruption and deceit is acceptable. There are numerous CAM practitioners and proponents who prey on people's fears about traditional medicine and offer them unproven, ineffective, and often expensive treatments.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 't') has been known since the 1950's that somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of all solid tumor cancers are glucose dependent. Their mitochondria are damaged and do not function so they can only power themselves with blood sugar. That is a good part of the reason both Chemotherapy and Radiation treatments work, they destroy the patient appetite, they fast and as a result their blood sugar goes down to about 70 over abut three weeks. The cancer cells dependent on glucose become weak and the immune system is able to eliminate many of them.

Of course you can get the same effect by putting the patient on a close to zero carb diet, but that doesn't make a lot of money for big pharma.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n contrast to normal differentiated cells, which rely primarily on mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation to generate the energy needed for cellular processes, most cancer cells instead rely on aerobic glycolysis, a phenomenon termed “the Warburg effect.” Aerobic glycolysis is an inefficient way to generate adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP), however, and the advantage it confers to cancer cells has been unclear. Here we propose that the metabolism of cancer cells, and indeed all proliferating cells, is adapted to facilitate the uptake and incorporation of nutrients into the biomass (e.g., nucleotides, amino acids, and lipids) needed to produce a new cell. Supporting this idea are recent studies showing that (i) several signaling pathways implicated in cell proliferation also regulate metabolic pathways that incorporate nutrients into biomass; and that (ii) certain cancer-associated mutations enable cancer cells to acquire and metabolize nutrients in a manner conducive to proliferation rather than efficient ATP production. A better understanding of the mechanistic links between cellular metabolism and growth control may ultimately lead to better treatments for human cancer.

[Newfie]

As to statistics, my Dad had pancreatic cancer. They did an operation and post op he passed due to a heat attack. So according to the record of death it was heat attack.

Baloney, it was cancer. Without the cancer he would not have had the operation or the heart attack.

It's just one way stats are skewed. Perhaps in this case because it was a prestigious cancer hospital. I have no idea how often I this happens, my personal evidence says 100%, which is obviously wrong.

Mom died of a bad kidney infection. She went into the hospital with a very mild hear attack and was to be released the day after she died. But she got an infection. I say it was death by hospital. But that's not a recognized cause.

I will likely die of cancer, too many in my family have gone that way.

Scares the shit outta me.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jesus_of_suburbia', '@')onlooker

You can't just subjectively decide which institution's corruption and deceit is acceptable. There are numerous CAM practitioners and proponents who prey on people's fears about traditional medicine and offer them unproven, ineffective, and often expensive treatments.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'A')s to statistics, my Dad had pancreatic cancer. They did an operation and post op he passed due to a heat attack. So according to the record of death it was heat attack.

Baloney, it was cancer. Without the cancer he would not have had the operation or the heart attack.

It's just one way stats are skewed. Perhaps in this case because it was a prestigious cancer hospital. I have no idea how often I this happens, my personal evidence says 100%, which is obviously wrong.

Mom died of a bad kidney infection. She went into the hospital with a very mild hear attack and was to be released the day after she died. But she got an infection. I say it was death by hospital. But that's not a recognized cause.

I will likely die of cancer, too many in my family have gone that way.

Scares the shit outta me.

[onlooker]

Your both conveniently eschewing the issue of the extensive corruption that is a feature of every country now including our own. So this goes beyond the isolated individual incidents you refer too. This you can say is a systemic issue. From the healthcare industry to cigarette companies to the fossil fuels industry. The nexus of greed and corruption has spoiled the sacrosanct contract of trust between consumers and corporations. It is no longer just about science when the issue is within the marketplace . It is about the ethical standards or lack thereof of companies and industries

[Newfie]

Companies have no ethical standards, they have quarterly reports.

I think we are giving concrete examples of corruption, first hand examples.

Don't know how that is ignoring it.

Just to be clear, in my work I saw corruption daily. Much of it was small and petty, but it sets the tone and transmits a message to the workforce that cheating is encouraged and tolerated. All of the larger companies I have worked for have been abusive in one form or another.

I expect that this same corruption extends to health care statistics which I suspect of being manipulated for various reasons. Not being of that industry I have limited experience. But the limited experience I have reinforces my notion of widespread corruption right down to the death statistics.

[dissident]

jesus_of_masturbia, the corporate shill.

Trotting out testicular cancer as some sort of proof of efficacy of chemotherapy is just sick. So what if some cancers are

1) slowly evolving (e.g. prostate cancer)

2) localized (e.g. testicular cancer)

In both cases surgery and yes even chemotherapy can actually work since the target is a relatively easy one. When most people think of cancer they do not restrict it to an easily treatable subset and consider all of the common types, including pancreatic cancer. So, "jesus" show me the success rate with pancreatic cancer. Everything is just hunky dory according to you.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11556730

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')f the 77 patients, 61 achieved cancer free status and 4 who did not need the study criteria excluded. Recurrences were detected in 12 (21.1%) patients, 2 (7.1%) patients among 28 stage II patients; 10 (34.5%) patients among 29 stage III patients; none (0%) patients among 14 seminoma patients and 12 (27.9%) patients among 43 non-seminoma patients. All recurrences were detected within 17 months (median, 3) after the initial treatment. Of the 12 patients experiencing recurrence, 4 died of cancer. The recurrence rate of the patients in stage III was significantly higher than that in stage II.

[ennui2]

Again, it's an issue of teasing out the difference between a genuine case of corruption and tinfoil conspiracy theories. Onlooker has trouble telling one from the other. He's constructed a rigid narrative and fits everything to it. And that's fine, but if it extends, let's say, to avoiding vaccinations, then it kind of backfires and will causes your premature death, and potentially others as well. That's the problem with making cynical us vs. them thinking a mantra. Not everybody is "out to get you". If that were the case you couldn't trust a single transaction in your day to day affairs. This is exactly why there needs to be regulation. And it's easy to just throw your hands up and say that the regulators themselves are corrupt. I mean, where does that lead you? Hair shirts in the woods cutoff from civilization because you won't even trust that the aspirin you buy is actually aspirin? At some point distrust crosses over into paranoia.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')rotting out testicular cancer as some sort of proof of efficacy of chemotherapy is just sick. So what if some cancers are

1) slowly evolving (e.g. prostate cancer)

2) localized (e.g. testicular cancer)

[onlooker]

"Immunotherapy is just really getting started." Jesus on a more conciliatory note, it seems to me this new "Immunotherapy is very promising indeed. Having witnessed my father die of cancer , the battle against Cancer should unite all people from all walks of life