There is no such thing as alternative medicine. There is medicine that has been shown to be safe and effective through properly conducted and blinded scientific studies. And then there is fraud.

"If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted."

IF and it is a VERY BIG IF... you can make money doing it.

"medicine that has been shown to be safe and effective through properly conducted and blinded scientific studies."

Currently to get a drug through the FDA costs north of a BILLION dollars.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/04/24/how-the-fda-stifles-new-cures-part-i-the-rising-cost-of-clinical-trials/

Which is fine, if the drug is a blockbuster that a company can turn a profit on.

If not? It won't be approved. This is one major reason that no-one is running with RISUG male birth control to get it FDA approved an used in the US. It would cost about $20 a shot and last for 10 years... so there would need to be 50,000,000 men getting the shot JUST TO CLEAR THE TESTING for the FDA.

and that is NO profit.

Think it's going to happen?

There are all sorts of off label treatments that use various drugs or certain vitamins that work for specific things... but you have to have a good doctor to know any of them.

This doesn't change the fact that "alt medicine" is often worthless, or questionable, but there is no use in pretending that regular medicine is the end all and be all.

see also:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2009/december/29/fda-approval.aspx

"but there is no use in pretending that regular medicine is the end all and be all."

Well, that's true as far as it goes. But where mainstream medicine is failing, it is not because the science is bad. It's because of regulation, much of which is itself unscientific. For instance, the FDA makes no distinction between a common side effect of a drug, and an occurrence that is reported by one person out of 10,000. The FDA treats everything that happens in a clinical trial the same.

Don't forget that demonstrating that a drug is safe is not sufficient to gain FDA approval. You have to demonstrate that the drug is not only safe, but that it is an effective treatment for the condition it is being offered for. Alt-medicine would fall flat on its face if it had to meet that standard.

I would trust mainstream medicine more if they were not subject to the same emotional biases and cited the same flawed government studies that dietary science and climate science seem to accept as gospel.

Did you know that chemotherapy is only effective on average about thirty percent of the time? and it has horrible side effects that can be lethal in and of themselves?

Some cancers dont respond to chemo or radiation at all.

Studies have found that doctors are very poor at analyzing and comparing risk. Many of them are protocol driven, and follow the standard treatment (that would be the one that your insurance company pays for) regardless of whether it is a good idea in your particular case.

Altie medicine may not be any better than the standard evidence based treatment, but I am sick and tired of doctors claiming that standard treatments for certain condtions are way more effective than they actually are.

I have seen several of my relatives and friends stampeded into aggressive painful, and ineffective surgeries and treatments that killed them quicker than doing nothing and reduced their quality of life substantially.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743205561/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pancreatic-cancer-type-jobs

I think this article does a lot better job of explaining some of the issues without resorting to symplistic hype.

What Isab said about chemo.

I've been doing outpatient hospice nursing for a year now. Give me a dollar for every time I've heard "Death is better than this". Or, "I'll be damned if I spend the last 3 months of my life in a clinic sucking down poison." I regret the former, and sometimes rejoice in the latter.

As to altie medicine, some can actually be effective. Colloidal silver, once mocked in relation to that poor blue bastard who drank it, is now mainstream. We've (family and nursing coworkers) used it to successfully treat pink eye, sunburns, cellulitis, sinus and ear infections. We have silver wound dressings and silvadene cream for burns which is phenomenally effective. Copper is gaining similar recognition as an antibacterial, and honey wound dressings are going mainstream, just so long as it is pharmaceutical grade. SueBee isn't gonna cut it, too processed to have any of the beneficial components left to do the job. But once you get the FDA involved, jack the price up through the roof and kiss that particular therapy goodbye.

Don't get me started on marijuana for medicinal purposes.

"medicine that has been shown to be safe and effective through properly conducted and blinded scientific studies." -- SwissArmyD at June 19, 2013 7:55 AM

Then sometimes there is an ethical problem with doing a double blind study. There is a drug called omegaven that will keep infants and young children alive without killing their liver. But a double blind study would mean that half the infants and young children would have to die.

But the FDA won't approve the drug for general use without the double blind study.

I just can't find the ethics to let half the children die to prove that it works as acceptable.

It's funny that most things people claim they cure with alt treatments (ear infections, pink eye, sinus infections, sunburn etc) are things that your body will almost always clear on it's own in time.

Chemo doesn't always work and isn't always needed. It's very hard to kill malignant self-cells and not the rest of you. But it does have a record of verifiable success, whereas juice has a record of saving...no one.

Trick question. Do you know why FDA approval is so important to Doctors and Pharma companies?

Because without FDA approval, your insurance is not obligated to pay for it.

Watch for these problems to escalate under the clusterfuck called Obamacare.

I have been a Principal Investigator in several studies that led to FDA approval of medical devices. I think that by and large the FDA does a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their approval process of pharmaceuticals is probably too slow and expensive and needs reform, I'll grant you. FDA approval is important because industry and academia needs an outside body to vett their claims. Even the most ethical and best intentioned scientists can't be totally free of bias.

Chemo doesn't always work and isn't always needed. It's very hard to kill malignant self-cells and not the rest of you. But it does have a record of verifiable success, whereas juice has a record of saving...no one.

Posted by: momof4 at June 19, 2013 10:27 AM

Your statement implies that it is always necessary to be pro active and aggressive in the treatment of cancer.

While juice doesn't have a record of saving anyone, it is a damn sight less likely to kill you than unnecessary chemo or radiation, and if you have a type of cancer that has remained localized it wont help you or hurt you.

Since doctors don't know yet which patients and cancers benefit from chemo, they will throw the proverbial kitchen sink at you if you let them.

In other words, that old adage, "first, do no harm" got thrown under the bus, when cancer became that huge boogie man that the white knights in the medical profession were going to save you from with those "spare no expense" "other peoples money" insurance policies.

Another myth peddled by mainstream medicine, is that detecting something early guarantees a cure. If a cancer has metastasized, early detection does almost nothing in most forms of cancer, and biopsies have long been suspected of spreading cancer cells to other parts of the body.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/apr/03/cancercare.health

Chemo doesn't always work and isn't always needed. ... But it does have a record of verifiable success, whereas juice has a record of saving...no one.

This.

I'm so tired of the argument: "X doesn't always work, so we should kick it to the curb entirely and embrace Y, which nobody knows anything about."

Chemo isn't a slam-dunk cure, and when it is, it's frequently terrible. But we know in general how successful it is because it has been studied repeatedly. We can make educated decisions based on data, not fantasy.

The fact that some doctors are uneducated or biased doesn't make the data weak. It means people need to be responsible for their own health care decisions.

While juice doesn't have a record of saving anyone, it is a damn sight less likely to kill you than unnecessary chemo or radiation, and if you have a type of cancer that has remained localized it wont help you or hurt you.

People who don't want to treat their cancer aren't required to. The problem is that things like juice are being called "treatments." They're not. Juice makes a tasty smoothie ingredient, but con artists who tout it as a cancer treatment belong in prison.

Thanks to chemotherapy 80%+ of children with leukemia are cured, vs. 0% just a few decades ago. The same is true of Hodgkin Lymphoma, germ cell tumors and other childhood malignancies. Chemo is not as successful in many of the common adult malignancies but to just disparage it is simply wrong. Progress is being made here as well, just more slowly than we would like.

Anyone know the incidence rate of childhood cancers in the children of childhood cancer survivors in comparison with the rest of the population at large?

@lujlp

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199805073381902

From the conclusion:" There is no evidence of a significantly increased risk of nonhereditary cancer among the offspring of survivors of cancer in childhood."

http://themetapicture.com/sometimes-the-healthy-lifestyle-isnt-all-that-cracked-up/

Luj - that was funny. Possibly unfair to compare a hag to a goddess.

A friend of mine has opted to treat her breast cancer (after lumpectomy) with juicing, marijuana oil, and massive quantities of selenium, apparently oblivious to the fact that more than trace amounts are a poison and kill you. Oh, and apparently now vaccines are the cause of cancer per her. The sad part is that she was a nurse practitioner and should know better than to be so stupid!

SwissArmyD "...no-one is running with RISUG male birth control to get it FDA approved an used in the US. It would cost about $20 a shot and last for 10 years... so there would need to be 50,000,000 men getting the shot JUST TO CLEAR THE TESTING for the FDA."

In the U.S. there are efforts to get RISUG FDA-approved under the name Vasalgel. Though the substance itself is very cheap to make, it is not a simple $20 shot. It requires a minor surgical procedure similar to a vasectomy. But instead of the vas deferens being severed, a polymer combined with DMSO is injected into it. It doesn't occlude the vas deferens; instead it inactivates the sperm passing through it. In clinical trials in India it has been 100% effective and there have been no side effects other than minor swelling in the area of the incisions. And it's easily reversible.

It would probably cost at least a few hundred dollars, and once approved it will probably be very popular and very profitable.

When it becomes available it will make vasectomies obsolete. It will give men control over reproduction, which I think most women will be fine with.

Isab, I don't think you read what I wrote. I said "chemo doesn't always work and ISN'T always needed".

By the above, I am not saying juicing is an alternative to chemo. There are times when doing nothing is an alternative-which is exactly what these alt therapies are. Doing nothing and paying money for the priviledge.

Which is yours or anyone other adults' right to do. I just find it stupid.

'Many consumers view alternative medicine industry as more altruistic and home-spun than Big Pharma.'

I hear people (trainers at the gym etc) talk about how 'Big Pharma' is all about money...sometimes I wander over and say 'Oh, so the herbs and treatment your local guy is pushing are all free?' and it usually shuts them down for a while.

The other dumb argument I hear is 'alternative medicine is preventative based, doctors only want to see you *after* something goes wrong.' Well, ya, I don't think we should all be on prophylactic antibiotics, surgery and chemo...sigh. When you get something serious, established, double-blind study backed traditional medicine has a much better chance of saving your arse than a packet of herbs and good wishes.

"There are times when doing nothing is an alternative..."

Indeed; there are plenty of times when treatment of any kind just isn't going to work. And chemo is admittedly a crude tool (radition somewhat less so, depending on the type of cancer). The thing people have to remember is that giving up isn't in the medical code of ethics. Doctors will keep treating you until you tell them to stop. If you have done a reasonable evaluation of your prognosis and you don't wish to be treated any further, you have to say "stop". None of which invalidates the value of the treatement in general.

There is a lady in my office right now who is still alive thanks to chemo and radiation treatments. It was rough on her, but she's now cancer free and nearly back to normal, and her prognosis to live out a normal life span is about as good as anyone's. Had she not had any treatment, or gone in for some ineffective alt-treatment, she would probably be dead now. What would be the use in that?

Unfortunately, the medical research isn't always great, either.

"Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.” "

"Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right."

Thanks to chemotherapy 80%+ of children with leukemia are cured, vs. 0% just a few decades ago. The same is true of Hodgkin Lymphoma, germ cell tumors and other childhood malignancies. Chemo is not as successful in many of the common adult malignancies but to just disparage it is simply wrong. Progress is being made here as well, just more slowly than we would like.

Posted by: DrMaturin at June 19, 2013 11:23 AM

Absolutely, but it has not been cost free in terms of either their own longevity or other associated medical problems down the road.

I think it is perfectly acceptable to disparage chemo when iti is offered as the standard treatment after every cancer.
If the standard for chemo, which is a thirty percent over all effective rate was applied to vaccines, and they said,

"there is a thirty percent chance that this vaccine will protect you, but it also has a fifty percent chance of either killing you or leaving you with lifelong quality of life serious medical issues"I wonder how many of you would jump right on it?

I am particualrly appaled by the bait and switch where physicians use the 80 percent cure rate for a common form of luekemia, and Hodkins disease, to brow beat patients into undergoing it for stomach cancer, for instance, where it has no benefit at all.

http://www.multivu.com/mnr/58593-st-jude-children-s-research-hospital-study-undiagnosed-cancer-survivors

The fact that some doctors are uneducated or biased doesn't make the data weak. It means people need to be responsible for their own health care decisions.

Posted by: MonicaP at June 19, 2013 11:02 AM

When people are scared and frightened by a cancer diagnosis they are not in a position to make a rational decision.

Most of them have neither the objectivity or the educational background to second guess an Oncologist.

A very helpful doctor who used to post here told me a couple of years ago, to not be stampeded by an oncologist, and if they were to recommend chemo, make them show me the studies that validated their opinion.

I was fortunate to be in a position to be the objective one making the decision for a loved one, and I followed his advice and got a little lucky.

It was my experience that doctors are extremely reluctant to disagree with another doctor. To get an objective second opinion, you have to get completely outside the insurance, practitioner, hospital, specialist network in your community, and you cant ask directly. You need to say, "this is what I am planning on doing. Do you agree, or disagree, and if so, why?

"Though the substance itself is very cheap to make, it is not a simple $20 shot." KenR

Let me explain my conclusion... GIVING the shot costs more for the minor surgery and so forth... but the pharma company that makes the RISUG 'drug' only makes money on what the shot costs to sell to the doc... therefore, ONLY that money goes back into all the R&D, testing, retesting, application fees, and all that the FDA requires.

That it'll cost hundreds of dollars for the consumer, doesn't enter into it... since that full price doesn't go back to the manufacturer.

Which is why I believe we will never see it, until, say... a Bill Gates decides to fund it, as a public health initiative or something.

There's just no money in it. I was hoping that it would get approval in India, and would be easier to push through here... but they seem oddly reticent to approval, even though they have not just studies, but long term ones.

Do any of you even know how radiation is effective against cancer?

Yes Rad, I know. Radiation basically kills cells. And cancer cells in general are a little more easily killed by radiation than normal cells. However it is a conundrum, because radiation also causes cells to mutate, and become cancerous.

My father in law died three months ago from a radiation caused cancer. He had radiation treatment in the 90's for prostate cancer which worked for a while until he started developing large sarcomas in his abdomen, which eventually could not be removed surgically anymore, and finally killed him.

Not quite, Isab.

Radiation can do these things when it imparts energy to a cell.

1) Nothing. The majority of a cell is water. Radiation which impacts without causing ionization does nothing whatsoever: nada, zip.
2) Damage the cell can repair.
3) Damage the cell cannot repair, it dies immediately.
4) Damage the cell cannot repair, which results in heritable traits. Some of these are cancers.

The vulnerability of such cells depends on a lot of factors, but two things stand out: reproductive rate and glycogen utilization. Cancer cells reproduce at big rates, so they are kiled at thousands of times the rate of non-cancerous cells, which still have the factors above. Glycogen aids the reproduction of cancer cells because they do not respire for energy.

Chemicals induce far more cancers than radiation does.