Insultingly Bad Article on Cancer and Patrick Swayze
September 18th, 2009
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Just a few days ago, the world heard the news of the sad death of actor Patrick Swayze. Although I didn’t know the man, the fact that he died at an age of only 57 and after battling a debilitating disease is certainly unfortunate and a tragedy for those who knew him.
Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer, which he had been diagnosed with just over a year ago. Pancreatic is one of the most difficult types of cancer to treat and has a very high fatality rate. One of the primary reasons for this is that the cancer is most often asymptomatic until a fairly late stage. Short of a CT-scan or MRI, there are no tests that are likely to pick up pancreatic cancer, and in many patients the cancer is not even known about until it has spread to another part of the body. Pancreatic cancer is also quite aggressive and the nature of the pancreas along with its location make surgical intervention difficult or impossible.
A drastic surgical option, known as pancreaticoduodenectomy can be preformed, but the success rate is not very high and the procedure is only an option at all in some cases. The surgery involves removal of portions of the pancreas and thus can result in debilitating complications. Radiation is of limited use in this kind of cancer and thus the primary treatment option is chemotherapy. The overall success rate for complete remission and survival past five years is only about five percent.
Swayze chose to go with an aggressive course of chemotherapy and mainstream cancer treatment. This is what kept him alive for more than a year. It is also the option that offered him the best chance of beating the cancer. Although the odds are stacked against anyone with pancreatic cancer, being otherwise in good health and young in age can increase survival rates to about ten percent. Granted, that’s an abysmally low probability of survival, but it’s better than zero, which is about what no treatment will get you.
It seems Natural News (a source of plenty of bad science in the past disagrees) What a surprise:
Patrick Swayze dead at 57 after chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer
(NaturalNews) Beloved actor Patrick Swayze died yesterday evening after a 20-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Having put his faith in conventional chemotherapy, he largely dismissed ideas that nutrition, superfoods or “alternative medicine” might save him, instead betting his life on the chemotherapy approach which seeks to poison the body into a state of remission instead of nourishing it into a state of health.
These are not condemnations of this remarkable man; they are simply descriptive explanations of the path he chose and the results he experienced. Patrick Swayze was a talented, dedicated actor and dancer, and his work brought joy to the lives of millions. He will be deeply missed, and in his death, he joins many other celebrities who have been recently killed by pharmaceuticals or chemotherapy.
Excuse me if I have to go vomit at this one. The idea that Swayze or anyone dying of pancreatic cancer is “killed by pharmaceuticals or chemotherapy” is complete bullshit. There is zero evidence that so-called “alternative” medicine has ever cured anyone of cancer and pancreatic cancer has always been a very difficult disease to treat. If Swayze had not received any treatment or had received any of the snake-oil treatment pushed by quacks, his twenty month battle would have been a two month battle.
The idea that there are “natural” ways to cure cancer or that cancer is some kind of new phenomenon simply ignores the facts. Cancer has been known about since antiquity and the problem of aggressive cancer cells invading an organ is never easily cured. To understand why cancer can be so difficult to treat requires a basic understanding of what it is. To be overly-simplistic, cancer is caused by corrupt, malformed or otherwise abnormal cells that reproduced out of control and can invade the tissue of life critical organs. These cells are the problem and the only solution is to kill off the cancerous cells. Yet since cancer is literally the body attacking itself, it is very very difficult to target only the unhealthy cells and not destroy other cells in the body.
Chemotherapy is based on the use of chemicals, specifically toxic chemicals, in the treatment of cancer. It is not inaccurate to say that chemotherapy drugs are poisons or that chemotherapy poisons the body. The drugs damage both healthy, normal cells and cancer cells. The goal of chemotherapy is to utalize chemicals and dosages that will cause as much damage to the cancer cells as possible and as little to healthy tissue as possible. Development of chemicals which are selectively designed to impact cancer cells more than they do healthy cells is a huge challenge to the biochemists and doctors who work tirelessly to develop the treatments. In practice, chemotherapy always has some effect on healthy tissues and produces symptoms that may be very unpleasant. However, it is continuously improving. The dream is to one day have truly selective chemicals that can destroy cancer cells and leave other tissue undamaged.
Western medicine offers no hope, no solutions
Of course, the cancer industry takes no responsibility for his death. Drug companies and cancer docs never accept responsibility for the way their poisonous treatments harm (and often kill) many fine people.Had Patrick Swayze’s pancreatic cancer gone away, doctors would have hailed chemotherapy as the genius treatment that saved Swayze’s life. But chemotherapy has never healed anyone of cancer. Not once in the history of medicine. And when people die after being poisoned by chemotherapy, the oncologists and conventional medical doctors just shrug and say ridiculous things like, “The cancer was too far along” or “He didn’t fight it hard enough.”
No one fought cancer more diligently and optimistically than Patrick Swayze. Even after being diagnosed with an admittedly scary disease — pancreatic cancer — he remained upbeat and enthusiastic about beating the condition. He put more faith in conventional medicine and chemotherapy than perhaps anyone, and yet that medicine failed him just the same. No one can fault Swayze himself for a lack of optimism.
“I want to last until they find a cure, which means I’d better get a fire under it,” Swayze said in a highly-publicized interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters. No one apparently told Swayze the cancer industry isn’t looking for a cure. They’re looking for more business from more patients, and a genuine “cure” for cancer is flatly incompatible with the industry’s business interests.
Apparently the big problem that this author has with the modern medical system is that it can’t help everyone, it can’t cure every disease and it can’t save every life. That, unfortunately, is the reality of life. If all medical problems could be easily solved then nobody would ever die. There are times when the human body is simply unrepairable. It will end up like this in all cases. Your body and mine will eventually experience a catastrophic failure that can’t be avoided and we will die.
Legitimate medicine is honest about the limits of intervention and treatment. Doctors and researchers are constantly working to improve treatments and success rates have gone up over the years, but they remain low for certain conditions, despite everyone’s efforts. Sometimes cancer is too far along. No doctor is likely to say that a patient didn’t fight hard enough, but there are times when it is simply unrealistic to expect a positive outcome. For Patrick Swayze, the odds were stacked against him from the get go. He fought hard and medicine did everything it could to try to reach for that slim chance of recovery. It was a long shot and like most long shots, it ultimately failed.
Alternative medicine can offer hope for any disease and promises of cures for even the most complex and serious conditions. It can tell those who are in the most dire of conditions that there is a cure that will bring them back to optimal health. It can do all this for a simple reason: it lies.
The chart to the right is from the British Cancer Research organization. Note that nearly all forms of cancer have seen an improvement in survival. Pancreatic cancer, however, has not shown such improvement in survival rates. This is not for lack of effort. It is an especially difficult cancer to effectively treat. When you’re dealing with reality, sometimes things don’t come out the way you would want.
And while this article may claim that nobody is looking for a cure for cancer, they take that entirely out of context. Cancer researchers understand that the disease is far too complex and varied for a single “cure.” Cancer is not really a disease but a variety of diseases, each best treated by differing methods. No, it will never be as easy as finding a magic potion that cures all cancer, but that does not mean that medicine is not progressing.
Now for the most cowardly and dishonest part:
Could he have been saved?
Could Patrick Swayze have saved his own life with natural medicine? Absolutely. Without question. Even late-stage pancreatic cancer can be reversed (yes, reversed) with full-on naturopathic treatments involving Chinese herbal medicine, deep body detoxification that includes sweat saunas and colon cleansing, radical changes in diet from “dead” foods to “live” foods, a healthy dose of vitamin D and the daily consumption of raw anti-cancer living juices made from fresh, organic produce like cabbage, broccoli and garlic.
Just wow. While I believe in freedom of speech and not using violence to make a point, I would not fault anyone in Patrick Swayze’s family, or in the family of anyone who has lost their battle to cancer, from beating this lying author to a bloody pulp. Sorry, but this is just outrageous.
Cancer will never be cured by “raw living juices” and the idea that organic produced cabbage is somehow going to cure cancer is just plain stupid. Long before synthetic fertilizer and microwave ovens, people died of cancer. Fewer died of cancer, because more died long before they could even get cancer, but adjusted for the demographics, it was just as common, and in many cases, more common than today.
There are plenty of people who try raw food diets, “detox” treatments or various herbs and other “alternative” therapies for cancer. They do no better than those who do not use these methods. When they also turn down mainstream therapies, they almost always die. A few may survive, perhaps one in five thousand, and only because of the rarity of spontaneous remission and they are the ones who are held up as success. The 4999 others are conveniently ignored.
For this ignorant scum to sit in his cushy chair and get paid to write bull is insulting to readers and to those fighting cancer right now as well as to all those who have worked so hard to improve treatment. Cancer is a very tough nut to crack. It’s a difficult and complex medical problem and no amount of organic cabbage or enemas will change that.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Quackery, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 18th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I saw that article in Natural News, my wife had it sent to her by a friend in Vancouver that is fighting breast cancer. The friend was outraged because some coworker of hers has been pestering her to try ‘natural methods’ to deal with her cancer, and this link on Swayze had put my wife’s friend over the edge.
I actually was thinking of posting it to you for use here, but you beat me to it.
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September 19th, 2009 at 1:08 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah, well this really is one of the absolute worst articles I’ve ever seen. Of course it’s insulting to Swayze and his loved ones, but also to everyone who has cancer or ever had it. It’s just plain outrageous.
Natural News is a pretty well established source of complete idiocy and lies, but this is bad even for them.
A lot of this “natural” crap is based on false pretenses and lack of understanding. First the “live food” thing I’m not even going to get started on, but to say that antioxidants and “superfoods” is a complete fallacy. While there is some evidence that antioxidents and certain foods can reduce the risk of cancer (slightly…) there’s no reason why these would in any way fight cancer. These idiots don’t even have the first clue how cancer treatment works or why it does.
These idiots don’t get it. Cancer is the bodys own cells out of control and damaging the body. No Chinese herb or “superfood” is going to be able to target cancer cells and kill them while leaving healthy cells alone. Creating compounds that are selective of cancer cells is the stuff of Nobel prizes, even if it only is somewhat effective on one form of cancer.
I really hope your wife’s friend is doing well. If the cancer was found before it developed any tumors outside of the breast tissue then her chances of successfully beating this and going on to live a long and healthy life are excellent. If it has migrated to other organs.. it’s not quite as good, but there still is reason to fight and be hopeful.
There is very solid evidence that keeping up one’s moral and being optimistic and outgoing and not just sitting home and sulking makes a very big difference in the success rate of treatment. So I hope she is not letting the idiots get her down.
They’re free to come to this website if they want to get schooled on the error of their ways. For a more professionally qualified and excellently staffed website, Science Based Medicine is a must – it’s on my blogroll.
I hope she can manage to get them off her back. She has enough to deal with and it’s not going to help for people to harrass her, even if its well meaning. I’d say her best bet is not to repeatedly brush them off with a polite decline, but to make it crystal clear that she is offended and does not want to hear about that crap, perhaps with something slightly dramatic like banging the stapler down on the desk or something.
I got an email from someone a long while back who related a story of people pestering him about trying “natural” medicine when he had thyroid cancer. People were offended that they were “putting radiation into him” and “making him radioactive” which they thought was the worst thing that could be done to someone and he needed to get some “healing” from natural methods. They wouldn’t stop until he lost his temper and yelled with some expletives that the person had no idea what they were talking about and if they keep bringing it up should not bother talking to him.
He closed by saying “I really wish I had just made that big scene to begin with, because that finally shut everyone up.”
BTW: he is fine as of the last time he emailed. Thyroid was removed and radioiodine therapy assured no remaining tissue. He now leads a perfectly normal life other than taking synthetic hormones to replace those the thyroid normally produces.
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September 19th, 2009 at 1:35 am
drbuzz0 said:
Well we have known this person for some time, and watched as she tore three ex-husbands in half, so I don’t think she is going to suffer in silence. Frankly I think that her generally feisty attitude will get her through; she is the sort that approves of radiotherapy because it is harsh and aggressive – that’s they way she likes to fight. Her general attitude has been one of high indignation that cancer has had the temerity to upset her carefully planed life, and thus needs to be punished.
I have been upset about the whole CAM issue for some time, but mostly in terms of stopping these quacks from hurting the misinformed. It never occurred to me how hurtful to those fighting a medical condition it would be to have the jackholes that support this nonsense pestering them. Yet another reason to fight this fight tooth and nail.
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September 19th, 2009 at 3:18 am
Natural News has so much crap and bad science, it makes me want to bang my head on the wall every time I go there. I see these idiotic reports of things like “living food” and “dead food” when all food is generally dead and all kinds of other bull****. Then I see people commenting and supporting it in droves. Part of my faith in humanity dies each time.
This was the first time I saw a story on Natural News I actually was happy to see. Not happy because I believe it, mind you, but because they may very well have crossed the line on this by a large enough step to actually get some of the backlash they so badly deserve.
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September 19th, 2009 at 5:30 am
Many other people dabble in some form of quackery but only Natural News manages to be completely wrong about almost everything, and to endorse almost every form of quackery in existence. Natural News is 100% proof triple-distilled bull****, compared to which most other quacks are just watered-down beer.
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September 19th, 2009 at 11:45 am
I am terribly disheartened by the comments on the article. It seems there are a lot of people who are so wrong in their understanding of medicine and cancer that they are “not even wrong” and I don’t know how they could ever understand reality.
Some like “cancer is just your body’s last ditch attempt to stay alive in a toxic world” or “It was the chemotherapy, not the cancer that killed him. Plenty of people have cancer and feel healthy until they start chemo and then they start dying. When will they get a clue?”
I wonder if these people would just use exclusively “natural” remedies (non-remedies) if they had cancer. I think that is the one thing that might actually knock them hard enough to consider listening to a doctor, but some never will.
It is a lot more tragic when someone declines cancer treatment for a condition that has a high rate of successful treatment. With Patrick Swayze, the only thing that they could reasonably offer him was more time, because the long term outlook for pancreatic cancer is so abysmally low. I do agree that the fact that there are some people who beat it, even if only 5% or so is enough to keep you fighting, but by the time a few months had gone by I think it gets to the point where it is clear that you’re not going to be that odd one in twenty who gets exceptionally lucky.
There is a legitimate argument and debate that oncologists are too aggressive with chemo in this kind of situation. As it is toxic and damaging to any number of things in the body, the side effects are very unpleasant. Aggressive chemotherapy in a case like this can slow the cancer progression and thus buy some time, but the price can be diminished quality of life. There is always that nagging question of when is it worth it. Would you rather be alive for ten months on intensive chemotherapy or for six months on less intensive chemotherapy or for two months on none at all?
Some might choose to end treatment when it is clear it is terminal because they would rather have a two months of relative comfort to ten months with all the side effects of chemotherapy. I don’t think that is necessarily an irrational or “quack” decision to make. I know oncologists deal with this tough decision, as to what to recommend on a regular basis. There is no easy answer.
This is really a terrible article though, it is so wrong and so insulting to many people. I didn’t know Patrick Swayze and I don’t even think I’ve seen many of his movies or know if he was generally regarded highly, but I still respect the fact that he fought against a disease that nobody deserves. I also respect anyone else who has a deadly and painful disease like this and certainly sympathize with their loved ones and their caregivers. This reads like a big smack in the face to all of them by someone who has no idea what they are even saying.
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September 19th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Is there really no depth too low for the snake oil pushers to stoop down too?
Should be a law somewhere against that.
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September 19th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Antice said:
Well, they could be sued if someone was dumb enough to take their advice and ended up dead or injured for taking their advice. Also, they could be sued for defamation of character by the estate of Patrick Swayze or the other celebrities mentioned in the article. It is hard to win a case like that, really hard, but sometimes just the suit itself is enough to make them shut up so they don’t have to go to court.
I don’t see how it matters though. It’s a free speech issue for one, but even if you could use legal channels to stop them, what does that get you? There are so many more out there and the internet makes it possible for any idiot to put up a site like that and there’s just about nothing you can do.
People who know better can continue to call them on it and expose their lies, but some people will always find a way to create self-serving and shameful lies.
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September 19th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
DV82XL said:
My father had prostate cancer for a few years until his death (which was caused by a heart attack). When they discovered it they considered radiation therapy or surgery but after monitoring it for a while it did not appear to be growing and had not spread, so it was decided to just do regular checks to see if it had begun to grow signifficantly or spread and if that happened they would start radiation. He was 84 when they found it and it was so slow that the risk of surgery was higher than leaving it. He lived another four years perfectly happy and with no major symptoms. He took drugs to prevent too much swelling, for comfort and symptom control.
My well meaning mother and her well meaning sister as well as many other well meaning people told him to take every kind of quack cure they heard on the radio or read in a tabloid. Of course, I was sure to get him all the real information and he never fell for it. He took vitamins and prostate herbal supplements every day. His doctor told him that they were not harmful but not to expect much from them. He took them because, as he described it, “It makes your mother feel useful and shuts her up.”
He considered some of the other snakeoil treatments just because people nagged him about them so much. He never really went, at least I don’t believe he went, to any alternative practitioners. He did say he did though. Sometimes when someone tried to convince him to go for something he’d just say “Oh yeah, acupuncture. I’m already getting that every week.” It worked. It was a complete lie, but it got them off his back.
In all honesty, I think that in his last four years the nagging to go to get some alternative treatment probably was more irritating to him than the condition itself. I’m glad he never went, even if it was harmless, he was too stubborn and disagreeable to ever allow his money to be taken by a scam artist. I suppose you could say the supplements were the one exception, but if you fault him for that, you have never experienced how badly my mother can nag.
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September 19th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
So the complaint of this assclown (love that word) is that the medical system couldn’t help cancer patients or couldn’t help them enough? It did help Swayze at least have some more time, like it does for many.
So it can’t save everyone? That makes medicine a horrible thing? If we could save everyone then there would be no need for more research. There is research because they are always trying to improve it.
It’s a ridiculous order to think that every disease, no matter how severe, will always be cured 100%. That’s just stupid. That would be nice, but life is not like that. There are people who can’t be helped. They try, they do everything they can, but that is the nature of life, it eventually fails, sometimes sooner and sometimes later.
Is anyone stupid enough to think you could reverse (“yes reverse”) late stage cancer with by “changing diet?” Sure, a healthy diet is important, but it ain’t going to cure cancer!
Give me a break! This goes back to that whole “Natural” bullcrap. In the “Natural” world people die all the time of what we think are trivial problems. The fact that he even lived to 56 is unlikely the “natural” way and the fact that most of us will live to 50 or well past it is not natural at all!
Also, as I read through this idiotic site (not this one, the one linked) I see lots of talk about how the big scary corporations make money off of killing cancer patients. First I don’t see how you make money killing your customers (I guess they’d say that they are constantly creating new ones). Aside from that, does cancer even make a lot of money for the drug companies? What portion of their income is actually coming from cancer drugs? Also, since a lot of research is done by universities and government, don’t a lot of the new treatments not go to drug companies? And what about the people treated with radiation and surgery?
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September 19th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Kim said:
They make some, but compared to other products, cancer drugs are not huge bread winners for the big pharmaceutical companies. It depends on the drug and the company. Some smaller companies may have more invested in cancer drugs and make money licensing it out, but for the ones like Pfizer, Astra-Zenica or Lilly, no they’re not huge.
Also, they only really can make a large profit on reasonably new drugs. When the patent runs out it becomes possible for any company to make it as a generic and at that point the prices drop dramatically and they no longer have all the sales.
Kim said:
The most profitable drug on the market is Lipitor.
http://health.howstuffworks.com/health-illness/treatment/medicine/medications/10-most-profitable-drugs1.htm
Other very lucrative drugs are mostly cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, antipsychotic drugs, blood thinners and antidepressants. Anti-Allergy drugs rank fairly high as well as do erectile dysfunction drugs, acid blockers, prescription sleep aids and some others.
Those drugs have broad markets and their production costs are reasonably low. That makes them the big money makers. A big drug company makes most of its money on those kind of drugs. Drugs directly related to cancer like chemotherapy drugs and ones that are used to improve the side effects of chemotherapy are usually considered to be specialty markets, because most are only used for a limited sector of cancer treatment.
The short answer is that they make millions on cancer drugs, but many many billions on other drugs, like the ones mentioned above.
Kim said:
Some of this research results in end products but some of it is mostly theory. Pharmasuitical companies can benefit from research of this type by taking it to the next step. If there are developments that are directly funded by the government and are done in, for example, a national laboratory, they may be public domain, and may end up being used to create a product by several manufacturers.
If it is university-sponsored, the university will usually license it to a manufacturer and both make money. If it is done by a combination of sources, or if it is some kind of combined effort, like for example, a combination of private and government grants to a university or a research foundation, then it can all depend on any requirements attached to the grants or it may be that multiple parties end up with a stake in the patent.
Kim said:
Nothing. They make absolutely nothing, with the exception of drugs which might be sold for pain management or antibiotics to prevent infection, but that’s trivial.
Radiation therapy may make some money for the facility, but not the drug companies, if it is external beam therapy or seed therapy. Drug companies don’t have anything to do with that. In the case of radiopharmasuitical treatments like iodine-131, most drug companies are not involved in that. If they do, it’s minor. Most of the pharmaceuticals of the world are provided by government programs. MDS Inc is the biggest distributors but they’re small by comparison to many drug companies and they have recently been taking a bath due to the problems at Chalk River.
Most radioisotopes used in medicine are sold at a loss. The Canadian Government has subsidized a large portion. They wanted to provide it “at cost” – meaning they would neither invest money in it nor make money from it, but that has not worked out and it therefore costs them money. The Dutch government does as well. The US DOE produces only a small portion of isotopes used for pharmasuiticals but produces a reasonable amount of Co-60, used for external beam therapy. Again, it’s subsidized. It is sold at a small net loss.
About the only producer in the world that actually makes a profit on it is the Russian nuclear research agency, but they’re a very small player.
I just want to be clear, less there be some claims of the big bad nuclear companies, that nuclear medicine is not making huge amounts of money for the reactor operators and also, lets note just for the record, that power reactor operators have nothing to do at all with radio therapy.
Also on another related note: lots of big corporations lose money on cancer. Insurance companies for one. Even hospitals can lose money because they have to provide care for patients and sometimes the bills don’t get paid and the hospital ends up having to write it off as bad debt. Also cancer patients can fill beds that’d rather have filled with a higher profit patient like heart surgery.
This idea that cancer is some kind of huge cash cow is complete fiction.
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September 19th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
Complete myth. Yes, there are some entities that make some money on providing services related to cancer treatment, but it’s not like it’s some kind of gold mine. It’s really not. And yes, plenty lose lots of money on it.
I’d be interested to find out how much money is made selling quack products to cancer patients though. I would not be surprised if it is a large portion of quack bottom line. Quack products also have the nice benefit for the producer of being pure profit. They don’t need to actually put in any work in R&D or production. They can just sell a pill full of drywall dust and call it a magic cure-all.
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September 19th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I wonder if it’s possible to determine if any of these quacks have had cancer themselves, and if the records of their treatment could be located. Since there’s so many of them, some of them must have had cancer at some point… what treatment options did they elect to use?
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September 20th, 2009 at 12:56 am
If they’re still alive it’s a good bet they either never had cancer or used conventional medicine (they’ll say it complementary medicine of course).
There have been quite a few people who said they’d beat cancer naturally, I don’t know of any that actually had cancer that are still alive (a lot of the diagnoses given in the quackery field are wrong).
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September 20th, 2009 at 2:26 am
Anonymous said:
My grandmother and late grandfather both enjoyed the beach in the 1940’s and didn’t do much about sun protection. Hence, on several occasions they had a skin cancer cut off. My grandfather, prior to his death, had small patches of skin, ranging in size from about the end of a pencil eraser to a thumbnail cut off of the back of his neck, his forehead, his nose (luckilly that was small enough not to leave a noticable scar). My grandmother had a couple. Because of this they got checked frequently.
I’d say it qualifies as “cured” because the doctor always said that given how small and early it was that if they were fine for the next few years then there was a well over 99% chance that that was the extent of it.
Apparently thinking that the best way to get the girls back home was to lie on the deck of a Merchant Marine ship covered in iodine has repercussions later in life.
Anyway, I would think you could probably “beat cancer naturally” if you just bit those little melanomas off instead of going to a doctor. That might seem a bit difficult if it’s on your nose, but a portion of Poppy’s teeth came out, so maybe it would be possible. Does that count as biting though?
Anyway, that’s one “natural” way to beat cancer. If you get a spot of skin cancer, bite that sucker off or get someone to.
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September 20th, 2009 at 2:34 am
drbuzz0 said:
Thinking back to some of the women I’ve crossed paths with in my life, they might provide a very similar kind of cure for testicular cancer.
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September 20th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Bull****. There are many people who have been saved by chemotherapy. How about Lance Armstrong? He had testicular cancer but by the time it was discovered he had cancerous tumors in his brain, lung and abdominal tissue. Anyone with cancer in that many places and with that aggressive of a spreading cancer has very low survival rates and his were supposed to be under 25%, but he managed to completely beat the cancer and is still cancer free 11 years later. It was due to new chemotherapy drugs.
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September 20th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Sadly it seems to be quite profitable to murder people with placebos.
I present you Matthias Rath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Rath
Inventor of “Cellular Medicine” which basically means to threat everything from high blood pressure to heartattacks, strockes, cancer and AIDS with vitamins and a good old dose of lies. He was and is running nationwide addcampaigns in South Africa and Germany to advertise his quackery and just as a bonus he runs smearcampaigns against anyone who opposes him, which is basically every doctor with common sense in Germany.
One of his greatest moments is sadly not mentioned in the english wiki. In 2004 he threatened a 9 year old boy with bone cancer with his vitamins and claimed to have cured him. He then proceeded to drag him around as the (still) living proof for is insane babbling and when his health started to decline he claimed that this was the result of the chemo the boy got before his parents handed him over to Rath. The boy died in November 2004 painfully from quickly growing metastatis in his lungs and brain and to this day, Rath claims that he had cured the cancer and he died from the results of the chemotherapie.
I think the problem with Mengele wannabees like him is that most people think “let him babble, if you think it doesnt work then get another doctor” but in fact, with every time that this pseudoscientific rubbish gets repeated, some poor child dies of an otherwise cureable disease because his parents think they found a less pain- and stressfull way to help them.
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September 21st, 2009 at 5:51 am
Antice said:
There is, if you can call it a law. It’s called common sense.
Unfortunately it’s not all that common.
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September 21st, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I know Mike Adams is realistically beyond all hope of developing common decency, but I wonder if he’d have the guts to go up to Steve Jobs and say that mainstream medicine can’t cure pancreatic cancer. Jobs had it, and actually *did* get cured of it. He was fortunate to be among the few who could be cured by having the entire pancreas removed and replaced with a donor organ (which requires not only having cancer in the right place and at the right stage, i.e. not metastatic, but also being very lucky in the donor organ lottery and/or rich enough to move to an area with a very short transplant list). It was in the category of heroic medicine, really, but he was cured of pancreatic cancer by mainstream medicine.
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September 21st, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Calli Arcale said:
I would not be surprised if when Steve Jobs does die (as we all will, lets face it, the man is 54 and had a major organ transplant. Chances are he’ll die in less than 40 years) there are likely to be some who claim that his death was the result of mainstream medicine. Or they might claim that mainstream medicine ruined his pancreas so badly that he had to get a new one. They may also point to all the side effects of organ transplantation and anti-rejection drugs and say it would have been better to have a “natural” cure.
Steve Jobs was able to live because he was both rich and lucky. He was able to move to a location where there was a shorter doaner list. Unfortunately, the national and international shortage of organs makes this a concern. He also had a form of cancer that was relatively isolated and not far along in its progress (as you mention.) It helped that he was relatively young and in otherwise good health as well, because getting priority on the donation programs often involves their assessment of your likelihood of successfully receiving the organ. So those who are less likely to successfully survive the operation and recover get a lower priority. (again, sad that they have to resort to that, but given the number of organs avaliable)
Still, it was really a dire situation for Jobs and and it took some very extreme and cutting edge medicine to get this to happen. Major organ transplants are always a big deal and the fact that the survival rate is as high as it is is just about stunning.
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September 21st, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Cure cancer with organic “superfoods” My god, this guy has no shame. I wonder how much of this crap he actually believes. Natural News is about as bad as bad science pages get.
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October 3rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
It is nothing short of tragedy that a person has to experience this as they undergo the reality of having cancer. They have to hear eventually from someone that they could have prevented their pain and could escape their death if they just did certain things. They don’t need to suffer, and it is their own fault that they do so. This is NOT the FAULT of the person with cancer. They are NOT a PAWN of evil pharmaceutical companies and medical practices. They ARE someone who is trying to cope with a progressive and extremely painful condition.
Just because YOU can’t handle death and are afraid of the world around you, that does not mean the person with cancer has to subscribe to whatever things you chose to believe based souly on faith. Do your family members and friends and favor and no matter how “well intentioned” your advice may be, what they REALLY NEED is your LOVE and your TIME. They may have less time left to experience these things with you and you with them.
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October 3rd, 2009 at 9:54 pm
kimberly said:
I’m not sure what you’re saying. I don’t think cancer patients are pawns of the pharmaceutical industry nor do I in any way dispute that they should do what they can with their time with friends and family. The only advice I give is to avoid anyone pushing questionable medicine and to stick to the real doctors for your best chance of beating it or at least maximizing your time.
So I guess we’re in agreement then?
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October 3rd, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Ya, I’m pretty sure Kim is on our side.
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November 17th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Patrick Swayze is one of the best actors in Hollywood and we are going to miss him.
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June 28th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Chinese herbs do work because it is time tested.:-’
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