What harm does Alt.Med do?

[RichardR]

Here's one answer: (http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/04/orange-man.html)

The Orange Man, unfortunately, made a different choice. Convinced that he could find another way, he sought "alternative" medical treatments. He somehow ended up in New York City, where he undertook a regimen that involved coffee enemas and megadoses of carrot juice. There he returned periodically for over a year, all the while purging himself with coffee enemas, consuming megadoses of carrot juice and vitamin supplements, and undertaking various other "alternative" treatments for a potentially curable cancer (and, I guess, trying to ignore the increasingly orange tint his skin was developing).

...

The Orange Man was finally forced to return to my attending when it became clear that the coffee enemas and megadose carrot juice therapy were not working. His rectal tumor continued to bleed intermittently but with increasing frequency. It continued to grow slowly and started to interfere with his ability to defecate. Finally, it began to produce a horrible sensation of tenesmus (the intractable sensation of having to move one's bowels that rectal cancer patients sometimes get and which can at times be almost unbearable). Finally, the Orange Man had had enough.

Unfortunately, the cancer hadn't yet had enough the Orange Man. By the time he returned to "conventional" doctors and surgeons, his tumor had grown considerably.
Grim reading. A very good article, though.

[Goshawk]

So....I guess we know the Gerson coffee enema cancer cure doesn't work, huh?

[Barbrae]

Originally posted by Goshawk
So....I guess we know the Gerson coffee enema cancer cure doesn't work, huh?

Well, I know lots of folks who used surgery and chemo for cancer but they still died of that cancer - I guess surgery and chemo don't work, huh?

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

Originally posted by Barbrae
Well, I know lots of folks who used surgery and chemo for cancer but they still died of that cancer - I guess surgery and chemo don't work, huh?

Do you have the number who survived under the Gerson/Gonzalus versus conventional?

I personally know of a few who have survived... some other moms. But, hey... what do I know, I'm just a mom who drives kids around? I see another mom picking up her younger kid from soccer pracitice while I drop mine off... with the head scarf and radiology marks for her cancer... and then the next year her hair has grown back and she is talking about the new house they are building. Funny, isn't it?

Or hubby's barber who has had a sone who has had leukemia... and survived.

Or the fact that I live 5 blocks from a Ronald McDonald House... lots of the families are there because of loved ones in the Oncology Ward of Children's Hospital. Do I go and tell them that it is hopeless.. and that they should be shooting coffee up their kids' butts?

What exactly IS the success rate of Gerson or Gonzalez?

[athon]

Originally posted by Barbrae
Well, I know lots of folks who used surgery and chemo for cancer but they still died of that cancer - I guess surgery and chemo don't work, huh?

Neither science nor medicine is about certainty. It is about predictability. If I have a six sided dice, with five sides having the number 'five' on it, and I roll it...I predict I'll get a five. I'll only be wrong 1 out of 6 times.

Science offers us a degree of predictability in a chaotic world. The more we understand of a phenomena, the more predictable it is. In medicine you want something to be as predictable as possible. Certainty, however...is far from a realistic expectation.

On that we cannot possibly disagree.

Here we are always discussing percentages and facts and figures, and the validity of double blind tests etc. These add numbers to our dice. When we ask for evidence, if that evidence presents itself as real (and not an assumption, a speculation or an anecdotal observation) then our dice get smaller and smaller.

Alternative medicines have pretty big dice. Indeed, so big, it's hard to see them as being any different to non-medical alternatives (like sitting and doing nothing). It's still a dice, and following it could still give you a positive result...

But when I take chances, I want my outcome to be as predictable as possible.

Athon

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

Originally posted by Barbrae
Well, I know lots of folks who used surgery and chemo for cancer but they still died of that cancer - I guess surgery and chemo don't work, huh?

So again I ask... what is the success rate of Gerson or Gonzalez treatments?

Do they put out reports like this were the mortality rate of children cancers as been reduced by 50%:
http://www.nci.nih.gov/newscenter/PediatricNotetoReporters

with pediatric cancer survival at 75%?:
http://www.nci.nih.gov/newscenter/pressreleases/ReportNation2004release
... Childhood cancers showed some of the largest improvements in cancer survival during the past 20 years, with an absolute survival rate increase of 20 percent in boys and 13 percent in girls. The current five-year survival rate of over 75 percent confirms substantial progress made since the early 1960s, when childhood cancers were nearly always fatal.

Please tell us where either Gerson or Gonzalez have published their studies.

[Eos of the Eons]

Well, and can anyone tell me why coffee enemas and carrot juice are supposed to help? How exactly do they help the body kick cancer? And why would anyone choose that over something that specifically targets the cancer?

[Hydrogen Cyanide]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Well, and can anyone tell me why coffee enemas and carrot juice are supposed to help? How exactly do they help the body kick cancer? And why would anyone choose that over something that specifically targets the cancer?

I am beginning to think that it is just one continual college/frat prank. I can just imagine a scene from a drunken college party where these guys dream up how much fun it would be to push coffee up bums and turn people orange -- and the biggest bonus would to be get PAID for it!! And they would be laughing all the way to the bank.

[Eos of the Eons]

:D Well, that's the most reasonable explanation I have ever heard!