
Cancer: Diet ‘cures’ are killing young people, say top oncologist - ColinWright
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/young-cancer-patients-are-ignoring-medical-advice-and-choosing-diet-based-treatment-approach/story-fneuzlbd-1227493034176
======
downandout
The most famous case of someone trying to use bunk science to heal their
cancer was that of Steve Jobs. He wasn't that young, but like those mentioned
in the article, he attempted to use diet and healing crystals to treat cancer
that was entirely treatable when first discovered [1]. By the time he realized
he was essentially killing himself by refusing treatment, the cancer had
spread.

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-
jo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-cancer-
treatment-regrets/)

~~~
idlewords
The five-year survival rate for neuroendocrine pancreatic tumors treated with
surgery in the earliest stage is 61%. Jobs lived eight years after diagnosis
despite postponing surgery.

So I agree with you in spirit, but it's not accurate to say he had a treatable
cancer that he allowed to kill him.

(source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_cancer#Outcomes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_cancer#Outcomes))

~~~
t0mbstone
The real question is: Why not do the surgery, and _then_ the diet and crystals
or whatever? Would it really hurt anything to do the diet, too? That way, you
have your bases covered with both traditional medicine and the natural
approach.

~~~
tptacek
It is incredibly nasty surgery, apparently one of the most difficult and
invasive performed.

------
tptacek
One of the tricky things here is that there seems to be some promise to
metabolic approaches to cancer therapy, at least for some rare cancers --- but
because there is no regulatory or financial barrier to entry for people to
devise "nutrition therapy" cancer regimes, it's a space that is absolutely
overwhelmed by quackery.

There is, for instance, some actual research generating interesting findings
on ketogenic diets as an intervention for glioblastoma and astrocytoma.
Unfortunately, "ketogenic diets" are also a mainstay of Mercola-ism, so it's
hard to get good lay-reader summaries of what's going on.

~~~
paul_milovanov
"some promise" is very far from "anywhere close to phase I human trials", so,
this is not quite that tricky :)

I think a lot of good would come out of:

(1) more awareness of Cochrane Collaboration (& donations to)

(2) prosecutors and the likes of FDA aggressively pursuing people that lead
others to reject life-saving treatment, esp. if conflict of interest is
present (e.g book sales)

(3) stretch -- teach high school kids basic research evaluation skills (do a
search on Google Scholar, consider number of papers, sample sizes, journal
quality, author credentials, citations and existence of metastudies). Some
version of rough smoke-test for this kind of stuff can probably be automated.

~~~
tptacek
What is a "phase 1 human trial" for a ketogenic diet? Millions of people
already have that diet.

------
fredkbloggs
If physicians want people to stop buying into the conspiracy theories, they
should start by ending their acceptance of free samples from the
pharmaceutical industry. And while we're at it, they could stop displaying
brochures from those companies in their offices, wearing the free lab coats,
and so on. Or better yet, stop accepting sales calls from them altogether. And
if they wanted this to be effective, they could push to make these ethical
conditions part of the requirements for professional society membership and
even state licensing.

I am sympathetic with the frustrated physician whose patients refuse to accept
that there are any benefits to drug treatments. I am also sympathetic with the
patient who has spent his entire life hearing nothing but rosy assessments of
drugs pumped out by the manufacturers even though many are completely
ineffective and many others have been removed from the market because they
proved unsafe. There are ways to improve this, but all three parties (as well
as the FDA, in the US) are going to have to give. Drugmakers need to stop
advertizing their products to patients and physicians. Physicians need to
leverage their professional associations to ensure that they are properly
informed about new drugs, from impartial sources. Patients need to insist that
their physicians follow these guidelines and then trust them, or find a
different physician that they can and will trust. And the FDA needs to be at
once much more demanding: many drugs are approved despite little evidence, or
unreliable evidence, of effectiveness; and much less so: the interminable
process of approval needs to be cut way down, especially for drugs that have a
narrow base of potential patients.

Trust is gone, and needs to be repaired. You build or rebuild trust by being
trustworthy, going far out of your way not only to show that you are worthy
but to go well beyond what would otherwise be necessary. If you want patients
to trust you, you need to do everything possible to earn it.

~~~
jeo1234
If you ran a pharma company and had a new drug which helped reversed
alzheimer's, which methods would you use to promote it? Target the patients,
hospital admin, government officials? Or would it make more sense to talk with
people who are trained in that field and deal with the people who will be
impacted the most?

Yes there are many cases of people being over-prescribed, and drugs being
approved with debatable benefits, but communication between pharma and doctors
can be very helpful. Given proper oversight of course.

~~~
fredkbloggs
I would publish a paper on it and then offer the drug free of charge to any
independent (MUST be wholly independent; no other compensation would be
offered, and the condition of the offer is that they MUST publish regardless
of the results) lab or clinic who wanted to test it. If my drug is really that
good, I'm not going to have any trouble getting physicians interested in
prescribing it.

You're underestimating the level of professional interest in drugs that are
genuinely effective. The reason it's become so hard to promote drugs is that
most of them being introduced today are of little to no benefit, especially
relative to side effects (and cost; poverty is a side effect). A drug that
permanently and completely reversed Alzheimer's Disease in even 25% of
patients would be an earth-shattering discovery and both clinicians and
biologists would be lining up to study it. Likewise a drug that reversed its
progress by 40% in 90% of patients for 10 years, etc. But most of what's
coming out today is at best on the edge of statistical noise. When you've got
a dozen companies spending tens of billions of dollars a year developing
something that's 6% effective in 12% of the population and has serious side
effects in 20%, according to a study with a 5% margin of error, it's going to
be a very crowded, noisy market, because the noise is the only way to
distinguish one very marginal treatment from another.

Make something great and this problem will solve itself. The need for the AMA
and other professional societies to involve themselves directly and provide
impartial education to their members still exists, however. Some new
treatments may benefit only a small number of people, and if the evidence for
their effectiveness is strong enough, those professional societies should help
make sure their members are aware of them. The converse applies, as well:
members should be made aware of new drugs that are ineffective as well, and
discouraged from prescribing them in most situations.

The main point here is that the decisions physicians are making need be based
entirely on the evidence of safety and effectiveness, not marketing hype or
freebies. Again, I really don't see indications that genuinely great drugs are
getting overlooked; if they are, it's probably because one overhyped drug is
just like another to an overworked physician. A dramatic reduction in that
noise will help with that.

------
Kluny
I'm not at all surprised at this based on my friends and I's experience with
the medical profession. If we go in for anything more subtle than a broken
leg, it's very difficult to get a busy doctor to pay attention to what you're
telling them or send you for testing. It becomes so frustrating that you end
up turning to the internet and trying things like food cures, just because
it's all you can do. I'm gradually learning to be more assertive with the
doctor, even going so far as to take my mom along for moral support (pretty
embarrassed about that but sometimes that's what it takes). But I've given up
plenty of times in the past when I had various kinds of muscle and tendon
injuries that made it difficult to work. I usually ended up self treating with
stretches, ice, expensive trips to physiotherapists and chiros, just on the
wild guess that maybe they might be able to help when my doctor refuses to. I
have no doubt that if I had any weird cancer-like symptoms I'd try to self-
treat for a good long time before I bothered taking a day off work to see a
doctor. Doctors suck.

------
isaaaaah
Trust is the essence of things going crazy in this field. Who on earth can we
trust these days? We dont even know if someone writing a comment on the
internet isn't an agent of some company or government. So why should we trust
in doctors selling chemotherapy and radiotherapy, while no one, until this
day, has fully understood what cancer actually is, where it comes from and
admitted that! The internet revealed most secrets about our own systems and
how trust is being abused in almost every field. Pharmaindustries will never
admit that the human body itself is the only thing in the universe that can
heal our illnesses. Healing is a job our body does, not the medicine or a
doctor. All drugs and docs can do is improve the conditions for our body to
actually heal itself. In the worst case they will just chop that thing off
causing you to be ill, and tell you that you've been healed. So why should we
trust them anyway? I do not give alot about alternative techniques myself,
since most of the time someone just wants to make money or fame with it, but i
can see no difference in classical medicine these days. So i still visit a
regular doctor, but i question his assumptions and double triple check what he
is trying to make me do.

~~~
DanBC
Some amount of mistrust of doctors is good.

An important question to ask a doctor is "what happens if we do nothing? What
happens if we do watchful waiting?"

Doctors are human and they're subject to cognitive bias, so it's useful to
check what they say against the science.

But that means using reliable, reputable, sources (eg the Cochrane
Collaborations) and not some guy on the Internet making money selling goji
berries as a cure for all cancer.

------
n72
Ugh, my girlfriend believes all this crap and to conciliate her I read a book
on naturopathic medicine. It was a load of garbage. Who knows, the conclusions
in the book may have been correct, however the author just made unfounded
assertion after unfounded assertion. Anyway, anyone have any resources on
gently trying to steer someone away from this type of thinking?

~~~
hiou
This is very anecdotal, but in my experience with the people in my life that
fall for these cures are very, very concerned with themselves and typically
lean toward needing excessive control of everything in their life. It appears
to me to stem from an obsession with ones own self/well being that leads to
this overthinking.

I've had success with trying to steer them into the thinking that they'll
probably be just fine and if not, it really isn't as huge of a deal since
we're all going to die. On top of that getting sick has a whole lot to do with
luck and genetics so they should try to accept that no matter what they do it
isn't going to be up to them in most cases anyway. Lastly, I help them focus
on the great people around them instead of continuing to dwell on whether or
not they have optimum health.

Of course, you can't just call them a selfish jerk, but instead try to guide
them out of that loop of self obsession.

------
sandworm101
Lol. I read the headline as 'diets cause cancer', that 'cures' for diets were
causing cancer in young people. I expected something about diet pills.

There is a great Perry Cox speech out there about a patient eating red peppers
to cure cancer.

Found it...

"Dr. Cox: And now I have to take your laptop from you, as I've deemed you just
too darn stupid to use it. You see, those bell peppers that you're munching,
they aren't gonna do a truckload of jack against the cancer raging inside of
your body. Of course, I've only been a doctor for some twenty years, and the
person who wrote that Wikipedia entry also authored the Battlestar Galactica
episode guide, so what the heck do I know? But if you feel like living, page
me."

------
jensen123
"You’ve got all these conspiracy theories that think we’re in cahoots with the
drug companies and that’s why we advocate medicine."

Yeah. Just a conspiracy theory. Nothing to it. Nothing at all. The
pharmaceutical industry has no influence whatsoever.

Some people might say that doctors make far more money from doing traditional
medicine, than they would from offering dietary advice, but this too has
absolutely nothing to do with it. Just another conspiracy theory.

~~~
Texasian
If alternative medicine worked, believe me, the pharmaceutical companies would
be edging in on that space.

If alternate medicine worked, it'd just be medicine.

~~~
ZeroFries
Why would they edge in on a space that doesn't make money? In other words, not
every medicine is profitable (eg: commonly available herb).

~~~
murbard2
Because they would sell you pineapple extract for ten times the price, and
you'd buy it because it'd be covered by insurance.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-
prescriptio...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-
prescription/)

~~~
tertius
And they would isolate the effective compounds making a more effective hybrid,
claim IP and make a ton of money.

------
ferrous_pyrite
Economics play a large role. Countries with high medical costs tend to have
more magical thinking that leads to overuse of "alternative" treatments with
no scientific backing and that don't work.

Why? It's hard to accept that one is taking an inferior solution due to
economic constraint, so people fall into a sort of magical thinking/self-
deception that leads them to reject modern medicine.

In a society with expensive private health insurance and extremely high
medical costs, it makes sense that people would resort to false cures. Of
course, it's not always about money. See: Steve Jobs. It tends to take on a
life of its own, after a certain point, because the mind-virus that might
start due to inaccessibility of care lives on and spreads.

~~~
nisa
Counter argument: Germany. Free and good public health care with additional
private health care that is affordable.

Esoteric thinking and homeopathic medicine are extremely common in educated
and high income circles outside of STEM fields - basically the middle class
loves this.

Reasons that are often cited and that I've encountered are mostly due to more
personal contact with the practitioner and some fear about big pharma.

It's getting so out of hand that a lot of children are not vaccinated - e.g.
Berlin Prenzelberg - a place where high income, high educated folks are a
majority is a major problem spot.

This is something different - at least in Western Europe.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I've only been to Germany once and I noticed that I couldn't get painkillers I
use in the US over the counter. Some are apparently prescription onlyc (at
least in typical doses/bottle in the US), but of course homeopathic junk was
on display and ready for sale. I suspect if they liberalized their laws then
people would just buy Tylenol or whatever and not some herbal remedy. There's
a real egg > chicken problem you're ignoring.

edit: I was in a supermarket where selling drugs is illegal not a pharmacy,
where it is legal. Still my point stands, if you're in pain you'll go with
whats easier. Putting up barriers to access is a problem. Tylenol should be at
the grocery store, not homeopathic junk.

edit2: HN wont let me reply to some comments:

I never understood this knee-jerk defense of the nanny state. Most nations
don't have a problem with this, but Germany does and that encourages
homeopathic nonsense in that culture, to the point of government funding of
it. Lets stop making excuses for failed policymakers.

~~~
Udo
_> I suspect if they liberalized their laws then people would just buy Tylenol
or whatever and not some herbal remedy_

I'm all for liberalizing drug laws in Germany, but just for completeness'
sake:

Tylenol is a brand name for Paracetamol which is readily available over the
counter without prescription in Germany, as is Ibuprofen (Advil), ASA
(Aspirin), as well as other anti-inflammatories and analgesics. I believe a
case could be made that on the heavier end of pain relief Metamizole
(Novalgin) should also be transitioned to a prescription-free status, but
there has been a widespread panic about its side effects at some point.

Also, a distinction should be made between herbal remedies which actually
produce some effect, such as valerian or volatile oils, and pure woo such as
homeopathic preparations.

The reason why supernatural "medicine" is so successful in Germany lies in the
fact that "alternative practicioner" is considered an actual profession with
deep ideological and historic roots in the country. Susceptible is pretty much
anyone who strives to use only "natural" resources for living because they
lack the scientific understanding to know that all substances are chemicals (a
bad word in Germany), and they often don't have any capacity to even recognize
the "alternative" treatment options are in fact based on magical thinking.

