In my view this is a tricky issue. I agree that anti vaxxers are a bad trend. But I think to some degree the medical establishment has brought this onto themselves. I remember when things like yoga and meditation came up a lot of doctors just brushed it off as total nonsense. It took a long time for them to catch up. Same for the microbiome. A lot of traditional medicine for a long time has claimed a connection between gut health and general health which most doctors also rejected. Only recently the idea gets some acceptance.
If I had a serious disease I would probably also look into alternative treatments (In Addition to the usual options) because I think most doctors have a very narrow view on things. What bugs me for example is the focus on fixing things vs preventing. Doctors should put much more effort into to promoting healthy lifestyles than they do now.
In short: I am not surprised that people are skeptical of the usual medical advice. Unfortunately some people take this way too far as the anti vaxxers show.
If you had a serious disease that was going to kill you quickly you wouldn't have time to look into alternative treatments. You would take the path of highest success rate, which in case you havent looked at the data, is chemo for many aggressive cancers.
No. I and saying that these treatments often have horrific side effects so it’s no surprise people start liking at other things. I personally would probably do a juice fast or similar and chemo.
As the sibling commenter said, cancer loves sugar indeed!
Better do a "regular" fast instead -- regular meaning just water, but also meaning often.
Autophagy (the [sub-]cellular janitor) kicks in after 24h* fasting and recycles and repairs old and damaged cells.
And better to do it to maintain / optimize health now. Why wait?
* I've heard plenty of benefits fasting 24-48h, but going longer than that I don't think justifies the risk.
--
To a lesser degree you can get the same benefits with fasting's little brother, Time Restricted Eating (these days called Intermittent Fasting) where you eat only during an 8 hour window.
Less autophagy but you will get some lowered inflammation which is great too (inflammation found to cause many mental as well as physical illnesses).
I'm going go assume you're not providing medical advice to cancer patients to fast during chemo. That would be... insane. If you have cancer, talk to your oncology team including doc, nurses and nutritionist that they will provide.
However... as a stage 4 survivor who fucked up my cancer with 18 weeks of chemo, lots of healthy eating, exercise and an amazing support system....
I currently practice intermittent fasting in a 16/8 cycle. I only drink black coffee and water during a fast 8pm to noon. I've found it has improved my energy levels (which were already awesome) and mental acuity. And consequently my productivity and appetite to take on more work.
So yeah, post chemo I'm a fan. But I only tried this years later and after my body had healed up.
Yeah, I was suggesting to GP that (1) better to prevent cancer than to treat it, and (2) better use fasting than fructose!
With that said,
Conclusion: STF during chemotherapy is well tolerated and appears to improve QOL and fatigue during chemotherapy. Larger studies should prove the effect of STF as an adjunct to chemotherapy.
There were no serious adverse effects.
Fasting started 36 h before and ended 24 h after chemotherapy (60 h-fasting period).
Source: The effects of short-term fasting on quality of life and tolerance to chemotherapy in patients with breast and ovarian cancer: a randomized cross-over pilot study.
A juice fast on chemo would kill you. It would throw your electrolytes out of whack and starve your body of protein. The lack of calories would leave you too weak to complete treatment. And cancer loves sugar. So you'd be feeding your tumors while starving your body of what it needs.
Or the path of any success rate. Yoga won't help you one bit if your apendix is about to burst. Acupuncture has never set a broken bone or de-clothed a crainial artery to relieve a stroke. Scientific medicine is a mirical we should all appreciate every day. Without it, half the people reading this probably wouldn't be here.
Totally agree. Modern medicine is a miracle. But it’s also not the solution to everything. When I taught yoga classes I saw quite a few people who had had multiple failed surgeries for back, knee and other problems. They got their problems under control by doing some simple exercises and more awareness of their movement patterns. This can’t be denied either.
Dude medicine has a failure rate as well, it's nothing that interesting. It's clouded in economics and politics, meaning it will never be truly altruistic. It's not much different from thinking software is a miracle. Human error is a leading cause of death in the West.
Yeah unfortunately a portion of the medical community has drifted away from treating root causes to palliative care for the sake of profits and revenue which leads to distrust and rightfully so.
> If I had a serious disease I would probably also look into alternative treatments (In Addition to the usual options) because I think most doctors have a very narrow view on things. What bugs me for example is the focus on fixing things vs preventing. Doctors should put much more effort into to promoting healthy lifestyles than they do now.
My understanding is that doctors receive zero nutrition training, including ones that graduate from Harvard. How they can the be the ones we look to for preventing illness, when they don't even have a baseline understanding of nutrition?
> Well your understanding is wrong. Both SCCA (Fred Hutch in Seattle) and City of Hope in Los Angeles have dedicated nutritionists on staff that advise patients on diet for best outcome.
I fail to see how that addresses his claim that doctors do not retrieve nutrition training.
I did a bit of Googling. It looks like most doctors probably do receive some nutrition training, but not much, and even that seems to focus more on biochemistry than diets and food choice. Some results:
> Despite the connection between poor diet and many preventable diseases, only about one-fifth of American medical schools require students to take a nutrition course, according to David Eisenberg, adjunct associate professor of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
...
> “Today, most medical schools in the United States teach less than 25 hours of nutrition over four years. The fact that less than 20 percent of medical schools have a single required course in nutrition, it’s a scandal. It’s outrageous. It’s obscene,” Eisenberg told NewsHour.
> Part of the problem stems from the fact that doctors don’t know how to provide information beyond the basics.
> Inadequate instruction during medical school, residency and other additional training is a primary reason for this dearth of expertise, according to an American Heart Association science advisory published Monday in the journal Circulation(link opens in new window) that looked at gaps in nutrition education over the decades.
> Modern medicine maintains the importance of proper nutrition, yet on average, U.S. medical schools only offer 19.6 hours of nutrition education across four years of medical education, according to the perspective authors. “This corresponds to less than 1 percent of estimated total lecture hours,” they wrote. “Moreover, the majority of this educational content relates to biochemistry, not diets or practical, food-related decision making.”
> A total of 106 surveys were returned for a response rate of 84%. Ninety-nine of the 106 schools responding required some form of nutrition education; however, only 32 schools (30%) required a separate nutrition course. On average, students received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school (range: 2–70 h). Only 40 schools required the minimum 25 h recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. Most instructors (88%) expressed the need for additional nutrition instruction at their institutions.
> Well your understanding is wrong. Both SCCA (Fred Hutch in Seattle) and City of Hope in Los Angeles have dedicated nutritionists on staff that advise patients on diet for best outcome.
> But hey, that jump you took to that conclusion was spectacular. You missed your calling.
> "How they can the be the ones we look to for preventing illness, when they don't even have a baseline understanding of nutrition?"
> This thread is unbelievable. Have all the rational people left HN?
> According to Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined". "Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He was also influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004." He eventually underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure") in July 2004, that appeared to remove the tumor successfully.[175][176]
> Jobs did not receive chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
> Jobs died at his Palo Alto, California, home around 3 p.m. (PDT) on October 5, 2011, due to complications from a relapse of his previously treated islet-cell pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which resulted in respiratory arrest.
It isn't stupidity that makes people not believe in medical science. Jobs wasn't stupid. It's some kind of hubris and mistrust. The belief that I know better than an entire community of professionals who have dedicated their lives to knowing these answers. Why, what if actual the answer is the one I want to hear instead of the difficult path?
It's more than hubris and mistrust. The moment they inject you with radiation to stage you as you begin the process of treatment is rather illuminating.
Hearing that Geiger counter tick behind you. Hearing it start screaming as the nurse arrives with a lead hypodermic containing radioactive sugar.
Seeing her approach your arm with that fucking thing.
Watching as the needle approaches your vein, about to puncture the skin.
Freeze frame right there. Now let's consider that moment. You have a decision to make. Will you let them do something that will harm you to try to cure you? That is a difficult decision for most people. It requires a tremendous leap of faith. It is equivalent to being awake as they're about to saw off a limb to save your life from a gangrenous infection.
Cancer treatment has many of these moments. Every time you're infused with doxorubicin and vincristine each chemo cycle is another of these moments.
Deciding to let someone hurt you badly to try to save your life goes against our primal instinct and takes a tremendous amount of rational will to overcome that resistance.
Being treated for cancer and choosing a treatment path isnt an impassive collegial debate in a HN thread. It is a visceral experience that results in complete submission to a terrifying process that involves cutting and poisoning your body. In many cases the treatment is very effective. But alternatives begin to look pretty fucking good as you start down that path.
I see examples of this all of the time especially amongst people who are successful or highly advanced in any sort of facet of life. My theory is that becoming advanced involves developing deep analytical skills, which it’s then tempting to apply to all sorts of other domains. The trap is that what made you advanced in one specialized area was years of foundational knowledge alongside those analytical skills. I find myself fighting that impulse a lot and have gotten better but I can easily see it going the other direction.
People like Jobs are successful because they go against the mainstream and do what they think is right even if everybody else disagrees. And they are very stubborn. It’s not surprising that they have the same mindset in other areas of life. This kind of arrogance and stubbornness makes them successful but can also be their downfall.
It speaks to the fact that cancer treatment is almost as scary as cancer itself.
Faced with the choice of poisoning your body to spite your cells, having a chunk of your organs lopped off, or just letting it ride... Hindsight is 20:20, maybe his decision was a mistake, but I have sympathy for Jobs here.
In fairness to Jobs, he would have known that the surgery was very invasive, came with significant side effects that would reduce his quality of life, while probably only buying time for a disease that would likely end up being terminal.
A difficult decision for anyone, no matter how rationally you look at it.
because they see the doctor and the medical system as something not personal and interacting with them..
my father(age close top 80) is doing this now in the sense he wants to jump on any not proven thing for dialysis even though its not proven. I constantly force him to interact more with his doctors and nurses to counteract these things. Sometimes it works sometimes not.
I feel sorry for your father. Dialysis is not fun, this is not irrational behavior, it's pain avoidance. My grandfather used to call me when he was going through dialysis - sometimes crying. It was heartbreaking.
I have talked to cancer patients and treatment really violates people. You go through endless tests, get treatments with horrific side effects and basically are just treated like an object. I have heard several times that they wanted to stop treatment just because it was such a terrible experience physically and psychologically. Not sure how to do better but it’s understandable.
Even in countries that have functional medical systems, medical treatment can be very de-humanizing. It's not something that may every go away, as medical practice fundamentally clashes with most people's idea of selfhood.
Not paying exorbitant fees to pump poison in your body that makes you wish you were dead anyway. Not giving your family false hope that you will get better while looking like a stepped-on prune. The humiliation of trying experimental, unproven treatments.
At least with witch doctors, you'll keep your family somewhat calm and won't take a toll on your wallet. More inheritance for them.
One of the biggest issues right now, is that we have a community (doctors, scientist, researchers) who need to backup their claims with actual proof's or risk loosing their license/reputation vs a community of "gurus"/"self-healers" who don't have to backup any of their claims at all. Thus the "gurus" can make HUGE claims, that to someone sick sound much better than the conservative claims made by doctors.
Give both groups the same voice & reach, and guess who wins.
That's the point of the scientific method, you undeniably prove your theories, or you are a fraud. Hypotheses must be challenged, especially for the prices hospitals charge.
Because these people know how to spin their "treatment". They convince the patient to chose their "treatment" them selves. They rarely give the ridiculous advice directly in front of witnesses. Instead the family will learn about the treatment from some third party, potentially the victim themselves.
I'm at a hotel that coincidentally has 500 people from a MLM finale/training for Essential Oils and this is what it's all about. Have the people tell their friends and family that the oils can even cure ebola to get your 4 to become 8, 8 to become 16, etc. My SO the oncologist-in-training is pissed that they can just say whatever and aggressively advertise their wares and she can't even get pens from pharma companies.
Spot on. We have, all across the west (the situation in the UK is similar to the US) regulated medical professionals but not medical claims. This needs to be addressed, with a presumption in favour of malice where claims are clearly not approached properly.
We had a committee of parliamentarians conduct an inquiry into homeopathy back in 2010, and predictably they found (after consulting with experts, taking testimony from all quarters etc) it was bunk. To the best of my knowledge we have not altered either policy or legislation in response to that.
This is nothing new though; gurus and healers have been saying for decades that there are better cures (after which most people who listened to them died and sometimes they died themselves after taking their own 'cure').
Hell, even here on HN we see people basically claiming that keto + no sugar + fasting will prevent or cure cancer. And this is a community that wants real proof, yet many here seem to believe that and might forgo chemo in the future because of that belief. The thing is; most of these people (as I usually check) seem to be in their 20s. In your 20s you are in fact indestructible in most cases, so thinking that you will survive anything and that doing some fad diet/cure/whatever will help you do that says or means nothing. Fast forward 30-40 years and then let's discuss that again.
Maybe they are right (but right means there is a lot of research and real cases and there are not at the moment), but if not, i'm quite scared about how many people here follow these half baked ideas and then basically play 'health guru' online because they 'feel so good'. Newsflash; you always feel good in your 20s, even if you smoke, eat burgers+pizza and drink every day, you still feel fine because you are young. It is dangerous claiming these things together with half baked scientific theories about cancer cells.
This is not new and it predates the internet. My wife's aunt died of breast cancer 30 years ago. She decided to not have chemotherapy and instead opted for self treatment via a vegan diet even though she was relatively young and had a very treatable cancer. It happened before our relationshp but the utter stupidity of that choice is still used as a cautionary tale among her family.
That said, I've seen two family members die from terminal cancer and in both cases, they would have been better served by hospice rather than spending the last year of their life in chemo. I felt like it was a money grab by doctors. Their end of life oncology treatment cost the insurance company a couple hundred thousand dollars each
> That said, I've seen two family members die from terminal cancer and in both cases, they would have been better served by hospice rather than spending the last year of their life in chemo. I felt like it was a money grab by doctors. Their end of life oncology treatment cost the insurance company a couple hundred thousand dollars each
On that subject I very strongly recommend Atul Gawande's "Being Mortal".
> I felt like it was a money grab by doctors.
I don't think that's what it is, and Gawande's book (where he speaks as both a surgeon and having had relatives — including parents — go through this) comforted me in that opinion. Rather:
* doctors generally are not trained in this sort of end-of-life care recommendations
* it's easy for a disconnect and misunderstanding to occur between, or for doctors to present alternatives but fail to notice the patient or family doesn't really understand (especially the implications of the various alternative)
* it is common for families to try for survival at essentially all costs (including intrusive and uncomfortable), and hard for doctors to disagree, sometimes at the result of (2) above but not always
* doctors are human and tend to get blinkered by what they do know, and what they do know is usually treatment
One interesting item (of many, the book is barely 200 pages but full of stuff) is Gawande's mention of Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Linda L. Emanuel's "Four Models of the Physician-Patient Relationship." which basically identifies a range from "paternalistic" (doctor knows best and takes all decisions) to "informative" (where the doctor is provides facts & figures and possibly options but no insight).
This might be the best post in this thread. I think you can see a lot of the paternalistic orientation on display even in this thread. I think it’s that sort of hubris which causes people to react in the opposite direction and reject the whole thing. So who to blame for me is clear, it’s the doctors.
I've seen the opposite - someone choose to step away from treatment because it wasn't worth it.
It was a very, very hard decision. They faced a lot of pressure from others (who they loved) but they did it.
Subsequently some of their friends even questioned the proberty of the people involved - the implication was that they shouldn't have died so easily, that there were things that could have been done.
But this was a man in his late 70's, with two degenerative diseases and an advanced hard to treat cancer (on top of a long standing easy to treat managable one).
This is clear cut. If you have, for example,stage 4 non-hodgkin's lymphoma and arent treated very quickly with R-CHOP chemotherapy, you will die very quickly. If you are treated, the cure rate is 90%.
Taking the time to look around, going down to South America to take in the airs, travelling to India to try to yoga it away, you will die. And quickly.
There are certain very aggressive cancers like NHL that are curable with a high success rate today using, in the case of NHL, a combination of chemo and bio agents like Rituximab.
If you aren't immediately treated you will die.
Convincing someone with one of these diseases to avoid "western"
medicine because they are lying and seek alternative treatment is essentially participating in assisted suicide.
It's interesting - I wonder if the advances in treatment have precipitated this position.
My instinctive attitude/response to cancer is that it's a death sentance, and I guess that makes me, and my generation, an probably a lot of the population suceptable to the grift of these hucksters.
Perhaps the right thing to do is to change the classification of diseases like NHL that can now be treated - perhaps they should just stop being "cancer".
On the one hand, the medical industry is tied so closely to government that they are even granted immunity for FDA approved treatments. A policy which basically assumes nobody makes mistakes.
They have made the requirements to bring a drug to market so onerous that only the very largest companies can afford it.
The regulatory infrastructure is heavily influenced by non-medical industry industries, such as the alcohol industry's non-stop lobbying to make and keep cannabis a schedule 1 drug.
This all stinks so badly my default position is to hardly trust anything coming from the establishment.
Anyone trying to make claims outside of establishment channels is generally a near lone voice that may or may not understand what they are talking about. Gauging their claims becomes very difficult as often it is not even legal for others to test their claims. I would basically have to become an expert, myself, to actually understand either side of a claim.
To make matters worse, everyone in the world is now an independent expert everywhere on everything and they can insert themselves into every conversation. I find most commonly people outside the U.S. commenting on things inside the U.S. while clearly not having one clue about how the government activities make the whole thing look and smell like a waste treatment facility.
Then people come up with the stupid terms, such as "anti-vaxxers". This term is now used against people who simply believe the government has no power force people to receive injections. Government forcing this kind of thing is going to get a bunch of people really screwed up and killed, largely because nobody anywhere in the process is ever close to being individually accountable (e.g., if somehow a court rules in favor of the harmed parties, they just get paid from tax dollars, not corporate profits, corporate assets, individual assets, and certainly no jail time for anyone).
Edit to add:
I remember reading the following quote from a parent who chose chemo for their daughter:
"We basically tortured her for two years and then she died."
A chemo truther here, if you will. AMA about what I understand about chemotherapy. To the best of my knowledge only very few cancers respond well to chemotherapy - they are testicular cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma and ovarian cancer.
If you contradict any of my opinions, before I reply to you I want to know, your personal experience in investigating cancer therapies beyond what your doctor, medical school or news media told you. For example:
- Have you read at length the articles/books by mainstream train MDs who have a different opinion?
- have you talked to oncologists with dissenting opinions?
I'm glad you mention testicular cancer, which I was diagnosed with in 1982, just as the first extended trials for a chemotherapy were completed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_cancer#Chemotherapy). My staging surgery found no metastasis, but a year later it was clear it had spread to my lungs. More surgery, plus four grueling rounds of chemotherapy. This spring I will celebrate 36 years without a relapse.
Thanks pmcjones,for chiming in. I hope you live a long life.
The general trouble today more than ever is that main stream medicine is exceedingly cartelized, commercialized and profit driven that it is difficult to disentangle the legitimate good therapies from the one that in some cases are downright harmful.
lostmsu, IMO that is not a reasonable thing to expect because:
- Papers are hard to read and understand for even for people in the profession.
- For a resonantly skilled person outside of the profession (say an engineer or physicist) it might take about 3 days to a week to read and understand a paper fully.
- A large part of the population - my guess easily over 50% will never be able to read and understand a paper.
- Papers can be fraudulent, data can be fudged, or entirely made up. The researchers could be biased etc. I'm not saying that every paper out there needs to be ignored, rather that the signal to noise ration is rather small.
This is the classic argument of quality vs quantity. Chemo will give you more time but severely damages your DNA, organs, etc. potentially affecting quality of life greatly.
Chemo truthing is not about QoL though. QoL has very much been a concern and debate of mainstream medical ethics over the last decade or so (at least).
Chemo quality of life can be terrible and costs can be insane. Choosing to die is often a reasonable choice to suffering terribly and going bankrupt for a chance of survival
We are barely out of the dark-ages of medicine and there are fundamental shifts in perspective every day. (Like the new link between viruses and everything from Alzheimer's to cancer.) Even "folksy"-seeming perspectives like the linking the gut to seemingly unrelated areas like the brain turn out to have been correct. And as for the "anti-vaxers", I had dismissed them out-of-hand until I spend time with several neurologists (both researchers and practitioners) that were staying at my hotel for a conference, and after a few drinks and stealthy nametag removal admitted they are in general not willing to administer most vaccines to themselves or their own children. (I can do into a few more details, but I do not wish to start a anti-vax flamewar...)
Just an FYI chemo truthers arent that new. They are older than flat earthers which started sprawling fairly recently in the last few years.
Given how expensive chemotherapy is can you blame anyone. Theres also another batch anti corn syrup, anti fluoride toothpaste, anti eating meat, anti self driving cars, anti electronical voting, and so on. The list goes on. And on....
Yeah, I belong to the anti-nuclear faction. And grouping it with anti-vaxxers is just a cheap rhetorical shot. It’s not that Chernobyl or Fukushima or million of tons nuclear waste that someone else will have to pay for to take care of are products of imagination.
The death toll from Fukushima is in the low triple digits at most.
Pollution from coal kills hundreds of thousands of people a year when it's working normally. (This is even if we completely ignore the effects of global warming, whose future death toll is unknown).
Nuclear being seriously dangerous because of a few isolated accidents IS your imagination. It's similar to people who refuse to fly, and drive long distances instead.
The problem is that nuclear "oopses" effectively become forever problems due to the half-life of the materials involved. When the worst-case scenario makes a location a permanent hazard / permanent toxic pollution generator, it's reason enough to say no.
Every other form of pollution can at least be cleaned up in a human timeframe. This kind can't even be approached by machines without them breaking down.
The only way I'd ever support nuclear power is if the nuclear industry were to develop an actually safe reactor (and by safe I mean that it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to cause a nuclear hazard, not "we have safety protocols in place"). But so far that hasn't happened in any meaningful way, so I'm all for dismantling everything and forbidding any new reactors until they can actually prove their safety (this is where I applaud Merkel).
But that's never going to happen, because big projects like this are full of graft, lies, payoffs, and plain fraud (just look at Boeing). So effectively, I don't expect I'll ever be anything but anti-nuclear. And that's a shame, because it has huge potential :/
Coal vs. Nuclear is a false dichotomy. We need to double down on renewables that by some estimates are already cheaper to build let alone to run and to decommission when plants reach their end of life.
And those accidents didn’t cost any money at all, and if they did, all costs were carried by the owners of the plants. And you believe the fantasy that the only deaths caused by Chernobyl was the firefighters and a few people working at the plant. And as usual, you ignore the question of the waste.
And there are other alternatives than coal, which are much more economical than nuclear when each producer carries their own costs, including environmental and insurances.
I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me about nuclear, but I do have a problem who are so narrow minded and lazy that they group everyone that have different ideas than themselves together.
LOL, I actually grew up near Chernobyl and my parents STILL work on CHNPP. So I do know a thing or two about the tragedy.
One thing for sure is that it is very speculative to assume pretty much any death toll rather then immediate deaths by liquidators right after the tragedy (<100). I am not sure that cancer rates in Chernobyl are greater than average or, especially, near the vicinity of coal/gas plant.
And if you really have a degree in physics you should know that nuclear waste is a very manageable problem. Finally nobody advocates about building more ChNPP style reactors - there are plenty extremely safe alternatives. France is a good example on this
Just because it’s very hard to estimate the exact excess deaths or cancers doesn’t mean there aren’t any. There are estimates from 4000 up to near a million early deaths, with the lower probably more reliable, but that is far from none or a few. Ukraine are still spending about 6% of its budget on costs related to the accident.
And it is just pure bullshit that nuclear waste is manageable. Or tell me why there’s still no long term storage facility open anywhere in the world. It’s not that they haven’t spent decades trying. The only way waste management isn’t a problem is if you just say it is someone else’s, ie, future generations problem, or if you rely on reprocessing that still won’t reduce all waste, or also seems to be hard to find economy in.
I’m an advocate for nuclear energy, but I acknowledge that there are some strong downsides. Per my analysis, those downsides are worth it, compared to the alternative (millions of death from coal pollution, climate change, etc.), but it’s not the same as people who have a completely wrong belief about things like vaccines, climate change, or chemotherapy. Of course, in some cases even chemotherapy isn’t worth it, such as very old people who would rather not suffer the pain and would rather dir quickly.
Also, GMOs are probably not spoken against for the reasons you think. Most anti-GMO advocates (that I know) are advocating against them because of the dangerous business model of companies like Monsanto that sue farmers because GMO seeds blow into the farmers’ fields, not because of mistaken beliefs about the health risk.
Judging by the downvotes I assume a few of the people from groups 1-5 are here. There are no scientifically founded reason be be against vaccines/nuclear/GMO, so grouping these things together by the parent comment should not be offensive to anyone
With a PhD in physics and against nuclear power I’m very happy to downvote anyone that groups that with anti-vaccines. I respect that people might have a different opinion than me about nuclear power, but calling opposing nuclear superstition is just cheap.
Some parts of anti-nuclear movement hold a position "ban nuclear no matter what". But for example, what happened in Germany, is nuclear plants being replaced by coal and gas plants.
Then discussion moved to if nuclear plant will be replaced by coal plant, is it really that better in the end? When faced that question, it was observed that anti-nuclear movement splits, where one side thinks that nuclear makes sense to stop coal, while another thinks that we must ban nuclear even if whole planet will die from climate change.
This is why, at least in Germany, some parts of anti-nuclear movement can be perceived as somewhat radical.
I don’t really care to have the discussion right now. There there are valid arguments on both sides.
It’s intellectually dishonest, lazy and counterproductive to groups everyone that you disagree with. That means that you never actually cared to understand the arguments.
The other I've heard was that lowering cholesterol drugs truthers or something, are also anti-vaxxers :-D. As a libertarian, I think we have rights to choose whatever therapy or preventive treatment as we want.
> Still, a group of online cancer truthers have zeroed in on chemotherapy as the ultimate example of the hubris and greed of Western medicine and Big Pharma.
Anti-vaxxers and chemotherapy truthers are employ only somewhat more extreme forms of the fallacious mode of reasoning that dominates today’s media. Open up pretty much any article about a complex issue, and you’ll see the pattern. Relevant facts will be combined with irrelevant ones and set in a narrative arc, a story with clearly identified villains and victims. The reader knows what conclusions she is supposed to draw based on how she feels about the villains and victims, as opposed to objective big picture analysis.
Take a simple example: Trump’s recent proposed revisions to NEPA, the federal law that requires government entities to perform environmental review of infrastructure projects: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/climate/trump-nepa-enviro.... The whole thing is set within a narrative arc about Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with Trump as the villain. Isolated quotes from individuals are provided, making various assertions. Nowhere is there any analysis of objective facts by which someone could evaluate the proposal. For example, there is no mention of the fact that European countries have environmental review rules even more streamlined than what Trump is proposing. There is no mention of the median environmental review period of transit projects under NEPA (6.7 years), studies that have been done estimating the costs of delaying infrastructure projects (trillions), etc. Nothing to permit objective evaluation, just narrative, victims, and the villain. This is how journalists are taught to write and this is how they do write.
Anti-vaxxers and chemo truthers simply engage in a somewhat more extreme version of this reasoning. They likewise ignore the big picture analysis. Chemotherapy, for example, clearly causes harms, but has even greater benefits. There are many studies quantifying those harms relative to the benefits. Instead of looking at that analysis, they elevate the narrative above all else. “Big drug companies,” “western medicine,” etc., are the villains. The narrative is that those greedy players are suppressing natural remedies out of a desire for profit. Within that narrative, a few anecdotes about people getting better without cancer are all it takes to make the narrative plausible.
If you read Matt Taibbi’s work, for example, is he so different? He uses “Wall Street” and “big banks” in the same way as these folks use “western medicine.” He constructs a narrative where the entire global banking system, and practices employed by nearly every advanced democracy, are causing harm in the pursuit of profit. The experts are hoodwinking you, but he and a few others have seen through it! Throwing in a few anecdotes of misconduct or bad behavior seals the deal and makes the narrative believable.
Is cancer infectious? How is this anywhere near anti-vaxxers? Don't vaccines mainly exist to treat for something dangerous to the whole herd? Only some small part of the herd even gets cancer.. how is this not discrediting vaccines by even just comparing the two?
One is to prevent the whole herd from being infected(eradicated possibly), the other is a sick member to choose their way to treat themselves. Grievance is a part of life, it is sad to see members go, but I can't compare between that and the herd disappearing completely(no one left to grief).
EDIT: also I can't help but feel that this claim puts Chemotherapy on the same level of effectiveness as Vaccines. I think all options should be exhausted before we start claiming chemo to be as miraculous as vaccines are.
An alternate take is that, from a certain point of view:
1: Cancer and heart disease are the leading causes of death in Rich Countries, specifically the US [1]
2: Your chances of dying from either cancer or heart disease, given no other incidents claim your life first, asymptotically arrive at 100% [2]
So, yes, cancer is not infectious, but our bodies are prone to two classes of diseases (neither cancer nor heart disease are actually a single disease, but more correctly disease families) that have environmental and hereditary causes. Our tools for treating both are crude, but getting more and more effective year-over-year.
By advocating against the state-of-our-current-art in treating either disease (informed criticism is fine, and in fact, encouraged), the end result is that many people suffer and die when they could merely suffer, then live years of their lives before succumbing to a relapse or other causes of death. Perhaps the headline is hyperbole, but the argument is analogous: By advocating against chemotherapy and replacing it solely with a hard-to-follow diet and exercise regimen, the cull of older people dying from treatable disease can look something like the cull of younger people dying from preventable disease due to advocating against vaccination against infectious diseases.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Given the amount of discussion in this thread, I dare say it qualifies as interesting to a fair number of people here.
Even though I am not one of the many people on here who build the tools used to spread misinformation, I find the intersection of memetics and technology interesting. The future course of humanity and history is deeply affected by this garbage.
If I had a serious disease I would probably also look into alternative treatments (In Addition to the usual options) because I think most doctors have a very narrow view on things. What bugs me for example is the focus on fixing things vs preventing. Doctors should put much more effort into to promoting healthy lifestyles than they do now.
In short: I am not surprised that people are skeptical of the usual medical advice. Unfortunately some people take this way too far as the anti vaxxers show.