Cancer

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Justin Hall
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Cancer

Post by Justin Hall » 14 Jun 2011 04:17

Here is a very good documentary I found Yesterday. Its free to watch until 20th, so please take the time to watch it and let me know what you think.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... movie.aspx

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Jeremy
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Post by Jeremy » 14 Jun 2011 22:11

My opinion; It's pseudoscientific rubbish.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRel ... nski1.html

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Post by Jeremy » 14 Jun 2011 22:15

This article also covers Burzynski extensively (you'll have to read down a little though). It's written by a cancer researcher.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/ ... or_woo.php

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Post by Justin Hall » 15 Jun 2011 02:45

First off they say in the documentary that the reason that National Cancer Institute couldn't get it to work is because they weren't following his recommendations and using there own amounts. wouldn't that explain why no one else can get it to work?

Saul Green says that PA is considered to be toxic. If his drug was dangerous why did the FDA state that it is safe to use? Also as they compare the FDA-supervised Clinical studies Antineoplastons Only treatments seems to be alot more effective then Chemotherapy Only. Are you saying that they never took place? It seems to me that all the stuff you shown is proven wrong in the documentary. If I'm wrong could you use details from post that disprove examples from the documentary?

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Post by Jeremy » 15 Jun 2011 15:50

You're making the assumption that the documentary is true, and then using it as evidence to argue that the documentary is true. This is circular reasoning.

There are two things worth noting.

1. The lack of sources. I have no way of checking up on most of the claims made in the documentary to see if they're actually true or not. My acceptance or dismissal can't be based on evidence, but just on whether I trust the source or not. As a skeptic and rationalist, I base my opinions (or try to) on genuine evidence (and not claims that evidence I can't see exists). On this basis, without evidence, I dismiss the claims until I can be presented with the primary evidence.

For example; You claim that the FDA has said that "Antineoplaston" is safe - but I can find no official statement of that. They've allowed it on testing, but obviously many unsafe drugs are tested with, that's how we find out they're not safe. Not only that, but if you go and look at some of Burzynski's work we see this;

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16484713

"Antineoplastons were tolerated very well with 1 case of grade 4 toxicity (reversible anemia)."

Which suggests to me the substance, like most substances, is toxic at some concentration.

I note in that study that the 2 year survival rate was 39% while the 2 year survival rate from conventional treatment in a larger study was 55% (source). We also aren't really given any comparisons or told whether the patients are receiving other treatments or not in Burzynski's study.

2. Of particular note here is the claim that cancer has been cured, but that the FDA is deliberately conspiring to repress that cure for the benefit of costly cancer treatments that are less effective. We're presented with the choice of a massive government conspiracy or somebody who appears to be a quack pseudoscientist actually being a quack pseudoscientist. I'm not prepared, based on people just stating it in a documentary, to believe that government organisations don't want cancer cured and I think that's definitely a time where; "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

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Post by Jeremy » 15 Jun 2011 15:52


Justin Hall
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Post by Justin Hall » 16 Jun 2011 06:35

http://www.commonweal.org/pubs/choices/21.html

its a bit long but I think its worth reading. He still does have a long way to go and it is just research. I have no way of finding the actually patient documents so really all we can do is base are believes on sites like the ones you and I post. I do understand that you can make anything sounds true but personally I do believe in Burzynski. In this article they don't say that it is a cure but just a step.

I'm not a person to believe on conspiracies for the most part, but when it come to health and food it seems to me that there is a lot that the government is doing wrong. For example someone my mom knows named Meghan telpner( she has a blog) use to have Crohn's disease which the doctors told her is incurable. With changing her diet and giving up meat along with taking naturopathic madicine and acupuncture, she is no longer has it. The doctors also wont recognize that she is cured yet she has no symptoms and more. why would that be? My mom also got rid of her allergies from going to a naturopathic doctor. Watch Jamie Oliver's food revolution and to me that seems like the governments really don't want change. But that is just my opinion.

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Post by Jeremy » 16 Jun 2011 14:45

It's important to recognise a few things;

1. Doctors are not infallible.

2. Governments are not infallible.

Doctors are only human, and make plenty of mistakes. Governments are made up of humans are make plenty of mistakes. Many issues that both doctors and governments work on don't have obvious answers, and we can only speculate as to whether they've made the right choice.

3. Humans are not infallible.

The fact that doctors and governments makes mistakes doesn't mean that people who think that they've made one on a particular issue are right. On any issue, it's clearly more likely that a trained professional will be more likely to be right than an untrained citizen. The only way we can determine who is right, if it can be determined, is by looking objectively at all the evidence - not the evidence from one side, but from all sides. For example, I'm strong opponent of alternative medicines and I have a significant books supporting alternative medicines, many of which people who believe in these things have either given to me or recommended that I read in order to convince me of their beliefs. Merely reading things that confirm your beliefs will confirm your beliefs.

4. Intentional deception is not the same as incompetence.
The thing that really got my skepti senses tingling on the claims you're making is that of the conspiracy. Medical progress on cancer is happing all the time - there are journal articles being published every week that improve our knowledge of cancer and treatments. On the other hand, the cases of massive government conspiracy are basically non-existent, and come with a lack of evidence. I'm not a cancer researcher, and the biology I study is zoology (although we have studied some aspects of cancer), but when you have a significant number of experts looking at the research and saying that no conclusions could be drawn, I'm prepared to accept that unless new evidence is presented, and certainly when I look at those studies, I find it hard to see how much could be gained (for example, in the one I quoted in my last post, all but 6 were receiving conventional treatment as well, and the survival rate was less than 40%. We're not told whether those 6 survived or not. How do we know it wasn't just the conventional treatment working, and with such a small sample, shouldn't we expect quite large or small percentages, just by random chance?). Now you're saying that all these cancer researches looking at his research actually can see that it does help, but are just lying as part of the conspiracy. I find that really hard to believe. Lots of these people (such as Orac, from the Respectful Insolence blog - and a cancer researcher) are frequently very critical of the government, and especially relating to health policies. The differences with their criticisms is that they're based around the government being ignorant, incompetent and short sighted, especially on issues of investment in research. Why would they, on one hand, say that the government is doing a poor job, and on the other hand lie in order to protect the governments conspiracy from stopping people from getting better treatment for cancer? It makes no sense.

Your story of Meghan Telpner is basically the typical cliché of alternative medicine proponents. There are many things worth noting. Firstly she may have been misdiagnosed. More likely she's gone in to remission - as google suggests *all people who have Crohn's Disease do* for some period of time. She's also modified her diet to reduce the symptoms - as is a *conventional treatment.* In fact I completely dispute the fact that she's been cured, and it would be easy to test. She's reduced her symptoms through diet, *just as doctors recommend* but if she were cured, she'd be able to change to eating an unhealthy diet and the symptoms wouldn't come back. Has that been tested? She certainly doesn't blog about it. From some brief google research, it's probably pretty likely that she occasionally has mild symptoms, and that as she gets older she'll have relapses as well - but even if that doesn't happen, we have an explanation consistent with modern medicine that doesn't rely on the efficacy of her various alternative medicine approaches.

There's a really fantastic book on the explanation for how people become to believe in alternative medicines and the science behind them called Snake Oil Science by R. Barker Bausell. I can't recommend this book enough. If you're going to start trying to look at all the evidence, instead of just trying to confirm your pre-conceived beliefs, then you should start with this book.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Sna ... g1iCx6MUEC

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Post by Justin Hall » 17 Jun 2011 08:10

Alright I'll give try and get it when I have the money to spare. You do make some very good points. I do have a question though, why doesn't the government focus a lot more on cancer prevention? There is tons of information about how cancer can be prevented yet it seems most people my age I talk to could care less about changing there eating habits. When I took food and nutrition in high school, i learned a lot of incorrect facts about food that was in the text book. So why would the government not but more effort/money into eduction about food?

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Post by Jeremy » 17 Jun 2011 17:30

I think that's a very complex question and I can think of a lot of reasons, which I divide into practical and political reasons. I'll just touch on the practical reasons - which is basically questions of what does the science say, how much does food influence cancer, what are the real and relative rates, and what is the loss of life (for example if an old person gets cancer and dies this is less of a loss of life than a young person).

The see two political reasons for this;

1. Lack of political return on investment. If you invest in cancer prevention due to diet through education, you're not going to save any lives for 30+ years, and the lives you do save, nobody will notice. I'm not going to get to 50 and say - the government educated me on how to eat, and that's why I don't have cancer now - thanks government, I'll vote for you. On the other hand, if you invest in treatments and research in to cancer then you get an immediate return, because you're dealing with people with cancer and they're getting better within a political cycle. It's a consequence of our democratic system that long term investments with invisible returns are less appealing than short term investments with obvious returns. This ultimately means it's our fault for not voting for political candidates with long term visions (or the system's fault).

2. "Liberal values." In the US, Australia and I presume Canada we have conservative parties that are economically conservative and individual freedoms liberal (unless it's about sex). This means that they support less government spending, less government influence and more individualism. Somehow these philosophies manage to convince around ~50% of voters, possibly because they say things in such simple (and wrong) terms that dumb people believe them, and the majority of any population has an IQ below average (not 50%, as is commonly believed, since IQ can't distribute symmetrically). [/anti conservative rant]. This means that governments, whether left or right wing, are continually under pressure to spend less money, especially on telling people what they should be doing. This makes it hard for any government to legislate about food. For example in Australia there has been big debates about advertising junk food during children's TV and having appropriate warnings on junk food. This is opposed by the right of politics because it's seen as the government telling people what to eat, and so apparently a bad thing.


Finally I'm not sure what it's like in Canada but in Australia we have a lot of initiatives about food health. It is taught all the way through primary school and high school (compulsory) and there is an increased effort to deal with this (although not related to cancer, but to obesity). More could be done, but certainly a lot is, so I'm not sure that I accept your premise.

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Post by Justin Hall » 17 Jun 2011 19:09

In Canada cigarette companies have to advertise the side effects and a bunch of chemicals on the side and there cant be any advertising. also now all smokes are covered so you have to know what your getting to get smokes. Which I guess is good but apparently its more of an annoyance then anything, But there isn't really anything like that with food. We now have the ability to see a nutrition chart if we ask for it at fast food places but its mostly not advertised. There is no healthy fast food anywhere close so I just eat everything from home. Food Health wasn't really taught and if it was I don't remember learning it. I only really learned about it in a extra course I took in high school. In that the recipes I brought from home seemed to be by far the most nutritious. We did learn some good techniques and how to cook certain foods. There wasn't any healthy food at my high school's cafe. It does sound different where you went to school. I just hope that Jamie Oliver comes to Canada lol

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