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.
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.
Hm, I distinctly recall media coverage that there was consensus among several doctors that Jobs would've had the best treatment possible with the likely outcome of remission had he only engaged with the treatment protocol instead of relying on un-proven, hokey reasoning.
Also I do recall Jobs ended up getting a new liver in 2009, so I'm pretty sure that prolonged his time on the planet by a pretty significant amount. I remember this because I looked into how he was able to get that liver...sort of like how he was being rebellious and clever to get a new Mercedes Benz every 6 months so legally he wouldn't need a license plate on his car, he managed to get himself on multiple lists and set up residency in a place that would be advantageous to get what he wanted...
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.
But at least take the 61% option + all your other remedies then? I'm assuming the 39% failure is "the cancer kills you" and not "the surgery or complications thereof kill you."
I would assume the oncologist in OP has less of a problem with people also doing other stuff they believe helps them, vs not including "traditional" (aka scientific) medical procedures that statistically improve their chances of survival.
I agree completely. I'm only pointing out that it's a messier story than the one we want to tell (Jobs signing his own death warrant by refusing prompt treatment).
How is it not a death warrant? 61% vs 0% (or whatever the percentage was by the time he got conventional treatment?) Look, it was his body and he can do what he wanted, but he made the wrong move in a very obvious and predictable way.
Not to mention the elephant in the room: Vegan diets are probably unhealthy. They lack selenium you'd otherwise get from meats. Low selenium and pancreas diseases go hand in hand.
There's also a link between drinking fruit juices and pancreatic cancers. Jobs constantly drank fruit juices as part of his vegan/fruitarian diet. Fructose megadosing is scary stuff. Healthy sugars and still sugars. They still have calories and still need to be processed.
> How is it not a death warrant? 61% vs 0% (or whatever the percentage was by the time he got conventional treatment?) Look, it was his body and he can do what he wanted, but he made the wrong move in a very obvious and predictable way.
61% of survival at five years. He survived longer than five years.
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.
"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.
Implied in what you said but worth mentioning specifically when talking about this is that different cancers can respond very differently to the same thing. There is (somtimes quite good) research of the effects of various things on various cancers, just not much (if any) about if combining various non-medical stuff with positive effects could lead to a cure to a particular cancer.
Yes, it's unfortunate the quacks have muddied the waters for ketogenic therapies, but luckily there's enough tantalizing science coupled with a low barrier for self-experimentation (assuming one has a few months+ of relative health) that anyone can attempt it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Good luck, I'm afraid that you're up against a really difficult problem. I earnestly have no doubt your girlfriend is a wonderful person, but thought patterns that lead to such beliefs, once established, appear to be very hard to change for a number of reasons.
Hope you can work it out or work around it, stranger things have happened.
I've found trying to teach statistics via dice is a good start for people without background. Learning by observing to separate "the last roll" from "my expectations concerning the next roll" is surprisingly powerful and enlightening once they can generalize that into one-off claims.
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."
"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.
Pharma is in that space.
They don't advertise it but they love "alternative" medicine because profit margins are insane. 20 euros for 10 grams of sugar brilliant, and it doesn't even have to work :) What is not to love for the profit driven pharma.
Exactly. Alternative medicine is medicine that is either not proven to work or is "medicine" proven not to work. Should something be sufficiently proven to work, with an appropriate risk/cost/etc vs. benefit ratio, it becomes medicine.
I think this ignores the process required to get something "proven to work". Something that involves years, millions of dollars, and an insane amount of bureaucracy.
Just publishing a scientifically sound paper in ARXIV isn't enough.
Not sure which angle you're taking on this. I could respond if you'd clarify. I'll take a guess though. If you are saying the bar is too high and such treatments will never get enough money to be sufficiently proven, well, then I'd point to the over 2 billion dollars we've poured down the drain funding alternative medicine studies via the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (formerly NCCAM).
AFAIK Tom Harkin is the main guy who pushed through the creation of the agency and in the past has expressed disappointment (around 2009/2010?) that they haven't been able to demonstrate alternative medicine modalities as being effective. That hasn't led to any defunding of the agency though. It keeps trucking along, spending over $120 million dollars annually demonstrating that things we already have a good idea don't work...still don't work.
> involves years, millions of dollars, and an insane amount of bureaucracy.
Think about it--20 years, over $2 billion dollars. That's a lot of time and money. They should have results to show for it.
Alternative medicine has this image of being "the little guy," and given it is less than 1% of dollars spent on healthcare in the US, it kind of is. However, that small percent is a small percent of a giant, giant, pool of money. While alternative medicine is small compared to medicine, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of money put towards it.
Doesn't really seem like they need to. After all, drugs are heavily regulated, and they're not having any trouble selling an unregulated -- and unproven -- substance. Why invite trouble?
Diet and exercise are great for prevention but not so great for cures.
If you want to avoid getting cancer, then leading a healthy lifestyle is an excellent idea.
If you actually have cancer, whether because you don't lead a healthy lifestyle or you did but just got unlucky anyway, then it's too late for diet and exercise. They might still help, but what you need at this point is treatment.
Pharmaceutical companies may not do prevention so well, but this article is about what happens after prevention fails, at which point you need cures, and every pharma company out there is trying to be the next one to produce a big (and probably expensive) cure.
> Pharmaceutical companies may not do prevention so well, but this article is about what happens after prevention fails, at which point you need cures, and every pharma company out there is trying to be the next one to produce a big (and probably expensive) cure.
Pharma companies are a lot bigger on treatments than cures (how much of this is that treatments are easier to find than cures, and how much of it is that cures eliminate their own market and thus make less business sense is a matter of debate.)
> how much of this is that treatments are easier to find than cures, and how much of it is that cures eliminate their own market and thus make less business sense is a matter of debate
Only in the sense that things aren't very easy to find when you aren't looking for them. Otherwise there really isn't much debate. Nothing brings home the bacon like chronic disease.
Does that apply to cancer? With cancer, it seems like a race to kill it before it kills you, and it's not generally something that can be managed as a chronic condition.
Important additional point - many markets (ie Europe) are cost-driven rather that revenue-driven (America). If alternative 'treatments' worked, there would be a larger push from the cost-driven markets.
My experience with oncologists is that they are not in it for the money. There are much less stressful ways of raking in the big bucks in medicine than having to tell a significant proportion of your patients that they are going to die.
Note also that if your theory were true, chemotherapy would always be the treatment of choice over radiation. Maybe you have another theory about Big Isotope you'd like to share?
> The pharmaceutical industry has no influence whatsoever.
It's not true to say they have no influence. Pharmaceutical companies constantly try to entice doctors to prescribe specific medicines.
But most mainstream medicine is backed by hard science. You can go out there and read the evidence. Trials are conducted and we know that, for example, chemotherapy can be effective in treating certain types of cancers, while, for example, Traditional Chinese Medicine is not. We know this because we've studied it, not because we've been bribed.
The pharmaceutical industry lobby's power is worrying, it's true. But that doesn't mean that pharmaceuticals are full of shit.
> Some people might say that doctors make far more money from doing traditional medicine, than they would from offering dietary advice
Actually, "alternative medicine" is incredibly profitable. There's a number of large companies which make massive profits off this stuff. It's incredibly profitable because there's no research involved, no expensive ingredients to source, no testing necessary. You can stick anything you want in a pamphlet or a bottle, and sell it at any price, and people will buy it if you have good enough marketing.
You were specifically talking about dietary advice, though. That's also profitable: many people make a very good living off quack dietary advice. People are willing to pay almost anything to get non-"traditional" medicine.
Heck, it might be more profitable than prescribing medication, because the pharma company isn't taking a cut!
> Yeah. Just a conspiracy theory. Nothing to it. Nothing at all. The pharmaceutical industry has no influence whatsoever.
We know the pharmaceutical industry has some influence on what treatments a doctor recommends. I don't think anybody is going to deny that.
The part where it gets ridiculous is when people think the pharmaceutical industry has puppet master like control over the entire field of oncology, from research to individual doctors. Somehow, they've managed to manipulate our brightest minds from asking simple questions like, "Can sodium bicarbonate cure cancer?"
I have family members who have refused cancer treatments based on these beliefs. One took cinnamon for his cancer and died last year. Another is convinced he's cured his own cancer taking sodium bicarbonate in lieu of early outpatient treatment.
> 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.
This idea is utter shit. Every doctor I've ever gone to has emphasized good diet and exercise as the key to good health. No doctor omits dietary advice so you'll eat like shit and live a sedentary life for the sake of future profits.
You could argue that they could/should do more to promote diet/exercise and I'd argue you're wasting your doctor's valuable time. You don't need someone with medical school to dispense advice on diet and exercise on a personal level. See a nutritionist for dietary advice or a physical therapist for an exercise regiment.
If you really think diet is a key then you should lobby your representative to subsidize healthy foods and food programs rather than corn based products. If you think exercise is important, than bully your representative to push athletic incentives. For example, mandatory insurance discounts for people who can demonstrate a athletic proficiency on some type of scale. (Remember the athletic tests you took as a kid?)
It constantly amazed me that the same people who insinuate hand wavy conspiracies that doctors have sold their integrity and your health and for a modest boost in salary don't even question the ethics of companies that make billions of dollars selling untested "alternative medicines" and "herbal supplements" even after they're caught lacing their products with natural amphetamines so their customers can legitimately claim they feel better.
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.
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.
I suspect that the reason is simpler. People want something to make them feel better, not something that has a chance of actually making them better. To many people, homeopathy and other alternative medicines offer a superior "feel better" package than traditional medicine. Modern health care can feel clinical, confusing, uncertain, and expensive. On the other hand, alternative medicine is cheap-ish and usually sold by "true believers" who will gladly spend time with you to assure you that everything is going to be OK.
The anti-big-pharma spiel is just a red herring that prevents people from worrying about whether or not they've made the right decision in rejecting real medicine.
>Esoteric thinking and homeopathic medicine are extremely common in educated and high income circles outside of STEM fields - basically the middle class loves this.
Yes. Also very (very) popular with teachers. When I remember back I had dozens of teachers telling me (us) that alternative medicine is often better than conventional.
It's funny how many educated (university degree) and seemingly intelligent people I know who have that one idiotic quirk when it comes to medicine. Once that topic comes up they turn off their brain and get their tinfoil hats ready to tell me about the truth.
It's like that fluoride conspiracy crap in the US - only that it's very popular here through all social classes.
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.
> 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.
Fun fact: The public health insurance in Germany pays for prescribed homeopathic "meds". So by paying my insurance contributions I indirectly support that esoteric nonsense.
Also Tylenol (which is called Paracetamol here) is available over the counter. But only in pharmacies. Just like every other pain medication (ibuprofen, aspirin, etc) which you can buy in other countries - even in the EU - in super markets. Germany is a "little" over regulated here.
Tylenol is a bad example, because the amount you need to kill your liver is not vastly higher than the therapeutic dose. It's one drug that should probably not be sold over the counter.
Also, the fact that you expected to find painkillers in a German supermarket just means you're an American. It doesn't say anything important about barriers to access there.
I know a lot of people who believe this stuff, and it's never about the money, except in a vague "big pharma wants to make big profits by killing us" sort of way.
They genuinely believe that mainstream medicine is outright harmful, and that the alternative stuff is better. This remains true even when the mainstream medicine is highly affordable, or even when the person in question has good health insurance.
I saw an interesting case recently. Somebody stepped on a rusty nail (I didn't know that was something that actually happened!) and of course they weren't up to date on their tetanus shot, since vaccines are deadly poison. They asked friends what to do and got a variety of answers, most being some variation on "whatever you do don't get the shot, it will kill you," with various crazy alternative cures proposed. Ultimately they went to an urgent care clinic and got the vaccine. This was described after the fact in a sort of "I know I shouldn't but I didn't have the willpower," the way a normal person might describe how they broke down and ate a tub of ice cream even though they're trying to lose weight. It seems that people still understand on some deeper level that traditional medicine really does work, even if they believe it's "bad" otherwise.
It ultimately looks to me like a variation on religion, where traditional medicine is seen as being sinful and alternatives are seen as righteous. You might come up with rationalizations about why, say, eating ham is bad for you, but ultimately a religious person with a pork prohibition will avoid it because it's just not right. And someone who believes eating pork is sinful can still easily end up wanting it, so it ends up being a weird internal struggle.
On another note, at least among the people I know there is vast overlap between people who use alternative medical treatments and people who believe in stuff like chemtrails. I'm pretty sure there's no financial basis for that one!
> "big pharma wants to make big profits by killing us"
There's a big difference between distrusting drugmakers and thinking they want to kill you. The last thing they want is to kill you. It's bad PR, to say the least. But more importantly, killing you takes away one of the medical plan's customers. It's the only thing worse than curing you, because they'll never again get money for something prescribed to you. This position is totally unreasonable and no one who considers the situation for even 30 seconds can seriously believe it.
There are a lot of people who believe totally unreasonable things.
And yes, there are a ton of people who think that, for example, vaccines are deadly, and that they are being pushed by big pharma anyway because of profit motive.
No, it doesn't make any sense. That's not a prerequisite for being believed.
The vaccine situation is somewhat different, because of the government's involvement in it. If and when there is a government mandate to have chemotherapy, we can talk about them together. Until then, it is reasonable to be more skeptical of vaccines that are required by law than of other treatments. History supports very strongly the idea that you should avoid anything the government tries to force upon you, and that evidence offered by or on behalf of the government is to be ignored.
I'm not an "anti-vaxxer", but I find nothing more abhorrent than the government dictating that something go into your body. It's the darkest of the dark, makes V For Vendetta look like rainbows and unicorns, etc. I would almost certainly believe that vaccines are overwhelmingly beneficial and that the benefits outweigh the risks for nearly everyone, if not for the government's involvement. Once the government is involved, I simply can't trust anything.
I'm pretty sure the government mandates lots of good things, as well as bad things. I could see saying that a government mandate gives you no information about whether something is good, but outright saying that you should avoid anything mandated by the government as a matter of course just sounds like a way to shut down your brain and avoid having to think for yourself.
Anyway, how is it different? You said above that it's a completely unreasonable position to think that big pharma wants to make big profits by killing us. Lots of anti-vaccine people believe precisely that, and now you're saying you don't find it unreasonable.
Well, killing people is pretty bad for business, as I explained elsewhere under this article. So I'm pretty skeptical of that motive... normally.
Once you have the government mandating that everyone buy your product, it doesn't really matter any more whether it's a good product or has good PR or is otherwise viewed as beneficial. A drugmaker selling something to the willing has an incentive to make sure it's not lethal, if for no other reason than that the most profitable business is repeat business. A drugmaker selling something the government mandates has no such incentive. This applies, actually, to anything of which purchase is mandated on threat of violence, not just drugs.
This doesn't pass a cursory glance at reality. Poor countries like India and China are building western-style hospitals as fast as they can, not ayurvedic clinics and temples. And very affluent areas of this country (USA) are the places where you find vaccine denial and demand for alternative medicine.
I don't think money is the governing factor with cancer. When you get a diagnosis, you face scary interventions (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy) and no reponsible doctor will promise you they will work. Believing that you can regain control over your body and your fate with something like diet is very psychologically appealing.
On that note, if someone you know gets cancer, please sit on your hands instead of sending them any lifestyle advice, however well-intentioned, and cut off the hands of anyone you know who does that. It's amazing how many people think it's appropriate to forward links about their pet cancer cure.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-jo...