If it worked it would be called “medicine”
Well yeah, quackery will do that. Calling it “alternative medicine” only promotes it and the scammers who sells it, there is no medicine about it.
My mom went from stage “0” DCIS to dying of stage 4 breast cancer in just 3 years while attempting to treat it with scam therapies.
When it was stage 2 she tried to treat it with localized vibration therapy, where her therapist used a massage gun on the area to try to resonate her body with the “healing frequency of the universe.”
Given that the stage 2-3 jump is when cancer cells begin to dislodge from the first affected lymph node into the lymphatic system and spread throughout the body, I’m fairly certain her “treatment” significantly accelerated that jump.
I’m sorry to hear about your mother, friend.
That does seem problematic. Even standard deep tissue massage is contraindicated in cancer patients.
Alternative medicine tied to lower
breast cancersurvival.Alternative TO medicine tied to lower breast cancer survival
I worked alongside doctors for years, and I have plenty of stories about how Western medicine failed.
I also have plenty more stories about people who didn’t listen to their doctors and ended up regretting it.
Not every medical problem can be fixed. Sometimes life just deals you a bad hand.
Where did I say that all diseases were curable by Western doctors?
Doesn’t “Western medicine failed” imply that you think alternative medicine would have succeeded? Apologies if I misinterpreted what you said. I didn’t mean it as a challenge.
Not who you’re talking to, but no, it doesn’t imply that.
If Person A’s strategy didn’t work, that doesn’t guarantee that Person B’s strategy would’ve worked.
It makes sense to distrust the American for-profit healthcare system where treatments that might work don’t get funded if they can’t be patented and monetized. Cancer is also a huge cash cow.
At the same time, taking unproven treatments is a risk. My father had stage 3 cancer and tried alternative treatments while getting periodic PET scans. When nothing decreased the tumor size, he finally got chemo and radiation. He’s still kicking almost 20 years later, but the radiation caused a lot of issues. He’s lucky it didn’t metastasize.
I hate the conspiracy theory that big pharma could cure cancer but they are covering it up because cancer treatment is such a profitable business. This makes no sense if you remember that big phara is a bunch of companies each of which is trying to maximize its own profits. The first company that can cure a cancer will make so much money, the Ozempic racket will look like chump change.
Not every company out there makes cancer treatment, so why don’t the companies outside the cancer racket cure cancer?
Well, only companies that specialize in cancer treatments could find a cure. If that is the case, why would a company want to be a small part of the cancer treatment market when they can have a monopoly on the cancer curing market?
Well, only the company that has the market leading treatment for a cancer can cure it. If that was the case, they would still want to cure it and sell the same amount of money as 10 years of treatment. Insurance would still cover it because it is saving them money in the long term and is, technically, better for the patient. It would immediately make the pharmaceutical company an obscene amount of money. Sure, once they cure all the existing cases, their revenue will fall off, but by that point, upper management will have cashed out.
taking unproven treatments is a risk
When talking about cancer, if anyone suggests a pyramid or breathing sunshine or just taking naturopath drops, those anyones should be thrown in jail for attempted murder, as far as I am concerned
It’s always the floaty hippie dippie assholes that do this and they always get a pass because “oh well, it’s alternative medicine!”
No
It’s snake oil salesmen leaving trails of dead bodies behind them. Fuck everything about these horrible narcissists
I agree. But for many the proven treatments also are a huge risk financially. Very possibly leaving them without savings, home, and retirement funds. But hey, at least they’re alive and have to slave away for today’s meal.
I get why people choose other options than the fucked up for profit healthcare system in the US.
I have a aunt like that (antivaxer too). That’s fine if you have a cold, but for serious stuff, they endanger others and should be treated as such.
I went to Alaska and purchased a tub of “devils salve”. I kept getting these neck rashes that I would treat with diluted potassium hydroxide (because it was available in my photography darkroom). So I tried the devils slave thinking maybe, like salicilic acid, this too had some real undiscovered scientific value. So then it did! After a few weeks, the rash was gone and my skin was healing. This happened several times.
Sometime later it happened again and my usual diy secret treatment didn’t fix it. LOL I even posted about it somewhere. As a last ditched effort I cave in and took an intihistamine. The rash was gone the next day.
Now, the devil’s salve is probably containing useful substances but its " the process ". Like bearing grease doesn’t do anything useful if you don’t put it on a bearing. It can do bad things if applied elsewhere, like collecting dust or degrading plastics. Probiotics don’t do anything if you don’t put them in the gut. ETC. So basically I had an allergy and I wasn’t aware. Going to diy medicine should definetly be last resort. My problem is my fear of the inevitable incurable disease that will one day make my insurance impossible to pay and steal everything I ever worked for. That’s all.
Whoa, I’m happy most health related insurances here don’t work like that.
I had a coworker that was heavily into this stuff. She got breast cancer and decided to go this route. If she isn’t dead she most likely will be soon. The last I heard it wasn’t pretty. She was in her early 30s.
Depends. We know Steve Jobs alternative approach to cancer was fatal however that is not necessarily true in all cases. Still, UNTIL an alternative approach has been proven people are gambling with their lives. Yet there are successes in alternative approaches to health problems. For instance, take the low carb diet that many people follow. It has been proven to virtually reverse type 2 diabetes in most people, so much so, that it is now accepted by the medical community.
That’s a diet, not alternative medicine.
Alternative medicine is always not medicine (e.g. it does not work more than the placebo effect in any good way).
take the low carb diet that many people follow. It has been proven to virtually reverse type 2 diabetes in most people, so much so, that it is now accepted by the medical community.
WTF… low carb diets are the result of the medical community.
Yes, spring child. It IS NOW.
We know Steve Jobs alternative approach to cancer was fatal
Pancreatic cancer is pretty fatal even without an alternative approach
the low carb diet that many people follow. It has been proven to virtually reverse type 2 diabetes in most people
I had great success with this diet…
…then it, along with a med change, put me in the ICU with DKA for three days
Pancreatic cancer is pretty fatal even without an alternative approach
He had the one treatable form of pancreatic cancer though. Of course that’s not a guarantee that treatment would have saved him but it would have greatly increased his odds of surviving.
