Natural Cures

[missjv]

hi,
don't be embarressed over chemo brain we all get it some of us worse then others. i did some pretty stupid things while under the influence of chemo. i walked around a parking garage for almost 2 hours looking for my car not remembering i drove my mothers car so i walked past it about 80 times before i realized my car wasn't even there. im sure i was on some kind of survelience camera and someone got a good laugh that day.


missjv

[Hannah]

I didn't "quote" this properly from Discoclub, but here it is:

"Dozens of therapies exist. Some are technological advances, some are Bio-chemical, some are focused on Cytotoxicity of natural origins. Laser, Microwaves, Genetics, even NanoTech is just around the corner.

Are these "Alternative"? Some of these may become mainstream in the next few years after enough research has been performed. These advances "work" now, they just have yet to be accepted.

Remember, even 5FU was once an "alternative" until it could get through the FDA testing protocol. "



There is a HUGE difference between alternative therapies and experimental or investigational drugs that are being studied for future FDA approval. The drugs that are now approved for treatment of colorectal cancer were NEVER considered alternative treatments. Experimental drugs in current clinical trials for any cancer are also NOT considered alternative treatments.

Alternative therapies are ones that either have been studied and have been shown not to work, or ones that simply haven't been studied at all. In other words, they are UNPROVEN treatments that are used instead of traditional treatments.

There are also complementary therapies, which are different than alternative therapies - they are used in addition to traditional treatment (not instead, like alternatives). Many complementary therapies have been proven to work, meaning that they might relieve symptoms or help with quality of life issues. It is also being shown more and more that complementary things like exercise may actually increase survival as well (yeah!).

There is so incredibly much we don't know about cancer - probably much more than we know. Again, what we do know about alternative therapies is that they are unproven. Some have been studied and have been proven NOT to work, and some have just never been studied.

For an example of a "non-study" of alternative methods, we could ask every survivor on this board to not have surgery or chemo and to do something different every day - go swimming, eat peanut butter, watch Grey's Anatomy, send their mother an email, call their best friend, eat oregano, etc. Every person could pick his or her daily activity and log the "results". At the end of the year, if five people who watched Grey's Anatomy didn't have a recurrence, would you ditch your chemo and start watching TV instead??

That's nuts - it's just not reasonable to rely on a few individual stories of alternative treatments like vitamins and supplements "curing" cancer. It is also so unfair and unethical to use a few stories from individuals to attempt to "prove" things that are simply not true.

I will be the first to say that I have some issues with the way the FDA handles new therapies - I do think that to an extent, it can "hold back" new treatments, which is a whole other thread I won't get started on. However, the research methods in the U.S. are designed to be as cautious as possible with people's lives and to not treat human beings as guinea pigs in drug laboratories.

I am not saying that the system is 100% perfect, but I do think it is the best one out there, one that balances research and advances with protecting lives. We are lucky to live in a country where we don't condone people who say things like "Grey's Anatomy cures cancer because I watched it for a year and I'm cancer-free." It is so tempting to believe that something so easy will work, but it's just not true.

Although you don't usually see me doing this, the American Cancer Society has a great page that explains Complementary and Alternative Methods (CAM):
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/conte ... uction.asp

There are so many good conversations to be had about CAM, and about 99% of the people on this board are having those conversations in good ways. So please, please just continue to be careful about how you talk about these things. I don't think anybody here wants one person or one message to give the wrong idea to someone who may be here for the first time, or someone newly-diagnosed who is looking for information.

I am getting off my soapbox now...
Hannah

[PGLGreg]

We are lucky to live in a country where we don't condone people who say things like "Grey's Anatomy cures cancer because I watched it for a year and I'm cancer-free."

We are lucky to live where we do condone such talk, generally speaking, because we reckon the costs in loss of freedom to exceed the harm done by ignorant, careless or malicious writings.

[Hannah]

Sorry, hmmm, I was trying to be quick and I do miss explaining myself more fully sometimes when I do that! I am EXTREMELY glad to live in a society where we have free speech (well, most of the time anyway, right?). I would literally defend anyone's right to say whatever they want any time (I'm pretty rabid about freedom of speech) - but that stops at "any place".

If things like that are said here, they will be confronted, corrected, and possibly deleted altogether. It really is not okay (here or anywhere else) to say or even suggest that an unproven remedy is a cure for cancer - whether it's watching Grey's Anatomy, that nanotechnology is already curing cancer, or that taking unproven supplements cures cancer. Even if there weren't laws about it (which there actually are), it still wouldn't be okay on this message board. Not okay with me, and not okay with The Colon Club. Period.

Hey, what can we say? The Colon Club is not a democracy - and if Molly and I see information that we know to be incorrect or that we think is preying on the members of the message board (ie advertising to sell alternative treatments), we will deal with it asap. People facing a cancer diagnosis can be vulnerable to all kinds of crap, and it's not okay to take advantage of that in any way under any circumstances - and it certainly won't be tolerated on this message board. There is a not-so-thin line between freedom of speech and fraud, and we won't be a part of anything that gets too close to that line - loss of free speech or not. People's lives could literally depend on what all of us say here, and that's too important to us.

Again, I'm not for one second suggesting that we don't have the conversation about complementary and alternative treatments - this isn't the first thread on this subject, and I hope that it won't be the last. It is truly an important discussion, but it can be complicated. For me it has always been hard to express myself well on this subject, and it's certainly never a short message! So when we are talking about it on this message board, everyone just needs to be careful about what they say and how it is said.

As Co-Founder of The Colon Club, I feel that it is certainly my responsibility to post responsible and scientifically-sound information - but I hope that all of us on this message board feel that way as well and will continue to respect that.

Meanwhile, I will continue to correct and clarify information that "pushes the line" as I see it, and I will do that as best I can. And as I've said before, I have absolutely no problem at all with people correcting me or asking for clarification of anything I have written - that's what we are here for.

Hannah