Pyro70 wrote:... but studies show there is a lot of damage done by alternative medicine - both in terms of health and certainly financial damage, along with false hope leading to poor life decisions.
This forum is also littered with people's lives ruined by cancer with regular medicine in terms of health and financial damage and false hope.
Poor life decisions? Don't get me started on general medical failure(s) on the first day of diagnosis … or adjuvant survivors damaged and disabled by chemo that likely had better options with a little lab work or preventative nutrition.
I think if you know it’s wrong you have an obligation to speak out against BS.
I've seen a lot of bs about supposed BS - definitely there is an unmet need for a good bs meter. Often times we are "authoritatively" told medical factoids that are greatly misrepresented and overstated in their scope, evidence and authority about supposed "bs". Medicine should be more highly regarded for what specific good it can predictively deliver in a cost effective manner, rather than idlely project likely adversarial advertising and potential incompetence onto other subjects for an extra profit.
Some of the more valuable presentations on these boards are the honest accounts of patients' journey into far places that we've never been, warts and all. Cool, thoughtful, insightful discussions before, during and after are so much more desired.
The scary thing in our society is that it’s socially acceptable to tell a cancer patient to try some alternative medicine BS. I’m sure everyone on this forum has experienced that.
Ordinary people have medical experiences that they don't understand, and frequently,
neither do their doctors. Biologically successful alternative medical treatments may be based on
slightly overcoming mundane biases, corruptions and ongoing failures in regular medicine that have had huge consequences.
Of course, some cancer success stories are either premature or biologically trivial. Medicine has a mixed track record allowing patients tools to differentiate substantial successes and kinds of success. We've encountered a lot of interference and obstruction along the way that has cost us data, time and money, that would have repeatedly discouraged and stopped out normal patients.
But it’s somehow considered rude to speak out against pseudoscience, quacks, and scams...
The forum's experience here is that such presumptive superior knowledge and authority spiced with rude words can quickly degenerate into damaging verbal fistfights. The
bolded words are dismissive, often more a personal attack, rather than useful discussion about personal experiences or clinical phenomena.