Hearing about amazing remedies is common place, and easy to tune out usually, but when you have an illness- miracle cures come out from the woodwork from all directions. With cancer especially, whose treatment is universally known to be long, difficult, ugly, the potency of these claims is even stronger."There is a tea in the mountains of Venezuela..."
"All you have to do is eat 20 pounds of raw juiced vegetables a day, along with a coffee enema!"
"Eating up to 70 live beetles a day can cure cancer."
"Eating Dandelions cures cancer.
"Injecting Baking Soda into your bloodstream cures cancer."
The list literally goes on and I have heard all of these, and more, as viable treatment options.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that healthy eating doesn't help in recovery, or that the natural world doesn't yield curative powers. Pirates would have had a much better quality of life with just a handful of lemons. I mean, majority of our medicine originated there in some form or another before being harnessed into pills and such. That is not my argument.
My father told me that while his former girlfriend had cancer, they were given a glass jar with moldy bread and beetles inside. You had to eat +1 beetle everyday, until you got to 70 beetles on a day, and then you were cured! He said mixing them into ice cream made it easier to get down. I know how that cure ended, but let's not discuss it.
The danger behind these supposed treatments are that they are treated as magic bullets, panacea. They tell you "Chemo is poison! It's expensive and the doctors are getting rich of you!" They offer to be instantly cured by something innocuous, cheap, painless, and guaranteed! You know the saying though, if it's too good to be true, it probably is. A healthy, balanced dose of skepticism is needed when evaluating these claims. You can eat all the dandelions you damn please, but if you are foregoing treatment to do so- I have a feeling dandelions will be sprouting 6 feet from you in a short time.
Sure, people going through conventional treatment die. But, the lady drinking tea from a mountain in Venezuela and rubbing goat excrement on her stomach- I am going to assume that risk goes up. By a lot. That is why these notions are serious and to be considered dangerous.
There is always a paranoia that cancer treatments are being kept hidden by the faceless pharmaceutical companies and doctors. How would anyone keep that secret? How cynical do you have to be to assume every single person who does research, every single oncologist, all of they are greedy assholes that laugh at you as you wither away? At the same time, people let some crazy doctor in Italy inject them with baking soda (who, btw, believes cancer is a fungus!?) Why trust him? Because everyone wants an painless absolute. People want to be "in" on the fight between "us" and "them", whoever "them" is.
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| These doctors think your debilitating nausea is hilarious, and profitable. |
Also, cancer is a constellation of diseases, not one. There is no absolute singular cure for cancer. If you have a genetic etiology, carrots aren't gonna fix that hot mess. They were supposed to make my eyesight better, and I am suspect of even that as I squint at my screen.
These alternative treatments always lack sources and are often anecdotal in nature. Some guy's aunt who had generic cancer ate nothing but radishes for 20 days and all the tumors were gone!!! The people behind these supposed therapies can even set up official sounding institutes and have "doctors"- but their claims don't have studies to support them, lack adequate tracking of progress, and rely on the few that survive without ever discussing how many didn't. If dandelions go through rigorous testing tomorrow and show they are the real deal, well, hallelujah.
My mom says to me "But its natural!" So what? So is hemlock. Doesn't mean it will help me. If anything, sometimes the supposed cure can be just as deadly. On researching the Gerson therapy at my mother's request, I discovered that daily coffee enemas have caused the death of over 7 people to date. Not a lot, but I for one don't want to die from a jittery colon.
Next time you read some article about the new wonder therapy for X disease, consider:
- Is it presented as a easy, painless alternative?
- Is it a cheap and commonplace ingredient?
- Is it predicated on a nearly sociopathic distrust of the entire medical establishment?
- Can it cure your gout, arthritis, and amputated leg all at once?
- Is it an Italian doctor with a shaky understanding of what he's trying to "cure"?
And then, after you consider all these points, do your friends and relatives a favor and do not share.
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