Alt-Med General Stupidity thread

Just a general thread for some of the dumber things I hear from the Alt-Med community. Anyone interested in contributing, feel free to post your own (astoundingly stupid) alt-med articles.

Let's start off with this:

Chemotherapy a fraud? Study reveals tumors grow faster after treatment

So, looking at the actual article, something immediately comes to mind. It mentions "a team of researchers from washington state", but neglects to provide any link. We do get the names of the authors, and with a little searching, come up with this article about how chemotherapy treatment in prostate cancer can lead to treatment resistance. The abstract paints a slightly different picture from the Underground Health article.

vs.

...Slightly different message. What's more, the authors make the mistake of conflating prostate cancer (a cancer where chemotherapy is known to be largely ineffectual and thus not commonly used until the cancer spreads to other parts of the body) with all other cancers, which is a bit like conflating smallpox with ebola - after all, they're both deadly germs. What's more, it should by rights take more than one research paper to overturn the vast amount of evidence that chemotherapy is effective in a large number of situations when dealing with a wide variety of cancers. I would question the statements by the authors of the paper quoted further down the line, but seeing as there isn't a damn citation in the entire article, I'm just not going to bother.

This piece is the worst type of dishonest, poorly-written tripe. Citation-free nonsense citing a single scientific paper, asserting that it overturns the medical paradigm, getting what the paper actually says wrong, and either clueless about the very subject they're talking about or lying flagrantly about it. Alternative medicine: if it was actually proven to work, it'd be called "medicine".

 

Hell just go to Natural News, Damn near everything thing there is either mostly or completely idiotic.

 

Yeah, this thread might as well be titled "Natural News/Mercola headlines and why they're full of (*)(*)(*)(*)". Still think it's an amusing and semi-useful exercise in cathartic ranting.

 

I would tend to agree with that assessment Only problem isthe usual suspects may be confused by the title...

 

Got any particularly dumb nuggets to share?

 

Not that haven't already been posted add infintum by Fraud or marshall and the latter doesn't seem to have been around of late. Maybe the home cut off his computer access?

 

Latest news from my facebook feed. I have this friend of mine, she's a bit older (50 or so?). And she just doesn't learn. The other day, she was posting that stupid "Facebook will mine our data unless we tell them not to in legal terms" nonsense, and now she brings up this gem:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/a...rasounds-causing-autism-in-unborn-babies.html

(Spoiler warning: they aren't).

Now, from the start, just skimming the article, something immediately popped into my head: "where are the links?" You know, when a good blog or news source references scientific papers, it generally links to them. For example, you wouldn't just have:

...You'd have

The article itself is nice, but has nothing to do with autism. Moving on, they talk about Pasko Rakic's study on mice. What they neglect to mention is that not only was this study not on humans, but that the mice were exposed for 7+ hours at a time on a regular basis. Then there's Casanova, whose unpublished hypothesis is just not that interesting, and... a plug for this lady's book. No mention of studies that go in the other direction (and believe me, there are quite a few of 'em). I could go on, but this is covered oh so much better here. The article is just more dumb paranoia-mongering.

 

You know, there's dumb, then there's really dumb, then there's woo, and then there's... Well, this:

http://phoenixtears.ca/what-it-does-and-how-it-works/

It's basically being marketed as a literal cure-all (an instant red flag - if it cures pretty much anything, it's probably bull(*)(*)(*)(*)), but the insanity doesn't start until a little further on.

Yep! Supposedly if you basically take a whole bunch of homemade Hash (which would explain how this guy got this (*)(*)(*)(*)ing crazy), you won't age! Anyone wanna take a guess as to how many scientific sources the website cites for these claims?

...If you guessed "0", then congratulations! They do have an extensive "testimonials" page, though.

Oh you crazy quacks. Please stop this bull(*)(*)(*)(*), it makes those of us who want to legalize weed and who aren't scientific illiterates look bad.

 

What's wrong with people not wanting to trust the eugenics funded medical industrial complex?

The medical industry only wants to Treat disease. If they Cured disease, they would lose biz.

Duh.

They're evil.

 

Do I respond to that level of idiocy or not? Oh what the hell.

1. Dead customers don't pay you money and their survivors will likely tell you to (*)(*)(*)(*) off too.

2. Then please explain why people no longer die of small pox, bubonic plague, diptheria, petussis and a whole (*)(*)(*)(*) load of other diseases that use to kill people in whole sale lots little more than 75 years ago. And please note most of those diseases mentioned have one thing in common.

 

This has a few problems. For example, the problem that these treatments generally do work better than any alternatives. Or the problem that the "medical industrial complex" is in fact in the business of "curing" diseases - Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Smallpox, Chickenpox, Tetanus and we're still trying for a vaccine for the Flu. Although to be honest, everything wrong with your post can be summarized in the last sentence - no, they aren't evil. People don't work that way; you don't suddenly become evil upon gaining control of a pharmaceutical organization, nor would most people do something which is so detrimental to society out of sheer self-interest unless they had completely rationalized it to themselves. And rationalizing "I'd rather see my family die of cancer than lose money on a cure" (although let's be honest - a company that actually did have a working cure for most types of cancer could basically jack up the prices as high as they wanted to recoup the losses) is pretty (*)(*)(*)(*)ing ridiculous.

...Although honestly, you can skip all that if you can just answer one question: what evidence do you have to support your viewpoint?

 

In 1993 Dr. Birzynski from Europe found a cure for most cancers.

His attempts to patent his cure were specifically lobbied against by big pharma.

He has a lawsuit running against them to this day. They paid off the patent office.

There's an excellent documentary on you tube about this. Search it.

And since cures do exist, the mega rich execs can afford them, but the commoners can't.

That's why they don't "let their family die of cancer" instead of losing money.

And vaccines are not cures, by any means. Vaccines often infect and kill the previously healthy.

Big med is NOT in the biz of curing anything, only treating, for the sake of return biz.

 

This crap again. Burzynski (assuming you spelled his name wrong and that there isn't another guy we're talking about) has been pushing his medicine for 35 years with neither a completely clinical trial nor any peer-reviewed papers on the subject that actually address the veracity of his medical findings. He started over 60 clinical trials but has not completed one of them. Just out of curiosity, do you know how we know why he started over 60 trials? It's because you have to report when you start a trial, in order to prevent the results from being swept under the rug, should the trial not go the way you want it to. Food for thought. I'll get back to this.

Please get in the hobby of providing citation.

I could not find any information to this. Please provide a source.

What, you mean is 90-minute hit piece on evidence-based medicine? Pass. Look, I've been over Burzynski. At length. The only thing amazing about his research is the utter dearth of real scientific evidence to back up his fairly extreme claims about his treatments. The only evidence he can be relied on to supply is anecdotes from former patients who survived. And even then, well, they don't hold up well.

Burzynski is a quack. As stated in the other thread, it's really simple. If Burzynski can actually demonstrate that his treatments are as effective as he claims and publicize it (the latter of which he seems quite good at), then he will not only die rich beyond his wildest dreams, but he will go down in history as a scientific revolutionary like Loius Pasteur, Joseph Salk, or Edward Jenner, with at least one Nobel Prize in medicine. Lord knows he knows this, so why hasn't he done more legwork to go public with his results? Instead of actually finishing those 60+ unfinished clinical trials and publishing papers on the subject, how has he been spending his time?

Oh right. On a bull(*)(*)(*)(*) documentary focusing not on the evidence for his cure but on a few personal anecdotes and attacks on the scientific establishment.

The overwhelming scientific consensus on most popular vaccinations is that they overwhelmingly succeed in preventing the disease they are aimed against. The basic functionality as to why is grade school biology at this point. Here's just one of many sites documenting how well they have functioned. As to your claim about infecting and killing the previously healthy... Well, once again: please provide a source. In this thread, you've made incredible claim after incredible claim, basically spitting in the face of all accumulated scientific medical knowledge, and provided... Um... How many sources or piece of information? Ah yes, at one point you pointed to a long-debunked documentary and said "google it". Dude, come on. You have got to be able to do better than this.



I personally hope everyone is paying attention to this guy. This is the face of alt-med: astoundingly gullible and simultaneously incredibly paranoid. It's like a sieve that lets in only the bad and stupid ideas.


*Correction: Burzynski did complete one trial. However, he never published it.

 

It is likely that the few actually cures Burzinsky has produced had more to do with what is known as spontaneous remission than Burzinski's treatments that's how few he's got after 35 years!

 

Oh Geez. don't get me started.

I give you Kevin Trudeau.

My wife buys these "books" and rails at me about "miracle cures" and the "evils" of medicine.

I'm no fan of the health care system but I'm smart enough to know snake oil when I see it and I try to tell her (as gently as possible) that these people don't give a damn about "health" and their only goal is to sell, something.

So I pick up some of her books and, sure enough, there he is with "Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About"

Then I make my big mistake.

I pull out Trudeau's biography and begin to read off the number of criminal and civil actions against him including medical and credit card fraud.

Let's just say the couch proved a worthy opponent for the next several nights.

I believe most of this stuff is fraud and we are ill served by a government that allows these people to sell these "cures" as long as they do a disclaimer in 3 point type admitting that the products they sell don't cure anything.

And I've learned that discussing this opinion with the "believers" is as dangerous as discussing religion or politics.

 

Sent to the couch for reasoned evidence and logic. Awesome story (how bad of me would it be to throw in a "Women, right?"?). I have had similar experiences with my mother, and her group of friends. It's ridiculous, the crap they believe in.

 

Now just one second.

I wasn't "sent to the couch."

I performed a "strategic withdrawal" in order to "minimize casualties."

 

I like this guy.

 

There are times when trying to hold a rational discussion about certain topics with one's spouse is as unpleasant as banging your head against a brick wall and for many of the same reasons....

 

Actually, speaking from experience, the wall is easier to negotiate with.

 

Anyone else here old enough to remember polio survivors?

I haven't seen a polio survivor to my recollection for over 20 years. When I was a kid though, I knew several adults, on crutches or in wheel chairs. Luckily because of the polio vaccine I knew I didn't have that in my future.

Now Polio is almost to the point of Smallpox- there are only a few places in the most backward parts of the planet that still have active polio- because of the resistance of superstitious and suspicious people who put their fear of vaccines ahead of their child being able to walk.

Everytime I hear someone spout the usual nonsense about vaccines it makes my blood boil. If it wasn't for vaccines we would all be wondering when the next smallpox epidemic would hit us, we would be worrying if our child was going to die or be crippled by polio, we would freezing up evertime our children coughed worrying that is signaled a slow suffocation from whooping cough.

As a parent- there is no more selfish and stupid thing that I think another parent can do than to not vacinate their children. Not only do they put their own children at great risk- they risk the death and injury to babies who can't be vacinated yet and for people who cannot be vacinated for other reasons.

 

Not to mention that they weaken the overall herd immunity, putting everyone at risk due to the simple fact that vaccines are not a 100% functional medicine. The success rates are staggering, but there's still decent odds it won't work, or won't have the protection it should offer. This is why herd immunity is such an important concept - because if almost everyone gets the vaccination, the small chance of it not working on any individual is mitigated by the lack of carriers around to propagate it.

 

Exactly so, stagnant. You need vectors to spread a disease, without adequate vectors a disease is greatly limited in how far it can spread. I am currently waiting for this round of shingles to clear up so I can go get the vaccine. The literature tell me that the vaccine is only fifty percent effective but a fifty percent chance to avoid this crap beats the hell out of no chance to avoid it.

 

Since Jenny McCarthy is joining The View, I expect she will use the show to push her wacky vaccine agenda. Expect millions of American hausfraus to pull back from vaccine use.

 

What the (*)(*)(*)(*). How the (*)(*)(*)(*) does anyone hire that stupid vapid anti-science (*)(*)(*)(*)wicket? Partially contributing to the resurgence of measles should be grounds for losing your career in entertainment.