Shark cartilage must work – it’s inside sharks, and sharks don’t get cancer.  Of course, zucchinis don’t get cancer either, and you can eat those without being attacked by zucchini with big sharp teeth and lasers on their heads.

On the other hand, I’ve been to several different accupuncture and Chinese massage practitioners, and some of them have been quite helpful with muscle pain.  None of them could explain to me what a meridian actually was, as a physical structure rather than an imaginary line on their wall charts, and unfortunately one of the better accupressure massage people was also a hopeless quack who wanted to sell me lots of herbs based on hokey woo-woo testing (the stuff where you see how the muscle responds while holding a bottle of Herb A in your hand compared to a bottle of Herb B.)  And while qi is fairly useful in martial arts, that doesn’t require it to actually exist in some way useful for medicine (e.g. a way to push yin or yang through your liver compared to a way to visualize how you’re holding your abdominal muscles.)

Modern medicine can often prevent the flu with vaccination, but until Theraflu came along, if you got sick anyway they didn’t have anything to offer besides aspirin, bed rest, and chicken soup, and I’ve found some homeopathic tablets that can at least reduce the symptoms from “awful” to “mildly unpleasant”. 

While the liquid versions are usually too dilute to be effective, the solid tablets do often contain measurable quantities of the active ingredients.   (Not always; some are just sugar pills or other binders mixed with over-diluted liquid.)   But compared to some quack herbal medicines, which can be bad for you, at least the diluted-to-nothing homeopathic snake oil is as safe as crystals and aromatherapy, if you don’t use them as a substitute for actual medicine.

My father had pancreatic cancer, aggressive chemo wasn’t going to cure it, but mild chemo was able to give him a couple of mediocre-health years so he and mom could do a bit more travel and spend some more time with each other and with the grandchildren, and left him less unhappy about things before he reached the point that they stopped the chemo and just did pain meds for a few months.

Xeni, I’m glad that medicine has a reasonable chance of curing you, and that you were able to detect it early.  Fuck cancer.

You’re sincere, but you’re killing people.  We’re being polite, but you’re killing people.  Your killing people is testing our patience.
Please go away.

It is an important message for those of us who don’t have cancer to remember when giving advice to someone who may be grasping at any thread of hope no matter how far-fetched it may be.

I prefer to bring people with cancer a nice casserole and my cat for an hour or two (if they are a cat person).  Studies may show that pets lower blood pressure, etc., but I think having something warm, furry, and purring in your lap and warming cold hands is good enough without needing to be mystical.

I think Xeni made the same point when she mentioned supportive therapies like nourishing soup and massage.  Those don’t have to be mystical either.

You’re right, I am angry. Angry at people like him, and you. Angry that I have cancer, too.

But anger didn’t cause my cancer. Malignant cells did.

If anything, my anger is helping me fight for my life.

But for ritual purposes, that won’t do the job. Consecration is an entirely different thing from sterilization.

She has been pharma-drug-free for six years, and her cancer (multiple tumors in her liver, a spot in her hip) has been shrinking, slowly but surely, to the point that some of the smaller mets are gone. Now. She only did this because there were literally no other options. Her cancer wasn’t operable, chemo and radiation don’t work well on her type of cancer, and the drugs had stopped her heart. 

Since 2006, with the awesome help of a rare awesome onc at Dana Farber and epigenomic research out of Portland State, science is beginning to explain why what she’s doing (basically a super low glycemic diet) works well on certain cancers, including GIST, an intestinal cancer, which in her case HAPPENS to also be non-aggressive and slow. It shows up but, when it does, it stops growing for a while. All cancers are NOT like this. We know my bestie also has two genetic mutations, one of which leads to overproduction of cancer cells. We also are beginning to understand why starving tumors of sugar (which they use to grow), certain compounds (some found in green tea and being used to make drugs now) that prevent angiogenesis (tumors’ ability to expand and feed themselves), and other factors can affect the epigenome, which is susceptible to environmental factors and influences which genes express themselves. While her treatment may be “natural,” then, it does have a strong basis in science that is still growing and influencing drug development. 

And oh, you’re right: the witch doctors you find when trying to figure this stuff out. 

She eschewed all conventional treatment; she had faith in a series of “woo” treatments because she believed it had cured her of cervical cancer years earlier. She never availed herself of surgery, chemo, or any other conventional treatments, other than some radiation to help with pain management of her bone metastases in her last months. 

She had a right to choose her own course but I wish she had chosen facing the reality of the disease rather than faith in alluring nonsense; she might have lived longer.

And fuck the assholes who took her money in clinics in Mexico and Germany, promising cures. And fuck them and other woo adherents for blaming her lack of remission on her somehow. Her only fault was in believing them.

That said, I am very, very mindful of what I put in my body, and I’m not living off pop tarts or anything over here. I limit sugar and simple carb intake for many reasons. Maybe it helps my odds, maybe not, but I’m doing it and it isn’t harming me.

Gerson’s a lying sack of shit who makes money off of desperate frightened people who have cancer.

Cellular experiments and human trials are two very different things. I agree with you that the potential medical benefits in marijuana are very promising. I would not forgo currently available medical treatment for, say, Rick Simpson’s idea of a cancer cure. We need more science. Legalize marijuana science in the United States now.

Thanks especially to those of you in this thread who have personal experience with cancer, and those of you who work as medical professionals helping people like me with the disease.

Nowhere have I said that these are bad. My oncologists recommended some of them, in fact, and I have found things like yoga, meditation, dietary changes, medical marijuana, and other supportive therapies to be extraordinarily helpful in getting through medical treatment, with the best possible results.

BTW, do you have cancer? I’m guessing you don’t.

I’m not gonna bother taking the bait here, but nowhere have I said that supportive therapies like massage, nutrition, and the like are a bad thing when used in addition to science-tested medical treatments.