Alternative medicine kills cancer patients

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article-ab...m=fulltext

Unfortunately I don't have access to the full study. Anyone else? I think this sort of study is difficult to run, and consequently quite rare. 

David Gorski comments here:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/alterna...-patients/

[Pollux]

"Alternative medicine kills cancer patients"

I remember reading that Steve Jobs sought alternative cancer treatments, instead of regular treatment. But the survival rate is around 4% for general pancreatic cancer, so it doesn't matter what medical herbs he would medicated himself with, he would have stood a better chance to have a few more years with regular treatment. But  he didn't, and he died earlier.

Steve Jobs 'regretted trying to beat cancer with alternative medicine for so long'

Steve Jobs died regretting that he had spent so long attempting to treat his cancer with alternative medicine before agreeing to undergo surgery, his biographer has disclosed.

In spite of pleas from family and friends, he tried to cure himself through acupuncture sessions, drinking special fruit juices, visiting "spiritualists" and using other treatments he found on the internet.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ap...-long.html

Conversely, Tommy Chong claims to have bein cured of prostate cancer using the Phoenix Tears method.
(A marijuana tincture.)

Conversely, Tommy Chong claims to have bein cured of prostate cancer using the Phoenix Tears method.
(A marijuana  tincture.)

Exactly. Stories like this are why we need to take a more systematic approach to work out what works, and what doesn't, through the wider population.

I remember reading that Steve Jobs sought alternative cancer treatments, instead of regular treatment. But the survival rate is around 4% for general pancreatic cancer, so it doesn't matter what medical herbs he would medicated himself with, he would have stood a better chance to have a few more years with regular treatment. But  he didn't, and he died earlier.

FYI. The more common kind of pancreatic cancer has a low survival rate. But Steve Jobs had a rarer kind of pancreatic cancer (islet cell tumor), which has a survival rate around 40-50%. 

Linda

The abstract suggests that survival rates may be lower for some cancer patients who opted for AM, vs those who opted for CT. I don't think it says that AM kills cancer patients, I think the cancer probably does that.

What the study appears to be telling us is that some folk who had cancer would have lived if they chose CM instead of AM. Cancer was the common factor for all.

Hence Gorski's headline (which I stole).

↑ Pretty much. I would expect ineffective AM to only have a placebo effect (if even that) unless anything toxic was being used.

FYI. The more common kind of pancreatic cancer has a low survival rate. But Steve Jobs had a rarer kind of pancreatic cancer (islet cell tumor), which has a survival rate around 40-50%. 

Linda

5-year survival rate
http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/islet...statistics

Jobs died 6-7 years after his first surgery, no?

What are people dying of, the treatment or the lack of treatment?

Here is another account. (At 6 min)