PeanutGallery wrote:The other issue is that the placebo affect can't be ruled out when dealing with alternative therapies. You might feel better for taking them because you expect to feel better and not because they are actually doing anything to help. Cannabis does have some use in Cancer treatment, but purely as a means to enhance the appetite and help with the rigours of chemotherapy.
I've had accupuncture and I found the biggest benefit from it was being left for half an hour in a darkened room with relaxing music. It was a pleasant experience, I can't honestly say I found the results to be any better than I would have got laying in a darkened room at home with relaxing music.
PeanutGallery wrote:Unfortunately we are at a very early stage of being able to deal with cancer, we know what it is and in some cases we can deal with it, but we don't yet have a treatment that is 100% affective across all types of cancer, in fact I would suggest we are a long way off from such a breakthrough.
As to the conspiracy theorists who believe we have a cure and it is being suppressed by big pharma, that is not the case. If it were we would still be seeing polio as a thing that happens along with smallpox.
Cancer is not just one thing. It takes on a variety of forms, there are any number of causes for different cancers some of which are better understood than others. Breast cancer is one of the most treatable and surviveable if caught early enough as far as I can tell.
One thing is for sure, though, and that is when cancer has spread to all the major organs of the body and a person's body weight has dropped as severely as the case mentioned above any remission would be bordering on the miraculous.
Which brings up another point. Cancer can go into remission for no apparent reason. It's also impossible to know whether a treatment has caused the remission or whether it would have happened anyway or if a different treatment might have worked where one failed. I have never found one of these anecdotal alternative cure stories to have stood up to close scrutiny of the facts. Either the person who puts their cure down to some snake oil quackery is also having a full on dose of chemo and radiation or they looked like they were better one day and a week later they were dead. Or, in a surprisingly large proportion of these miraculous cases, they never had cancer at all.
Certainly many doctors who are familiar with the side effects of certain treatments and the expected outcome choose a shorter but less uncomfortable end to their life. All these things are easy to discuss when it's not us or a loved one who's facing the dilema and I sure as hell know if it were me I'd be keen to try anything that might work. Not something I would like to face but statistically there's something like a 1 in 3 chance I will have to.