Remember that a few alternative treatments may be beneficial, most do nothing one way or another, and some are downright harmful. And that patients are in a poor position to tell which is which. And that there is no shortage of charlatans and quacks who will loot every penny they can from desperate parents, typically amidst pious denunciations of the greed of the traditional medical establishment.
Agreed. This is something near and dear to my heart.
I’m a GP who “specialises” in managing people with coronary artery disease, so cancer isn’t my thing, but anyone in the position described here needs to be aware of the things desperation can do to the judgement of otherwise rational people.
There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. There is evidence based medicine and non-evidence based medicine (the gold standard for evidence being the double blind trial). Most “alternative” therapies are marketed as such because they otherwise fall into the latter category. This, along with a liberal helping of demonization of the “medical establishment” - which exists as a discrete entity only in the minds of medical kooks - completes the tom-foolery.
No one is saying that supplements and diets aren’t good for you.
Black tea, for example, has been shown to have beneficial effects on cornonary micro-circulation.. but you’d be a fool to rely on chugging black tea and tea extracts in place of real medicine if you’re fresh off the cath lab table with freshly reopened arteries and a stent or three.
Radical diet intervention (Ornish type diets) have been shown in clinical trials to reverse the formation of plaques in arteries.. but they regress even faster when the fish oil supplements and ultra-low fat diet is combined with statins, beta blockers and other traditional drug therapies.
Anyway.. prayers for the kid and his parents. Its always an awful shock when an otherwise healthy young person is diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness!