Thats a good story, and i don’t doubt it. That doesn’t make it the responsible choice. The kid needs treatment that is overwhelmingly proven.
I was cured of childhood cancer with surgery and chemo. That was in 88-89, today 80% of childhood cancers are curable.
It doesn’t prove they are wrong, just by the fact this is news shows that Billy is the exception to the rule. If he where the rule to what worked, this wouldn’t be news or controversy. Some cancers go into natural recession, but many, many cancers, especially this type, are cured with chemotherapy.
Back when these ‘natural cures’ where the norm, cancer was almost always fatal, and a word of doom. Now, most cancers are treatable. I sure wouldn’t turn my back to what science and statistics shows.
The one horrible thing about cancer is: you and I can have the same cancer and it acts differently in everyone.
Just because this kid made it by some miracle does not mean you should just chuck chemo out.
Chemo has saved many many lives. There are grown up children today that are alive because of Chemo.
Billy’s recovery does not prove that the majority of patients would have the same outcome.
Anecdotal evidence of one case (or even a hundred), don’t count for much in my book.
I believe God can heal on His own, if He wants to. More often than not he uses doctors and modern medicine to heal, not quacks.
My sister-in-law is going through chemo for non-Hodgkins lymphoma these days. I admire her in saying she admires the bravery in those less well. She feels it is her responsibility to go through this treatment to be there for her young adult children, and yes, she wants to live!
The mom needs to deal with this in the best way, chances, her son has to survive. God graced us with the brains to figure some of this stuff out on our own. Ultimately, it is His will. I pray God gives them the best outcome.
I think that this is a perfect example of why people have to do a lot of research on their own. A doctor’s idea of survival is living 5 more years after the treatment has been given. This is what they base it on, especially with this kind of cancer. As long as they can get a patient to live another 5 years, thats success to them.
Now, if you had 5 more years, and possibly only 5, would you want to live them in a fog from painful treatments, and pain killers, or would you want to live day to day with a clear mind, so you can cherish every moment with loved ones? Its a hard call to make...and the results of the treatments aren’t the same for everyone.
I’ve had this young boy in my prayers ever since I heard about this. Quite honestly, I think I would still pursue natural remedies instead of chemo.
That means 1 chance in 20, so you can find people who did survive without treatment. This is one. Now, what happened to the other 19?
There are numerous, “natural” strategies, potentially preventive or to put certain cancers into remission, that seem beneficial according to multiple, legitimate medical studies, and I’m familiar with quite a few of them. Copper reduction therapy is one. An antiangiogenic approach is another. Many herbs have been shown to promote apoptosis. Simple dietary changes can be quite beneficial as well.
That said, I still wouldn’t toss conventional medicine out the window. Sometimes you need a flyswatter, sometimes you need a cannon, sometimes the two work synergistically together and sometimes they don’t. Some of the most powerful, beneficial herbal therapies actually hamper the effectiveness of chemotherapy because they’re at cross purposes. Chemo suppresses the immune system and promotes targetted (not completely, but for the most parf) cell death. Herbal therapies support and strengthen the immune system.
You’re not wrong in your enthusiasm, since there is genuine health benefit in a lot of this. But, there is quackery as well. And, to go to the extent of condemning all medical treatment in favor of alternative methods is slipping into dogmatism.
Here is the crux: if the govt has control over your children, then by definition, YOU DON’T.
An astoundingly inaccurate headline about the Daniel Hauser case:
Billy Best actually did undergo at least a couple of rounds of curative chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease, possibly more, over four or five months before he decided to run away. He did not "survive without chemo." Most likely, he survived because of chemo.
Monopoly medicine = gunpoint medicine ?
Chemotherapy may have great short term survival rates for children for some cancers, but it isn’t the only treatment (especially long term) and it doesn’t address the underlying causes.
Monopoly medicine has no financial incentive to pursue natural (ie. non-patentable) treatments for cancer because they don’t pay as well as a toxic dose of chemo.
Almost all states have laws which recognize the right of parents to exempt their children from vaccines (which do not treat illness, and often do cause great harm). Medical freedom means that a) all treatment options with plausible justifications should be permitted and b) parents and children trump State and Big Pharma.
Was this article written in cahoots with that Trudeau guy who hawks natural cures in infomercials?
Thank you for posting this.
I agree with you about natural remedies. In 1997 my husband had a heart attack. At the
hospital, the heart doctor told me he put my husband on a magnesium drip while he
waited for the heart surgeon to arrive. They did an angioplasty that night. We take Magnesium
Glycinate everyday now. This kind of Magnesium doesn’t cause diarrhea. About three months
ago I started putting Magnesium Oil (Magnesium Chloride) on my husband’s feet and legs
every night. When he went for his heart checkup a month later, the doctor said his heart was doing
great. The best report from the
doctor that he’s ever gotten regarding his heart. I think the magnesium is the reason he hasn’t had a second heart attack.
http://www.winningcancer.com/txt/fundamental-methodology/
The first priority in our protocol is to address patients’ magnesium deficiencies. When it comes to healing and life itself, after the sun, the water we drink and the air we breathe, magnesium lives up to its billing as the miracle mineral that can save us in our time of desperate need. Called by the ancient Chinese the beautiful mineral its beauty is seen in the absolute healing power it contains. Magnesium holds the key for hundreds of crucial enzyme reactions and cellular processes. Magnesium chloride, when supplied in sufficient quantities, can kick start cell physiology in a very powerful way. Few know that magnesium chloride is an impressive infection fighter and even fewer know that the best way to deliver magnesium to all the cells is through the skin.
Cancer five then and fifteen year survival rates are up across the board as advances are made in the biological sciences and the treatment of cancer.
Try triple ply tinfoil, the mind control rays are still penetrating.
On Studying Cancer
“I am all for making an informed and well researched decision. And think most people who use alternatives are generally well informed on their treatments as well as their disease”—someone on Free Republic who wanted to go it alone in the treatment of his colon cancer.
The problem here is three-fold:1. The sense of desperation at being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness with no promise of a simple, pain-free cure can dispose people to grasp at straws.This is no put-down to these people, but just a statement of fact. And it's true for any question that presupposes both a certain level and breadth of knowledge of a particular topic, whether it's the engineering of coal-fired electrical plants, the hand-grinding of solid carbide surgical burrs, or restaurant management. The sheer amount of information (and disinformation) on the web on any subject is staggering. It takes much time and effort to get a sense of what is current in just one little area of one little area.
2. Most people lack both the knowledge and skill to read, to understand, and to interpret the papers that present the results of basic science research.
3. Most of the sources used by people who turn to the 'alternative' route are without scientific merit.
Suppose someone is diagnosed with colon cancer and he says he doesn't trust his doctor because all the doctor will recommend is surgery and he's in league with the surgeons to give them more work. Besides, the thought of surgery is really scary and is a positive confirmation both of the presence of a deadly disease as well as the patient’s own inability to do anything about it. Consequently, he says he's going to take the 'alternative' route to treatment and is going to research things on his own.
Since he's grown up hearing that a room full of monkeys, if given enough time, will by chance type the works of Shakespeare, he figures that there's bound to be something out there that will cure him. He's certainly smarter than a roomful of monkeys and, besides, if he doesn't try he'll never have the chance of bumping into the cure. You know, if you never play Lotto, you'll never win. Since he doesn't trust medical science because of its monetary self-interest, everything medical science says is suspect. Where does he go, then, for information? To those who sell alternative medications and procedures? But the same things can be said of them in terms of monetary self-interest. Does he type in 'colon cancer' AND 'cures' into some search engine on the web? If he does, he'll come back with almost 1.5 million web pages that would take years to read (Google, using the above criteria). But even then he has only scraped the surface and all the while the cancer is relentlessly progressing toward a more serious condition.
The lone researcher must still find some way of separating websites containing accurate information from those that are simply not factual and from those that are actively misleading. How will he do it? And simply being willing to conduct his own research will have no positive effect on the progression of his cancer. The tumor doesn't care about how hard the person it's on its way to killing is willing to work to become truly knowledgeable about it. It has its own timetable and set of conditions.
If the lone researcher wanted to go to the principal scientific journals in the field of medical research in general, cancer in particular, and colon cancer specifically, he would be faced with the same problem. If he went to PubMed, a resource of thousands of peer-reviewed journals in the fields of medical science, and entered 'colon cancer' AND ‘review’ into the PubMed Query in order to find articles that give an overview of the subject of colon cancer and the research being done on it, he would get a return of 2191 articles. And these are not the primary source papers.
If he just searched for 'colon cancer', he would get a return of 15,435 papers. The problem would still remain of how to learn sufficient background material (as well as techniques) in animal physiology, cancer biology, cell biology, genetics, human physiology, immunology, molecular biology, pharmacology, surgery, etc., to be able to understand what the papers are saying.
In addition, he would need enough experience to be able to read the papers and determine whether their results were arrived at in a way that others could independently reproduce. He would need to know how those results applied to males versus females, old versus young, with this or that complicating medical condition. Beyond that, he would still need the knowledge and experience to be able to judge whether the conclusions the researchers draw from their results were valid.
And finally, he would need some way to determine whether he is picking one thing and rejecting another because it does or does not appeal to what he has already decided he wants to be true.
Meanwhile, he's been diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of cancer that needs treatment now. What should he do?
The best thing, since he lacks time and expertise, is to go to people who have gone through all of the training mentioned above. These people are called medical doctors. Some of them specialize in the diagnosis of the disease; some, in the medical treatment of it; some, in the surgical treatment of it; some, in the radiological treatment of it. They work together to pool their knowledge in the subject as it applies to one specific person and try to find the most effective way of treating the disease in that individual. Thus the single individual becomes the recipient of the benefits of hundreds of thousands of hours of study and experience that he could not possibly get on his own.
Yes, sometimes doctors are wrong. They aren't gods. They don't know everything, even though some think doctors believe so. But they will be far more likely to know what to do in a given medical situation and to be worthy of one's trust than some clerk at a health food store proudly displaying his certificate in herbal bowelology he got mail order from The Center for Wholistic Healing.