“Do you honestly think JAMA would be overflowing overnight with articles and testimonials? Do you think cancer doctors and drug suppliers who have Mercedes and kids with braces are gonna be happy?”
Ok, I’ll play with you. Let us suppose that a cure for cancer has been suppressed by Oncologists/Pharma etc.. Unless I miss my guess, oncologists are just as likely to have cancer as the rest of the population. If it is well known within the oncological circles that baking soda cures cancer (and it must be true since they are supposedly suppressing the information), then you would find oncologists with much lower death rates due to cancer.
I am currently unaware that such a scenario is accurate, as the information would have leaked out into the life insurance industry, which would be reflected in their actuarial tables. They, of course, would have cheaper life insurance premiums than the rest of us. Now, not only do you have to have the oncologists, and their MD buddies, and the whole insurance industry in on the cover up, but you have to keep all of them quiet about it so it doesn’t leak out to the rest of the population. Do you really think such an improbable conspiracy is even possible?
No, oncologists are taking chemo and radiation, and having cancer surgery just like the rest of the population in treating their cancers. I suspect that they are dying from cancer at a slightly lower rate than the rest of us since they will spot it quicker in themselves, and get treatment earlier than the rest of us. I have a oncologist friend, that I played in the dust of childhood with long ago. She’s had her cancer surgery. She’s had her chemo and lost all of her hair. Various pubs list her in the top 10 in her field. She’s still following normal protocol for her neoplasm. Your scenario would be big news to her I would think.
Ok, I’m not playing the game anymore. The idea that the medical establishment is hiding effective treatments from the rest of us seems rather paranoid to me. If you really believe such stuff based on the premise that they’re all keeping it a secret from the rest of us, then I am not the only one that is “quite an optimist”, and I would also have to “have a lot of faith” that such an improbable veil of secrecy could be maintained.
I’m not playing any kind of games.
I simply posted something I heard because FReepers are, as a group, generally more intelligent, have far more of an open mind, and have the wherewithal to look at things and make up their minds for themselves.
If there is ANY EVIDENCE that this therapy is at least as effective as chemo and radiation then it needs to come into the spotlight.
And since you are the one that brought it up, I seem to have heard recently something to the effect that 80% of people in the oncology field have stated they WOULD NOT take the standard protocols. The protocols they make a living at prescribing every day.
This predates the "patent medicine" era in the US which gave rise to the FDA, by the way. Consider Lister being thrown out of hospitals for advocating asepsis during surgery, or the great practice of bleeding people for therapy.
The other issue is that there are so MANY d@mn cofactors involved in almost anything involving the human body, that there are bound to be any number of efficacious treatments, which really do work, but only for a relatively minor subset of the cases, in which certain very specific conditions hold.
So the large scale statistical studies which focus on the center of the bell curve for effectiveness, but look at the tail of the curve for risk, are likely to throw away a number of promising treatments.
The problem is that it would cost too much money, and take too much time, to narrow down the causes and conditions which led to success for the minor treatments.
On the other hand, there's always the H. pylorii type of thing...
Agreed that it is difficult to change the pH of the body by food or drink, due to the volumes invoved, and the body's tendency to be a self-buffering system; also agreed that food and drink will not change genes -- though they might affect *expression* of genes, or might allow explotation of genetic quirks present in certain classes of tumors.
Cheers!