Re: Why there is no scientific evidence to support alternative medicine


"Peter Moran" <pmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Carole" <hubbca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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??? That is just not true. The FDA has no control over medical
research,
not even in America.

But isn't it true, that any alternative doctor who wants to prove a
treatment works on a real patient, isn't allowed to show it?

Isn't allowed by whom? This is paranoid nonsense. Burzinski displayed
three of his supposedly cured patients on a TV show (they died shortly
after). Gonzales published his cases in an alternative medical journal
and
there is now a 1.3 million dollar stgudy devoted to his methods. Holt in
Australia got access to the current affairs programs that are always
giving
air time to those who claim they can cure anything.

Yes, I remember seeing Dr Holt on the TV several times, in A Current Affair
hosted by Ray Martin.
Ray Martin also interviewed the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott. So despite
all the publicity and testamonials of cured patients, this radiowave
treatment is still considered inferior to current treatments and isn't
supported by the government.

Launch of the NHMRC Review of the Use of Microwave Therapy for the Treatment
of Patients with Cancer Practised by Dr John Holt in Western Australia
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/ministers/publishing.nsf/Content/health-me
diarel-yr2005-ta-abbsp290905.htm?OpenDocument&yr=2005&mth=9
Claims its not as effectsive as conventional therapies.

However, there were a lot of testamonials, many people were cured who were
given up by mainstream, and the thing is that the treatment has virtually no
side effects and isn't toxic.
There is private research going on into his method, no help from official
sources.



methods. This could have been determined by the author by simply
performing
a Pubmed search http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez on any
vitamin,
herb, acupuncture, chiropractic, and even energy medicine such as
therapeutic touch. There are thousands of studies. I picked a herb
at
random: Cat's Claw, and got 66 results.

I'm not too sure about pubmed's status as an unbiased keeper of records.
The guy from Doctoryourself.com claims there are many alternative
journals
which aren't indexed and catelogued.

They have to reach minimum standards.

Also Wallace Sampson MD, noted sceptic, could not get his sceptical
journal
"Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine" listed on Medline. That shows
there is no bias against alternatives.

It shows that medline is devoted to orthodox medicine.


here are "good" medical journals, and that there are
"naughty" journals?
No kidding. The good journals are easy to access on
the internet through a huge electronic database called Medline
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) This wonderful, free
service
is brought to you by the National Library of Medicine and the National
Institutes of Health. In other words, by you. By your tax dollars.
Generally
it is money well spent, until you go a-searching for megavitamin therapy
research papers. Then you will find that you can't find all of them."

http://www.doctoryourself.com/medlineup.html
"There were 754 million Medline searches in the year 2005. Not one of
those
searches found a single article from the Journal of Orthomolecular
Medicine.
There is a growing appreciation in the scientific community that the
Journal
is being deliberately censored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Since 1989, JOM has been rejected for Medline indexing five times. "


That I can understand. It is mainly a self-promotional journal; run by
Abram Hoffer, and has no proper scientific review board, although I have
noted that it is trying to cover broader material in its more recent
issues,
probably with the objective of getting listing on Medline. .

It is not censored. You can read it on line.

Fair enough. It looks pretty dry anyway http://www.orthomed.org




It is also not true that there is no budget. The NCCAM has over a
hundred
million dollars available yearly for research into alternative
methods,
and
they have been trying for years to get those claiming they can cure
cancer
to apply for funding. Where to apply --
http://nccam.nih.gov/research/
They are currently funding a trial of the Gonzales/Kelley treatment of
cancer which involves coffee enemas and other unlikely means.

I had a look at the trials it was funding.
http://nccam.nih.gov/clinicaltrials/alltrials.htm
There are about 80 categories, one of which is cancer.
In the cancer category, the trials seem to be more for alleviating side
effects of orthodox treatments.

As I said, they have had difficulty finding any out of the dozens claiming
to be able to cure cancer that can put up a wortwhile case. They made a
firm offer to the Gerson clinic that they would definitely fund a trial of
their method if the clinic could produce a dozen cases of cancer that went
into remission with their method. The clinic could not even do that.
This is the Gerson clinics account of what happened.

"The genesis of this inquiry occurred during a landmark study by the U.S.
Congressional Office of Technology Assessment [Ref 2] to which one of us
(G.H.) was an advisor. In its report, OTA put forward a protocol for
best-case reviews based on the premise that, no matter how many patients
failed, as few as 10 or 12 cases with objective evidence of tumor response
would be enough to propel an investigation by the National Cancer
Institute
(NCI). Because we had proposed the original best-case review protocol to
OTA, we were eager to construct a best-case review. However, we found
OTA's
(and later NCI's) protocol to have a serious shortcoming when used
retrospectively: its focus on only tumor regression. Adequate
documentation
of tumor regression is unlikely to be collected in most alternative
medical
practices."

In other words, the record keeping and follow-up in alternative cancer
clinics is of inadequate quality to demonstrate that their claims are
true.

For some reason alternative medicine doesn't measure success in terms of
tumour regression.
They believe in whole body treatment and say the tumour is just a symptom,
that merely treating the tumour doesn't address the whole problem and that
cancer is a whole body disease (something like that).
In other words, the alternative mob don't like the criteria used to judge
success.
Read about it at -

http://www.cancertutor.com/WarBetween/War_Cure_Rates.html
Chapter 4: Remission, Cure Rates and Other Deceptions


I wouldn't be too confident that it picked research cases for real
results.
I'd like to see the cases that get the knock back and hear the reactions
from the people who put them forward.



In truth, most alternative methods have now been researched
sufficiently
to provide some idea as to their worth. or lack of it and with nothing
very
spectacular to report. Some methods are never likely to be seriously
researched as they are just too implausible.

The NCCAM has a panel system, which decides which cases they will choose
for
trials but there's no list of cases that get rejected. So what what
might
happen is that therapies that work might be labelled as "implausible"
and
the ones that seem less threatening to big pharma, are given a try.


They were publishing the minutes of their meetings online. With
cancer
the measure was not plausibility (they were at one stage interested in
investigating further an Inidan homoepathic clinic) but the ability toi
produce cured patients.

There are cured patients using many alternative treatments and from what I
hear, many that orthodox medicine has given up on. I think the problem is
definition of "cure".



The truth is that those with important medical claims such as curing
established cancer won't usually publish anything that reveals their
true
overall results, not even simple case series. They already know that
their
methods don't work very well in patients who have active cancer..

I think alternative cures are suppressed and it would take a lot of
evidence
to convince me otherwise.

Which cures do you think are suppressed? The fact is that the claimants
cannot produce cured patients, even though their claims require that they
should be able to do so and they are treating suitable patients by the
thousands.

I have an idea there are many suppressed cures -- essiac, Dr Holts radiowave
therapy, herbal, nutritional treatments.
I'm not sure but there could be hundreds of treatments which are suppressed.
However, from my own experience there are many nutritional treatments that
are kept quiet in favour of pharmaceutical treatments.
Basically the system is rigged to discount anything that isn't
pharmaceutical. I have heard of all sorts of intimidations, putdowns,
threats, ruined careers, and so on used against doctors who go outside the
boundaries.
Dr Simoncini was barred for supposedly killing a patient with his bicarb
treatment. Why aren't doctors who use chemo barred when their patients die?


I know you have a completely closed mind. I write so that others may see
the flaws in what you post.

That's a fairly arrogant comment -- but typical.
My thinking may have some gaps, but your conventional medicine has a history
of suppression and corruption.

Carole
www.cellsalts.net


PM

Carole
www.cellsalts.net





PM.

www.cancerwatcher.com











.

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