Conversations with a quack.

From an old exchange of emails with one of the principals of a prominent
alternative cancer clinic. I cannot reveal what he said for privacy reasons, but this is an email I sent to him, that I recently came across. It gives some idea of the frustrations of dealing with these folk. Back then I naively thought that productive dialogue was possible.

Quote---

XXXXXX, what is the object of these cases? I would be surprised if you could not, by sifting through a thousand odd cases over many years, find some cases with unexpected outcomes, such as these with ovarian cancer. I have previously pointed out that such cherry-picking is never going to be enough to switch medical opinion from skepticism to endorsement. I am dismayed also that your clinic is sifting through old cases to try and find good ones, instead of prospectively showing a treatment effect of Gerson in new patients with measurable cancer, in a well-planned study, as I have suggested. You badly need to do this if only to give yourselves and your patients some idea of what patients with established cancer can expect.

While most or nearly all cases like these ovarian ones will end up dying of cancer, we do not know how many will live on if untreated. I have given you the example of colon cancer, where 7% of patients having palliative operations were still alive and well ten years later. That equates to sure and permanent cure for colon cancer, despite the fact that the patients were thought to have residual cancer after their surgery like these ovarian cancer patients.

I did not have time to respond to your earlier email after I accused you of "bullshitting". I don't think you understand the enormity of your error. Here you are professing to have some knowledge of cancer and the results of your own and conventional management of it, when you repeatedly show you have not even the dimmest grasp of anything to do with cancer.

Not only that, but you wish to enter into argument with someone who has been studying it, and also alternative methods, quite intensively. You have formulated all your opinions within the incestuous circles of alternative medicine, which studiously ignores a vast amount of information about cancer that has been gained within the last hundred years, and also ignores the only question that cancer patients really want answered, which is "How often does this method work, as opposed to others that I might choose?". You could show this if you chose, and not choosing to do so leaves you permanently suspect.

Peter Moran

www.cancerwatcher.com



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