23 ms·

I lost my boyfriend to cancer 'conspiracy theories’

176 points by DanBC 6y ago

maallooc 6y ago
Another score by natural selection
- jakeinspace 6y ago
  To be fair, one might argue that medical intervention would inhibit natural selection. At least, selection for individuals with less risk of cancer.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Purely physical fitness is not the only parameter natural selection optimizes for. If it were, human babies would be born functional, like most other creatures.
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      There’s a relationship between r/K type[1] and body size, resting heart rate, length of gestation cycle, length of time from birth to reproduction, parental rearing duration or presence, and more. Very interesting to me, though it doesn’t say much about humans relating to other humans. I also believe this theory has been criticized, and I don’t mean to advocate for it, but to raise awareness about how statistics give power to test our science as well as our intuitions, when it is used properly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
  - abjKT26nO8 6y ago
    No, one cannot. Modern medicine is part of our environment. Failure to make use of it is a failure to adapt to the current environment which lessens the disadvantage of individuals with higher risk of cancer, who may have other advantages letting them thrive in this environment.
- BbzzbB 6y ago
  That's unnecessarily harsh for a sad story, frankly anyone can fall into those rabbit holes (even if you're smart enough to grow Apple).
  - zenexer 6y ago
    In case anyone was unsure of the reference here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems
- madiator 6y ago
  If you read the book "Thinking fast and slow" or perhaps "Predictably irrational", you will realize how irrational all of us are.
- nisa 6y ago
  I hate these cynic comments. There are always people involved that knew about his situation lied to him, took his money for fake cures and fake diagnosis. Every one of them should face charges and be forbidden to see patients. This quack bullshit is insanely huge here in Germany and while it's true that in the end it's up to the patient to make the call, most of these quacks build up a relationship and gain trust and then sell their bogus cure with a huge margin. I had a roommate in her 20ies spending 5000+ euros because one of them told her she had heavy metal poisoning - I told her to see a regular doctor and she likely couldn't talk to me if that would be the case (she was fine, just gullible). Fuck everyone that does this. These are plain criminals in my view. There are tons of problem with the medical system and pharma biz, I'm not cheering for them but the alternative is often way worse and outright dangerous for a lot of people.
  - stainforth 6y ago
    It was a revelation to me to hear also about homeopathy being followed in Germany. Forgive the generalization, and perhaps the usual mistake of stereotyping, but I thought Germans prided themselves on logic and efficiency. Are there reasons or demographic aspects to this buy-in?
    - luckylion 6y ago
      I don't know about reasons, but I don't think it's a "the people are stupid" thing. My private insurance covers homeopathy, the public ones do not. I asked them to just drop that and save me 10 bucks, but they wouldn't and said they don't claim it works, but many of their members do like it, and those were mostly civil servants, lawyers, journalists etc. A friend of mine in medicine had a different perspective on it, his stance is basically that as long as they redirect the actual cases to the actual doctors, homeopathy is fine. It keeps the people who really just want somebody to talk to out of the doctor's offices and they will find help there, because the real doctor doesn't have time to do psycho-therapy light with them. At least from personal experience (my mother believes in it as well), it works. She knows very well what problems call for a doctor and what are okay to try homeopathy on.
- dang 6y ago
  Please stop posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments to HN. You've been doing it a lot and we ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
DanBC 6y ago
BBC Three is aimed at the 16 - 34 year old demographic. The article talks about someone who went all in on alternative therapies and declined mainstream treatment available on the NHS.
- ansible 6y ago
  I know people that have gone through chemotherapy. Since this was his 2nd cancer diagnosis, I can understand why he wouldn't want to go through it again. I can understand why he would so desperately want an alternative. If I were to be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I don't know what I'd decide for myself. Of it depends on the diagnosis, if it was just a small skin cancer they could just cut out, sure, let's do that. But if it was something more pernicious, like the Hodgkin lymphoma, I might refuse chemo. I may prefer to just get my affairs in order while not going through chemo, and just trying to appreciate what days I have left. And being able to appreciate the days I have left, because chemo can really knock you out. What's the point of getting more months of life, if you can't do anything? I wouldn't put any of my hopes in an alternative medicine cure, but I've been studying science in various forms for a long time. I have a reasonable knowledge of what might work and what wouldn't.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    In the beginning, chemo can actually give you a couple days per week of normality before it knocks you on your ass. I remember chemo saturday, sleep sunday, mon/tue/wed were pretty good, thur/friday decline, chemo again saturday. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It can give you an extra few months of normality, even if you end up dying at the same time.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    But in this case he didn't really have a choice. His attempt at an "alternative" therapy at best didn't have any effect, and by the looks of it it didn't really give him good quality of life either as his health was deteriorating.
    - buitreVirtual 6y ago
Nextgrid 6y ago
> He started documenting his journey on Facebook Lives and grew a huge following. This is a major problem; not only did this stupidity cost him his life but he also put others at risk.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  It's not fair to say it cost him his life when his survival chance was 50% to begin with and the first chemotherapy failed to cure him. Nobody can say whether the outcome would have been better with a second chemotherapy or perhaps with no treatment at all.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    The first chemo gave him six more years. The 50% estimate was for long term survival, which is generally considered to be 10-15 years or more. It doesn’t say what his short term survival odds may have been. Somewhere between 51-99%.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Well not doing anything decreases your chances of survival to about 0%, so I think that is definitely fair to say.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  Why do you think he put them at risk rather than the other way around? He grew a large following of people encouraging him to continue down that path.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    I'm sure a lot of the attention he got was from people already digging their own grave, but the same way he got into it in the first place (by looking at others' stories with alternative "therapies" and the encouragement they're getting) will unfortunately also con others into this dangerous scam.
- kulig 6y ago
rvz 6y ago
> "Cherries neutralize acidity in the body and kill cancer cells," read one post on Instagram. "Memes" on Instagram and other social media platforms disguised as misleading and inaccurate health advice is the actual problem. Looks like the word "Meme" in 2020 is now totally different to when it was used in 2006.
- catalogia 6y ago
  The term 'meme' was coined in the 70s and means an idea that spreads from one person to another. It comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene; the idea is that memes are subject to selection just like genes.
  - swayson 6y ago
    Appears intelligence agencies also investigated it https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1229817-vault-7-leaks https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1229817-vault-7-leaks
  - arunc 6y ago
    Thanks for the etymology. Never thought meme came out of gene.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      It didn't, it's from a Greek word.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      It resembles "gene" but has an independent origin: meme (n.) "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene. https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race". https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene
capn_cabbage 6y ago
The opposite can be just as dangerous * . "Medlife Crisis" has an [informative video][1] that explains some of what can happen. * Edit: I shouldn't have equated the dangers here. This was a bad take. I still believe there are good bits of info provided in the video, but the relevance to this thread is less than I considered and I should have thought more about what I was sharing. Edit 2: I didn't mean to link to a specific timestamp of the video in the original link. That has been removed. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNzQ_sLGIuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNzQ_sLGIuA
- ipnon 6y ago
  At the population level, chemotherapy increases survival rates and remissions.
- dicytea 6y ago
  I clicked on his COVID-19 video[1] on a whim and while I have not watched it yet, my god is the comment section alarming. Is the YouTube comment section always like this when it comes to this topic? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ts8X3HDtPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ts8X3HDtPE
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    Yes. Youtube comment sections are among the lowest quality information sources available on the Internet.
  - capn_cabbage 6y ago
    Yes that seems to be typical. YouTube comment sections tend to be of poorer quality when the topic is popular or if the channel has a large enough audience.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    ObXkcd: https://xkcd.com/481/ https://xkcd.com/481/
mg794613 6y ago
Why is this article so bend on blaming the meme, as they obviously got the majority of the false information on forums? I don't believe anyone does this based on memes.
- Latty 6y ago
  I think that's fundamentally misrepresenting what the article is saying. They are saying that the memes shared in these communities serve to reinforce and spread the ideology.
- pohl 6y ago
  Before “meme” implied GIF or JPG it was just the idea of self replicating ideas that propagate from brain to brain. Text is a medium for meme propagation. The meme itself is independent of the medium. One could catch QAnon from a GIF and pass it on to someone else verbally. Calling the GIF a “meme” is just a colloquialism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
samirillian 6y ago
50% chance of survival. So at least a 50% chance, even by the doctors' own admission, that she just lost her boyfriend to cancer. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with naturopathic solutions, but people seem to lose the ability to reason about probability after the fact. This is not to make light of the situation, but more to say "don't beat yourself up" about a bad thing that happened.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Their decision to pursue "alternative therapies" reduced that 50% chance to a guaranteed 0% since at best these therapies don't have any beneficial effect.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    There may be cases of spontaneous remission. Effectively, that is the non-treatment control group.
  - smabie 6y ago
    I'm sure the alternative therapies have some effect. Maybe even a strong effect sometimes. Placebos are very powerful.
    - Nursie 6y ago
      It's very powerful against a subset of problems, usually the kind of things that are affected by perception of severity, would heal themselves over time anyway etc etc. It's far less of an effect, if what I've read is to be believed, when measured against things like terminal cancer.
  - samirillian 6y ago
    50% chance (assuming doctors were correct about survival rate) that your life would be better if you didn't go through chemo. Sum % positive reasons of not doing chemo: n% chance that you'd recover without doing anything n% chance that these naturopathic cures do somehow cure you n% chance that the treatment would actually make things worse It's a garden of forking paths. You can't just reason about this with one number. Choices are hard. People die. Just a matter of order.
strken 6y ago
She didn't lose her boyfriend to conspiracy theories, she lost her boyfriend to the pervasive system of beliefs that prevents people from confronting their assumptions when it really matters. Belief in conspiracy theories is the specific issue from a whole class of problems: what is the most important thing you believe, how do you know it's true, and is that good enough or do you need to take additional action in case it's false?
- BEEdwards 6y ago
  Except his stance before the cancer came back was pro medical science, it was his youtube and facebook research that dragged him into the conspiracy.
  - pizza234 6y ago
    This is not clear. Based on the article: > Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos it seems that he first decided not to undergo chemo, then clinged on whatever he could.
- baddox 6y ago
  The conspiracy theory is a pretty necessary part, because the ideology needs to be able to dismiss the medical status quo, and it’s simpler to claim that the whole system is a conspiracy rather than attempt to address any actual medical or scientific claims.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
annoyingnoob 6y ago
When my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer she refused medical treatment. She did not want to go through the therapy, the medical process was a worse outcome than death for her. She seemed to just decide that she was done, resigned to her fate. My uncle offered her some kind of herbal tea as a solution to her cancer. Grandma had a worse view of alternative medicine than the actual medicine she had already refused. I had never seen her so upset with my uncle. Her reaction has stayed with me.
- TravHatesMe 6y ago
  I find it admirable that she was able to be accepting of her fate. I wish I could be that strong, although perhaps it comes with age ("I've lived a full life, I am ready"). I don't believe in naturopathy either, but I wonder if it still has a positive impact for those whom believe in it, ie. the placebo effect.
  - nothal 6y ago
    It's probably easier if your odds are not as good as 50%.
    - cko 6y ago
      True, but that may be the perfect opportunity to place hope in these alternative remedies, which she refused. I have a family member with lung cancer and when they felt traditional options have been exhausted, they went full alternative. TCM and such.
  - annoyingnoob 6y ago
    Her husband, my grandfather, had died some 30 years prior. She was alone for a long time, more than anything I think she wanted a partner but never seemed to find the right one. She may have felt like medicine was only a temporary solution and not worth it for a relatively short time more.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    I think being informed helps too. I have a couple of extended family members who made this choice. While both were older, they were also both doctors. I imagine that having a clear picture of what treatment looks like can clarify the decision.
egonschiele 6y ago
Yep. Same thing is happening to me now. My dad got thyroid cancer in 2006. In 2018 it spread to his lungs, and in 2019 to his brain. My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it.
- klyrs 6y ago
  I was there almost 10 years ago. My dad's cancer had metastasized, conventional treatments were failing, and a "monk" wandering the cancer ward offered meditative therapy to the tune of $30,000, up front, no refunds. My brother and I begged them not to waste their money. The charlatan sustained his sales pitch for nearly a month before my parents eventually refused him. My dad lived for another year, and my mom still regrets not "trying" the snake oil.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    That's so low it is disgusting.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it. It is the ability to not let go - we don't want these things to happen. We want to have hope that something out there can save - and these emotions are abused. It makes it all the more dastardly.
- tim333 6y ago
  Guess if the regular therapies don't work it would encourage you to have a look.
luxuryballs 6y ago
an interesting aspect of this is the aversion to traditional therapy caused by experiencing it the first time and how much it made him suffer, I wonder how much of the motivation was due to that versus how much was due to the "false hope" I also wonder if this is a argument for there being value in investing in ways of making chemotherapy less traumatic even though it wouldn't be making it more effective, just less psychological damage
gideonparanoid 6y ago
Coronation Street - a popular TV soap in the UK had a storyline about this last year [0]. As the storyline played out, the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life. I think it was quite brave of a soap to tackle that, & hopefully it's made people think if they were considering alternative 'solutions'. [0] https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/06/coronation-street-spoilers-sinead-tinker-considers-alternative-cancer-treatment-8040952/ https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/06/coronation-street-spoilers-si...
- stepstop 6y ago
  > the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life. Isn't this the same story as Steve Jobs? I recall reading that on this forum
  - mc32 6y ago
    Yes exactly. There have been others like Farrah Fawcet and Andy Kaufman (although Fawcet did it in combination with traditional treatment).
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    It may be that Jobs shortened his life with his rejection of mainstream treatments, but pancreatic cancer also has relatively poor prognosis even with optimal treatment. Good thing it's rare.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      That’s true, but I think in Jobs’ case he actually had a rare type that is treatable. It’s hard to know how much impact his delay had, but it’s possible his focus on alternative medicine killed him. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Jobs&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Health_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Jobs&mobile... > In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.[158] The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor;[159] Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.[158] Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[160] instead relying on alternative medicine to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death". Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that."[161] Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[162] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."
Guy2020 6y ago
Ultimately, individuals are responsible for their choices in "free societies." I don't want to live in a world where all information is regulated by the government. This is a good story about poor choices made by an individual, but I hope it is not fodder for any attempt at regulating what free people choose to do with their lives. I think we need to do a better job at educating people on the dangers of freedom...what do you guys think? Perhaps we need some sort of "media literacy" education at the primary school level that trains people in evaluating sources of information ( which seems to be reserved for the university level in many cases, unfortunately ). My thoughts are with the family of this man. Edit: Wow, I'm surprised at the negative response to my comment. What is so controversial about my views here?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I don't think there is any argument at regulating what free people do. The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available as well as eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk. This is not an argument for regulating information, you are still free to peddle quack as long as you don't make false or unproven claims, and if you are sure your "quack" is actually legitimate you are free to do research, studies and tests just like the supposedly-evil "big pharma".
  - Guy2020 6y ago
    > The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information." > eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk. What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like? > the supposedly-evil "big pharma" Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      > I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information." Either that or government-approved websites (like the NHS is providing in the UK). It is in the government's best interest to keep you alive for as long as possible (if nothing else, just so you can pay tax longer), and while they aren't always perfect (like the current covid-19 response from some countries) I would still trust them more than some random people playing doctors on social media. > What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like? Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law? > Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree Perfection will never be achieved, but if we take all the effects of "big pharma" (both good and bad, across all diseases) and compare it to the effects of backyard quack medicine, who wins? I'm willing to bet good money that big pharma wins by a large margin, so I'd be willing to trust them until there is enough evidence that says otherwise.
felixchan 6y ago
50% of long-term cancer survival is high. He probably should have took it. Alternative treatments don’t guarantee higher success than modern medicine. However, if modern medicine puts the chance of survival at < 5%, it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches. Modern science aims to create a standardized approach for categorized diseases. Controlled experiments aim to find a magic bullet, but are these experiments really “controlled”? Everyone eats differently; everyone shits differently. Different air quality; stress levels; sleep; metabolism. Not to mention, the body and its disease are both is ever-changing systems over time. Until we have nano-machines, we won’t know the true cause and effect of all these variables. Therefore, the holistic approach* is to use intuition, adaptation, and nonstandard ways to deal with this recognition. The downside of this approach is the amount of information and the ability to determine the credibility (eg. random social media), especially for a layman. However, if one was knowledgeable enough to read thousands of academic papers, from various fields (outside of oncology) -- one could develop a more tailored plan for the individual that accounts for these other factors. *Holistic approach does not mean disregard of science. It does not mean rejecting standard protocols. It means that one should consider a wider-range of factors, in addition to standard protocols. It is an approach that places more value on breadth.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches Fringe approaches would not be considered "fringe" if they were proven to have an effect. Even if it improves your survival rates by merely 1%, it would be still used as part of modern medicine if there was nothing else. The problem is that the quack makes you believe that it will work, so you're still wasting time trying the "treatment" and potentially suffering its side-effects (not to mention the financial impact). It's worse than not doing anything, since at least the latter means you've accepted your fate and can enjoy whatever time you have peacefully instead of being busy with a quack treatment. Furthermore, modern medicine isn't inherently hostile to "alternative medicine". If you think about it, all the potential treatments being researched in labs right now (including for covid-19) are still at the "alternative" stage, and if they end up being proven to work they simply become "medicine". What modern medicine is hostile to is unproven, or proven not to work treatments. If you think you actually have an "alternative" theory that isn't quack, you are welcome to do your research on it to at least rule out any existing reasons why it couldn't work (using existing medical literature), and if the theory still stands by then you are free to engage with the mainstream medical community or study, become a researcher and then test your theory in a safe and controlled environment so the outcome is actually valuable (and will influence further research even if this particular theory doesn't work) and not just anecdotal evidence.
tyingq 6y ago
Thankfully Google got better at pushing this kind of stuff down. It wasn't that long ago that they often returned sketchy websites for mainstream type cancer queries: https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/t-google-cure-for-cancer-top-result-carrot-1501591007.png https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/t-goog...
DubiousPusher 6y ago
If you have someone in your life who is thinking like this and you can get them to read it I highly recommend "The Emporer of All Maladies". It's not a debunking book. It doesn't even address alternative treatments at all. It is a kind of biography of cancer. I think it can help because it puts faces to some of the people who have developed cancer treatments over the years. And it really demystifies the work pharmaceutical researches have done to develop chemotherapy. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z3XeFbDJNYEBM https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z...
- ouid 6y ago
  I was about to take your recommendation at face value, but then I looked at your username.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  I read this book a few weeks ago and can recommend it as well. It's a very good book.
- fossuser 6y ago
  His second book, The Gene, is excellent too and definitely worth reading if you liked The Emperor of All Maladies.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    Will do. Looking forward to it now. Thanks.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The problem is that reading an entire book takes effort, and the whole reason why these quack treatments thrive is because people can't be bothered to do effort (and if they did they would have a very high likelihood of disproving the quack just based on reading existing medical literature) and want a quick and easy solution.
  - 6y ago
dleslie 6y ago
Sounds to me like he was holding on to some sense of control while he was struggling with losing control to cancer. He'd survived it once already, and had been given a coins' toss chance at long term survival; in medical terms, that's a decade and a half more of life. Faced with painful chemotherapy and likely years of pharmacological interventions that have their own side effects, he ... took a different path. I'm thinking it's a safe bet that there's a deficiency in the NHS' delivery of counseling and mental health services for those facing mortal crisis.
lordnacho 6y ago
IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream before passing from pancreatic cancer. I find it's hard to blame people when there's such a storm of information surrounding these things. It's easy to see how even very intelligent people can pick the wrong remedy. Also I used to think it was clear cut, but I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.
- thefounder 6y ago
  The more vulnerable/desperate you are the more likely you are to fall into snakeoil traps. It has little to do with intelligence.
- microtherion 6y ago
  > IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream Yes, he did. Then again, pancreatic cancer, even the "milder" form he had, does not have a great prognosis, and he lived another 8 years after the diagnosis. > I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy. Hope you ran out on them as well…
criddell 6y ago
If you go on amazon and choose just about any "apricot kernel" product page, the comments invariable mention people consuming them to treat or prevent cancer. In fact, as I typed "apricot kernel" into the search bar, Amazon suggested "apricot kernels bitter seed for cancer". That seems dangerous to me.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  That scam's existed since the 1960s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883134
- dehrmann 6y ago
  That whole family of stone fruit seeds tend to contain cyanide (that's why it's bitter).
wavepruner 6y ago
edit: (I say all this as a sick person who was bed-bound for years. I was able to reverse the course of my illness after studying the work of biochemists that is considered "alternative") The attitude in this thread is ableist. Sick people are intelligent. Sick people are capable. Sick people can feel what is happening in their bodies. And they have a right to seek treatments they deem best. Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer, or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure. When it gets to this point it makes sense to strike out on your own. Some have success. Others do not. But it's a battle that has to be fought unless you want to just give up and lose the life you had. I really struggle to understand why healthy people are so hostile towards sick people who are just trying to survive. Yes, it's sad to watch sick people desperately seek for effective treatments. But just imagine how hard it is to be that sick person desperately searching for effective treatments while your peers treat you like you're crazy, and then simultaneously refuse to provide any reasonable alternatives.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Sick people just trying to survive should listen to their doctors. It's stupid to normalize seeking out quacks because you don't believe the experts.
- derefr 6y ago
  > or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. One of the foundational principles I use to reason is "if there was a free-lunch (i.e. a higher-ROI solution—more reward for less risk), then anyone truly motivated to solve the problem would have switched to it, or at least added it to their offering as an extra hail-mary on top of their current approach. Given that they didn't, the free lunch must either not be free (i.e. no less risky), or not be much of a lunch (i.e. not rewarding.)" Yes, in this case, you've got a system with mixed motivations; the FDA isn't motivated to solve problems, so there might be some beneficial drug that isn't on the market. But that doesn't mean that your doctor in particular—someone who is motivated primarily to solve your problem—won't still tell you about such drugs, and help you to acquire them through grey-market channels. Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc. They also will just tell you to eat a certain food or take a certain supplement as your "prescription", if doing that is a higher-ROI solution than any drug. If doctors are only offering you treatments with devastating side-effects, that's because those are the highest-ROI treatments that exist. Doctors always prioritize safety over benefit[1]; the only time they offer unsafe treatment is when there is no safe treatment—or at least no safe treatment that pays for the costs of going through it by actually having a non-zero likelihood of helping you. [1] For example, doctors use known placebo-equivalents as the first-line treatments for many psychiatric conditions, because placebos have no potential risks; so even if the likelihood of remission from placebo is low, as long as it's higher than zero (which it usually is in psychiatric conditions), doctors want to first make sure you aren't someone who would go into remission from placebo, before moving onto trying to treat you with drugs that actually do something (and therefore have risks.)
jmcgough 6y ago
I've seen stuff like this a number of times. Someone gets their opinions horribly warped by well-crafted YouTube videos and graduates to spending a lot of time with like-minded peers on Facebook groups, subreddits or discord, reinforcing those beliefs. I used to watch a talented gamer on twitch who goes on rants about how covid is a liberal scam, constantly advocates an all-meat diet ("there's no proof vegetables are healthy"), and shares YouTube videos on stuff like that. Trying to tell him otherwise only reinforces his beliefs, and he'll parrot talking points from videos. Completely soured me on his content and it's just really sad to see. When someone lacks the scientific training or education to know whether something is a conspiracy theory, they can really get pulled in by charismatic YouTube personalities espousing nonsense. Social media is really poisoning some peoples' minds.
- fossuser 6y ago
  It’s scary how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of thing. It makes me wonder what would happen if I watched YouTube videos every day that were misleading but well produced. Would I eventually end up the same way? How damaging is just repeated exposure and reinforcement to this kind of stuff? Is everyone vulnerable? Even being scientifically minded and trying to be a good rational thinker, the way otherwise intelligent people are corrupted scares me. It makes me extra cautious with what information I choose to expose myself to. I do take some comfort that I was able to throw religion away even while growing up surrounded by it as a child. I hope that means there’s a way to be more resilient to misinformation.
  - alfonsodev 6y ago
    > Would I eventually end up the same way? In theory no, if you have developed critical thinking. I wonder if critical thinking works like a muscle that we have to train. I personally check opposite opinions on youtube, but it's scary how youtube algorithm wants to brainwash me with recommendations on any direction I take, I use the option of "not interested" a lot, to clean up recommendations. That and the evident radical polarization, scares me.
    - 6y ago
qwerty456127 6y ago
It would help a lot if popular alternative treatments were studied thoroughly (including testing on big numbers of human volunteers - every person who chooses to exercise their right to deny conventional treatment should be convinced to contribute by letting scientists observe him while he is treated alternatively) with intention to identify and dissect every humble positive effect they might cause in any particular kind of patients. A statement like "there is no credible evidence that thing helps" really can't convince an alternative treatment enthusiast to give his idea up. "Obiviously" there is no evidence because nobody no scientist for it. We need to be able to tell them honestly: "we have tried hard, hundreds different people were studied thoroughly for this particular treatment, it really doesn't help or only helps slightly a particular kind of patients you don't fit, please go and get treated the way proven efficient".
- insickness 6y ago
  The problem is that there are an infinite number of 'alternative' treatments to any illness. How many of these should be taken seriously and tested? Typically, if enough people take an alternative seriously, someone eventually tests it.
  - em-bee 6y ago
    all of them? you are not testing the treatment, you are testing the development of the cancer in the patient, regardless of which treatment they get. simply test everyone diagnosed with cancer on a regular basis just like they get tested when they do the recommended treatment. in other words, if someone refuses the treatment, don't let them refuse the tests as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jackinloadup 6y ago
Having had 5 others in my life die from traditional cancer treatment I can certainly understand why people look for alternatives. I've seen brain, skin, blood cancer as an adult and I'm not sure what other cancers relatives had while I was growing up. I've always worried if I would have the strength to fight or cave.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Treatments, side effects, and recovery rates vary tremendously among types of cancer. Some are eminently treatable with virtually no downsides. Some progress so slowly that treatment is all but unnecessary in most cases. And some remain tremendously aggressive, treatments themselves debilitating, and spread or recurrence all but assured. Cancer is not s single disease, with a common origin, treatment, or outcome. It is a common characteristic --- malignant cell growth --- with multiple distinct manifestations, causes, prognoses, and treatments. Knowledge of what specific condition is being faced makes a huge difference in response options.
fractionalhare 6y ago
It's deeply ironic that the BBC served me this ad while reading the article: https://ibb.co/CVTw7pT https://ibb.co/CVTw7pT
- ColinWright 6y ago
  The BBC does not serve ads, that's a part of the article as a demonstration of the memes that are out there.
DiabloD3 6y ago
I like my conspiracy theory. The reason we have such a bad problem tackling cancer, both medically and socially, is because it is just too damned profitable to get rid of it. The cure for cancer? A lifetime of eating a nutritious diet, don't eat lots of carbs, eat absolutely no refined carbs, eat enough meat, avoid almost anything that's pre-made or shelf stable, don't smoke, don't drink. Do research into anti-inflammation lifestyles. Exercise for the point of reducing those markers, eating for the point of reducing those markers, getting enough sunlight because Vitamin D is necessary for these things (the sun/cancer risk model made popular in the 90s is not without its massive dose of irony). You can't 100% keep yourself from getting it: if you live long enough, eventually your body's ability to eat cancer cells (the process of autophagy is amazing) just ceases to work... but you can put it off as long as you can until something else kills you first. I'm pretty sure if 90% of the garbage the average person eats every day just vanished off store shelves, we'd see a ten-fold decrease in cancer rates. Nobody wants to have that discussion. Nobody wants to talk about how a little diet modification here, a little diet modification there, a little more exercise of the right kind, would see a ten-fold decrease in many things, not just cancer. My conspiracy theory is, fundamentally, we don't care about other people so strongly that it bled over into we don't care about ourselves, too. What is it that people our age are saying? 'We're here for a good time, not a long time?' Yeah, what happens when you're still alive past 40, everything you did is going to hit you like a freight train... ... and big Pharma is here to help (their bottom line). If you try to dodge big Pharma, but don't keep your wits about you? You get taken in by scammers, you forget to use your cognitive skills to weed the facts out from the bullshit. That guy got taken in, and it killed him. This was his second pass through that meat grinder, he got to see how big Pharma cures you up front, he wanted a second opinion, and he got it from a snake oil salesman. If you try to dodge big Pharma, but do keep your wits about you? Maybe you change your lifestyle now, decades before its too late; maybe if your destiny was to get cancer in your 50s, maybe now you get it in your 60s or 70s instead, or maybe you don't get it at all. We perform preventative maintenance on so many things, our little community on here HN certainly appreciates that more than most, so why, collectively, is it so hard to imagine preventative maintenance of the human body? Cancer for most people is the end result of an entire lifetime of avoiding the truth; only the truly unlucky did everything right and still got it, or got it at an unimaginable young age before they had any choice in the matter. I realize that I'm probably going to get a lot of downvotes because of what I wrote, and I don't care. I'd rather be downvoted for saying the truth, then keep my points through silence.
ilamont 6y ago
But after reading a lot online, Sean believed he could cure his cancer by detoxing and completely changing his lifestyle, avoiding the gruelling side effects he remembered from chemotherapy. Strongly recommend reading "The Unwinding of the Miracle" by Julie Yip-Williams (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39216478-the-unwinding-of-the-miracle https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39216478-the-unwinding-o...). A NYC lawyer and mom diagnosed in her 30s with Stage IV colon cancer, she provides a document of her thought processes as she is confronted with terminal cancer. She describes the multiple types of modern medical treatments and trials she participated in and (with her oncologists' permission) flirts with Chinese medicine and alternative diets and treatments. It really is unflinching and uncomfortable look at the disease from a patient's point of view, but also a beautiful book.
pizza234 6y ago
While this is an interesting subject, the article is very ambiguous abous the causality relationship: > Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos It seems to me that he had already decided not to undergo chemiotherapy, and clinged on whatever it was available, or at least, more subtly, he deeply wanted to find any other cure that was was not chemotherapy. While cancer conspiracy theories are certainly damaging, if the reading above is correct, such theories correlated to his death, didn't cause it - he may as well have turned to religion, drugs or anything else.
- nazgulsenpai 6y ago
  This was my takeaway as well.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  It is clear from the article that he was told thermoscans of whatever would track the progress of the cancer, and showed that is was being defeated. There is a huge placebo effect on mental outlook of a sciencey test like that. It seems clear that if he had had regular medical scans that showed a growing tumor he might have changed course. The alternative medicine community it complicit in many avoidable deaths. It's a testament to the power of self delusion that they can sleep at night.
- Nursie 6y ago
  He turned to alt-med because it promised a cure without chemo - "At the time, Sean’s doctors told him he had at least a 50% chance of long-term survival if he underwent chemotherapy. But after reading a lot online, Sean believed he could cure his cancer by detoxing and completely changing his lifestyle, avoiding the gruelling side effects he remembered from chemotherapy." Though I agree the phrasing is inconsistent with what you found later on in the article there, this suggests that the alt-med community sold him on a 100% chance of survival without needing chemo, so he rejected chemo. I guess we don't know without them saying explicitly, if he would have had the chemo if he hadn't found alt-med, but that's certainly what the girlfriend feels - "My thoughts on alternative cancer treatments have changed, I believe it cost Sean his life."
c3534l 6y ago
The person who was interviewed in this article sounds like a really gross person. She killed her boyfriend, but can only muster blame for internet memes and position herself as a victim. She actively encouraged and enabled the death of another person because she couldn't be bothered to look for good medical information and rather than feel guilt, she feels betrayed as if she's the victim. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the kind of person who thinks they singlehandedly know better than doctors despite learning nothing about medicine is also the sort of person who will fail to see their own insidious behavior for what it is.
- Invictus0 6y ago
  I don't agree with this take. Here you have a person who is faced with a life-threatening illness and a brutal treatment plan: the temptation of an alternative cure that seems to have some following online is very strong. There is a kernel of truth to a lot of these alternative medicines, so it's easy for people to say "what if it's true?", and in desperation people will often latch onto these things.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > She killed her boyfriend Where did you get that from? She and his mother tried to turn him away from that course early on. He eventually took her along with him on the alt med journey, but not until after - "At first I was like, 'how are you going to cure your own cancer?' I was just so shocked, I told him, 'I really don’t think you should do this.' "I wasn’t supportive and neither was [his] mum but slowly but surely we got completely sucked into this world."
  - c3534l 6y ago
    The article states quite clearly, multiple times, in multiple different ways that she encouraged and bought into this nonsense. So you have somebody who is told by their doctor they have a 50% chance to live and they, of course, turn to their social support and what does their social support do? They say "you're right, you don't need treatment. Doctors are evil and shouldn't be trusted. The thermal scans show you're healthy." When you have IRL social support for your beliefs, that's not just a bubble, that's a death cult. Do I really need to post all of the many quotes from the article showing they were complicit in all of this?
deleted 6y ago
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anonAndOn 6y ago
Bob Marley died at 36. His early death may have been avoidable had he not chosen "alternative" medicine and just chopped off the toe. [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Marley#Illness_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Marley#Illness_and_death
- mNovak 6y ago
  huh, TIL
vmh1928 6y ago
This thread could just as easily been titled: "an example of how powerful cognitive biases are." People come to believe many things and believe them, in the face of contradicting evidence, even to the point where the belief kills them.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"'False information online is so dangerous'" I agree completely!
specialist 6y ago
Everyone involved in this disinformation are murderers. Instagram hosting false cures (memes) like thermographic scans, coffee enemas, and other whackadoodle bullshit is profiting from death, misery, despair. I'd have a wee bit more tolerance for Freedom Speeches™ advocates, and their specious slippery slope blather, if they acknowledged that rights come with responsibilities. So go ahead and tell your lies. And then rot in jail. Similarly, Freedom Markets™ assumes rational actors with perfect information. I invite everyone who blames the victims to hang out in the oncology waiting room, see the desperation. Tell me that if it was your child or your husband sitting there, you wouldn't do absolutely anything, no matter the cost or the long odds.
mcguire 6y ago
After reading the article and comments here, I can't help but think about the times I've seen people here, on Hacker News, writing that they would be happy to be treated by doctors who get their entire medical education from YouTube. Yes, it's expensive and difficult, but maybe "gatekeeping" is not so bad, given the intellectual and emotional pitfalls of being human and the number of people out there who have it to their advantage for you to believe false things.
SZJX 6y ago
I have to say, the article itself is also not very "scientific" though. The doctors mentioned that chemotherapy would result in a 50% long-term survival rate. So it is entirely possible that he could have gone with chemotherapy, and still died in the end. In the same way, the fact that he went with alternative therapies and died doesn't "prove" that alternative therapies are all effectless. Though I also believe that in the case of cancer, until a definitive cure comes out, chemotherapy is probably as good as we can get, and I don't really assume any ill intent on the part of the people who invented it, even though it's perfectly understandable that people (even including Steve Jobs) try to seek for alternatives when it doesn't work out. But I do think that it is not entirely meritless to keep a healthy dose of skepticism on the drug industry, especially given precedents that are plain to see such as the rampant opioid crisis, as well as the dubious practice of using antidepressants on juveniles etc. etc.
damionx7 6y ago
There are a lot of wrong theories you can give, then surely it doesnt matter if its A, B or C. There is only evidence based treatment we can rely on.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
After lots and lots of discussions I now belive pepole are fundamentally irrational. 75% of the world population believes that there is a god, despite not having a single tangible reason to belive that. Somehow they have a need for simple, rigid explanation for the world. One that is always right. All these medical scams perfectly fit that paradigm. They are right, not like these pepole who have a "theory". Ultimately I think they are happier.

176 points by DanBC 6y ago

maallooc 6y ago

Another score by natural selection

jakeinspace 6y ago
To be fair, one might argue that medical intervention would inhibit natural selection. At least, selection for individuals with less risk of cancer.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Purely physical fitness is not the only parameter natural selection optimizes for. If it were, human babies would be born functional, like most other creatures.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    There’s a relationship between r/K type[1] and body size, resting heart rate, length of gestation cycle, length of time from birth to reproduction, parental rearing duration or presence, and more. Very interesting to me, though it doesn’t say much about humans relating to other humans. I also believe this theory has been criticized, and I don’t mean to advocate for it, but to raise awareness about how statistics give power to test our science as well as our intuitions, when it is used properly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
- abjKT26nO8 6y ago
  No, one cannot. Modern medicine is part of our environment. Failure to make use of it is a failure to adapt to the current environment which lessens the disadvantage of individuals with higher risk of cancer, who may have other advantages letting them thrive in this environment.
BbzzbB 6y ago
That's unnecessarily harsh for a sad story, frankly anyone can fall into those rabbit holes (even if you're smart enough to grow Apple).
- zenexer 6y ago
  In case anyone was unsure of the reference here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems
madiator 6y ago
If you read the book "Thinking fast and slow" or perhaps "Predictably irrational", you will realize how irrational all of us are.
nisa 6y ago
I hate these cynic comments. There are always people involved that knew about his situation lied to him, took his money for fake cures and fake diagnosis. Every one of them should face charges and be forbidden to see patients. This quack bullshit is insanely huge here in Germany and while it's true that in the end it's up to the patient to make the call, most of these quacks build up a relationship and gain trust and then sell their bogus cure with a huge margin. I had a roommate in her 20ies spending 5000+ euros because one of them told her she had heavy metal poisoning - I told her to see a regular doctor and she likely couldn't talk to me if that would be the case (she was fine, just gullible). Fuck everyone that does this. These are plain criminals in my view. There are tons of problem with the medical system and pharma biz, I'm not cheering for them but the alternative is often way worse and outright dangerous for a lot of people.
- stainforth 6y ago
  It was a revelation to me to hear also about homeopathy being followed in Germany. Forgive the generalization, and perhaps the usual mistake of stereotyping, but I thought Germans prided themselves on logic and efficiency. Are there reasons or demographic aspects to this buy-in?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I don't know about reasons, but I don't think it's a "the people are stupid" thing. My private insurance covers homeopathy, the public ones do not. I asked them to just drop that and save me 10 bucks, but they wouldn't and said they don't claim it works, but many of their members do like it, and those were mostly civil servants, lawyers, journalists etc. A friend of mine in medicine had a different perspective on it, his stance is basically that as long as they redirect the actual cases to the actual doctors, homeopathy is fine. It keeps the people who really just want somebody to talk to out of the doctor's offices and they will find help there, because the real doctor doesn't have time to do psycho-therapy light with them. At least from personal experience (my mother believes in it as well), it works. She knows very well what problems call for a doctor and what are okay to try homeopathy on.
dang 6y ago
Please stop posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments to HN. You've been doing it a lot and we ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

DanBC 6y ago

BBC Three is aimed at the 16 - 34 year old demographic. The article talks about someone who went all in on alternative therapies and declined mainstream treatment available on the NHS.

ansible 6y ago
I know people that have gone through chemotherapy. Since this was his 2nd cancer diagnosis, I can understand why he wouldn't want to go through it again. I can understand why he would so desperately want an alternative. If I were to be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I don't know what I'd decide for myself. Of it depends on the diagnosis, if it was just a small skin cancer they could just cut out, sure, let's do that. But if it was something more pernicious, like the Hodgkin lymphoma, I might refuse chemo. I may prefer to just get my affairs in order while not going through chemo, and just trying to appreciate what days I have left. And being able to appreciate the days I have left, because chemo can really knock you out. What's the point of getting more months of life, if you can't do anything? I wouldn't put any of my hopes in an alternative medicine cure, but I've been studying science in various forms for a long time. I have a reasonable knowledge of what might work and what wouldn't.
- selectodude 6y ago
  In the beginning, chemo can actually give you a couple days per week of normality before it knocks you on your ass. I remember chemo saturday, sleep sunday, mon/tue/wed were pretty good, thur/friday decline, chemo again saturday. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It can give you an extra few months of normality, even if you end up dying at the same time.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  But in this case he didn't really have a choice. His attempt at an "alternative" therapy at best didn't have any effect, and by the looks of it it didn't really give him good quality of life either as his health was deteriorating.
  - buitreVirtual 6y ago

Nextgrid 6y ago

> He started documenting his journey on Facebook Lives and grew a huge following. This is a major problem; not only did this stupidity cost him his life but he also put others at risk.

lazyjones 6y ago
It's not fair to say it cost him his life when his survival chance was 50% to begin with and the first chemotherapy failed to cure him. Nobody can say whether the outcome would have been better with a second chemotherapy or perhaps with no treatment at all.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  The first chemo gave him six more years. The 50% estimate was for long term survival, which is generally considered to be 10-15 years or more. It doesn’t say what his short term survival odds may have been. Somewhere between 51-99%.
- fastball 6y ago
  Well not doing anything decreases your chances of survival to about 0%, so I think that is definitely fair to say.
isoskeles 6y ago
Why do you think he put them at risk rather than the other way around? He grew a large following of people encouraging him to continue down that path.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I'm sure a lot of the attention he got was from people already digging their own grave, but the same way he got into it in the first place (by looking at others' stories with alternative "therapies" and the encouragement they're getting) will unfortunately also con others into this dangerous scam.
kulig 6y ago

rvz 6y ago

> "Cherries neutralize acidity in the body and kill cancer cells," read one post on Instagram. "Memes" on Instagram and other social media platforms disguised as misleading and inaccurate health advice is the actual problem. Looks like the word "Meme" in 2020 is now totally different to when it was used in 2006.

catalogia 6y ago
The term 'meme' was coined in the 70s and means an idea that spreads from one person to another. It comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene; the idea is that memes are subject to selection just like genes.
- swayson 6y ago
  Appears intelligence agencies also investigated it https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1229817-vault-7-leaks https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1229817-vault-7-leaks
- arunc 6y ago
  Thanks for the etymology. Never thought meme came out of gene.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    It didn't, it's from a Greek word.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    It resembles "gene" but has an independent origin: meme (n.) "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene. https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race". https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene

capn_cabbage 6y ago

The opposite can be just as dangerous * . "Medlife Crisis" has an [informative video][1] that explains some of what can happen. * Edit: I shouldn't have equated the dangers here. This was a bad take. I still believe there are good bits of info provided in the video, but the relevance to this thread is less than I considered and I should have thought more about what I was sharing. Edit 2: I didn't mean to link to a specific timestamp of the video in the original link. That has been removed. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNzQ_sLGIuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNzQ_sLGIuA

ipnon 6y ago
At the population level, chemotherapy increases survival rates and remissions.
dicytea 6y ago
I clicked on his COVID-19 video[1] on a whim and while I have not watched it yet, my god is the comment section alarming. Is the YouTube comment section always like this when it comes to this topic? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ts8X3HDtPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ts8X3HDtPE
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Yes. Youtube comment sections are among the lowest quality information sources available on the Internet.
- capn_cabbage 6y ago
  Yes that seems to be typical. YouTube comment sections tend to be of poorer quality when the topic is popular or if the channel has a large enough audience.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  ObXkcd: https://xkcd.com/481/ https://xkcd.com/481/

mg794613 6y ago

Why is this article so bend on blaming the meme, as they obviously got the majority of the false information on forums? I don't believe anyone does this based on memes.

Latty 6y ago
I think that's fundamentally misrepresenting what the article is saying. They are saying that the memes shared in these communities serve to reinforce and spread the ideology.
pohl 6y ago
Before “meme” implied GIF or JPG it was just the idea of self replicating ideas that propagate from brain to brain. Text is a medium for meme propagation. The meme itself is independent of the medium. One could catch QAnon from a GIF and pass it on to someone else verbally. Calling the GIF a “meme” is just a colloquialism.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

samirillian 6y ago

50% chance of survival. So at least a 50% chance, even by the doctors' own admission, that she just lost her boyfriend to cancer. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with naturopathic solutions, but people seem to lose the ability to reason about probability after the fact. This is not to make light of the situation, but more to say "don't beat yourself up" about a bad thing that happened.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Their decision to pursue "alternative therapies" reduced that 50% chance to a guaranteed 0% since at best these therapies don't have any beneficial effect.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  There may be cases of spontaneous remission. Effectively, that is the non-treatment control group.
- smabie 6y ago
  I'm sure the alternative therapies have some effect. Maybe even a strong effect sometimes. Placebos are very powerful.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    It's very powerful against a subset of problems, usually the kind of things that are affected by perception of severity, would heal themselves over time anyway etc etc. It's far less of an effect, if what I've read is to be believed, when measured against things like terminal cancer.
- samirillian 6y ago
  50% chance (assuming doctors were correct about survival rate) that your life would be better if you didn't go through chemo. Sum % positive reasons of not doing chemo: n% chance that you'd recover without doing anything n% chance that these naturopathic cures do somehow cure you n% chance that the treatment would actually make things worse It's a garden of forking paths. You can't just reason about this with one number. Choices are hard. People die. Just a matter of order.

strken 6y ago

She didn't lose her boyfriend to conspiracy theories, she lost her boyfriend to the pervasive system of beliefs that prevents people from confronting their assumptions when it really matters. Belief in conspiracy theories is the specific issue from a whole class of problems: what is the most important thing you believe, how do you know it's true, and is that good enough or do you need to take additional action in case it's false?

BEEdwards 6y ago
Except his stance before the cancer came back was pro medical science, it was his youtube and facebook research that dragged him into the conspiracy.
- pizza234 6y ago
  This is not clear. Based on the article: > Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos it seems that he first decided not to undergo chemo, then clinged on whatever he could.
baddox 6y ago
The conspiracy theory is a pretty necessary part, because the ideology needs to be able to dismiss the medical status quo, and it’s simpler to claim that the whole system is a conspiracy rather than attempt to address any actual medical or scientific claims.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

annoyingnoob 6y ago

When my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer she refused medical treatment. She did not want to go through the therapy, the medical process was a worse outcome than death for her. She seemed to just decide that she was done, resigned to her fate. My uncle offered her some kind of herbal tea as a solution to her cancer. Grandma had a worse view of alternative medicine than the actual medicine she had already refused. I had never seen her so upset with my uncle. Her reaction has stayed with me.

TravHatesMe 6y ago
I find it admirable that she was able to be accepting of her fate. I wish I could be that strong, although perhaps it comes with age ("I've lived a full life, I am ready"). I don't believe in naturopathy either, but I wonder if it still has a positive impact for those whom believe in it, ie. the placebo effect.
- nothal 6y ago
  It's probably easier if your odds are not as good as 50%.
  - cko 6y ago
    True, but that may be the perfect opportunity to place hope in these alternative remedies, which she refused. I have a family member with lung cancer and when they felt traditional options have been exhausted, they went full alternative. TCM and such.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Her husband, my grandfather, had died some 30 years prior. She was alone for a long time, more than anything I think she wanted a partner but never seemed to find the right one. She may have felt like medicine was only a temporary solution and not worth it for a relatively short time more.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  I think being informed helps too. I have a couple of extended family members who made this choice. While both were older, they were also both doctors. I imagine that having a clear picture of what treatment looks like can clarify the decision.

egonschiele 6y ago

Yep. Same thing is happening to me now. My dad got thyroid cancer in 2006. In 2018 it spread to his lungs, and in 2019 to his brain. My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it.

klyrs 6y ago
I was there almost 10 years ago. My dad's cancer had metastasized, conventional treatments were failing, and a "monk" wandering the cancer ward offered meditative therapy to the tune of $30,000, up front, no refunds. My brother and I begged them not to waste their money. The charlatan sustained his sales pitch for nearly a month before my parents eventually refused him. My dad lived for another year, and my mom still regrets not "trying" the snake oil.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  That's so low it is disgusting.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> My parents spend a lot of time daily researching "alternative therapies". It's terrible to watch it and not be able to do anything about it. It is the ability to not let go - we don't want these things to happen. We want to have hope that something out there can save - and these emotions are abused. It makes it all the more dastardly.
tim333 6y ago
Guess if the regular therapies don't work it would encourage you to have a look.

luxuryballs 6y ago

an interesting aspect of this is the aversion to traditional therapy caused by experiencing it the first time and how much it made him suffer, I wonder how much of the motivation was due to that versus how much was due to the "false hope" I also wonder if this is a argument for there being value in investing in ways of making chemotherapy less traumatic even though it wouldn't be making it more effective, just less psychological damage

gideonparanoid 6y ago

Coronation Street - a popular TV soap in the UK had a storyline about this last year [0]. As the storyline played out, the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life. I think it was quite brave of a soap to tackle that, & hopefully it's made people think if they were considering alternative 'solutions'. [0] https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/06/coronation-street-spoilers-sinead-tinker-considers-alternative-cancer-treatment-8040952/ https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/06/coronation-street-spoilers-si...

stepstop 6y ago
> the character chose alternative therapies before finally trying conventional medicine, but it was too late & she lost her life. Isn't this the same story as Steve Jobs? I recall reading that on this forum
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes exactly. There have been others like Farrah Fawcet and Andy Kaufman (although Fawcet did it in combination with traditional treatment).
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  It may be that Jobs shortened his life with his rejection of mainstream treatments, but pancreatic cancer also has relatively poor prognosis even with optimal treatment. Good thing it's rare.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    That’s true, but I think in Jobs’ case he actually had a rare type that is treatable. It’s hard to know how much impact his delay had, but it’s possible his focus on alternative medicine killed him. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Jobs&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Health_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Jobs&mobile... > In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.[158] The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor;[159] Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.[158] Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[160] instead relying on alternative medicine to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death". Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that."[161] Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[162] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."

Guy2020 6y ago

Ultimately, individuals are responsible for their choices in "free societies." I don't want to live in a world where all information is regulated by the government. This is a good story about poor choices made by an individual, but I hope it is not fodder for any attempt at regulating what free people choose to do with their lives. I think we need to do a better job at educating people on the dangers of freedom...what do you guys think? Perhaps we need some sort of "media literacy" education at the primary school level that trains people in evaluating sources of information ( which seems to be reserved for the university level in many cases, unfortunately ). My thoughts are with the family of this man. Edit: Wow, I'm surprised at the negative response to my comment. What is so controversial about my views here?

Nextgrid 6y ago
I don't think there is any argument at regulating what free people do. The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available as well as eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk. This is not an argument for regulating information, you are still free to peddle quack as long as you don't make false or unproven claims, and if you are sure your "quack" is actually legitimate you are free to do research, studies and tests just like the supposedly-evil "big pharma".
- Guy2020 6y ago
  > The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information." > eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk. What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like? > the supposedly-evil "big pharma" Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information." Either that or government-approved websites (like the NHS is providing in the UK). It is in the government's best interest to keep you alive for as long as possible (if nothing else, just so you can pay tax longer), and while they aren't always perfect (like the current covid-19 response from some countries) I would still trust them more than some random people playing doctors on social media. > What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like? Outlawing unproven medical claims, and actually enforce the law? > Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree Perfection will never be achieved, but if we take all the effects of "big pharma" (both good and bad, across all diseases) and compare it to the effects of backyard quack medicine, who wins? I'm willing to bet good money that big pharma wins by a large margin, so I'd be willing to trust them until there is enough evidence that says otherwise.

felixchan 6y ago

50% of long-term cancer survival is high. He probably should have took it. Alternative treatments don’t guarantee higher success than modern medicine. However, if modern medicine puts the chance of survival at < 5%, it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches. Modern science aims to create a standardized approach for categorized diseases. Controlled experiments aim to find a magic bullet, but are these experiments really “controlled”? Everyone eats differently; everyone shits differently. Different air quality; stress levels; sleep; metabolism. Not to mention, the body and its disease are both is ever-changing systems over time. Until we have nano-machines, we won’t know the true cause and effect of all these variables. Therefore, the holistic approach* is to use intuition, adaptation, and nonstandard ways to deal with this recognition. The downside of this approach is the amount of information and the ability to determine the credibility (eg. random social media), especially for a layman. However, if one was knowledgeable enough to read thousands of academic papers, from various fields (outside of oncology) -- one could develop a more tailored plan for the individual that accounts for these other factors. *Holistic approach does not mean disregard of science. It does not mean rejecting standard protocols. It means that one should consider a wider-range of factors, in addition to standard protocols. It is an approach that places more value on breadth.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches Fringe approaches would not be considered "fringe" if they were proven to have an effect. Even if it improves your survival rates by merely 1%, it would be still used as part of modern medicine if there was nothing else. The problem is that the quack makes you believe that it will work, so you're still wasting time trying the "treatment" and potentially suffering its side-effects (not to mention the financial impact). It's worse than not doing anything, since at least the latter means you've accepted your fate and can enjoy whatever time you have peacefully instead of being busy with a quack treatment. Furthermore, modern medicine isn't inherently hostile to "alternative medicine". If you think about it, all the potential treatments being researched in labs right now (including for covid-19) are still at the "alternative" stage, and if they end up being proven to work they simply become "medicine". What modern medicine is hostile to is unproven, or proven not to work treatments. If you think you actually have an "alternative" theory that isn't quack, you are welcome to do your research on it to at least rule out any existing reasons why it couldn't work (using existing medical literature), and if the theory still stands by then you are free to engage with the mainstream medical community or study, become a researcher and then test your theory in a safe and controlled environment so the outcome is actually valuable (and will influence further research even if this particular theory doesn't work) and not just anecdotal evidence.

tyingq 6y ago

Thankfully Google got better at pushing this kind of stuff down. It wasn't that long ago that they often returned sketchy websites for mainstream type cancer queries: https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/t-google-cure-for-cancer-top-result-carrot-1501591007.png https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/t-goog...

DubiousPusher 6y ago

If you have someone in your life who is thinking like this and you can get them to read it I highly recommend "The Emporer of All Maladies". It's not a debunking book. It doesn't even address alternative treatments at all. It is a kind of biography of cancer. I think it can help because it puts faces to some of the people who have developed cancer treatments over the years. And it really demystifies the work pharmaceutical researches have done to develop chemotherapy. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z3XeFbDJNYEBM https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z...

ouid 6y ago
I was about to take your recommendation at face value, but then I looked at your username.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
I read this book a few weeks ago and can recommend it as well. It's a very good book.
fossuser 6y ago
His second book, The Gene, is excellent too and definitely worth reading if you liked The Emperor of All Maladies.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Will do. Looking forward to it now. Thanks.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem is that reading an entire book takes effort, and the whole reason why these quack treatments thrive is because people can't be bothered to do effort (and if they did they would have a very high likelihood of disproving the quack just based on reading existing medical literature) and want a quick and easy solution.
- 6y ago

dleslie 6y ago

Sounds to me like he was holding on to some sense of control while he was struggling with losing control to cancer. He'd survived it once already, and had been given a coins' toss chance at long term survival; in medical terms, that's a decade and a half more of life. Faced with painful chemotherapy and likely years of pharmacological interventions that have their own side effects, he ... took a different path. I'm thinking it's a safe bet that there's a deficiency in the NHS' delivery of counseling and mental health services for those facing mortal crisis.

lordnacho 6y ago

IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream before passing from pancreatic cancer. I find it's hard to blame people when there's such a storm of information surrounding these things. It's easy to see how even very intelligent people can pick the wrong remedy. Also I used to think it was clear cut, but I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy.

thefounder 6y ago
The more vulnerable/desperate you are the more likely you are to fall into snakeoil traps. It has little to do with intelligence.
microtherion 6y ago
> IIRC Steve Jobs also went with alternative before turning back to mainstream Yes, he did. Then again, pancreatic cancer, even the "milder" form he had, does not have a great prognosis, and he lived another 8 years after the diagnosis. > I've run into doctors who believe in homeopathy. Hope you ran out on them as well…

criddell 6y ago

If you go on amazon and choose just about any "apricot kernel" product page, the comments invariable mention people consuming them to treat or prevent cancer. In fact, as I typed "apricot kernel" into the search bar, Amazon suggested "apricot kernels bitter seed for cancer". That seems dangerous to me.

dredmorbius 6y ago
That scam's existed since the 1960s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883134
dehrmann 6y ago
That whole family of stone fruit seeds tend to contain cyanide (that's why it's bitter).

wavepruner 6y ago

edit: (I say all this as a sick person who was bed-bound for years. I was able to reverse the course of my illness after studying the work of biochemists that is considered "alternative") The attitude in this thread is ableist. Sick people are intelligent. Sick people are capable. Sick people can feel what is happening in their bodies. And they have a right to seek treatments they deem best. Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer, or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure. When it gets to this point it makes sense to strike out on your own. Some have success. Others do not. But it's a battle that has to be fought unless you want to just give up and lose the life you had. I really struggle to understand why healthy people are so hostile towards sick people who are just trying to survive. Yes, it's sad to watch sick people desperately seek for effective treatments. But just imagine how hard it is to be that sick person desperately searching for effective treatments while your peers treat you like you're crazy, and then simultaneously refuse to provide any reasonable alternatives.

adrianN 6y ago
Sick people just trying to survive should listen to their doctors. It's stupid to normalize seeking out quacks because you don't believe the experts.
derefr 6y ago
> or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. One of the foundational principles I use to reason is "if there was a free-lunch (i.e. a higher-ROI solution—more reward for less risk), then anyone truly motivated to solve the problem would have switched to it, or at least added it to their offering as an extra hail-mary on top of their current approach. Given that they didn't, the free lunch must either not be free (i.e. no less risky), or not be much of a lunch (i.e. not rewarding.)" Yes, in this case, you've got a system with mixed motivations; the FDA isn't motivated to solve problems, so there might be some beneficial drug that isn't on the market. But that doesn't mean that your doctor in particular—someone who is motivated primarily to solve your problem—won't still tell you about such drugs, and help you to acquire them through grey-market channels. Doctors do this all the time—they get patients into drug trials, order in drugs from the medical systems of other countries, acquire new-old stock batches of drugs no longer produced, etc. They also will just tell you to eat a certain food or take a certain supplement as your "prescription", if doing that is a higher-ROI solution than any drug. If doctors are only offering you treatments with devastating side-effects, that's because those are the highest-ROI treatments that exist. Doctors always prioritize safety over benefit[1]; the only time they offer unsafe treatment is when there is no safe treatment—or at least no safe treatment that pays for the costs of going through it by actually having a non-zero likelihood of helping you. [1] For example, doctors use known placebo-equivalents as the first-line treatments for many psychiatric conditions, because placebos have no potential risks; so even if the likelihood of remission from placebo is low, as long as it's higher than zero (which it usually is in psychiatric conditions), doctors want to first make sure you aren't someone who would go into remission from placebo, before moving onto trying to treat you with drugs that actually do something (and therefore have risks.)

jmcgough 6y ago

I've seen stuff like this a number of times. Someone gets their opinions horribly warped by well-crafted YouTube videos and graduates to spending a lot of time with like-minded peers on Facebook groups, subreddits or discord, reinforcing those beliefs. I used to watch a talented gamer on twitch who goes on rants about how covid is a liberal scam, constantly advocates an all-meat diet ("there's no proof vegetables are healthy"), and shares YouTube videos on stuff like that. Trying to tell him otherwise only reinforces his beliefs, and he'll parrot talking points from videos. Completely soured me on his content and it's just really sad to see. When someone lacks the scientific training or education to know whether something is a conspiracy theory, they can really get pulled in by charismatic YouTube personalities espousing nonsense. Social media is really poisoning some peoples' minds.

fossuser 6y ago
It’s scary how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of thing. It makes me wonder what would happen if I watched YouTube videos every day that were misleading but well produced. Would I eventually end up the same way? How damaging is just repeated exposure and reinforcement to this kind of stuff? Is everyone vulnerable? Even being scientifically minded and trying to be a good rational thinker, the way otherwise intelligent people are corrupted scares me. It makes me extra cautious with what information I choose to expose myself to. I do take some comfort that I was able to throw religion away even while growing up surrounded by it as a child. I hope that means there’s a way to be more resilient to misinformation.
- alfonsodev 6y ago
  > Would I eventually end up the same way? In theory no, if you have developed critical thinking. I wonder if critical thinking works like a muscle that we have to train. I personally check opposite opinions on youtube, but it's scary how youtube algorithm wants to brainwash me with recommendations on any direction I take, I use the option of "not interested" a lot, to clean up recommendations. That and the evident radical polarization, scares me.
  - 6y ago

qwerty456127 6y ago

It would help a lot if popular alternative treatments were studied thoroughly (including testing on big numbers of human volunteers - every person who chooses to exercise their right to deny conventional treatment should be convinced to contribute by letting scientists observe him while he is treated alternatively) with intention to identify and dissect every humble positive effect they might cause in any particular kind of patients. A statement like "there is no credible evidence that thing helps" really can't convince an alternative treatment enthusiast to give his idea up. "Obiviously" there is no evidence because nobody no scientist for it. We need to be able to tell them honestly: "we have tried hard, hundreds different people were studied thoroughly for this particular treatment, it really doesn't help or only helps slightly a particular kind of patients you don't fit, please go and get treated the way proven efficient".

insickness 6y ago
The problem is that there are an infinite number of 'alternative' treatments to any illness. How many of these should be taken seriously and tested? Typically, if enough people take an alternative seriously, someone eventually tests it.
- em-bee 6y ago
  all of them? you are not testing the treatment, you are testing the development of the cancer in the patient, regardless of which treatment they get. simply test everyone diagnosed with cancer on a regular basis just like they get tested when they do the recommended treatment. in other words, if someone refuses the treatment, don't let them refuse the tests as well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jackinloadup 6y ago

Having had 5 others in my life die from traditional cancer treatment I can certainly understand why people look for alternatives. I've seen brain, skin, blood cancer as an adult and I'm not sure what other cancers relatives had while I was growing up. I've always worried if I would have the strength to fight or cave.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Treatments, side effects, and recovery rates vary tremendously among types of cancer. Some are eminently treatable with virtually no downsides. Some progress so slowly that treatment is all but unnecessary in most cases. And some remain tremendously aggressive, treatments themselves debilitating, and spread or recurrence all but assured. Cancer is not s single disease, with a common origin, treatment, or outcome. It is a common characteristic --- malignant cell growth --- with multiple distinct manifestations, causes, prognoses, and treatments. Knowledge of what specific condition is being faced makes a huge difference in response options.

fractionalhare 6y ago

It's deeply ironic that the BBC served me this ad while reading the article: https://ibb.co/CVTw7pT https://ibb.co/CVTw7pT

ColinWright 6y ago
The BBC does not serve ads, that's a part of the article as a demonstration of the memes that are out there.

DiabloD3 6y ago

I like my conspiracy theory. The reason we have such a bad problem tackling cancer, both medically and socially, is because it is just too damned profitable to get rid of it. The cure for cancer? A lifetime of eating a nutritious diet, don't eat lots of carbs, eat absolutely no refined carbs, eat enough meat, avoid almost anything that's pre-made or shelf stable, don't smoke, don't drink. Do research into anti-inflammation lifestyles. Exercise for the point of reducing those markers, eating for the point of reducing those markers, getting enough sunlight because Vitamin D is necessary for these things (the sun/cancer risk model made popular in the 90s is not without its massive dose of irony). You can't 100% keep yourself from getting it: if you live long enough, eventually your body's ability to eat cancer cells (the process of autophagy is amazing) just ceases to work... but you can put it off as long as you can until something else kills you first. I'm pretty sure if 90% of the garbage the average person eats every day just vanished off store shelves, we'd see a ten-fold decrease in cancer rates. Nobody wants to have that discussion. Nobody wants to talk about how a little diet modification here, a little diet modification there, a little more exercise of the right kind, would see a ten-fold decrease in many things, not just cancer. My conspiracy theory is, fundamentally, we don't care about other people so strongly that it bled over into we don't care about ourselves, too. What is it that people our age are saying? 'We're here for a good time, not a long time?' Yeah, what happens when you're still alive past 40, everything you did is going to hit you like a freight train... ... and big Pharma is here to help (their bottom line). If you try to dodge big Pharma, but don't keep your wits about you? You get taken in by scammers, you forget to use your cognitive skills to weed the facts out from the bullshit. That guy got taken in, and it killed him. This was his second pass through that meat grinder, he got to see how big Pharma cures you up front, he wanted a second opinion, and he got it from a snake oil salesman. If you try to dodge big Pharma, but do keep your wits about you? Maybe you change your lifestyle now, decades before its too late; maybe if your destiny was to get cancer in your 50s, maybe now you get it in your 60s or 70s instead, or maybe you don't get it at all. We perform preventative maintenance on so many things, our little community on here HN certainly appreciates that more than most, so why, collectively, is it so hard to imagine preventative maintenance of the human body? Cancer for most people is the end result of an entire lifetime of avoiding the truth; only the truly unlucky did everything right and still got it, or got it at an unimaginable young age before they had any choice in the matter. I realize that I'm probably going to get a lot of downvotes because of what I wrote, and I don't care. I'd rather be downvoted for saying the truth, then keep my points through silence.

ilamont 6y ago

But after reading a lot online, Sean believed he could cure his cancer by detoxing and completely changing his lifestyle, avoiding the gruelling side effects he remembered from chemotherapy. Strongly recommend reading "The Unwinding of the Miracle" by Julie Yip-Williams (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39216478-the-unwinding-of-the-miracle https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39216478-the-unwinding-o...). A NYC lawyer and mom diagnosed in her 30s with Stage IV colon cancer, she provides a document of her thought processes as she is confronted with terminal cancer. She describes the multiple types of modern medical treatments and trials she participated in and (with her oncologists' permission) flirts with Chinese medicine and alternative diets and treatments. It really is unflinching and uncomfortable look at the disease from a patient's point of view, but also a beautiful book.

pizza234 6y ago

While this is an interesting subject, the article is very ambiguous abous the causality relationship: > Soon after Sean found out his cancer had returned, when he had decided he was rejecting chemotherapy, the pair found themselves watching countless YouTube videos It seems to me that he had already decided not to undergo chemiotherapy, and clinged on whatever it was available, or at least, more subtly, he deeply wanted to find any other cure that was was not chemotherapy. While cancer conspiracy theories are certainly damaging, if the reading above is correct, such theories correlated to his death, didn't cause it - he may as well have turned to religion, drugs or anything else.

nazgulsenpai 6y ago
This was my takeaway as well.
angry_octet 6y ago
It is clear from the article that he was told thermoscans of whatever would track the progress of the cancer, and showed that is was being defeated. There is a huge placebo effect on mental outlook of a sciencey test like that. It seems clear that if he had had regular medical scans that showed a growing tumor he might have changed course. The alternative medicine community it complicit in many avoidable deaths. It's a testament to the power of self delusion that they can sleep at night.
Nursie 6y ago
He turned to alt-med because it promised a cure without chemo - "At the time, Sean’s doctors told him he had at least a 50% chance of long-term survival if he underwent chemotherapy. But after reading a lot online, Sean believed he could cure his cancer by detoxing and completely changing his lifestyle, avoiding the gruelling side effects he remembered from chemotherapy." Though I agree the phrasing is inconsistent with what you found later on in the article there, this suggests that the alt-med community sold him on a 100% chance of survival without needing chemo, so he rejected chemo. I guess we don't know without them saying explicitly, if he would have had the chemo if he hadn't found alt-med, but that's certainly what the girlfriend feels - "My thoughts on alternative cancer treatments have changed, I believe it cost Sean his life."

c3534l 6y ago

The person who was interviewed in this article sounds like a really gross person. She killed her boyfriend, but can only muster blame for internet memes and position herself as a victim. She actively encouraged and enabled the death of another person because she couldn't be bothered to look for good medical information and rather than feel guilt, she feels betrayed as if she's the victim. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the kind of person who thinks they singlehandedly know better than doctors despite learning nothing about medicine is also the sort of person who will fail to see their own insidious behavior for what it is.

Invictus0 6y ago
I don't agree with this take. Here you have a person who is faced with a life-threatening illness and a brutal treatment plan: the temptation of an alternative cure that seems to have some following online is very strong. There is a kernel of truth to a lot of these alternative medicines, so it's easy for people to say "what if it's true?", and in desperation people will often latch onto these things.
Nursie 6y ago
> She killed her boyfriend Where did you get that from? She and his mother tried to turn him away from that course early on. He eventually took her along with him on the alt med journey, but not until after - "At first I was like, 'how are you going to cure your own cancer?' I was just so shocked, I told him, 'I really don’t think you should do this.' "I wasn’t supportive and neither was [his] mum but slowly but surely we got completely sucked into this world."
- c3534l 6y ago
  The article states quite clearly, multiple times, in multiple different ways that she encouraged and bought into this nonsense. So you have somebody who is told by their doctor they have a 50% chance to live and they, of course, turn to their social support and what does their social support do? They say "you're right, you don't need treatment. Doctors are evil and shouldn't be trusted. The thermal scans show you're healthy." When you have IRL social support for your beliefs, that's not just a bubble, that's a death cult. Do I really need to post all of the many quotes from the article showing they were complicit in all of this?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

anonAndOn 6y ago

Bob Marley died at 36. His early death may have been avoidable had he not chosen "alternative" medicine and just chopped off the toe. [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Marley#Illness_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Marley#Illness_and_death

mNovak 6y ago
huh, TIL

vmh1928 6y ago

This thread could just as easily been titled: "an example of how powerful cognitive biases are." People come to believe many things and believe them, in the face of contradicting evidence, even to the point where the belief kills them.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"'False information online is so dangerous'" I agree completely!

specialist 6y ago

Everyone involved in this disinformation are murderers. Instagram hosting false cures (memes) like thermographic scans, coffee enemas, and other whackadoodle bullshit is profiting from death, misery, despair. I'd have a wee bit more tolerance for Freedom Speeches™ advocates, and their specious slippery slope blather, if they acknowledged that rights come with responsibilities. So go ahead and tell your lies. And then rot in jail. Similarly, Freedom Markets™ assumes rational actors with perfect information. I invite everyone who blames the victims to hang out in the oncology waiting room, see the desperation. Tell me that if it was your child or your husband sitting there, you wouldn't do absolutely anything, no matter the cost or the long odds.

mcguire 6y ago

After reading the article and comments here, I can't help but think about the times I've seen people here, on Hacker News, writing that they would be happy to be treated by doctors who get their entire medical education from YouTube. Yes, it's expensive and difficult, but maybe "gatekeeping" is not so bad, given the intellectual and emotional pitfalls of being human and the number of people out there who have it to their advantage for you to believe false things.

SZJX 6y ago

I have to say, the article itself is also not very "scientific" though. The doctors mentioned that chemotherapy would result in a 50% long-term survival rate. So it is entirely possible that he could have gone with chemotherapy, and still died in the end. In the same way, the fact that he went with alternative therapies and died doesn't "prove" that alternative therapies are all effectless. Though I also believe that in the case of cancer, until a definitive cure comes out, chemotherapy is probably as good as we can get, and I don't really assume any ill intent on the part of the people who invented it, even though it's perfectly understandable that people (even including Steve Jobs) try to seek for alternatives when it doesn't work out. But I do think that it is not entirely meritless to keep a healthy dose of skepticism on the drug industry, especially given precedents that are plain to see such as the rampant opioid crisis, as well as the dubious practice of using antidepressants on juveniles etc. etc.

damionx7 6y ago

There are a lot of wrong theories you can give, then surely it doesnt matter if its A, B or C. There is only evidence based treatment we can rely on.

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

After lots and lots of discussions I now belive pepole are fundamentally irrational. 75% of the world population believes that there is a god, despite not having a single tangible reason to belive that. Somehow they have a need for simple, rigid explanation for the world. One that is always right. All these medical scams perfectly fit that paradigm. They are right, not like these pepole who have a "theory". Ultimately I think they are happier.