Keep Your Cures Off My Cancer

[SidDithers]

10. Orac addresses alternative treatments in that second link...

Orac is really David H. Gorski, who is an "American associate professor of surgery at Wayne State University[1] and breast cancer oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gorski

He states:

It might surprise readers to learn that when it comes to patients wanting to use alternative medicine to treat their cancer, I take a very practical approach to the problem. I will tell them what I think about it and, if interested, lay out the reasoning why. I might even tell them that I think they’re wasting their time and money. But then, if they insist on using it as well, I try to make sure that they are undergoing conventional, science-based treatment and tell them that they can use whatever they like alongside it as long as (1) I know what it is and (2) it doesn’t interfere with the science-based treatments they are undergoing. The reason is simple. I want the patient to live, and as long as that patient doesn’t abandon conventional science-based cancer treatment in favor of quackery, the patient’s chance at survival has been maximized, assuming condition #2 is met. I might be caustic, funny, and even contemptuous on this blog, and that’s fine. In the “real world,” however, how I behave has real consequences, and I don’t want those consequences to be to drive a patient away from the treatment that will help her. The blog is the blog, and I pull no punches here, but I try never to attack a cancer patient for her choices, no matter how horrific the quackery I am deconstructing is. Real life is real life. The two must be distinguished.

I think his comments make a lot of sense.



Sid