The problem with glioblastoma is that completely removing all the visible tumor --as the surgeon did

[longship]

62. The facts on ketogenic diets and cancer.

As I posted above, I am skeptical of this claim. Apparently, so are oncologists, like David Gorski.

Here's his summary of ketogenic diets.

Clearly, ketogenic diets are not ready for prime time as a treatment for cancer, either alone or in combination with conventional therapy. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped it from being touted by all manner of alternative cancer practitioners (i.e., quacks) and others as a cancer cure that “they” don’t want you to know about or saying things like, “…it’s nothing short of medical malpractice and negligence to fail to integrate this type of dietary strategy into a patient’s cancer treatment plan,” as Joe Mercola did. Dr. Seyfried himself has contributed to the hyperbole quite a bit as well. For example:

"These studies are all in combination with either radiation or chemotherapy. My preference is to start metabolic therapy with GBM (glioblastoma multiforme). This is a devastating type of brain cancer. Metabolic therapy with a restricted KD could be done with a few tumors where you know the conventional standard of care doesn’t work at all. You would choose those kinds of patients and do a clinical trial based on historical controls and see what the outcome would be and see if you could get some level of survival that would match or be better than the conventional standard of care."

Regular readers of SBM should know the problem with this sort of approach. No IRB worth its salt would approve such a trial because it would be ethically dubious, but, even worse, it would be ethically dubious and it wouldn’t really tell us anything unless those few patients either had near-miraculous responses or died very quickly. Anything else would simply tell us that the diet is probably doing no harm. More numbers would be needed, particularly if the comparison is to historical controls, to get even an inkling of whether there might be benefit. In that case, you might as well do a proper phase I/II clinical trial, which is what is happening.

(Snip links to current trials)

In other words, clinical data should be rolling in fairly soon, and that’s a good thing. In the meantime Dr. Seyfried and other advocates who so passionately believe that ketogenic diets will greatly help patients with brain cancer do no one any favors by claiming unequivocally that cancer is a metabolic disease and saying that ketogenic diets are more beneficial than chemotherapy for patients with brain tumors.

Much, much more at link.

Ketogenic diets for cancer -- hype vs science (At Science-Based Medicine Blog)

Apparently my skepticism is well placed. The studies cited in this thread are at best preliminary and apparently unblinded. (Not sure how one would blind somebody's diet, however.) As Dr. Gorski says, there are some stage I/II clinical trials in the works. So we may know the facts soon enough. And in conjunction with standard treatment, the diet at least seems to do no harm, although a few patients in the pilot trials seemingly could not tolerate it and dropped out, which should be a bit worrisome to folks promoting it. Then, there's the issue that a main proponent of ketogenic diets for cancer has associated with the utter quack Joseph Mercola.

My best to you all.