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“Garlic has long been considered a powerful natural antifungal,” said Dr. Lawrence D. Rosen, chief of pediatric integrative medicine at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and a pediatrician at the Whole Child Center in nearby Oradell. Dr. Rosen pointed out that studies have found garlic effective against a number of fungal infections, including those caused by Candida and other common pathogens.
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Here's the supporting study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12174037?itool=EntrezSys...
And conclusion: "Fresh garlic extract has a greater efficacy than garlic powder extract as indicated both by its effects on morphology and inhibition of growth."
(none of this is to say it's not effective, just that it's unlikely western doctors would do this based on current clinical evidence)
What would be unethical about instead offering an experimental antifungal treatment that had not been clinically tested or verified? When you have a fast-acting terminal disease and are capable of participating in informed consent, seriously, what's the worst that can happen?
Note than many of the barriers are political. For example, we want to use clinical date from the EU, but the GDPR law makes working with the data extremely challenging. Previously, I worked with GA4GH which is trying to get consent forms changed to allow more aggregation of clinical data to be re-used outside of the original trial (metastudies on millions of patients) but it hasn't really gained a lot of adoption.
Other barriers are financial- there are a lot of incumbents who make a lot of money without making the system significantly better (I think of the major EHR companies here, especially Epic, but many drug makers and medical device makers fall in this category too).
Even within the reasonable constraints on ethics, the field could do tremendously better but there is no political will to make it so.
When I read "black seed" in the comment I guessed it might be Nigella seeds, which are sprinkled atop pides in the local middle-eastern bakeries, adding a lovely piquancy to the bread.
It likely was not used in this case. A doctor friend of mine once told me that American doctors try to err on the side of doing things they could defend in court if sued for malpractice. Remedies of this sort probably fail to meet that standard.
I do personally know someone who served as "patient zero" in a clinical trial years ago trying to marry Western cancer treatments to non drug approaches, like diet. They lived when they should have really died. But I haven't heard of anything further coming of that initial study.