Chemo Truthers Are the New Anti-Vaxxers

In my view this is a tricky issue. I agree that anti vaxxers are a bad trend. But I think to some degree the medical establishment has brought this onto themselves. I remember when things like yoga and meditation came up a lot of doctors just brushed it off as total nonsense. It took a long time for them to catch up. Same for the microbiome. A lot of traditional medicine for a long time has claimed a connection between gut health and general health which most doctors also rejected. Only recently the idea gets some acceptance.

If I had a serious disease I would probably also look into alternative treatments (In Addition to the usual options) because I think most doctors have a very narrow view on things. What bugs me for example is the focus on fixing things vs preventing. Doctors should put much more effort into to promoting healthy lifestyles than they do now.

In short: I am not surprised that people are skeptical of the usual medical advice. Unfortunately some people take this way too far as the anti vaxxers show.

> According to Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined". "Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He was also influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004." He eventually underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure") in July 2004, that appeared to remove the tumor successfully.[175][176]

> Jobs did not receive chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

> Jobs died at his Palo Alto, California, home around 3 p.m. (PDT) on October 5, 2011, due to complications from a relapse of his previously treated islet-cell pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which resulted in respiratory arrest.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

It isn't stupidity that makes people not believe in medical science. Jobs wasn't stupid. It's some kind of hubris and mistrust. The belief that I know better than an entire community of professionals who have dedicated their lives to knowing these answers. Why, what if actual the answer is the one I want to hear instead of the difficult path?

One of the biggest issues right now, is that we have a community (doctors, scientist, researchers) who need to backup their claims with actual proof's or risk loosing their license/reputation vs a community of "gurus"/"self-healers" who don't have to backup any of their claims at all. Thus the "gurus" can make HUGE claims, that to someone sick sound much better than the conservative claims made by doctors.

Give both groups the same voice & reach, and guess who wins.

This is nothing new though; gurus and healers have been saying for decades that there are better cures (after which most people who listened to them died and sometimes they died themselves after taking their own 'cure').

Hell, even here on HN we see people basically claiming that keto + no sugar + fasting will prevent or cure cancer. And this is a community that wants real proof, yet many here seem to believe that and might forgo chemo in the future because of that belief. The thing is; most of these people (as I usually check) seem to be in their 20s. In your 20s you are in fact indestructible in most cases, so thinking that you will survive anything and that doing some fad diet/cure/whatever will help you do that says or means nothing. Fast forward 30-40 years and then let's discuss that again.

Maybe they are right (but right means there is a lot of research and real cases and there are not at the moment), but if not, i'm quite scared about how many people here follow these half baked ideas and then basically play 'health guru' online because they 'feel so good'. Newsflash; you always feel good in your 20s, even if you smoke, eat burgers+pizza and drink every day, you still feel fine because you are young. It is dangerous claiming these things together with half baked scientific theories about cancer cells.

This is not new and it predates the internet. My wife's aunt died of breast cancer 30 years ago. She decided to not have chemotherapy and instead opted for self treatment via a vegan diet even though she was relatively young and had a very treatable cancer. It happened before our relationshp but the utter stupidity of that choice is still used as a cautionary tale among her family.

That said, I've seen two family members die from terminal cancer and in both cases, they would have been better served by hospice rather than spending the last year of their life in chemo. I felt like it was a money grab by doctors. Their end of life oncology treatment cost the insurance company a couple hundred thousand dollars each

Manditory relevant Dr Cox rant: (Scrubs - s07e06)

https://youtu.be/RK8dMRLVWvg

I'd type the quote, but I'm on a tablet and cannot find anywhere from which to cut and paste it.

This is clear cut. If you have, for example,stage 4 non-hodgkin's lymphoma and arent treated very quickly with R-CHOP chemotherapy, you will die very quickly. If you are treated, the cure rate is 90%.

Taking the time to look around, going down to South America to take in the airs, travelling to India to try to yoga it away, you will die. And quickly.

There are certain very aggressive cancers like NHL that are curable with a high success rate today using, in the case of NHL, a combination of chemo and bio agents like Rituximab.

If you aren't immediately treated you will die.

Convincing someone with one of these diseases to avoid "western" medicine because they are lying and seek alternative treatment is essentially participating in assisted suicide.

I'm skeptical of all of it.

On the one hand, the medical industry is tied so closely to government that they are even granted immunity for FDA approved treatments. A policy which basically assumes nobody makes mistakes.

They have made the requirements to bring a drug to market so onerous that only the very largest companies can afford it.

The regulatory infrastructure is heavily influenced by non-medical industry industries, such as the alcohol industry's non-stop lobbying to make and keep cannabis a schedule 1 drug.

This all stinks so badly my default position is to hardly trust anything coming from the establishment.

Anyone trying to make claims outside of establishment channels is generally a near lone voice that may or may not understand what they are talking about. Gauging their claims becomes very difficult as often it is not even legal for others to test their claims. I would basically have to become an expert, myself, to actually understand either side of a claim.

To make matters worse, everyone in the world is now an independent expert everywhere on everything and they can insert themselves into every conversation. I find most commonly people outside the U.S. commenting on things inside the U.S. while clearly not having one clue about how the government activities make the whole thing look and smell like a waste treatment facility.

Then people come up with the stupid terms, such as "anti-vaxxers". This term is now used against people who simply believe the government has no power force people to receive injections. Government forcing this kind of thing is going to get a bunch of people really screwed up and killed, largely because nobody anywhere in the process is ever close to being individually accountable (e.g., if somehow a court rules in favor of the harmed parties, they just get paid from tax dollars, not corporate profits, corporate assets, individual assets, and certainly no jail time for anyone).

Edit to add:

I remember reading the following quote from a parent who chose chemo for their daughter:

"We basically tortured her for two years and then she died."

It's a very different take, but it's real.

A chemo truther here, if you will. AMA about what I understand about chemotherapy. To the best of my knowledge only very few cancers respond well to chemotherapy - they are testicular cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma and ovarian cancer.

If you contradict any of my opinions, before I reply to you I want to know, your personal experience in investigating cancer therapies beyond what your doctor, medical school or news media told you. For example:

- Have you read at length the articles/books by mainstream train MDs who have a different opinion?

- have you talked to oncologists with dissenting opinions?

This is the classic argument of quality vs quantity. Chemo will give you more time but severely damages your DNA, organs, etc. potentially affecting quality of life greatly.

Chemo quality of life can be terrible and costs can be insane. Choosing to die is often a reasonable choice to suffering terribly and going bankrupt for a chance of survival

We are barely out of the dark-ages of medicine and there are fundamental shifts in perspective every day. (Like the new link between viruses and everything from Alzheimer's to cancer.) Even "folksy"-seeming perspectives like the linking the gut to seemingly unrelated areas like the brain turn out to have been correct. And as for the "anti-vaxers", I had dismissed them out-of-hand until I spend time with several neurologists (both researchers and practitioners) that were staying at my hotel for a conference, and after a few drinks and stealthy nametag removal admitted they are in general not willing to administer most vaccines to themselves or their own children. (I can do into a few more details, but I do not wish to start a anti-vax flamewar...)

Well at least it's not contagious so all they'll achieve is win a darwin award

So this lovely list of people has a new group: 1) Anti-vaxxers 2) climate change deniers 3) anti-GMO 4) anti-nuclear 5) (new!) chemo truthers

Sadly, a lot of the population are members of at least one group. Would love to know if the membership numbers of are 1-5 going up or down

The other I've heard was that lowering cholesterol drugs truthers or something, are also anti-vaxxers :-D. As a libertarian, I think we have rights to choose whatever therapy or preventive treatment as we want.

> Still, a group of online cancer truthers have zeroed in on chemotherapy as the ultimate example of the hubris and greed of Western medicine and Big Pharma.

Anti-vaxxers and chemotherapy truthers are employ only somewhat more extreme forms of the fallacious mode of reasoning that dominates today’s media. Open up pretty much any article about a complex issue, and you’ll see the pattern. Relevant facts will be combined with irrelevant ones and set in a narrative arc, a story with clearly identified villains and victims. The reader knows what conclusions she is supposed to draw based on how she feels about the villains and victims, as opposed to objective big picture analysis.

Take a simple example: Trump’s recent proposed revisions to NEPA, the federal law that requires government entities to perform environmental review of infrastructure projects: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/climate/trump-nepa-enviro.... The whole thing is set within a narrative arc about Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with Trump as the villain. Isolated quotes from individuals are provided, making various assertions. Nowhere is there any analysis of objective facts by which someone could evaluate the proposal. For example, there is no mention of the fact that European countries have environmental review rules even more streamlined than what Trump is proposing. There is no mention of the median environmental review period of transit projects under NEPA (6.7 years), studies that have been done estimating the costs of delaying infrastructure projects (trillions), etc. Nothing to permit objective evaluation, just narrative, victims, and the villain. This is how journalists are taught to write and this is how they do write.

Anti-vaxxers and chemo truthers simply engage in a somewhat more extreme version of this reasoning. They likewise ignore the big picture analysis. Chemotherapy, for example, clearly causes harms, but has even greater benefits. There are many studies quantifying those harms relative to the benefits. Instead of looking at that analysis, they elevate the narrative above all else. “Big drug companies,” “western medicine,” etc., are the villains. The narrative is that those greedy players are suppressing natural remedies out of a desire for profit. Within that narrative, a few anecdotes about people getting better without cancer are all it takes to make the narrative plausible.

If you read Matt Taibbi’s work, for example, is he so different? He uses “Wall Street” and “big banks” in the same way as these folks use “western medicine.” He constructs a narrative where the entire global banking system, and practices employed by nearly every advanced democracy, are causing harm in the pursuit of profit. The experts are hoodwinking you, but he and a few others have seen through it! Throwing in a few anecdotes of misconduct or bad behavior seals the deal and makes the narrative believable.

Is cancer infectious? How is this anywhere near anti-vaxxers? Don't vaccines mainly exist to treat for something dangerous to the whole herd? Only some small part of the herd even gets cancer.. how is this not discrediting vaccines by even just comparing the two?

Why is this on HN?