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Comment by samirillian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

There may be cases of spontaneous remission. Effectively, that is the non-treatment control group.

I'm sure the alternative therapies have some effect. Maybe even a strong effect sometimes. Placebos are very powerful.

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.

A 50% chance _with_ treatment. A 0% chance without. I know what I'd pick.

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