Some Thoughts on Cancer from a Hacker

My sons and I have talked about that and have wondered if killing the cats ultimately helped. As I understand it, ultimately some other rat population crowded out the rats that were carrying the vermin. Perhaps that was more effective (and perhaps indirectly supported by reducing the cat population). I don't have the answer, I am just saying I have wondered if a different conclusion is in order.

Couldn't it be that your family's survival rate isn't due to nutrition?

Sure. It could also be that I got well with cystic fibrosis by sheer luck and happenstance. However 10+ years of steady forward progress seems to imply otherwise. :-)

FWIW: When my dad had colon cancer at the age of 69 and wasn't diagnosed until after he lost half his body weight, my parents focused heavily on hydration. They calculated how much fluids he needed daily and anything containing caffeine did not count. (Alcohol would not count either but my dad gave up drinking many years earlier.) When he was really nauseous from chemo, she made him homemade "slushies"/milkshake-like drinks. She used ice cream, milk, and fresh or frozen fruit...not sure what else. When he was too sick to tolerate that, she used ice, frozen fruit and fruit juice. On bad days, he got this twice a day in place of meals. She was putting so much weight on him at a time when most patients are losing weight that his doctor basically yelled at her for it. He has a long-standing heart condition and the doctor was concerned that regaining so much weight so quickly would put too much strain on his heart.

My mother also came up with some excuse for him to miss one radiation treatment a week. She watched her mother die from cancer in her teens and she is convinced that the radiation killed her. I have been told she came up with excuses even though she kept his skin in such good shape that he never had radiation burns, which is apparently a common reason (especially with older people) for delaying treatment. She used Penaten cream (a German product for treating diaper rash) to keep his skin in such good shape. My understanding is this product was adopted by two different cancer clinics because of her use of it on him. She also used it to help his 13 inch surgical scar heal better.

I also used adequate food and hydration to break my sister's fever the first twenty four hours after she was home from the hospital following her first mastectomy. I have always put more emphasis on hydration with my sons and my own health issues than on eating. It takes 2 to 3 weeks to starve to death (or more in some cases). You can die from lack of fluids in as little as 2 days. Dehydration can be misinterpreted as hunger and this probably contributes to obesity and is probably why drinking a great deal of water is a dieting technique that helps some people lose weight.

Maybe you have the right idea about nutrition, but you don't know --- so you're gambling with people's lives by telling them things that may only make the situation worse.

I do wrestle with such questions. I have a website where I try to share information about how I got well. I often wonder if it should come down. Though I worry more about people misunderstanding it and thus misusing it and getting into trouble that way. The approach itself is very conservative, much more so than conventional medicine. And we all impact our body chemistry every single minute of every single day with myriad small choices, starting with every single thing we eat or drink. Study after study after study indicates that diet and lifestyle play major roles in every major deadly disease but then when you come down with something doctors have no idea what to tell you about nutrition. The state of the art nutritional advice for my condition -- where having a dietitian on staff is common for CF clinics -- is to recommend a "high fat, high calorie, high salt" diet. In practice, this means they actively encourage people with my condition to load up on junk food. This runs counter to my experience of what works. It also is the opposite of what most folks with my condition are doing who have better than average success in the face of this problem. So I am hardly the only one, my example is just more dramatic.

So, for now, I leave the website up and struggle with how to better convey what I understand. Because I think it is clear and well established, even in "conventional" mental models for health, that diet and lifestyle do make a big impact and since no one can stop eating entirely or cease to have a lifestyle, it seems to me the only sane thing to do is try to encourage and support better education and mental models for those pieces of the puzzle.

When you hear people complaining about this, it's a good sign that they're on the extreme margins of whatever field of study they're in, or that they're getting too far ahead of themselves (i.e. trying to pursue clinical studies before basic scientific facts are known). The "mechanism of action" becomes much more important to reviewers when your evidence for efficacy is weak and/or the thing you're advocating tends to go against established scientific theory.

Sometimes the medical establishment is conservative, but this is a feature, not a bug.

Likewise, the recent WHO announcement re: cell phones & brain cancer was poopooed, since everybody knows the radiation is not powerful enough to damage DNA, but! it could certainly cause some low-grade inflammation of brain tissue. Low-grade inflammation + daily use -> chronic inflammation -> cancer?

No, I don't know how something like leukemia would fit under this rubric.

(EDIT: I am guessing you are reading it that way due to the quotation marks? If you check my comment history, I think you will find I am prone to overuse of quotations. I stick them in to make it clearer it is a phrase and those words belong together. I often feel English doesn't do a good job of making such distinctions. I suspect this has something to do with growing up in a bilingual household. In German, lots of words get run together into a megaword, which makes it clear it's basically a phrase. We do not have a similar mechanism in English. I often feel that leaves too much room for misinterpretation. So it's an odd personal quirk. Sorry for the confusion.)

Thanks.

I would guess that when the first crazy experimentalist tried putting seeds in the ground instead of foraging for fruit, there was a cave painting about how the Spirits would punish the whole tribe for its arrogance.

So for a while there, they were seriously working on making a virus that would be completely invisible to your immune system- and this was maybe eight years ago. I'm sure there are dozens of little biotech companies in the bay area alone trying to do the same thing now.