Was cancer less likely in a pre-industrial world?
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
This a meaningless question for most people, if it helps save lives in the future, great.
I think you should also pay attention to Bret Weinstein's work on telomeres and cancer. If the environmental pressures are for a low age, you end up with long telomeres to allow more dividing of cells to replace those damaged, however those same long telomeres make you more susceptible to cancer should you live longer.
What you are likely trying to broach is the question "do organisms evolve to die?" the answer to which is "yes." This was originally studied in pea plants. The maturation of the seed pods sends a chemical signal back to the main plant which induces death. It dies so that its progeny have more space; this is incentivized over generations because a changing genome is more advantageous to a static one.
Same logic can be applied to animals. It is not just that there may be no pressure to evolve telomere repair, it may be that telomere repair is markedly disadvantageous.
Would you risk your life crossing a road? Working on a construction site?
As for the far future, maybe we will lie in a tank somewhere, have a cord attached to our brain and control robots that are in the dangerous environments for us. At least the people who can afford such a life style. It would also mean that we don't have to do shorter trips to visit someone or some place as you could just use avatars that are already present. Only for larger distances will ping delays become significant (thousands of km). It also means that we don't need breathable atmospheres or livable temperatures any more. Terraforming Mars would be a waste of time, as would be living down a gravity well. Maybe even the robots would be a waste if we can just live in simulated worlds instead. Already now there is a large gamer population. If you extrapolate the growing segment, we might end in a world where people spend their entire lives in simulated environments.
You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
Also no matter if you live in a virtual system or a real one, your body needs are real, and tied to an ecosystem. Taking a brain and putting in a jar works in Robocop, but again, not in reality. It's not a matter of technology. everything is interconnected.
Anyway.
So you claim to know what future generations will be like? Not a good idea. OP is quite right that many kids today spend a great deal of time in front of screens. This is even more noticeable in Asia, the most populated continent on Earth, where online gaming is huge.
I would not be so fast to waive this as a sci-fi flick. It's the classic misalignment of generation's values mistake. We should not assume that we'll be able to understand what our children and grandchildren's values will be.
> Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.
This might be true for the majority of the society, but not everyone. Personally, i enjoy isolation from others for the most part due to my personality being rather introverted. This is also why i'm okay with remote work and prefer it to being in the office. There are certainly other people who wouldn't mind doing their jobs remotely and even if not everyone needs to do that, the technologies that would be developed around this concept would most certainly be useful in some way, like remote surgery: https://fortune.com/2020/02/11/tele-robotics-surgery-5g-heal...
Even if the things above are somewhat feasonable (with technologies like VRChat becoming an interesting way of socializing for some, as well as communities on Discord and Reddit, as well as social media in general), as for the "brain jar" scenario, i think you are mostly correct. I doubt that we'd be able to tackle the more "sci-fi" topics that concern our biology. For example, even if one could maintain a brain within some sort of a container, we know way too little about what exactly it'd need to remain healthy, as well as how we'd connect all of the nerve endings. Essentially, i think that we need to study our bodies more, since there's probably a link even between our gut bacteria and the functioning of our brains, as well as all of the hormones etc.: https://www.daimanuel.com/2020/11/17/how-your-gut-health-aff...
That's not to say that we shouldn't explore new possibilities and research longetivity or even the mechanisms that control the functioning of our bodies, though. That sort of research would at the very least decrease the health spending in the elderly and would help them enjoy their later years more fully. I think it's worth pursuing without going into either of the two extremes - full trans humanism or total denial.
Is anyone asking me? No. I'm in the minority.
Sorry to be direct, but for most people who enjoy VR environments, but not actual environment, the issue is often in self-perception, confidence and so on. The VR is an artificial SUBSTITUTE for social engagement. But it's to actual engagement like porn is to having an actual relationship (i.e. not good at all).
There's place for VR and so on, but it'll never become the dominant form of existence, unless we hook our brains to the network at a very very low level the kind which is not on the horizon yet (and no, Neuralink isn't it).
Yet the technology existing in of itself and these methods of communication and self expression existing expand the options that are available to people, which can be useful! Would the ICT industry be able to adapt to the challenges posed by the current pandemic and remote working conditions, if progress hadn't been made in regards to asynchronous communication methods previously (Slack, Teams, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip etc.)? Probably, but the end result could be less enjoyable than it is now.
That's not to say that anyone should be forced to replace their preferred means of communication in the long term (except for maybe temporarily in the face of situations like the current one in the world), or be forced to live to 150 years of age, or even be a brain in a jar if we're discussing sci-fi.
Yet, in my mind, having a bit of diversity in our approaches to seeing what's possible is definitely a good thing!
So, let people enjoy spectator sports, let them enjoy their sports news and enjoy all of the interesting things that result from the industry needing to achieve everything to support them, from high framerate cameras for slow motion replay, streaming games to large audiences in real time, technologies for cameras that track balls going across the field quickly, motion stabilization and any of the other thousands of neat things you wouldn't think about twice, but could find use in other industries.
To sum up:
> You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
I think you're right here that all of society will not change, but that's not to say that it hurts to be optimistic about new possibilities.
To cite Tolkien: Elves were destined to be 'immortal', that is not to die within the unknown limits decreed by the One, which at the most could be until the end of the life of the Earth as a habitable realm. Their death - by any injury to their bodies so severe that it could not be healed - and the disembodiment of their spirits was an 'unnatural' and grievous matter. It was therefore the duty of the Valar, by command of the One, to restore them to incarnate life, if they desired it. But this 'restoration' could be delayed by Manwe, if the fea while alive had done evil deeds and refused to repent of them, or still harboured any malice against any other person among the living. [0]
Of course, most of the reincarnated Elves probably stayed in Aman, so they had little influence on the development of Middle-earth. But that is not a bad consequence of getting killed in a war.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/90vqkq/why_exa...
Presumably because the loss of a 1000 year old friend hurts a lot.
Suppose we stop aging - this may be great, as we could live at our physical peak until death and the life would be much much longer on average. But at some point, maybe 100 - 200 y/o depending on individual, people's mind may just break.
To truly achieve immortality, we would have to probably reverse engineer the brain and gain complete understand of how it works. Even if we could copy brains atom by atom, or upload it to virtual world, without understanding of how to assemble a brain, this will be useless. A virtual brain, which would not be enhanced in some way, would age exactly like a real world one.
So probably the scenario where people can't die of old age is almost impossible, because that requires technology more advanced than even the ability to backup/restore a mind - which would allow people to die in accident and be restored - although most certainly there would be laws to regulate it, unless we have practically infinite space / land for people to live.
Sorry for going all Sci-Fi on this, I watched the 6th Day yesterday. The antagonist thought he could be immortal because he had a machine that could clone (or rather copy) a person including the brain. He had the ability to get himself resurrected if he died, but he probably wouldn't be able to live even a thousand years, unless he also had developed the technology to prevent data corruption in his brain.
Unless maybe I'm completely wrong and the brains are so flexible they would just work, but there's no way to test it, is it.
But your average folks... eh, died of old age.
I'm not sure that it's actually telomere length itself that's the factor. I think it's more about telomerase.
Telomerase is the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. In cancer cells telomerase production is (usually) upregulated. This leads to cancer cells being able to continue dividing without telomere shortening being a problem.
However, this is just a guess. I'm not clear on the details of the processes.
Successful cancer is the one that learns how to look innocently, at least to the immune cells patrolling the body.
Successful immunological treatment (actually using mRNA vaccines, that is what Moderna and BioNTech were originally about; Covid vaccines are only an adaptation) teaches the immune system to recognize the bad cells again based on their mutations. It will then jump into action and control the cancer growth.
I think infant mortality was high, and the likelihood of simple infection killing you was high.
Which explains why manual labour was so feverishly avoided by anyone "upper class". Death roulette is not for the important people.
Those shovelling peasants were every day risking their life and were thus "expendable".
Medical info, including infection deaths for former presidents and their families:
https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-c...
That said it's impressive how easy it is to pierce your body with just about anything when just enough effort is involved and I doubt they had ergonomic tools and safety equipment too. Even gloves are a luxury.
A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality, and if you made it to 10 in 1850 (hardly preindustrial, but preindustrial stats are harder to find) you could expect to live to 60 or so. Presumably you'd compare the cancer rates of your study's skeletons with the cancer rates of today's 60 year olds.
Most of the progress, in absolute terms, with reducing maternal mortality and the infant/toddler death rate in the industrialized countries was actually made before antibiotics were developed, in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. In England in 1851 about 26% of children died before the age of 5, falling to 23% in 1891, 19% in 1911, 11% in 1921, 9% in 1931, and 7% in 1941 (and then we're in the antibiotics era).
https://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/dmortality.htm
...I also like the link to play the video via Real player in the upper left corner :)
My top three favorite human accomplishments of all time are:
1. printing press 2. vaccines 3. antibiotics
And the order of the last two is debatable.
Why is the theory an accomplishment? Hooke's and van Leeuwenhoek's first observations of micro-organisms in water drops were treated as a meaningless curiosity for about 150 years, and essentially ignored.
Finally it was realised that here was an alternative to prevailing ideas about infectious disease that had great explanatory power. The war of ideas lasted until the early twentieth century, when the last doctors clinging to the "miasma" theory and its ilk finally gave up.
The theory made vaccines and antibiotics conceptually possible.
If that was true, then age composition would be roughly the same as is now, except for larger number of infants.
You could even argue that if you had weaker infants die, you should end up with statistically stronger adults than now and you should see people live to older age than now.
I don't want to say infant mortality rate wasn't high, I just want to say that it has nothing to do with the topic of the discussion.
For example, the introduction and "ramping up" of testosterone and estrogen at puberty has a significant impact on the human condition that simply cannot apply to the prepubescent state, as does their subsequent decline in menopause and old age in general.
Each stage of life comes with its own signals that can be serious health conditions if present in other stages of life, but completely normal and healthy at the appropriate stage. A tween with acne is rarely something to call the doctor about. But a 3 year old with acne certainly is. A colicky baby needs a soother or some other placation. But a colicky adult certainly needs medical intervention.
So the idea that weak babies make weak adults and strong babies make strong adults doesn't work out as cleanly as this comment suggests.
The mammal strategy traded the long game for the quick win.
We have all sorts of (genetic) machinery who's function is to grow fast but then STOP as we can't support gigantic sizes. (Maybe in part because of the quick and dirty foundations but thermodynamics have scaling issues too)
So we need to shut of all those machines before we get too big.
And so here we happily sit in our bodies, our mammal factory and everything is great; just don't push that big red button over there, or pull that lever or that one or that one or ...
eventually if you live long enough some of those buttons will be pushed and the mammal machinery will do what it evolved to do. grow fast and break things.
A final observation on humans in particular, recently bipedal, have not gotten all the bugs worked out on that. Deployed a monkey patch for dimorphic gender singling requires cron job flipping on a subset of growth machinery some years after the main global shutdown but only flip them on for a season or so; still seeing evidence of switch bounce issues, see ticket BCRA1.
Or they were hunted to death by organised groups of early humans.
Wales are probably only surviving because their environment is so foreign to humans.
Feel like Argentinosaurus might have had something to say about that argument..
From an evolutionary perspective natur might have just stoped after we gave birth but for humans you need to be still very healthy for much longer.
We have a second evolution which we as a species gained due to our more generic and bigger brain and therefore being able to retain and learn more even through generations.
Whenever nature stoped we continued (glasses, cancer treatment etc.)
I personally would not subscribe to your idea that cancer is our basis and we just let loose.
Cancer is just one sickness of a highly complex system.
And after all why would longevity even be a goal for evolution? It's a wishful human idea of lifing forever. I myself I'm looking forward to NOT life forever and still today the thought of not being able to end my life for good is my worst nightmare next to loosing my mind.
The marsupials of Australia called and would like a word with you.
Let's cartoonishly oversimplify cancer so that we can see how life expectancy would affect observed statistics. Let's say cancer occurrence is 0% for people up to age 40, and then starting on the 40th birthday, cancer occurrence is 10% per year. Everyone who gets cancer dies immediately.
Then, imagine that life expectancy in 1500 was 25 years old, standard deviation 10 years (yeah lognormal blah blah just go with it). So, most people don't live to 40, but the ones who do sometimes get cancer.
But then, after 1500, life expectancy mean increases by 0.1 years per year. By the year 2000, life expectancy is 75 years old! Much more cancer is going to happen! Many more of the deaths will be from cancer!
Cancer itself didn't change.
So, these researchers see a lower cancer rate in the bones they're looking at, but they need to do some MATH on the ages these bones and of modern humans to know how to compare cancer rates then to cancer rates now.
Sebb suggested that lower life expectancy leads to less cancer. Dsjoerg defined a hypothetical model that would lead to that happening, and then said that proves Sebb was correct.
That's just circular reasoning. And when the hypothetical doesn't match observed reality it's a sign it might be broken.
These diseases are essentially dying of old age. Better treatment for heart disease will mechanically increase cancer deaths and/or Alzheimer.
There isn't a necessarily good or bad here but those Darwinian forces did eliminate a lot of genetic defects from the population before modern medicine.
In the future though we might be able to yet again eliminate defects not by natural selection but by gene editing while still allowing those individuals to carry on a normal life.
One big thing to consider is how would an 18th century person know they had leukemia? Cancers that don’t have a physical manifestation were probably classified as some other mysterious malady.
What I'd really like to know is incidence of cancer in marsupials, birds and fishes, one would predict it to be markedly lower.
Turns out it was curing the <something>, but the next thing the population would statistically die of was: heart attacks.
It could be very well that it is those people who would die as newborn or children without modern medicine and access to clean water have bigger chances of getting cancer with age.
It's 82 today.
The effects are not as dramatic as when infant mortality is included but our life expectancy has absolutely increased.
It's a compelling theory, too, because the average age of a cancer is 66 today. But it really addresses the idea of cancer being less prevalent than less likely.
Living into your 80s was uncommon prior to, well, even 1950. Nowadays, many developed countries have significant cohorts of people 80+ and even 90+. Unfortunately, while those people are alive, they are not particularly healthy. We haven't yet learnt how to expand average "healthspan" as much as average "lifespan".
> If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then he had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years.
This is from wiki. Our life expectancy is much higher. In fact, contemporary medicine is saving a lot of adults.
So, your claim (that life expectancy hasn't changed much) doesn't contradict the parent's claim (that a lot more people are dying of age-related cancers).
I'm sure some of our environmental issues make cancer more likely. But we shouldn't imagine that the pre-industrial world was super healthy. People were living in filth. This was in fact one of the reasons they died so soon.
It's also one of the few things we haven't really found a cure for. I think because each cancer is a different random genetic mutation that would benefit the most from a custom generated antibody or something. Whereas other major causes of death have been pretty much eradicated by things like antibiotics and vaccines. So I think this makes the numbers relatively higher.
And of course because healthcare was so poor, I'm sure there would also be many causes of death misattributed. Even in this day and age we can't seem to standardise it. Some countries attribute every death to coronavirus if the person was infected, others only if it was 100% certain to be the cause of death.
> The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][5] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies
PBS made it into a documentary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_(film)
* https://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all-maladies/
"After you save people from dying of cheap things, they start dying of expensive things."
Also, modern proliferation of toxic chemicals.
Furthermore, people living longer are inevitably going to go by either cardiovascular issues/stroke, pneumonia, or cancer.
Gluten do this by forming gluten net during dought mixing. Or even by mixing flour with water and waiting. So gluten is super good and almoust magical ingradient.
Real problem is that Western World started to abuse wheat flour after yeasts were discovered. You know, in older times "white bread" was mainly for rich peoples and poor peoples used flour with more chaff. But in last years chaff costs almoust same as flour :)
Celiac disease is only 1-2% population, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity is 5-6%. So that "harmful gluten" is a myth. But if you have some intolerance then gluten is very very toxic. And nothing wrong with skipping it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten
Rye flour contains some form of gluten but it do not form gluten net. But still can be toxic for ill peoples.
So, using wheat flour/gluten is simplest way to have bread that have nice volume. Other flours are good for pies or require to use cake mold.
As for why gluten is better for machines: when dought contain formed gluten net it make it elastic, a bit like gum. So it can be nicely formed. Dought also can be to strong with too much gluten - that require much more force for shaping.
Also with good gluten net dought can sustain longer period after forming and before baking, making it less time sensitive - bread do not get flat before there is free place in the stove/oven.
Our bodies aren't designed to be topped-off 3 times a day.
Thank you for my TIL!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Bunch of stuff happening in the Pacific as well, e.g., chilli peppers (capsicum):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A...
Good book:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.
Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.
Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.
In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.
None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?
By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.
Mostly everything we consume these days has been touched by a form of plastic.
I am wondering if microplastic is a factor in addition to air and water pollution, processed/pre-packaged food.
Another factor maybe humankind beating/cancelling natural selection due to modern medicine. So people who would normally perish in olden days are living longer only to be later killed by cancer.
There’s another factor of total population. More people means more diversity and more DNA copying errors? Can someone expert in this field comment on this?
It's not a debated issue: it's well known.
[1]https://cues.rutgers.edu/2019-microplastics-conference/pdfs/...
The best I’ve seen is increase inflammation due to small plastic particles.
I've seen countless stats that plots petro-chemical use over years, and cancer rates. The charts are identical.
If a quarter or half of your population is dying at age 0, then another quarter or half must likely be living into their 70s for the mean age to end up 35.
Well not really age 0, rather between 0 and 5.
The rest of your point stands.
Life expectancy of children and young adults has increased significantly in addition to the reduction in infant mortality.
From wikipedia: The discovery of SV40 revealed that between 1955 and 1963 around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the U.S. were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.
Link to studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sv40...
"The committee concludes that the biological evidence is moderate that SV40 exposure could lead to cancer in humans under natural conditions."
And there's more. SV40's probably also transformative (observed in both mammals and humans) and the vaccine has moderate evidence of causality.
Then there's the strange disappearance of the CDC page awhile back - http://www.laleva.org/eng/2013/07/cdc_disappears_page_linkin...
And the papers correlating the virus to cancer:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10472327/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16966607/
etc
up to 14% of deaths 400 years ago in the UK were cancer according to the new research. It's currently 29% in the UK, and 17% in the world. 29% is much higher than 14% but according to the article people used to believe it used to be just 1%. How much of that increase to 29% is because of new problems or just because we live longer so cancers get the chance to kill us more vs all the things that used to kill us earlier
Thanks Monsanto. Err... Bayer (same people who sold Heroin over the counter 100 years ago)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705608/
I agree Monsanto is a horrible company, but for other reasons.
> Overall, a scrutiny of the method used in these commentaries by Samsel and Seneff reveals a major flaw. These authors employ a deductive reasoning approach based on syllogism, which is formed by two or more propositions used to generate a conclusion. The first proposition is generally related to glyphosate’s properties (e.g., glyphosate is a chelator of Mn) and the second proposition is related to human physiology (e.g., sperm motility depends on Mn). From each of these pairs of propositions, Samsel and Seneff conclude a causative link of glyphosate with the etiology of different diseases. For instance, since glyphosate is a metal chelator (proposition 1), and since sperm motility depends on Mn (proposition 2), they conclude that glyphosate may partially explain increased rates of infertility and birth defects (13). They extend this reasoning to multiple body functions to propose that the dysregulation of Mn utilization in the body due to glyphosate’s metal chelating properties explains autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety disorder, osteoporosis, inflammatory bowel disease, renal lithiasis, osteomalacia, cholestasis, thyroid dysfunction, and infertility. More recently, Beecham and Seneff have used the same reasoning to conclude on a causative link between glyphosate chelation of Mn and the large rise in the incidence of autism spectrum disorders in children within the US (35). However, there are no scientific studies establishing a causative link between glyphosate and the described chronic diseases.
They are literally saying that syllogism cannot possibly work because there aren't "scientific studies". What is syllogism? It's literally logic. If you then read the actual article they are criticizing, there is literally graph after graph establishing a strong correlation between disease and glysophate use. Not only do they find correlations, they reason through several causative mechanisms, in extremely detail, based on chemistry, and then somehow that doesn't count? That paper is absolutely choc full of evidence. What more are they holding out for? It's like their brain doesn't work.
Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything. Lot of other things have happened in that same time period such as increases in obesity, etc. The real way to study it is to give an animal glyphosate and see if it does anything to cancer rates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4819582/
Evaluation of carcinogenic potential of the herbicide glyphosate, drawing on tumor incidence data from fourteen chronic/carcinogenicity rodent studies
"There was no evidence of a carcinogenic effect related to glyphosate treatment."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014589/
> The strongest evidence shows that glyphosate causes hemangiosarcomas, kidney tumors and malignant lymphomas in male CD-1 mice, hemangiomas and malignant lymphomas in female CD-1 mice, hemangiomas in female Swiss albino mice, kidney adenomas, liver adenomas, skin keratoacanthomas and skin basal cell tumors in male Sprague-Dawley rats, adrenal cortical carcinomas in female Sprague-Dawley rats and hepatocellular adenomas and skin keratocanthomas in male Wistar rats.
In fact, this paper links to some of the same studies that the paper you linked to also does, with different conclusions. In particular, it seems your paper was extremely selective about which cancers could be caused by glysophate, e.g. ignoring several types.
> Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything.
That's just an absurd statement, so I'll disengage now.
You say that like selling heroin over the counter is a bad thing.
And it ain't looking good for Bayer.
I have often wondered if back pain was less likely in the past? How did they manage without chiropractors?
Of course, he believes otherwise about his own particular school of chiropractic, the Gonstead Technique. As a long time beneficiary of that method I've come to agree with him. It has helped me quite a bit, and the long list of his vastly improved patients (many or most who are refugees from other chiropractors) is impressive and convincing to me.
Some healers are quacks; in some disciplines, most are. But that doesn't make them all quacks.
They may be on to something without knowing exactly what.
Tough it out. You had to work/farm/hunt to survive.
We've always had charlatans pretending to have solutions to our problems before chiropracty and homeopathy, we had traveling salesmen peddling fish oil as a cure-all and of course the power of prayer.
Not sure if it speaks to the gullibility of humanity or craftiness of private enterprise.