Saturday, March 24, 2007

Cancer Therapy: Read The Evidence and Make Up Your Own Mind

Peer-reviewed evidence is the difference between scientific fact and people trying to cheat dying people out of their every last dollar. For example, certified physicians prescribe chemotherapeutics, instead of say, leech therapy, because they have gone through a rigorous process of clinical trial testing to demonstrate their safety and efficacy, leading to approval by governmental agencies such as Health Canada and the American FDA. Additionally, there is a huge volume of peer-reviewed studies, from many different sources, attesting to efficacy, published in the scientific literature. This evidence is easily accessed through the internet using database search engines such as PubMed. For example, a 5 min search on PubMed yields numerous studies demonstrating the efficacy of chemotherapeutics currently employed in the clinic:




This is just a tiny sampling of the published peer-reviewed work (ie a PubMed search of "cisplatin clinical trial" yields 460 studies). While of course those in the field of oncology have looked at this evidence and come to the overwhelming consensus that chemotherapy is very often efficacious, one need not take their word verbatim. The evidence is out there, each person can read through it, speak with physicians and scientists, ask questions, and ultimately make up their own mind. On the other hand, quackery must be accepted on faith or presumed authority because objective facts, data and statistics are not made available for rigorous analysis.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also there is lots of new drugs that a person that is conned into alternative therapies might miss out on. Herceptin being the newest lifesaving drug that is probably only available by going through conventional treatment practitioners and not the leech therapy dudes.