rationalskepticism.org

BWE wrote:I simply refuse the biologic route. And yeah, I try to be polite and say thank you for the information but 90% of the time people who offer unwanted advice go on and on about it and I occasionally go to the shut the fuck up place

Some good posts from you here. If you tell people about your illness, a certain percentage of them WILL start in with the ‘have you tried x,y,z ‘alternative’ medicine?’ The onus is then placed on you to politely tell them thanks but no thanks. I don’t want to have to do that. I told you about my illness because I have known you for a long time, and figured that in time you’d be noticing I’m not quite myself. I didn’t request advice on how to treat my illness. One person in particular asked me if I had heard that cancer can’t survive in an alkaline environment and that ‘turning your body alkaline’ would cure cancer. Of course I’ve bloody heard it, I’m someone who immediately started researching my condition in some considerable depth as soon as I found out what I had. This, and a basic level of intellectual ability, is how I know it’s complete nonsense. You can’t turn your body alkaline, and if you could, you would die. Sadly one ‘thanks but no thanks’ was not enough. She started in on me again later the same day, saying that she had suffered from polycystic ovary disease and an alkaline diet had cured it, so I should try this diet. Can anyone tell me why someone thinks that PCOD behaves the same way as stage IV renal cell carcinoma and will respond to the same ‘treatments’?

Another friend I’ve known a long time lost her husband to oesophageal cancer two months before I was diagnosed. We had all clubbed together to obtain some cannabis oil (illegal here unless you’re a child with epilepsy, having hundreds of seizures a day). I’m well aware of the reported benefits on cancer symptoms, not a problem. It was unlikely to harm him in his terminal illness. After he died and my cancer returned, she was left with an almost full vial, which she passed on to me. I gratefully accepted it, and would have gladly used it for alleviation of symptoms if she had not been storing it incorrectly for months. Unfortunately, it came along with a ring bound booklet full of complete nonsense, for example that cancer is a fungus, that it can be cured by cannabis oil and that doctors don’t want you to know. Clearly this doesn’t make sense on any level. As a basic start off, we live in the U.K. where we have the NHS. Doctors working in the public health system have nothing to gain by lying about effective treatments. As soon as I realised what this booklet was driving at, it went straight in the bin. Let’s hope she never asks for it back. It angers me to think she read all this at a vulnerable time in her life and was invested in her husband being cured by the oil.