"Alternative medicine" kills cancer patients
XX2 century based on RealClearScience: Alternative Medicine Kills Cancer Patients, Study Finds
Chiropractic, homeopathy, acupuncture, juice diets and other forms of alternative medicine cannot cure cancer, no matter what different charlatans say about it. Unfortunately, cancer patients, frightened by a terrible disease, instead of visiting real doctors, regularly turn to these healers, hoping for a miracle.
However, a new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival) once again clearly shows that alternative methods do not cure cancer – they kill.
A group of scientists from Yale University studied the National Cancer Database, which collected 34 million clinical histories of cancer patients, including information about the prescribed treatment and its results. The researchers compared the histories of patients who received conventional cancer treatment – chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery – with those who refused them in favor of alternative means. In 2004, they found 280 patients who suffered from non-metastatic breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer or colorectal cancer and used alternative medicine (defined in the database as "other, unproven cancer treatment conducted by non-medical personnel"), and compared them with 560 control subjects who received conventional treatment. The researchers then tracked the treatment results over time.
Survival schedule of cancer patients who used alternative medicine (solid line) and conventional medicine (dotted line) for 7 years (84 months) after diagnosis.
After five years, 78.3% of patients treated with conventional methods are still alive – compared to 54.7% of patients who preferred alternative medicine. For some specific types of cancer, the results are particularly revealing. Thus, breast cancer patients who have used alternative medicine die five times more often. Colorectal cancer patients who prefer alternative methods have a four-fold greater chance of dying. Lung cancer patients who have trusted "unproven treatment conducted by non-medical personnel" are twice as likely to die. Prostate cancer patients who have abandoned traditional medicine in favor of alternative medicine also die, although here the difference has not reached statistical significance.
The researchers could not determine which specific alternative methods were used, but it does not matter: there should be no significant difference between the results of different "alternative therapies", since, by definition, there is no convincing evidence that any alternative remedy is effective in the treatment of cancer.
"Other limitations of this study include unaccounted–for factors or sample bias that could affect survival," the authors noted. "But since patients receiving alternative medicine are more likely to be younger, richer, more educated and less burdened with concomitant diseases, this hardly explains the observed differences in survival."
Proponents of alternative medicine often innocently ask what harm it does. As the study shows, for cancer patients, the harm from alternative medicine is quite specific – death.
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04.09.2017