Via Reddit: A team of scientists from Yale University perused the National Cancer Database, a collection of 34 million records of cancer patients along with their treatments and outcomes, to identify patients who elected to forgo conventional cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery in favor of alternative medicine. They found 280 subjects diagnosed with cancer in 2004 who used alternative medicine and matched them with 560 control subjects who received conventional treatment. The researchers then tracked subjects' outcomes over time.
After five years, 78.3% of subjects who received conventional treatments were still alive, compared to only 54.7% of subjects who used alternative medicine. Even more startling, breast cancer patients who used alternative medicine were five times more likely to die. Colorectal cancer patients were four times more likely to die. Lung cancer patients were twice as likely to die. Prostate cancer patients were also more likely to die, though the difference did not reach statistical significance.
The researchers could not specifically identify which alternative medicines subjects were using, although there shouldn't be much variation between therapies, since, by definition, there isn't convincing evidence that any alternative medicine is effective.
Proponents of alternative medicine often innocently ask, "What's the harm?" For cancer patients who opt for treatment with alternative medicine, the harm is death.
After five years, 78.3% of subjects who received conventional treatments were still alive, compared to only 54.7% of subjects who used alternative medicine. Even more startling, breast cancer patients who used alternative medicine were five times more likely to die. Colorectal cancer patients were four times more likely to die. Lung cancer patients were twice as likely to die. Prostate cancer patients were also more likely to die, though the difference did not reach statistical significance.
The researchers could not specifically identify which alternative medicines subjects were using, although there shouldn't be much variation between therapies, since, by definition, there isn't convincing evidence that any alternative medicine is effective.
Proponents of alternative medicine often innocently ask, "What's the harm?" For cancer patients who opt for treatment with alternative medicine, the harm is death.
(Link to source)
42 comments:
Jobs that no longer exist: Steven.
Speaking of healthier (and happier than those of late) things. Yesterday I went to the grocery store. I wanted oatmeal (among other things) but I didn't want the tall round cardboard box of oatmeal, I wanted the short round cardboard box of oatmeal. They didn't have any short rounds in Quaker, only the tall rounds. The only short round was an unfamiliar brand of steel-cut organic oatmeal so I bought one.
I'm not a believer in things organic but I thought, "Hey, it's oatmeal, it's born that way. What can it hurt."
Today I cooked my new steel-cut organic oatmeal from the short round box and #%$@&&#@ it to %#$@$ %$#@ it was shit. Total shit flavorless mushfuck shit. A lesson learned.
Pardon the symbols but Father Martin has been hanging around and as I have plans for the afterlife I don't want him to report me.
The statistics mentioned are missing key data points. What was the remaining life expectancy of those that chose alternative medicine? Where the control numbers on conventional medicine options limited to those with a life expectancy of less than a year due to disease problems progression?
I ask, because most people I know who advocate for alternative medicine don't simply ask "what's the harm?", rather they weigh that harm against the potential to exceed conventional treatment at that level of progression.
To my mind it's mostly quackery, Leland.
I fear that our beloved Trooper York, based on his posts, may have fallen prey to just such a scammer up there deep in the bowels of The Naked City.
It would explain his recent loss of contact with reality and degraded mental competence.
I still love him though. Platonically.
I agree about the organic oatmeal. Hoping we get a "pass" for being in the electronic vicinity of Fr. Fox. Also, "IRISH" oatmeal? What, does it have chunks of druid in it? Leprechaun bits? Why? Why is oatmeal implicitly better if it's from farging Ireland?
Irish oatmeal is just the oat grains not squished flat. If you want oatmeal more like boiled wheat (farro) (as they do in Italy). You don't boil it till its mush, you just get it al dante. I think it tastes ok, a wee bit crunchy. If you want your oatmeal convenient and fast, the flattened stuff is cheaper and works. If you want it more chewy, the expensive Irish stuff works. In the end, it is just oats and not particularly flavorful (You ad stuff to make it so).
Alternatively you could go the Southern route and go with boiled lye treated corn bits (aka grits). Or back to Italy for polenta.
It is all basic peasant food, and delicious if you do it right. If you do it wrong, it is stuff you feed the chickens.
And if you go organic, that just means you are paying twice as much.
But what do I know, I prefer grass.
What you yanks don't understand is that grits are just a transport mechanism for salt and butter. And sometimes cheese or shrimp or other accoutrements.
It's just like why you don't understand why we see General Lee as representing all that is good and honorable in this rotten world, despite that little slavery thing.
Fucking Bluebellies. If Massa Robert's boys had gutted a few more of 'em when he was in Southern Pennsylvania things would have worked themselves out just fine.
Uncle Robert owned no slaves. His wife did.
As for cancer, sounds like too much money is being diverted to other () options and the AMA don't like it.
And "salad" is a delivery system for ranch/russian dressing ... and cupcakes (all the stuff available to put on your salad at the salad bar). As for the cancer study, who can trust the scientists anymore? You have to look at who is paying them.
Scienter emptor?
What Rabel said.
Don't get me started on General Lee or Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stonewall Jackson or Jubal A. Early. Those men and their courage are still revered by those of us who remember them.
Fuck Y*nkees.
CSA!
CSA!
CSA!
My Tiki torches are all down in Florida. Elsewise I'd fire one up.
I appreciate the concern but I view all doctors with a very healthy dose of scepticism.
The homeopathic doctor we use turned to me and said "You think this is all bullshit right?"
I said "Of course I do but you buttress it with some facts." He took the most extensive blood tests we ever had and found us to be deficient in many types of vitamins and minerals. He gave us a course of treatment that has improved our health in a very significant way.
Look I would love to eat pizza and burgers and drink twenty pints of beer a day like I did in my twenties. And thirties. And forties. And up till I was 57. But I can't do that.
Plus alternative medicine is the stuff that Grandma used to do. I find that the best thing for me and makes me feel better than all of the stupid medicine I have been taking.
Did you see where they want to dig up the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest?
When we these people ever stop their bullshit?
The second American Civil war is starting. You can feel it. in the air.
Trooper, It is personally heartening for me to hear you have found religion, vis a vis eating right. I sense you're feeling much better, which is the key to sustaining the lifestyle change. Kudos.
Thanks.
I don't subscribe to all of the nonsense attributed to alternative medicine. I just think that some of it has value. Eating better and exercise has a lot to do with it. I am striving to do better.
My problem has always been stress. My stress is off the charts right now and it is a big problem for everyone.
Some mea culpa. I don't normally equate alternative medicine in relation to cancer care with homeopathic solutions. I did stop to consider that in this case, alternative medicine smoking dope. Still, my comments about the lack of relevant statistical data on key points remained relevant regardless of the actual type of alternative medicine.
But to me, when a person has stage 4 cancer and given months to weeks to live; and they are willing to try out non-FDA approve treatments that might work: I think they should be allowed the option. I do worry about some hustlers taking advantage of people given horrible news and still others that would intentionally distort or lie about a persons illness just to get willing volunteers. So I'm not exactly in the camp of "what harm could it do". However, I'm at least willing to listen to that camp.
Trooper,
Phil Collins called. He can feel it in the air tonight, too.
edutcher said...
Uncle Robert owned no slaves. His wife did.
------------------------------
Late 1850s: Arlington plantation and the Custis slaves
Arlington House, Arlington
Mary Custis' inheritance in 1857
Christ Church, Alexandria
the Lees worshiped here
In 1857, his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis died, creating a serious crisis when Lee took on the burden of executing the will. Custis's will encompassed vast landholdings and hundreds of slaves balanced against massive debts, and required Custis's former slaves "to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease."[51] The estate was in disarray, and the plantations had been poorly managed and were losing money.
Lee tried to hire an overseer to handle the plantation in his absence, writing to his cousin, "I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty."[52] But Lee failed to find a man for the job, and had to take a two-year leave of absence from the army in order to run the plantation himself. He found the experience frustrating, since many of the slaves had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died, and protested angrily at the delay.[53] In May 1858, Lee wrote to his son Rooney, "I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority—refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.—I succeeded in capturing them & lodging them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them."[52] Less than two months after they were sent to the Alexandria jail, Lee decided to remove these three men and three female house slaves from Arlington, and sent them under lock and key to the slave-trader William Overton Winston in Richmond, who was instructed to keep them in jail until he could find "good & responsible" slaveholders to work them until the end of the five-year period.[52]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee#Marriage_and_family
The Norris case
In 1859, three of the Arlington slaves—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs—fled for the North, but were captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and forced to return to Arlington. On June 24, 1859, the anti-slavery newspaper New York Daily Tribune published two anonymous letters (dated June 19, 1859[54] and June 21, 1859[55]), each claiming to have heard that Lee had the Norrises whipped, and each going so far as to claim that the overseer refused to whip the woman but that Lee took the whip and flogged her personally. Lee privately wrote to his son Custis that "The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy."[56]
Wesley Norris himself spoke out about the incident after the war, in an 1866 interview printed in an abolitionist newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Norris stated that after they had been captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that "he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget." According to Norris, Lee then had the three of them firmly tied to posts by the overseer, and ordered them whipped with fifty lashes for the men and twenty for Mary Norris. Norris claimed that Lee encouraged the whipping, and that when the overseer refused to do it, called in the county constable to do it instead. Unlike the anonymous letter writers, he does not state that Lee himself whipped any of the slaves. According to Norris, Lee "frequently enjoined [Constable] Williams to 'lay it on well,' an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done."[53][57]
The Norris men were then sent by Lee's agent to work on the railroads in Virginia and Alabama. According to the interview, Norris was sent to Richmond in January 1863 "from which place I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom." But Federal authorities reported that Norris came within their lines on September 5, 1863, and that he "left Richmond...with a pass from General Custis Lee."[58][59] Lee freed the Custis slaves, including Wesley Norris, after the end of the five-year period in the winter of 1862, filing the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862.[60][61]
Biographers of Lee have differed over the credibility of the account of the punishment as described in the letters in the Tribune and in Norris's personal account. They broadly agree that Lee had a group of escaped slaves recaptured, and that after recapturing them he hired them out off of the Arlington plantation as a punishment; but they disagree over the likelihood that Lee flogged them, and over the charge that he personally whipped Mary Norris. In 1934, Douglas S. Freeman described them as "Lee's first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators" and asserted that "There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing."[62]
In 2000, Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee, found the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris "extremely unlikely," but found it not at all unlikely that Lee had ordered the runaways whipped: "corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism 'firmness') was (believed to be) an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage."[63]
In 2003, Bernice-Marie Yates's The Perfect Gentleman, cited Freeman's denial and followed his account in holding that, because of Lee's family connections to George Washington, he "was a prime target for abolitionists who lacked all the facts of the situation."[64]
Lee biographer Elizabeth Brown Pryor concluded in 2008 that "the facts are verifiable," based on "the consistency of the five extant descriptions of the episode (the only element that is not repeatedly corroborated is the allegation that Lee gave the beatings himself), as well as the existence of an account book that indicates the constable received compensation from Lee on the date that this event occurred."[65][66]
In 2014, Michael Korda wrote that "Although these letters are dismissed by most of Lee's biographers as exaggerated, or simply as unfounded abolitionist propaganda, it is hard to ignore them. [...] It seems incongruously out of character for Lee to have whipped a slave woman himself, particularly one stripped to the waist, and that charge may have been a flourish added by the two correspondents; interestingly enough, it was not repeated by Wesley Norris when his account of the incident was published in 1866. [...] [A]lthough it seems unlikely that he would have done any of the whipping himself, he may not have flinched from observing it to make sure his orders were carried out exactly."[67]
Lee's views on slavery
Since the end of the Civil War, it has often been suggested Lee was in some sense opposed to slavery. In the period following the war, Lee became a central figure in the Lost Cause interpretation of the war. The argument that Lee had always somehow opposed slavery helped maintain his stature as a symbol of Southern honor and national reconciliation. Freeman's analysis places Lee's attitude toward slavery and abolition in a historical context:
This [opinion] was the prevailing view among most religious people of Lee's class in the border states. They believed that slavery existed because God willed it and they thought it would end when God so ruled. The time and the means were not theirs to decide, conscious though they were of the ill-effects of Negro slavery on both races. Lee shared these convictions of his neighbors without having come in contact with the worst evils of African bondage. He spent no considerable time in any state south of Virginia from the day he left Fort Pulaski in 1831 until he went to Texas in 1856. All his reflective years had been passed in the North or in the border states. He had never been among the blacks on a cotton or rice plantation. At Arlington, the servants had been notoriously indolent, their master's master. Lee, in short, was only acquainted with slavery at its best, and he judged it accordingly. At the same time, he was under no illusion regarding the aims of the Abolitionists or the effect of their agitation.[68]
A key source cited by defenders and critics is Lee's 1856 letter to his wife:[68]
... In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.
— Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December 27, 1856
The evidence cited in favor of the claim that Lee opposed slavery included his direct statements and his actions before and during the war, including Lee's support of the work by his wife and her mother to liberate slaves and fund their move to Liberia,[69] the success of his wife and daughter in setting up an illegal school for slaves on the Arlington plantation,[70] the freeing of Custis' slaves in 1862, and, as the Confederacy's position in the war became desperate, his petitioning slaveholders in 1864–65 to allow slaves to volunteer for the Army with manumission offered as a reward for outstanding service.[71][72]
However, despite his stated opinions, Lee's troops under his command were allowed to raid settlements during major operations like the 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania to capture free blacks for enslavement.[73][74][75][76][77][78]
In December 1864 Lee was shown a letter by Louisiana Senator Edward Sparrow, written by General St. John R. Liddell, which noted Lee would be hard-pressed in the interior of Virginia by spring, and the need to consider Patrick Cleburne's plan to emancipate the slaves and put all men in the army who were willing to join. Lee was said to have agreed on all points and desired to get black soldiers, saying "he could make soldiers out of any human being that had arms and legs."[79]
What is that cocksucker doing here? Did the alcoholic cunt he is married to get black out drunk and leave her computer on? Go fuck yourself, Meade-bitch. You are an asshole and should stick to what you do best - deleting comments over at your "wife's" blog and trimming her shrubbery.
Love you, Sixty. Remember: “hate does not fix the world“
Sixty, Retirement has upset the delicate balance over there. They're both realizing they made horrible mistakes getting married. Meade has been ranting about the evils of alcohol, anti-depressants, etc.
Another senseless drive by act of terrorism.
I am trying to look on the bright side these days.
Anything that gets nick, Sixty and me United on the same page can't be all bad.
Thanks buddy.
You have to admire his cut and paste skills. Can you imagine them at a faculty cocktail party "Oh honey, tell the Dean again about how you copied someone else's words and pasted them on a blog to make just such a marvelous point!"
Cutting and pasting is just one of the ways Meade gets a beard. The other was through marriage.
"Anything that gets nick, Sixty and me United on the same page can't be all bad.
Thanks buddy."
Troop, you're welcome.
Matchmaking just might be the thing I do best. Anyway, I see you've been having some health problems and I want you to know that I'm praying for you — body, mind, and soul. I know you're a man of faith. Don't ever lose your faith. Let me encourage you to turn away from anger, evil, and hate. And may peace and love surround you and God bless and keep you always.
Sincerely,
Laurence Meade
In these troubled times I always ask myself, What Would Meade Do?
And after a period of reflection and prayer I've decided that it's time to fire up the weedeater and get to work in the yard.
I am just glad I don't have diabetes.
I am thankful I am not married to a black-out drunk. But Meadey likes her that way - he's a regular white Bill Cosby.
Well he does like pudding. Just sayn'
Sixty, He had an abusive old man which is why he cruises blogs seeking hatred. When abused as a child, hatred is seen as "love."
Well I am trying to lower my stress level so I don't have a lot hatred.
How about some amused contempt?
That is about as far as I go with this.
Old stale news. No?
Trooper wrote: "Old stale news. No?"
Indeed, but enough about Meade's "wife", eh?
Lawsey it's hot out there. Temp 93% RH 58% Heat Index 106.
Fortunately my Olympian athletic conditioning, Apollonian musculature and superior genetic history lend themselves to a heated environment.
Like Lem's when the Devil himself drops by for a visit.
Did I say superior genetics? Maybe not the best time.
It is hot and humid, but then again, it is August. I ignore the Heat Index bullshit - that's weather sensationalism like AGW. It has not gotten to 100 degrees here in years, but they pimp the HI like we are living on Venus.
I work in the ambient temperature and so far, August has been quite mild.
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