I’m a graduate student studying metabolomics, and my lab mate is actually doing her thesis research on cancer metabolism. My knowledge base is strong in the biology involved, and weak in the politics of medical studies and treatment preferences, as I have no direct interface with MDs.
Cancer has no ‘silver bullet;’ as is generally recognized in medicine nowadays, it is actually a collection of diseases with differing causes, that respond in different ways to various treatments because the mechanisms which promote cancer development, growth, and metastasis differ between forms. There is a consistent cycle in cancer research that pays homage to this fact—someone has good lab results with a new drug, everyone gets excited, and then it’s found that its utility is extremely limited (or more often, impossible due to deleterious side effects). This knowledge causes me to have a very low probability estimate for the truth (of the magnitude, at least) of these claims.
Another red flag: If this was such a medical breakthrough, it would be backed up by controlled studies, and it would be a paper in Cell or Nature, not a self-published book announcing boldly that it has The Answer.
If you would like more specific information about cancer, I can either answer questions or send links, later, but at the moment, I need to leave my computer.
“Clinical trials are needed to test such non-toxic therapies. Biological research suggests that cancer is a treatable condition. Although current data is not sufficient to indicate the degree of life extension achievable, many terminal patients might die of other causes, before the cancer kills them. Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity.”
I’m trying to think how to frame my response to this. I will essentially never say that something shouldn’t be studied (unless the act of studying would cause more harm than good to intelligent test subjects), and I don’t know with certainty that vitamin C megadoses would not be helpful. I know a lot of reasons why they probably wouldn’t be, but that’s all I have.
My major problems with the book itself (from what I can see of it online, and what I’ve read of the studies on the subject) are:
1) It suggests (‘Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity’) that some wrong is being done to cancer patients by not chasing this idea farther than it has already been chased. This is both somewhat sensationalist, and revealing that the authors either don’t know much about or have chosen to ignore the cognitive environment of cancer research. Cancer researchers would love to find a silver bullet, or even a reasonably effective bronze one. Quite aside from the good it would do for humanity, it would bring them an awful lot of immediate prestige. Existing biases in the field are therefore very much in favor of pursuing avenues of research that might be a bit of a stretch, if there’s any hope that it might lead to a breakthrough. This makes blind rejection of potentially useful ideas very uncommon, which strongly downregulates my estimate of the idea’s merit.
2) If the authors think that this research has a high potential for payoff, why are they not conducting it themselves, instead of imploring others to do so? There is certainly a much higher personal payoff to be had if it were to actually work, if they were to do it themselves. (I do rather intimately realize that ‘doing research onesself’ is much simpler said than done, and therefore would accept it as an answer that they are making serious, concerted, and persistent efforts to begin the clinical trials they’re calling for.)
Point 1 is only sensationalist if not true. The fact is, there has been little research conducted in the area. This is mostly because, as far as I can tell, there were some supposedly ‘definitive’ studies in the 1980s which ‘proved’ there was no effect. Those studies, however, had serious flaws. More research has been conducted recently, some of it very promising, but still mostly of the ‘kills cancer cells in a test tube’ type rather than the ‘large scale double-blind placebo controlled test’ type.
Meanwhile, several individual doctors have used the techniques described and report great success.
As for point two, the authors are both retired former academics, not clinicians, and conducting clinical trials is not their area of expertise.
I’m a graduate student studying metabolomics, and my lab mate is actually doing her thesis research on cancer metabolism. My knowledge base is strong in the biology involved, and weak in the politics of medical studies and treatment preferences, as I have no direct interface with MDs.
Cancer has no ‘silver bullet;’ as is generally recognized in medicine nowadays, it is actually a collection of diseases with differing causes, that respond in different ways to various treatments because the mechanisms which promote cancer development, growth, and metastasis differ between forms. There is a consistent cycle in cancer research that pays homage to this fact—someone has good lab results with a new drug, everyone gets excited, and then it’s found that its utility is extremely limited (or more often, impossible due to deleterious side effects). This knowledge causes me to have a very low probability estimate for the truth (of the magnitude, at least) of these claims.
Another red flag: If this was such a medical breakthrough, it would be backed up by controlled studies, and it would be a paper in Cell or Nature, not a self-published book announcing boldly that it has The Answer.
If you would like more specific information about cancer, I can either answer questions or send links, later, but at the moment, I need to leave my computer.
The books in question are popularisations of many earlier studies, and certainly not ‘announcing boldly that it has The Answer’. To quote from the material at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/cancer-nutrition-and-survival/243487
“Clinical trials are needed to test such non-toxic therapies. Biological research suggests that cancer is a treatable condition. Although current data is not sufficient to indicate the degree of life extension achievable, many terminal patients might die of other causes, before the cancer kills them. Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity.”
I’m trying to think how to frame my response to this. I will essentially never say that something shouldn’t be studied (unless the act of studying would cause more harm than good to intelligent test subjects), and I don’t know with certainty that vitamin C megadoses would not be helpful. I know a lot of reasons why they probably wouldn’t be, but that’s all I have.
My major problems with the book itself (from what I can see of it online, and what I’ve read of the studies on the subject) are:
1) It suggests (‘Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity’) that some wrong is being done to cancer patients by not chasing this idea farther than it has already been chased. This is both somewhat sensationalist, and revealing that the authors either don’t know much about or have chosen to ignore the cognitive environment of cancer research. Cancer researchers would love to find a silver bullet, or even a reasonably effective bronze one. Quite aside from the good it would do for humanity, it would bring them an awful lot of immediate prestige. Existing biases in the field are therefore very much in favor of pursuing avenues of research that might be a bit of a stretch, if there’s any hope that it might lead to a breakthrough. This makes blind rejection of potentially useful ideas very uncommon, which strongly downregulates my estimate of the idea’s merit.
2) If the authors think that this research has a high potential for payoff, why are they not conducting it themselves, instead of imploring others to do so? There is certainly a much higher personal payoff to be had if it were to actually work, if they were to do it themselves. (I do rather intimately realize that ‘doing research onesself’ is much simpler said than done, and therefore would accept it as an answer that they are making serious, concerted, and persistent efforts to begin the clinical trials they’re calling for.)
Point 1 is only sensationalist if not true. The fact is, there has been little research conducted in the area. This is mostly because, as far as I can tell, there were some supposedly ‘definitive’ studies in the 1980s which ‘proved’ there was no effect. Those studies, however, had serious flaws. More research has been conducted recently, some of it very promising, but still mostly of the ‘kills cancer cells in a test tube’ type rather than the ‘large scale double-blind placebo controlled test’ type.
Meanwhile, several individual doctors have used the techniques described and report great success.
As for point two, the authors are both retired former academics, not clinicians, and conducting clinical trials is not their area of expertise.