On 09/23/2015 02:15 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Diet and Heart Disease
Chronic Lyme Disease
Fibromyalgia
Diet and Cancer
Vaccination and autism
???? and Alzheimer's
Chronic fatigue syndrome
Environmental sensitivity syndrome
First of all, I would like to recruit this list to identify other issues where
at least one of us Global Warming Believers departs from some other equally
strong scientific consensus.
Unfortunately, I don't know the consensus in most of those categories. I can
wander off what my oncologist claims about diet and cancer, though. But my
oncologist was trained as a DO, which puts her credentials at risk in some
people's eyes:
http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/QA/osteo.html
So, the fact that she takes the very conservative position that we just don't
know enough about the ties between diet and (my type of) cancer, is interesting
to me.
AND then, I would like to have a discussion concerning why and when we feel
qualified to depart from a scientific consensus.
I feel qualified to depart from what she tells me because of my personal experience about
what has worked for me during chemo and the course of my experimental drug. But these
departures do _not_ extend (by induction) to any general population. I can only say that
what she tried failed and what I tried worked. Granted, this is not about diet and
cancer so much as diet and cancer intervention. I can, however, proceed by deduction and
suggest that I'm probably not an entirely unique subject. There are probably some
generalizations that could be made and I can explore the space of conclusions to
speculate on what those might be. To be concrete, here's an example. About 2 cycles
into my treatment, I began to experience a "welling up" in my throat,
especially when bending over or going upside down on my inversion table. She tentatively
diagnosed it as GERD. She put me on proton pump inhibitors and when they didn't work,
motility promoters. Neither worked. But I discovered that i
nsoluble fiber _did_ work. She doubts me to this day. And, to be honest, I
often doubt myself. Another issue where I disagree with her is on the subject
of fasting. There are these somewhat controversial papers that indicate
medium-term fasting (more than 48 hours) assists the therapy in triggering
apoptosis (good cell death that minimizes free toxins) and reducing necrosis
(bad cell death where toxins roam a bit more freely). She maintains that
people on chemo need to eat in order to sustain themselves in the face of the
poison. I maintain that as long as we're poisoning ourselves anyway, why not
do a proper job of it?
--
⇔ glen
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