Homeopathy, Why people want to Believe

A *primary care physician which is the doctor Reece is referring to I think, is a generalist, has knowledge of medications they prescribe, but their knowledge is not as extensive as the pharmacists knowledge would be.

Or at the very least, it will be extensive in a different way from the pharmacist. That's why it would be better to ask both, I think.

An oconlogist is a specialist and would be expected to know completely the the interactions of the medications they have at their disposal during treatments. I don't think pharmacists dispense chemotherapy drugs. Do you agree?

I agree. That's why I wanted to make sure that questions about chemotherapy are probably better addressed to your oncologist.

Linda
 
I can't speak for the original poster but I know one person who died from her cancer using the "treatment" of her "doctor" while refusing to go see a real doctor or go to a hospital. Her friends, her neighbors, and her rabbi all begged her to go to a real doctor even as a compliment to her "treatment" but she refused. And she died unnecessarily.

On the other hand I was quite impressed with William Bengston's paper (I just listened to that podcast) on his "hands on healing" methods and its success in curing cancer in mice. I would really like to see additional studies on larger animals, larger numbers of mice, and humans (who also use conventional medicine).

I think we might be further ahead if we looked at the actual research, rather than trading stories of questionable purview. If a treatment accomplishes what we are looking for (at least improved quality of life if not also improved quantity), this shows up in studies of efficacy/effectiveness (such as randomized, controlled trials).

Bengston's paper did not impress me, the sloppiness of his approach irked me. If you actually think you are accomplishing something wonderful, why would you deliberately perform the experiment in a way which doesn't allow physicians to take your claims seriously? Apparently this is being tried in an uncontrolled way in humans, so an alternate route (to get funding and access) would be to go the with the Best Case Series protocol through the NCI (assuming some of the wilder claims hold up when investigated properly).

http://cam.cancer.gov/best_case_protocol.html

Linda
 
I think we might be further ahead if we looked at the actual research, rather than trading stories of questionable purview. If a treatment accomplishes what we are looking for (at least improved quality of life if not also improved quantity), this shows up in studies of efficacy/effectiveness (such as randomized, controlled trials).

I don't disagree, but examples were asked for and I provided one. It also explains the animosity of some, including myself, towards alternative therapies.

Bengston's paper did not impress me, the sloppiness of his approach irked me. If you actually think you are accomplishing something wonderful, why would you deliberately perform the experiment in a way which doesn't allow physicians to take your claims seriously?
Linda

Why didn't it impress you? He cured cancer at a fantastic success rate in mice. I would like to see some more mice studies before human studies, but the success rate was so incredible I can't help but be impressed.

In what was the experiment peformed that doesn't allow physicians to take his claims seriously? The claims were about mice, not people. I understand that he does his "treatments" on people who request it but that is addition to conventional medecine so the results will always be inconclusive.

My understanding, and I could be wrong about this, is that most cancer treatment experiments start with mice. If they are sufficiently successful there will be further animal trials, then non-blind human trials, and eventually blind human trials. It takes millions and millions of dollars in funding to bring a treatment up to the level where it can legally be administered to humans as "medicine." (Obviously people can consent to whatever they want, but most people won't take a treatment unless they knew it had passed trials for safety and efficacy in humans).
 
I don't disagree, but examples were asked for and I provided one. It also explains the animosity of some, including myself, towards alternative therapies.

Good point.

Why didn't it impress you? He cured cancer at a fantastic success rate in mice. I would like to see some more mice studies before human studies, but the success rate was so incredible I can't help but be impressed.

It didn't impress me because it was so sloppy that we can't tell if he cured cancer at a fantastic success rate, or if it was just the effect of two people who didn't have any experience, implementing the experiment poorly. Studying cancer using animal models isn't as simple as just sticking tumours in mice and seeing whether or not they grow. It's hard to get tumours to grow, because an immune reaction will destroy the "foreign body" in most cases. So you use mice with a defective immune system, or you try to use tumours which are less foreign, like injecting a mammary cancer from a specific strain of mouse into that same strain of mouse (which is what they describe). But if you don't go through a very careful process of making sure the tumour takes in every mouse and making sure that each mouse has the same amount of tumour, you don't know if variation in your result was because of your intervention or because of poor implementation. Added to that, the experiment wasn't blinded, the treatment application was haphazard, and ad hoc explanations were offered for failures in the treatment group and successes in the control group.

In what was the experiment peformed that doesn't allow physicians to take his claims seriously? The claims were about mice, not people. I understand that he does his "treatments" on people who request it but that is addition to conventional medecine so the results will always be inconclusive.

Inconclusive? He doesn't make claims that are inconclusive. He makes claims which are astonishing. It should be relatively easy for him to pick a few of those cases to present for a Best Case Series, if the claims had any validity.

My understanding, and I could be wrong about this, is that most cancer treatment experiments start with mice. If they are sufficiently successful there will be further animal trials, then non-blind human trials, and eventually blind human trials. It takes millions and millions of dollars in funding to bring a treatment up to the level where it can legally be administered to humans as "medicine." (Obviously people can consent to whatever they want, but most people won't take a treatment unless they knew it had passed trials for safety and efficacy in humans).

But he already seems to have the kind of information needed to make astonishing claims (if he doesn't have that information, he shouldn't be making these claims). It wouldn't cost him anything to copy that information and present it to the National Cancer Institute. Then they will provide the funding needed to more fully test the therapy. It's been 13 years since the mouse study was published. A lot could have been accomplished in that time period.

Linda
 
It didn't impress me because it was so sloppy that we can't tell if he cured cancer at a fantastic success rate, or if it was just the effect of two people who didn't have any experience, implementing the experiment poorly. . . . So you use mice with a defective immune system, or you try to use tumours which are less foreign, like injecting a mammary cancer from a specific strain of mouse into that same strain of mouse (which is what they describe). But if you don't go through a very careful process of making sure the tumour takes in every mouse and making sure that each mouse has the same amount of tumour, you don't know if variation in your result was because of your intervention or because of poor implementation.

I see what you mean by sloppy but the results seem impressive all the same. They were careful to use only mice in which the tumor had taken and each mouse was injected with same amount of cells (they did have a biologist that knew what he or she was doing). There may have been variations in how much took in each mouse but even with that in the mix the results are amazing. I don't see how such variations could account for the results across 4 experiments.


Added to that, the experiment wasn't blinded, the treatment application was haphazard, and ad hoc explanations were offered for failures in the treatment group and successes in the control group.

I agree with these criticisms but they don't negate the results. They are impetus, however, to draw up a more rigorous version of the experiment.

Inconclusive? He doesn't make claims that are inconclusive. He makes claims which are astonishing. It should be relatively easy for him to pick a few of those cases to present for a Best Case Series, if the claims had any validity.

I have not read his book but in the paper he makes no claims about being able to cure humans at all. The paper's claims are only about mice. My understanding of the problem with human testing is that it would be immoral to ask humans to forgoe conventional treatment in favor of experimental treatment and so we are left with people who are also undergoing conventional medical treatments. If so, how do we know successes are really due to the healing hands treatment and not to the conventional treatment?

We could use people who are in such dire straits that all accepted conventional treatments have failed, but even such people can usually get themselves into a pharmaceutical trial that uses medicine that actually makes sense.

But he already seems to have the kind of information needed to make astonishing claims (if he doesn't have that information, he shouldn't be making these claims). It wouldn't cost him anything to copy that information and present it to the National Cancer Institute. Then they will provide the funding needed to more fully test the therapy. It's been 13 years since the mouse study was published. A lot could have been accomplished in that time period.

Like I said I haven't read the book. But how many humans has he treated? Does he make any claims (in public) anywhere about his success rate in humans?
 
I see what you mean by sloppy but the results seem impressive all the same. They were careful to use only mice in which the tumor had taken and each mouse was injected with same amount of cells (they did have a biologist that knew what he or she was doing).

Where does it say that they established the tumour had taken or that the mice were injected with the same number of cells?

I have not read his book but in the paper he makes no claims about being able to cure humans at all. The paper's claims are only about mice. My understanding of the problem with human testing is that it would be immoral to ask humans to forgoe conventional treatment in favor of experimental treatment and so we are left with people who are also undergoing conventional medical treatments. If so, how do we know successes are really due to the healing hands treatment and not to the conventional treatment?

I haven't read the book either, but here is Robert McLuhan's (a proponent) review of those claims:
http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2012/02/bengstons-energy-healing-too-good-to-be-true.html

Please note that if Bengston is treating cases under conditions where conventional treatments could account for the results, it would be unreasonable for him to claim that his therapy is effective. So I suspect that these are cases where conventional treatment wasn't used, or where it was expected to be hopeless. The criteria are listed in the link I provided earlier.

Linda
 
Where does it say that they established the tumour had taken or that the mice were injected with the same number of cells?

This was more clear in his interview with Alex but he said that 5 of the 6 treated mice all developed significant tumors (the sixth one, which died early on from non-cancer causes, was not included in the experiment). Things were similar in the other experiments, mice that didn't live long enough to develop tumors were excluded. Only the mice that actually developed the cancer were included. Furthermore attempted re-injections of cured mice were unsuccessful.

You are correct, however that it does not say that the mice were injected with the same number of cells. I had seen that in a different, conventional experiment with the same mice and the same cancer (which makes the omission in Bengston's papers all the more glaring. I am going to send an email to Carol Hayes who oversaw the fourth experiment to ask her if she can confirm that all the mice received the same injection.

I haven't read the book either, but here is Robert McLuhan's (a proponent) review of those claims:
http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2012/02/bengstons-energy-healing-too-good-to-be-true.html

Please note that if Bengston is treating cases under conditions where conventional treatments could account for the results, it would be unreasonable for him to claim that his therapy is effective. So I suspect that these are cases where conventional treatment wasn't used, or where it was expected to be hopeless. The criteria are listed in the link I provided earlier.
Linda

I read the review but it is hard to get a sense of what exactly Bengston is claiming vis-a-vis humans. I just ordered the book so when I am done reading I can give a report.
 
This was more clear in his interview with Alex but he said that 5 of the 6 treated mice all developed significant tumors (the sixth one, which died early on from non-cancer causes, was not included in the experiment). Things were similar in the other experiments, mice that didn't live long enough to develop tumors were excluded. Only the mice that actually developed the cancer were included. Furthermore attempted re-injections of cured mice were unsuccessful.

What I meant was (sorry if this is too technical) that the tumour is described as a transplantable tumour, so when you get the tumour material and the mice from the Jackson laboratory, the tumour is meant to be serially transplanted (http://dtp.nci.nih.gov/branches/btb/tumor-catalog.pdf page 9). The frozen tumour cell are injected into donors, after 7 days the donors are sacrificed, and tumours which aren't necrotic are then used for transplant into a new set of donor mice. This process is repeated indefinitely, so that there is a fresh supply of good quality tumour (tumour which is less likely to be destroyed by an ordinary immune reaction) available for transplant into experimental mice. Tumours which are necrotic mean that the host mouse has already started to mount an immune response to the tumour.

This process isn't described in Bengston's paper. He only describes that initial procurement of tumour from the Jackson lab and then injection into the mice. What happens next sounds like the description of what ordinarily happens in the donor mice at the start of the transplantation process - some tumours grow but become necrotic as the host mounts an immune response and destroys the tumour. I can't tell from the description in Bengston's paper whether it is realistic to expect the mortality rate we might see with established tumour. And we wouldn't expect any tumour to grow in mice which mounted an immune response to the tumour after the initial injection, as they will now have antibodies to the tumour circulating. This is all part of an ordinary, rather than miraculous, process.

You are correct, however that it does not say that the mice were injected with the same number of cells. I had seen that in a different, conventional experiment with the same mice and the same cancer (which makes the omission in Bengston's papers all the more glaring. I am going to send an email to Carol Hayes who oversaw the fourth experiment to ask her if she can confirm that all the mice received the same injection.

Excellent. I have long hoped for clarification on this issue. Under ordinary circumstances, mice models aren't expected to correspond all that well to human cancers. But this seems like it would be an exception - i.e. If it is actually doing something in mice the hope would be good for humans as well.

I read the review but it is hard to get a sense of what exactly Bengston is claiming vis-a-vis humans. I just ordered the book so when I am done reading I can give a report.

Thanks.

Linda
 
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