Miracle cure

Mayo's take on diet and cancer prevention :
https://sncs-prod-external.mayo.edu/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/plant-power-to-lower-cancer-risk

@ https://flip.it/TbHbsL

We all have to pick our poison, Right?

@surftohealth88 oh C’mon Surf! That’s the best you’ve got?😖Sounds boilerplate, like all the other websites.
The article I posted on cheese says it best: don’t look for any magic bullet to save you from anything. Only a real bullet can make all your troubles disappear!😂
Phil

I agree with everyone else that a healthy lifestyle can make a big difference in our ability to fight illness. Never underestimate that. But be wary of "miracle cure" stories, because of Survivor Bias.

Let's say that oncologists are 99% accurate at predicting whether a certain cancer is terminal. That would be a pretty good track record. But if 10,000 people get that diagnosis every year, then 100 of the diagnoses will be wrong, so we have 100 new potential "miracle cures" every year for the media to report on. The other 9,900 diagnoses were correct, so even if those people also moved to "blue zones" or got blessed at a mega-church, or ate special mushrooms, they're not around to talk about how it didn't work for them.

Our human brains are built to spot patterns and find causes, whether they exist or not (like in a series of coin tosses). As a result, we start looking for special circumstances in those 100 exceptions, rather than just accepting that they are a normal and expected part of the diagnostic process: it's very unfortunate that they got an unnecessary scare, but very fortunate that their cancer was misdiagnosed (or at least, misdiagnosed as terminal), and they were able to get on with their lives.

@northoftheborder

I agree 100 % - there are no miracle cures but there are spontaneous remissions and it is well known and documented phenomenon in medical literature and practice.

Top oncologist at Stanford hospital explained that and I heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes. Two Cat scans and a positive biopsy of lymph nodes sent to 2 top labs for examination confirmed diagnosis- there is NO way it was not correctly diagnosed in the case that I am talking about.

Spontaneous remissions happen every day for all kind of diseases. There is also well known "placebo effect" where people get well just by believing that they are getting a treatment . Nobody knows why it happens but researchers know that it DEFINITELY happens and that is WHY every single study has a "control" group and nobody knows who is getting a treatment and who is not. At the end of the study there are always patients in control group who get the same excellent results even thou they never got any treatment.

There is a happy medium in all of this - following what modern medicine can offer and at the same time following healthy complementary protocols of exercise and healthy dietary choices.

And at the end, our surgeon who is a top onco urologist and is a chair of Urology department and one of the top researchers in PC cancer center and personally did a ton of research in the area of PC and nutrition told us to stay away from animal products to try to delay or even prevent BCR as much as possible.

Now- should we not follow our doctor's advice and should we question his experience in treating PC patients and results that he got in his research ?

We choose to follow our doctor's advice and that way we know that we did everything that could be done and we did something HEALTHY. If things go "sideways" there will be no "what if's" for us . No type of food can prevent BCR 100% but perhaps it can delay it. No type of food can prevent PC 100% but it perhaps can slow it down. And if all fails healthy vegetable based diet will give my husband the best starting point for any necessary treatment in the future.

@surftohealth88

Oh don't even tempt me! hahahaa My sister has actually said she plans to retire there. If I were you I think I'd take Mr. Surf and by the hand and lead him to the place of healing. 🙂

@surftohealth88 Very true. That's why I added "(or at least, misdiagnosed as terminal)" in my post — in other words, the doctors correctly identify the cancer, but sometimes fail at predicting its future progression, because the human body is a complex system and doesn't always behave as expected (there are "edge cases" in every bell curve).

That's what those most of those spontaneous remissions would be. Our brains don't like to accept them as statistical artifacts, so we look hard for cause-and-effect. That's not a bad thing — sometimes scientists actually find one (like a rare, protective genetic mutation) that can be reproduced in multiple, increasingly-complex studies and trials, and then cancer science progresses and we all benefit — but it can also lead to flights of fancy among laypeople or even sometimes individual practitioners.

p.s. As I mentioned, I agree that a healthy body can fight illness better, and a healthy diet is part of that. I don't get concerned until the advice becomes overly specific and prescriptive. IMO, until we have more large-scale research findings, Michael Pollen's advice is probably best: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." (He defines "food" as something your grandparents would have recognised, e.g. not weird, overly-processed microwaveables, and elaborates that our grandparents' rule to cover 1/2 of the plate in vegetables, 1/4 in starch, and 1/4 in a high-protein source still holds up).

@northoftheborder I should mention that the prediction of my own progression in 2021 was wrong (so far), because even though my oncology team was just starting to use new techniques like doublet therapy and aggressive treatment for oligometastatic cancer, those approaches were too new to have shown up in the SEER data oncologists use to estimate our life expectancy with advanced prostate cancer.

While early signs from big studies like TITAN and STAMPEDE were promising, they couldn't honestly tell me that I might be doing so well after more than 4 years, because there was little data then to back it up. That's another reason that forecasts are sometimes wrong: long-term survival data is necessarily retrospective, based on people who started treatment 10–15 years ago (or more); we won't know my cohort's long-term survival prospects until another 10–15 years have passed.

p.s. We faced exactly the same problem with aid data when I worked in international aid. The data was likewise retrospective, showing what was happening in a crisis *last* week, last month, or last year; it didn't actually tell us what was going to happen over the next week/month/year, because situations change. We'd do our best to forecast, and we got it right a lot of the time, but when we didn't, politicians and the press would be all over us about how stupid/useless the international aid system was (smugly working from ex-post knowledge, when we had to make rapid decisions ex-ante).

@northoftheborder

Agreed : ))) ! And yes- for most people 1/2, 1/4, 1/4 formula is something achievable and manageable and can have great benefits and you also mentioned very , very important element - processed food !!! Thanks for reminding us all that (as an example) no matter how many healthy grains your bread or cereal has - if it is over-processed and has added color, artificial aroma, preservatives , excess sugar etc etc - it is has zero nutritional value , actually it has "minus 1,000" nutritional value.

Terminal - yes, I always say that LIFE is terminal and the most dangerous thing, ha ha ha ; ), XP, and is trying to leave us from the moment we take our first breath he, he he , and nobody has "expiration date" bar code printed on our forehead, so we should never give up and always hold onto hope : ))) !

Positive mutations and immunology : ))) ! You probably saw this but maybe somebody did not - it is about amazing new discovery and new immunology treatment for deadly type of leukemia and it shows how future treatments for all types of cancer will probably look like : ))

@dpayton

Ohhhhh < 3 !!!! *sigh
This is it !!! I am packing !!! And let me tell you, I tried so many times to "take him by the hand" out of here XP
HOWEVER, now I have really valid and non disputable reason 😉 he he he - 2 birds with one stone, actually THREE birds - surfing, healing and affordability !!!
Wish me luck ; ) !!!!

PS: Ask your sister if she would rent us one room ; )

Grazie per la condivisione < 3