ayurvedic Cancer treatment

As I have said before - there is no such thing as alternative medicine. If it works, big pharma will snaffle it and make money. If it does not, they won't and it is not medicine. Herbal medicine that works is not alternative medicine, it is hard science.

Ask Steve Jobs about alternative medicine.

Common sense stuff like clean diet, excercise, meditation, avoiding pollutants and whatnot is not alternative medicine. It is using nature to maximise your chances and minimising risks.

ASAdvocate said:

Several of the largest

Several of the largest prostate cancer forums do not allow threads regarding alternative treatments. Their moderators believe that such choices can endanger men by causing them to bypass proven methids of cancer cure/control.

When discussion of competitors is forbidden, I take it as a sign of weakness in the mainstream treatments. 

Radiation and surgery have a number needed to treat of 33 or 27 respectively (PROTECT trial results) to avoid metastatic disease, all with horrific quality of life consequences.

That means that 26 or 32 men recieve no benefit but all the QoL losses.   Put another way, the chances of conventional treatments preventing metastic disease are about 3%.

Those odds are terrible, and most competitive medicine treatments probably do at least that well.  It's nearly impossible to fund large scale trials of competitive medicine, so no one can say for sure.
But 3% is a pretty low bar.

hopeful and optimistic said:

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Unlike alternative treatments and pills, conventional medicine and pharmacology is based on research. There are rigid controls for pharmacology. Medical physician are credentialed to a high standard.

Many times those who spend their time and energy pursuing  alternative treatments, are not medically treated with conventional medicine in a timely manner, and suffer  any and all conseqences of non treatment.

 

Alternative treatments are based on individual patients. Holistic is not just a word, it means looking and treating the entire milieu that leaves the patient vulnerable to cancer and other illnesses.

My alternative doctors identified and treated problems in my digestion, liver function, kidney function, dentistry, food allergies, heart health, breathing, and more. I became more healthy than at any point in my life thanks to their assistance and my own hard work.

Unlike conventional medicine, alternative doctors apply years of experience in their clinical practice to make informed medical decisions individualized and appropriate for each patient. Conventional medicine relies almost exclusively on large, randomized trials. They use these to develop a "standard of care" forced upon all patients. The results are fine for the average patient.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an average patient. Engineers figured this out 50 years ago, trying to design ergonomic airplane cockpits. They measured thousands of pilots, took the averages, and set up the seats and controls accordingly. Pilots hated them. They were terrible for everyone.

Finally one smart engineer looked at the INDIVIDUAL results rather than the average. He found that if you took just 6 parameters such as height, weight, leg length, arm length, torso height, etc. that there were ZERO pilots who were within one standard deviation of the average on all 6. Now airplane pilots, factory work stations, and many other devices are designed to adjust to a wide variety of sizes, needs, and level of ability.

There is no such things as a standard of care in modern ergonomic design; the goal is to accommodate the innate differences among all human beings. Conventional medicine never got that memo.

The only reason you need to look at thousands of men in an prostate cancer trial is that the treatments are so ineffective that you can't see any difference unless you use very large numbers. There's never been a randomized, placebo controlled, double blind trial of appendectomy as treatment for appendicitis. That's because appendectomy works in nearly all patients. There will never be a random trial of people jumping out of airplanes with and without parachutes, because parachutes work.

All of the alternative practitioners I've worked with, without exception, have full medical credentials, including MDs from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other first-rate institutions. Most have years of additional formal training. The very best are doctors who were smart enough to notice and face up to the fact that they were harming most of their patients, and they didn't want to do that.

Unlike conventional medicine, alternative medicine does not slander and lie about its competitors. Most alternative practitioners encourage their patients to choose thoughtful combinations of conventional and complementary treatments. Some won't work with you on alternatives unless you are taking some form of conventional treatment.

I spent my time and energy pursuing alternative treatments for 10 years, and enjoyed the best quality of life I had ever known. I didn't neglect conventional treatments, I considered them carefully, found them wanting, and opted to wait until my circumstances changed the risk equation enough to warrant enduring the harsh treatments offered by conventional medicine. When I finally did accept conventional medicine, it was the biggest mistake of my life. What was presented as palliative care in fact destroyed my quality of life. Every symptom I have, a list that is quite long, is a direct result of the treatment and not the cancer.

I'm not suffering the consequence of non-treatment.  I'm suffering for the consquences of conventional treatment because in a moment of weakness and fear I put aside rational thought and accepted a poison deceptively described as medicine.

Everyone has the right to their own body and their own life.  It is an awesome responsibility but one that cannot be delegated.  People who choose alterntive care, whether or not they accept convention treatments as well, deserved just as much compassion and respect as any other patient, and any other human being.  Slandering their care givers and questoining their choices is neither helpful, compassionate, or caring.