Nutrition news is ripe for overstatement. You might say there are fruit flies of hyperbole swarming many popular reports on select health benefits. Take this example from a site I won’t name (not naming my source would be in keeping with many health reports): “In parts of China where people eat a lot of vegetables such as garlic and onions, villagers have one-quarter as many cases of cancer as people in the rest of the country.” Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the health claim the writer makes in using this example is true or as strong as he says it is. There are likely many combined reasons that guard these Chinese from cancer.
In popular news, nutrition reports can be maddening. Often, the news will simplify a report too far, like saying coffee is linked to hallucinations when the report is actually inconclusive. Or a report may be accurate and the study reported on simplistic. So when I began reading Ty Bollinger’s book, Cancer: Step Outside the Box
The first thing Bollinger wants us to believe is that pharmaceutical companies and certain medical groups do not want us to heal from cancer or find its cure. They want to make money off of our disease, so they have stifled real cures like apricot seeds in favor of their money-making treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. He argues that the FDA and other agencies are pressured by lobbyists to ban nutrition and promote manufactured drugs. Some leaders are pressed to promote something regardless of clinical evidence and others are steeped in a groupthink that prevents them from questioning the promotion.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that medical doctors can suffer from unhelpful groupthink, that they can be biased against nutritional approaches to health, but Bollinger’s claims are too much. For example, he repeats the story of Jason Vale, a young man who had a rare form of cancer (Askin’s Tumor) cut out of him twice, but Jason believes eating apricot seeds was the key to keeping the cancer away. You can read the rationale in detail here. In short, raw apricot seeds have an enzyme that becomes cyanide when you eat them, and when it does, they say, the cyanide will attack only your cancer cells, not your healthy ones. I don’t understand how the cyanide gets to the cellular level without killing the rest of me on the way, but apparently people do eat these raw seeds (cherry, apple, plum and others) without being harmed. Overeating these seeds will take you to the mat for the final count.
I don’t know if apricot seeds helped or simply did not harm Jason Vale, but to ignore the surgery that certainly did help, mock that surgery elsewhere in the book (and chemo and radiation, which Jason also took), and advocate the seeds as the real cure is possibly a groupthink in the opposite extreme.
Another problem is the apparent cherry-picking of studies common among health advocates. He points to specific or generalized studies in support of his preferences and pans the ones that do not support them. When you wade deep into his book, you can easily begin to wonder which claims have credibility and which do not. (An interesting note: Sean Swarner, a another young man who had Askin’s Tumor and Hodgken’s Lymphoma, apparently did not use alternative treatments and went on to write Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World
A couple of observations have cooled my enthusiasm for the natural health or alternative health movement.
First is that they almost always cite anecdotal evidence while clinical studies are rarely seen or cited. Then, seemingly overnight, five gazillion websites pop up citing the same handful of success stories. Wading through the sheer volume of hype to find the one or two sites that quote the clinical study that found the natural supplement or procedure is slightly less effective than a placebo becomes a daunting prospect. It’s just like pointing out the mathematical odds always favouring the house in any gambling establishment so that if you gamble enough you will always lose more than you win and the person you are talking with immediately pointing to their neighbor who won a hundred bucks only last week.
Secondly I take issue with the assumed malevolence of all practitioners and suppliers of traditional medicine products and procedures. “The BlahBlahBlah your doctor doesn’t want you to know about!” This in support of a huge multi level marketing organization where everyone is only there to help their neighbor achieve wellness through supplements not available in any store. In regard to their own people they ignore the fallen nature of man and the fact that, just like the traditional practitioners, the alternative practitioners are also acting out of self interest. In regard to the other side, they ignore the fact that our capitalist system actually harnesses the self interest of individuals to work on behalf of the self interest of all. If I produce a product or service that doesn’t actually benefit my customers, they won’t come back and I’ll be out of business in short order. Therefore, it’s in my best interest to find a way to meet the needs of my customers or clients.
Good post. I’m always taken aback by the “evil corporations are hiding cures” argument, particularly because while there are certainly some people with actually evil motives, I think most people are at their hearts good, and people who go into medicine or science-research in medicine do it because they want to help people. Make a living, sure, but not by actively being evil.
The biggest challenge to medical research, in my mind, is the combination of the placebo effect and confirmation bias, both of which make it ridiculously hard to verify whether a given treatment actually works without careful study.
And I always keep this chestnut in the back of my mind: “Alternative Medicine is medicine that’s not been proven to work or been proven not to work. Alternative Medicine that’s been proven to work is just called Medicine.”
I also wanted to say something about opinionated scientists. When you talk to a variety of very educated people, like cancer doctors, they can argue very well for their own ideas and effectively accuse the rest of their colleagues of being idiots, but it still doesn’t make them right. The human body is a complex organism. Research showing a link doesn’t necessarily reveal a cause.
You wouldn’t believe the crazy claims our family had to deal with when my father was diagnosed with brain cancer. I found Quackwatch to be of great help during that time.