Quack Remedies

High time I got round to the post I have mooted for ages about quack remedies, prompted by an altercation I had online with someone promoting the highly dangerous Gerson protocol for cancer treatment. Don't just believe me, here is what Cancer Research UK has to say about it:

Gerson therapy involves a specific organic vegetarian diet with nutritional supplements and enemas. There is no scientific evidence to use it as a treatment for cancer.

Summary

• Gerson therapy uses a specific organic vegetarian diet, nutritional supplements and enemas to treat cancer
• There is no scientific evidence that it can treat cancer or its symptoms
• Gerson therapy can have severe side effects Source

The way the therapy is described is the point: there is no scientific evidence that it will treat cancer. Personally I think coffee enemas can only end in years. It is also significant that it is a cancer treatment because naturally people with cancer get very desperate and are taken in.

Unfortunately we live in an age where people don't know how to marshall scientific evidence and believe things which have no real evidence. There is a particular way of doing scientific research which will show that you will keep getting the same result to a statistically significant number of times with the same intervention as long as all the other variables are controlled. The highest level of evidence is that provided by what are called double blind randomized controlled trials, where neither the scientists or the testees know what is being done.

You don't have to read the boring research - in Britain you can tell if a treatment is evidence based because you can get it on the NHS. You can't get homeopathy or chiropractic for example. This is because they don't work. I do like the quaint homeopathic remedy of bits of the Berlin Wall to treat feelings of isolation!

The biggest barriers to getting treatments which work are the alternative remedies industry and the internet.

The good news is that if you eat a balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, little fat and sugar, drink moderately and don't smoke, exercise regularly and deal with stress, you are already doing all you can to extend your life using the power of food. There are otherwise vanishingly few food treatments and the vast majority of supplements are a total waste of money.

You can easily tell these quack remedies. They have testimonials. They will say they are ancient (in other words date from the times we were ancient at forty). Are all natural. There is a full list of red flags here.

Things have reached such a sorry pass that people don't believe medicine works any more. The ridiculous belief that vaccines cause autism persists with no evidence whatsoever. Diseases which were thought conquered have had a resurgence because of these dangerous clowns.

Currently most dangerous is the refusal to quake before the coronavirus. The evidence is very clearly that while the vaccine does have some risk it is always better for you and everyone else to have the vaccine than risk having the virus. The only alternative is lockdowns and isolation because you can't have an economy if you're dead. If you want the whole picture there is a very good discussion with the evidence in answers to an actual vaccine sceptic in the comments here.

What does this have to do with witchcraft, especially as witches are known for peddling herbal remedies? There are two answers to that. The first is that witches are also supposed to be wise and real wisdom means consenting to a treatment which has some chance of working. It also means not wasting money on shit which won't work or will harm. Can you tell I've had enough of idiots over the past couple of years?

The other thing is that in addition to the objective effect of medicine I mentioned above, the mind has a great effect on health and this is where the magic comes in. I have left it last because of course the placebo effect is incredibly difficult to pin down in research, and is virtually impossible to control for. However I am sure anyone would agree that going about things with a mindset that you are actually going to do everything you can to change things, can only help. We all know Uncle Al's definition of magic as the art and science of causing change in conformity with will and that applies here. It also means the magical tools, even if they are the magical tools of remembering to take medication and turn up for appointments.

I am in two minds about mentioning him because his presence here will seem to contradict what I've said above about evidence but I'm bringing him up for a particular reason. Plus you wouldn't know it was a post by me if it wasn't completely contradictory. There was a controversial psychiatrist called William Sargant (1907 to 1988). In the age of psychotherapy he poo pooed it completely and usually without a valid evidence base pursued the physical treatments of the time, most of which are defunct, such as lobotomy, abreaction, insulin coma therapy. The only treatment of this vintage still in use is ECT because (you guessed it) it has a valid evidence base in RCTs. One of the things you don't read about him now was that at the time he had an exceptional success rate with these ineffective treatments. Unfortunately because he refused to participate in research this was only ever anecdotal. The reason he appears here is that it is thought these treatments were more successful for him because he thought they would work. His belief made them work.

This is not to say that anything will work if you believe it will (see, I'm a witch, I knew you were thinking that). The treatments he was working with had other variables involved that contributed to them working and his belief in them only increased the success rate. For example, in the 1950s mental health professionals thought Deep Insulin Coma Therapy was an effective treatment, because it had worked in trials. However these trials weren't controlled enough and when better controlled trials were done and the actual coma was taken out, it was found what made people better was the nursing care!

To summarize: prescribed treatments on the NHS are evidence based in the UK, and beyond a normally healthy lifestyle no special supplements are usually needed. Therapies outside the NHS are best avoided because they can actually be harmful. If you are unfortunate enough to have cancer, please follow your medical team's advice.

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic, I will not give credence to any conspiracy theories or nonsense about the coronavirus and thus possibly cause deaths. I will not enable comments promoting nonsense.