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Someone who bills herself “Montreal Healthy Girl” has some news for us all: “CANCER IS ACTUALLY A GOOD THING!!!” Did you get those extra exclamation marks? Obviously all manner of truthy, because serious emphasis. I’d dearly like to give this person one hell of a smack, to say the least.
So what is Cancer exactly and what the hell can we do about it when we are faced with a paralysing fear of death? The following may surprise you, but finding out you have the big C is not as terrifyingly final as we are taught to think. Contrary to popular belief and misinformation, CANCER IS ACTUALLY A GOOD THING!!! It is your body’s way of defending itself against a poisonous internal environment and without it, most of us would die long before our diagnosis.
Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s obvious this stupid twit does not know one thing about cancer, nor did she bother with actually getting acquainted with anyone who happens to have cancer. Most people are aware that cure rates are up for many types of cancer, and many people with stage IV cancers are living their lives for decades past diagnosis. CANCER IS NOT A GOOD THING. IT’S A BAD THING WHICH REQUIRES PROPER TREATMENT FROM PEOPLE WITH ACTUAL MEDICAL DEGREES. Cancer does not save you from early death due to a “poisonous internal environment”. Cancer cells are terrifyingly magnificent, and out of all the things on this planet, they play the game of evolution best. There are so many different types of cancer cells, it’s dizzying, and no, all cancers are not treated the same; they cannot be. For each type of cancer, it’s a different game. If you want a thorough understanding of how cancer cells work, read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Cancer cells are rogues, and they excel at reproducing and mutating. Some cancers tend to be low aggression, like mine (colorectal cancer), others are incredibly aggressive and scary as fuck. As always, with any cancer, your best bet is early detection, and prevention, like not smoking, which cuts your chances of lung cancer way down. It never hurts to eat healthy and get at least moderate exercise, but those things will not guarantee you’ll never hear “it’s cancer.” The older you get, the more likely there will be an incidence of cancer. Get those screening tests! Cancer is not the result of an “imbalance” or the body being too “acidic”, which is the fucking stupid twit’s answer to cancer and how to get it to “reverse itself”. This sort of crap is incredibly dangerous, and leads to people dying. Please, if you hear “it’s cancer”, do not fall for this sort of crap. I’m the last person to say that cancer treatment is any sort of fucking fun, it isn’t. It’s a right pain in the ass (literally in my case), and the side effects are nasty. It’s better than death, which is what you’ll get with Ms. Healthy Girl and those like her. In the case of someone like myself, with colon cancer, you might actually live for quite a while without treatment, being that it’s not an overly aggressive cancer. But there will pain. Enormous, bad pain. Pain which will get worse. And by the time you drag your sorry ass to an actual physician, it will likely to be too damn late.
I won’t link you to the idiot’s fucking page, because this infuriates me no end, but I will link you to Jonathan Jarry at McGill, who has plenty to say about this dangerous fucking mess of a person.
That was a bit of mind-beggaring stupidity. I don’t understand how “food babe” can be so stupid -- there is a significant percentage of the people who will encounter her blitherings that are fighting cancer right now. And a significant percentage will be, eventually. I hope she never finds out what a bad thing cancer is.
We are all like the person, falling from a cliff, who says “hey, the breeze up here is really bracing!”
What made me scream with anguish was a comment on that piece of fucking garbage:
This fucking oblivious horror of a person will happily profit off these people’s pain and anguish, and she’ll cause them a hell of a lot more when that woman dies. Fuck.
Since youtube is her channel, there’s basically no “editor” or oversight that can be approached to shut her down or hold her liable.
What can be done? I suppose her youtube video is evidence of her giving medical recommendations, and someone could obliterate her with a lawsuit. But someone would have to listen to her advice and die for that to happen.
There isn’t anything to be done. She has the standard big ass disclaimer at the end of each post, not intended as medical advice, blah blah. For all the cancer art, I did a lot of looking at cancer cell images, and you would not even begin to believe all the “alt” health cancer sites. “The Truth About Cancer!!!” and other assorted bullshit. It’s a whole fucking industry, and it terrifies me how many people die because of it.
The McGill article mentions the twit’s idol, and he’s responsible for so many deaths of indigenous people, I’d gladly see him shuffle off this world, with extreme prejudice. They’re dealers in death.
Caine@#4:
She has the standard big ass disclaimer at the end of each post, not intended as medical advice, blah blah.
If she’s giving advice, whether it’s intended as medical or no, a top-notch lawyer’d go through her disclaimer like an oxyacetylene torch opening an aluminum coke can.
This is one of those “the world is probably glad Marcus is not a billionaire” because if I was, I’d spin off one of my attorneys and tell them “go make a project out of her and report back to me next year.” It’d be like the nazgul descending on a cute goat, with extreme prejudice and garlic and rosemary and a big fire.
Marcus:
Now that I could live with. It’s too bad all the idiots with money tend to fall for such crap.
Oh I hate people who try and profit off human misery, all the while causing yet more… as if we didn’t already have enough…
We went through this with my father. My cousins would contact us with the latest bit of bullshittery. (They’re Mormons, if that explains anything.) How you could go to Mexico! And get coffee enemas! etc. Also, you have to follow their exact diet! And so on. (With apologies, doubt it’s right) ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
It’s when you wish there was a hell these people could roast in while you sit there sipping gin tonic telling them it’s actually good for them.
Fuck her. Truly. Fuck “Montreal Healthy Girl.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Technically, cancer may be the result of a “poison”, synthetic or natural, internal or external. But cancer is not the body’s defense against the poison, it’s precisely the opposite, it’s what happens when the body’s defense mechanisms fail, it’s the failure of defense!
But yeah, this alkaline-diet-as-a-cure-for-cancer nonsense is quite prevalent nowadays. I mean, the basic idea of “try to eat less processed foods and plenty of fruits and vegetables” is sound advice, but then they wrap that up in a lot of nonsensical talk that defies basic physiology and in these stupid long “protocols” so they can charge people money for the advice I basically just gave in 10 words and that everyone knows anyway. It’s infuriating. Even more infuriating when they try to convince people that their oncologists are the ones trying to kill them, and they can forgo chemo for juices. Gah, I viscerally hate these idiots.
Indeed. Cancer can always knock on your door, even if you think you followed all the rules. My mom has never smoked anything her entire life, she’s not even a secondhand smoker. Didn’t save her.
kestrel,
Oh I’ve heard that one too! More than once. I still don’t understand how anyone can think that is a good idea…
These people make me so angry. I have I think mentioned the friend who having had treatment for breast cancer declined treatment for liver cancer, but then went off down a sewer of woo. She did the whole going vegan, alkalising her diet crap and spent a month of her last four months after diagnosis alone in countries where she didn’t know the language under going “treatments” that made her even more miserable than the real treatment had. All of the “treatments” she tried made her miserable, and worse guilty when she didn’t follow them perfectly (impossible to do), they didn’t give her more time, in fact they probably shortened her time as her diet was so restricted. They played upon her fear. She wouldn’t have lived much longer had she accepted proper treatment, but even if she had decided on no treatment but no woo she would have been with her family, friends and her beloved dogs when she needed us most, rather than far away and alone. Urgh.
JFC on a pogo stick, the “big C” isn’t as terrifyingly final as it used to be because of advances in medical treatments. This is like the people who are all, “incidence of polio is low so we don’t have to vaccinate!”
But is it as good a thing as being hit by a train?