Barbara Ehrenreich had breast cancer, and ugly and frightening as that disease is, she found something else that was almost as horrible: the ‘positive thinking’ approach to health care. People are stigmatized if they fail to regard their illness as anything other than an uplifting, positive life experience, an opportunity to examine their lives and identify what is most important to them…and also, most disturbingly, if they fail to appreciate that the attitude that they bring to the problem will determine whether they live or die. It’s the Oprah-zation of medicine.
In the most extreme characterisation, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance – it is a “gift”, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor writes in her book The Gift Of Cancer: A Call To Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”
Well, doesn’t that just make you all want to rush out and take a bath in some carcinogens? We healthy people are missing out on enlightenment!
We’re also missing out on an opportunity to be bilked. That’s what this is really all about: con artists who can’t really do anything to fight the cancer can at least tell you to smile, be cheerful, pray, buy my super-duper vitamin supplements, and pay the cashier my consulting fees on the way out … and if it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. You’ve got a disease that’s ripping through your guts and causing pain, yet if you feel a moment’s doubt or worry, you’ve invalidated the charlatan’s prescription, and your relapse is all your fault.
This is where the feel-good phonies prosper. Look at how Deepak Chopra treats his ‘patients’.
Besides, it takes effort to maintain the upbeat demeanor expected by others – effort that can no longer be justified as a contribution to long-term survival. Consider the woman who wrote to Deepak Chopra that her breast cancer had spread to the bones and lungs: “Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”
Chopra’s response: “As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.”
The poor woman has a metastisizing cancer that has spread to her bones and lungs, and Chopra is telling her that diet, prayer, and not thinking ‘toxic’ thoughts will lead to a cure! I don’t know how that quack has avoided arrest.
I much prefer the honesty of Ehrenreich (I also like the connotations of her name). This is the truth:
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.
Its absurd to make people think they have to be positive or else it wont work. Its even dumber to suggest that prayers will cure you… How do these people get away with these claims so easily?
Well yeah, but the water in Jamaica Bay is freaking cold this time of year.
Well it appeared to give her the ability to display some courage in the face of idiocy. Whatever comfort that does or does not bring her…
For more information on those who prey on cancer victims:
http://anaximperator.wordpress.com/
Seriously, though, Barbara Ehrenreich ought to be regarded as a national treasure.
Her honesty in the face of adversity should be admired.
Where’s that benzene when you need it?
From this article on Patrick Swayze’s cancer and subsequent death, while the actor briefly tried some Chinese herbs in addition to his main treatments, he was quick to call out the “cures” alt medicine likes to push and say he wasn’t going to use them:
“That’s one thing I’m not gonna do, is chase, is chase staying alive. I’m not, you know, you’ll spend so much time chasing staying alive you won’t live, you know? I wanna live. If anybody had that cure out there like so many people swear to me they do, you’d be two things: you’d be very rich, and you’d be very famous. Otherwise, shut up,” he told Barbara Walters in an interview that aired in January of this year.
Incidentally Swayze lived longer than many with the disease, and almost certainly longer than those who relied on alt medicine.
The same article mentions that patients taking the alt medicine regimes last about four months from diagnosis, while patients undergoing standardized treatment last about 14.
My grandfather lived with disease for most of his life. There were lots of people telling him to pray harder, or just so, or just then, and everyone was sure he had been blighted because of having married a pregnant woman (much like half of everyone at the time) or because he wasn’t sincerely pious or perhaps secretly sinful in some way. Not that god ever bothered to smite the church elders with arthritis, despite them raping people.
This stuff is merely a continuation of that attitude, dressed up in modern mysticism.
The decades of frustration and self doubt are still being inflicted on people, even though science has proven beyond a shadow of doubt that disease occurs due to flaws and weaknesses in the imperfect human body.
It’s not only a cause for anger, but also for deep sadness. Why are believers always so vigorous in hurting their fellow humans?
I can’t help to see the parallel to this:
http://transhumangoodness.blogspot.com/2007/07/deathism-vs-battered-person-syndrome.html
If you can’t do anything about it, pretend it’s a good thing.
People do this with all kinds of diseases and disabilities — look at the number of people who think that being blind must automagically make you able to hear like a dog, or the sheerly annoying (as a person with a disability) number of people who seem to think that disabled (and sick) people exist to be moral exemplars to them.
I blame the ancient Greeks, personally; there’s no character in a ancient Greek work of literature who has what we’d now call a disease or disability who isn’t “gifted” or otherwise special in some way (the blind or lame prophet, for example), and the trope has persisted through western literature so universally and for so long now, people have basically been subconsciously conditioned from birth to believe that disease, disability, and infirmity must always come with some kind of (hidden) upside. Add that to the human tendency to construct narrative out of temporally-connected series of events, and everyone is looking for a good story in adversity.
The whole So-Called-Alternative-Medicine thing where if you just submit perfectly to the quack’s comprehensive regime of physical, emotional, and social control, you’ll get better (and you’ll get worse if you don’t!) doesn’t help, either.
The reality is, disease and disability aren’t morally uplifting and don’t exist to teach other people how to be patient, tolerant, or any of that other BS. They’re ugly, usually painful, inconvenient, and undignified, and, above all, not about anyone but the person who has them (and maybe their immediate circle).
Oh man, you reminded me! I took my regular shower this morning but forgot my ethidium bromide facial cleanser.
I have a number of woo-soaked patients, one of whom has talked her husband out of most of his cardiac medications in favour of some heavily marketed herbal crap.
She thinks they’ve both made it to their 80’s because of “living right,” and she is quick to denounce her relatives who have gotten cancer and died for having a poor lifestyle and a poor attitude. *He* on the other hand, is simply trading time for the stress of having to stand up to her.
When he has his next heart attack, which is imminent, there is a part of me that wants to tell her she could have had more time with him, if she had allowed him to be treated properly. But obviously I can’t do that.
I have some mixed feelings about this. The quotes from “The Gift of Cancer” and the Chopak nonsense make me gag, but I can understand the need for many people to stay positive.
When my partner was diagnosed with lymphoma we were obviously devastated. The first visit to Cancer Care was truly horrible. The nurses and receptionists and schedulers were the happiest most upbeat people that I’ve ever met, all of them smiling from ear to ear and it pissed me off royally.
“You’d think they’d realize that this is life and death shit we’re dealing with,” I grumbled to my partner. By the second or third visit, I was actually grateful for their approach. We went to every appointment wound so tight, terrified of what the doctor might say. The oncologist on the other hand was always matter of fact and never pulled any punches which we also greatly appreciated.
I laughed and understood when I read Ehrenreich’s article but I disagreed on a strictly personal level. I felt that the personnel were trying to do an impossible job which they knew would not end well for many of the patients that they saw every day. No one proselytized or tried to pray with us or made promises that they couldn’t keep, they just tried to make a tough situation a little more bearable and we were thankful for that.
It won’t determine the outcome but it does influence it a little – via stress hormones.
What Sven DeMilo said. Barbara Ehrenreich is an impossibly awesome writer and journalist, and I wish she got more work. I had no idea she’d had cancer, I’m glad she’s better, and I’m overjoyed she kept her good sense with her, too.
I want to CORRECT a small thing paul seem to have missed, I dont want his “followers” to blindly accept it:
I agree with Everything except the LAST LINE which everyone should, especially americans, be worried that Paul do not agree ith: ->
and blame only ourselves for our fate.
YES, you SHOULD blame yourself, because it is only YOU that is responsible for YOUR life. This is the problem with American culture and the reason so many believe in god, they blame EVERYONE ELSE. Americans never take responsibility for their lifes, it is HIS fault.
“it wasnot MY fault I spillt coffe over me”.
“It was not MY fault I smashed my car into a pedestrian, it was the car companies”.
And so on. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY is the PRIMARY point you should take with you in this post, that Paul Myers do not agree with this is very… American?
That americans have Hugeamount of STDs, Crime rate, Poverty and illiteracy, it is not Americans fault, it is the Evil Asians and Europeans who score better.. No No, they Cheat.. Because americans are the BEST, I saw that on TV once….
Cheezes christ, Take responsibility.
Why not just let the truth exist? You feel what you feel. Focus your attention on it. Learn from it.
New Age crap differs little from mainstream religion. At its core, it’s a constant effort of willpower that has little to do with the truth.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I learned from one of her talks about the new book that she has a doctorate in biology. I was surprised that I didn’t know this, and also that I wasn’t familiar with her first books, which offered an early critical perspective on medicine with regard to women:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ehrenreich#Non-fiction
What are the connotations of her name?
Fantastic article; thanks for posting it, PZ.
I ran into a similar attitude when I had problems with breastfeeding. I can’t describe how frustrating it is to have someone tell you that you can’t breastfeed because you are too upset about not being able to breastfeed. Super, I’ll just change my feelings 180 degrees right now then.
Is there any research to show that positivity is related to disease outcome?
Saber–WTF???
As a cancer survivor myself, I can tell you that I found her book to be so important. There is nothing so filled with superstition as the mind over matter connection in regards to cancer. The amount of people making themselves miserable for feeling sick, because they are somehow supposed to be curing the illness and the attitude is huge. Even saying all of that, there remains one positive about life threatening ilness, which is certainly a cliche. It does remind you about death, which can make you more productive while alive. It doesnt always do this, and doesnt need to do this. Sometimes it is just painful and awful, sometimes life affirming. The point is no one can make you think anything, and no thoughts will destroy a tumor.
Alt-med is quackery, I agree. But where is the justification for this?
In the last decade, I have my wife and a close friend of mine have battled cancer (wife is fine, buddy is struggling), and I don’t remember any stigmatization.
Rage, rage against the dying light.
Well, or don’t. It’s your problem (not alone, but it is yours), deal with it as you best can, and don’t let anyone tell you how you must respond to cancer.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Yeah, and as crusty old Doc Johnson told us “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Adversity and pain can be used to develop extraordinary powers of concentration and persistence — but usually it doesn’t. Requiring it to happen is one of the cruelest things I can think of that doesn’t involve electrodes.
Add to the blessing-of-cancer people, those bozos who claim that if you have a specific illness, this is somehow tied to a matching spiritual failing, heart disease often being cited as a result of not loving enough, or some such.
Sheesh, if that was true we would have lost Cheney decades ago. Oh wait .. my theory is that his current heart is pure steampunk clockwork, thus evading heart disease by not having one.
Carry on.
Noni
~exceedingly grouchy this morning~
What a loving merciful god. “Here, have a dose of cancer so you can get to know me.”
Inglorious Basterd.
“Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”
I thought jesus and the church would lead us to god. Is jesus a cancer?
realinterrobang@#11 is completely right.
People would come to my grandfather, and offer him the things they would otherwise have thrown in the trash. They said it was charity, but in truth they were trying to profile themselves as charitable. That’s not the same thing, and he told them so. He also told them fuck off and never come back.
He always vigorously fought against the role that was expected of him: to be a passive receptacle of “aid”, uncritical and slavishly grateful.
I actually have the same kind of arthritis as my grandfather did, but all it really taught me is to test carefully if I can walk today, each morning, and a hundred ways to limp on either leg. That’s pretty much it, though.
I’m just glad that I’m not subject to a religious congregation trying to give charity to look good, and that I live in a country which firmly believes in secular, non-interfering monthly stipends to the disabled, that they can spend on whatever they like.
And @Saber: we’re talking about cancer, specifically the cancer of a woman who drinks moderately, apparently never smoked, etc., etc. If she was a pack-a-day smoker, you would have a point. But she’s not.
Personal responsibility is a very good thing indeed but, as I’m sure you would agree, none of us is a god and therefore sometimes stuff is going to happen that is not within our control.
When my mother was dying of Alzheimer’s Disease, not only was she encouraged to be upbeat, but I was admonished to take it as a “blessing” that I was required to care for her. My blessings included cleaning shit and blood off my mother, and being so traumatized by my mother attacking me that I don’t think I’ll ever recover.
Being hounded by medical and hospice staff to look on the bright side made things much worse for me. That “blessings” attitude, that “opportunity to love and to learn” attitude, added up to less help when I needed it, less understanding when I needed it, and, most horribly, less care for my mother.
Elin,
Ehrenreich = rich[ly endowed with] honor
@ carovee #21:
Yes, eg my link in #15. However, fake positivity such as prayer isn’t any good – if anything, research shows that’s slightly bad for people! Instead, biologically, it’s all about not generating stress hormones to run around loose in your body without having a viable fight or flight outlet for them. So the ideal strategy is to work on fixing the few things which you can fix while trying not to worry (tough!) about the ones you can’t.
I know that this must have been very difficult for you, Lynna, but do you think caring for your mother would have been appreciably easier without the “blessings” attitude of the staff?
I know that there were people with that attitude when my wife was sick, but given the overall difficulty of the situation, they didn’t seem to affect her one way or another. The fact is, she wasn’t really in a listening mood.
carovee–
I had my first child in a Catholic hospital, and a wizened old nun nurse saw me attempting to breastfeed my son. She pronounced that I would never be able to breastfeed successfully as I was too nervous. I was so pissed off at her that I was determined to make it work, and I did. Second kid, too. I guess she did me a favor, though I’m sure it wasn’t intended that way.
This one hits close to home. When my own trophy wife was diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago, we had no end of well meaning but clueless friends who wanted desperately to find some mistake my wife had made that they could blame it on. The thing was, this was difficult, as she always ate a healthy diet, went to the doctor regularly (hell, she found the lump 2 years before the doctors finally agreed with her that it might be cancer!), exercised. All the things they tell you to do. So the probing got personal. Was she too angry? Had she accepted God? All these stupid, completely impertinent questions asked not with a goal of understanding but rather because the questioners would rather not think that we live in a universe where everything–including our own bodies–is trying to kill us.
I will say this: Having a healthy attitude does help you beat cancer. That has nothing to do with any silly-assed spiritual woo. It just helps you deal with all the lousy shit your will go through. Coincidentally, Molly Ivins was going through her first round of cancer treatment at about the same time. Molly provided one of the biggest laughs my wife had during the whole ordeal:
“Many lovely people sent books on how to find a deeper spiritual meaning in life. My response was, ‘Oh, hell, I can’t go on a spiritual journey — I’m constipated.'”
The whole essay is here, and it’s worth a read:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/molly-ivins/molly-ivins-august-24-2000-08-24.html
Dog bless her. My wife was luckier than Molly…so far.
If cancer is like finding God, I guess getting shot in the face must be like having an orgasm to those people.
I had a serious medical adventure many years ago, and i have these New age sisters in law that tried to push that positive thing to “cure myself bull sit, 13 yeas later, I am still a cripple, It is definitely not as “gift”, it’s damned annoying. I am not more spiritual, nor caring, in fact I am much more crotchety and atheistic.
Yeah, well, my mom just died of cancer. Tell me to my face it was because she wasn’t “persistent enough” to beat it–then pray to whatever quack god[dess]/s[es] you believe in that you’re faster than I am.
Her Christianity didn’t seem to have much of an impact; maybe she just didn’t believe enough. Or maybe my atheism counteracted it and I killed her.
Wth.
As someone who works at a bookstore, I sell far too many copies of ridiculous self-help books. Worse than the self-help/self-disease-help books are the metaphysical garbage that people dig into. ‘The Secret’ is still going strong, and it disturbs me that such a large portion of our population is so gullible.
PS Note that when researchers only go by what they presume to be a stress event rather than genuinely measuring strain (medics aren’t as good as physicists/engineers at being precise over these terms!), ie looking for the relevant chemical changes actually occurring in the individuals about whom they’re merely making assumptions, they tend not to find a link. Psychobabblers (and doctors in general) can be such idiots much of the time.
No No, I apologize, poorly formulated. Let me get another chance at it:
It is VERY ImPORTant that people understand that THEY are responsible for THE LIFE THEY LIVE and no one else. Do not blame OTHERS for the life You Live.
I am NOT saying it is “her fault” that she got cancer, no one is to blame, cancer is cancer. But to say that someone else would be to blame THAT is a problem. You also have, as osmeone said, smokers and other drug users, they are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the cancer or possible illness they have.
I simple pointed out, Do Not Act Like Someone Else is Responsible For The Life You Live. Take Responsibility, that is all.
I cam not “blaming” her or she should feel “guilty”, no, of what? She got cancer, thats life, but do not blame someone else or something 8a Company for example) for your missery, accept it, that is life.
des victimes partout en europe http://seulomonde.canalblog.com/
So… how does it work if the “gift” is genuinely given by another – as in Tasmanian devils?
Apparently, their “toxic thought” is enough to give not just one individual, but every other individual that first individual’s cancer…
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-devils1-2010jan01,0,1890302.story
If this is old news, I apologize, and can only hope that Deepak is doing his utmost to uplift the spirits of Tasmanian devils everywhere.
@ Lynna, OM #31 – That’s horrible. I can’t even imagine how that must have felt.
Generally though, I’ve never had anything that horrific happen to me in my life. I’m lucky so far, being 22. Even though I consider myself an atheist and regard myself as fairly skeptical on a great majority of claims made by ju-ju doctors and hucksters in the ‘alt-med’ fraternity, I’m not too sure what my immediate thoughts would be faced with a cancer diagnosis. I feel ashamed for saying it, but it would probably be something along the lines of “Fuck you God.”
I am not suffering from a terminal lack of Jesus, my physical pain is not a gift. I don’t deserve to be ill because I don’t worship God.
I suffer from lupus and fibromyalgia (among other illnesses) and I get this crap from people fairly often. I am glad that I have weeded those most likely to treat me in such a way from my friends and family.
It’s hard to pretend everything is peachy and it’s stressful. Why should sick people have to put on a fake smile to save other people from feeling uncomfortable?
I’m not saying I’m never happy or that I never smile or never get pleasantly excited, I’m just saying that a person should not have to fake it when they are miserable.
Not only is pasting on a fake smile and perky attitude tiring and stressful but it creates another problem. If you go around pretending to be happy people don’t take your illness or the limitations it causes seriously. People will go so far as to take a photo of a person smiling posted on facebook to mean that person is faking illness.
So it’s a catch 22 – no one believes we are sick if we are momentarily happy or do something enjoyable but people look down on us if we express our unhappiness with being ill or let our fake smile slip.
@saber
I was just diagnosed recently with breast cancer.
No family history.
Don’t smoke, maybe a couple glasses of wine a month, have and active lifestyle and run regularly (did my first marathon in 2008, a broken bone in my foot from a fall stopped me in 2009). I was planning to run two this year. That’s in addition to the sport in which I make my living teaching. I used to work in science labs, but rarely worked with anything dangerous, and the labs were careful.
Diet okay, could eat more vegetables. Didn’t buy organic though.
I’m 38.
So Screw taking responsibility for this.
It’s a s*^*&y piece of bad luck. The universe is random, and to think I am responsible for this cancer is just a variant on whole bulls(*& idea that our thoughts can control the universe. No matter what you do, it won’t stop every bad thing from happening.
That’s actually one of the great things about being and atheist – I don’t have to blame myself for this. I looked back over it, and while there were a couple of things that might have a small effect on the outcome, there is a good chance they wouldn’t have. I don’t have to wonder about what I did to deserve this. I can accept that it sucks, the universe isn’t fair and just get on with my life/surgery/treatments, and taking advantage of the best modern medicine has to offer me.
And yes, I have got the question “do you think it was because of X?”.
I think it makes sense that we all want to find some way to be sure it won’t happen to me. But you know what? It might. It probably won’t though. Life’s a game of chance, and sometimes you lose for no good reason.
Very possibly. It can be fecking hard to make both go away unless caught early, both seem to spread albeit admittedly only one shows signs of being infectious, both seem to be moving goalposts, and neither is good for you, your loved ones, or society.
I maintained a positive attitude because, although I had cancer, it beat being dead. My attitude did not “cure” my cancer. A surgeon and several months of chemo took care of that.
I did not get closer to God. I told the very nice minister who came to see me in the hospital that I did not need any prayers. I told the social worker who assured me that if I “needed to talk”, she would be available, that there were probably others who would profit more from her attention (thank you very much).
My attitude only affected me to get my ass to work every day during chemo so I would have some distractions from feeling like crap. Most of my students were great during this time, and I let them know how much I appreciated their efforts.
By the way, I never smoked, haven’t been a drinker for 25 years, so I decided to blame my mom for my cancer.
Just a nitpick with the title of this post: Cancer is a family of different diseases. I try to only nitpick when I think it’s important, and this is one of those cases. While doctors and researchers have made great progress in the treatments and cures of many cancers, it is not always apparent. The idea that cancer is “a disease” inevitably leads to the assumption that there should be “a cure”. From the perspective of finding a cure for cancer, the progress that’s been made so far can easily look to an uninformed person just like the lies that the alt-med woo peddlers spew about “western medicine”.
Sorry about the nitpck. Obviously I know what you meant–as did practically all your readers–but I thought this was a point worth mentioning.
I’ve been meaning to read her new book – I definitely have to get to that!
Thanks for highlighting Barbara Ehrenreich’s wonderful book and especially her views on cancer. My best friend from childhood had breast cancer, and is recovered now, but she hated all that Pink Ribbon crap and loved “Bright Sided”.
Years ago a woman I knew went to Mexico for some quack treatment, and died there. Her husband and sons were devastated.
On the plus side of modern medicine, a woman I know in her 70s has survived over 3 years with pancreatic cancer, thanks to real experimental treatment with chemotherapy.
I hate quacks and love to see someone speak out against positive thinking as a cure. It hurts too many people who through no fault of their own do not get better, but are blamed for it.
See Barbara on TV. She talked to Jon Stewart about this for a little while. It’s nice.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/barbara-ehrenreich
Having cancer is also a great opportunity to get a sweet book deal out of it and cash in on your own disease!
This article makes me think of the Christian Scientists (members of the religion) who pretend that all disease is merely “improper thinking.” They continue this delusion all their lives until they finally get a serious illness — then they are shamed, because what they have is essentially a self-inflicted mental illness. “Yes, poor Martha, she just can’t seem to overcome her belief of cancer.” Like Martha is just a confused fool.
Saber, what does any of what you’re saying have to do with what Barbara said? She did not imply that you ought to blame others for your problem. Just because she is rejecting the notion that you should blame yourself it does not mean she thinks others are to blame. You even seem to agree with her once you clarified yourself so I’m not quite sure who you’re yelling at with your oddly formatted posts?
One major point of this article is a request: please, don’t discriminate against or guilt-trip a victim.
You can be a detoxed vegan, filled with pure thoughts, compassionate, spiritually enlightened, a master of the art of meditation, a Tibetan Rinpoche, a Taoist Master, an advanced Yogi, a Christian Saint – nonetheless, it is very likely you will die of cancer.
Check the stats. Gurus die too.
seconded! Nickel and Dimed was epic, and should be required reading for every doe-eyed American who still thinks there’s such a thing as class mobility in this country.
*off to see if library has more of her books*
I lost my grandfather exactly one month ago to a very suddden, aggressive intestinal cancer. He was reduced in a couple of weeks from the hard-working, generous man we all loved to a barely coherent, emaciated, sobbing shadow of himself before finally expiring, after suffering more than anyone should, really.
This kind of thinking makes me so mad I don’t even get angry. It just shorts out my rage circuits and leaves me very sad.
“Alternative” medicine is a piece of shit.
Saber? Do you actually live in America?
It is a culture founded entirely on self blame.
I don’t think this “idealogy” is strictly American in any way. Re #11 your post reminds me about the book Magic Mountain- moral exemplars of the sick, nostrum medicine, and manipulation of faulty psychological theories to cure sickness; but was written in Germany in the early 1920s.
Mann said of his novel:
“What Castorp learns to fathom is that all higher health must have passed through illness and death. […]. As Hans Castorp once says to Madame Chauchat, there are two ways to life: One is the common, direct, and brave. The other is bad, leading through death, and that is the genius way. This concept of illness and death, as a necessary passage to knowledge, health, and life, makes The Magic Mountain into a novel of initiation.”
So yes I agree that the “positive thinking approach to health care” is probably deep rooted in philosophy or maybe is a basic cognitive bias.
Ehrenreich is a very important writer and journalist. She hits nerves that need hitting. ‘Nickled and Dimed’ even spawned its own conservative counterstroke (a book called ‘Scratch Beginnings’ that pretends to refute her thesis but really only demonstrates conservative logic-immunity.) Best of all of course Minneapolis’ own puritannical scold Katherine Kersten wrote a hectoring dogwhistle of a column about it. That’s fame. And the one hallmark of an immersion journalist of worth–they chronicle everything, including their own health. Compare that to the terminally saccharine lackwit Mitch Albom.
ice9
“This is the truth:…”
Ehrenreich has always told the truth as she sees it. I may disagree with her here and there over a minor point, but I’ve long respected her.
Lynna, I have a friend going through that now, and I can see how much it tears people up. I’m sorry that happened to you.
Don’t know how it is for her, but if you were having a terrible time, would you feel better if people told you “Wow, that sucks, I’m sorry for you, let me know if I can help” or if they said “You should think of it as a GOOD thing. This is GOOD FOR YOU.” ? I know which one I’d pick.
Don’t mind Saber, he appears to be just a libertarian with an axe to grind.
It’s a bit ironic how this sort of makes sense if religion is like cancer.
#11 realinterrobang
Yep, that was the beginning of my long road to atheism. A cherry, upbeat story in Readers Digest about a 13 year-old girl who died of leukemia that I read when I was about the same age.
Firstly, I was aghast that there were fatal diseases that afflicted children. (Yes, I was ignorant & naive at that age.) And very unimpressed that a Creator would permit a disease that eliminated a precious soul before it was old enough to know & worship its Creator. Ditto for prenatal deaths, stillbirths and diseases that attack infants.
Then the parents, after the death of their daughter, waxed poetic on how their daughter’s illness & death had strengthened their marriage and faith.
It absolutely revolted me that they felt that God would send them a child to suffer & die, whose only purpose was to fix THEIR lives. Like Abraham who treated Isaac merely as a sacrifice to his own faith.
To say you came through this ordeal with a stronger marriage & faith is one thing – to treat it like it was given to you in order to strengthen them is another thing altogether – and disgusting.
I have a life threatening peanut allergy and I get hassled from multiple sides. I have had reactions by touching a surface with residue on it.
I get
1) It is all in your mind if someone slipped peanut products in your food and you couldn’t taste it you wouldn’t have a reaction. I inform people that say this that I will press charges of poisoning and attempted murder if someone tampers with my food. I have had people try to give me food with peanut products.
2) That if I was Christian and truly saved I wouldn’t be allergic because the bible said so. (I informed her and the principal of what I said above)
I also get that I’m over reacting and no-one can react by touching something they are allergic to. This nearly killed me when I was 4 and my teachers made me handle peanut butter. Mom nearly killed the teachers.
Another time I had a reaction because this fruitcake lady was adding her clothes and fabric softener to my laundry in the apartments. A cop that lived in the apartments intervened when she started yelling at me for complaining about her to management.He told her that if she did it again she could be arrested – basically for putting a noxious substance in my wash, because she had been informed it was dangerous to me.
I’ve been called germophobic because in high risk environments (Planes, ballgames, schools) were lots of people tend to eat things with peanuts, I tend to not touch common surfaces with my hands.
Note I am NOT a ban peanuts everywhere person. I just ask that people tell me the truth when I ask about food, and that stewards not toss peanuts down the length of the plane full force. (I since learned to tell Southwest that I’m allergic so they can tell the crew not to do this particular stunt. )
Hear Barbara Eherenreich on the Commonwealth Club podcast:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/09/09-10eherenreich-audio.html
My favorite bon mot: “I don’t want to die, but I especially don’t want to die holding a pink teddy bear.”
Actually, positive thinking can be detrimental to some people :
The perils of positive thinking
I too am excessively annoyed by the “blessing” angle. My life has been crap in the last few years, I’ve been sick and depressed and jobless.
And those people come to me with trite deepities like “When god closes a door he opens a window” (to which I answered : “Well, looks like the f***ing basterd that put that f****ing window up on the second floor where it’s absofu***ing useless to me.” I got a hilariously satisfying malaise at that).
Then they tell me that everything will be all right. No, it f***ing well won’t. The only thing that will make a difference is my own hard work and those who actually help me. “Thinking positive” and “being thankful” won’t do anything, getting up in the morning and toiling away will. So stop bullshitting me.
I wish people would just shut up with the useless inanities and just help those in need. But I guess it’s much less effort to think everything will sort itself out. And that keeping that big smile pasted on their faces means nothing bad will happen to them.
Well, I think I can speak to this.
I’ve been HIV positive for over fifteen years, and it finally caught up with me in mid-2008. Fortunately for me, I was able to qualify for a medical retirement from the Federal civil service (after twenty-four years), and am doing much better.
Among the people I routinely encounter, the usual reaction I’ve gotten is ‘wow, you’re doing much better,’ to which I say, ‘yes, yes I am, and very happy about it.’ To the extent that I’m appreciating life, well, I was doing that _before_. Wonderful husband, two great if crazy kids, a safe, comfortable house, etc. I don’t know how long I’ve got, but it’s a lot longer than if this had happened, say, fifteen years ago.
Thanks, Western medicine!
The ‘illness as blessing’ people have long chapped my hide; there used to be a woo-spinner called Louise Hay, who reaped massive baskets of cash from AIDS-afflicted guys back in the 20th century. In one article, she was challenged on her ‘you can heal yourself from AIDS’ spiel, and she admitted that, in her definition, being ‘healed’ and physically dying were not incompatible.
I had a fantasy of going to one of her seminars and punching her dead in the face; then, as she sprawled bleeding on the floor, asking her, ‘Ms. Hay, why did you choose to manifest this in your life at this time?’ But I look lousy in orange.
I wonder how someone can say that the cancer is a gift? Probably they should have breast cancer operation here in Bulgaria – it had been 5 years after my mother’s operation for first stage breast cancer and she still can’t use to full extend her left hand (and probably never will) and she is still hurting from time to time.Mind you she is lucky-she was diagnosed early.Many others don’t have her chance.
The first time I heard of Barbara Ehrenreich was on The Daily Show (I know, I’m uncool and behind the times) and I loved the interview. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but does anyone else worry that the belief that “cancer is a gift” might lead to a movement of people with cancer or other diseases actively protesting against finding cures or treatments, claiming that it’s a blessing/lifestyle, not a disease?
terminal cancer, an excuse to burn out on speedballs
Good for Ehrenreich! If you can’t be miserable, irritable, and depressed when you have cancer, when are those feelings appropriate?
As someone who spent most of last year in breast cancer treatment or recovering from breast cancer treatment, I can say that my experience has made me much more aware of my mortality, and more determined to make this world a better place while I can.
Although for the most part, I viewed the whole cancer-business with black-humor, I growled at anyone who suggested alternative-to-reality treatments, and because I was feeling more than a bit grouchy about the whole business, I also growled at some of the many well-meaning people of faith who were “praying for” me.
Because of my experience, I will growl even louder at anyone who claims the we are intelligently designed, and that an all-powerful loving god created us.
I also found it did help to unburden my toxic feeling–about religion and about all those folks praying for me–to my kids and on Pharyngula.
The good news is that the cancer appears to be gone, and my doctors tell me that the likelihood of it returning is quite small, so I’ll eventually die of something else. Yay!?
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snake-Other-Preoccupations-John-Diamond/dp/0099428334/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262549239&sr=1-2
perhaps because it’s British. Anyway, a very clever book by a dying man who was annoyed by “alternative medicine”. It is quite old now, but plus ca change….
It’s funny and clever, and if I’m ever as ill as he was, I hope I can face it as truthfully as he did.
Saber, I would say that the education system has failed you and made you an idiot, but you really should take responsibility for that. It’s no one else’s fault except your own.
People like you try to assign blame to people when bad things happen to them in order to ease your fears that something might happen to you. If someone gets cancer, then it’s probably just because they smoked or did drugs or didn’t eat right or didn’t jog enough. You’ll find any divergence with your own situation, to blame the person for their disease so that you don’t have to face the cruelty of fate. The reality is that 90-year-old chain-smokers go through their lives without ever getting cancer, while a 22-year-old friend of mine who never drinks, never smokes, is physically fit and leads a perfectly healthy lifestyle was diagnosed with cancer last year.
But I hope blaming people for their cancer helps you sleep better at night.
Cause of Cancer???
The number of micro waves in our airspace we absorb by our bodies cannot be good. Is this a cause? Who knows?
Also, about cancer in 2010. We live longer and therefore cancer can come to more of us. And, we are not afraid of telling everyone and the doorpost that we have cancer. There was a time, when it was only whispered and called “The Big Cee”.
Cancer is still a big secret in many countries, so it is hard to know how prevalent it is worldwide.
Get tested; Molly Ivins demands it.
Jim Jenkins wrote:
I was amazed at how consistently patient, pleasant, and cheerful the doctors and staff at my radiation therapy treatment center were, from the receptionist to the head doctor. I had never encountered a medical office, or any professional office, staffed by such upbeat, cheerful people.
But they didn’t try to tell me that I should feel cheerful. Didn’t ever tell me to “stay positive.” They consoled me when I was depressed, and let me rant when I needed to, all without judging me, or trying to invalidate my feelings, which I truly appreciated.
And I came to see how important that upbeat attitude was when I finally encountered one person on the staff who wasn’t all warm-and-fuzzy, and my reaction was, “Don’t I have enough on my plate without your being so clinical and abrupt?!”
Lots of wishful thinking and prayer didn’t put my cancer in remission. Science did with chemo treatments.
The atheist bus campaign is unusually relevant here. Although it would probably have to be elaborated into something like:
“There’s probably no god or alt-med treatment which is effective at anything other than transferring money from your bank account into that of the alt-med con-man trying to fleece you; so stop worrying and get on with the rest of your life.”
One more reason to quit smoking then!
THANK YOU.
Breast cancer as a marketing tool needs to be brought to light. People feel like activists when they just buy tons of pink shit without really knowing how much money goes to breast cancer. They feel like they have done their bit. The commercials that act like its a chance to be empowerfulized instead of a scary disease are really fucked up. Companies do this FOR PROFIT. I saw doritos for the cure, for fucks sake. Sharpies for the cure. WINE FOR THE CURE.
They are starting to do this with other lady cancers. There was something about ‘riding the teal wave’ or something at the cancer hospital I work at a few times a week, I think it was for ovarian cancer. Barf.
The military is using this same positive-thinking nonsense to tackle PTSD: http://www.vawatchdog.org/10/nf10/nfjan10/nf010210-3.htm
Given the massive costs of treatment, it seems they’re attempting to get people to think happy thoughts (and hopefully not file claims) to a cure! Government endorsed woo… and, imo, being done to avoid expensive treatment for war related conditions. Just infuriating.
Living in the light of reality beats that delusional crap any day. I would rather die with a clear head than guilt ridden that somehow my moments of anger and depression made the cancer worse.
This discussion bring up one of my most hated ‘comfort phrases’, that god only gives people what they can handle.
Leaving aside the fact that there is no god, what people are really saying is, “I would never be able to deal with a sick child or with losing a spouse, but luckily god gave those problems to you, since you clearly are more capable.”
Oh, Ehrenreich weighs in on that article (Re my #85 post) too.
Swayze was also straightforward that his long-time smoking had increased the risk of him developing cancer. Three cheers for him, in facing reality with open eyes, even about his own fatal disease.
saber,
I’ll muddy the waters for you even more; I knew a woman who had a primary lung cancer;never smoked, always drank modestly, was always at her ideal weight,that particular histotype didn’t care. Long and short of it, she lasted 4 years after diagnosis,made her peace,did every thing she wanted by that time.Now, had she smoked and had that same diagnosis, she would be vilified by others as the responsible agent for her disease and having willingly creating a burdon on society….none of that true by the way.Yes in general smokers are more likely to suffer from lung cancer…but we don’t always know what we think we know and it is as important to not quickly assign responsibility to others as it is to rightly assume the responsiblity for our own life…..and no ,I don’t have any stories about contracting syphilis as an adult and it not being my fault.
genshed @72-
Quoted because it’s simply the most spectacular thing I’ve read all week.
Hmmm. That’s one “for the cure” product I might be able to embrace!
Not to mention the whole side “save the boobs” campaign. Because nothing’s as good for people having a disease as to reduce them down to their oogleable body parts! And to make them feel like losers if they’ve had them removed, since it’s the parts that are important to be saved rather than the people! God, that makes me mad.
This reminds me of Andreas Moritz, king of the charlatans. PZ wrote about him awhile ago, and I also made a post. Moritz actually responded to mine, showing himself to be an active liar and thief. He has an FAQ on his website largely devoted to telling people how they can give him money. Oh, and AIDs and diabetes are not diseases.
I despise these people.
Want to know what else is a gift; late on set diabetes, with the gangrene and amputation of a leg.
My first thought is to go up one side of Saber and down the other. Looks like possibly a language barrier? Or perhaps just brain damage?
I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (4;11 translocation) back in the beginning of August ’09. Have since done 4 rounds of chemo, and lots of different drugs and various hospital stays for side effects. (Prednisone is pure evil in pill form.) Have heard all the “positivity” stuff–but nobody has had the balls to come up to me and tell me I should see this fucking disease as a “gift”. I think I may well have a “gift” for them if they did.
After my wife was diagnosed with a pair of type 1 gliomas in January of ’08, we have dealt with all sorts of shit (personal, financial, medical)…now we’re both under the gun…”Gift”??? Fuck that noise. She has chosen to forgo brain surgery & chemo–it wouldn’t fix the main (at least visible, manifest) problem, which is the cerebellar ataxia as a side effect of the body fighting the slow-growing gliomas. And the idea of chopping up her brain doesn’t really appeal to either of us–side effects possible there that just don’t seem to be worth the risk. (Especially when it wouldn’t fix what is already broken, and can’t be fixed…although with more stem cell research, it may be soon…we remain hopeful. She’s already outlived predictions from a couple of different docs.)
We both realized that the only way I’d survive this is going full-bore chemo. If I hadn’t, I’d have been dead by September. No amount of smiling and thanking a non-existent “god” would have stopped that.
Now, folks, a sense of humor is absolutely VITAL in dealing with this crap…but sunshine happiness gift from “ghod”? Gimme a fucking BREAK. And no, as a cheerful and happy atheist, I don’t blame myself, or anyone else, for this–excrement occurs, boys and girls…sometimes our cells do some weird stuff. On the upside, the high blood pressure I’d been on medication for over 10 years to handle vanished with my leukemia. On the whole, I’d have preferred the metoprolol, but that’s just me being picky. I’ve also lost 60 pounds, and still have an appetite. So THERE, Suzy Creamcheese!
The only way out is through. I go in for another bone marrow biopsy tomorrow (and let’s talk about fun times…that ain’t one of them…), and will hopefully be able to move forward with a bone marrow transplant…which is the only real hope for a cure for this mess at my age (cure meaning a 45% chance of still being alive in 10 years…I’ll take it…57 looks pretty damned good right now…). “god” gives this cheery little gift more often to children (in whom it is also easier to cure)–and people believe this asshole exists, and is BENEVOLENT??? No wonder I became an atheist. (I was brought up Baptist…I came by atheism quite honestly.)
In summary, Chopra is an idiot. I saw the Ehrenreich piece on The Daily Show–she was great. More people need to understand this mess. Signing off now…
Bill Chandler
If there is a God then breast cancer did lead my grandmother to him. The magic juices she bought from her quack probably did a nice job of keeping her hydrated while she suffered and died.
Ah, but WINE is open-source software – it’s Free as in Beer as well as Free as in Speech. Good luck raising money selling that.
Cancer, I hate. You think I hate religion? I have a distaste for religion. You don’t know distaste from out-and-out hatred. Hate is visceral. Distaste is what one has for fried liver, or tofu hot dogs. Religion is silly. Religion doesn’t kill, it’s the religilous who occasionally do.
Cancer, I hate. It killed my father. It tried mightily to kill my mother (Alzheimer’s got her first). It’s actively trying to kill others in my extended family, friends, people I’ve never met but admire. Cancer, I hate.
Much as I’d like to be all happy-genki about fighting the good fight, it’s a battle. No amount of medi-woo is going to win it. Only proven techniques of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and surgery that have been shown to work (“Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proven to work? …Medicine.”) are suitable for this fight. It’s trench warfare against tumors, and don’t try to sell me on using the nutbars’ Nerf Medicine.
Janine, #95
And such a blessing it is. Lack of energy, depression or exaggeration of depression. Then you add complications such as Aspergers in my case, where my handling of my diabetes tends to be inappropriate, and my reaction to advice and counseling tends to the rejection of ill informed crap.
BTW, I know a fellow inhabitant of Horton House who has diabetes, and had to have a leg amputated because a fracture refused to heal. She’s grumpy, hates untoward familiarity, and can be a nice person so long as you let her make the initial move. I’d cuddle her, but I have no desire to see my life end at this time. :)
Oh, my! I failed on sooooo many levels at being a good patient.
It’s depressing that I only learn this late I should have been full of joy and thank the Divinity for the wonderful gift of multiple abdominal and thoracic metastases that I got as a great blessing, and turn my mind to the more profound meanings of life. My soul’s empty of meaning now that I missed the great message that God sent me, now that I failed to see I was chosen to be purified by this great gift, with the aid of megavitamin cures and energy healers.
Instead of turning my heart in prayer to [insert deity here], I put my faith in those so-called doctors. Instead of purifying my body of toxins, I let them pour in my veins those awful poisons they call “chemotherapy”. Instead of saying my last prayer when I guessed that all those long, complicated scientific Latin-sounding expressions translate in ‘cancer’ for the layman, I simply asked “what’s the prognosis,” as the sinner that I am. Instead of purifying my thoughts and filling them with piety, I kept having all sort of dirty thoughts, and preoccupied myself with little worldly stuff.
The worst part is that I had the occasion to repent and turn my heart to God. That particular area of the hospital was the richest in crosses, bibles, icons, crucifixes, holy candles, rosaries and other similar gadgets. There also was a full wall with religious literature. There even was a priest that kept haunting the rooms… The third time he came to mine, I almost kicked him out, although I was barely able to move. (Hey, it was self-defense: after having escaped mutant cells, he was trying to annoy and bore me to death!)
?
No, it’s…
Tea for the tillerman
Steak for the son
Wine for the woman who make the rain come.
—Cat Stevens
[blockquote]We’re also missing out on an opportunity to be bilked. That’s what this is really all about: con artists who can’t really do anything to fight the cancer can at least tell you to smile, be cheerful, pray, buy my super-duper vitamin supplements, and pay the cashier my consulting fees on the way out … and if it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. You’ve got a disease that’s ripping through your guts and causing pain, yet if you feel a moment’s doubt or worry, you’ve invalidated the charlatan’s prescription, and your relapse is all your fault.[/blockquote]
Ah yes, The Secret has gone medicinal! Visualize that cure. Believe in it, and “put it out into the universe!” And if it didn’t work, it’s not that the universe isn’t a sentient being who grants wishes. Nooooo…. it’s really YOUR FAULT. You didn’t believe hard enough! You didn’t buy the book/DVD that shows you how to believe properly. You didn’t attend the six day $1000 seminar to teach you proper belief.
(My apologies, but I just thought of this.)
If disease is a gift from God, then God has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Gah! Blockquote fail! Sorry.
When my husband died of pulmonary fibrosis, certain members of his fundie family blamed me. Even though they had probably 25 baptist churches full of people (and some random nunnery in Europe) praying for him, since I didn’t give god the “power of positive prayer”, I killed him.
Stupid motherfuckers.
I would assume having a positive attitude would help with pain management and reduce side effects like depression. I think they did some sort of survey in the NHS and patients with a positive outlook tend to be happier with their treatment outcomes (doesnt actually make any difference in curing them).
All pretty obvious really
I followed the link in #94 re: Andreas Moritz, where I found this:
Andreas Moritz is a medical intuitive; a practitioner of Ayurveda, iridology, shiatsu, and vibrational medicine; a writer; and an artist. He is the author of the international bestseller, The Amazing Liver and Gallbladder Flush; Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation, Lifting the Veil of Duality, Cancer Is Not a Disease, It’s Time to Come Alive, Heart Disease No More, Diabetes No More, Simple Steps to Total Health, Diabetes—No More, Ending the AIDS Myth and Heal Yourself with Sunlight. For more information, visit the author’s website: [redacted]
I’ll be 71 tomorrow, and a bit behind the curve in textspeak, but please join me in a chorus of, OMFG!
Amen. How horrible of them. That kind of thinking is the worst in humanity, and it is a deranged and shameful advertisement for their god; a being who demands its ass kissed before it lifts a finger whether by one or by all is not a moral being.
Placebo effect. I believe it has been documented that some fixed percentage of people who BELIEVE they’ve taken a medicine in good FAITH will get better even though they never actually get the medicine. Believing in something fake works for some people. See herbs and vitamins.
In another category, religious BELIEF substitutes for the useless herbs or placebo meds. In both categories, misplaced FAITH can statistically affect the outcome of treatment.
With that on the record, counting on a low probability placebo effect is not a good treatment strategy.
Enjoy.
I am sorry, ursulamajor, about your loss and having family members blaming you. Why not also call you a murderer. If only it were easy to cure the pain others can cause.
Someone please explain to me how religion makes people moral.
As for the diabetes, mythusmage, that happened to my mother. For a while, we thought she was gone. But as it stands, she needs to be cared for. I guess we should be thankful that members of my family have the opportunity to serve.
Bill Chandler, may your procedure go well tomorrow.
From my experience, not having pain and depression really helps with having a positive attitude.
Really.
I think, in fact, that’s the way it works.
Guess what, when you’re in pain, you get depressed.
Surprise!!!
And when you’re really depressed no amount of “positive thinking” is going to fix it.
Just snap out of it is the last thing anyone ever needs to hear.
The amazing thing is when you fix the problem the depression goes away like magic!
Imagine that.
In Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich takes a critical look at the so-called evidence and finds it wanting. Most of what we think we know about these “studies” is simply the result of positive spin having been put on questionable data, correlations unrelated to causations, the placebo effect, as The Tim Channel points out, etc. And, of course, our tendency to believe what “makes sense” to us.
Joe @ #108–Happy early Birthday! I, too, was born in the first half of the last century…
I’m late to this…
Thanks for highlighting Barbara Ehrenreich’s unfortunate but alas not uncommon experience.
This woo-is-wonderful and meld-your-mind-over-matter! chatshow shit, invariably pushed with the aid of some expensive ‘supplements’, books and baubles and too often given an absurdly easy ride by women’s magazines, newspapers and assorted yap-media is one that is, in my professional opinion (I’m a Community Nurse with a considerable proportion of terminally ill patients on my list), an insiduously poisonous attitude which has steathily destroyed the psyches of countless people whose health is under a hideous and more-often-than-not fatal disease.
Daily, I have to deal with loving, desparate, friends/relatives – as well as the sick themselves – waving some newly-minted piece of bullshit at me. What really hurts is the hope in their faces when they do so, the fragment of hope that is imploring me to show some sign of enthusiasm or assent to their preparation / breathing exercises / latest book, something that they can then take to their hearts as a tiny step of hope to hold onto when death is threatening.
I’d love to take Chopra, Winfrey et al around with me when I go to work tomorrow. I’d hope they had the conscience and the humanity to shut the fuck up henceforth when they see the effect upon real people of the cynical uselessness of their ignorant, insulting guru-dribble.
Ray Comfort knows all about cancer.
Thank you, MikeTheInfidel, you just did a very difficult feat; you made me hate Ray Comfort even more then I already did.
A problem I’ve seen with the woo-in-medicine is that it obscures real medical techniques that sound like quackery. I’m thinking in particular of the Buteyko method for asthma control, which clinical trials have consistently shown is effective. The “alternative medicine” practitioners will bring this up as evidence that it would be unfair to dismiss their woo as woo.
The absurdity in that, of course, is that the acceptance of the Buteyko method demonstrates the opposite — when a technique can survive clinical trials and prove its effectiveness, western medicine will embrace it, even if it results in fewer drug sales and doctor visits. If a claim is rejected by modern medicine, it’s almost certainly because it has been shown to be bogus.
Ursalamajor – My sympathies, and understanding. Former church mates have been bombarding me with sympathy/christmas cards telling me that my husband died (October) because I left the church. Which is the fundie way of saying I killed him. Their new tack is to tell me that if I don’t come back to the church he will roast in hell forever. Interesting way to show what loving christians they are. Motherfuckers indeed.
Amen, Janine. MikeTheInfidel–thanks for posting that. Here I already thought Ray Comfort was a total asshole, and a complete waste of protoplasm. Shows how wrong a guy can be…
…bc…
Their new tack is to tell me that if I don’t come back to the church he will roast in hell forever.
I thought that, according to their theology, if a person accepts christ as their savior, they went to heaven. I did not know it was conditional to what other people accepted. Or are these assholes lying and trying to guilt trip you back into the fold.
Where is the fucking morality that religion supposedly provides people?
This thread is upsetting me then more of the others on this blog.
A mixture of the blindingly obvious (ie can be worked out by a small child, if smart) and the stupidly dangerous. The gas imbalance is a consequence (a mere symptom) and not a genuine cause at all for those whose breathing difficulties are caused by a faulty immune response to allergens (or even to cold, dry air) and involve swelling and obstruction of the airways and little to no chance of ever breathing through the nose at all! Your token example is just another bit of quackery – among the other mainstreamed quackery (like falsely blaming ulcers on stress).
ursulamajor and Patricia, you both deserve a hug, and your fundie families deserve being beaten up with a Northern Pike. what a horrible thing to tell someone who just lost someone :-/
Thanks everyone.
Patricia, I’m so sorry. I hope you never felt a twinge of guilt. That’s one thing I never even thought of allowing myself, though you know they wanted it so badly! Gotta blame someone, can’t blame god. During the whole thing, I supported their right to pray and have a preacher at his funeral (he was an evolution believing deist). Who was the generous, loving moral one? They couldn’t/wouldn’t ever comprehend that it was actually me.
I think it’s a question of application. Claiming that the gas imbalance causes asthma is clearly quackery, as I well know from having the allergen type of asthma. Claiming that the technique can help reduce use of rescue inhalers is backed by multiple clinical trials. “Positive attitude” healing is neither: negative thoughts don’t cause disease, and positive thoughts won’t even help in curing it (much less cure it).
This kind of guilt trip manipulation tack is truly a new low for fundies.
Ursulamajor and Patricia, what can I say. You have my fullest sympathy for the horrible things that were done to you, for what its worth.
Janine, Well of course they think he already is roasting in hell, the plan is to have me go back to church and pray him out of the fire. No doubt after I have to beg for forgivness for myself. They are such assholes.
Thanks Jadehawk, in my case at least my own immediate family is very supportive of me.
Good luck with your test Bill!
My sympathies as well. For the four years from my mother’s cancer diagnosis to her death there are absolutely no pictures of her because that would have revealed to God a concern that she might die. I was told it was my fault, but never that my mother would roast in hell for it. Even at 13, I knew that was not true even in their own dogma.
Don’t forget your online family. We are behind you too.
One of my best friends, who was a firm believer in Christianity (and from a family of the same), died of cancer a few years back – he got mouth cancer which he beat but which came back and went to one lung (which they removed (and then the other, which killed him.
I was never able to ask him what he felt about the God who was allowing him to die so young (he was mid-twenties) and despite living what he’d believed was a good and righteous life – mostly because I know he’d have found a way to rationalise that his god was still a good god, and my reaction to that, which, considering how angry and upset I was that one of my best friends was dying, would not have been pleasant, and I didn’t want to do that to him.
Sadly, it’s a reminder of just how obtuse and inane faith is. If his god exists then he’s a worthless piece of shit.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Help me pick it apart, smart people. You know how they have those stages of grieving? The only one I never went through is “anger”. He got a horrible disease. He died. I was (and still am) very very sad, but never angry. Other than the way his family acted, there was no one to be angry at, the least of which my husband.
I wonder if the anger part is more of a religious phenomenon, since they don’t seem to understand that sometimes awful shit just happens.
Wow said
Duhh if you get both lungs removed it’s definitly going to kill you.
And that’s baffling in and of itself – for crying out loud The Bible might as well be subtitled ‘God fucks with people, good and bad, for 4,000 years because he’s a malevolent, capricious scumbag.’
If Christians for a moment think that bad things don’t happen to good people then they haven’t been paying attention.
Patricia–These are BAPTISTS saying this shit? Don’t they know that THEY can roast in their hell for such heresy? *sigh* Amazing the intellectual knots they can tie themselves in trying to “save souls”. My sympathies to you–it must have been a terrible time.
Thanks, Patricia and Janine, and everyone. I’ve had so many dear friends and family members tell me they’ll pray for me–and I know it is their way…while they know it ISN’T mine…and I try to nod and smile, knowing it is the best they can say in a hard situation. It is truly refreshing to come to a place where people don’t offer to pray for you…having cancer is bad enough. (And bone marrow biopsies SUCK. Literally. My doctor is good, though…prides himself on a 3-minute biopsy…even though it FEELS like 3 hours…)
The thought that someone (ANYONE) would try to threaten your husband–AFTER THE FACT–with hellfire…and to play such savage mind games on you–Patricia, these people are SCUM. Sorry, that’s the best I can say of them.
I don’t post here often…but I read as much as I can here. And this thread obviously got under my skin. PZ, thanks for posting this–even though it gets the blood boiling. Please pardon my rambling. Sleep must come soon…that’s something else cancer takes away. Energy…consciousness. The docs tell me it’ll come back after the transplant. And that can’t come a minute too soon.
Bill Chandler
…bc…
Ursalamajor – You are much kinder to them than I was during my husbands death. I made the preachers leave his room, and more than once I’ll admit to screaming at them Where’s your fucking god now?! My reaction has been to close all contact with them, the pouring on of guilt would never stop.
Thanks Gregory, it’s tough to be on the recieving end of so much of gods love. *snort*
I am not a psychologist, but my wife is, and she describes the Kübler-Ross model (the five stages of grieving) as “a good model for how Elisabeth Kübler-Ross deals with grief.” There seems to be a fair amount of literature questioning the validity of Kübler-Ross, especially across cultures.
Patricia–I am so deeply sorry for you loss. I haven’t spent much time in the comments for the past few months–I noticed your absence, but hadn’t heard this news. Please accept a supportive hug from your fellow Oregonian, and don’t hesitate to email me (my username at gmail dot com) if you need a little more regional support.
As for your church, words fail me. I feel physically ill when I read stories like yours and UrsulaMajor’s. I honestly don’t understand how people can rationalize these severely warped beliefs, but they scare the fucking shit out of me.
Be well, dear lady.
Thanks, Dr Scooter, for the valuable piece of information – what I meant was the cancer got into the other lung, and that’s what killed him (eventually).
But yes, I suppose I could have written that to be less ambiguous.
Patricia, don’t think for a minute that I wasn’t screaming that inside. I really don’t know how I got through it all. The fact that I had my then 5 year old with me at Johns Hopkins, I guess. He witnessed enough without seeing that kind of explosion. I’ll now live vicariously through your great description.
“Where’s your fucking god now?!”
Delicious.
Bill – I was in the old believers, which is a literal biblical sect. In some parts of the country they are called Brethern. Snake handlers, and speakers in tongues. Real swell folks, probably two degrees cooler than that moron that pickets our soldiers funerals.
Sorry about your friend Wowbagger, that had to be hard to watch and not be able to be honest with him.
The story on 60 Minutes right now is about the lack of response to disability claims to the VA, btw.
Thanks Nerd & Jen. :) I also appreciate no one saying they’ll pray for me. What a worthless sentiment. So far three people have planted trees in my husbands memory, that beats prayer every time!
Ursalamajor – I don’t know about the stages of grief yet. So far sad and mad cover the whole of my world.
ursulamajor 130
Everyone grieves differently, the stages are only guidelines of what may be experienced, and should not be viewed as being in a particular order. It is intensely personal with no right way.
Do not get hung up on process.
@115 It does appear that Ray Comfort was taken out of context, that he was saying that if cancer is god’s way of teaching, then don’t go to the physician. But, on the contrary, Jesus told his disciples to cure the sick without worrying about it supposedly being a lesson being taught to sinners. Note especially the first sentence, and the last paragraph:
http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2009/12/n.html
There’s plenty of things to blame Ray for, including rather unclear writing in that passage. He is innocent of saying that cancer victims should not go to doctors in context, however.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Patricia–Sorry, I must have crossed (er…sorry) my messages here. Maybe it was Ursulamajor? Ah, they’re all fucked up as a football bat. I was just raised Baptist, so I’m more familiar with that brand of fuckery. Condolences to you as well, Ursulamajor…sheesh, the fact that we even have to DISCUSS such levels of stupidity…*sigh* again…
So many of them MEAN well–it’s what makes it so hard to come back at them with anything other than a nod and a smile. (Until they get up to fuckery at THAT level…at which point I believe a 12-gauge to be an appropriate response, but that’s just me…)
I’m hard pressed to understand how people can look on such activities and still pretend them to be the acts of, and results of, a “loving, caring, supreme being”. Phelps be damned…the lot of ’em be damned, as long as they’re preaching that utter bullshit.
OK, ramble over…hops off soapbox…
…bc…
I have heard reference to your personal tragedy without knowing what it was, Patricia. And I noted your absence from posting. Now I know that you lost your husband. My deepest sympathies.
@143–So. And exactly HOW is one to know if “god” is “chastening” one through cancer? I suppose one is expected to gain this precious knowledge via prayer and consulting with one’s minister and the ever-present bible?
Sorry, I’ll take my oncologist’s recommendations over ancient fiction and clueless fiction-thumpers any day of the week.
(god “chastening” through cancer. Whatta guy.)
Whoops, there I go…my wife was in psych nursing for the last 5 years of her career, before the cancer, and her favorite phrase was (and still is) “don’t engage with 2-year olds, teenagers, and mental patients”…and here I am engaging…stopping now…
…bc…
Another good book is this vein is an older one by Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor.”
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illness-Metaphor-AIDS-Its-Metaphors/dp/0141187123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262568355&sr=1-1
She shows how TB, cancer and AIDS have been romanticized in literature and how this keeps us from thinking critically about these diseases.
From John B Hodges:
Saber #42 reveals the true motivation for his “personal responsibility” message. “Do not blame someone or something else (a company for example) for your misery.” Corporations are tired of being forced to take responsibility for e.g. dumping carcinogens in the water, adding them to food, allowing contamination in the workplace, etc… so they are pushing this “personal responsibility” line, no one but YOU are responsible for your cancer. Companies are never responsible for anything.
It is just the old superstition that if you get sick you must have sinned, recycled.
Janine, She Wolf Of Pharyngula, OM #120
Me too.
Patricia and ursulamajor, I cannot express how angry I am that people would treat you that way. I grieve for your treatment by those righteous people. Sorry, words fail me right now.
Thanks Michelle B.
Patricia, had not seen you for a while and now I know why. If you ever need to talk/want to talk to someone outside of your immediate circle, email me at keltixx (at) yahoo(dot) com. I listen well and I promise to never say, “I know how you feel”. I know we do not know each other, really, but been reading you for a long time and missed you.
Ursulamajor, Wowbagger and the others, offer is open to you as well. My blog (click on name) addresses how I dealt with loss, but we are all different. Anger was the overriding element for me, not unusual given the circumstances. Anyway, my email is always open.
Ciao y’all
Ehrenreich also talks in the book about how barbarous and lacking-in-effectiveness the standard cancer treatments are, especially chemo. So she not only calls out faulty pop psychology but also the mainstream medical treatments for cancer, suspecting them of just perpetuating an ineffective but lucrative cancer industry of uncertain cures that can also kill you. She includes in her critique a questioning of the necessity of breast x-rays, pointing out that excessive exposure can itself lead to cancer.
LOL! :-D Are you an Avatar? :-D
Tell her this entire paragraph right now.
America, Schmamerica. Some risk factors for cancer (like… smoking, or splashing around with ethidium bromide solutions) are under your control, but others aren’t. That includes radioactivity from the rocks under your feet or from the 14C in the air or the 3H in the water – as well as replication errors and repair errors in your DNA that have no specific cause beyond statistics. I wonder if quantum fluctuations actually play a role here – whether a guanine points this way or that way (mimicking an adenine) or not is probably that kind of thing. Quantum fluctuations are true random.
Richard the Lying-Hearted has he been called.
I’m allergic to nuts, including pea- and wal- and hazel-. I can detect pretty small quantities of that stuff: in most (not all, but most) cases when it says “may contain traces of nuts” or “has been processed in machines that also handle nuts”, I get a reaction. To taste nuts I need much greater quantities. The immune system is orders of fucking magnitude more sensitive to proteins than the tastebuds, as the most cursory knowledge about antibodies should make obvious.
Fortunately, my reaction is just a scratching burn in the throat… and to trigger it, I must put stuff into my mouth… I don’t sweat on my hands, though, unless I hold something for a long time or the weather is really hot.
Well… that’s like blaming the common cold on getting wet and cold: all that suppresses the immune system, making infections easier if the pathogens happen to be around. If you don’t get infected with Helicobacter pylori, you don’t develop stomach ulcers no matter how little is left of your immune system, because you just can’t.
<raising index finger> But internally completely consistent, see comment 68. Throughout the Old Testament the LORD God kills people just to teach other people a lesson, making His morality worse than that of Kant who led his students to the church in the annual procession as was his duty, turned around instead of entering the church, and went home.
Écrasez l’infâme.
Sorry Tis…Sometimes people may wonder why I am such a vicious atheist and slayer of christian trolls. Quite simply, I’m tired of turning the other cheek to these hurtful manipulating bastards.
That’s enough out of me, gotta lock up the Patrol.
To add to nejishiki @147, there was an excellent piece in the New York Times December 4, 2005; Illness as More Than Metaphor; By DAVID RIEFF her son.
Attitude doesn’t affect cancer survival (see for example Coyne et al, [Cancer] 2007 Dec 1; Vol. 110 (11), pp. 2568-75). The thing that really bugs me about the whole ‘fight cancer and be a survivor’ thing is how it plays out for those who aren’t going to survive. The last thing a terminally ill patient needs is the implication that she could have been a survivor if she had somehow tried harder. Dying’s bad enough without some smug bugger telling you it’s your own fault.
There are a few things one can do to decrease the odds of getting cancer. Don’t smoke, get the HPV vaccine if you’re the right demographic, use condoms, don’t snort radioactive twinkies. But a lot of it’s just dumb luck.
Likewise, there are (sometimes) things you can do to improve your odds of surviving a particular cancer. Get your chemo, if chemo is recommended, on time. (Nothing like on again off again chemo to select resistent clones.) Get that lump looked into early. Don’t blow off a positive biopsy. But again, there’s a lot of dumb luck involved.
A positive attitude won’t do squat. Neither will homeopathy, chiropractors, or all the herbal teas in the world (indeed, green tea will likely decrease your survival in multiple myeloma.) Cancer is a failure on a lot of levels, including DNA repair and immunologic. But not a failure of the mind, brain, or soul. In the end, it’s just not your fault.
Bingo! We have a winner.
Sure, but… still, try to read for understanding next time.
Isn’t that a common phenomenon in psychology?
“The closer you get to humans…”
It’s pretty obvious that Comfort is setting up a counterfactual here, and destroying it in the next paragraph.
Google “breast cancer unawareness month”.
<headdesk>
Stupid me. Ethidium bromide isn’t blue, some marker stuff that’s loaded on the gel with it is.
so they manage to be consistent when it’s about being cruel, but not about anything else. figures.
159:
I always mix bromophenol blue with my ethidium bromide face cream so I can make sure I get complete coverage.
I’m also appalled at how terribly people have been treated. I’m almost surprised that the “power of positive thinking” ideas have stood at all in the face of the damage they do on the flip side, but I guess anything to be a way to magically ward it away from oneself will stick around.
My child has nut allergies also – he gets hives from peanut oil, even if it’s touching someone who has recently eaten them and has residue on their hands. And accidentally eating ice cream with almonds in it once sent us to the ER, where we were treated atrociously. The intake nurse said “So you THINK he’s having an anaphylactic reaction” and it took THREE HOURS for him to get any medication at all. We were lucky that it was his first real almond exposure and he had vomited copiously within a couple of minutes, so the exposure was minimal and the symptoms waned quickly. I also had an anaphylactic reaction once and ended up at a different urgent care, again with the doctor saying “You THINK you’re reacting to something?” What the hell, like the average person is too stupid to know that an instant onset of vomiting, throat closing, and whole-body swelling is a big deal?
Point being that even some medical workers don’t take allergies seriously. I wouldn’t put it past that idiot nurse to be one of those “Oh, a little bit won’t hurt you” types. And no, praying won’t get you out of your allergies. Science might, but positive thinking won’t. And what bad choices did anyone ever make to deserve being allergic?
,Dude, seriously, do you think you’d find a surgeon who would knowingly take out the second lung? Patricia, Ursulamajor, I can’t say I know loss that close to my immediate loved ones followed by an insensitivity almost too deep to fathom;and the amazing thing here is they really think they’re doing you the favor of offering you salvation;the cruelty in their thoughtlessness is staggering.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/does_a_positive_attitude_prolong_cancer.php
Orac wrote about this before.
In fact, positive outlook or “wanting to go on” does not statistically alter cancer outcomes, at least according to one study.
And for you “it’s your fault you have cancer!”
people — get stuffed, you bloody morons.
Cancer is not a punishment for the weak, over-eater the smoker or the drinker. It’s a disease. plain and simple. It’s not a curse from god, because there is nobody there to lay curses. Being happy about it also won’t help you. In fact, some have suggested that data shows the opposite. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Although I’m fairly sure I do recall her using “barbaric” or some similar term in one of the talks and wondering aloud why better treatments didn’t yet exist, I rather suspect her treatment of the matter in the book is more nuanced than this.
Orac has a series of posts about the latest recommendations, btw:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/12/how_not_to_protect_your_medical_turf.php
Folks, please do not try this at home. thank you.
nah, probably best to not do that either.
I’ll have to read exactly what she says as well. It’s not a secret that cancer treatments are pretty barbaric – we’re getting better, but still the options are basically cut/burn it out and/or poison your whole body in hopes of killing it. But one can’t argue there isn’t a shitload of research trying to make it better, though.
That’s news to me.
http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/commonCold/cause.htm
http://www.commoncold.org/special1.htm
BS
Hi, longtime lurker here; it appears this thread hit a lot of nerves because here I am, one of many posting. :)
Two things I’d like to say:
1)As a nurse: Regardless of your disease, I will always do my best to be positive, courteous and honest with you. You’ll feel enough like crap on your own, let alone having to deal with me getting emotional. Also, If I cried over every patient I’ve ever had with a terrible illness, I’d never get out of bed each day. I don’t expect you to “positive think” your way to a cure, I’d rather you take your meds and follow direction. That being said, I like to encourage my patients to focus on what they can change in their situations b/c although you might be dying, its pretty clear that humans need to feel some control over our lives for peace of mind which is far from being happy or “Blessed” by an illness.
2) My Uncle died last Tuesday of Cancer. I’m tired of wearing a frozen smile and nod for the well-meaning jerks who say, “He’s in a better place now.” or “Did he have a spiritual moment before he died? Patients always have a special relationship with god before death. I find it so comforting.”
Just because its comforting doesn’t make it true.
I can accept that “His pain is over at least.” He is out of pain now, death tends to destroy sensory impulses. . . And than on top of it all, to have a minister at his funeral telling the family to “Be joyful!, Do not weep for him, He awaits you in the hereafter, with Jesus Christ our Savior!”
My uncle was not a religious man, He rarely attended church. I think he did consider himself Christian.
I’d like to say this: he was a good and kind man, loving, affectionate, charitable and pretty humble as well as being hardworking and thoughtful. If judged by those who loved him than he was a great man. In brief; He was the sort of person who gives christians a good name.
I’ll miss him.
Huh. From 2001:
http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/cancerland.htm
Interesting. Apologies to deang.
The husbeast and I live in a retirement community where there is an unusually high incidence of every disease one can think of. After all, we are all over 55. Severe arthritis, cancer, replacement parts of all types, stents (husbeast currently has eight and he is only in second place), stroke, Alzheimer’s, ALS (three others have it in addition to the husbeast), depression, you name it, it is here. As a result, most of us empathasize with everyone else, without indulging in false sentimentality. There is gentle mourning for those who pass, and public cheers when someone officially is declared in remission. Those who know us are at least vaguely aware that we are unbelievers; not once has anyone said he would pray for us, and offers of support are offered with sincerity. For all those who have said, “What can I do?” I say, “Nothing right now, as technology is making it possible for me to physically care for him, but the time will come when I will need your help and I will ask then.” We count ourselves fortunate, and I find myself fuming when I hear how you, Patricia, have been treated by people who probably think they are great christians. Fuck ’em.
I count among my new friends here several widows who have had practical advice on learning how to be one, i.e. mourning takes as long as it takes, the first year is a horror, there will be several years of not minding being alone as there is no one to answer to, and then, a certain amount of loneliness, as there is no one to answer to. One of my dearest friends, a woman whom I have never met in person, was caregiver for 7 years to her ALS husband, has an interesting take. Grieving in its own way begins with confirmation of diagnosis, and everyone is different. She remarried a few months after her husband’s passing and she lost friends who were shocked at what they judged to be her haste. For pete’s sake, she had been grieving for seven years, was she supposed to immolate herself in her dead husband’s memory? In those seven years she nearly destroyed her own health; I gained 50 pounds. (Husbeast has said, “Hah! I can see it now – first week after I’m gone you’ll be at a fat farm!”).
For all those here who have lost loved ones recently, my deepest condolences. Been there, done that. Will be there again, by and by.
My father is dying of cancer. It is not a blessing. Sure, I can find good things that have happened to me since he got his diagnosis–maybe even as a result of his diagnosis. For one thing, I moved back home, and I have gotten to spend a lot of time with my sister and her wife and their kids. In fact, after I moved back, my parents started letting my sister’s wife in their home, so some reconciliation has taken place between them (which I may or may not have had a part in–can’t say for sure). The relationship that I have with them and with their children is absolutely wonderful, and I would not have been able to have it when I lived across the country, and there’s no way in hell I would’ve moved back here for anything other than my father dying (that includes my mother dying). Still. I really, really wish that my dad didn’t have cancer. I wish it for his sake, mine, my mother’s, my siblings’, everyone who knows him.
Few situations in life are so simple as to be either purely good or purely bad. But just because I can see beautiful things that have happened in this ugliness doesn’t mean that I welcome the ugliness. It only means that I’ll (likely) survive it.
I used to have a friend whose 18 month old daughter was operated on for brain cancer just before we met. She believed that god had given her little baby daughter brain cancer in order to punish her for straying from her faith (Southern Baptist I think) and bring her back to him! I wish I had had the nerve to say something but I didn’t know where to start.
The daughter seemed to come through alive (though you’re never sure with cancer), but she still walked with a hand on the wall to balance herself three years later.
Imagine worshiping a god who would give your innocent, defenceless baby a brain tumour because you weren’t going to church as often as you should!!
Unfuckingbelievable!!
I’ve not faced anything like cancer, but I am disabled for a few reasons and the one phrase people use, even most counselors and therapists is “after going through all that, you’re a survivor.”
Some times it pisses me off, the rest of the time it just strikes me as incredibly stupid.
What a brilliant bit of insight you have there, you figured out that you’re not conversing with a corpse.
EVERYONE is a survivor, until they aren’t, at which point NOBODY is a survivor.
Yes, thank you very much, I realize I’m not fucking dead. Now please, can I have a little bit of help with the parts of being alive that I’m currently struggling with?
I sympathize, jafafahots. My wife has a rare genetic disease which doesn’t manifest until adulthood. It seemed like it was going to kill her a few years ago. It killed her mother and probably her grandmother, both of them dying undiagnosed. When we broached the possibility to her doctor, he dismissed it out of hand since “nobody gets that”. We paid out-of-pocket for testing, and I carry an electronic copy of the results, her medical records, and information on drugs she can’t receive. And still, doctors insist on telling her she just needs to calm down and think positively. If she were a “positive thinker”, she’d be dead or paralyzed from drug allergies by now.
I got through my bout with cancer via two things:
The skill of my medical personnel and lots and lots of D&D.
It’s been gone for a year and I do not remember one instance of thinking that thinking would make it go away.
I recall a study that indeed showed a correlation (albeit not as very strong) between attitude and cancer survival chances. The conclusion of the authors, however, was the opposite from what the woomasters tell us: When you have greater survival chances and doctors tell you so (e.g. because your type of cancer is not as malign as another type), that gives you a positive attitude, while a doctor telling you that there isn’t much that can be done will certainly make you very sad.
Is it just my impression, or is it something very ‘American’* about exploiting others’ misfortune and gullibility with no repercussions so long as there is a spiritual element involved?
It is as if this kind of swindle is exempt from all official scrutiny. Very primitive indeed!
*Oh, I know that the woo and rip-off is practised everywhere, but most other Western countries seem to clamp down on at least the most blatant swindle, spiritual/religious or not.
I believe the “positive thinking” phenomenon is causing serious problems across the board, not just in the medical/healing field.
It seems everywhere one turns lately there is this attitude that by merely thinking positively, all one’s wants & desires will be fulfilled, consequences be damned!
It is especially prevelant in the Christian community–can’t afford that huge house? Nonsense! God wants you to prosper, so go ahead and buy it–the Lord will provide a way. Gone is the old “to the meek & humble among us shall God’s reward come eventually…either in this life, or the next.”
Now we see the “New Christian Doctrine” anchored in the belief that only through Christ can one truly achieve the aquisition of material wealth…whether your personal finances green light it, or not! We are living the results of that mind set today…yet another gift from the “True Believers”.
Just think positive and trust in the Lord–good health & good fortune shall be yours!
The Secret
@ Patricia and ursulamajor – Unholy fuck… those folks are unbelievable. You have my deepest symapthy.
Regarding cancer, well, it certainly did my father the world of good when it killed him in 2007 (10 months between diagnosis and the end). Chemo is really nasty, but the 1st course put it into remission although that only lasted 6 weeks.
One thing that I will say is that the doctors, nurses, the MacMillan Cancer Support charity, and the nurses on the palliative care ward where he spent his last week were fantastic. In many ways I’m glad that we have national healthcare here in the UK because I’d dread to think what would have happened if we were in the US.
I also found out that my parents were relatively religious – odd to discover this aged 35 but the stereotypical “English reserve” is hard at work in my family. The reason that we didn’t go to church was that the local vicar was as ‘fire and brimstone’ as you get in the Church of England and my folks did not agree with this.
FWIW I don’t think that god smited my father, the many years of smoking probably didn’t help even though he’d quit in the 80s…
I think people need to understand that the mental condition of a patient does need to be dealt with as well as the physcial problems.
Encouraging someone to be active physical and mentally while being treated will improve the quality of their remaining life even if the disease itself can’t be cured.
You can’t regrow someone spinal column yet but you can take actions to prevent a person in a wheelchair committing suicide
Ehrenreich also talks in the book about how barbarous and lacking-in-effectiveness the standard cancer treatments are, especially chemo.
Barbarous, maybe. Some people have horrible side effects. Some come through asking what all the fuss is about. I’ve had more than one patient complain that I told them to buy anti-nausea meds before they started and that they were a waste of money because they never felt a twinge of nausea.
And, yes, chemotherapy can definitely kill you. So can penicillin. What about it?
Then there’s the efficacy question. For that, I’m going to refer you to http://seer.cancer.gov/. Check out breast cancer incidence and mortality. Note how much lower the latter is than the former. That’s not due to positive thinking and alternative medicine. Or check this article. I’m linking to the pubmed reference, but go to the full text. Table II is particularly amusing: it shows that, in Germany, men with testicular cancer had a higher 10 year survival than men without. Probably due to better follow up and fewer risk taking behaviors (or, even more likely, chance), certainly not to any health benefit of the cancer itself or the chemotherapy (beyong curing the cancer), but not something likely to happen if treatment were truly ineffective.
@ MrJonno–which is healthier for a patient’s mindset: the acceptance of one’s condition based upon reality (which does not automatically translate into throwing in the towel…on the contrary, in fact) or having them cling to some new age quakery full of total BS & false hope until they eventually realize they’re not only dying a painful death, but they’ve been played for a fool besides?
I’ll take the Truth over mumbo-jumbo any day…in other words, I choose dignity.
Its not about lying to a patient, its about promoting what they can do with their damaged bodies or limited life spans.
Telling someone that homeopathy will cure cancer is already a crime in the UK (don’t know if it is in the US), but telling them that aromatherapy might reduce the pain and try it seems pretty sensible to me.
I’m sure you will find that reading interesting science blogs can act as pain relief as it distracts the mind
reminds me of religious types like John Piper who say “Don’t waste your cancer” and regard it as god’s plan and a blessing.
It is only sensible if you can cite the proper scientific studies showing real efficacy. Until then, it is woo and should be treated like the pile of horseshit it is. In other words, either prove the benefit or shut the fuck up. Welcome to science.
For a bit of clarification, from the 2001 piece I linked to above:
You are willfully ignoring the numerous posts from people here who have been and are patients who are saying that this particular approach directly harms their mental conditions. That is beyond being misguided or miseducated, it is cruel. You are denying them their own experiences and claiming to know better in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. You need to go back and read this entire thread.
Doing just about anything that distracts the mind can reduce pain including watching TV.
The UK National Kidney Federation gives lots of advice including learning to live with pain. Pain relief is as much an art as it is a science. If a patient says holding a daisy in one hand while hopping on one leg means they feel better then that is exacly what they are feeling (Not the same as being well that is medicine)
http://www.kidney.org.uk/Medical-Info/kidney-disease/pain12steps.html
Medication reducing pain
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2170475/
@ MrJonno: I emphatically second Nerd of Redhead and say (paraphrase) what a huge, steaming pile of absolute horseshit!
And I know of what I speak–I’ve suffered from an extreme case of Avascular Necrosis since the age of 39…or 15 years of agony & 14 major joint replacement surgeries, during which I’ve been a regular (bi-weekly/monthly) patient at several pain clinics on both the east coast & the west coast.
In my vast experience in dealing with excrutiating pain (I do not exaggerate), I’ve had my share of 1st order, 3rd rate assholes plying their new age mumbo-jumbo crap by pushing every absurd notion under the Sun on me. And for all their insulting bullshit I’ve been fed, I’ll tell you what works: strong narcotics administered in proper dosages…i.e, enough mils. to do the job.
I am insulted by this bullshit of positive thinking and anything associated with it.
Why does god hate children?
Why does god have such a limited tool set (all his tools seem so hammer like)?
Why does god insist you grovel and grovel some more only to work his weird (and if he be judged as a human to human standards) and often down right mentally deranged criminally insane plan?
Why does any sane modern person feel so insecure that they have to believe in only the goodness when the goodness and badness are so obviously “it’s life”?
Why don’t all True Believers give up their medical coverage, doctors, care givers, etc.?
Dianne, that’s a bizarre remark. Ehrenreich certainly isn’t suggesting any such thing. Is it possible to speak critically of contemporary medicine or public health with other skeptics without being accused of promoting SCAM/woo? I often face the same thing when corporate agriculture comes up, and I’ve come largely to avoid those discussions. It’s very frustrating. (The exception was a really interesting discussion I had once over at Science-Based Medicine when Sb was down.)
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/courageous_man_refuses_to_believe
A nice ironic comment to this subject!
These interventions do not constitute a “cure” or anything close, which is why the death rate from breast cancer has changed very little since the 1930s, when mastectomy was the only treatment available.
Just, flat out untrue. (Yeah, I know it only goes back to 1975, not 1930. The SEER database only goes back that far.)
There is certainly a lot to criticize in modern medicine, including the practice of oncology. But the claim that there has been NO improvement since the 1930s is not a reasonable or responsible claim to make.
Or compare survival in the Phillipines where only about half (as opposed to probably 90+%) of patients with early breast cancer receive adjuvant therapy (hormones and/or chemotherapy). Do you prefer the 59% or the 90% 5-year relative survival?
SC,OM – Thanks for the tip last night on the 60 Minutes show. If I have to wait four years for my VA benefits I’ll be one sorry puppy.
Good observation.
<headdesk> Thanks! I really should have remembered.
Or anywhere else for that matter.
That’s news to me.
http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/commonCold/cause.htm
http://www.commoncold.org/special1.htm
The first link is irrelevant unless you stopped reading at my comma; the second, however, is interesting because it points out that the cold is the reaction to the infection, the stronger the stronger the immune system is.* Inflammation is also linked to cancer because it makes cells proliferate.
* There is no typo or grammatical error in this clause. I’m just too tired to reword it.
<scales falling off eyes>
So that’s where the bizarre debt culture that caused the economy crisis comes from.
To everyone who has posted stories about dealing with the “you (or your loved one) must have done something to cause/deserve their illness,” I am so sorry to hear that you’ve had to deal with that kind of treatment when what you needed was compassion and support. All that attitude reflects is a desperate need to cling to the illusion of control over the uncontrollable. Life is harsh and unfair – you can do everything right: eat right, exercise, manage your stress, etc., and still it’s no guarantee of a long and healthy life. That’s the way it is and no amount of “guilting back to God” or medical woo or peddling the “power of positive thinking” is going to change that. All you can do is get the best medical advice & treatment you can, ask for your dignity & intelligence to be respected by insisting your doctors be upfront about your choices & chances, and the freedom to live your life as you see fit.
Actually, the bit about respecting one’s intelligence and dignity when it comes to giving a full diagnosis applies to the family/loved ones of the patient as well. I can’t tell you how insulting, not to mention damaging, it is to not be told the full extent of a loved one’s illness out of a misguided need to “protect” someone from the fact that the person they love may be dying.
My mother was diagnosed with MS when I was 3 and it was a pretty straightforward downhill progression – no plateaus, no remissions. It pissed me off to no end that no one, including my dad, ever took the time to actually explain what was wrong with her other than “she’s having a hard time walking because it’s MS” even though I’d keep asking – no explanation that the disease wasn’t going to just affect her legs, but her entire body, her eyesight, her organ functions and even her immune system. I was a kid, but I wasn’t stupid – it was pretty obvious that she was not getting better, no matter what meds they had her on (back in the 80s I think the treatments were mostly combos of steroids and they had some pretty awful side effects). It’s not like I needed a technical explanation of how the mylein sheathes were being eroded in her brain, preventing nerve impulses from traveling to the necessary body parts, but some sort of preparation would have prevented a lot of confusion and fear and guilt. By the time she died from pneumonia (2nd bout in less than 2 year), she was bedridden, had to ingest food through a tube through her stomach & had to be in adult diapers (the entire disease progressed to that point over a course of nearly 8 long years). It was beyond traumatizing watching her go through that without having any explanation or context given to me to help me understand what was happening – I even overheard a comment about how having kids may have triggered the onset of the disease and for years afterward I felt guilty wondering if having me (and my brother) was what made her sick.
For obvious reasons, I’ve tried to keep up on the research, (the average risk is 1/750, which rises to 1/40 for a direct relative, and it’s 2-3 times more common for women than men, and this year I’ll be as old as my mom was when she was diagnosed – still a small risk, I know, but it’s hard not to wonder “what if”). One of the most frustrating things about MS as a disease is that (as far as I know), medical science still hasn’t been able to pinpoint what causes the disease, although how it progresses and how it operates is far better understood, and I believe the treatments now are more substantial, at least for most types of MS.
And yeah, I did get the occasional “she must have done something to deserve the disease,” unsurprisingly mostly from the church crowd – I immediately ceased my flirtation with my childhood church’s youth group when the group leader insinuated that my mom had gotten sick because she started seeing my father when he was still married to his first wife and that if she (and the rest of the family) had come to church more often, she would have gotten better, so I should “be a good Christian” by coming to church more so the same thing won’t happen to me – that may have been the first time I ever swore at an adult; I heard similar comments from the more churchy side of the family, too. My stepmom didn’t even get so much as a divinely inspired wart despite the fact that she starting seeing my dad before my mom died. And of course there were the countless comments of “Don’t be sad, she’s happy with Jesus now!” and “This should be a positive experience for you since it’s taught you how to be more mature for your age” (really?? losing a parent before I even got my first period is supposed to be a “character building experience”???). I got to go through the same round of comments again 2 years later when my dad died of a stroke – and he had no major health problems, pretty even diet (could have exercised more but he wasn’t overweight), pretty happy-go-lucky guy; if anything, if he’d actually taken medical advice and gone on medication to manage his blood pressure, he might still be around (after finding that out, I’ve made it a point to pay attention to my blood pressure when going in for my annual check ups).
As far as the homeopathy stuff goes, yeah, it’s hookum. Sure, things like pleasant scents & good tasting food can make you feel better – I used to pick fresh bunches of lilacs to leave in my mom’s room because the scent made her happy and made Ghiradeli brownies often for the same reason, but her level of happiness had nothing to do with the actual progression of the disease – a homecare aide we were interviewing tried to give her the whole “You MUST think positively about your condition! It’s the best medicine for you!” schpeel and I’m surprised the wallpaper didn’t peel from my mother’s very acerbic response. Frankly, I think she was more than entitled to her bouts of anger/self-pity – who wouldn’t feel that way? The reason the disease was caught so early was because my father was a doctor and recognized that what she was feeling was not in her head (she started showing signs less than 2 months after giving birth to my brother) and told the examiner to look specifically for signs of MS. Thankfully they listened to him, otherwise it would have taken months for the diagnosis.
Sorry for the longwinded post – didn’t expect the topic to trigger the verbal upchuck.
Been meaning to read Nickel & Dimed – will definitely do so, as Ehrenreich sounds like a fascinating writer.
There is no need to apologize, Pint.
The Pint – This is becoming quite an amazing thread. Which flavor of church were you in?
But that wasn’t the claim she did make, which you should know since you quoted her. She said “changed very little,” and she said it in 2001. It doesn’t actually appear from the table you linked to that she was wrong – for white women, a decrease from 31 to 26; for black women, an increase during that time period. There are of course a number of complexities here, but she did not say NO improvement, but “very little,” which is certainly a point worthy of debate (I don’t know how this compares to other treatments). And you should note that she goes on to say:
She was simply not making the absolute claims you’re attributing to her. (I don’t know what she says in the new book.) Re mammography, Orac’s post that I linked to above chastises them for revealing the recs the way they did since they appeared to come out of the blue, suggests that he’s now become less “dogmatic” than he was in the past, and praises systems in which the course of screening is decided individually between patients and doctors. Well, yes, they did come out of the blue, because aside from articles like Ehrenreich’s there was little to indicate that the need for and usefulness of this screening wasn’t settled science; I have to wonder, given that it wasn’t, why doctors were so dogmatic about it; and I also wonder why the hell we don’t have a system more like the European or Australian with regard to mammography and coverage…
Her claims may have been overblown (I really don’t know; and you know immensely more about this than I do), but I think it’s worthwhile to debate the criticisms she actually made in the context she actually made them.
*You’ll also note, if you read the whole article, that she discusses positive changes in the treatment of breast cancer that the Women’s Health Movement played a role in bringing about. She’s not anti-medicine, but about empowering women within it.
from SC’s link in #170:
really??! what for?
*note to self: must ask mom if they do that in Germany too*
@ Patricia & Janine – Thanks for understanding. It’s been 20 years and I’m still amazed at how this stuff sometimes spills out. I don’t comment very often here – hard to have the time to keep up with everyone’s posts – but I do enjoy reading you guys quite a bit.
As to the flavor of church I had to swallow (they’re all pretty bad if you ask me), it’s been a really long time, but I do believe it was a Calvinist church when I was a kid. My parents weren’t really religious – we only went to church if the grandparents were visiting from the Philippines (HUGELY religious over there, the paternal grandmother was Catholic and had a small chapel in her home, complete with church-style pews, eek!!). I never minded it before – the summer “bible school” (cheaper than camp and it was right up the street) was never anything more than “Jesus says to love people – now it’s time for arts & crafts!” but the attitude of some of the parishioners definitely went downhill as my mom’s conditioned worsened – and she was never a big participant in church activities to begin with, which may have also contributed to what sometimes seemed like eagerness to point their fingers at her; back then it was a pretty white neighborhood too, so I wonder how much of it was also due to our being “ethnic.” I have to give credit to the original pastor, though, as he made an effort to stop by and visit with my mother after his sermons, just to say provide company and talk about whatever she wanted, no preaching or “come back to church, Jesus will make you better.” He was a rarity and it was a shame when he passed away a few years before my mom did – his replacement never bothered to come by.
After mom died and the stepmom came on the scene, it was Catholicism because the stepmom attended Mass every week (one must keep up social appearances) – same after my dad died because the relatives who took me in were Catholic & sent me to a Catholic high school (good people who still made the mistake of equating steady church attendance with moral character). Instead of bringing me to god, it sent me screaming in the opposite direction. Although oddly enough, I had more of a problem with my peers than the nuns & priests – I got the “your parents died because they committed adultery” and “God must be mad at you because you don’t believe/take communion/aren’t confirmed” lines from classmates rather than the nuns and priests! At least with (most of) them, I managed to earn some respect for being able to present rational & logical arguments when debating theology.
Chemotherapy, which became a routine part of breast-cancer treatment in the eighties, does not confer anywhere near as decisive an advantage as patients are often led to believe, especially in postmenopausal women like myself — a two or three percentage point difference in ten year survival rates,1 according to America’s best-known breast-cancer surgeon, Dr. Susan Love
This is one of those statements that is just true enough to completely confuse people. The difference in the 10-year survival rate depends on a number of factors, including patient characteristics such as age, menopausal status, comorbities, etc and tumor characteristics such as size, hormone receptor status, HER-2 status, invasion, grade, etc, and treatment characteristics, ie which chemotherapy is used.
To give a couple of extremes, a 50 year old post-menopausal woman in otherwise good health with a stage Ia (<1 cm, non-invasive) ER/PR positive low grade cancer would have a less than 1% benefit from chemotherapy: without chemotherapy about 96% of such women would be alive in 10 years, one would die of cancer, the others of other diseases. Chemotherapy only reduces the risk of dying by less than 1%. Really not worth it. And almost never offered. Hormonal therapy is used in this situation, but mainly as a preventative measure against future cancers.
The same woman with an ER/PR negative tumor 5 cm in size with 4-9 LN involved would have a much larger benefit. For this stage (and remember, the same patient, postmenopausal, in good health), almost 95% of women treated with resection alone will die of cancer. With a third generation chemotherapy, an additional 18% will be alive in 10 years. I’ll agree entirely that less than 25% survival is inadequate progress, but I find calling it no or even “little” progress misleading, given that mastectomy can save less than 5% of these patients. And it’s certainly not a 1% advantage. (Source for these estimates is http://www.adjuvantonline.com)
And why is Dr. Love considered an expert in chemotherapy anyway? She’s a surgeon. All she knows about chemo is that if she sends a patient to medical oncology she has to split the credit for any 10-year survivals.
My mother had breast cancer about 5 years back. Living in woo central (Seattle area) I had to hear the bullshit a lot. I heard it all.
-Does your mom meditate?
-Does she think ‘positive’ thoughts?
-Use the magical homeopathy?
-Align her chakra’s?
-And occasionally I heard the “has she accepted jebus/asked jebus to heal her”?
The worst though was when I would mention that she had to do radiation treatment for about 3 months (she was lucky that they found it early) and a few people tried to tell me that it was worse then doing nothing, i.e. herbs and prayer. I would then react in my normal way: I would verbally tear them a new asshole with the power of science, logic, and reason. So many of them were lucky that my mind was elsewhere because a few said some very rude shit of the “I bet she did something to deserve it” variety. All my will power was used to stop me from violently and painfully rendering them sterile, then asking if doing nothing would be preferable to medical treatment.
To all the others who have gone through something like this or will at some time, my heart and thoughts are with you. And to all those people who would exploit someones misfortune to further you personal brand of woo, please just fucking kill yourself already.
No Gods, No Masters
Cameron
I think it’s worthwhile to debate the criticisms she actually made in the context she actually made them.
I respectfully disagree. The claim that there is little difference between care in the 1930s or even the 1980s and 2010 is just too ridiculous to be part of a useful discussion.
Another scenario just to show in an exagerated, but plausible situation, how much difference chemotherapy can make, consider a very unlucky 25 year old with hormone positive breast cancer, with >9 LN positive and a tumor 3-4 cm in size. Best surgery alone gives her a less than 10% chance of living 10 years (about 1% surviving without relapse). Chemo- and hormonal therapy gives her a slightly better than 40% chance of surviving 10 years (almost 35% without relapse). Again, not great, but a greater than four fold improvement over her chances in 1930. In the 1980s she would have gotten a 1st generation regimen which would have given her a less than 25% chance of surviving 10 years. So an improvement of greater than 50% over the last 20 years. That’s not the nil situation that Ehrenreich proposes.
There are plenty of criticisms that can be reasonably made of modern medical and oncologic care. There is clearly room to do better. But saying that statements like you quoted are “reasonable” criticisms is a bit like saying that the statement “Monsanto is an evil company out to turn us all into mutants” is a reasonable place to start a discussion about the problems of corporate agriculture. I’m sure that there are problems in corporate agriculture, but I also think that genetic engineering and Monsanto paranoia just obscure them. Likewise, the statements like “These interventions do not constitute a “cure” or anything close, which is why the death rate from breast cancer has changed very little since the 1930s, when mastectomy was the only treatment available.” It’s not true and it obscures the real problems.
Dianne, you’re galloping all over the damned place! I gave a link to the full article and then a couple of longer quotations. You’re blending together short phrases, not responding to my replies, and not trying to understand her larger point (it seems).
I have no doubt that this is true (same figures in 2001 when she wrote that?), which was why I mentioned the various complexities in my post above. However, she didn’t appear to me in that piece to be bashing chemo broadly, but to be critical of how breast-cancer screening and therapies are “sold” to patients and the public. As she said, chemo “does not confer anywhere near as decisive an advantage as patients are often led to believe.” Again, I don’t know how often patients are led to believe this (or were in 2001), but as a member of the public I do think the complexities have been downplayed and screening and some treatments are generally presented as more effective for more people than they are in fact. I don’t know what “but I find calling it no or even ‘little’ progress misleading” is referring to, exactly. Could you stop putting words in quotation marks and divorcing them from their contexts, please? I will say that, for 2009, her claims weren’t nuanced enough, though whether that was true in 2001 is another matter.
I don’t know. That’s a valid question.
***
I really don’t think minimizing the side effects of these treatments is what you want to be doing here. I mean, “Yes, it’s generally miserable, but it’s what we have, people are working hard to develop improved treatments, and it can make a real difference for some people” would, to me, show a lot more respect than this hyperdefensiveness.
The Pint, no doubt you have heard of the recent hypothesis of narrowed cerebral veins as a mechanism in MS. I’ll watch that research with interest.
Again, that was not her claim. And that piece was published in 2001.
The table you linked to shows:
All races – female – 1975: 31.45 (deaths per 100,000)
All races – female – 2000: 26.63
White – female – 1975: 31.79
White – female – 2000: 26.17
Black – female – 1975: 29.49
Black – female – 2000: 34.36
People can judge for themselves (lacking the longer-term data, unfortunately) the extent to which her statement was justified.
It’s not a good sign for the death rate in blacks to be on the increase rather than the decrease! That suggests whatever the overall improvements are, they’re not getting to (or working on) all people equally.
Not getting to, I suspect. Wonderful country, eh?
It wouldn’t be good if it was, but it’s not. Look at the data. There is a lot of year-to-year variation. 1975 happens to be the lowest year, 2000 was about average. You can draw a line between two points but you can’t establish a valid trend.
Yeah, I noticed the variation, but there still does seem to be an upward trend (statistically significant or not, I have no idea); definitely no downward trend, which isn’t good at all. Could you do your graphing thing, Svennie? Please?
(Oh, never mind. I forgot about your resolution.
*pout*)
Wow, what a thread.
As one who has recently finished my fourth round of chemo (for acute leukemia, not breast cancer), I can state that while chemo is miserable (especially the latest round, which included vincristine, daunarubicin, and l-asparaginase, along with prednisone to ward off the side effects of the l-asparaginase…and the damned prednisone has a worse list of side effects & withdrawal effects than ANY of the chemo drugs…that shit is just EVIL…), it beats the living daylights out of the alternative.
Many kinds of cancer there are…for my particular brand (ALL), treatments and outcomes have improved dramatically over the years. The head doc on the bone marrow transplant team that I’m working with explained it at length to us. Basically (this is vastly truncated), in 1960 or so, the difference between acute leukemia and chronic leukemia to the patient was that the acute form would kill you in about 4-6 weeks, whereas the chronic form would take a few to several months to kill you. No real treatment was available.
Now, with appropriate treatment and a timely diagnosis, many kids are cured (pretty much completely) regularly (leukemia is more common in children than adults); adults are surviving far longer, and with the combo of chemo & BMT, I may well have a 45% shot at being alive in 10 years. Not great odds–but far better than a few weeks of misery and then game over.
30 years ago, I watched my father die of lung cancer (he’d smoked 2 packs of Kents a day for 33 years or so…pretty well established that it was self-inflicted…that didn’t make it any better or easier to 17-year-old me, or him…). They did radiation therapy on him, which I still believe killed him faster than the disease did. It was about two months from his diagnosis to his death. This did not instill a great faith in one’s chances of surviving cancer in my young mind. But a whole lot has happened in those 30 years. And faced with the choice of chemo or shuffling off this mortal coil in a few weeks, well, chemo it is, for me.
I wouldn’t wish chemo on much of anybody–although for the most part I’ve had less trouble with it than many people do, it seems–but I’m certainly glad the option is now available. Don’t know that I would be willing to undergo radiation–fortunately, that isn’t a part of the approach this group uses. I’m ok with that.
My wife wasn’t too happy with the chemo approach at first, either. Having been a nurse for 15 years, she’d seen chemo from the other side of the needle, and was not a fan–but once again, presented with the options, there wasn’t really much of a choice to be made.
Peace,
Bill Chandler
…bc…
I did look at the data. I worked my way back through the posts to figure out which one was supposed to have the relevant link in and then looked at the source table across the years, several times, to see that the average and whites downward trend really wasn’t matched by the blacks trend – because my initial thought had been that SC had merely accidentally copied that pair of numbers upside-down in #211.
O RLY?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/cancer_is_a_disease.php#comment-2181716
You should know better by now. ;)
Bill – Nice to see you back. I have been thinking of you today.
I do already know better – better than you do apparently (with your insinuation there) – not to trust humans and certainly not to trust them to be infallible. I wouldn’t trust you another time either. I’ve seen what you’re like (individually and collectively).
But nor would I, just as I didn’t this time, accuse without checking (eg to say “didn’t you mean those numbers the other way up”), having not bothered to follow that semi-private dispute earlier. What I can’t so trivially do is check that linked page’s data for possible errors against reality.
Thanks, Patricia. The biopsy got postponed until tomorrow–my doctor got stuck at the Phoenix airport for 2 days, on the way home from a California vacation. Boy, I hope he’s over that little buzzkill before it’s time for him to drill into my pelvis…it’s bad enough if the doctor is in a GOOD mood…
Hope you’re doing well. More anon.
Bill Chandler
…bc…
And if there’s anything the VA doesn’t want, it’s pharyngulation.
By the way, has anyone heard from brokenSoldier lately?
So, the winkie thing didn’t signify anything to you? Really?
Use of winkies is not trustworthy either. Especially since you’re so full of yourself you just linked back to yourself like I should care. I already told you I’d been ignoring your public-private argument. That and your inappropriate capitalisation (which wasn’t even filling the role of an in-joke) negates any validity one might otherwise ascribe to your winkie. I didn’t miss seeing it at all.
Get help.
What? Not a single reference to the one whom all of you should take umbrage at, Bruce Lipton? This man who was once an epigeneticist, now claims that the “Biology of Belief” (also the name of his recent publication) can save one from disease. He uses his scientific credentials to bolster his reputation and then spews nonsense to an undereducated and scientifically illiterate audience about how positive thought changes one at the cellular level. I find this philosophy much more repugnant than the run of the mill charlatan such as Chopra. Am I alone on this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_RLY%3F
An UnSAnian nobody? He doesn’t even manage to rate a sizable wikipedia article let alone be known outside whatever obscure connectivity led you to him. Sure, from what I can see on googling, he’s a crank/quack nutter or conman. However, the ant must first be noticeable in order for one to take umbrage at it.
A relevant poem has better world coverage than the apparent non-entity against whom you’re railing.
OK, I have to ask: what’s private about it?
@ SC #226:
That (wikipedia) looks like an admission that you’re a troll! :-D
All it does is confirm my existing low opinion of you and the post in question.
NB Having had years when they didn’t work, I don’t generally bother even looking at video links – especially undocumented ones like yours, with no good reason to believe there’s anything there worth the trouble anyway.
SC – This must be your night. Sheesh!
No, I haven’t seen Broken Soldier for some time. But then I was gone for awhile. I’ve wondered if he is OK too.
The VA works in mysterious ways – just like gawd. When my Advocate to the VA saw my husbands death certificate he sighed and said, “Sorry, welcome to the screw the widow program.”
I don’t think he’s been around since (early?) last summer.
@ SC #228:
Look at the number of active participants compared with the rest of the flow. Like a conversation being ignored in a noisy party room. NB This sub-thread would be another semi-private one despite occurring in a public place. No-one else even cares or is assiduously ignoring it.
That cluelessness from you is just another example of why I have a low opinion of you. You have observable form over years of posts.
No, it offers confirmation that you are not Aware of All Internet Traditions.
Ad LOLiam?
*growl*
Please keep us updated.
That doesn’t make it remotely private.
Except of course those who click on the links and post replies. Seriously, SEF, you’re sounding extremely silly. You should stop now.
Hi Nerd! Don’t know if Broken Soldier has a blog or not. I did notice he was gone. Something about the regulars that ticks in the back of your mind.
Did you see see my smartass crack (!) about Tiger Woods and Fair Isle on the other thread? So far no one has got the joke.
…OK ask the Redhead. :)
SEF whats up with you tonight? Usually I tell anyone that can’t say anything nice to come sit by me, but you are being a real stinker.
who pissed in your coffee today? it doesn’t even occur to you that this conversation might be read by people who aren’t actively participating?
bloody hell, it’s not like it’s even a secret that Pharyngula has a huge lurker-following; and that doesn’t even include the regular posters who are reading this conversation.
Patricia, a bit of research found this blog. There was a gap between March and one in October.
I saw your crack, but I’m still trying to unravel it. I guess I’m stranded…
My mom mostly felt anger at the damn fool who misdiagnosed her pancretitis as alcoholism. She later found new physicians and was in the process of recovering when a crisis killed her. In my dad’s case it was his addiction to tobacco smoking. Took the left lung, then the right, and back in 1972 lung transplants were not standard procedure.
These days I have trouble getting people to accept the fact I’ve been diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, which affects how I respond to treatment for Type II Diabetes and clinical depression. I understand how people hate having their problems dismissed and I hate it. I mean, if observing a person’s throat swelling shut means nothing to a medical worker, that medical worker got his medical license fraudulently and needs to be criminally prosecuted.
Mother died in part because of misplaced trust. Father died in part because of an addiction. Neither case excuses the mistakes others made in their treatment. Good intentions excuses nothing.
Alan, I’m concerned about you. Do you have a good therapist who works with your other doctors?
So I graphed the breast-cancer death-rate data, and I’d embed it if I had a clue how. I’ll post it here:
http://terrapinprocrastination.blogspot.com/2010/01/breast-cancer-trends.html
Strong trends, though not what I expected from just looking at the data (fascinating, that). Anyway, the racial disparity is obvious and surprisingly recent, but trends for everybody are now clearly downward.
Ha! Nerd – You have it.
My life is currently on the decrease. But I hope that someday I will M1.
Nerd – The Duke of Windsor made Fair Isle vests the hot ticket on England’s golfing links. And of course Bertie Wooster was PG Wodehouses worst golfer. The whole thing is hysterically funny, and all the better for having episodes on YouTube with Stephen Fry as Jeeves.
Thanks, doll!
?
Well, I think this should be put in the context of other diseases* (your graph is a bit smushed), and the point should be sharply made that mortality rates for black women were still higher in 2009 than they were in 1975. Higher.
*Next, maybe?
Nothing “smushed” about it–I could make the changes look bigger by scaling the y-axis from 20 to 40, but that would be dishonest.
Also not sure what trends in other diseases would provide as context.
But yeah, the three things that jumped out at me from those data are 1) the increase in mortality among “black”* women from ’75-’90; that’s what really cries out for explanation here; 2) the fact that there was no racial disparity before like ’84 (what I meant by ‘surprisingly recent”); 3) the clear downward trends from about ’90 (“white”* women) and ’95 (“black” women).
So let’s think about what these data mean…this is annual death rate (per 100,000) from breast cancer. That metric integrates both incidence (rate of new cases) and treatment effects. Therefore an increase could reflect increased incidence even in the face of more effective treatment (and, I guess, vice versa). The data are adjusted to remove demographic (population age structure) effects so that’s not it.
I’m too stoned lazy and tired to research this at the moment, but surely that increase has been noticed and discussed before?
General mortality rates: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/2/459
Wow, there’s a lot of data (I mean there are a lot of data) there…I’m just amusing myself graphing stuff like breast cancer incidence (new cases per year; always notably higher in whites* than blacks*) and prostate cancer mortality (astoundingly higher in blacks*–more than double– but showing a general increase from ’75 to ’93 and then a large decrease thereafter)…
Lots of really interesting and sobering questions raised by this amusement.
*I’m tired of using scare-quotes, but I really hate hate hate these polarized and dehumanizing terms
What about 20 to 60, or 70, or 80?
Antiretrovirals? Effective vaccines? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what are valid comparisons here.
Again, it’s an increase overall.
I don’t know how “clear” these are.* This is all within a fairly narrow range, even for the privileged groups (and the rates for black women are still higher than they were in 1975). Not to be dismissed, but surely not evidence of a cure.
*(bearing in mind, once again, that Ehrenreich wrote that piece in 2001)
What? The point is that starting at 20 is wrong. I could scale it from 0 to 80 if you’d like, but that would look really squished.
Right, well, the thing is that contrary to PZ’s post-title, cancer is not a disease, it’s a whole class of diseases with similarities and differences. As I mentioned, the temporal pattern for prostate cancer in men is totally different, and of course we’d see different patterns still for lung or pancreatic or melanoma or whatever.
Again, that conclusion is completely dependent on cherry-picking 1975 as the starting point. The trend clearly increases, then decreases. Extrapolating, the rate this year (i.e. 2010) ought to be lower than 1975, so would you insist that that is a decrease overall? Of course not.
*shrug* I do. I’d be happy to run the regressions and show you the P values. But true, not as clear in 2000.
Indeed not. Cancer still kills. But in the absence of a decline in incidence, evidence for improving care and treatment.
How so?
Huh? You’re misunderstanding. The question was the basis on which the Y range was chosen.
But cancer isn’t the only disease, or the only one for which treatments have been developed. Breast cancer compared with other cancers is interesting, and all compared with other diseases is as well.
Well, I didn’t cherry-pick it. Nor did Ehrenreich. It was simply the first year in the data Dianne provided, which was just prior to the rise of chemo as a key breast-cancer treatment.
What? The mortality rates for black women are higher in the last recorded year than they were in the first.
But you’re not addressing Ehrenreich’s argument, which was the focus of the discussion.
Actually, it looks like it will still be slightly higher. What about compared to 1970? What about the effects of the economic crisis for 2011,…?
You may find black people and white people less dehumanizing than blacks and whites.
spend the rest of the week altering your thoughts in the new direction you want to move towards. Over time and with practice, your new attitude will be your fallback position for everything in your life.
http://www.skincancerwarningsignsinfo.com
but there still does seem to be an upward trend (statistically significant or not, I have no idea); definitely no downward trend [for black women]
OK, I retract the latter part of that as a general statement, based on the graph.
uh…thanks, sarah
well, yeah, or “women,” as in #245, but it’s still polarizing. Really, especially you folks for whom race is a purely social construct, don’t you find calling people “black” and “white” really unfortunate and just basically wrong? I do.
As for whatever the hell we’re arguing about, or not, SC, I’m getting off at this exit, before arrival in Bizarroworld proper.
good night
No, it’s a social reality, with real social consequences. (That you apparently believe it’s a biological reality makes me very sad.)
Good night.
*sigh*
:(
Then you’re an incompetent and/or a liar.
Of course I knew about the standard out-“joke” stuff – which didn’t help your original comment. What I said in #223 was that it “wasn’t even filling the role of an in-joke”. Note that: in-joke. To which you responded not by pointing at somewhere within pharyngula, where it had some special in-joke meaning, but out at wikipedia with the standard meanings!
You continually fail at reading comprehension (and honesty). And the others in the gang fail with you or aren’t honest enough to point out your failing.
You’re projecting. :-D
However, I don’t really expect you and the rest of the gang to notice or admit the reality of the situation. That would require far too much competence and honesty from you all compared with previous evidence of your standard behaviours.
Joffan@ 210
Not sure if you will be back to see it, but the whole story of hope is premature, but agree with the watching with interest. See Multiple Sclerosis and Irrational Exuberance at “the white coat undergound”. I have been greatly saddened by the false hope created in many of those with MS and now the inevitable conspiracy theories are beginning to emerge.
That is profoundly lame and dishonest. SEF, when people not involved in the “argument” ask you why you’re behaving so strangely, perhaps you should pay attention. You go on these odd aggressive jags from time to time during which it’s difficult to reason with you. I guess I’ll wait this one out.
You’re projecting again! There’s no expectation that waiting will make any difference, though, given that it’s your standard behaviour.
NB You also mistakenly wrote “when people not involved in the ‘argument'” instead of “when fellow gang members, unable to defend the indefensible ‘argument’, instead dishonestly”.
I have paid attention. I know who’s who.
@ Joffan #210 – No, I actually hadn’t read that article, thanks for the link! It could take MS treatment & research in a completely different direction, I’m fascinated by where this could lead.
I don’t, though, not in any way that should make you sad. In the context of the contemporary USA, I agree that race is a real social construct, with all kinds of consequences etc. It’s a kind of folk taxonomy of people, not a meaningful biological taxonomy. OK?
[My usual insistence at this point would be to point out that this social construct, however, is clearly based on phenotypic variation that has a very strong clustered biogeographical signal and a genetic basis. As crude and stupid as they are, social categories of race really do sort most people accurately in terms of the geographical origin of at least some of their ancestors. That’s because of real biology. But this point is tangential at the moment.]
Here’s the thing as I see it. Even as a “social reality,” calling people blacks and whites (or, adjectivally, black and white, and brown and red, for that matter) is insanely simplistic, pointlessly and subliminally polarizing, and (ironically) basically racist in origin. Barack Obama is a “black”? Taken literally, that’s a fucking stupid thing to say from any perspective, social or biological. Especially biological. So that’s why the terminology bothers me, a lot, whether used by racist assholes or by workers for social justice.
I have quoted (from fallible memory) this dialogue, from the old Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin show, before, but I find it profound enough to repeat:
Q: Why do you refer to yourself as “black” when your skin is brown?
A: Look at your own skin. Is it “white”?
Q: No…my skin is flesh-colored.
A: So is mine
I respect your view on cancer.
This is one of the most outspoken views from an American I have read in a long time.
The idea that you “just” have to be positive to beat cancer is utterly rediculous.
Me, as a cancer survivor can tell all those idiots this: it is an horrendous disease, where the surgeon litterally has to cut flesh out of your body to get rid of the cancer.
And then you can only hope that he has cut out enough, because if he didn’t you have to get chemo therapy.
The pain is indescribable, both physical and mental, because you are thrown in “survival mode”, and you are handed over completely to the competence of the surgeon to do so.
If anybody had said to me: be positive, I would have screamed.
Thank you PZ. ^..^)
look at the size of that martyr complex… are you sure you’re not a Christian?
that doesn’t make any sense… attaching the labels “black”, “white”, or whatever to biology is indeed “insanely simplistic, pointlessly and subliminally polarizing”, but how can you even attempt to understand social consequences of the race-concept if you aren’t willing to look at how people in those different social categories are faring in society? By the American race-concept, which “OF COURSE is racist in origin, Obama is black (social grouping isn’t based on mendelian genetics, dont’cha know), and the racist BS being thrown his way won’t make any sense if you dismiss that for the sake of “color-blindness”. You can’t study consequences of racism if you aren’t willing to look at the groups that emerge from it.
And in any case, what is useful in social studies has no relevance to how to treat individuals in everyday life (where one should be avoid quick labels in general)
SC @211: My bad for not linking this table too, but you need the incidence numbers as well as the mortality data, really. The (age adjusted) incidence of breast cancer in black women in 1975 was about 94/100,000. In 2000 it was 116/100,000. So there was an increase in incidence of about 20/100K and of death of about 5/100K. This is suggestive of improvement in treatment on the background of increased incidence. The incidence for both races listed peaks in the late 1990s.
So if your claim is that I provided inadequate data I’ll agree and apologize embarrassedly. However, the numbers you provided don’t prove lack of progress. Also, why 2000? Data was given through 2006.
Probably more useful table showing 5-year relative survival in black and white women with breast cancer starting in 1960 (though data prior to 1975 may be less reliable since it is based on smaller numbers.) Scroll down to see one reason why black women do worse: later stage at diagnosis. Scroll down to the last table to see that late diagnosis is NOT the only reason for worse prognosis…
Should this discussion be moved to the open thread or dropped as this post scrolls off not just the first but the second page?
Huh. Why would that be? Is it because people are living longer but then that effect levels off, changes in screening,…?
What?
This is ridiculous. Her specific statement is quoted several times above. I’m not going to repeat it yet again. You provided data to counter it, and I’m not convinced they did. I would like to see comparable mortality data for the US for diseases for which a cure or something ike it has been found – diphtheria, polio, whatever. However, incidence (diagnosed) is an element to be considered, although I’m not sure that it’s not more complex than you’re presenting it.
Oh, good grief. One more time: because that piece by Ehrenreich was published in 2001. I assume her book has updated information and arguments, but I haven’t read it yet.
Thanks for the other data. I’ll take a look.
Hmm… Thinking about this more as I slowly wake up :)… If the existing interventions did “constitute a ‘cure’ or anything close,” incidence shouldn’t really be all that relevant. Should it?
RMM Barrie @258:
Obviously I need to use bigger flags. When I tag Zamboni’s work as “hypothesis” and say I’ll “follow with interest”, I’m avoiding exactly the kind of false exuberance that apparently concerns you. It could be a great new tool in MS treatment, or it could be a minor addition, or it could be nothing. But a certain amount of energy in pursuing it will be necessary, so I would not get too negative about it either.
The Pint @261: You’re welcome!
Here’s my major problem with her article:
As you point out, the effectiveness of various interventions differs among and can be determined for different types of cases. We can see, for some, significant differences in survival rates with or without different interventions. I think it’s misleading to lump everything together like this. (Of course, it’s misleading for people to proclaim the effectiveness of screening and various interventions in an unnuanced way, which is what she was responding to, but that’s not really an excuse.)
I always found the “Top Posts” box pretty useless, but it’s been helpful for this and the “Danish cartoonist proven wrong” threads the past couple of days.
But I’m happy to drop it. I haven’t enjoyed it. I don’t like feeling like I’m attacking people (like you) who do difficult and amazing work. I do think these are important issues to discuss, though.
Joffan @271
I basically agreed with you, including following the research with interest, and provided a link to read more. I guess you have not had the opportunity to read PalMd. Follow his links directly to the paper, if you want source material.
I did not correct your inaccuracy, but am now, as is for cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.
Your link to BBC, does provide a reasonably balanced view. It really does not matter what you avoided, the issue is a significant portion of the press used hype. CTV (a Canadian network) proclaimed the tiny pilot study, as one of five medical breakthroughs for 2009, including the description as a treatment, which is just not true. Of course, if you had of read the entirety of the link provided, you would already have known that.
Thanks for the opportunity for a little rant in the middle of the night (EST North America) as it does make the MS pain subside.
It works well for something other than it was created: as a realtime search for keywords in threads (no need to load a new page of search results).
SC, #240
Not yet, but I have hopes.
Do keep in mind that Aspers are not all alike. Not entirely alike, for Aspers show a range of behaviors and difficulties. We are each individuals with individual histories and experiences. This means we will exhibit different behaviors. There are general traits we hold in common, but we don’t hold every specific trait in common. Just remember that we’re different.
BTW, it is my contention that Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory is not Aspers, he’s a fussbudget.
Strange Gods Before Me, #252
I find people to be the least threatening of all. Respecting people is a big help.
I would like to see comparable mortality data for the US for diseases for which a cure or something ike it has been found – diphtheria, polio, whatever. However, incidence (diagnosed) is an element to be considered, although I’m not sure that it’s not more complex than you’re presenting it.
There is no cure for polio. There is an extremely good preventative measure, but if you get polio you’re in pretty much the same deep shit as you would have been 50 years ago, modulo a bit of improved supportive care. Diphtheria can be cured-sometimes, if the bacteria hasn’t gotten too far ahead, if the toxin isn’t so rampant that it kills even when all the bacteria are dead, but prevention is better. Preventing breast cancer would be nice too but we don’t know how yet.
One problem might be that people think that if a disease can be cured it can always be cured. Breast cancer can be cured-sometimes. A lot of women with early breast cancers will get surgery, take tamoxifen for 5 years, and go on to die of something else 30 years later. (To confuse the issue a bit, that something may well be another breast cancer.)Bacterial infections can be cured. Sometimes. Certainly a lot of pneumonias are cured. But pneumonia is still among the top 10 killers. Septicemia, another sometimes curable bacterial infection, is also there, #10. (Source.
So, bottom line, incidence matters. Especially in a disease which can sometimes, but not always, be cured.And, yes, it’s more complicated than I’m presenting it. But we went into all the known details it’d take all day. And still probably be an oversimplification.
While I’m meandering on the subject, there’s something weird about the sociology of how people think about cancer and the word “cure.” First, there isn’t A cure for cancer and probably never will be because, as already pointed out, it’s not a single disease. There are a variety of cures for a number of particular cancers and an increasing number of agents which can prolong the lives of people living with cancer for…who knows how long at this point. The classic is imatinib. Imatinib is not a cure for chronic myelocytic leukemia. Stop taking it and the disease comes back. But of people in the original study of its use, around 90% are still alive 10 years later. And about 1/2 of the deaths were due to causes other than CML. I’m sure everyone would prefer a pill that you could take once and stop, but given that the five year relative survival in the 1980s was around 20-25%-taking much less easily tolerated drugs, it doesn’t seem like a bad treatment.
We don’t have cures for a lot of things. Diabetes and hypertension can be cured only in the extremely rare event that they are secondary to another condition (usually a tumor secreting something unfortunate). Only a handful of viruses can be treated for cure (mostly you have to give supportive care and hope the patient’s immune system gets it together faster than the virus can destroy his/her body). Heart disease can’t be cured. Asthma can’t be cured. Medicine in the early 21st century involves a lot of temporizing, preventing progression/further damage, prevention of initial damage, and supportive care and only occasionally an actual cure.
Dianne,
*eyeroll*
I said “a cure or something [l]ike it,” lazily paraphrasing Ehrenreich’s “a ‘cure’ or anything close.” I’m fully aware of what you’re saying, but consider an effective vaccine “something close” to a cure in the sense that if made available and used it would be expected to have a similar dramatic effect on mortality rates. For a disease like breast cancer, if interventions did constitute “a ‘cure’ or anything close,” then incidence rates (which wouldn’t really be expected to vary wildly) shouldn’t much matter. The fact that, for example, septicemia is still a killer should of course be noted, but what I was asking for was a comparative table of mortality rates for something like septicemia over time (here, I would expect incidence rates to matter more).
No, I don’t think that is the problem. I think the problem, as Ehrenreich says, is that “To the extent that current methods of detection and treatment fail or fall short, America’s breast-cancer cult can be judged as an outbreak of mass delusion, celebrating survivorhood by downplaying mortality and promoting obedience to medical protocols known to have limited efficacy.” (I’ve noted my problem with this above.)
Since I said basically as much in my comment above, I don’t know whom you’re arguing with here. (You never did address the routine screening issue that Ehrenreich raised back in 2001 or my questions about it.)
Her point is that breast cancer(s), and those who have it, are treated differently in the society from those conditions and the people who have them. I don’t know why you continue to fail to address her main argument. Did you even read the article I linked to?
Jadehawk @#265: I take your point.