About 400 elementary- and middle-school students taking part in the Shenendehowa Inventors program will display their inventions at the former Cotton Market store at Clifton Park Center from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
By definition alternative medicine is that which is practiced without evidence that it can provide clinical benefit for a specific disease.
The evidence needed to win marketing approval of a cancer intervention requires (wisely) prospectively designed controlled studies that test an intervention against a standard of care, or that meets unmet needs - such as shrinking tumors in patients with disease refractory to standard therapy.
Anyone can concoct a theory and promote it as a "cure" for cancer, and unfortunatly some do. But without standards for evidence we would be subject to endless sales pitches from those who are just wrong, or would exploit vulnerable people with life threatening diseases ... promising risk free and natural cures - appealing to wishful thinking.
There is no conspiracy to suppress novel approaches to cancer. Doctors, scientists, regulators get cancers too, as do their loved ones.
Often the miracle "cures" are promoted based on cell culture experiments ("science"), with no mention of the doses needed to achieve those same effects in the body - which could be more toxic than conventional chemotherapy at those doses, or simply not possible to achieve orally ... with no mention that cancer cells in test tubes, or implanted in animals, do not predict very well what happens to cancer cells that originate in the human body.
Posted on September 28 at 11:10 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hi
By definition alternative medicine is that which is practiced without evidence that it can provide clinical benefit for a specific disease.
The evidence needed to win marketing approval of a cancer intervention requires (wisely) prospectively designed controlled studies that test an intervention against a standard of care, or that meets unmet needs - such as shrinking tumors in patients with disease refractory to standard therapy.
Anyone can concoct a theory and promote it as a "cure" for cancer, and unfortunatly some do. But without standards for evidence we would be subject to endless sales pitches from those who are just wrong, or would exploit vulnerable people with life threatening diseases ... promising risk free and natural cures - appealing to wishful thinking.
There is no conspiracy to suppress novel approaches to cancer. Doctors, scientists, regulators get cancers too, as do their loved ones.
Often the miracle "cures" are promoted based on cell culture experiments ("science"), with no mention of the doses needed to achieve those same effects in the body - which could be more toxic than conventional chemotherapy at those doses, or simply not possible to achieve orally ... with no mention that cancer cells in test tubes, or implanted in animals, do not predict very well what happens to cancer cells that originate in the human body.
Karl Schwartz
Patients Against Lymphoma
lymphomation.org
On Op-ed column: Heal thyself - Alternative medicine merits closer attention