Finding a Crowdsourced Cure For Brain Cancer 217
Hugh Pickens writes "Salvatore Iaconesi, a software engineer at La Sapienza University of Rome, writes that when he was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, his first idea was to seek other opinions. He immediately asked for his clinical records in digital format, converted the data into spreadsheets, databases, and metadata files, and published them on the web site called The Cure. 'The responses have been incredible. More than 200,000 people have visited the site and many have provided videos, poems, medical opinions, suggestions of alternative cures or lifestyles, personal stories of success or, sadly, failures — and simply the statement, "I am here." Among them were more than 90 doctors and researchers who offered information and support.' The geneticist and TED fellow Jimmy Lin has offered to sequence the genome of Iaconesi's tumor after surgery, and within one day Iaconesi heard from two different doctors who recommended similar kinds of 'awake surgery,' where the brain is monitored in real time as different parts are touched. A brain map is produced and used during a second surgery. 'We are creating a cure by uniting the contributions of surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers. The active participation of everyone involved — both experts and ex-patients — is naturally filtering out any damaging suggestion which might be proposed,' writes Iaconesi. 'Send us videos, poems, images, audio or text that you see as relevant to a scenario in which art and creativity can help form a complete and ongoing cure. Or tell us, "I am here!" — alive and connected, ready to support a fellow human being.'"
doesn't this rely rather strongly on the novelty? (Score:5, Insightful)
There were a ton of people interested in his case, but imo that was strongly dependent on the novelty and the fact that it's uncommon so far. Why did these geneticists and researchers spend a bunch of unpaid time on his case in particular? Because it was one of the few (only?) available in this form. But every year there are about 13 million people diagnosed with cancer. What if even 1% of them were uploaded online? Would there be folks like Jimmy Lin looking through all 130,000 of those cases on a volunteer basis? My guess would be no: once it gets to be a few hundred or thousand people trying the same thing, and then it just goes back to being normal medicine again, of the kind where you need doctors who're doing it as a full-time job to go through all the cases.
Re:doesn't this rely rather strongly on the novelt (Score:5, Insightful)
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At the same time bigger charities are sometimes very inefficient. hundreds of thousands of dollars can go for salaries and even more might be spent on advertising.
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It also sounds like Sturgeon's law is having a field day among some of the contributors...
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It also also sounds like the same asshat throws as many posts at Slashdot as what they can in a day to make themselves feel good about how pathetic they are.
Funny this. If I just put your name, "AC" in your very own post - it fits perfectly!
Just STFU or login if you have any balls left.
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Will it help him?
No, it won't. In fact it will get in the way.
The problem is that he will get a lot of opinions with a lot of different treatments which will be mutually exclusive. Also he will get a lot of BS suggestions ranging from homeopathy, feng shui to praying. Quod capita tot census.
The only surefire cure -in fact the only medical discipline that REALLY is
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Not to be all grammar Nazi (prepare for incoming grammar and spelling mistakes), but I think you meant "QUOT CAPITA TOT SENSUS". When I looked at your version, it made no sense (That head many counts.). Then I thought about it. "One head, many opinions"
Still he reached more famous surgeons/doctors (Score:2)
I agree with 99% of the above post, and also with the fact it's novelty alone that makes it standout (and that universal healthcare is better than spending the same amount on a single person however pathetic his story).
Still, outside becoming famous Iaconesi got something he would never have reached without his initiative : he raised the attention of various, famous physicians.
Basically, he's about to obtain a cure "à la Steve Jobs" without the money.
Which is wise.
For a single person.
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Basically, he's about to obtain a cure "à la Steve Jobs" without the money.
Have a little optimism. He might live after all. </joke>
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He probably has a better chance using this method. Assuming he can attract the right attention, of course.
Yes, if all he gets are a bunch of stories, some life affirming notes, some neat-o brain surgery ideas and his tumor's DNA sequenced, then it's not going to do much good. If, on the other hand, he finds out about some procedure that is actually helping people that his current doctor's may not be aware of, then it will be worth it.
Remember, your doctor is only as good as what he knows, and as good as h
Re:doesn't this rely rather strongly on the novelt (Score:5, Interesting)
But think about it this way - a big part of the reason for sharing such information and making it commonly accessible is to enable the automation of pattern-finding.
This is tough to do with patient records scattered through fifty thousand different hospital databases. With those 130,000 cases online, you're going to start seeing commonalities in various reactions to treatments, statistics, etc. which in turn will make it much easier for researchers to begin understanding what combinations of cures/treatments may or may not work - leaving the "weird" ones that don't fit into any patterns to the Jimmy Lins.
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That's true, and an interesting angle. Some of that does happen already: at university-affiliated research hospitals in particular, there is a trend towards digitizing this information and making it available to researchers (under various confidentiality agreements, and with Institutional Research Board approval), who do things like mine it for patterns. I know some people at U. Washington in St. Louis doing that kind of thing. But it's a good point that it might become more widespread if there were an open
Support =/= Cure (Score:5, Insightful)
"Send us videos, poems, images, audio or text that you see as relevant to a scenario in which art and creativity can help form a complete and ongoing cure."
Cancer does not work that way.
Re:Actually it does work that way... (Score:4, Insightful)
Medical professionals do not place their job security above the well-being of their patients; those who do get destroyed for malpractice. I hear this claim getting repeated about pharmacologists a lot here on Slashdot—that they don't want to cure diseases because palliative care is a better cash cow—and it just reflects immensely on how ignorant people become when they reduce everything to money.
Doctors are primarily concerned with helping people. With few, anomalous exceptions, they want to eliminate disease and make the world a better place. There are plenty of ways to get a secure job that don't involve making a lifelong commitment to interacting with sick people (and for surgeons, the insides of sick people) on a regular if not daily basis. They also don't cost several extra years, nor the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars involved in tuition. You've clearly gotten them confused with IT managers.
Furthermore, the few doctors who don't consider patient welfare to be their major drive are preoccupied with personal glory, which they already obtain through saving lives. Nothing could be better for them than saving lives even after they're dead. Curing a disease and inventing something that improves the quality or process of medical care both accomplish this.
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As surprising as this may seem, stories like that are statistically quite rare, even though there's three or four cases per year. It usually indicates that the company involved is dying or desperate. While pharmaceutical companies as a whole (not the pharmacologists themselves they employ, whom I was actually discussing) do put away a lot of profit into investments, most of the money still goes into research.
Companies still have a major incentive to cure diseases, too—adversarially. Curing a disease t
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You provide no evidence that you can find a cure far faster than you would ordinarily. In fact, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that a bunch of distracted cancer researchers might get LESS work done when you force them to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with the public at large. Also, there is a huge bottleneck with respect to access to medical equipment, so what you are likely to end up with is a ton of uneducated guesses (the opposite of an educated guess/hypothesis), re
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The 'immortality' of these cells is disputable: once the host is dead and, say, cremated it's "game over" for the immortal cells just as well as the host ; )
There are a few [wikipedia.org] strange [wikipedia.org] exceptions [wikipedia.org]...
Thank fuck! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank fuck! (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
Answer: It doesn't.
Misguided (Score:5, Insightful)
This is incredibly misguided, and that is the most charitable way of putting it. Other things you could call it are bloody stupid, daft and irresponsible. There is no way in hell you're going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff with such a volume of random input, most of it crap, and come up with any useful ideas, let a lone a "cure". Especially not if you're apparently going to accept most of the crap. Homeopaths? Chinese doctors? Spiritual healers? "Uniting their contributions" is going to drag the net worth of the resulting mess down to below zero...
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It does sound like a badly done odd-one-out list, doesn't it?
"For 10 points, which of these are people who may actually be able to cure your cancer? Surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers."
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Cut the guy some slack, he's just been diagnosed with cancer, quite frankly he's going to be scared shitless and clutching at every straw he can get his hands on. I'm not condoning his approach but I can certainly understand it. Really though he needs to grit his teeth and just get on with the treatment ASAP, It's not the dark ages.
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Oh, I don't mind the guy doing this one bit. I mind web sites with a huge audience (slashdot and CNN) publishing this as anything but one desperate man's cry for help. I read this first on CNN, which described it as an open source "cure" for cancer. As if the one thing that's been missing in all the thousands of trials and billions of dollars spent trying to cure cancer was one man's complete medical record.
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This is incredibly misguided, and that is the most charitable way of putting it.
There is no way in hell you're going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff with such a volume of random input
Oh really? So from your own point of view, there is no way in hell such a thing as Slashdot can work, all those random comments from idiots who can't even RTFA! Not mentioning such a ludicrous idea as an open encyclopedia where every other ignorant can edit an article.
Yes, a lot of suggestions are going to come from homeopathy and spiritual healers. And you know, then, maybe these people will learn more in the process than if they were being outlawed and chased by lawyers.
Iaconesi mentions the word 'harmony
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Announcing that you are going to accept the contributions of homeopaths, etc. is like saying you're going to read Slashdot at -1 or accept every edit on Wikipedia.
Ayurveda (Score:2)
Homeopaths? Chinese doctors? Spiritual healers? "Uniting their contributions" is going to drag the net worth of the resulting mess down to below zero...
Reading your comment, it appeared to me that you rejected these alternative methods right away, but after reading it another time it's more about the "uniting" part. I have tried many alternative cures for my fatigue problems, like acupuncture, haptotherapy, ayurveda and more. I always try to find an explanation for things that work. I've tried Ayurveda, and although I have no idea what happened, it worked for me like nothing else. I didn't have to do anything, no herbs or pills, no difficult conversations,
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Whatever the reason, anything that implies that "homeopaths, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers" do anything that comes close to curing cancer should never, ever be written.
Such crap only gets in the way of real medicine and gives false hope. It also serves to line con artists' pockets with cash from gullible people.
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Big parts of Chinese medicine is real medicine. Same for homeopathy.
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There are bits of Chinese medicine that might potentially be real, if they could be standardized, purified and most of all validated. Homeopathy on the other hand, relies purely on the placebo effect. You don't need expensive water for that.
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You are a bit harsh.
First of all lots of chinese medicine is: standardized, purified and most of all validated. It is just so that western medicine does not trust a medical study that was done 450 BC on 3000 war prisoners.
Regarding Homeopathy, if it would rely on the placebo effect only a small number of patients would be "cured". I suggest to read something about history of homeopathy and modern homeopathy. E.g. a typical homeopathy medical is "Extract from Camomile", it is neither diluted nor treated spec
Re:Misguided (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not. The first thing you learn when you look into Chinese medicine is that everything is done a little bit differently by each practitioner. When an actual clinical trial of some technique or concoction fails to show an effect the first criticism from believers is usually "oh, you didn't do it right. You have to do it the way THIS school/practice/group/individual does it!" If you do a clinical trial of Advil, Adex, Actron, Anadin or any of the other Ibuprofen brands, you get the same results, because each of them is exactly the same thing.
No. The placebo effect is quite strong. It can be measured and quantified, although it does depend on the circumstances and the effect in an individual depends very much on that individual's psychology and how they view the treatment they're getting. Modern clinical trials peg the placebo effect at around 30%. Homeopathic remedies HAVE been run through randomized clinical trials and they do not perform better than a placebo.
I don't think you know what homeopathy is. Homeopathy specifically involves diluting substances (ranging from herbal extracts to things like arsenic) until there it is very unlikely there is even a single molecule of the active substance remaining. That is, homeopathic remedies are water. The "theory" underlying homeopathy is that water molecules have a memory of other molecules they've been near and somehow this memory effect turns the water itself into an active drug.
The camomile example you give sounds like an herbal remedy. Many people confuse the two. Many "homeopathic" practitioners probably hope people confuse the two since herbal remedies have a LOT better chance of actually working (i.e. greater than zero). Herbs do indeed contain active ingredients that could potentially be purified, standardized, and validated. However, studies to date (and the US government has invested billions in doing these studies) have resulted in finding one traditional herbal remedy (that hasn't already been turned into a drug) that performed better than placebo: ginger for nausea. Other plant extracts are already used extensively. Aspirin (from willow bark) is the standard example. Currently drug companies are "mining" tropical rain forests looking for drugs.
I'm afraid you don't know what you're talking about, regarding homeopathy or anything else you've mentioned. Please stop trying to educate other people. And no, I'm not being harsh. People like you and the quacks that practice homeopathy are screwing around with people's lives. I have one friend who lost her mother because by the time they realized the alternative "medicines" weren't working it was too late. I remember the day she asked me if I could recommend a good oncologist.
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There was a discussion about the national health service in the UK covering homeopathic treatments a while ago on Slashdot. The average Slashdotter (sorry, average of the ones who are not idiots) thought it was a horrible idea. I thought it was a great idea. Provided the "homeopathic treatments" were tap water, prescribed by a real physician. The physician could prescribe water to patients who wanted it for a variety of common ailments such as the common cold, instead of things like antibiotics, but if
Limited resources (Score:2)
The criticism of that idea is that you'd be reinforcing the superstitious beliefs of people who already believe in homeopathy.
A better criticism is that it costs real money and real resources to administer this "treatment" which can and should be better spent on something proven to actually work. Money and time are in finite supply and I would be rightly pissed off if my tax dollars were used to pay for treatments that are demonstrably bogus and unethical.
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Not if it's tap water. That's the point. Your resources are going to be wasted regardless of the "treatment" you prescribe. The only difference is what prescription you give. Here are the options, and the likely consequences:
a) prescribe nothing. This is the logical prescription. Unfortunately it doesn't satisfy the patient and he goes and wastes some other doctor's time until he gets one of the other two results.
b) prescribe something active but (somewhat) harmless like antibiotics for a cold. The p
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Then do scientifically controlled double-blind studies about it, publish the results, and make tons of money for curing diseases that we can't currently cure. Leave out all of the "chi" junk too.
Re:Misguided (Score:4, Insightful)
When it comes to what works, the only thing I really trust is double-blind studies.
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My famous double blind study is that one about parachutes.
30 volunteers are in a plane to test the new parachute.
The scientist has numbered all parachutes from 1 to 30, and he is the only one who knows which numbers are the new ones, and wich are the placebo.
Neither the volunteers (singel blind), nor the guy at the exit door, handing out the parachutes (double blind) knows who will get a new parachute and who will get the placebo.
The scientist counts the corpses afterwards, not surprisingly all the voluntee
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And you successfully demonstrated that jumping out of a plane with a working parachute does indeed improve your chances of survival.
What was the point of that silly post anyway?
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The point was simple: the experiment would run the exact same way regardless wether it was conducted as a blind, double blind or not blind at all experiment.
People here on /. shout "double blind study" and "law of thermodynamics" quite to often.
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The people participating could have been warned by the local witch that by deploying the new parachutes not only would they die, but their wives, children, and children's children for seven generations would also die horrible deaths. As they were superstitious folk (why else would they be consulting witches?) everyone given the new parachute died in a simple splat rather than cursing their kin.
Never expect the parties being tested to not interfere with the e
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I see you don't understand what a blinded trial or the placebo effect is either. You're welcome to broadcast your ignorance but please, PLEASE stop trying to convince people to make decisions regarding their health based on it.
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In the real world, experiments are more complicated. Having done them, I understand this. There is this thing called measurement error, for example. There's the fact that measurements are often a factor of human opinion. Is that tumor 8 or 9mm? I used to measure tumors in mm, by the way, and trust me, they're rarely ever exactly 8 or 9. When you're measuring something like how long an organism is disease free, you're assessing something. It's not as simple as whether or not the test subject impacted
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Were the effect of the parachute unknown, or only suspected, the experiment would have been an absolute, unqualified success.
The example is simply using something which is already know (and hence absurd to use as an experiment) in order to distract from the actual purpose and effects of experimentation.
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Lots of them. Not sure what you're trying to get at. Double blind studies happen all the time. Yes, they're hard to do. They often have problems (usually related to the fact that they don't include a statistician until the very end). But you can blind human studies just like you do with any other lab animal.
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The ones I've been involved in included a statistician in the experimental design. The statistician helps you figure out, among other things, how many test subjects you're going to need. Yes, it's possible that sometimes you get to the end and have results that are suggestive that there might be an effect, but it's not statistically significant, which means you need to do the whole thing over with more test subjects.
What GP may not be understanding is that placebo studies on humans don't mean you get suga
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Thankfully, more stupid stuff that was taken as a given in the past is being tested and proven wrong. Unfortunately, the trickle effect of discoun
Re:Misguided (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the following slowly, so that you'll understand it completely:
Cancer isn't one thing. It's many things, under one umbrella term.
Colon cancer isn't the same as lung cancer or skin cancer. There's no such thing as a "cure for cancer", and there never will be. There are treatments that can cure cancer for individual patients when it rears its ugly head, but there's no such thing as, "Wow! Look at this drug! No more cancer for anyone, ever!!".
A 100% effective treatment for a specific cancer would be a multi-billion dollar a year drug, and would earn that revenue for years to come. (Yes, patents expire, but there are different routes of administration and different formulations to patent.)
On the other side of the ledger, you have homeopathic "cures", that do absolutely nothing but drain people's wallets. Homeopathic drugs are nothing but really expensive water -- by design. You dilute some marginally useful ingredient many, many, many times over, and then sell people on magical bullshit.
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Unless that treatment were to be a simple virus [redorbit.com] either injected into a tumor or an IV drip [dailymail.co.uk]. Then there wouldn't be much money for that treatment now would there? As you google the rio virus and other possible virus treatments for cancer you should notice a trend. All the companies that are doing clinical trials have tried to *modify* the virus in some way in order to
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The problem with your entire argument - that patents sabotage cancer (and other research) is that quite a bit of the planet doesn't give a flying fuck about patents and, if you actually developed a simple, inexpensive and reliable (but not patentable) cure, you could make money by advertising / selling it in the wide swath of the planet that doesn't care about American law.
Kind of like an experiment...
Patents are done very poorly at present, but they aren't the reason that we haven't been able to cure much
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Unless that treatment were to be a simple virus [redorbit.com] either injected into a tumor or an IV drip [dailymail.co.uk]. Then there wouldn't be much money for that treatment now would there? As you google the rio virus and other possible virus treatments for cancer you should notice a trend. All the companies that are doing clinical trials have tried to *modify* the virus in some way in order to make in "novel" so they can patent it. The goal is NOT to find a cure for any type of cancer - it is to find a "novel" cure that can be patented.
Did you read the article? The treatment is novel. The fact that a virus exists which can fight certain types of cancer cells means absolutely zero if you can't find a way to deliver the treatment. That's the treatment. Randomly infecting yourself with the virus isn't going to work. That's where the research comes in.
For the record: There are many, many examples of pharmaceutical drugs based on natural compounds. The novel parts of these compounds are their concentrations, what they're combined wit
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*eyeroll*
There have been plenty of drugs that work well in rats but don't work in humans, or would kill them. Don't get yourself in a lather over the fact that something worked in rats or a petri dish but isn't on your drug store shelf. It's 99.999% likely it's because it wouldn't help you or would kill you.
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+4 insightful just goes to show that slashdot is getting stupider every day, though I'm sure we can all agree it died a few months back.
As for homeopathic cures, I have no opinion, but then again, I am smart enough to understand that my knowledge of quantum physics and entanglement are insufficient to make an educated op
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As for my comment on your stupidity, it has everything to do with the stupid comment you posted, which was basically a response to nothing. I did compliment you on your set up though, very smooth, nice seque into your tripe.
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Nowhere did I say I support con artists.
You spoke up in support of "homeopaths, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers", and (just as importantly) against "huge pharmaceuticals and the legions of sheep that take their drugs". That's essentially the same thing (i.e., defense of con artists).
Let me explain to you how it works: Double blind, randomized controlled trial, or the effect didn't happen.
And here's how we know there's no quantum entanglement going on: There's nothing to get entangled. Once you get it diluted to the
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I suggest you start . [scienceblogs.com]
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Maybe a couple of hundred grand and a testing facility. Starting off exploring the role of quantum tunneling in olfactory perception would probably be the easiest entry point.
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Obviously you don't, but believe you do. ;D
Does not really matter for me, it is just surprising how many people have opinions without ever having read anything about the topic they have the opinion about
Re:Misguided (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like he's got it about right, considering there's never been any evidence for homeopathy working that's stronger than the placebo effect. Maybe YOU could explain for us how homeopathy works, since you seem to think you know, and nobody else has been able to verify it working, much less *explain* its workings.
We're not talking "chew willow bark to relieve a headache" type of "alternative medicine" - willow bark is simply a natural source for a well-studied and well-characterized chemical - acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin. We're talking about "soak a piece of willow bark in a bit of water or alcohol, and continue diluting until no trace of any salicylate from the willow bark can be detected in the water or alcohol, and then expect it to have an even more potent effect than the willow bark itself."
That's the shit that is completely bogus, and completely without merit, except as a placebo.
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This: Well considering that in homeopathy the more dilute a substance is the strong the medicine is but it has to be diluted in the proper way is obviously wrong. But a common repeated myth.
The rest of your post makes sense, hint: a therapy usually starts with an X1 solution.
My wife who as bad allergies tried a homeopathic nasal flush (lots of stuff at x20, x50 x100 and a couple of things at x200) and it worked but the inert ingredient was salt and you just mixed with warm water, interestingly warm salt wat
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> You're diluted.
FTFY
Re:Misguided (Score:4, Informative)
First, he was 100% correct about cancer. Second, even if he doesn't know how homeopathy works, I do, and it doesn't. This is how homeopathic "medicines" (no, they aren't medicine; I'm not even willing to just put medicine in scare quotes and leave it at that. It must be said explicitly, homeopathy is not medicine; it is water.) are made:
1: Put random shit in bottle. Set counter C to 0.
2: Dilute 100:1 with water.
3: Shake solution up and down ten times.
4: Shake solution side to side ten times.
5: Shake solution back to front ten times.
6: Tap bottle of solution on a Bible (King James preferred for some reason) ten times.
7: Increase C by 1.
8. GOTO step 2 until C is 30 (or whatever number you prefer).
The interesting thing here is that by 13C or so, there's no way that there's any of the original substance left unless you poured some 1C in the ocean and smacked it up a few times with a Bible. At 14C, you're lucky if you got a single molecule. Beyond there it's just gone. So unless Jesus comes down from Heaven to make water into medicine every time you shake a bottle and beat a Bible with it, homeopathy is nothing. See this website for more details: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/ [howdoeshom...hywork.com]
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I'll take a stab at correcting his procedure:
1: Put some shit dictated by your repertory or materia medica in a bottle. Set counter C to 0.
2: Dilute 100:1 with water.
3: Succuss bottle on some elastic surface to help that "water memory" to develop.
4: Increase C by 1.
5: GOTO step 2 until C is 30 (or whatever number you prefer.)
At the end of this procedure, you will still likely be unable to detect even a single molecule of "active ingredient" in the water, and you will still be left with a very expensive suga
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You did not correct his procedure. ... except for the "random shit" ;D now it is still shit, lol.
You repeated it
Just as a side question, if you have a C1 "solution", is that used as a medicine or only the C10 or C30 solution?
The next thing is, you believe the diluted stuff is a "medical" as in "it cures" ... however it is not.
Fact is, people who only know what you just have posted, or our parent, don't know anything about homeopathy.
You know, at the time where flight was invented. No one knew how it works e
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Yes, the version I corrected only really had minor wording problems - it was fundamentally correct. Guess you noticed that.
You seem to be having trouble with the distinction between "something empirically works - we haven't figured out the equations describing the mechanism yet, but we're studying it via the scient
Re:Misguided (Score:4, Informative)
Do yourself a favor and look at the studies. Not just the favorable ones, but all the studies, including the meta analysis of multiple studies. PubMed is a good start.
The reason I know this is because I've been pulling information on studies from databases for almost 14 years now as part of my job. I know how to look this stuff up and weigh the evidence. I also know a thing or two about routes of administration and mechanisms of action. When you don't have a single molecule of the active ingredient left, there's no viable mechanism of action, and no administration whatsoever.
Oh, and in regards to flight: When the Wright Brothers flew, they didn't chalk it up to magic. They understood the basics of what was keeping them aloft, even if they didn't yet understand aerodynamics the way we do today. Homeopathy rejects basic physical principles we know today, in favor of faulty reasoning. It's not quite at the level of alchemy or astrology on the Bullshit Meter, since there are at least some observations (albeit incorrectly interpretted) behind it, but it's pretty close.
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You obviously don't know how homeopathy works. Perhaps read up an article or a book about it?
Huzzah, the google has provided the answer! http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/ [howdoeshom...hywork.com]
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Here's how it works:
1a) Con artist invents "cure"
or
1b) Person with no knowledge creates "cure"
2) Said person sells ineffective product to sick person
3) Person dies, so they can't tell their story of how painful the whole thing was, especially seeing the people with proper treatment get better.
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The fact that there are animals like the naked mole rat would seem to contradict your statement that there will never be a cure for cancer.
Not necessarily. There's nothing to say that the genes which grant the naked mole rat their seeming invulnerability to cancer would be useful (or possible) in humans. In humans, the p16 gene could do something horrific. And at any rate, this is a gene that occurs naturally in the naked mole rat. It doesn't exist in humans, so humans would still get cancer, unless we were going to go the genetic engineering route and eradicate cancer that way (which would involve ethical problems we're not even close to
Protip: if you're looking for a cure for cancer (Score:2)
The guy who actually has it is going to be so rich that he's living on his own private moonbase with a harem of Scarlett Jonannson clones.
You are not going to get better by taking free advice from smelly hippies and Doctor Trollface.
Hallmark Cards (Score:2)
My ex (Score:5, Interesting)
My ex was in chronic joint pain for years. She was told by leading medical experts that it was arthritis (before she was 30) and prescribed all kinds of arthritis medication and treatment over decades for it before giving up because nothing really worked.
When I started living with her, I spotted lots of problems she had with movement and joints and I had to explain to her that, no, it's not normal to hurt all the time, or to dislocate your shoulder by opening a jar of sweets. We googled around, and put a lot of footwork into avoiding quackery, and ended up discovering about hypermobility syndrome (now call JHS, where J = joint) purely by chance. The doctor had never heard of it and was interested in it up to a point.
Basically, her DNA codes a few dodgy things that make her cartilage weak. Most people have JHS in some form or another but if two people with particular bad cases coincide to make a child, the child is *generally* worse. There's also an even worse form called EDS where sufferers are in a wheelchair from birth.
This gives some sufferers chronic pain from being a baby while others just become good ballet dancers (huge amount of flexibility in the joints, which *can* wear the joints to the point that inflammation of tissue and joint damage results). My ex was a professional black belt karate instructor throughout most of her painful years (because flexing joints made them no worse, and was not a way to induce the pain - a clear sign that it *wasn't* arthritis from the very start.
In the end, we gave up on all the doctors she'd had previously, and researched it ourselves. We hit at random upon a rare condition that had almost zero information on it at the time. Apparently there was one guy in the country doing research on the condition when we discovered it (and other sufferers we met up with describe him as one of the most arrogant and ignorant doctors they'd ever met - telling tiny slips of girls that were not far off transparency that they were obese and he wouldn't treat them, etc.).
We FORCED her current doctor to refer us to a specialist. We were referred to a consultant who dealt with arthritis. However, he was bright enough to look and say instantly "You don't have arthritis, you have hypermobility" and write us off with a confirmed diagnosis that the doctor would at least accept to prescribe more suitable medication for (i.e. not arthritis medication which worsens the problem because the condition is the polar opposite of arthritis).
Beyond that, she never got much help and still has the condition. Variably over the years she's been registered disabled and able to run a karate club (though not simultaneously - the condition is always present but the severity varies greatly with seemingly random triggers and even things like the weather).
Bear in mind that all this happened in a country with free healthcare.
- Doctors can't know everything.
- Even those that are specialised in your area might not help you at all.
- Even those who want to help often can't find out enough to get you to someone that helps.
- Even those with a real interest on the cutting edge of research may be able to do no more than prescribe a painkiller and sign a form for you.
- The human body is more complicated than any one person, or even group, can ever understand.
But, that said, we went to great lengths to avoid quackery. At a residential weekend for sufferers, there was one true doctor who gave a short 10 minute presentation and then tried to escape before he got hounded for everyone's personal problems. 50% of the rest were salesmen trying to flog memory foam pillows and other junk to "help your condition". The other 50% were nothing more than charlatans (I shall never forget being in a Reiki healing class for moral support - against my will - and there being a ten-minute interlude between the instructor and a student where one "saw colours" with her eyes closed and then they discussed how insightful and "in-touch" with Reiki that made her while
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And this guy in Italy has turned this around on its head and put all his medical records on line for all to see, hoping that the doctors will swarm to him and he can agglomerate all of that into "the cure" for himself. Whereas since he's acknowledging the homeopaths and spiritualists and quacks who've been responding to
Must be an Italian thing... (Score:2)
But has he actually FOUND anything useful? (Score:2)
It's all well and good that he received all these notes from thousands of well-wishers, but has he actually FOUND anything useful for his case? Awake brain surgery is neither particularly new nor innovative; it's been in use for years. It beggars belief that his current treatment team was unaware of the technique. And I don't think all the kooks trying to cure his cancer by nutrition, spiritual healing, yoga, homeopathy, "Chinese Medicine", etc., really have that much to contribute, cure-wise.
Zombies (Score:2)
Zombies can cure cancer: they'll just as happily devour your brainz whether you have it or not. "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Your distinctiveness will be added to our own."
Rio Virus? (Score:2)
Ultimate crackpot circus (Score:2)
I'm sorry that people get cancer.
Making this sort of medical data available to any researcher with an itch for free is useful.
I also agree on the flip side better organizing online moderated and professionally reviewed resources to educate and provide legitimate advice and treatment options is also beneficial.
At the same time encouraging others to follow this same path will only enrich crackpots and scam artists selling their cures and assorted bs which simply does not work.
Even the better moderated cancer
You can't crowd-source the theory of relativity (Score:2)
I treat people with brain cancer for a living in a university hospital. As someone once said, 10 barbers won't make your haircut 10x faster. In the end, if his disease is bad, there is simply not much to be done today in order to obtain a cure. When I say "bad disease", I don't mean stage or grade or histology. I mean the specific population of cells with the specific DNA alterations that he has in his head. His best chance is probably in a clinical trial. Believing that we somehow, somewhere, have a cure
excellent book about cancer for slashdotty peeps (Score:2)
If you are science-minded and are interested in the history of cancer research and the state of the art, I can't recommend this book highly enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439170916 [amazon.com]
I'm not a physician or a scientist, but I spent years on a team with both in a cancer research lab, and everything in the book is consistent with the science I have picked up along the way. It's also very readable. I give a copy to everyone I know who has to confront a cancer diagnosis.
Markets (Score:2)
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I used to have chronic pain and various other problems for the first 35 years of my life. I'm much better after i decided to research the human body instead of having some average doctor with no ability for data synthesis just repeating things they've memorized by rote or been paid to advertize.
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It's a neoplasm for sure and given that it's a cancer(malignant) it's sure as hell not a lipoma(benign).
If you read the text of the first link it's a "low-grade glioma"(which despite the -oma ending is still a malignant tumor(which would generally have a -sarcoma or -carcinoma ending))
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It sounds like a (poor) attempt to describe being handed a burned DVD with a bunch of DICOM [cabiatl.com] files on it and some shitty EZreaderlitecrippleware.exe application set to autorun.
If you've never had the pleasure of being sick enough to get them to break out the cool diagnostic imaging gear, it might well have come as a surprise to you that that's how it works. However, describing the process of typing "Linux DICOM viewer" into google and trying a few things as "hacking the files" seems a bit much...
Re:Sweet, but the interesting implications are (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry to hear about your dad, but please don't put uninformed stuff like this out there. Cancer isn't one disease, it's many. And some do have high survival rates. The others we are working on.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/survival/latestrates/survival-statistics-for-the-most-common-cancers [cancerresearchuk.org]
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I'm sorry about your dad.
Cancer is a lot of different but related diseases, though. Some of them are quite treatable and curable. I have a few members of my extended family who had cancer 5+ years ago and are cancer free now. I went to high school with a kid who had cancer. He's still alive and doing well today, and that was a long time ago. Of course, I also know people who have lost this battle. It's not a death sentence for everyone, though.
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A friend of mine was diagnosed with a particularly nasty variety that had a 0% survival rate. She went from "Hey, what's this weird yet painless lump in my belly?" to heart failure in 6 months. That was 13 years ago. She was 20. My uncle had prostate cancer ~5 years ago and is fine. My grandmother had some kind of breast cancer 10-15 years ago and is fine now. My father-in-law had one of those near-100% cure skin cancers removed a few years ago. Time will tell, but he's almost certainly fine.
I'm not
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It depends on the cancer. Caught early, most breast cancers are survivable. Most forms of skin cancer are easily remedied. It also depends on how long the cancer grows before it's diagnosed. I had a close friend who had been in pain for quite some time and only went to the ER when the pain was unbearable, and she'd had a cancer on her gall bladder that was bigger than the gall bladder. had she sought treatment far earlier, she might still be alive today rather than dying horribly four months later.
OTOH, if
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The first step of good brainstorming is writing down every idea that comes to mind, no matter how bad, because sometimes a terrible idea can inspire a good one you wouldn't have had otherwise. This project does seem to be fueled by desperation but I still think it has potential, if only as a thought exercise.
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You seem to think that the 'brainstorming' part hasn't typically been done. For most diseases that are reasonably common, all sorts of stuff has typically been tried and abandoned. Are there possible real cures in abandoned therapies? Sure. How do you go about screening them for plausibility? Real science takes time and care to set up. You just don't lump a couple of dozen people with 'cancer' together and try to figure out what to do.
It's certainly possible that in a couple of software generations, e
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Bloody hell, people still push that shite?
And the movie you linked? "simplistic to the point of idiocy" it's been called. That makes me wonder exactly what you learned from them than a highschool textbook could have taught you better.
For anyone else posting - this is serious quackery here, leading in lawsuits and charges of administering illegal medicine by various private individuals, groups and government departments.
Or a conspiracy theory to stop cancer treatment reaching the masses. You decide. I'll