Max Gerson believed that cancer was a result of an individual lacking production of "cancer digesting" pancreatic enzymes - aka he was a complete quack.
As a medical student dedicating the overwhelming majority of my spare time fighting conflict of interest infringement in the Pharma/Device-physician relationship, and in addition attempting to permanently establish evidence-based standards for patient care, its advice like yours that take the whole fucking thing two steps back.
Do sick people a favor, and keep your ignorant statements to yourself.
No, it means that he invented treatment regiments that weren't supported by any scientific evidence, and did so while failing to document or properly control any of his "studies," some of which were repeated and found to be not only no better than placebo, but actually harmful to patients.
If I call Dr. X a fraud because he claims coffee enemas are a great way to clear the body of cancer (Such as, say... Max Gerson did), yet Dr. X also believes that drinking water is necessary to sustain life, it doesn't follow that I don't believe drinking water is a great way to stay alive.
It's a reversal. Cure implies that a disease cannot, under most circumstances, come back due to the treatment regimen (whether that be diet, drugs, radiation, etc...). The reason it's a reversal and not a cure is that if a patient were to "stop treatment," which in this case means revert to a diet far above daily caloric needs, it is likely insulin resistance will return.
I hate to rain on your parade, I do... But, you simply couldn't be further from the truth. Diet can only be considered a "cure" in an extremely small subset of all disease; and, furthermore, the word "cure" is practically never used to describe the effects of diet in any treatment scenario.
It's true that there is no money to be made by Pharma, and that's why they aren't funding this study. My words may be harsh, but it's people like you, spreading pseudoscience, that lead to desperate patients being taken advantage of.
He goes over the top but so do you. Diet is a word usually reserved for a temporary alteration in the type and amount of food we eat. But of course it also refers to a permanent change in what we eat. The evidence that an evidence-supported diet in the latter sense (eating 'properly') can protect us to varying degrees from the onset of much disease is overwhelmingly supported by countless peer-reviewed studies.
Right because desperate cancer patients that could clearly seek an alternative are being told that their only hope is Chemo therapy or death aren't being taken advantage of...
God forbid someone suggest an alternative as simple as gasp diet.
Well, to be fair, I don't believe there are a lot of peer-reviewed, doubly blinded, placebo controlled studies that provide evidence that diet helps in most cancers. Lots of evidence that suggests you can avoid them in the first place, but once you have Cancer, you usually have to turn to modern medicine, in much the same way you do when you have something like HIV. Diet just won't cut it.
It's also important to differentiate diseases resulting from pathogens, versus basic body health.
Type-2 Diabetes is almost 100% a function of nutrition - it almost doesn't exist in many populations of the world that haven't been exposed to a western diet, and, quickly develops in those populations as they adopt a western diet.
There are instances in which chemotherapy is the only option, as advised by sound evidence-based medical research, just as there are instances in which diet is a completely acceptable treatment, and those instances must abide by the same strict evidence-based guidelines.
However, when people go around claiming that diet can cure the majority of disease it plants a seed in the minds of patients that have no option, patients that should be discussing palliative care with their physician, that all they need is a pot of "herbs" and a low-fat, vegan diet to cure their terminal illness. Then the physician has to spend an exponentially larger amount of time than it took to plant that seed to dig it up and move on, time s/he could be spending discussing palliative treatment or even working with other sick patients.
Let me know if you disagree, however I think the problem so many people have in this thread (and an increasing number in today's world), and one reason a good number seek and believe in alternative treatments, is because the medical community (as viewed by individuals from the outside anyway) is viewed to be full of self-righteous elitists who believe they always know what is best when dealing with the human body, while a. People like to believe in miracles, and b. Successful outlier cases that are contrary to common medical understanding keep cropping up -- the media loves them and people notice them. One more reason could be that many have experienced alternative treatments be fiercely dismissed by their physician, even when it can be surmised that the dismiss-er is probably fairly ignorant on the particular topic -- it turns people off. Naturally physicians don't have to have an answer or even an opinion, so why does it seem like they often feel they have to? Can it be boiled down to personal insecurities and fears? Trying to live up to the stigmas around what a doctor should be and know?
I would agree that people like miracles and notice them. However miracles are by their very nature the exception, not the norm. Science works by quantifying what is the norm through carefully controlled studies. The reason that alternative treatments are fiercely dismissed by many physicians is because they know, on account of said science, that they should not be the first course of action. Empirically, they work far too infrequently. Until an alternative treatment can demonstrate that it works for a statistically significant sample size it should not be recommended as the first course of action. However, if it does prove to be a viable treatment in a statistically significant study, it becomes part of mainstream medicine, not an "alternative" therapy.
