Penn & Teller on Alternative Medicine

Amorelli, you keep saying that doctors kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Do you think there may (just conceivably) be some kind of correlation between people who are very very ill, and those who receive treatment?

Do you also think that people who are very very ill are more likely to use actual working medicine rather than 'alternative' medicine, so the vast majority of alt meds are for things that get better by themselves?

Finally, do you think alt med practitioners perform detailed follow up work to check the survival rates of those unfortunate few who were very very ill, and chose the 'natural' alternative?

Just wondered.
 
One statistic that should be counted, and charged against the alt-med practitioners, is all the people who get a serious, life-threatening disease such as cancer, and try to have it treated with alt-med. By the time they turn to real doctors, it's too late. It would be instructive if these deaths were to be counted.

Orac Knows has posted an article called The Orange Man about a patient he saw.
When I hear advocates of alternative therapies claim that their therapies are harmless, I think of the Orange Man. When I hear advocates of alternative therapies claim that their therapies are harmless, I also think of women like Patti Davis, who underwent a breast biopsy and was told that she had breast cancer. Her cancer would have had a high probability of being cured (oncologists hate to use that word, but in this case it is not entirely inappropriate) with conventional therapy, but instead she, like the Orange Man, opted for a variant of the Gerson therapy, driving to a clinic in Tijuana, undergoing "detoxification, and eating 7-8 pounds of carrots a week at one point. Her mother, who had had breast cancer at age 47 and survived 22 years after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, urged her daughter to finish her surgical therapy and a course of conventional therapy, to no avail. Mrs. Davis ultimately did return to conventional therapy when she felt a lump under her arm that had developed while she was undergoing the Gerson therapy and finally realized her mistake.

By then it was too late. She later died at the age of 39.
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Has Amorelli trolled off to somewhere else?

Alternative Medicine is the conceit of a modern medicine culture. We have the luxury of playing around with "natural medicine" BS because we can always get REAL help if we need it.

We've become bored with the "miracle" of antibiotics, because people like Amorelli have never experienced life in a world without them.

Our average life span has at least doubled since the dawn of modern medicine and scientific practice. The proof is all around us: modern medicine works!

Is Amorelli claiming that Medical Doctors kill more people than they help? Because that's the only significant issue. Consider a world without BIG PHARMA, life would be over much sooner, and the population would be much smaller.

I say that Doctors would kill millions if they decided to all simultaneously stop practicing. Alternative Medical practioners could do the same, and the result would be statistically insignificant.
 
I only scanned this topic... but I really liked the "chemicals bad" bit.

What is really fun is using my nick on Usenet when the Laetrile spammers try to pass it off as some kind of "Vitamin B-17"... especially since its main ingrediant is cyanide. From This Page is this quote:
The phase I study was designed to test the doses, routes of administration, and the schedule of administration judged representative of those used by laetrile practitioners.[3] The study involved 6 cancer patients. The investigators found that intravenous and oral amygdalin showed minimal toxicity under the conditions evaluated; however, 2 patients who ate raw almonds while undergoing oral treatment developed symptoms of cyanide poisoning.
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To the original poster:
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do some serious thinking about this. Your health is the most important topic you'll ever form beliefs on.

My parents are firm believers in "alternative medicine" and are very distrustful of doctors. I was brought up on herbs, homeopathic remedies, and never had vaccinations. I was a very, very sickly child.

My father recently told me that he thought he had cancer. He didn't want to go to the doctor, though, and he'd been treating it for the last six months or so with herbs. I begged him to go to a hospital. He finally did. The doctors say he has six months to live.

Based on my own experience, and extensive research I've done, "alternative medicines" are, at best, useless, and, at worst, can kill you. There are a FEW exceptions, sure, but about 99% of the time, it's true. You should research any treatment you're getting, because the chances are that if it's alternative, it's a scam.

quackwatch.org is a good place to start.
 
Hawk one said:
(Just to clarify, I did catch your sarcasm at the end, and only followed up on it in the same vein. No attack at you meant, in other words.)
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Hawk one, thank you so much for taking this in the spirit in which it was given. About 95% of the time, when I post a comment somewhere, especially the first several (dozen) times, pretty much the (what I feel is) obvious sarcasm is mistaken for earnestness. Actually, I post in very few places, since I am unable (read; unwilling) to dumb my comments down.
 
hcmom said:
Hawk one, thank you so much for taking this in the spirit in which it was given. About 95% of the time, when I post a comment somewhere, especially the first several (dozen) times, pretty much the (what I feel is) obvious sarcasm is mistaken for earnestness. Actually, I post in very few places, since I am unable (read; unwilling) to dumb my comments down.
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Let's just say that you don't survive certain parts of this forum for very long without reckognising sarcasm. And I am also not in favour of dumbing down things (though I do like it if people can explain it to me in normal English. Sometimes that will inavoidably lead to dumbing down a subject... But hey, it's not a perfect world). Though I do think that when it comes to use of humour and sarcasm, it helps if you learn to know your audience first...

...Of course, sometimes you learn to know them by spotting their reactions to your first sarcastic post.
 
Amorelli said:
Well if you googled "iatrogenic deaths" in google and if you looked into the links there then you would see studies that show a lot more deaths and thats what I was looking at (maybe their wrong). Also I went to your link and then went to the website and looked at their updated PDF file for 2006 patient safety study and the number went up to 300,000 and this is only including medicare beneficiaries.
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Nope, you're still wrong. Iatrogenic deaths still do not make it into the top 5. Cancer, heart disease, lung disease, stroke, and accidents kill far more people than the medical industry.

Furthermore; many of these are caused at least as much by the patient as by the medical industry (eg. not following instructions when taking medications, failing to inform doctors about medications they're already taking); or by unforseeable complications (idiosyncratic drug reactions, etc.) Plus, there is no differentiation made in the most popular sites between actual medical-industry-caused injury and death, incidental injury and death, and suicide (eg, someone slips on a wet hospital floor, takes a deliberate overdose while in a hospital, patient fails or refused to follow care procedures and develops an avoidable infection, catastrophic equipment failure, etc.).

Plus, CAM is a multi-million-dollar industry, that kills or injures hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people every year. Either directly, through poisoning, allergic reaction, inhibiting judgement and causing accidents, toxic interaction with other herbal medications or drugs, long-term toxic poisoning, damage from improper manipulation of tissues or spinal column, and so on; or from simply causing people to delay receiving real medical treatment for serious illnesses until too late.

Here's a good source for you to begin your research: http://www.valleyskeptic.com/altmed.htm

And the medical industry would not lose money, since if alternative medicine worked, it would be part of the medical industry. Many current drugs are derived from herbal sources, purified and stabilized, in standardized doses. Herbal medicine doses cannot be standardized, which has led to poisonings and other adverse reactions; and often contains other substances which can cause adverse reactions when combined wtih other herbal medicines, or even certain foods; which, unlike conventional medications, are very poorly understood due to the lack of scientific research.
 
Amorelli said:
Can you prove the drugs and the medical industry don't cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and injury?
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Can you prove that invisible fairies don't steal people's souls at night causing deaths while asleep?

Utilize logic or go away.
 
luchog said:
Nope, you're still wrong. Iatrogenic deaths still do not make it into the top 5. Cancer, heart disease, lung disease, stroke, and accidents kill far more people than the medical industry......
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And the death rates depend on age. For those under the age of 45 the top killer is "motor vehicle accidents" (see the various tables at http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/ )... perhaps we should ban all motor vehicles.
 
Amorelli said:
Fun fact: it's impossible to have a fatal over dose on marijuana. Aspirin cause more deaths than marijuana. So why ban it? Because our government are crooks. You can't trust anything. I would post a link about marijuana because there is such a thing as medical marijuana but I need 15 posts first to link.

So marijuana (natural) is safer than cigs (synthetic). Pot can help people while cigs kill people. So here is just one example of how government can be really crooked. Many studies show marijuana can help illness and yet its illegal. So there, I found a natural substance that can help but our government denies it.
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Both cigarettes and pot can help people.

Pot can help with glaucoma and nausea. Cigarettes can help with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Both can hurt people. Cigarettes cause lung cancer. Pot causes chronic bronchitis and emphysema.

In both cases, when the pharmaceutical is isolated from the wunnerful, wunnerful, all-natural source, it can help without harming.

And this proves the superiority of "natural" medicine, how?
 
Back to the original point that I think Amorelli was trying to make, the number of deaths caused by doctors and modern medicine. The number, whatever it may be, is tragic, and lowering it would be good, something to consider is to compare that number to the number of lives saved. I suspect, however, that that particular number would be quite difficult to nail down. But, I'm sure even a rough estimate would show why one should trust a doctor more then any alternative medicine proponent.
 
ihaunter said:
The number, whatever it may be, is tragic, and lowering it would be good, something to consider is to compare that number to the number of lives saved. I suspect, however, that that particular number would be quite difficult to nail down.
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This was exactly my point earlier when I said that if all medical doctors were to jointly stop practising around the world then millions would die, however the alternative "medicine" practitioners could do the same, and nobody would notice.

I don't think the number of those saved by modern medicine would be that hard to determine. If statistics exist to blame modern medical practices for deaths, then certainly we should be able to determine how many people would have died or become much more seriously ill had there been no intervention?

I agree that deaths or injury that occur within the medical system should be taken seriously and attempts made to lower that number, but there shouldn't be ANY doubt as to the efficacy of modern medical methods and pharmaceuticals. Without them, we just wouldn't have the luxury to play around with woo-woo alternative "cures"...we'd be dead by 40....
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
And the death rates depend on age. For those under the age of 45 the top killer is "motor vehicle accidents" (see the various tables at http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/ )... perhaps we should ban all motor vehicles.
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Hooking in one that, I have major problem with the term "leading cause of death" because it's not very meaningful in and of itself, and that's the way scare-mongers like it. By definition, if deaths occur, something has to be the leading cause; this does not say anything about absolute numbers involved. If only one person out of a given population dies in a particular time period, whatever that one person died of (even if it's just a fluke, like chocking on a piece of diced carrot) is the leading cause of death for that population. Moreover, when a "leading cause of death" is eradicated, something else must needs become the leading cause of death in its stead, even if there was no increase in the number of deaths due to that latter cause.

Besides, Amorelli, by placing the blame for any number of deaths on hospitals and the medical profession, is committing the error of equating correlation with causation. To compare, I suspect the overwhelming majority of motor vehicle-related deaths occur on paved roads, and involve at least one licensed driver. By Amorelli's reasoning (and I use the term loosely), it not only follows that paved roads and drivers' licenses are the cause of motor vehicle-related deaths, but that unpaved roads and unlicensed drivers present a safer alternative.
 
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