joyfulgirl said:
Hoxsey actually claims a very high success rate and if I were diagnosed with cancer I would absolutely look into it.
What are you basing this assessment on? I ask because none of the sites I looked at before selecting the link I did, including some alternative cancer treatment research centers, could provide anything beyond anecdotal support for Hoxsey cures. At the risk of being redundant, that link summarized what, so far as I could find, is the research consensus on Hoxsey to date:
Only 2 human studies of the Hoxsey herbal treatment have been published. One was published in a pamphlet provided by the Tijuana clinic and simply contains a description of 9 patients who received the treatment. It concluded that the treatment is effective, even though most of the Hoxsey-treated patients received standard cancer treatment in addition to the Hoxsey treatment. The other study published in the Journal of Naturopathic Medicine involved 39 people with various types of cancer who took the Hoxsey herbal treatment. Ten patients died after an average of 15 months and 23 never completed the study. Only 6 patients were disease-free after 48 months.
The National Advisory Cancer Council studied many of Hoxsey’s patient records and learned that most of the patients had never had biopsies, so that there was no confirmation that they actually had cancer. The National Cancer Institute investigated 400 patients who were reported as cured by Hoxsey. Patients or their families were interviewed, and all records were carefully reviewed. These patients fell into 3 groups: those who had been treated, but didn’t actually have cancer; those who had received successful conventional cancer treatment before seeing Hoxsey; and those who had cancer and had died of it, or were still alive with evidence of cancer. Out of the 400 cases, not one case of a Hoxsey cure could be documented.
Considering that, again so far as I can tell, Hodgkin's has an 85% cure rate with conventional treatment, I just find it very hard to imagine endorsing the Hoxsey route in preference to that, if it were my child. 85 is not 100 and the side effects of the chemo are indeed awful, but with odds like that...
Also, I don't see where the Weil quote goes beyond what the link I posted already acknowledges, i.e., that some individual components commonly used in the various Hoxsey preparations are indeed known to have anticancer properties. Lots of natural medicines have anticancer properties, that is not in dispute, but that's not the same thing as a likely cure for active cancer of whatever type. Weil says, "I’m intrigued by the Hoxsey formula, and hope that if research confirms its effectiveness, it will someday be more widely used."
"If research confirms"--I guess that's the part that gives me pause.
I never cease to be amazed by how skeptical people are of alternative health.
I think maybe you're reading a bit too much into my armchair doubts about Hoxsey as a treatment for Hodgkin's. I am not in any general way skeptical of alternative medicine, far from it; our family doctor is an integrative medicine specialist, I've posted in here before about my own experiences using light boards and St. John's Wort for depression with very good results. We keep a couple of Dr. Weil's remedy books on our bookshelf here at home and refer to them often. But where life-threatening but potentially curable illnesses are concerned, IMHO, it's very important to look at statistical probabilities based on solidly documented research. I would not seek to deny another adult the right to make their own decisions on the matter, and my misgivings about the significance of Cherrix's age in all this are mostly the same as nb's--i.e., how can we achieve a consistent legal standard for such cases? or can we at all?
Good health is in no small part simply a blessing, no matter how well one does their part to cultivate and preserve it. Unfortunately an awful lot of people have bad luck despite apparently exemplary lifestyles, and at that point you do have to put your faith in and surrender your own control of the process somewhat to someone whose judgment you trust, be it an herbalist or an allopath. But these decisions are seldom cut-and-dried and there is a lot of patronizing and overwrought propaganda coming from both sides to contend with, very little of which seems to have the individual patient's best interests in mind.