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  • 2016-06-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Chemotherapy Doesn't Work, Doctor Blows the Whistle (en)
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  • In June 2016 several alternative health and conspiracy blogs published posts claiming that a Berkeley doctor had recently blown the whistle on chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer, revealing that it doesn't work 97% of the time and is only recommended due to practitioner greed (i.e., oncologists get kickbacks from suppliers). Most of those posts featured a video published to YouTube under the title Chemotherapy Does NOT Work 97% of the Time and Kills 97% of the Time, a five-minute clip featuring a conversation between an interviewer and naturopathic physician Peter Glidden (in which the latter misrepresented a study to claim that chemotherapy kills an average 97% of cancer patients) and cited the work of a Dr. Hardin Jones: One aspect of note is that the clip was published to YouTube in May 2014, but identical blog posts trumpeting it as a bombshell showing a doctor blowing the lid off the scam of chemotherapy weren't published by AnonHQ and RealFarmacy until 8 June 2016 and 10 June 2016, respectively: Is any of this true? First off, as David Gorski wrote for Science-Based Medicine, such claims about chemotherapy by alternative medicine practitioners and aficionados are quite common and are typically misleadingly based on cherry-picked statistics, misunderstandings (or misrepresentations) of how chemotherapy works, and a focus on chemotherapy's very visible drawbacks rather than its (less-obvious) successes: As well, the key information that none of these alternative health sites presented regarding Dr. Hardin's statements on the efficacy of chemotherapy was that they were based on work published in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences way back in 1956, and a paper (not a study) titled A Report on Cancer that he presented at a science writers' conference on 7 March 1969. All of this material is fifty to sixty years out of date, and Hardin himself passed away in 1978, so even if he had researched cancer and chemotherapy until his dying days, all of his findings would now be upwards of forty years old. In the field of medical science that's a huge time difference, as exemplified by the plethora of now standard medical technologies that didn't emerge until 1978 or later: in vitro fertilization, MRI machines, the identification of HIV, hepatitis vaccines, the first draft of the human genome, etc. But even back in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Hardin's conclusions were highly questionable due to his use of old and flawed studies as their basis: Moreover, our understanding of cancer and its treatment has advanced greatly since Dr. Hardin's days. Although what he said sixty years ago may have had at least some element of supportable plausibility to it, that information is now woefully out of date and has been supplanted by additional research and a superior understanding of cancer that has been developed in the last several decades: Finally, although chemotherapy undeniably causes bad side effects in many cases, doesn't work well for some forms of cancer, and may be over-recommended by some practitioners, its benefits (especially in cases of breast cancer) are undeniable: (en)
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