science

If it worked it would be called "medicine"

My mom went from stage "0" DCIS to dying of stage 4 breast cancer in just 3 years while attempting to treat it with scam therapies.

When it was stage 2 she tried to treat it with localized vibration therapy, where her therapist used a massage gun on the area to try to resonate her body with the "healing frequency of the universe."

Given that the stage 2-3 jump is when cancer cells begin to dislodge from the first affected lymph node into the lymphatic system and spread throughout the body, I'm fairly certain her "treatment" significantly accelerated that jump.

Well yeah, quackery will do that. Calling it "alternative medicine" only promotes it and the scammers who sells it, there is no medicine about it.

Alternative medicine tied to lower ~~breast cancer~~ survival.

Alternative TO medicine tied to lower breast cancer survival

It makes sense to distrust the American for-profit healthcare system where treatments that might work don’t get funded if they can’t be patented and monetized. Cancer is also a huge cash cow.

At the same time, taking unproven treatments is a risk. My father had stage 3 cancer and tried alternative treatments while getting periodic PET scans. When nothing decreased the tumor size, he finally got chemo and radiation. He’s still kicking almost 20 years later, but the radiation caused a lot of issues. He’s lucky it didn’t metastasize.

I worked alongside doctors for years, and I have plenty of stories about how Western medicine failed.

I also have plenty more stories about people who didn't listen to their doctors and ended up regretting it.

And try as I like.
A small crack appears in my diplomacy-dike "By definition", I begin.
"Alternative Medicine", I continue.
"Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work.
Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work?
Medicine."

I have a aunt like that (antivaxer too). That's fine if you have a cold, but for serious stuff, they endanger others and should be treated as such.

I had a coworker that was heavily into this stuff. She got breast cancer and decided to go this route. If she isn't dead she most likely will be soon. The last I heard it wasn't pretty. She was in her early 30s.

I went to Alaska and purchased a tub of "devils salve". I kept getting these neck rashes that I would treat with diluted potassium hydroxide (because it was available in my photography darkroom). So I tried the devils slave thinking maybe, like salicilic acid, this too had some real undiscovered scientific value. So then it did! After a few weeks, the rash was gone and my skin was healing. This happened several times.

Sometime later it happened again and my usual diy secret treatment didn't fix it. LOL I even posted about it somewhere. As a last ditched effort I cave in and took an intihistamine. The rash was gone the next day.

Now, the devil's salve is probably containing useful substances but its " the process ". Like bearing grease doesn't do anything useful if you don't put it on a bearing. It can do bad things if applied elsewhere, like collecting dust or degrading plastics. Probiotics don't do anything if you don't put them in the gut. ETC. So basically I had an allergy and I wasn't aware. Going to diy medicine should definetly be last resort. My problem is my fear of the inevitable incurable disease that will one day make my insurance impossible to pay and steal everything I ever worked for. That's all.