My Malignant Melanoma

Over on CRUK's cancer chat site, there's a muppet who is plugging the Budwig Diet to cancer patients. Here's what I had to say to him:

"A quick glance round the internet shows that people are using this diet instead of radio-and chemo-therapy on the advice of morons like you.

Thinking that the papers you linked to in some way supports the Budwig diet only confirms your scientific ignorance. None of the papers are about the Budwig diet at all.

As I said, science deals with evidence, and there is no evidence whatever for the Budwig diet. There's nothing more to say from a scientific point of view. I have an open mind-show me some evidence. Believing the unsupported word of an internet time-waster like yourself isn't open-mindedness, it's stupidity.

Linus Pauling's ideas on dietary Vitamin C and cancer were tested and are nonsense (We might note in passing that he actually died of cancer)

The research you refer to is about intravenous vitamin C rather than dietary Vitamin C, in mice rather than people, and is far from conclusive. Linus Pauling won the Nobel prize for work on the nature of the chemical bond. He had neither training nor any research background in Medicine, or any biological science.

Your logical error is called the appeal to authority. Linus Pauling also had strong political opinions. Should we remake society in line with them because he won a Nobel Peace Prize? It does not logically follow that being right about chemical bonds makes you right about cancer, politics, or indeed even reliably right about some other aspect of chemistry. (Even Budwig's supporters claim that she was nominated for the peace prize rather than the prize for medicine, incidentally)

Bring some real evidence to back your assertions, or shut up. Since you clearly wouldn't know evidence if it was tattooed on your forehead, it's going to be a long wait. That's evidence that the Budwig diet is helpful for the outcome of all cancers which I'm talking about, as this is the claim that is being made.

The most impressive of the papers you linked to concludes that one component of the Budwig diet MIGHT be worthy of further investigation for some prostate cancer patients.

1. It does not study the Budwig diet at all, but a simple low-fat diet with flax seed oil. Budwig made strong claims that organic flaxseed oil must be mixed with organic cottage cheese to be effective, and that either component taken separately would have the opposite of the desired effect. The study you quote does however pertain to this claim. It tends to disprove it, as no excess deaths were recorded in the patients as would be expected from Budwig's claims.

The Budwig Protocol is actually a complete lifestyle, which besides flaxseed oil/cottage cheese includes a number of elements. It includes a vegetarian diet, flaxseeds, fruit juices, vegetable juices, sauerkraut, sunshine, "emotional and spiritual peace" "stress control", "avoiding negative energy" from a variety of sources in synthetic clothing, bedding, etc. in your immediate environment. and so on...

2. It only studies one sort of cancer. Things which help with one sort of cancer can harm in the case of another. For example testosterone is required to allow prostate cancers to grow, but it may inhibit breast cancers.

3. It does not study the post-treatment period when people seem most likely to be conned into the Budwig diet.

4. It does not conclude that the diet helps in any way, but that it MIGHT be worth looking into. Since the paper dates from 2008, it seems that they have not cured cancer in the meantime, or I would surely have heard about it.

5. The study does not actually look at survival or any real-world end-point at all, but biochemical changes which they believe might be associated with a better outcome.

Advising anyone to even consider the Budwig diet on the strength of this research is highly irresponsible. But of course your ideas on the Budwig diet come from internet quack sites, not scientific or medical research. These are the only places where this diet is promoted. You are just parroting quack propaganda.

Might I suggest that you, and anyone else like you, who want to play scientist/doctor based on tripe they read on the internet, who think that any study of a field implies scientific endorsement, and doesn't understand what the resulting papers mean refrain from giving unqualified medical advice to cancer patients?"

Obviously it would be better if people like this were split, salted and nailed to a fence, but we do what we can.

Labels: Budwig, Diet, nonsense, quack