Cancer is scary. Chemo and radiation are scary. Herbal medicines and special diets seem friendly and comforting by comparison, but we now have clear evidence that people who use alternative treatments for cancer are more likely to die.
Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine followed 281 people who used alternative medicine, without any conventional treatments like surgery or chemo and compared their survival rates to controls who had the same health status, type of cancer, and other factors. Those controls were far more likely to still be alive after five years than the people who chose to only use alternative medicine.
The study was observational, so technically it can’t 100 percent prove that alternative medicine was responsible for the deaths, but the researchers controlled for just about every plausible factor that might have affected survival.
But there’s a small industry around selling bogus cancer cures to people who can’t afford real treatment, or who just believe claims that supplements and the like do a better job
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