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Comment by dennis_jeeves | Hacker News Reader

A chemo truther here, if you will. AMA about what I understand about chemotherapy. To the best of my knowledge only very few cancers respond well to chemotherapy - they are testicular cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma and ovarian cancer.

If you contradict any of my opinions, before I reply to you I want to know, your personal experience in investigating cancer therapies beyond what your doctor, medical school or news media told you. For example:

- Have you read at length the articles/books by mainstream train MDs who have a different opinion?

- have you talked to oncologists with dissenting opinions?

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I'm glad you mention testicular cancer, which I was diagnosed with in 1982, just as the first extended trials for a chemotherapy were completed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_cancer#Chemotherapy). My staging surgery found no metastasis, but a year later it was clear it had spread to my lungs. More surgery, plus four grueling rounds of chemotherapy. This spring I will celebrate 36 years without a relapse.

Thanks pmcjones,for chiming in. I hope you live a long life.

The general trouble today more than ever is that main stream medicine is exceedingly cartelized, commercialized and profit driven that it is difficult to disentangle the legitimate good therapies from the one that in some cases are downright harmful.

I think most people should be able to read a few papers if their life depends on that.

lostmsu, IMO that is not a reasonable thing to expect because:

- Papers are hard to read and understand for even for people in the profession.

- For a resonantly skilled person outside of the profession (say an engineer or physicist) it might take about 3 days to a week to read and understand a paper fully.

- A large part of the population - my guess easily over 50% will never be able to read and understand a paper.

- Papers can be fraudulent, data can be fudged, or entirely made up. The researchers could be biased etc. I'm not saying that every paper out there needs to be ignored, rather that the signal to noise ration is rather small.

- Controversial findings are often not published.

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