Why Dont You Blog?

As mentioned in a previous post, Katie is a 14 year old girl who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her parents have eschewed proper medical treatment in favour of alternative therapies and prayer. That alone would be bad, but reading through some of the comments on her blog opens a whole new can of worms.

One might imagine that almost all the comments are basically “we are praying for you Katie” and “with God’s help you will get through this” (neatly ignoring the fact God gave her cancer in the first place, God prevented her parents treating her and God is causing the cancer to spread). In this situation, I can actually forgive the people posting because they are just expressing their feelings towards this in the only manner they know how. It is almost nice that all these people are praying for Katie - I will leave the issue about all the other people who are dying because they dont have a blog so no one is praying for them until another post.

The one which got me was this: (some numbers “x” out to reduce the free publicity)

At 11:23 PM, John Noble said…

DO THIS NOW! Go to www.immunopower.com and order Immunopower for Katie. This formula was developed especially for cancer patients by Dr. Patrick Quillin who was VP and Director of Nutrition at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America for ten years. Then CALL the Center for Advanced Medicine (760) xxx-9xx2 and reserve a phone consultation with Dr. Quillin. If you have questions call Noreen Quillin at (760) xxx-5xx3. You may tell her that John and Rod in Houston referred you. We have been following your story since it made the front page here in Houston. As you may already know, cancer is caused by nutritional deficiencies and toxic overloads. That is why it is so important to immediately contact Dr. Quillin so that he can help find and correct the deficiencies and overloads that caused the cancer to occur in the first place. The key is to restore the immune system with an aggressive nutritional program, which combines a specially designed supplement formula with specific anti-cancer whole foods. This approach has had proven results, especially for advanced cancer patients like Katie.

How shocking is that. Still, it is nice to see we now have a cure for cancer and the world’s medical researchers can rest at last. Given it seems so simple, it is strange anyone dies of cancer any more.

Crackpottery should be made illegal.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Now, this is going to be short (ish) but mainly because I am aware that it is a sensitive issue and I am (oddly) loathe to upset people, however it is something which has managed to get my hackles up.

In a nutshell, there is a blog about Katie, a 14 year old girl who is dying of Hodgkin’s Disease. This is a story which has been picked up by various blogs (Orac for instance, but may others). No matter what, this would be a sad story and I am sure most people’s hearts go out to the girl and her family.

There is just one small problem with the whole story. Katie’s family have chosen to not head down the “conventional medicine” route for her treatment and instead opted for prayer. Now I know it is not the BMJ or anything but Wikipedia has this to say about the cancer Katie has:

Hodgkin’s lymphoma was one of the first cancers to be rendered curable by combination chemotherapy.

You would hope, that as she is young and was otherwise healthy, early (proper) treatment would have given Katie very good chances with this one. Sadly her family thought otherwise. She was denied accesss to Chemotherapy and instead relied on a combination of crackpottery and prayer. Needless to say, it has not worked. I am going to avoid linking directly to her sites or the blogs made by her family. I am not going to really talk about her or her condition any more. This is about the bad science.

Her father has put together some blogs about her / for her. At the top is this bit of shockingness:

Katie is now 14 years old and was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a lymphatic cancer when she was 13. This site is a request to pray for her. Call her prayer pager 1-361-333-KATY (5289), enter your ZipCode and # key, to let her know you have prayed for her. Updates of her progress will be posted on the site. The Power of Prayer is Awesome. See beginning story at www.prayforkatie.blogspot.com.

Sadly for Katie, the power of prayer is not awesome. Pretty much every time it has been studied it shows people who are subject to prayer show improvement over those who are not prayed for. People who are prayed for and know about it show less improvement. If your faith does mean you feel praying for Katie will help her, then dont call her “prayer pager” just do it. And if Prayer works, why wont God cure amputees?

It is really sad to see this girls chances have been destroyed because so many people seem to think that “hope” is a better alternative to treatment. It is even sadder to read the comments on Katies blogs and see so many other people seem to rate the value of prayer that you just know there will be other, needless, deaths.

Shame on them. If their God exists, they are going to hell.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Now, as mentioned in the past I am a big fan of the Respectful Insolence blog and I regularly use it as a jumping off point when I go blogsurfing. Also, I have in the past been forced to admit I am wrong and where required correct previously posted statements. Today, it seems I may be heading down this road again, but I am not sure yet.

Previously, I mentioned to apparent oddity of British people thinking that developing cancer or not was down to fate. This was fairly quickly challenged by a post here (albeit by a biased poster) which initially I ignored. My take on heather’s post was that it was just a bit of semantic pedantry and I could ignore it. Today, however, after reading Orac’s post I see I may have been making too much of a broad brush judgement.

Now, heather quite rightly points out (as does a lot of Orac’s post) that chance does have the “final say” as to whether or not a person will develop a cancer. I agree and this isn’t what my complaint about poor education was meant to imply. Heather points out:

My point is that - even cancers caused by heavy irradiation are due to chance, although the chance may approach 100% with regard to certain substances. With most cancers, you can only consider the impact of lifestyle choices statistically. (And having some acquaintance with epidemiology, I can say this is a pretty arcane art).

And I cant really say anything which disagrees with this.

My point is, and I am painfully aware now that this is an assumption, the way I read the study was not that people believed their chance of developing cancer was a risk which was affected by various lifestyle and genetic factors but remained (non the less) a “chance” event.

I read the report on the survey as suggesting that the people thought the chance of them developing cancer was entirely down to fate with no impact from their lifestyle choices. My own discussions with British people (whilst not exactly being a survey) suggests this is about right. I know people who smoke 20 a day with almost no fear of cancer (putting developing it down to “fate”) but baulk at the thought of eating a foodstuff which may prove to contain a minute trace of a carcinogenic compound.
This leads nicely to one part of respectful insolence I actually don’t agree with.

Only people who have never tried to convince patients to change such lifestyles for the benefit of their health would so blithely attribute this belief in “fate” to stupidity or ignorance. In some cases it may be stupidity or ignorance, but in the majority of cases it probably is not. For instance, 90% of the people in the U.K survey knew that smoking increased the odds of developing cancer, and that still didn’t stop a significant proportion from attributing whether smokers get cancer or not to “fate.” It’s all easy from the air to dismiss patients as being “ignorant” or “stupid,” but it won’t help to persuade them that there are indeed actions that they can take themselves to decrease their risk of developing cancer.

Now, it strikes me that here Orac is no longer arguing that the people thinking developing cancer is down to fate are ignorant or not, he is simply saying the “patient” should not be thought of as ignorant. This is a wonderful point of view for a doctor to take but, at the risk of being rude, is fairly meaningless. Yes, it may not help persuade patients to modify their lifestyle but that certainly does not falsify the idea.

All in all, I stand corrected with the automatic assumption that the report implied the people thought it was Fate / Chance and no other factor. I (currently) still think that people who do think it is Fate / Chance and not lifestyle factors are poorly educated or stupid (or both).

I will try to retain an open mind though.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]