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AndrewHickey comments on I want to save myself - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you have cancer and actually want to save yourself (rather than giving the appearance of wanting to save yourself, as all too many do), I would recommend buying and studying Cancer: Nutrition And Survival or The Cancer Breakthrough from http://www.lulu.com/ascorbate .
These may look like quackery to the casual observer, but the co-author, Dr Steve Hickey is very far from a quack. He is a relative of mine, and so I may be biased, but that means I can tell you that he is the single most intelligent human being I have ever had any contact with.
His doctorate is in medical biophysics, but it's from working with him (I proofread, fact-checked and helped research his books) that I first learned about Bayes' theorem, Solomonoff induction, and most of the other tools of advanced rationality. Unlike most people working in the medical sciences, he can actually think.
I have observed people with cancer who have read his books and followed his advice, and I have observed people with cancer who either haven't read these books or haven't followed the advice. In my experience the main difference between the two groups is that the former group are alive.
(I get no financial benefit whatsoever from these books, and any benefit to my uncle from a single sale is on the order of a latte from Starbucks. This is meant as as dispassionate a piece of advice as I can give.)
This would be good to know if true. Can we get a second opinion on this, preferably from someone with domain knowledge of medicine?
I'm a graduate student studying metabolomics, and my lab mate is actually doing her thesis research on cancer metabolism. My knowledge base is strong in the biology involved, and weak in the politics of medical studies and treatment preferences, as I have no direct interface with MDs.
Cancer has no 'silver bullet;' as is generally recognized in medicine nowadays, it is actually a collection of diseases with differing causes, that respond in different ways to various treatments because the mechanisms which promote cancer development, growth, and metastasis differ between forms. There is a consistent cycle in cancer research that pays homage to this fact - someone has good lab results with a new drug, everyone gets excited, and then it's found that its utility is extremely limited (or more often, impossible due to deleterious side effects). This knowledge causes me to have a very low probability estimate for the truth (of the magnitude, at least) of these claims.
Another red flag: If this was such a medical breakthrough, it would be backed up by controlled studies, and it would be a paper in Cell or Nature, not a self-published book announcing boldly that it has The Answer.
If you would like more specific information about cancer, I can either answer questions or send links, later, but at the moment, I need to leave my computer.
The books in question are popularisations of many earlier studies, and certainly not 'announcing boldly that it has The Answer'. To quote from the material at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/cancer-nutrition-and-survival/243487
"Clinical trials are needed to test such non-toxic therapies. Biological research suggests that cancer is a treatable condition. Although current data is not sufficient to indicate the degree of life extension achievable, many terminal patients might die of other causes, before the cancer kills them. Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity."
I'm trying to think how to frame my response to this. I will essentially never say that something shouldn't be studied (unless the act of studying would cause more harm than good to intelligent test subjects), and I don't know with certainty that vitamin C megadoses would not be helpful. I know a lot of reasons why they probably wouldn't be, but that's all I have.
My major problems with the book itself (from what I can see of it online, and what I've read of the studies on the subject) are:
1) It suggests ('Cancer patients deserve to be offered this opportunity') that some wrong is being done to cancer patients by not chasing this idea farther than it has already been chased. This is both somewhat sensationalist, and revealing that the authors either don't know much about or have chosen to ignore the cognitive environment of cancer research. Cancer researchers would love to find a silver bullet, or even a reasonably effective bronze one. Quite aside from the good it would do for humanity, it would bring them an awful lot of immediate prestige. Existing biases in the field are therefore very much in favor of pursuing avenues of research that might be a bit of a stretch, if there's any hope that it might lead to a breakthrough. This makes blind rejection of potentially useful ideas very uncommon, which strongly downregulates my estimate of the idea's merit.
2) If the authors think that this research has a high potential for payoff, why are they not conducting it themselves, instead of imploring others to do so? There is certainly a much higher personal payoff to be had if it were to actually work, if they were to do it themselves. (I do rather intimately realize that 'doing research onesself' is much simpler said than done, and therefore would accept it as an answer that they are making serious, concerted, and persistent efforts to begin the clinical trials they're calling for.)
Point 1 is only sensationalist if not true. The fact is, there has been little research conducted in the area. This is mostly because, as far as I can tell, there were some supposedly 'definitive' studies in the 1980s which 'proved' there was no effect. Those studies, however, had serious flaws. More research has been conducted recently, some of it very promising, but still mostly of the 'kills cancer cells in a test tube' type rather than the 'large scale double-blind placebo controlled test' type.
Meanwhile, several individual doctors have used the techniques described and report great success.
As for point two, the authors are both retired former academics, not clinicians, and conducting clinical trials is not their area of expertise.
I would advise that the person with domain knowledge of medicine should also be someone who has read the books in question. "Antioxidants have no/limited effect on cancer" is a cached thought among most medics, mostly based on some incredibly badly-run studies (especially the ones by Moertel which a high-school student should have been failed on). The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_therapy sums up much of the arguments on both sides though.
There are less costly ways of signaling that it's worthwhile to study more (if it is) than having to read whole books. That and if there are no papers that hold any convincing power would be evidence for the ideas being wrong.
True. There are papers that hold convincing power, but I couldn't (and currently can't) remember the references (there are roughly 1100 references in the longer of those books, and I checked most of them, but six years ago when it was written). I didn't mean to imply that those were the only sources of information (though to my mind they're the best and most complete). I probably shouldn't have said 'read the books in question', but definitely I think one needs to have at least looked at some of this information before discussing it.
The original paper by Pauling and Cameron (still, alas, the only formal study to be done on patients with more than relatively tiny dosages) can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC431183/?tool=pmcentrez , for example. I co-authored a paper about five years ago that showed that Cameron and Pauling's results couldn't be explained by any selection biases, but I can't find any record of us having got round to publishing it. I'll have to chase that up...
But there are lists of references at the end of both http://www.tomlevymd.com/news/VitaminC_Cancer_w_Comments.pdf and http://www.encognitive.com/files/Cancer%20and%20Vitamin%20C%20Therapy%20for%20Patients.pdf for example (two things I found by googling appropriate terms) that look like they contain a reasonable selection of papers.
(ETA added the last half of the last sentence in the first paragraph, because forgot to type it.)
Same content cluster: T. Campell: The China study. Not so much for treatment, more in regards of prevention.
Well, given that I have collaborated with him and know many other people who have, that those books were written modified after advice I and others have given (and that all the books on that page were collaborations with at least one other author, some two or more), your first interpretation is incorrect.
And given the content of the books, which in most cases seemed to me (having read them) to be aimed at medical professionals or biochemists, your alternative interpretation is also incorrect.
Therefore I would advise that you reconsider your habit of judging not only a book but its author's personality by the book's cover.
As for "It wasn't the personality of the author I was describing," what else is "What this book cover tells me, no screams at me, is that this self-published author is above listening to advice of others or accepting offers of help. This probably means collaboration is off the table, too. They like to work in their own self-absorbed bubble of "genius" and much too readily pass off or ignore other's work or data that doesn't fit their own working narrative. Professional standards don't apply to them." ?
I will just point out here that: You still haven't explained what caused this completely insane over-reaction that led you to judge not a book by its cover but the personality of the author based on a thumbnail of the cover, despite claiming you 'want to help'.
You have made a further, equally unwarranted assumption here. I didn't go through and downvote every one of your posts. Multiple people have downvoted your posts in this thread, and any one of them could have done so. Or it could just be that a lot of people find your posts downvote-worthy. Or you could easily be lying. I am not, incidentally, the person who downvoted the post to which I'm replying (which stands at -1 as I type, and if you doubt this I will gladly prove it to you by doing so.
You made very, very serious allegations against the professional ethics of multiple people (because as I pointed out, all those books were written by multiple authors, despite your expert opinion on the covers leading you to think they were written by someone incapable of collaboration. Clearly your expert knowledge of the covers didn't go so far as looking at the bits where the authors were listed).
As for the last:
"I could have eliminated the offensive speculation in my interpretation. I took a risk at including it as it makes me look silly. But I did because without it there didn't seem a point in commenting at all."
Quite. So you'd rather 'look silly' by speculating offensively about people and subjects you know less than nothing about, because if you didn't do so there would be no point in commenting. In which case I'd suggest just not commenting unless you have something worthwhile to say.
Point taken.
Apologies to all involved, especially to DanArmak for muddying up his post.
I'd be happy to delete any comments that came across as offensive.
Well possibly if instead of just posting a list of (as it turns out) utterly inaccurate and incredibly insulting speculation about the personal character of a close relative of mine, you'd actually said what, specifically, you found problematic about the cover (or even which of the several linked books you were talking about), it might have had some use.
Saying "that cover will turn away potential readers" is not helpful unless accompanied by suggestions as to what to change.