In Theory: Skepticism in the face of dire health news
In the last decade, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued more than 90 warning letters to companies the agency says fraudulently marketed products for the treatment of cancer. The products under various labels include fish oil, skin creams, salves and herbal teas.
Adding to the FDA’s efforts against “treatment scams,” the Federal Trade Commission says patients who use alternative products promising remedies for cancer may delay conventional treatment, placing their hopes on ineffective and potentially harmful alternatives. “It’s best to be skeptical of websites with ads for products that claim to treat cancer,” the FTC website says.
However, several websites argue the contrary, encouraging skepticism of government and medical science. A site called “Cure Your Own Cancer,” for example, labels oncologists and pharmaceutical companies “criminals” and is among many that call chemotherapy ineffective as a cancer treatment.
Such claims are refuted by a hundred years’ worth of evidence, according to ScienceBasedMedicine.org, which states that “Good science is the best and only way to determine which treatments and products are truly safe and effective.”
Q. What about the human condition leads consumers to distrust medical science and government agencies when it comes to something as serious as cancer treatment? How would you counsel a patient at a time of such crisis?
I don’t know about the human condition, but anyone who can go bankrupt on co-pays and hospital parking while regularly logging extra time in the waiting room hours after one’s appointment, only to have doctors blithely contradict each other, can build up some serious distrust of the medical establishment. Ditto a government that should replace “In God We Trust” with “Ah, Well, Perhaps You Should Consider the Source.”
Fact is, while garbage trucks come down my street every Thursday, while teachers regularly show up for work at my kids’ schools, and while there aren’t gaping, car-swallowing potholes on the 134, civic, private, and religious institutions have done a lot to whittle away at the public trust in the last 40 years. And anyone living on a reservation can attest to it being longer than that.
So it is reasonable to understand that it is precisely cancer’s gravity that can make a person think not of the systematic eradication of polio but instead of Daraprim’s price hike from $14 a pill to $750, not of fluoridated water as a good thing but fluoridated water as a government plot, of antivaxxers rather than the kindly school nurse. They think, “Remember how I got a flu shot that one time and then got the flu?”
As a small-c cancer survivor, I was grateful for the medical establishment that saved my eye even as it wiped out my bank account. Sadly, it’s common in America to trade financial security for health, which then leads to health problems that somehow don’t circle back around to financial security ... I tell other cancer survivors that I will set up their GoFundMe page, I’ll buy them lots of broccoli, and I’ll drive them to their doctor appointments (but I’m not paying for parking).
Marty Barrett
President, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Verdugo Hills (UUVerdugo)
::
To be more specific, these are consumers with a deadly disease who may have exhausted all other options, are probably terrified, and may not be at their best mentally. I don’t have data but am guessing that quack medicine is turned to more often by the less-well educated, of which our country has more than other developed nations, unfortunately. Let’s not forget also that unlike the rest of the developed world, many in the U.S. cannot afford our high-priced health marketplace, and have no or inadequate coverage to help them.
Significant advances in cancer treatment have come relatively recently. Older patients may assume cancer remains a death sentence and the treatments worse than the disease.
Surely seeking a fantasy miracle cure is not that different from the aspect of the human condition which calls out for help and counsel from supernatural beings. Given the complicated and mysterious influence of our mind on our body, divine aid or keeping hope alive cannot be discounted.
My advice tends toward the pragmatic, along with offering rides and bringing meals. I would try to help by urging the most appropriate and evidence-based treatment available, and by doing anything I can to make the inevitable end, whenever it comes, as peaceful as possible.
Roberta Medford
Atheist
Montrose