Help or Hindrance
Letter to the Sunday Star Times, sent yesterday.
25 Harrisville Road,
Tuakau 2121,
092368990
Aug 2010
Dear Sir,
Michael Jameson (oncologist) complains that the solution to the question as to whether or not vitamin C helps cancer patients, is that any benefits short and long term, needs data accumulated by doctors through case studies, and long term trials.
Jameson is part of the reason why it’s “a long slow” (non-existent) process.
Replay this scene, all around the country … whereby ALL oncologists say “No”; and don’t offer to monitor and collect scientific data.
How dumb is that?
What about all those patients who are sick of oncologists saying no, and are going to do it anyway, today…, every year, without subsidy from the Government? These people are footing the bills themselves … quite happy to be studied, and are a valuable huge raft of study material needlessly going to waste!
So what exactly what is the problem with doing this? That the patients aren’t some specially chosen, vetted, double blind, randomised forty year long trial?
The sensible solution appears simple. If patients are going to use vitamin C anyway, oncologists should say “Yes”, THEN monitor their progress themselves. Even better, oncologists could use as controls, identical cases who don’t want to use vitamin C. Within a year or two, a whole raft of ‘proof of the pudding” case studies and observation trials with controls throughout the country, would be ready to hit the medical journals, resolving some of the very issues Jameson raised.
Hilary Butler.