Skeptics - profits before patients?

1. Skeptics attack CAM, support orthodox medicine despite flaws.
I am sceptical about many things, from homeopathy to whether Watford Football Club will finish above Everton in the English football Premiere League. But then I have followed Watford FC since I was 8, I read about them, they wanted me to be a director - I am fully informed. Equally, if they now sign Ronaldo and Messi I will take this new information into account and probably change my views. That really is what being sceptical is all about - being fully informed, and, open-minded.
It is also about questioning the status quo. Is it still relevant? Is it still the best on offer? Is the Government correct in its thinking? Should we still pull out of Europe given an increased pound? And so on.  
However, there is a group of people in the UK who like to call themselves Skeptics, who, to the ordinary man in the street, appear mindless. They never question the status quo, only something that they call alternative health (and which often isnt).
I am indebted to several Skeptics for clarifying to me that they most definitely neither fully informed nor open-minded.
These UK Skeptics seem to be focussed on only Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Its bad. Needs to be stopped immediately and the people who suggest it helps can be branded immediately as quacks.
This is puzzling because either you are a sceptical person or you are not - you cant shut your brain off. For example, there is plenty to be sceptical about in the field of orthodox medicine, but these skeptics seem to avidly toe the line supporting only orthodoxy, which they call science-based medicine or science based medicine or or evidence-based medicine. (Er, ... like prostate surgery, or radiotherapy, brachytherapy, cybeknife, chemotherapy for the under 12s, virotherapy, dendritic cell therapy, each of which is used in cancer centres today yet has hardly a decent clinical trial behind any of it. They dont mention those.)  HRT is known to kill people - that is clear from a number of real life studies. Not a skeptic mention. But woe betide a homeopath providing nosodes for pain relief or a naturopath providing herbs. Its all dangerous mumbo-jumbo, from people who give false hope.
On these Skeptic websites you will find little mention of really important news items like:

1. The World Health Organisation: Corruption endemic in medicine chain

2. British Health system covering up vaccine dangers

3  Landmark study fails to replicate research used to approve drugs

4. "Deadly medicines and organised crime. How Big-pharma corrupted healthcare"

5. We can no longer Trust Clinical Trials 
You will note a little consistency here. All these links go to science produced by experts in their field. All is damning of the companies and science the skeptics mindlessly argue for.
 
2. Why do so many Skeptics simply toe the line?
You have to wonder why? they do not seem worried about these really important issues. Why do they merely toe the orthodox line? But its not just me asking questions: In 2012 their e-magazine Skeptic was taken to task for toeing the line and pushing the spoon fed doctrines of Al Gore on climate change. You would have thought with all the interest in global warming (or is it climate change?) and now a spell of 15 years without seas rising and a temperature flat at best, there would be a lot to question. But no.
Of course, there are people who claim that some skeptics receive funding in the form of salaries, grants and even under the table payments from Big Pharma. This may or may not be true. The charity Sense about Science has been known to receive funding from Big Pharma and even Coca Cola. By coincidence its friends have criticised people who think alternatively in medicine or who criticise the sugar epidemic.
It is also clear that some skeptics may line their pockets in other ways, as we will see.
3. Warning: Skeptics may reduce survival times and endanger lives
Worse, I wonder if some of these so-called Skeptics ever stop to consider the potential harm they may do to cancer patients?
Their selektive interests, obvious disregard for, and dismissal of, any scientific evidence that conflicts with their orthodox medicine is wonderful and the only true way jihad, renders them open to claims of bigotry and makes it all to easy for real oncologists to dismiss then as irrelevant. Somehow, I doubt they care.
However, there is little doubt that their actions can and do mislead the lay person, the patient who is already confused and frightened by the diagnosis of cancer; the person who is trying to find out as much information as possible, as quickly as possible, to empower themselves and make more-informed and more-educated personal choices.  
For reasons best known to Skeptics they do not want you to be better informed or to make better personal choices. One even tells people to seek out icon magazine, remove it from hospitals and burn it. How does that help someone with breast cancer if we feature an article by UK cancer Tsar Mike Richards, or a Professor from the Royal Marsden? Perhaps it is because we tell the truth that the pill and HRT cause cancer or that Paclitaxel spreads it?
They also dont seem to want you taking any control over your life or your cancer. Its this extreme left wing, Animal Farm, troll mentality. Dont think - we will take care of your every need. Their stance is that the moment you are diagnosed with cancer you lose your mental capacity, you become helpless and vulnerable - their words for stupid. And so you need protecting. Not from a Doctor who might give you any of the above treatments without a serious, non-fudged Clinical Trial to support it, or a doctor who might hand you six or more drugs none of which have ever been tested in combination. No. You need protecting only from Homeopaths, Nutritionists and Naturopaths and all that Woo. 
Unsurprisingly, the net effect is that, rather than protecting the patient as they claim to be doing, they confuse the patient more, put doubt in their heads and restrict their treatment choice. But then thats what they want to do - to confuse you further, just when you are most vulnerable.  Ultimately, the only thing they really protect is Pharmaceutical companies profits. 
But the research that they ignore is quite clear: Since 2006, there has been an explosion in research into complementary therapies and overwhelming evidence that diet, weight control and exercise INCREASE SURVIVAL and even PREVENT A CANCER RETURNING. So says the American Cancer Society, in a report endorsed by the National Cancer Institute in America. The latter body even conducted research in 2012 talking about which foods caused a cancer to regrow and showing which stopped the regrowth. The lead researcher even said you could get these helpful bioactive natural compounds in supplements.

In 2017, the American Cancer Society produced the results of their clinical trial. It looked at their guidelines on diet and exercise. All the people in the Trial were stage 3; all had had chemo and surgery. Those who stuck closest to the diet and exercise guidelines had 31% less recurrence and 42% less death over the next seven years. Would someone - even a skeptic - please tell us a drug that can deliver these reults to Stage 3 cancer patients?
But the dinosaur skeptics want CANCERactive and Chris Woollams to stop telling you this sort of research. 
3. Misinformation, disinformation and lies
For example, in her Book Review: everything-you-need-to-know-to-help-you-beat-cancer a Skeptic called Josephine Jones (but that is a self-admitted fictitious name) uses the fact that she was a former scientist to rubbish the compilation book of this website. With a myriad of her twisted statements of what we actually do say in the book, Sarah or Bert, with their GCSE in metalurgy or woodwork, working for an industrial chemical company, says, for example,  He (Chris Woollams) also stresses several times that glucose "feeds cancer cells without seeming to grasp that it feeds the other cells too. 
What is she trying to achieve? To stop you knowing that high plasma glucose levels mean lowered survival? What? There is research on exactly that. Chris has now produced a review - 20 links between sugar and cancer. Professor Robert Thomas has joined in. Professor Angus Dalgleish gives stage 4 patients metformin. What is it? A Dibetes Drug. What does it do? Cuts blood sugar. What does that do? Stops cancer feeding. Jones was just one Skeptic who attacked people like Chris who said sugar was bad for you in 2012. Surprise, surprise. The Times did an investigation and announced the pure co-incidence that Sense about Science had received a donation from Coca Cola shortly before these sugar attacks. Jones has since dropped mention of sugar. But the damage to her reputation (if she had any credibility in the first place) is done. 
As Chris adds, "In 2015, a head oncologist at top cancer hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering wrote to me saying that they were following my e news and were extremely interested in calorie restriction (lowering glucose levels) in increasing cancer survival times. I have since received e mails from oncologists in California, MD Anderson and Florida. The Sloan-Kettering e mail said that I was in the forefront of cancer researchers. But alias Josephine Jones thinks she knows more!?"
The truth is that ONLY glucose feeds cancer cells, which is what it says in the book (sometimes glutamine too). But healthy cells are flexible and can use more than just glucose, if none is present - exactly what I say in the book that Josephine Jones lies so frequently about. So you can switch your diet to a good fat diet still feeding the healthy cells but starving the cancer cells (see Fasting and Cancer).
Josephine Jones also doesnt seem to have a clue about the importance of polysaccharides in cellular communication, and suggests that they are a source of glucose - they are not. Your body cannot break them. This ignorance, from a fabricated and fictional character, is blatantly dangerous to the health of cancer patients across Britain and the globe.  She seems to know little or nothing about the subject and actually wrote the book review on Everything you need to know to help you beat cancer  following tweets with other skeptics from a Trustee of Sense about Science to go and get Chris Woollamst because he took Professor David Colquhoun to task when he lied about him setting up CANCERactive for personal gain. He ended up with severe egg on his face when asking our accountants to explain a year where Chris had received a small payment only to find he had given it back PLUS 15,000 as a personal donation!!! Colquhoun published a public apology. But his actions just added weight to the feeling in many quarters that the skeptics are prone to exaggeration and even downright lies.
Some people even think that Josephine Jones is really another skeptic called Guy Chapman. who has a thousand page website under the guises of Guy Chapman Blahg and Guy Chapman Central. He is an Affiliate marketeer. Chapman has been known to use several fictitious names in the past. Skeptics do that because they can then appear to have a number of people and websites agreeing with their extreme views.
Websites like RationalWiki (Irrationalwacky more like!) and the Daily Quack make claims about CANCERactive and me personally that are just totally inaccurate. Apparently, I live on a sprawling estate in Buckinghamshire, I am being paid consultancy fees, and CANCERactive only spends about 40 per cent of its income on its declared aims unlike the truly wonderful Cancer Research UK, which in 2017 was deeply concerned about a $7 million pound shortfall in its pension fund. (Sigh!).
Cancer Researchs blogger even chums up to the skeptics and vice versa. What a sorry bunch of saddos.
Says Chris, "By the way, I live in Thailand, have done for years after leaving Barbados, I have made serious donations to CANCERavctive, and CANCERactive spends about 97 per cent of its revenue on information and support as none of the Trustees and directors takes a penny in salary unlike Cancer Research, which has become little more than the R&D department of Drugs companies.  
It is all just simply Skeptic LIES. Theres no other word for it".
4. Skeptic SCAMS lining skeptic pockets
"Skeptics seem to operate in the UK at several levels. And then there is a little concern I have that a few Skeptics are puting profit before patients:

1) The we believe were do-gooders: the several hundred foot soldiers who meet in pubs and tweet under bizarre, often childish, monikers; they frequently sound like mid-life crisis sufferers yearning for the days back behind the cycle sheds poking fun at school prefects and teachers alike. They can be anything from pathetically puerile to downright abusive, even publicly swearing at people in tweets. Their communications often contain not one scintilla of science. But then, that isnt the issue. They are frequently just being used by......
2) The Placements: The other end of the spectrum - the few opinion former/leaders, most usually, directly or indirectly, funded by Big Pharma, Big food, mobile telephony companies or whatever, happy to allow vested interests to drive their opinions. (In our investigations, two of them we found had started their sketicism when they perceived they had been wronged in their academic posts by complementary medicine and its advocates!)
There is frequent communication between the top people and their sycophant followers and highly organised attacks on, for example, Acupuncture and its practitioners, Homeopaths, Chiropractors, HRH Prince Charles, Herbalists, Nutritionists, Complementary and Alternative Medicine and anything or anyone else that ultimately is perceived to represent a threat to the sales of drugs; CANCERactive and Chris Woollams included. 
3) The Users for Private Gain:  A recent study has shown that more than a few skeptics seem to be running businesses (Affiliate Marketing Programmes) behind their Im out to rid the world of Quacks stance. You might well consider this a SCAM. Guy Chapman is one such Skeptic who has an affiliate marketing business. A large affiliate marketing business. In fact he speaks on Affiliate Marketing at conferences so presumably hes quite good at it.
The danger for innocent readers with cancer is that they click on a Skeptic site (like the factually inept RationalWiki) then get bounced around between further skeptic sites when they click links. After an innocent start, who knows where you could end up? The potential is there for having your personal data used, and abused.
 
A thousand pages lie behind Guy Chapmans blahg and Chapman Central. The more readers he can capture the better his business potential; and more readers will come through CONTROVERSIAL ARTICLES. A skeptic saying that Chris Woollams has written a very good book and is kind to his mum will not achieve anything like the volume of reader hits of a book review that instead controversially rubbishes the book, or saying that Freddie Star ate my hamster! Saying CAM is useless, or Homeopathy sucks will most likely bring howls of protest from the 80,000 practitioners in the UK and several million worldwide. The potential business from an attack on a large subject like CAM is huge - an Affiliate Marketeers dream.
But it is hard to know who is actively an affiliate marketeer, and who is just a gullible and innocent collector of leads. So  ...
WARNING: Do not click onto any Skeptic Website - you dont know where your personal ID will end up.
5. Controversy brings readership ... and that means money  
In a nutshell then; Skeptics say controversial things - and this brings readership to their website blogs. And ultimately, controversy gets them noticed and up the Google rankings. And that means more people hitting their sites. AND HITS MEAN MONEY. 
Affiliate marketeers want hits - they want to capture your e mail address, then your ID and ultimately sell you something. 
Importantly, you will not find one mention by them of matters crucial to the genuine interests of cancer patients such as the increasing number of illnesses and deaths from cocktails of prescribed medicines, bribery settlements where drug companies were trying to encourage doctors to prescribe one prostate cancer drug over a better one, or cases where thousands of patient details were passed to the safes-force of one pharma company for money, or simply the multitude of over-claims for certain new wonder drugs in press releases to journalists. Press releases that often break the 1939 Cancer Advertising Act. Press releases that reek of false hope and non-scientific eulogy. Why? Because Big Pharma would hammer them.
 
The one-sidedness of the Skeptic arguments says it all. If they are genuinely trying to help cancer patients by protecting them from snake oil salesmen they would  be arguing to protect cancer patients from ALL the fraudulent snake oils, not just the few they personally choose. But CAM is enough - a big business without incurring the wrath of Big Pharma. The Daily Quack picks on a little practitioner in Cleethorps or Cardiff every day. Why? Because it gets new readers, and  the attacked dont fight back.
How ironic that skeptic David Colquhoun accuses me of using a charity for Private Gain, only to allow himself to become embroiled (I presume unwittingly) in others using cancer and cancer patients to fuel their business databases.
Frankly, their actions are scandalous.
6. A danger to your health
Of course there will be a few who genuinely believe that stopping a man selling snake oil purporting to be a cancer cure is helping patients and we totally agree. The World Wide Web is littered with over-claims for coral calcium, B-17 and shark cartilage. But, for example, using the outdated 1939 Cancer Advertising Act to stop cancer patients (who may have been told there is nothing more their oncologist can do) seeing advertising in the press or on the web for the merits of a private UK clinic is disgusting.
One Skeptic recently even wrote to Christies, Manchester asking them if they felt they were breaking the 1939 Cancer Act because they told people they treated cancer. 
How on earth does any of this nonsense help cancer patients live longer? You may wonder if that was ever the purpose of their actions? It is not.  
Part of this group will deny there is any evidence for natural treatments or complementary therapies or newer alternative therapies like HIFU and Abletherm, or Hyperbaric oxygen and radiotherapy - their comments are frequently, quite simply, inaccurate and merely serve to confuse patients and restrict treatment choices further. But, as you read more you discover that is the idea. 
But what of complementary therapies that patients might want to use? To repeat:
 
The American Cancer Society report says that there has been an explosion of research into complementary therapies since 2006 - something our research centre Cancer Watch shows clearly - and overwhelming evidence that certain complementary therapies (for example: diet, exercise, weight control) CAN INCREASE SURVIVAL TIMES and STAY CANCER FREE!

Yet several Skeptic opinion formers blatantly tell people there is absolutely no evidence for complementary therapies; all complementary therapies. "I wouldnt believe a word Chris Woollams says", came from Professor David Colquhoun, who also implies on DCs Improbable Science that complementary therapies ... are quackery. A while back he even begrudgingly argued that acupuncture seems to work, but added ... you can stick the needles in anywhere! Bizaare. 
To cause further patient confusion and to stop patients taking up meaningful complementary therapies does not protect the patients. It stops them and their nurses understanding more about what can help and taking small but positive steps to increase their personal odds of survival. The patient will not survive as long as they might well have done before the confusion kicked in. It also puts UK cancer patients at a disadvantage compared to, say American patients, where oncologists actually recommend complementary therapies - Dr Henry Friedman calling building an Integrative Programme, Enlightened Medicine. Is a Skeptic who denies complementary therapy research worried about this?
As I write this I note, according to Bloomberg, that GSK pleaded guilty to the illegal promotion (Incentives?) of two drugs as part of a $3 billion (three billion dollars) settlement  - the largest US health care fraud case ever. In part, the placements are just cogs in this big picture with many of the foot soldiers merely the pawns simply and unwittingly  used to spread the confusion and disinformation.
To quote the words of George Bernard Shaw: "It is easy ...... terribly easy..... to shake a mans faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a mans spirit, is the devils work"
7. Investigative journalist uncovers the links
Readers who find themselves against the Skeptic bulldozing of natural health care and complementary and alternative treatments, plus those interested in having a continuing choice in their cancer treatment might like to read Dirty Medicine - the Handbook, a follow up to the 1993 book Dirty Medicine, by the investigative journalist Martin J Walker. There is also an excellent free downloadable essay entitled Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism by the same author.
This is well worth the read and an excellent place to start - it is a real eye-opener!
A review of Martin Walkers work and his revised Handbook is available at
http://anh-europe.org/news/anh-feature-dirty-medicine-%E2%80%94-the-handbook-by-martin-j-walker
To quote from the Handbook: These faux intellectual lobby groups are running one of the greatest scams ever practised, yet they manage to keep their smug self-satisfied cynical demeanor as they destroy peoples choice of health care therapies...

The role of ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members is a fascinating thread running through the fabric of the anti-natural healthcare campaign in the UK".

To buy the Martin J Walker Handbook CLICK here. 
To read about GSKs $3 billion fraud settlement CLICK here

To read about cancer research being falsified CLICK here
Two other relevant articles are:
 
Does Integrated Medicine make sense - a review of the Dartington Debate CLICK here
Skeptics can be harmful to your health CLICK here