Skeptics may be harmful to your health

Warning: Skeptics may be harmful to your health
The late Becky Simpson, a six-year cancer survivor at the time, was a panellist at the Dartington debate.
The great majority of cancer patients will empathise with the frustration of Becky in her piece (Click here - Does Integrated Medicine make sense? The Dartington Debate). Integrated Medicine should have been the norm in the UK 20 years ago. Factors such as the inability of Integrated Doctors to advertise their knowledge in cancer because of an outdated law (the 1939 Cancer Advertising Act), and the determination to see the law enforced against anyone even suggesting non-drug therapies might help survival are integral to the problem. Frankly, only the cancer patient suffers.
Becky also commented on her run-in with the Skeptics. The problem is that on one hand they cannot be taken very seriously. But on the other you have to take them seriously because the are potentially very dangerous to patient health and especially cancer patient survival.
I am not going to repeat what is written elsewhere (CLICK HERE - Are Skeptics the new Quacks?)
The peurile sniggering in the audience is all part of this ’pub group’ mentality. It is not so much an organisation as a ’cult’; and you don’t tend to get many well-balanced people in cults, unless they have a chip on both shoulders.
Secondly, Martin J Walker, the investigative journalist who uncovered all manner of links, placements, vested interests and so on, thinks the Skeptics definitely shouldn’t  be treated seriously. Why? Because they are simply not open to debate since they would have to consider new information, new research, and new scientific evidence that might conflict with their stance. Since they are not about to change their point of view, having any of them turn up to a debate is a complete waste of time.
Moreover, when the issue is medicine, and particularly, cancer, 99 per cent of them don’t have a clue, as is shown in some of the ’blogs’ which attack CANCERactive . They are neither well read nor well researched and few, if any, are oncologists, microbiologists or biochemists. Frankly, the great majority write misleading drivel.  (Actually it’s dangerous drivel if someone with cancer were to read it).
This of course is extremely worrying for the person with cancer. Whilst skeptics rush to call a Doctor who writes books on health and sells supplements a ’snake-oil salesman’, they don’t seem to believe they do any harm at all, leaving the obvious conclusion that they are either
        a Stupid, and/or,
        b Deluded, and/or,
        c Paid, directly or indirectly, by companies with vested interests to see the demise of anyone who dare suggest herbs, natural compounds and complementary therapies have research behind them to support their inclusion in treatment programmes designed to beat cancer.
Whatever. They come between the patient and better health.
The Dark Side - restricting personal choice
And this is the ’Dark Side’ of the ’Health Industry’. When Catherine, my daughter with the glioma, was given 6 months to live we were told the drugs provided no cure. We had to find alternatives. And, as we were both scientists by training, we went looking and found so much highly usable information around the world; information that could add months, if not years, to Catherine’s survival. What worried us was that the vast majority of this research was just not being passed on. People weren’t so much dying of cancer but of IGNORANCE  - so we set up a charity to pass the information on.
But, in so doing we also found that there are actually people who try to stop the information being passed on - for Catherine this was nothing short of quackery; Black Quackery. The Dark Side of health in the UK. 
Tell me please, who would want to stop a 22 year old girl accessing information that might give her four more months of life? Who would want to limit her personal choice of treatment? Who would want to stop her being ’better informed’? Who would want to ridicule the herbalists, nutritionists and their research on natural compounds and diet helping to beat cancer when the American Cancer Society, for example, is quite clear that ’Diet’ can increase cancer patient survival times AND EVEN KEEP YOU CANCER-FREE?
And that report has been endorsed by the National Cancer Industry in America, no less.
NCI scientists have even produced research in 2012 on how junk foods feed cancer stem cells and cause them to re-grow, while certain natural compounds (like curcumin, vitamin D, piperine and EGCG from green tea) can stop the cancer re-forming. 
 
Who would want to stop cancer patients, including my daughter, knowing these truths? Ultimately only someone who stands to lose out, and anybody who is gullible enough to support them.
Lack of Medical Credibility
Skeptics rarely divulge many details about themselves. Apart from possibly wanting to create some mystique or kudos around their banal utterings, there are several reasons for this.
1. If their employers knew what they were up to, they could lose their jobs.
’And what do you do in your spare time? Watch football? Raise money for good causes? Enjoy gardening?’
’No, I stop people with cancer learning that curcumin can restrict metastases.’
2. They can libel the innocent. If you cannot identify them it makes suing them difficult. So they can slag people off to their heart’s content. But they are still breaking the law by telling untruths about people. These people are often called trolls. I’m sure you can think of far better names. 
3. They can lie and exaggerate. One skeptic states that they were a ’former’ scientist. What does that mean? An ’O’ level in metalurgy? A geology A level?
4 They don’t have to have any cancer credential at all. If I told you that the person standing in front of you telling you that there was no evidence for a ’good diet’ helping people with cancer was actually a graduate in Physics who became a computer nerd, then advised people on computing business systems, you probably wouldn’t listen to one word he said about cancer or your health, would you?
Don’t.
To read about investigative journalist Martin J Walker’s books on the Skeptics CLICK here