P
Peter Moran
Guest
"Anth" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> "Peter Moran" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>
news:3fe0b521$0$896$61c65585@uq-127creek-reader-02.brisbane.pipenetworks.com.au...
> >
> > "Anth" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]...
> > > Coley's Toxins went through double blind trials and are not used in mainstream despite the
> > > fact they were shown to be effective. Shame really, because people with end stage metastatic
> > > cancer with no
> > other
> > > options could benefit from them.
> >
> > Show me the money, Anth.
>
> (I'd scan the pages from the Moss The Cancer Industry but my scanner isn't working)
Moss is not exactly an unbiased source of information. He selects whatever supports his case and
ignores anything that doesn't.. He has been a principal promoter of alleged conspiracies since he
was sacked by Sloan Kettering, but has never learnt anything from the fact that many of the agents
and personages in which he has invested trust have proved false, and none have ever established
reasonable validity, despite many years of examination both within and without alternative medicine
The most recent example of his credulity regarding alternatives is when he personally acted as
escort for a group of patients going to Ireland for so-called Cytoluminescent therapy. He strongly
recommended this to patients with advanced cancer but it later proved to be a rather shonky quack
enterprise.
>
> Here's some info from the net.
>
> In 1962, Dr. Barbara Johnston, M.D. published a double blind study on Coley's toxins. This study
> was conducted at New York University-Bellevue Hospital. The results were clear-cut. In the control
> group treated with fever inducing placebo, only one patient of 37 showed any signs of improvement.
> Of the 34 patients treated with Coley's toxins, 18 showed no improvement, 7 noted decreased pain
> while 9 showed such benefits as tumor necrosis, apparent inhibition of metastases, shrinkage of
> lymph nodes, and disappearance of tumors [12].
> [12] Johnston, Barbara, "Clinical Effects of Coley's Toxin. 1. Controlled Study. 2. A Seven-Year
> Study." Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 21:19-68,
August
> 1962.
It says "controlled". Moss says it was double-blind, but I still say this would have been unusual
even in 1962. But I admit that if a "fever inducing placebo" was used it may have been single or double-
blind (what was the placebo? - this in itself would be somewhat odd--- such agents are rare -- 2,4,
dinitrophenol? ---- I can't think of any that would be safe enough to use as a placebo- can anyone?)
. It may be true, but I have seen Moss misinterpret or misrepresent things in the past. But he is
much more reliable than Mercola, for what that is worth.
In any case, even if true, how many patients were alive and cancer free even three months later?
This in no way establishes worthwhile benefit to Coley's toxins, when the primary object of the
medical treatment of cancer has always been to find an at least moderately reliable permanent cure.
It is an alt.med furphy that showing "any effect" translates into a "worthwhile effect", or that
medicine should have rested upon such rather dismal results rather than looking around for something
better.. The reason chemotherapy and radiotherapy gained ground over numerous other treatments being
tried early last century is the absolutely spectacular way in which they will cause some kinds of
cancer to disappear and at rates much higher than shown in this study.
You will never have seen this. Any doctor will have. Sure, these methods were used in circumstances
where they were found not to help much, but much less so today. Real medicine is a constant learning
experience and can never be characterised by the past.
Having said all that, there was more optimism thirty or more years ago that a chemical "magic
bullet" for cancer was just around the corner. Treatments that may help prolong the life of the
occasional patient but which did not work very reliably may well not have been pursued with the
vigour that they might have otherwise. Even today, in a less optimistic era, cancer research is
driven by the expectation that ever-evolving new knowledge about cancer and newer technology such as
molecular biology will supply better answers than looking to the past.
> In 1982 at the conference held in Cologne, Germany, Mrs. Nauts reported
the
> first results of randomized trials of MBV (Coley's toxins) begun in 1976
at
> Memorial Sloan-Kettering: Advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients
receiving
> MBV had a 93 percent remission rate as opposed to 29 percent for controls who received
> chemotherapy alone [13].
>
> [13] Nauts, Helen Coley, Bacterial Products in the Treatment of Cancer: Past, Present and Future.
> Paper read at the International Colloqium on Bacteriology and Cancer, Clogne, Federal
> Republic of Germany, March 16-18, 1982.
I think this was from Coley's niece. The possibility of bias has to be allowed both ways.
I believe such results would have been taken seriously by the medical profession if the study was
convincing.
Papers read at medical conferences can differ greatly in quality from those published in the better
peer-reviewed journals. That applies especially to tightly focussed special interest group
conferences such as "Bacteriology and Cancer", where the organisers can be scratching around for
papers to fill the program. The presentations can thus be of quite poor quality, with insufficient
numbers for statistical significance, improper randomisation and other defects. Or they may be
included because they promote a particular viewpoint rather than for their scientific worth. Such
papers are also virtually impossible to chase down so as to check what they really showed. If, as I
presume, this particular work was never published anywhere else, it does raise doubts..
*In view of the fact that a great deal of alt.med lore is based upon old publications that are
almost impossible to check, and that the studies themselves are often found to be misrepresented
when they are checked, I think we should be allowed to attribute lessened significance to any that
are offered as evidence WITHOUT A SOURCE FOR THE FULL TEXT.*
In support of this suggestion I advise that I am shortly putting an example of such gross
misrepresentation up on the 'Net. Hardin Jones is said to have shown that untreated cancer patients
live four times longer than untreated. I have tracked down, with some difficulty, the 1956 paper
offered as the source of the claim .
Peter Moran
news:[email protected]...
> "Peter Moran" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>
news:3fe0b521$0$896$61c65585@uq-127creek-reader-02.brisbane.pipenetworks.com.au...
> >
> > "Anth" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]...
> > > Coley's Toxins went through double blind trials and are not used in mainstream despite the
> > > fact they were shown to be effective. Shame really, because people with end stage metastatic
> > > cancer with no
> > other
> > > options could benefit from them.
> >
> > Show me the money, Anth.
>
> (I'd scan the pages from the Moss The Cancer Industry but my scanner isn't working)
Moss is not exactly an unbiased source of information. He selects whatever supports his case and
ignores anything that doesn't.. He has been a principal promoter of alleged conspiracies since he
was sacked by Sloan Kettering, but has never learnt anything from the fact that many of the agents
and personages in which he has invested trust have proved false, and none have ever established
reasonable validity, despite many years of examination both within and without alternative medicine
The most recent example of his credulity regarding alternatives is when he personally acted as
escort for a group of patients going to Ireland for so-called Cytoluminescent therapy. He strongly
recommended this to patients with advanced cancer but it later proved to be a rather shonky quack
enterprise.
>
> Here's some info from the net.
>
> In 1962, Dr. Barbara Johnston, M.D. published a double blind study on Coley's toxins. This study
> was conducted at New York University-Bellevue Hospital. The results were clear-cut. In the control
> group treated with fever inducing placebo, only one patient of 37 showed any signs of improvement.
> Of the 34 patients treated with Coley's toxins, 18 showed no improvement, 7 noted decreased pain
> while 9 showed such benefits as tumor necrosis, apparent inhibition of metastases, shrinkage of
> lymph nodes, and disappearance of tumors [12].
> [12] Johnston, Barbara, "Clinical Effects of Coley's Toxin. 1. Controlled Study. 2. A Seven-Year
> Study." Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 21:19-68,
August
> 1962.
It says "controlled". Moss says it was double-blind, but I still say this would have been unusual
even in 1962. But I admit that if a "fever inducing placebo" was used it may have been single or double-
blind (what was the placebo? - this in itself would be somewhat odd--- such agents are rare -- 2,4,
dinitrophenol? ---- I can't think of any that would be safe enough to use as a placebo- can anyone?)
. It may be true, but I have seen Moss misinterpret or misrepresent things in the past. But he is
much more reliable than Mercola, for what that is worth.
In any case, even if true, how many patients were alive and cancer free even three months later?
This in no way establishes worthwhile benefit to Coley's toxins, when the primary object of the
medical treatment of cancer has always been to find an at least moderately reliable permanent cure.
It is an alt.med furphy that showing "any effect" translates into a "worthwhile effect", or that
medicine should have rested upon such rather dismal results rather than looking around for something
better.. The reason chemotherapy and radiotherapy gained ground over numerous other treatments being
tried early last century is the absolutely spectacular way in which they will cause some kinds of
cancer to disappear and at rates much higher than shown in this study.
You will never have seen this. Any doctor will have. Sure, these methods were used in circumstances
where they were found not to help much, but much less so today. Real medicine is a constant learning
experience and can never be characterised by the past.
Having said all that, there was more optimism thirty or more years ago that a chemical "magic
bullet" for cancer was just around the corner. Treatments that may help prolong the life of the
occasional patient but which did not work very reliably may well not have been pursued with the
vigour that they might have otherwise. Even today, in a less optimistic era, cancer research is
driven by the expectation that ever-evolving new knowledge about cancer and newer technology such as
molecular biology will supply better answers than looking to the past.
> In 1982 at the conference held in Cologne, Germany, Mrs. Nauts reported
the
> first results of randomized trials of MBV (Coley's toxins) begun in 1976
at
> Memorial Sloan-Kettering: Advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients
receiving
> MBV had a 93 percent remission rate as opposed to 29 percent for controls who received
> chemotherapy alone [13].
>
> [13] Nauts, Helen Coley, Bacterial Products in the Treatment of Cancer: Past, Present and Future.
> Paper read at the International Colloqium on Bacteriology and Cancer, Clogne, Federal
> Republic of Germany, March 16-18, 1982.
I think this was from Coley's niece. The possibility of bias has to be allowed both ways.
I believe such results would have been taken seriously by the medical profession if the study was
convincing.
Papers read at medical conferences can differ greatly in quality from those published in the better
peer-reviewed journals. That applies especially to tightly focussed special interest group
conferences such as "Bacteriology and Cancer", where the organisers can be scratching around for
papers to fill the program. The presentations can thus be of quite poor quality, with insufficient
numbers for statistical significance, improper randomisation and other defects. Or they may be
included because they promote a particular viewpoint rather than for their scientific worth. Such
papers are also virtually impossible to chase down so as to check what they really showed. If, as I
presume, this particular work was never published anywhere else, it does raise doubts..
*In view of the fact that a great deal of alt.med lore is based upon old publications that are
almost impossible to check, and that the studies themselves are often found to be misrepresented
when they are checked, I think we should be allowed to attribute lessened significance to any that
are offered as evidence WITHOUT A SOURCE FOR THE FULL TEXT.*
In support of this suggestion I advise that I am shortly putting an example of such gross
misrepresentation up on the 'Net. Hardin Jones is said to have shown that untreated cancer patients
live four times longer than untreated. I have tracked down, with some difficulty, the 1956 paper
offered as the source of the claim .
Peter Moran