Ignorance is Strength

I hope that this clears everything up, but I will summarise these findings for you. Dr Day (who is a qualified medical doctor), says that all cancer is caused by a failed immune system and can be cured by praying and consuming extract of barleygreen. Drugs are bad. Dr Burzynski (who is a qualified medical doctor) says that all cancer is associated with an absence of antineoplastons and that replacing these chemicals (a form of drug treatment) will fix the problem. Dr Clark (who has a legitimate PhD in physiology and a Doctor of Naturopathy degree from a correspondence school) says that all cancers are caused by a thumb-sized parasite in the liver and that killing this grub with electricity cures cancer immediately. Dr Chachoua (who is a qualified medical doctor) says that cancer is a result of an unfocussed immune system and that certain drugs can enable the immune system to target cancer cells more effectively.

To the untrained eye, these differing views of cancer and its causes and cures might seem contradictory. In fact, you might even say that they are mutually exclusive, in that they all propose completely different causes and cures for cancer, with no possible overlap. If you were a believer in "alternative medicine", however, you would see no inconsistency at all. As all of these stories have the common property of being opposed to "conventional medicine" (read "medicine"), they can all be correct simultaneously.

Dr Chachoua recently won a court case against Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was awarded $11 million in damages. I will write that out in words – eleven million US dollars. He was awarded this because the hospital's research arm had discontinued contracted research into his techniques. On his web site, Dr Chachoua suggests that his cure has been common knowledge for a long time and that it is a disgrace that this simple answer has not been taken up by conventional medicine. After the court-endorsed theft of money that could have been used for real research, Dr Chachoua created another web site which said that the $11 million was going to be used to do all the research again because all details of it had been lost by the hospital. These statements seemed inconsistent to me – it was going to take $11 million to refind the obvious – but, as I am a simple shill for allopathy, perhaps I just don't understand. (It seems that Dr Chachoua didn't use any of the $11 million to pay for registration of his domain name because the second site now points to a pornography sales outlet. I can understand how looking at dirty pictures could make someone's final days more interesting, but I don't think it's a cure for cancer.)

I found out about Dr Chachoua's windfall when someone posted details of this major victory for "alternative medicine" on an Internet mailing list inhabited by devotees of Hulda Clark. It was received with great pleasure and rejoicing. The person who posted the message had read it on a similar list devoted to the followers of the Burzynski creed, where it had engendered a similar enthusiastic response. The truly amazing thing is that any rational follower of either Burzynski or Clark should consider Chachoua to be an outrageous charlatan because he says quite clearly that their heroes are one hundred percent wrong. I have, in fact, openly challenged the supporters of these different curers to join me in denouncing all the other ones as quacks but the only response I got was to be accused of opposing "alternative medicine". Guilty, Your Honour.

Another thing that all these curers have in common, as well as being alternative, is that they are all being suppressed by the great billion-dollar cancer conspiracy. That's the conspiracy that has doctors and executives of pharmaceutical companies and fund-raising organisations letting members of their families die from cancer because they are forbidden from mentioning the alternatives and therefore threatening their employers' profits. The amazing thing to me is that these people are so suppressed that Lorraine Day can only appear on television weekly, Hulda Clark can only sell a few hundred thousand copies of her books every year (you can only get them through underground outlets like Amazon.com), Burzynski can charge $125,000 to participate in a "clinical trial" (because the authorities allowed him to exploit a loophole in the law which said that a clinical trial was not a "treatment"), and Chachoua can only get $11 million from a court. It seems to be an amazingly ineffective conspiracy.

From the original manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The title of this paper – "Ignorance is Strength" – came from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and is a suitable slogan for the "alternative medicine" movement. The following paragraph contains a possible manifesto for the movement, based on what Orwell wrote.

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Altmed intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Altmed, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately, it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able – and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years – to arrest the course of history."

One day I will write something about similar inconsistencies in the diet business. In the meantime, if I combine a no-fat diet with a no-carbohydrate one, add a touch of no-protein, avoid meat and dairy products, stay away from anything with additives or artificial vitamins and completely eliminate anything with a trace of genetic engineering I will probably lose weight and lower my risk of diabetes. The beauty of it is that I wouldn't have to stay on this regimen for more than a couple of weeks before I saw the effects.

References:

1. The Lorraine Day quote is from her web site at www.drday.com
2. The Burzynski quote is from the Burzynski patient group web site at www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. Dr Burzynski's own web site is at www.cancermed.com, where he is a smart enough not to talk about curing anything, preferring to leave that to the "patient group". There are two advertising sites for the Burzynski clinic at www.cancerbusters.com and www.ouralexander.org. Feel free to be outraged at the way dead and dying children are used in the promotional campaign.
3. The Hulda Clark quote is from her book The Cure for All Diseases. That's The Cure for All Diseases, in case you missed it the first time. The Clark web site is at www.drclark.net, although, like Burzynski, she prefers someone else to run the site and make the claims. You can look here see how Clark reacts to criticism.
4. The Chachoua quote is from his web site at www.nexusmagazine.com/chachoua.html
5. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. You can

From: "icyflames2"
Subject: Re: Cancer cures, Orwell and Earl
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 01:01:16 -0230

Peter,
This diatribe of your's only leads me to believe you fell down the rabbit's hole and been to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party? Real "Alice in Wonderland" stuff you wrote here.
I'd like to ask you, did Dr. Lorraine Day really have breast cancer or are those pics of her cancered breast-(i take it to be a cancer tumour, perhaps you know better)-on her website fake. If she did have cancer-(and note that she didn't take conventional therapy for it)-is she now cured? If she did indeed have cancer and she is indeed still alive, and she didn't take conventional cancer therapy for it, by what means do you think she is still alive? You yourself got doublethink i wonder? I bet you'll give me no answer to any of these questions of mine, will you?
From all i've heard of Dr. Burzynski he has a far greater cure rate with the type of cancer he treats than does conventional medicine! I guess personal testimony from people who have been treated by him is only to be regarded as "worthless" anecdotal evidence by "scientific method" people such as yourselves.
As for the other two, i don't know of them but they don't sound like they're doing much harm to me! They're apparently obeying the first law of medicine which is, "First do no harm", which for many conventional treatments and cures, the same thing can't be said. Remember conventional medicine's great motto and perhaps first law,.....cut, burn and poison and sell as many expensive pharmaceutical drugs as you can to get as rich as you can,.....which sems to any logical reasonable type person to be doing a great deal of harm, aided and abetted by dummies like you. I wonder when next you're going to take pen in hand and write another great load of pseudo psychological rubbish. What a twit he is folks.--rb

The following message was written in red text on a blue background. That means it looked like this. I have translated it into a form suitable for human eyes.

Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:12:33 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
From: Don Conner
Subject: Ditto to Icyflames2

Greetings, I wish to express my agreement with the response to your "Ignorance is strength, Indeed it must be so. Look in the mirror. I was being told by the medical establishment in 1991 that I had less than five years to live in the absence of a liver transplant. Under their treatment, that was nearly the case. The most promising treatments offered by alopathy only made me more ill. I made a unilateral decision, AMA. (against medical advice) I explored ,in my ignorant strength, all that I could ingest in the shortest period of time. I researched outside our culture and found some amazing contradictions as to what I was told by conventional American medicine. These same contradictions were arrived at through accepted scientific method in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, England. Not being able to travel there in person, I contacted people in those places, found the hardware I needed and did my own auto hemotherapy with an ozone machine I built, the same with a Rife Machine and an all natural diet of juicing and raw vegetables, I am well today and I rely on myself to stay that way. I can say definitively that I am well and absent any viral load. Because of what modality, I really don't care. I know that if I had done the medical model with transplant and all, that today I would be on a thousand dollars a month immunosupressive drugs and what ever else I had to take to deal with the side effects of the immunosupressant drugs. No thanks. Your errant poorly researched skepticism is the mirror of the worst charltonism present in the alternative health field and needs to be taken with a tub of salt as well.

Sincerely, Don Conner