Lee's Blog

I sometimes get frustrated at both sides of the debate over CAM* cancer cures. Yes, I even get frustrated at Orac! The reason is that the defenders of science tend to allow defenders of CAM get away with not proving their case.

The defenders of CAM like to whine that of course they can’t afford to do proper randomized placebo-controlled double-blinded trials, and the scientific community won’t fund those trials, and it’s just all very unfair because people are dying for lack of that proof.

This is bogus**, and defenders of science should hit them with that every time they whine about it.

CAM defenders claim to have cancer cure rates for all cancers upwards of 90%. If this is the case, they can prove it to the complete satisfaction of anybody (including the Nobel Prize committee) very easily and cheaply, just doing what they do now. All they need to do is pick one of the truly horrible cancers — pancreatic, for instance — and report two-year survival for a reasonably large group, say one hundred patients.

Two-year survival percentages for pancreatic cancer are in the single digits for all patients, regardless of age, medical condition, and treatment (though survival is lower without treatment, of course). Therefore it doesn’t matter whether people are randomly assigned to the CAM treatment or not, or whether there’s a control group, since there are no known variables that would make much difference in survival. The natural history of the disease serves as the control group.

Similarly, there’s no need for any patients to receive a placebo. Placebos may make a difference in how the patient feels about the situation, maybe in the pain or discomfort he suffers, but they make very little difference in survival. If placebos kept cancer patients alive, oncologists would have lots more surviving patients.

Likewise, there’s no need for blinding either side, if the measure is “Patient is alive” vs. “Patient is dead”. Barring fraud, there are very few doubtful cases where one might be inclined to score a patient as alive or dead based on one’s presuppositions about the effectiveness of treatment.

In short, to prove that a CAM cancer treatment works, the practitioner should proceed as follows:

• Line up a hundred or so pancreatic cancer patients.
• Make sure they are properly evaluated by a conventional oncologist, so there can be no question of their diagnosis.
• Document irrevocably their identifying information, so there can be no doubt as to who was in the original group***.
• Treat them according to the CAM protocol.

If, after two years, ninety of the group are still alive (as we would expect given the claims of CAM practitioners), then the treatment undeniably must have worked. There simply are no known confounding factors, biasing influences, or other treatments that could have produced that result.

And if CAM defenders don’t push for this simple demonstration … well, we know what that means.

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* I.e., pseudo-scientific.
** Simon Singh got in trouble for using that word …
*** I would put all the info in one big document then encrypt it using public/private keys, burn the encrypted document on CDs, and then ship it off to national health services, insurance companies, individual oncologists, mass media, bloggers, and anyone else I could think of. But then, I think in computer terms. The point of encrypting is that the patients’ private information isn’t revealed to the world. Part of setting up the test is that the patients agree that after two years their info can be revealed. Since they don’t expect to be around in two years, it seems to me that they’d be willing. After two years, you reveal the private key so anyone who wants to can verify that the surviving patients really do represent 90% of the original group.

The IPCC report was supposedly the work of a group of scientists, conscientiously reporting the state of scientific knowledge. It was not supposed to be political hackwork, cherry-picking or making up supposed evidence in order to deceive readers into taking the desired action. Yet there are numerous cases now where it has indeed been shown to be hackwork. One of its sources was a boot cleaning guide, for crying out loud!

Various people online have objected that, oh, well, the report is hundreds of pages long and only about four fraudulent statements have been publicized so far. I mentioned before one of my favorite lines from Alas, Babylon: if you shake a haystack and four needles fall out, chances are that haystack is just thick with needles.

My first question is, “Is global warming occurring at all?” Suppose the answer to that is, “Yes.”

Second question: Is global warming harmful? The usual answer is, yes, of course, what kind of denialist are you that would question that?

But really, as the saying goes, ’tis an ill wind that blows no one good. Global warming could hurt some people and help others. If the harm affects only a small group (people who live in areas that are already almost awash) and the benefit accrues to billions, the moral calculus is quite different than if the harm affects billions and the benefit accrues only to a few. That is an issue that should be considered and studied instead of assumed.

Of course, one must also consider the animals. I certainly am not one to say, let our animal cousins die so long as we’re okay. However, an awful lot of our animal cousins are endangered right now because of us. If, for instance, global warming improved growing conditions in the temperate zones that are already farmed, it might be possible to feed the existing human population with less impact on animal species. Again, it’s possible that some few will be more endangered but many more will be less endangered, or vice versa. But, again, that is an issue that should be considered and studied instead of assumed.

Moreover, with respect to animals, there seems to be quite good evidence that glaciers have advanced and retreated quite dramatically even in historical times, implying that the Little Ice Age and recovery therefrom are by no means unique. Yet cold-climate animals continue to exist.

Again, I am not callously indifferent to the harms that could come from global warming, but I recognize that there might be benefits too which should not be summarily dismissed.

One thing that has always bothered me about the global warming dispute is that so many people seem to be asking the wrong question. The question is usually, “Can Western civilization be forced to do something about the global warming that it has caused?” But that’s like “Have you stopped beating your wife?” There are other questions to be asked first.

First question: Is global warming occurring at all? The problem with this is that the answer is Yes, No, or Maybe, depending on the time-scale.

• Yes. On a scale of thousands of years, the Earth is warming up. Fifteen thousand years ago, the spot where I am sitting was under a mile of ice. It’s warmed up substantially since then.
• No. On a scale of millions of years, the Earth is cooling down. For most of the Earth’s history, there were no continental glaciers anywhere, not even at the Poles. Our current climate, with an ice cap on Antarctica and another on Greenland, with occasional excursions on the continents of the Northern Hemisphere, is quite unusual. Any warming we may see is quite trivial compared to that huge decline.
• Maybe. On a scale of decades and centuries … I don’t know. The part of the Earth for which we have the best, most complete, and longest records, underwent the Little Ice Age not so long ago. According to Wikipedia, there is evidence that the Little Ice Age was world-wide, though of course the IPCC denied this and further claimed that “[Viewed] hemispherically, the ‘Little Ice Age’ can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels.”

I find it extremely hard to believe that a “modest cooling”, a decrease in average temperature of just 1°C, produced winters so cold that trees broke apart when their sap froze solid, that it was possible to have “Ice Fairs” on the Thames River, and that whole villages were destroyed by advancing glaciers. The claim comes from the IPCC, of course, so they probably got it off the back of a cereal box.

It’s possible that the Little Ice Age was a blip and the Earth is now recovering back to the same levels as the Medieval Warm Period (though it isn’t there yet). Glaciers that destroyed medieval villages have melted back (I don’t know where I read this, but I remember a sad description of villagers going up to the glaciers and praying to God to stop their advance — it didn’t work). Grapes grew in Britain during the Medieval Warm Period, but the Little Ice Age was too much for them and they essentially disappeared. Apparently it is now possible to grow grapes in Britain again, though not as well as during the Medieval Warm Period.

So the Earth may be warming up, or it may have warmed up since the Little Ice Age but has now reached a plateau, or it may even have started to cool again, maybe because of the low number of sunspots recently.* And it is really maddening that the principal climate scientists have made it impossible to know what the answer really is.

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* Or, if the IPCC is correct, the Little Ice Age affected only the well-instrumented parts of the Earth, and all other parts were much warmer than today, so as to offset the documented temperature drop. In that case, most of the Earth is cooler than it was 150 years ago.

One of the questions I have about the climate scandal that I don’t think has been answered is, why were FOIA requests required in the first place?

I mean, if I were a scientist, and my painstaking research revealed an existential danger to life on Earth, I’d want to get the word out any way I could. I’d want other scientists to have full access to my data. I’d want them to replicate my results and confirm my conclusions.

Sure, there’d be those skeptics who couldn’t be convinced no matter what (see previous post about birthers and mention of the TANG memos), but if everyone who looked at my mountain of evidence without too much bias reached the same conclusion, that conclusion could be considered pretty sound.

If I really thought I’d found a serious threat that required immediate action, the one thing I definitely would not do is hang onto the data and dole it in minimum publishable units, for the sake of my career. And yet, that’s what it seems that the “scientists” at the University of East Anglia have been doing. In between destroying the data so there’s nothing left but their “corrected” version, of course.

It would have been a whole lot simpler and more convenient if, when FOIA requests came in, the “scientists” (who would have deserved that name) could have just pointed to their freely available repository of files and said, help yourself.

Another question I have is why those “scientists” were even allowed to hang onto that data. Did they personally buy it out of their own pockets? If so, then, yes, I suppose they owned it and could legally refuse to hand it over to anyone. But I don’t think they did.

So why didn’t the UEA simply order their employees to make the data freely available? Sure, that would have cost money to put the files in shape for release, but there are billions sloshing around in the global warming biz. They could have asked the UN for a grant. They could have asked the World Wildlife Fund. They could have asked Al Gore. They could have asked Parliament, or the U.S. Congress. They could have simply put an appeal on the Internet. They didn’t do any of that. Why not?

Why didn’t Parliament simply order the records released? If uncontrolled global warming occurs, it could harm Britain along with the rest of the world. If the major economies of the world are destroyed in an effort to stop global warming, it most certainly will harm Britain along with the rest of the world. Wouldn’t it make sense for the British government to compel its employees to reveal the data and allow a thorough review of the matter?

The global warming science is settled, settled! Aren’t you listening? It’s settled!

Why, you have only to look at the IPCC report, which was based on the unimpeachable, peer-reviewed research of every highly-respected climate scientist on the globe!

Well … except for that thing about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035. That was just a throw-away claim made in a popular article by a non-researcher, but it sounded really scary so they tossed it in.

And, well … except for that thing about the rain forests, that came from a report by an environmental group that wouldn’t have any bias, oh no. Not to mention that the report, besides not being peer-reviewed and being written by people with no expertise in climate research, didn’t actually say what the IPCC claimed it said. But other than that, it was really reliable.

And, well … except for the fact that some of the most prominent figures among the climate scientists engaged in illegal action to conceal their purported evidence, though they managed to drag out the process long enough that the statute of limitations has run.

And, well, also … except for that other fact that while they were breaking the law by concealing their purported evidence, they also “lost” (oops!) the raw data that didn’t have their “corrections” in it.

And, um … except that the Russians say some of their own climate observations were deliberately removed from the records to produce an apparent global warming.

But other than that the science is absolutely settled and beyond any rational questioning. Which is why, no matter what the topic under discussion, commenters on ScienceBlogs routinely throw in sneers about global warming “denialism”, saying, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who doubts any global warming claim whatsoever, no matter who it comes from or what provenance it might have, is equivalent to a believer in homeopathy and creationism.

Well, I don’t believe in homeopathy, creationism, distance healing, astrology, 9/11 trutherism*, or birtherism**. But I am very troubled by the evidence that is coming out about global warming. At this point, I don’t trust the so-called researchers any more than I trust any other political hack.

And I really wish the people who are pleased to style themselves skeptics on ScienceBlogs could bring themselves to give up the fallacy of guilt by association. Global warming is not necessarily true just because many of the people who doubt it, disagree with them politically.

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* 9/11 “truthers” claim the United States government and/or the Mossad — anyone besides Arab terrorists — brought down the Twin Towers.

** “Birthers” claim that The One is not a U.S. citizen and cannot produce a valid birth certificate because he was born in Kenya and thus is not eligible to be President.

During the recent dust-up about Daniel Hauser and his parents’ refusal to permit the chemotherapy that would very probably save his life, there were a lot of comments basically to the effect that there are safe and effective “natural” treatments for cancer (Hauser’s mother claimed a 100% chance of a cure by such treatments) which Big Pharma and the medical profession in general have been covering up to protect their lucrative policy of burning, slashing, and poisoning their patients.

Sure.

I personally have known two doctors who died of cancer, two more who lost spouses to cancer, and one who lost a parent to cancer. And that’s just doctors that I know and whose histories I know. Did they all know about safe and effective “natural” treatments for cancer? Did they all just sit back and die, or let their loved ones die, to protect the incomes of other people? None of these doctors were oncologists; it didn’t benefit them personally to suppress natural cures.

So maybe they themselves didn’t know about the safe and effective “natural” treatments? Maybe only the cancer researchers, oncologists, radiologists, pharmacists, Big Pharma executives, and similar vile people are in the know?

But then, let’s talk about Orac himself. He recently lost his mother-in-law to cancer. Did he know there was a cure, but he didn’t provide it to her because he needed to protect his livelihood? If so, all I can say is, he’d better hope he doesn’t talk in his sleep.

For that matter, since Orac is a cancer researcher, what does he do all day? Does he know there’s a cure that he has to be careful not to find? Does he carefully redirect all research into what he knows to be dead ends? Is he, in fact, spending his entire professional career deliberately failing to find what he knows to exist? What kind of person would do that? And it can’t be just him; every cancer researcher must be deliberately going down blind alleys their entire professional career — if they know about the cure. What keeps all of them — every last one of them — from going public? (“Ooh, ooh, I know! Death threats from Big Pharma!” And no one’s heard of the letter hidden away to be mailed upon the person’s death? No one’s ever read Firestarter on how to deal with a big and ruthless organization trying to shut you up?)

Well, maybe cancer researchers don’t know about the cure. Maybe only the Big Pharma executives know. But how are they keeping a lid on it? How are they suppressing research all over the planet? How are they preventing government-run health systems from seeking out the one true Cure For All Cancers? After all, the cure is known to some and it can’t require a huge research effort to find, since it’s all natural and besides there hasn’t been a huge research effort that found it.

All I can say is, I must be wasting my time programming for the financial industry. I want to get into programming for Big Pharma. They must have some really great data mining software — in many languages no less — to keep track of every researcher everywhere so that those who start down a productive path can be derailed or, ahem, eliminated.

Hmm, I wonder what the death rate is for bright young idealistic cancer researchers. It must be very high. Should some enterprising reporter check into that? Being sure, of course, to make the fact of the investigation very widely known.