up vote 1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm just wondering what work has been done to look at cancers left untreated and what the survival rates and prolonging time periods are like.

The reason I ask is that I see claims of cancer treatment from various alternative therapies, but wonder how they stack up against cancer where no active treatment has been sought.

According to Skepdic, Gerson practitioners claimed certainty in being able to cure cancer.

How do the claims of success in alternative cancer therapies compare to cancers left untreated?

link|improve this question
1  
I think the underlying question is something like "how do we refute the benefit of snake-oil cures if we don't know the survival statistics of no treatment at all?" Given the reference to gerson therapy this is nearly a good question. What would improve it would be a specific reference to a type of cancer where the snake-oil was claimed to work. In fact is is almost a generalisation of the Steve Jobs alternative therapy question. I think it is worth some work to make it concrete enough to reopen but I'm not quite sure exactly how. – matt_black Oct 27 '11 at 23:00
Cleaned up borderline snarky comments from several participants. Let's be nice and see if there is a Skeptics.SE question here. – Oddthinking Oct 28 '11 at 1:23
@James, the way this site works (when it works!) is that someone finds a notable claim that someone else made that they aren't sure about. Everyone here goes "Oh my! Someone out there is wrong! Let's fix that, with hard evidence." They go to sites like SkepDic to find that evidence. What they don't like to do is just research any random science question without anyone making a claim. It is a weird rule, but that's how our scope is defined. – Oddthinking Oct 28 '11 at 1:32
Your only claim here is pointing to a site that already answers your question: Gerson therapy has not been scientifically tested. Fifty cases were examined and found to not show evidence. – Oddthinking Oct 28 '11 at 1:33
2  
The general answer is that, in the gold standard, new treatments are tested against placebo, until an effective treatment is found. Once one is found it is generally considered unethical to leave the control group untreated for serious diseases, so the comparison has to be against existing treatments. This is a comment, because this entire discussion is off-topic for Skeptics.SE. – Oddthinking Oct 28 '11 at 1:36
show 1 more comment
feedback

closed as not a real question by Chad, Oddthinking Oct 27 '11 at 18:42

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.