Is it possible to post negative Alt experience?

LOL, Gracie1- yes!  Along with quite a few others.  The table would have to be pretty big if it were all inclusive.  

....The Doctors, anything on the OWN channel or the ONE channel, whomever wrote that stupid "What Cancer Can't Do" poem......

Yup. This year's "quackery" is next year's standard of care.

Remember when Galileo was called a heretic for suggesting the earth revolved the sun?

Remember when the flat earth theory was a religious doctrine?

Wasn't it Oprah's pal Maya Angelu who said "When you know better you do better"? 

Dismissing things as quackery because you don't agree with the source that introduces them seems narrow-minded.  Some wacky things work, and some things that have the backing of big pharma turn out to be a very big mistake.

As Lucy88 pointed out, sometimes we find out that we didn't know as much as we thought we did, and irrefutable truths turn out not to be the truth.

If the only opinions allowed to go unchallenged are those that agree with you, and you find it necessary to insult anyone who has a different approach, perhaps that would explain why people who sometimes think outside the box might be less than welcoming to you on their "home turf".

"When you know better you do better. " - I don't know who said it, but I agree.

"Dismissing things as quackery because you don't agree with the source that introduces them seems narrow-minded."  I agree.  That's why I dismiss things as quackery that have no scientific evidence to support them, and I dismiss as quacks those who continue to promote quackery.  

"Some wacky things work, and some things that have the backing of big pharma turn out to be a very big mistake."  Yep.  That's why we have science.

"sometimes we find out that we didn't know as much as we thought we did, and irrefutable truths turn out not to be the truth."  Yep.  Again, the scientific process at work.

"If the only opinions allowed to go unchallenged are those that agree with you, and you find it necessary to insult anyone who has a different approach...."   That sounds like a classic example of projection to me.

Gracie, I totally agree - Oprah is a clown.  A brilliant money-maker, but a clown nevertheless, particularly when she gets involved with health matters.   

Re:

"Yup. This year's "quackery" is next year's standard of care"

Uh, no it's not.  Evidence based medicine is not going to be accepting of this year's quackery(tooth fairy science)  next year.   Just because you wish it so, dosen't make it so. It's actually childish thinking.  Orac has a great post on that today:

"Part of growing up is to realize that, to achieve your thoughts and desires requires more than just thinking and wanting really hard. The Secret bypasses the hard work and leads to regression straight back to the fantasies of childhood. In many ways, so does a lot of CAM. "

"If you believe the woo-meisters, basically thinking something makes it so. As I've pointed out before, this sort of wishful thinking is infantile but it meshes scarily well with a lot of what various alternative medical systems preach"

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/02/placebo_versus_the_law_of_attraction.php#more

Re:

Remember when Galileo was called a heretic for suggesting the earth revolved the sun?

Yawn.  The  tired old Galileo gambit is resurrected once again.  Galileo was persecuted by the church not his scientist peers.  They were rather accepting of his theories.  Whenever, I point this out the next argument is, "Well,yea but, they laughed at the Wright Brothers". Yes, this is true but they also laughed at the Marx Brothers and the 3 stooges.  That  twisted logic is pretty much out the door.  Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.

Re:

"Remember when the flat earth theory was a religious doctrine? "

Yes, now you are getting it.  Many alternative therapies are based on religious dogma.

Well in that case, I suppose I should apologize for insulting Oprah and her pals....not gonna happen. I've never insulted any board member for their treatment choices....none of my business. When you get to be where I am in this cancer mess, it's a whole new ball of wax and I don't have time to waste on un-productive people who "love" what cancer has done for them and "embrace" their new life and act like doctors and so on and so on. Speaking only for myself here. If you find a post where I've insulted someone for their treatment choices or their opinion, I'd love to hear it. Maybe I forgot and maybe I should be sorry. I'm more than willing to do that, but insulting celebrities who think they know it all.....nope, no apology coming.

The Galileo gambit is actually now considered a logical fallacy:

The Galileo gambit, or Galileo fallacy, is the notion that if you are vilified for your ideas, you must be right. It refers to Galileo Galilei's famous persecution at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church for his defence of heliocentrism in the face of the orthodox Biblical literalism of the day. People use this argument repeatedly in response to serious criticisms that more often than not they just don't understand

The fallacious fallacy

In "reality", taking up the mantle of Galileo requires not just that you are scorned by the establishment but also that you are correct.^[1] There is no necessary link between being perceived as wrong and actually being correct; usually if people perceive you to be wrong, you are wrong. However, the selective reporting of cases where people who were persecuted or ostracized for beliefs and ideas that later turned out to be valid has instilled a confidence in woo promoters and pseudoscientists that is difficult to shake. They really do forget the part where they have to prove themselves right in order to be like Galileo.

Cranks who use the gambit to claim persecution by "big science" often fail to see the irony in the comparison - it was the Catholic Church that censored Galileo, not the "scientific establishment

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit

Interesting reading, BlackCat, and some very good points made!  I don't remember ever seeing rationalwiki.org before, but ohmigosh!  LOVE IT!   I got sucked in for a while, but I especially enjoyed The Fine Art of Baloney Detection !   

PatMom, I really don't know what or who you're referring to, but the actual topic of this entire thread *IS* about the problem of not being "allowed" to express certain opinions, so ....?  

Thanks, Susieq!  It seems to me there's a huge elephant in the room around here, and it gets frustrating, you know?

As for the thing about "....  today's quackery is tomorrows standard of care" or whatever, I keep thinking about so many quack theories that keep coming up in this forum that have been around forever, debunked, and factually incorrect. Yet they keep coming up again and again.  Color me cynical, but I just don't see that Rife Therapy or The Baking Soda Cure will *ever* become standard of care, for example.  It just makes no sense at all!  

thenewme:  I've never heard of either one of those therapies, but rest assured if I did, I would research them thoroughly before giving them any consideration.  The site provides me with a lot of information and ideas...the final decisions are my own.

What is beginning to make sense in conventional medicine, and will hopefully soon become "standard of care" is the role that diet, supplementation and the immune system plays in prevention of all types of disease.  There are studies being done on the various supplements and how they work along with conventional therapy to make it more effective.  The premise behind the new cancer vaccine is to target the immune system and boost it to recognize and kill cancer cells.   

thenewme:  I agree, but for many years diet and supplementation has been ignored by conventional medicine, although many knew and tried to tell the world that it held the key to keeping our immune system strong, so it was "alternative" before it was "scientific". I don't think we can discount all alternative theories as quackery, and not consider them, simply because they don't have a lot of scientific evidence backing them up.  I think a little common sense must prevail at all times.

I do not consider diet and healthy habits to be alternative either.  I was considered to be the "health conscious" one in my family and I still got BC.

Diet is not alternative medicine. MDs have told me to eat well all my life. Surgery is not alternative medicine. It is medicine. It works so many followers of alternative medicine want to claim it for their own, but surgeons are practitioners of standard evidence based medicine.

Rosemary, a doctor telling you to eat well is not the same as telling you which specific foods to include in your diet, and which specific foods to avoid. 

I've had a doctor tell me to watch my diet to lower my bad cholesterol level and raise my good cholesterol level, but when I asked what foods would do that, I just got a blank stare. 

Diet counseling is not part of conventional medicine, unless someone is seriously overweight.  Otherwise, patients are expected to navigate their own way through the diet maze.

That doesn't even begin to take into consideration how many modifications have been made to the basic 4 food groups and food pyramid over the years.