The Internet is full of complete nonsense about alternative medicine, as we all know. Much of it could be funny – if it was not so extremely dangerous. Misinformation on health can (and I am afraid does) kill people. One of the worst BS I have seen for a long time is this article entitled ‘Here’s What Oncologists Won’t Tell You About Essential Oils’.
A few excerpts might be of interest:
START OF QUOTES
…The human body resonates at a frequency of 62-78 MHz and scientists believe that diseases start at 58 MHz. Many studies have shown that negative thoughts can reduce our frequency by 12 MHz, while positive thinking raises it by 10.
This means that there are many things that can affect our health in ways we can’t imagine.
According to the latest studies, essential oils can fight cancer thanks to their antibacterial properties and their ability to change the frequency we resonate at.
One of the scientists involved in the study, Bruce Tainio, developed a special Calibrated Frequency Monitor that measures the frequency of essential oils and how they affect us. M. Suhail, an immunologist, says that cancer develops when the DNA in our cells’ nucleus is corrupted.
Essential oils can correct this and repair the code, effectively improving our chances against the terrible disease…
In his book “The Body Electric”, R. O. Becker said that our bodies’ electronic frequency determines our health.
Even Nikola Tesla said that removing outside frequencies can make us more resistant against ailments, while Dr. Otto Warburg discovered over a century ago that our cells have a specific electrical voltage that can drop due to a various factors and trigger diseases such as cancer.
However, science has now discovered that essential oils with higher frequencies can destroy diseases with lower frequencies.
Here’s a list of some of the oils used in the research and their electrical frequencies:
- Juniper – 98 Mhz
- Angelica – 85 Mhz
- Frankincense – 147 MHz
- Rose – 320 Mhz.
- Sandalwood – 96 Mhz
- Helichrysum – 181 MHz
- Peppermint – 78 Mhz
- Lavender – 118 Mhz
In the study, cinnamon, thyme, jasmine and chamomile oils had the best results when put up against breast cancer cells. Chamomile destroyed 93% of the cells in vitro, while thyme destroyed 97% of the cells…
11 oils were examined in total including bitter and sweet fennel, winter savory, peppermint, sage, lavender, chamomile and thyme.
Frankincense oil
According to Suhail, frankincense oil can divide the nucleus of cancer cells from the cytoplasm and prevent it from reproducing. The oil works thanks to the presence of the so-called monoterpenes which have the ability to kill cancer cells.
Frankincense oil works in all stages of cancer and is cytotoxic, meaning it doesn’t destroy healthy cells.
End-stage liver cancer patient
In the study, a patient with end-stage liver cancer was given only a few months left to live. The tumor was inoperable due to the large size, so having nothing to lose, the man decided to try frankincense oil.
He applied a bit under his tongue and topically on the area of the liver, and on his next doctor visit, the tumor has already reduced in size. The patient continued using frankincense oil, and it eventually reduced just enough to be operable. His tumor was later removed and the man is now happily enjoying his life free of cancer.
A child with brain cancer
One of the toughest cases among all the patients in the study was a little girl aged 5 with brain cancer. After exhausting all other options, the parents decided to give the girl a mixture of frankincense and sandalwood oil.
They rubbed the mixture on her feet while also rubbing a bit of lavender on her wrist. After a few months, the cancer was completely defeated!
Bladder cancer patient
Jackie Hogan is a woman suffering from bladder cancer who needed to undergo a surgery for bladder removal due to the cancer.
However, she decided to try using essential oils in her condition and after a few months of applying a mixture of sandalwood and frankincense oil topically on the area, she is cancer-free.
Stage-4 cancer patient
One woman in the research was diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer which has already spread to other organs in her body.
Instead of agreeing to chemo and surgery, the woman started applying a bit of frankincense oil topically on the affected areas of her body every 2-3 hours and she was completely healthy in 7 months.
Breast cancer patient
A woman diagnosed with advanced breast cancer used a mixture of frankincense and lemongrass oil (topically and under the tongue) to defeat the disease in only a few months.
Cervical cancer patient
A woman with cervical cancer was given only a few months left to live, but thanks to the powers of frankincense oil, she managed to defeat the diseases in a couple of months.
There are many more patients who have managed to defeat different types of cancer using the remarkable powers of various essential oils…
_________________________________________________________________________
END OF QUOTES
Unspeakable nonsense!
I managed to find 4 of the studies this article seems to refer to:
__________________________________________________________________________
Dozmorov MG, Yang Q, Wu W, Wren J, Suhail MM, Woolley CL, Young DG, Fung KM, Lin HK.
Chin Med. 2014 Jul 2;9:18. doi: 10.1186/1749-8546-9-18. eCollection 2014.
- PMID:
- 25006348
Ni X, Suhail MM, Yang Q, Cao A, Fung KM, Postier RG, Woolley C, Young G, Zhang J, Lin HK.
BMC Complement Altern Med. 2012 Dec 13;12:253. doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-12-253.
- PMID:
- 23237355
Woolley CL, Suhail MM, Smith BL, Boren KE, Taylor LC, Schreuder MF, Chai JK, Casabianca H, Haq S, Lin HK, Al-Shahri AA, Al-Hatmi S, Young DG.
J Chromatogr A. 2012 Oct 26;1261:158-63. doi: 10.1016/j.chroma.2012.06.073. Epub 2012 Jun 28.
- PMID:
- 22835693
Suhail MM, Wu W, Cao A, Mondalek FG, Fung KM, Shih PT, Fang YT, Woolley C, Young G, Lin HK.
BMC Complement Altern Med. 2011 Dec 15;11:129. doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-11-129.
- PMID:
- 22171782
____________________________________________________________________________
I do not think that these papers actually show what is claimed above. Specifically, none of the 4 articles refers to clinical effects of essential oil on cancer patients. In fact, according to a 2014 review, and a 2013 paper (the most recent summaries I found) there are no clinical trials of essential oil as a cure for cancer.
The conclusion therefore must be this: Essential oils might be an interesting area of research, yet one has to tell consumers and patients very clearly:
there is no evidence to suggest that using essential oils will change the natural history of any type of cancer.
I have always found that the major essential oils are olive, canola and sesame though some heretics include sunflower oil.
The human body resonates at a frequency of 62-78 MHz and scientists believe that diseases start at 58 MHz. Many studies have shown that negative thoughts can reduce our frequency by 12 MHz, while positive thinking raises it by 10.
That does it! I am getting a 3 metre iron stake, some heavy duty copper wire and grounding myself.
=================
I wonder how many people this stupid article will help kill? It looks like a parody that Alan Sokal would be envious of but people will take it seriously.
I suspect I even know some who would fall for this crap.
My brother has liver cancer that has grown so large that it is non operable. I told him to start using oils and he said his doctor told him to not use anything but just do the Chemo. He called the oils snake oils. I told him I will use my snake oils any day over your Chemo,if I ever get cancer. After 2 weeks on Chemo, he was admitted to the hospital and they said he was with-in minuets of dying. He told the doctor no more Chemo. He is home now using the oils. His last visit the tumor had not grown, so he is stable. Even if you choose Chemo, you can still use the oils and thousand have found that they work for them. I can honestly say I have known a dozen people in the past few years that did Chemo and only lived about a year at the longest and all of them said they would never do Chemo again. Chemo has worked on some people but for the majority it is a death sentence of torture.
I did chemo for stage 3A Lung Cancer. My red,white and hemoglobin numbers dropped and my sister put Frankincense Oil on my feet with Fractionated Coconut Oil and all of my Blood counts numbers came up. Best of Prayers to you and Yours?
It sounds as though the single dose of chemo that your brother had has stabilised his cancer for a while. Though from what you say it was probably not liver cancer, which isn’t normally treated with chemo, but cancer which had started somewhere else and spread to his liver.
With regard to palliative chemo (i.e. used in incurable cancer with the aim of controlling symptoms and prolonging life) it is very important to monitor it carefully and stop at once if it isn’t working or if the side-effects become unacceptable. It is also important not to start it unless the patient is reasonably fit – the most important indicator of prognosis is how well they are to begin with.
My father was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and by the time the diagnosis was made he had lost nearly 30Kg and was in a wheelchair. I didn’t think he was well enough for chemo but he insisted, so I arranged for him to be seen at the hospital where I was working. Although it was a two-hour drive from his home he decided to have his treatment there, and he actually seemed to enjoy his trips to London for chemo, not least because he had a number of ex-girlfriends who lived nearby and they would visit him on the ward. He would also flirt outrageously with the nurses… Although the drugs he was on are known to be very toxic (cisplatin, mitomycin C and 5-fluorouracil) he found the side-effects quite manageable.
Following the first dose he was well enough to have a short walk with me in a local bluebell wood. By the time he had completed 24 weeks of treatment he was well enough to take himself off to a university reunion and dance at a wedding. Once year after starting treatment the cancer came back and progressed very quickly; within a few weeks he had died. But that year of good-quality life was of immeasurable value to him and to our family. Don’t knock only living a year.
I have never wanted to deny the chance of a similar benefit to my own patients, and I have seen this sort of response (and better) many times over. But of course not everybody does well with chemotherapy and it is so important not to push it too far. The problem is when you know that some people are going to benefit and some aren’t, but you can’t know in advance which they are.
There is now a lot of active research into why some cancers respond to chemotherapy and others don’t, and this, together with the development of targeted therapies, is changing the approach to managing metastatic and incurable cancers. As cancer treatment becomes more personalised we are going to see a lot fewer people having treatment that isn’t going to help them.
” I have known a dozen people in the past few years that did Chemo… for the majority it is a death sentence of torture.”
A sample of a dozen people does not justify such a sweeping generalisation. Oncologists base their advice on data collected from many thousands of individuals in clinical trials, and on their own years of experience. You are also implying that chemo shortened their lives, which may not necessarily have been the case. And to use the word “torture”, which is the deliberate infliction of pain, is an insult to the many professionals working in oncology who put the welfare of their patients above everything else.
The decision whether or not to have chemotherapy in these situations is a personal one, and should only be taken after due consideration and after the person has been properly informed.
I should add that anybody considering palliative chemotherapy and reading your post is likely to find it unsettling and confusing, and not helpful in making a decision.
None of these are essential oils.
Heretic-
“one who holds a doctrine at variance with established or dominant standards,” mid-14c., from Old French eretique (14c., Modern French hérétique), from Church Latin haereticus “of or belonging to a heresy,” as a noun.
Sounds to me like the heretics are the scientists, allopath doctors, scientologists and religious nuts and all university idiots.
I guess I was one of the people who fell for that stupid crap. I cured a melanoma with essential oils. A T-2 melanoma first biopsy; biopsy from surgery lesion, no cancer cells. Whatever. Five years ago.
Why are you ascribing the lack of cancer cells in the second operation to the essential oils? Have you considered the possibility that they may all have been removed by the biopsy?
Usually when somebody finds a mole, the initial treatment is an excision biopsy. This is a small operation under local anaesthetic to remove an ellipse of skin containing the mole with a couple of stitches to close the wound. Unless the mole turns out to be malignant that is all that is necessary.
However, if the pathologist finds a melanoma in the biopsy specimen, there is a high chance (though by no means a certainty) that there are islands of malignant cells in the surrounding skin. For this reason a simple excision biopsy is not considered to be adequate treatment and a definitive operation is required to remove a much thicker circle of skin surrounding the original site. The size of the circle depends on the thickness of the melanoma but it is usually several centimetres, and the wound may require a skin graft, depending on its size and position, in order to heal.
The tissue removed is also carefully examined by a pathologist, and if it contains melanoma cells then further treatment may be required (such as removal of lymph nodes). If it is clear (as in your case) then regular follow-up is usually all that is necessary.
Finding no malignant cells in the second operation is quite a frequent occurrence, however, and has nothing to do with essential oils or anything else that you may have done in between.
Melanoma can often behave in quite unpredictable ways, more so than other types of cancer. As an example, I have a friend whose sister once had a mole removed when she was travelling in Greece (it was never examined pathologically so we don’t know what it was). Some years later she had a fit and was found to have a brain tumour. This was surgically removed and proved to be a melanoma which had spread to the brain. That was about forty years ago, and she is still alive, having never had a recurrence anywhere else. On the other hand I have seen patients where it has suddenly reappeared years (or decades) after they were declared free of it, and other cases of advanced melanoma which has spontaneously stopped growing or regressed for a while in the absence of treatment.
This variability makes it quite difficult to treat, particularly in the case of advanced disease where particular chemotherapy drugs might work very well for some individuals and not at all for others. Happily the situation is much better these days as advances in molecular biology have enabled particular metabolic pathways that are mutated in melanoma to be identified and targeted by monoclonal antibodies and other drugs designed specifically to act on them. The result has been several new drugs which are very effective in treating advanced melanoma, much more so than chemotherapy has ever been.
Essential oils may smell nice, but there is little evidence that they have any effect against melanoma or any other tumour, and no reason to suppose that they should have, other than wishful thinking, which doesn’t work in real life the way it does in Disney films.
On the topic of lymph nodes, i had a bad wisdom tooth infection and it spread to the lymph node under my jaw and it felt like probably the size of almost a pingpong ball. i dipped a qtip in Thieves oil and swabbed the tooth area and applied theives undiluted directly to the giant lump. I did this for 3-4 times a day for 3 days. And it has never given me a problem since. Within minutes I had relief.
Marsha,
I have had melanoma on my forhead for 7 years. I have been putting Frankincense on it for th epast 6-months and although I have seen improvement, it is still there. I have not taken it internally yet.
Which essential oils did you use to cure your melanoma?
none.
see a dermatologist or an oncologist.
Michael Strauss,
I am not sure what you mean by a melanoma on your forehead for seven years. Has it been confirmed by a biopsy? It is possible that you have been diagnosed with a pre-cancerous condition related to melanoma that might be safe to keep under observation with a view to definitive treatment if there is any sign of progression, in which case have you considered that putting anything on it that might change the appearance is only going to confuse the situation and may delay diagnosis if it does turn fully malignant?
I assume that you have actually seen a dermatologist. Therefore I am curious to know why you would follow the recommendations of a complete stranger over those of your own doctor, particularly as you haven’t even met them, they have never seen the lesion and they don’t appear to be medically qualified, or even to have any experience at all dealing with melanomas other than a rather vague story where they have possibly misinterpreted what was going on.
Marsha Whitehurst Croker,
It sounds as though Mr Strauss is proposing to take your advice regarding the management of what he believes to be a melanoma on his forehead. Bearing in mind that you haven’t seen it yourself, and that people can and do die of melanoma, are you prepared to take responsibility for any consequences?
Frankincense has kept my husbands cancer at bay with no chemo .cured a tumor the size of my fist on the top of my dogs head yearrs ago. 1 drops a day and gone in 10 weeks. lived to be 15. would never do chemo
Hi Vicki, I am so happy to hear about your husband and your dog! I am drinking Frankincense for my cancer, and I never thought of using it for my dog, who had a tumor removed that turned out to be cancer, about a year ago.
I now see a similar lump on him and wanted to ask you if you used a fractionated coconut carrier oil with the Frankincense on your dog???
Let me quote Steven Novella on April 12 2017
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/naturopathic-death-from-iv-turmeric/
I can’t see how the human body has one particular frequency of resonance – rather different parts might have different frequencies? Whatever, this whole essential oil stuff is just daft. How do you define what is an essential oil – as opposed to non essential? I would imagine by the profit margin of the purveyor.
Stephen Hicks said:
It’s a common misconception that ‘essential’ relates to being in some way necessary. It simply means it contains the ‘essence’ of a plant’s fragrance (whatever that is).
Essential oils are produced by steam distillation of the respective plant. A more suitable name is volatile oil, as they completely evaporate in air.
“Essential” in the case of plant oils merely refers to the oil containing the ‘essence’ of a plant’s scent.
But you’re dead right about the frequency nonsense. It’s a concept that dates back to the first part of the 20th century, thanks to a couple of cranks called Albert Abrams and Royal Raymond Rife. Both these guys claimed to be able to cure cancer by electromagnetic impulses set to the same frequency as that of the disease. New Age fans seized on the concept of ‘vibrations’ associated with living matter (they often quote Einstein saying that “Everything is vibration”, though I’ve never been able to track down exactly what Einstein said or in what context).
If you want to explore and enjoy the vibration nonsense, just google “human body resonates at a frequency of 62-78 MHz” and you’ll open the entire can of worms.
Indeed. I’ve yet to come across a quack who can give an explanation of the word ‘frequency’ other than saying it means vibration – vibration of what, they are never too clear. And don’t ask them for magnitude, power, etc. Well beyond them.
Well, it appears that their expertise often focuses around 62-78 Hz infraspinatus-subscapularis co-vibration. Forcing an alternating (
current) internal/external rotation at 60-70Hz on one’s shoulder is quite the money-maker these days.Sub 62 Hz is so old-school these days…
WHat is a Quack? I have witnessed many allopaths that had no clue about how to heal a human body. Does that say intelligence or Quack? I’ve come across surgeons that wanted to amputate gangrened feet that I cured naturally…who is the Quack in that situation? Who is using this term to define whom?
What’s a ‘frequency’, jacqueline?
Vibration nonsense. You are certainly of scientific thinking, but not quite the right kind. With vibration and changing the frequencies with machines we have cured cancer, made it rain in Australia, stopped hurricanes from hitting Hawaii, cured my cat, healed wounds, and many other miracles. Where are you? What reality are you stuck in? The entire body and world is made up of frequencies including thoughts, but no..vibration nonsense. Good luck to you.
Of course you have, Jacqueline. Of course you have. Miracles indeed. What a wonderful thing to witness.
Now if you want to step this way the nice men in the white coats are going to take you for a little rest for a week or two in their special house. It’ll do you some good.
I hope you’re not expecting a reply from Prof Odds.
Originally these oils were ‘essence’ – distilled down.
As in ‘essence de parfum’.
In English this became ‘essential’ which in terms of strict etymology, they are.
But by corruption this now conveys the idea they are ‘vital’.
They are not, but camists take advantage for marketing.
They would wouldn’t they!
Unfortunately, this is true. Human greed has corrupted so many natural remedies that it’s become a nightmare to find solid factual information.
I do however believe that plant based medicines are far better than synthetic pharmaceuticals. Lifestyle also plays a huge role in longevity.
Stacey Lajeunesse said:
Two questions:
1. Where might solid factual evidence be found?
2. How would you distinguish between solid factual evidence and nonsense/marketing hype?
Why do you believe that?
For one thing, our bodies aren’t even meant to absorb synthetic junk.
My father has been alive over 2 years now using essential oils, turmeric and antioxidants.
This regimen came about after much research and the fact that the “maintenance chemo” for multiple myeloma was literally killing him. His labs and light chain numbers/proteins have all remained at a normal level since starting the eo’s.
Besides, if it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for my family.
Also, I have a personal friend who worked on an oncology board at a major hospital who did not hesitate to tell us….”if you think that there are not benefits to Drs. who get that port in you ASAP after a cancer diagnosis, think again”! It’s a money racket for sure!
If you know the science of it, the C word is something they came up with to scare people into submission of their high dollar treatments. It is in fact not any scarier than the common cold, and diseases such as high blood pressure and Diabetes are as much a health factor as the big “C”.
People need to cut out the sugar and all the lifestyle things that knowingly do harm to our bodies, then we’ll see where cancer ends up on the scary list.
Sally said:
What on earth do you mean by that?
LOL!
Now I know you’re taking the piss!
Sigh… another one who doesn’t understand the way different cancers behave and why it is unreasonable to attribute the extra years to turmeric, sugar free diet, etc. but luck, chemotherapy and whatever other therapy already received . Anyone have the energy to reply in more detail and explain better to Sally why she is wrong?
Sally
The cost of cancer treatment is quite high already, and getting higher than many can comprehend.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5159700/
“As bad as the financial costs of modern myeloma treatment are, they pale in comparison with what we anticipate in the near future. For example, trials are evaluating the promise of KRD as initial therapy; this regimen is ∼1.5 to 2 times more expensive than VRD.46,49 But more important in terms of cost is the likely addition of daratumumab, a highly active monoclonal antibody to various triplet regimens currently in use for the treatment of myeloma to create quadruplets that could cost in excess of $300 000 per year.”
Where does it all end … When everybody is broke ? Even if the medical payment is government sponsored, where do governments get their money ? hmmm.
I agree with what you say about “synthetic junk”. I just refer to them all as toxins, I think toxins are what you are referring to. In reality toxins don’t need to be synthetic to be toxic to humans. I wouldn’t single sugar out for cancer, too much sugar leads to all sorts of disease. There are studies that indicate that there are other foods that are cancer causing. In fact, red meat is strongly suspected to be a carcinogen. Processed meats are known to be cancer causing.
All disease come down to health at the cellular level. Cells are healthy when they get enough of what they need, and less of what is bad for them. Cells are in dis-ease when they get too much of what is toxic to them, and not enough of what makes for healthy cells and healthy cell reproduction.
This is NOT over simplification.
“This is NOT over simplification”
correct! it’s gross over-simplification.
Did I over simplify about the cost of treating cancer also … Or am I correct about that ?
Crickets … no reply from the Pharma sponsored blog
https://www.ajmc.com/newsroom/study-examines-costeffectiveness-in-multiple-myeloma-treatments
” New drugs to treat multiple myeloma (MM) have provided clinical benefits, but a study published in the Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy found not all of them can be considered cost effective.
Historically, 2 drugs—bortezomib (BOR) and lenalidomide (LEN)—have been used in combination with dexamethasone (DEX) to treat MM. However, 5-year survival rates remain below 50% with a single course of drug therapy costing between $75,000 and $250,000. There has not been an evaluative of the cost effectiveness of other drugs used to treat following relapse, including pomalidomide (POM), carfilzomib (CFZ), ixazomib (IX), daratumumab (DAR), elotuzumab (ELO), and panobinostat (PAN).
“The availability of effective treatment options for MM patients is of paramount importance,” the authors wrote. “However, in an era of continuing increases in healthcare spending and drug prices, it is also important to understand the relationship between costs and outcomes achieved.”
RG said:
More flailing…
More sickness disease and death from Big Pharma drugs designed to cure illness. They just keep coming.
Gilead hit with more lawsuits over harmful side effects of AIDS drug.
“For years, Gilead represented its TDF-based medications as safe and effective, misleading Plaintiffs, their doctors, and the medical community into believing that no safer alternative design existed that would have saved Plaintiffs from TDF’s dangerous effects,” says one of the two lawsuits filed July 12 in Alameda County, Calif., Superior Court.
“Indeed, it was Gilead that discovered and helped develop the safer design around the same time it developed TDF in the mid to late 1990s,” the lawsuit says. “Gilead, however, shelved TAF, the safer design, in 2004. Gilead marketed and sold only the dangerous and less effective design – TDF and TDF-based combination pills – for approximately 15 years,” the lawsuit continues.
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2019/07/18/gilead-hit-with-more-lawsuits-over-harmful-side-effects-of-aids-drug/
Tell you what RG.
When you reveal your full name and credentials and explain to us why we should discuss the finer points of difficult subjects such as managed care and health economics regarding cancer therapy cost effectiveness in the US. Then I promise we will decide if we want to stop ignoring your amateurish attempts at sounding smart and respond respectfully even to your most ignorant comments.
What ‘Pharma sponsored blog’, RG?
Bjorn
Who died and left you king of the blog message board ? Is EE OK ?
My credentials ?? …. lol
We’ve had this discussion before, credentials do little more than give a license to kill. Nobody needs credentials to understand that Big Pharma is over charging for cancer. Making long term customers of sick patients, while extracting all their money…. wow, what a business model. No wonder Big Pharma is hated.
Some Pharmaceutical Corporations actually kill the patients outright…. this is bad bad bad, not good.
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/08/28/oxycontin-settlement-12-billion-purdue-pharma/
Since you asked, I’m a gas station attendant…. there ya go.
do you sell laughing gas?
This is where WISDOM comes in. Plant based is derived from GOD, Yes, God, the one that actually made our bodies. Synthetic drugs are man-made. Who knows our bodies better? We all are practicing or are we?
are you serious?
Laura,
I am sure that the leaders of many religious bodies would take a more nuanced view here. Does the Pope take advice and treatment from his doctors? The Chief Rabbi? The Dalai Lama?
Alternatively do you support ISIS in rejecting the benefits of modern civilization and turning the clock back centuries to an age when nearly half of all children died before reaching the age of 5 and most women died in childbirth after their 10th – 20th pregnancy?
If you believe that God made plants, do you think that He might also choose to inspire the medical researchers who have developed new drugs, and to guide the hands of the doctors prescribing them?
I probably know them better than you do, though I am not entirely sure I understand the question.
I was forced to give up practising as a result of illness.
Some parts of the body are magnetic some are electric wouldnt you think the frequencies would be different, also depending on how healthy the cells are in any particular area.
Please do tell us more, jacqueline…
Jacqueline,
I’m really not sure that I understand what you mean by that statement. James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated the relationship between electricity and magnetism in the late nineteenth century (in the process paving the way for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity); essentially they are the same thing.
If you are using the words “electric”, “magnetic” and “frequency” to mean something other than the way they are normally understood (and I think you are), it would be helpful if you could define them so that the rest of us know what it is you mean.
I’ve been to Grasse in France visiting the principles of the very different ways of production of such essences sometimes even wax is used for extraction. For explanation let me quote the following:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_oil
I absolutely LOVE my essential oils and find they help me in many facets of my life. That being said ESSENTIAL OILS DO NOT CURE ANYTHING. These oils help you through many things bit never would I advertise my oils as a cure for anything.
I love my essential oils and the way I can get rid of many chemicals in my home by using them. I would never say they cure anything. That being said I believe a persons health decision belong to them, not me or anyone else. If they decide a holistic alternative medicine instead of the poison in chemo or radiation it is nobody’s business but their own.
Same thing for wearing seatbelts in a road vehicle or a plane? Should tobacco companies be free to advertise however they want, where and whenever they want? How about when a parent decides on a ‘holistic alternative medicine’ for a child? Exactly when should society step in on what you regard as “nobody’s business but their own”?
BTW, essential oils are themselves chemicals. What do you use to get rid of them from your home?
Frank,
It costs taxpayers a lot of money when people refuse to wear seatbelts and get in a car accidents. How much does it cost the taxpayer when a cancer patient refuses chemo or radiation?
Or do you see it as a moral issue – saving people from doing things wrong?
I see it as an ethical issue: saving people from their own stupidity. Your economic argument is disgraceful, from my point of view. It’s like saying we should encourage as many people as we can to smoke in order to save taxpayers’ money on pensions and welfare support because smokers will die a lot earlier.
It all really comes down to the issue of informed consent, as Richard Rawlins so often reminds us. If a patient chooses to refuse chemo- or radiation therapy because they don’t want to face the possible side-effects that’s indeed entirely their own business, but if they’re choosing essential oils over chemo/radio because somebody’s told them essential oils can cure cancer, that’s an entirely different issue.
The raison d’être of Edzard Ernst’s blog is the very widespread amount of misinformation on health issues, with ‘holistic alternative medicine’ erroneously championed as a panacea that can replace orthodox medicine to the extent that the latter is cast in the role of the enemy of health.
Frank,
“Your economic argument is disgraceful, from my point of view.”
That’s actually not MY argument.
“I see it as an ethical issue: saving people from their own stupidity.”
I see that as disgraceful. Both the idea in and of itself, and the way you try to frame forcing your own moral view on people as an “ethical” issue. Your phrasing is frequently used by the religious right in their effort to control womens’ reproductive rights.
“The raison d’être of Edzard Ernst’s blog…”
If that’s true, the amount of misinformation, misleading framing, etc on this site isn’t helping the cause. From Chinese medicine to cupping to jackfruit to discounts on massage (and who knows – maybe homeopathy, chiropractice, etc – I don’t know enough about those) – posts and comments range from blatantly (and easily verified) wrong to having a distinctly deceptive taste.
Wrong “jm”. You probably did not invent the argument yourself, you’re not the thinker, but you made it your own by posting it 😀
As to your claims of misleading and misinformation – how about substantiating your fantastic assertions with some verifiable information and facts instead of diverting and obfuscating and quoting ancient scriptures?
Wow Bjorn, I’d hardly call Unschuld’s commentary & analysis “ancient”. The one that contradicts your whole “modern acupuncture is based on ancient bloodletting rituals” is from 2003. It’s also quite clear, and quite verifiable. He’s not shy with references.
But if you have a better source than Unschuld for analysing the history of Chinese medicine that supports your ideas, please share. Otherwise, I’d say your bloodletting idea is a good example of “blatently wrong”.
😀
Your selective reading skills never cease to amaze dear “jm”.
You keep referring to Unschuld. I guess it is Paul Unschuld, who is rather famous for pissing off acupuncturists and other amateurs oriental medical pantomime for saying something to the effect that traditional Chinese medicine is based on magical philosophy. I am not sure Mr. Unschuld would agree with your interpretation of his interpretation of ancient[sic] Chinese scriptures.
Instead of spending my morning coffee on finding my notes on this, I asked uncle Google for the term “Unschuld and bloodletting”
The top hit is a reference to a book:
“Pricking the Vessels: Bloodletting Therapy in Chinese Medicine”
By Henry McCann
Several Passages of this interesting book can be seen in the Google Books preview and they seem to contradict your assertions rather firmly with multiple references to bloodletting from the Huang Di Nei Jing.
Mr. McCann even refers to Unschuld in this very context.
Let us see “jm” if you can find item no. 2 in my Google hit-list yourself. It contains this reference to Paul Unschuld:
Now I have finished my morning coffee and have to get to work.
I think you and Mr. Unschuld need to have a talk about the term bloodletting and its relevance to ancient[sic] oriental medicine 😉
Wow again Bjorn – two commnets, and two great examples of my point. You should probably reread the Unschuld quotes I pulled for you (they are quite clear about the philosophical change in Chinese medicine):
http://edzardernst.com/2017/05/is-the-royal-college-of-nursing-promoting-quackery/#comment-102825
And read the intro to his book:
https://www.amazon.com/Huang-Nei-Jing-Wen-Translation/dp/0520266986/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1528127387&sr=8-2&keywords=unschuld
And you should probably talk to acupuncturists about Unschuld. You’ll be surprised – he’s famously quite respected :).
Oh, and thanks for the book link – there really isn’t enough written about bloodletting. It tends to conjur up images of extremist western bloodletting (like the George Washington example) that folks latch onto if they don’t do any research…and leads them far astray into fantasyland.
Tell us dear “jm” what this has to do with aromatic essences and their use?
And while you’re at it you can write a post of your own where you once and for all tell us what we should read out of your beloved scriptures that justifies your bruise-scraping, needle piercing and suck marking practices.
We ordinary people only see Unschuld’s and other scholars explanations of how the “doctors” back then admittently knew about such anatomic features of the body as the nose and ears and blood and liver but they had not the faintest idea of their function or interaction and their ministrations were based on philosophy and fantasy, not on knowledge or systematic experience. The translations of old scriptures you refer to tell of piercing and bloodletting with needles and sharp objects. Health care professionals like me naturally conclude, as do any normal people, that this kind of torture and injury must have been terrible and useless. Me calling it “blood-letting rituals” is in a way a nice term, I thought. Your low opinion of this you have not supported with reason or evidence.
Why don’t you tell us in a little essay why we are wrong? I am sure professor Ernst will be happy to post it on his blog if it is not too long and properly written. Or you could start a blog of your own and invite us all to your enlightening arguments.
But this post is about aromatic essences and we have strayed off topic. Enough of that here.
Bjorn,
“Tell us dear “jm” what this has to do with aromatic essences and their use?”
I was going to ask you that. I was replying to Frank – you brought up “quoting ancient scriptures”. Since I’ve never quoted ancient scriptures, I figured you were talking about the Unschuld quote I recently gave you.
“And while you’re at it you can write a post of your own where you once and for all tell us what we should read out of your beloved scriptures that justifies your bruise-scraping, needle piercing and suck marking practices.”
I already told you what to read. And provided a link. Twice now… Are you feeling ok? What was in your morning coffee? Or not in your morning coffee?
Or, you could do some warm up reading – the whole interview that you pulled the “…the Su Wen was not written by a single hand…” quote from. Matthew Bauer’s interview is in two parts – read them both. I think Bauer was one of the acupuncturists on here who tried to steer you in the right direction about the bloodletting thing…
“We ordinary people…blah blah blah…”
In which case…you should probably not speculate about what modern acupuncture is based on. Simple. Just stick to modern evidence, problem solved.
“Why don’t you tell us in a little essay why we are wrong?”
Or, you could read the beginning comments of Unschuld’s book. Really, the least you could do is 5 minutes of research.
I’m going to speculate now – since you went from quite certain (you post the bloodletting thing a lot) to “I was just trying to be nice”…maybe you actually read the Unschuld quotes this time. Next you’ll have to read his translation of the actual text. You should have at least a vague understanding of what you’re calling torture and injury.
A bit more speculation – since you uncharacteristicaly dropped the “rather famous for pissing off acupuncturists”, perhaps you did some googling. 🙂
I am starting to think “jm” doesn’t like me – wonder why? 😉
I think you’re absolutely adorable, Bjorn. ?
Next time you feel the bloodletting urge, I think you should either talk about how modern acupuncture has its basis in the Su Wen, the text that “marks the move from shamanistic/animistic medicine to medicine based on natural laws/sciences” (boring).
Or, talk about “acupuncture in its beginnings was meant as a tool to correct early physiological deviations from a correct course of events, not to treat manifest disease”. (less boring)
Come to think of it…just change your time frame. All medicine, if you go back far enough, is based on killing or removing the evil spirits that are causing you harm. (exciting!) Totally different than modern medicine (if you discount bacteria, viruses, etc, of course).
You are welcome to the last word, But try to make some sense. This comment of yours does not.
Try drinking more coffee.
I believe the phrase you’re looking for is “that’s their funeral”.
@Carol
Have you ever wondered what is in those oils? It is called ‘chemicals’. Tea trea oil for example contains many similar, poisonous chemicals as paint thinner, thats why they smell simillar. Tea tree oil and lavender oil have been shown to be hormone imitators causing breast enlargement in young boys. This means they are probably cancer enhancing.
As the oils are poisonous, they kill cells in lab cultures, same as alcohol or thinner, to name a couple of examples. We know alcohol doesn’t work against cancer or have other medical benefits in the human body. Neither do plant oils, AKA “essential” oils. They are essences, not “essential”.
Full of erroneous and dangerous claims. I love essential oils, but to state that frankincense is “cytotoxic” and then claim it means it won’t kill healthy cells is utter bulltweet. The very nature of anything cytotoxic is that it is destructive to cells.
Gee, I wonder what the dollars and cents value would be of scientific proof that (say, for example, 5) essential oils kill cancer cells? Not a claim, I beg to clarify, merely a musing… (I remember sitting in Hillary Putnam’s William James Seminar and hearing reference to “the cash value of an idea”… Or perhaps the trade would be other than monetary…
Bottom line about all this controversy is. There has always been a war ever since the Allopathic system has been established and for us in US by Rockefellers. The war is on control over WHO can CURE what. And the institutions created to pump out non-healer doctors incapable of SEEING anything outside a book have continued to mute anything that doesn’t come from their world of controlled drugs and the way they want it to be run. All other are quacks or heretics which true definitions adhere better to allopaths than any others. Its the educated ones that steam roll out anyone because they do not make clinical TESTS to prove things, rather miracles though clear proof, they still reject because this is a WAR, a separation. There is bigger wisdom with those that can SEE than with clinical physical brain use, and natural substances will always top any synthetic manmade substance used to kill rather than cure.
sad to see that all those natural substances did nothing against your paranoia.
Personally i would rather be confused and indecisive than dead. I believe.
Sceptics please consider this:
Antitumor Activity of Monoterpenes Found in Essential Oils
ScientificWorldJournal. 2014; 2014: 953451.
Published online 2014 Oct 14. doi: 10.1155/2014/953451
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4220615/
Frankincense essential oil prepared from hydrodistillation of Boswellia sacra gum resins induces human pancreatic cancer cell death in cultures and in a xenograft murine model
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23237355/?i=10&from=essential%20oil%20cancer%20frankincense
Essential Oils and Their Constituents as Anticancer Agents: A Mechanistic View
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/154106/
Plenty more where they came from.
I’m still looking for the study that cites the frequencies of the body mentioned in your original article above, because I have found it before and I have read it myself .. i am certain it was published someime in June 2014 .. but there is no sign of it anywhere now. Perhaps it’s been removed from the medical database because it was attracting too much attention?
Sharon, please consider this:
many plants have anti-cancer activity of some sort. in the vast majority of cases, this does not translate into clinical effectiveness of one reason or another. clinical effectiveness needs to be demonstrated in clinical trials.
Yes, it was most likely removed by the FDA/DEA…because they don’t want anyone turning away from their costly drugs, which makes them billions of dollars, while full of dangerous side effects, including death from Chemo!
Read evidence below:
https://www.drugwatch.com/featured/big-pharma-marketing/
I see that you haven’t found a natural cure for paranoia yet.
Until I followed your link I didn’t realise that marketing drugs directly to the public was legal in New Zealand; I certainly never seen it there. Thankfully it is only a problem in one country,
where the law is heavily in favour of Big Business as opposed to consumers, the environment etc. The rest of the world is rather more sensible.
Do you have any evidence that the FDA/DEA are remotely interested in that nonsense about frequencies?
Sharon,
The studies you are referring to are all pre-clinical studies in tumour models (mainly standardised cell lines growing in culture and in one case a cell line grafted onto mice specially bred to have no immune system). These are the standard first steps in investigating the possibility that something may prove to be useful in the treatment of cancer. A great many plant-derived substances are found to have some activity in these models. It would be surprising if they didn’t, since plants have evolved all manner of defenses against being eaten or outcompeted by other organisms.
However, very few agents that show promise in these in vitro studies actually turn out to be useful clinical treatments. Many of them behave quite differently in the body than they do in cell culture, and many of them prove to be too toxic. Approximately 1 in 1,000 of them survive pre-clinical and clinical testing and make it into the clinic. This is a long process that takes 10 – 15 years. I find it very frustrating that so many people are unable to distinguish between what is essentially an idea and what is a safe and effective treatment (this particularly applies to journalists).
If we look at some of the plant-based (and fungus-based) cancer treatments that we do use in real life we have etoposide (from the May-apple), daunorubicin, mitomycin and bleomycin (from fungi), vincristine, vinblastine and vindesine (from the periwinkle), paclitaxel and docetaxel (from yew), irinotecan and camptothecin (from the Camptotheca tree). These are all in common use, but they have to be given properly in order to work. They all have a narrow therapeutic ratio, which means that if you give slightly too little they don’t work and if you give slightly too much they are dangerously toxic. Scheduling is important – they are usually given as single doses, repeated at intervals of several weeks, and the effect is quite different if this is varied. Many of them have cumulative toxicities which require careful monitoring (daunorubicin can damage the heart, bleomycin can damage the lungs). In general they have to be given intravenously. Some of them can cause extensive tissue damage if they end up in the wrong place.
A few drops under the tongue or in massage oil are really not going to do the job.
I’m not even sure why essential oils should be considered in a different category from any other candidate anticancer drug. What they have is common is that they are hydrophobic (i.e. the don’t mix with water), which may cause particular problems with drug delivery, they are volatile (i.e.they readily evaporate) and many of them smell nice. However, there is no particular reason why these properties should be correlated with pharmacological activity.
Adding chemicals to these natural plant-based cancer treatment can cause the “same” dangerously toxic side effects” as the whole Drug itself!
Read article below:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/herbal-medications-prescription-drugs-dont-mix
I’m not sure what you are saying. These natural plant-based cancer treatments ARE chemicals. Plants are made of chemicals.
It is well-known that all kinds of things can interact with prescription drugs, even something as apparently innocuous as grapefruit juice.
It’s quite apparent that the writer is making a distinction between “natural” and “artificial” substances (such as mustard gas derivatives commonly used in chemotherapy).
I believe it was Bruce Tainio in 1992. I don’t think it was ever published in the medical literature.
Sharon, just Google “Frequencies of the body” to find studies that cite the frequencies of the body.
You will be greeted with a cornucopia of total guff: hits beyond your best dreams (or worst nightmares) of the consequences of seemingly world-wide lousy science education.
Or you could read this article as an example of a reasonable, informed, clear scientific account of frequency and its relevance to aspects of health.
‘Frequencies’, ‘energy’, ‘quantum’, ‘field’ and many more words have been regularly poached from physics, misapplied to the world of pseudo-medicine, and cause physicists to react on a spectrum from choking with laughter to apoplexy that folk can be so easily duped by sciency-sounding terminology.
Essential oils, plant essences, contain various chemicals, which offer therapeutic effects. Dr Jean Valnet and a few other well educated people provided a good body of evidence for essential oils and their uses… Don’t throw away and rubbish something without exploring the subject properly.
Every human alive can speak authoritatively about his/her own personal experiences. The bottom line can be summed up in a single question…”Did it work for YOU?” It is really beyond my willingness to care what most people think about something when they speak in complete and abject ignorance of the subject. If a person has never bothered to try essential oils, that person can only speak in ignorance. If a person has never tried frequency treatments, then that person also speaks in ignorance.
There are many people who have been granted life after trying alternative methods of treatment for cancer and a multitude of other diseases. Do any of you think they give a rat’s butt what you have to say about a treatment that saved their life? I watched helplessly as one of my brothers and one of my sisters died at the hands of a doctor who literally killed them both with radiation and chemotherapy. They died slowly, painfully, and in terrifying agony. Their deaths were so traumatizing to the members of our family that every one of us has decided that should cancer come our way, we will gladly choose alternative methods of treatment rather than the barbaric treatments prescribed by men and women who claim to be medical doctors, who are in fact nothing more than legally sanctioned tormentors and executioners.
@PP: “every human alive can speak authoritatively about his/her own personal experiences…” WTF does that mean? Do none of us humans ever lie, convolute, misinterpret or strategically-misstate our “personal experiences” for a myriad of reasons? Oh wait, humans never falsify their “experiences”…that’s been proven through the eons of human history.
Given how incoherent, inarticulate and jumbled your written expressions are I can only imagine what it must be like to be face-to-face and suffer through your “thoughts” emanating in verbal form. Whew! I shudder to think of it. I’d only pray you had a breath mint.
@RG: so no credentials….only your enlightened opinion on all things you only wish you understood.
But as the saying goes opinions are like armpits, everyone has two and much time and effort is required to keep them from stinking. I’d suggest you investigate the truth of that claim by getting some credentials and seeing if the stench changes.
Micheal Kenny
What type of credentials are sufficient to participate this forum ? Please advise
I don’t see where EE has imposed any requirements. Who are YOU ?
I don’t see anybody else being asked for credentials, why me ? Cuz you don’t like what I say, that’s why.
This might be of interest to some of the more open minded readers of this thread.
Regarding the use of essential oils as an adjunct to chemotherapy and radiation.
We all have to find our own path. Life is precious.
https://naturallivingfamily.com/essential-oils-for-cancer/
Other than an advert on the website of a chiro who ‘specializes in Aromatherapy and Biblical Health’ and a ‘group fitness and martial arts instructor, health coach, lactation consultant, and a natural health guru’, and some unverified and unverifiable anecdotes, do you have anything that would convince anyone with a brain?
This Web site is a good example of how not to interpret biomedical papers.
An in-vitro study suggesting a possible method of action can form the basis of further research, but cannot in any way support a recommendation for treatment. Safety and efficacy studies and randomised clinical trials are required, and only a fraction of a percentage of promising treatment candidates manage to get through those.
The site has apparently been fact-checked and reviewed by a qualified medical practitioner, and my guess is that his input has been in advising on how best to use misleading wording to deceive readers untrained in biomedical science (or in critical thinking generally) without actually making claims that are illegal.
If a person has mind and wise then think about natural treatment and there is no side effect of natural treatment. As God created plants for our health. So turmeric, fruits, and vegetable has no harm. God made these for our health and benefits and also to use these for diseases as in old age people were using natural ingredients, there were no cancer and people were living long healthy life but when people ignored natural ingredients, they suffered from unknown and complicated diseases.
are you competing for the most fallacious comment of the day?
No, but telling the fact and truth of life which we can’t ignore even if we are dumb deaf and blind.
If there are any benefits for natural remedies it is slight probably mainly placebo if they can be taken without toxic side affects and are cheap then go for it .. however the evidence comes down strictly in favour of evidence based conventional medicine I wish that things were not this way but that’s how it is. In my 55 years on the planet I have seen friends die in there prime from cancer and other diseases many were fit some vegan some religious. It simply does not matter life is always about quantity not quality… the burden of proof favours evolution..
you are born flourish for a time and decline pray all you want to mythical gods and put your faith in unproven remedies you won’t be the first and certainly not the last to try these as a last ditch solution to outsmart your destiny..
Differential effects of selective frankincense (Ru Xiang) essential oil versus non-selective sandalwood (Tan Xiang) essential oil on cultured bladder cancer cells: a microarray and bioinformatics study
Mikhail G Dozmorov 1 , Qing Yang 2 , Weijuan Wu 3 , Jonathan Wren 1 , Mahmoud M Suhail 4 , Cole L Woolley 5 , D Gary Young 5 , Kar-Ming Fung 6 , Hsueh-Kung Lin 7
Affiliations expand
PMID: 25006348 PMCID: PMC4086286 DOI: 10.1186/1749-8546-9-18
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25006348/
Conclusion: The effects of frankincense and sandalwood essential oils on J82 cells and UROtsa cells involved different mechanisms leading to cancer cell death. While frankincense essential oil elicited selective cancer cell death via NRF-2-mediated oxidative stress, sandalwood essential oil induced non-selective cell death via DNA damage and cell cycle arrest.
I’m not quite sure what your point is in posting this. These studies demonstrated that there are chemicals which can be extracted from frankincense and sandalwood which are toxic to cells and that they have different mechanisms for killing them, neither of which are particularly surprising findings. Cancer cells tend to be more particularly susceptible to these effects as they have lost a number of cellular defense mechanisms on their way to becoming cancerous.
Isolated cells in culture are useful for investigating biochemical effects and mechanisms, though in this particular case perhaps less so as it isn’t very clear what the extracts actually contain. However, they behave very differently from cells in the body, and experiments such as these, while they can help our understanding of metabolic processes, seldom lead to a useful treatment.
I cannot vouch for electric “frequency” theories, but many different essential oils are known to induce apoptosis of skin cancer cells INCLUDING melanoma.
There is solid research, for example, on the use of DMSO as a solvent to help various essential oils penetrate to the deep layers of the skin where they can work their magic. DMSO combined with 10% of tea tree oil, for example, seems to be a more effective treatment for “solar keratosis” than any currently prescribed medicine. Actinic keratosis are precancerous lesions that often convert, with time, to basal and squamous cell carcinomas.
I have extensive solar keratosis all over my hands and arms from years of living in the harsh Florida sun. So, I tried the treatment described in the studies. I created the 10% solution by using a syringe to drop the correct 5 ml of tea tree oil into a 50ml bottle of DMSO. Used every other day for the last two weeks, the lesions are not yet gone completely, but they are infinitely improved. The solution stings when initially applied, but the pain goes away quickly, and it is far less irritating than several therapies previously prescribed by dermatologists. I can fully accept the idea of applying essential oils in other ways, to kill other types of precancerous and cancerous lesions, that plague organs other than the skin. It is really just a question of getting them, safely, to the target organs. Skin is probably the easiest organ to treat with essential oils.
I should say that DMSO does have the undocumented side effect of significantly raising blood pressure. You will not read anything about this adverse effect in the literature. In fact, other studies claim that it actually reduces pressure. However, for me, it reliably raises my pressure, and significantly, within about 15 minutes of painting it on my skin. The phenomenon occurs whenever I use DMSO, even when it is combined with other medicines. So, it is definitely the DMSO and not the tea tree oil. But, when applied alone, tea tree oil just sits on my skin, doing very little. I take a 12.5 mg. losartan pill each time I paint DMSO on myself and I keep the treatment area limited in size. With losartan coming to my rescue, my blood pressure reliably goes down again every time.
As noted, numerous different medications have been prescribed for me, over the years. They were all supposedly designed to remove the keratosis lesions, all the way from Carac chemotherapy cream to diclofenac cream. None of them worked at all. Carac was the most painful and caused much more redness and irritation than the DMSO/tea tree mixture. None of the prescribed medicine worked at all. It would be much better if physicians, like yourself, actually investigated essential oils with an open mind, rather than shutting yourself off to anything you have not been taught in school.
ABG,
That would not give you a 10% solution. You need to check your arithmetic.
OK. It is approximately an 11.11% solution. I removed 5 ml of DMSO first. I wish I could go to a drug store and buy the mixture already made. Even so, no mixture, even mixed by a machine, would ever be exactly 10%. It might be 10.0001% but never 10%. So, mine is off by 1.11%. The beauty of natural products like tea tree oil is that it doesn’t matter. There is a large margin of safety, unlike with chemotherapy creams like Carac.
The point is not whether the solution is 9%, 10% or 11%. The point is that essential oils can and do eliminate cancerous and/or precancerous lesions, if they get deep enough into the skin. That supports the use of essential oils in skin cancer and, possibly, against other types of cancer if and when they can be put safely into contact with tumors. It does not support theories about electrical wavelengths, of course, but who knows? I won’t rule anything out, although I would not rely on far out theories.
At any rate, the mixture, 1% plus or minus, is far more effective against actinic keratosis than Carac, diclofenac and imiquomode. This is in synch with scientific studies on the subject.
“essential oils can and do eliminate cancerous and/or precancerous lesions”
ANY EVIDENCE?
ABG
When I prescribe something I want to know that the patient is getting the specified strength and dose, and if a nurse or pharmacist were found to have made an error of this size it would be regarded as a serious incident. There are drugs where a small change in dose can result in quite a large change in either efficacy or toxicity. This is particularly true of drugs used to treat cancer, of which you claim that tea tree oil is one.
You originally stated that you added 5ml of the tea tree oil to 50ml of DMSO and now you say that you did something different, so although you might not consider it important you are contradicting yourself.
Why should natural products be any different from anything man-made? Other than that you probably don’t know the strength or activity in the first place.
I am not aware of an antineoplastic effect of any essential oil. Do you have any evidence from a controlled clinical study that this is the case, and do you know if any biochemical mechanism has been proposed?
There are numerous controlled studies available for you to read. The 10% DMSO/Tea Tree oil study that I’ve emulated and is working for me, is just one of them. Do a simple search on the government’s pubmed database. You don’t need me to do it for you. It is publicly available. The search will take a few minutes. Reading the studies will take a few hours. Maybe, a bit longer than a few hours because there are so many of them. Since you’ve taken the trouble to write an article about the use of essential oils, you should be willing to put in the time. Best regards.
“There are numerous controlled studies available for you to read.”
THIS IS NOT TRUE!
If you disagree show me the studies.
Edzard, I don’t have time to do the work for you. The studies are all there. Anyone can find them if they know how to do a search properly. Just do the search yourself and you will find all the studies. If you don’t find them, it means you have not done the search. Good luck.
sorry, but this is a lie!
there are no studies to show that essential oils cure cancer
Edzard, anyone fluent in English can search the US government’s pubmed database and find the studies. I think you are fluent in English. In any case, I have no reason to “lie” to you as you are asserting. Why would I “lie”?
I didn’t create the DMSO/Tea Tree oil treatment myself. I wish I could say I had. It would make me very proud given how effective it seems to be compared to past treatments I’ve been subjected to. But, I didn’t. It was simply a controlled study I read on the Pubmed database. I’ve tried to emulate the study myself, although my pharmaceutical mixing skills apparently leave much to be desired, as pointed out by Dr. Kyrly. Best regards.
thanks – you really think that I did not know?
Ok. I just noticed you are of German nationality. Maybe, your insulting accusations arise out of not being fluent enough in English. I don’t have time to do searches. I have other things to do, and did not intend to spend so much time on this. Unfortunately, I did not record all the search results from several weeks ago except in my own mind, because I am not writing anything other than a simple comment, and never intended to have to defend the therapy as some sort of peer reviewed study or product. However, I did notice a reference preserved in my recycle bin in my computer. It is a study on mouse skin. Perhaps, it will help you, but I need to move on to other things, so I will not respond further. Best of luck to you.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22727730/
1) I am not of German nationality
2) the paper is an animal experiment; it does not show that essential oils cure cancer in humans or animals.
“When I prescribe something I want to know that the patient is getting the specified strength and dose, and if a nurse or pharmacist were found to have made an error of this size it would be regarded as a serious incident.”
If you use this therapy, you should make certain that the nurse/pharmacist who prepares the solution is more careful than I was, but the bottom line is that the 10% solution worked for the cases in the studies and the 11.11% solution worked for me.
@Edzard: Perhaps time to put this in your stock responses.
“Why should natural products be any different from anything man-made?”
You make a good point. They are not all different. So, my statement was overly broad. But, tea tree oil, in particular, is often applied at 100% strength to the skin, and has few recorded adverse effects other than temporary skin irritation.
You are right, of course, that I should have been more careful about the mixing process. But, the 11.11% mixture works well as far as I can see. I don’t get a lot of skin irritation from it, other than temporary stinging that is a lot milder than what I got from Carac cream. And, best of all, it seems to be working. The lesions are disappearing and the skin is smoothing out.
As for your request for more specific data, I am sorry to say that my research efforts from a few weeks ago were not preserved, except in my own memory. I did not expect to be defending this therapy against criticism, as taking it was simply a personal choice to seek a solution to the problem of my actinic keratosis, which up to now have defeated all therapies designed to eliminate them.
I did find a file with some notes, preserved in my recycle bin, however. It contained only two references, one of which is a mouse skin study of the mixture on mouse skin, which I have already given to Edzard in another comment, and this one, which is in-vitro but seems to directly address your question about the general efficacy of tea tree oil against malignant melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma.
Best regards.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30599074/
ABG,
Melanoma cells and squamous carcinoma cells in culture are very different from melanoma and squamous carcinoma in a human being.
When a possible anti-cancer drug is identified it needs to go through a series of stages of testing to assess its activity, toxicity and usefulness. One of the first stages is to investigate its effect on cancer cells in culture. This is mainly to shed light on the metabolic pathways that it affects, but this very artificial and controlled assay tells us nothing about how it would perform against an actual cancer. Even the malignant cells used are normally from a standardised immortal cell line and are very different from those you would find in a tumour.
The next stage is animal testing. A common model here is to grow an artificial tumour in the skin of specially bred mice which lack an immune system (they are called nude mice as they also lack hair). Again this is very different from a real-life tumour. If the drug looks promising it is then tested in a number of different animal species to establish its toxicity and how it is metabolised and excreted in an entire organism. Once it has passed this stage then it can be put forward for phase I human trials. These are usually conducted in volunteers with advanced cancer who have exhausted all their conventional treatment options, and the main end-point of these studies is establishing a tolerable dose; it is not expected that any of the subjects will have a useful cancer response though occasionally they do. Once the drug has been confirmed as safe to use in humans, the next stage is a phase II human trial which may or may not be randomised. In these trials for the first time the drug is assessed for its activity against actual human cancers. If it appears that it has some useful activity and the toxicity is manageable then the next stage is phase III trials. These are randomised and usually double blinded, and use much larger numbers of subjects in order that any results can be statistically analysed to distinguish real effects from chance. If the drug passes this, then the production is scaled up and licenses for clinical use can be issued.
This whole process takes 10 – 15 years.
Only about one in a thousand candidate drugs make it from the in-vitro stage to licensing for clinical use, so all that you can conclude from promising results at this and the mouse-skin stages is that it is worth investigating it further. Most of them prove to be ineffective, toxic, unstable, too awkward to administer etc. You absolutely cannot go from cell cultures to clinical use.
“…You absolutely cannot go from cell cultures to clinical use…”
It all depends on the molecule in question. Substances that are deemed GRAS by the FDA, like tea tree oil, are sold OTC and can be prescribed by doctors freely. The question, in this case, is whether the combination of DMSO and tea tree oil would change the nature of both products from OTC to something that requires approval. It is a grey area. Tea tree essential oil alone, when applied to my skin, even at a 100% strength, does nothing but stink up the room. And, DMSO, when I rub it alone, does nothing but give me a garlic aftertaste in my mouth.
When you combine with DMSO, however, like most molecules, the tea tree essential oil seems to penetrate into the deeper layers of the skin, where I assume it comes into contact with living cells. That is probably why it stings a lot. Once in contact with those cells, it seems profoundly effective at killing cancerous and precancerous cells, while having relatively small toxicity to the normal somatic cells.
I will, once again, note that DMSO has some undocumented side effects, at least for me. It raises my pressure by from 10-20 point systolic and from 10-15 points on the diastolic scale simply after painting two hands with it. In order to limit this phenomenon to one that is manageable, I am starting with the hands. Only later, after all the hand lesions are gone, I will continue up the arm, section by section. Right now, I am able to reliably control the pressure spike with a 12.5 mg. losartan pill, but I do not have high blood pressure. Someone who has a tendency toward naturally high pressure should not try this treatment.
Anyway, that’s all I am going to write about this. You can use the information as you wish. Best of luck.
ABG: “Substances that are deemed GRAS by the FDA, like tea tree oil, are sold OTC and can be prescribed by doctors freely.”
I would deeply hesitate to call that “clinical use”. It may be conducted in a medical clinic by a medical doctor, but if there isn’t a formal body of medical evidence which justifies that use then that is not professional science-based medicine and is drifting towards anecdote, amateurism, and quackery.
And, yes, there is anecdotal evidence that tea tree oil may be effective in treating some skin conditions. So what? Just do the damned research already. Not least because if that effect is confirmed, the knowledge learned as to its mechanism of effect, safe therapeutic window, and so on may lead to the development of superior products (safer, more effective). Likewise, if the research finds the anticipated effect to be only a mirage (which also happens regularly), it can be quickly discarded and all attention turned to other promising avenues.
As any good pharmacognosist will tell you, folk remedies belong at the start of medical discovery, not at its conclusion. Alties are notorious for skipping the part in the middle. But for each that leads somewhere, there are plenty more that lead nowhere—except into their peddlers’ bank acounts. And that at the very minimum is a gross dereliction of medical duty and “First Do No Harm”, even before we ask if there might be less innocent motives at work.
You make an interesting and worthy point, but I have a question.
Should the same standard be applied to the mRNA based Covid-19 vaccines?
With only a few months worth of testing, with new side effects being discovered everyday (just a few days ago, capillary leak syndrome became a recognized, potentially lethal, adverse event for the Moderna vaccine, joining pericarditis and myocarditis) and no idea what the eventual consequences will be, it is not only offered to patients, but is forced on them.
What are your thoughts on that? Do you support the Covid-19 vaccines?
@ABG: “You make an interesting and worthy point”
Which you promptly evade.
“Should the same standard be applied to the mRNA based Covid-19 vaccines?”
Yes. And they have been. What the heck do you think Phase 1–3 trials are? Monkey juice?
“With only a few months worth of testing, with new side effects being discovered everyday”
“everyday”? [citation required]
What we are on now is Phase 4. Let’s assume for discussion a phase 3 trial is conducted on 30K volunteers, half of whom receive a placebo, so 15K get the vaccine. That is a sufficiently large number to detect adverse effects that occur in 1:5000 cases. What we are detecting now are the rare AEs that only occur in 1:100,000 or fewer cases. A P3-sized trial is unlikely to detect those; hence the need for ongoing postmarket monitoring, through a variety of passive and active reporting systems, to recognize those rare AEs when/if they occur.
Remember: the US has detected a small number of very serious AEs after 500 MILLION doses of vaccines given.
Now let’s hypothesize that vaccine AEs have to date resulted in the deaths of 50 Americans. Yes, that is Thing, for those 50 most of all. Framed like that, it’s terrible. How could anyone want this to happen? Well, of course, no-one does. However…
COVID itself is killing 500-1200 Americans EVERY DAY. And that’s right now, after half the country has been vaccinated; 12 months ago it was 1500–4500 daily.
Framed in that context: 50 deaths a day would be a fabulous improvement. No, not ideal, but if those are the only two options available then it isn’t even a choice: you take the 50/day NOW, and then you worry about getting it down to 5/day, then 5/month, then 5/year later.
“Ah, but what about Ivor Mectin?” you cry. “I was talking to my brother’s friend’s neighbor’s homeochirorepubquackter, and he swears that’s a 100% effective cure!!!!1!1!!”
Yeah? Prove it. Prove it to the same standard to which COVID vaccines have already been held. We can wait: the US is only running a death toll of 1000/day, and there’s another 300M to go. Don’t don’t evade, don’t excuse, don’t lie, and don’t tell us that you deserve an instant free pass that not even Pfizer and Merck are given because you’re SPECIAAAAAALLLLLL.
…
Yes, it really sucks the goat that vaccines aren’t 100% safe and effective. BUT NOTHING IS. Go read about life in the US before penicillin was discovered and mass-manufactured in sufficient volume and quality to treat everyone who needed it. Before antibiotics, healthy people of every age could and did with great regularity die from SIMPLE SCRATCHES:
(Dr Charles Fletcher, who gave the first penicillin injection at the Radcliffe Infirmary in 1941, on life before penicillin.)
And yet, not every person treated with penicillin has been cured, and penicillin itself is known to have a very serious AE (severe allergic reaction) that can result in death. And over time penicillin’s effectiveness has decreased too. So should Florey and Merck have discarded penicillin as “Not Good Enough”, i.e. less than perfect, and resumed looking until they found something that was?
That is the argument you anti-vaxxers constantly make. And it is a truly garbage one: insincere, narcissistic, borderline abusive. And you absolutely know it too, and you know that we know it, and you take great glee in wiping our faces in it.
I’d have loved to have seen all of you pissy poseurs inside a septic ward. You’d have soiled yourselves as you ran out screaming in horror. (Unless, of course, you had sepsis yourself, in which case you’d have just screamed in agony and delirium until unconsciousness mercifully took you; and then, most likely, eventually death.)
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“What are your thoughts on that?”
My thoughts are that you are arguing in bad faith, deliberately wasting our time, abusing our goodwill, and getting your jollies by doing it.
“Do you support the Covid-19 vaccines?”
Already had two shots of AZ. I’m not afraid to put on my big-boy pants and roll the dice on a 1:100,000 risk of it f-ing me up in exchange for a 1:1 (averaged) chance of making our world just that bit better for myself and everyone else.
Because I understand just enough about how this world works to know how fantastically fortunate and privileged we both are, and unlike you am utterly disgusted at those who so gleefully squander it.
And now I’ve had enough of your crap, so either grow up and start acting like a decent human being or GTFO.
This will be my last response to you. Obviously, you’ve done no research whatsoever on ivermectin. Because if you did, you would look at the real world chart of the response of hundreds of millions of people on the Indian subcontinent to widespread use of ivermectin as a prophylactic. Then, compare that chart to the pitiful results of mass vaccination as a means to control Covid, in America and Western Europe. You are nothing more than a member of a type of Priesthood, much like the Catholic Church back in the Middle Ages. Hateful. With a closed mind. A flat earther. A fool. Nothing more. Goodbye.
@ABG: “This will be my last response to you. Obviously, you’ve done no research whatsoever on ivermectin. Because if you did, you would look at the real world chart of the response of hundreds of millions of people on the Indian subcontinent to widespread use of ivermectin as a prophylactic.”
Ah yes, yet another claim by one who feels no need to post his evidence. Your mouth writes your ass a lot of checks—and even one just bounced.
Ivermectin is used widely on the subcontinent to treat parasitic infections. It is excellent at that. And while it is acknowledged also to have some antiviral properties, the problem is this: the dose at which it harms the virus is higher than the dose at which it harms the human. You can kill a virus using just about anything: bleach, shotguns; the lot. But if the treatment kills the patient in the process, you haven’t got squat.
There have already been some studies on ivermectin; from which (off the top of my head so caveat emptor) the Argentinian study, which was negative, the Oxford study which is ongoing, and he Egypt study that declared terrifically positive results onto to be withdrawn for major ethical problems. (Not saying it was fraud but, y’know.)
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking/ivermectin-convalescent-plasma-and-hydroxychloroquine-one-year-rotten-apples
Most importantly, I would without hesitation bet you $100 a time on all potential treatments that all of them will ultimately fail. For the simple reason that the great majority of potential treatments ever proposed wash out further on. Some look great on paper, but fail in-vitro. Some look good in-vitro, but are useless to a mouse. Some work in animal tests but, when they take a stab at humans, something stabs back. Thus the bets I would lose on the few hopefuls that ultimately made it all the way through Phase 3 to market, and nothing bad happens in Phase 4 would be covered by all the money you lost, and I’d have me a lovely Ferrari at the end of it.
That is the harsh truth of all pharmaceutical research: the great majority fail. (The lucky ones are the ones that fail quickly, and not at the end of phase 3 after a billion dollars have already been spent.) That is why I’m skeptical of ivermectin, for the same reason I’m skeptical of Remdesivir, of every other promising candidate until it has competently, scientifically proved for itself that it doesn’t doesn’t work.
And lest anyone play the “But Ivermectin is cheap so Big Pharma blah-blah” card: Dexamethasone is cheap, and recommended in COVID treatment. And who the heck do you think makes Ivermectin anyhow? It not 100% organic Himalayan soil farmers. If pharma was convinced that it worked, it would sell the crap out of it now and use the money from that to pay for the development of new and improved treatments to later sell at a premium. Who actually gets rich selling Ivermectin to desperate COVID patients and the neurotically, gullibly well. America’s “Frontline Doctors”, that’s who. Mug.
“Then, compare that chart to the pitiful results of mass vaccination as a means to control Covid, in America and Western Europe.”
Hitchen’s Razor says “boo” to you.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Bear in mind the data will be extremely messy with extnsive confounders and not necessarily “intuitive”. However, as a very rough rule of thumb, as vaccination goes up, new cases stay the same or start to go down. And death rates are clearly down. So like all antivaxxers you can only maintain your fragile position by lying, and then running away when your lies are called out.
“You are nothing more than a member of a type of Priesthood, much like the Catholic Church back in the Middle Ages. Hateful. With a closed mind. A flat earther. A fool. Nothing more. Goodbye.”
Aaaand, there we have it. I offered you every opportunity to change my mind with evidence. And all I got was an antivax flounce. (If Prof Ernst would like to make some money, he is welcome to put that on a t-shirt and sell it. Just put me down for one.)
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p.s. The Ancient Greeks knew the Earth was a sphere. Because they could logic and math, and show their workings to anyone who asked. Flat Earthers are the ones who insist that the Earth is flat, because; and even when their own experiments tell them their hypothesis is wrong, they keep the idea and discard their own evidence. So, LOL. You can’t even do science insults right, you dismal fool.
You don’t have any clue what you are talking about. For example, you are willing to violate your own pontifications about testing, with respect to Covid-19 vaccines, even though no one has any idea of what the long term effects will be. I asked you a simple question. Why? You respond by telling me that they have been in Phase 1, 2, 3 and now, allegedly, “phase 4” testing. That claim is impossible. No one can do a controlled study on the long term effects of a brand new technology that has never been widely used before, that is, mRNA vaccines, for the simple reason that it has only been used for 8 months. This shows that you use no logic in your thought processes.
You also have not read or investigated and, obviously, have no knowledge, whatsoever, of the efficacy of essential oils. You refuse to do any research on the subject yourself, and insist on being spoon fed, so that you can continue to pontificate like a fool. In spite of your total lack of knowledge, you are perfectly willing to pontificate on the uselessness of essential oils in the treatment of disease. This shows that you are very similar to many priests of the 7 century Catholic Church, who had no knowledge of Latin, in the sense of knowing what the words from the Bible mean, but nevertheless gives sermons in Latin to his Congregation because he has memorized the words. That’s why I call you a flat earther.
You deny the efficacy of ivermectin and, again, pontificate about it, but, again, it is obvious that you have made absolutely no effort to investigate it. Meanwhile, you attempt to call others out because they refuse to waste time on trying to educate a mind that clearly does not have the capacity to understand.
Finally, you brought up the discovery of penicillin, implying that narrow minded people like yourself were responsible for that, thereby bringing great benefit to people like me. You are unlikely to be a real physician. All medical schools I am familiar with include a course in medical history, and penicillin features very prominently in the curriculum.
I should not need to do this with such basic and well-known historical facts, but since I am obviously conversing with someone who lacks basic information, I will tell you that various molds were used thousands of years ago, by ancient people, including but not limited to Egyptians and Greeks, to heal wounds. Penicillin was discovered, in 1918, NOT by a drug company or an ignorant group of pontificating people like your group, but by Alexander Fleming, a British doctor in clinical practice. He noticed that a culture of staph aureus, saved and cultured from a pustule he had opened on one of his patients, failed to grow in the presence of certain molds, specifically penicillium. He turned to a chemist friend and asked the friend to identify and purify the active element produced by the mold. It took many years to do so.
In 1930, about 12 years later, a human infant with gonorrhea contracted from his mother was treated by another doctor, familiar with Fleming’s work. Purified penicillin was not yet available, but the baby was treated successfully with a rough penicillium mold extract. In 1941, a British policeman was treated with a partially purified mold extract, but died anyway, because Oxford scientists ran out of partially purified extract. Maybe, if they had turned to a rough extract, the man would have lived. In 1942, Fleming’s friend finally managed to purify penicillin, and Fleming used it, immediately, on Harry Lampert, the first person to receive purified penicillin, thereby curing him of bacterial meningitis.
In any case, I do not enjoy conversing with dullards. Yet, I feel compelled to respond to your serial provocations when yet another email comes into my box. I have tried to stop the emails by removing the “notify me of follow-up comments” checkmark, but it doesn’t seem to work. I request that the owner of this website remove me from his mailing list. Thank you.
From all the foaming around the mouth of “ABG”, I guess the e-oil business isn’t going so well anymore? She should look at the CBD market, that’s where all the money is going these days. Young-Living, do’Terra and the other producers of cheap aromated oils are out and the hemp-leaf is what opens any purse today.
I do not sell essential oils or any other natural medicines. I do recognize their value, and I have fully researched and understand how they can be used to increase public health. Unfortunately, it appears that the priests of this “Church of Medical Ignorance” are unwilling to investigate anything themselves. Instead, they are outraged by my blasphemy, much like the Catholic Church was once outraged by the blasphemy of those who announced their discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around. So, you resort to insult and innuendo.
You folks are the same type of people who once insisted that the earth is flat, against all evidence and against the rules of logic. Of course, most of you don’t believe that today, but that is only because the orthodoxy doesn’t teach it anymore. The basic problem with you is that you are incapable of thinking for yourselves.
Once again, I request that owner of this website please remove my email address from the mailing list, as unchecking the “notify me” button doesn’t appear to work. Thank you.
@ABG: “You don’t have any clue what you are talking about.“
Also @ABG: “This will be my last response to you.”
Okay, but whatever.
“For example, you are willing to violate your own pontifications about testing, with respect to Covid-19 vaccines, even though no one has any idea of what the long term effects will be.”
Please point to any vaccine that has been found to have long-term effects. Vaccine AEs show up within minutes to days, not month to years. That’s not really surprising, because exposure to the vaccine and its ingredients is brief and not ongoing. You get a jab, it does its work (gently) triggering the immune system, and the body breaks it down and clears it.
So you would have to hypothesize that brief exposure starts some kind of subtle chain reaction that very gradually escalates until its effects finally become visible only after some months. Again, you are welcome to find a vaccine, or even any pharmaceutical that is known to have a dose-response curve like that one. We are talking about some organic molecules, the SARS-CoV-2 virus stripped down to still recognizable but pathologically impotent fragments, and some commonly used off-the-shelf inert ingredients whose safety profiles are well understood. Some of the fancier vaccines use stuff like “carrier viruses” (which are quite harmless themselves) and mRNA (the same stuff our own cells use); but again, these do not persist: our bodies soon break them down, just as they break down every other virus and every other mRNA strand.
Thus the only reason why we don’t learn of some side effects after well after the vaccines are rolled out is not because those effects start out very small and take many months to grow till they’re visible, but because they are so very rare that it takes many months for enough of them to happen to be distinguishable from totally normal random chance.
This is why I feel pretty comfortable as a lay person in saying that you as a lay person are (almost certainly†) wrong. Because I understand just a little bit about how stuff works, so I can be modestly confident that I can tell the difference between a plausible concern and an obvious scary ghost story. And what you’ve got is not built on informed insight and prior plausibility but on ignorant fear and malicious manipulation. Which is also how I cross-check my initial assumption as an extra guard: if a claim is being loudly hyped up by a specific group of people already known to be liars and manipulators with a self-serving agenda of its own, then it is very very likely to be absolute garbage from a scientific perspective but worryingly effective as malicious propaganda seeking to mislead and control whoever is susceptible to its siren song.
And as we are seeing, there are a lot of these rubes about.
My personal lay interest is not so much critiquing the science/non-science itself; more about understanding what it is that makes people go wildly wrong in pursuing one or the other (or both). So cheers for today’s exercise in the flaws of human nature, but in all your bluster you have only fooled yourself.
If you wish to change my mind, show me your body of EVIDENCE. That is all.
I will as a (also lengthy, sorry) footnote observe: It is NOT my job to investigate tea tree oil, or ivermectin, or any other possible treament for a particular disease. I am not qualified to do so—and neither are you.
The difference between me and you is I know this, whereas you think your degree at Google U has qualified you to be an impartial judge. I may not know much about the scientific process, but I can see when someone is operating on confirmation bias: seeking to “prove” their belief, not doing their damndest to disprove it. That is the distinction between religion and science, and it is very very apparent in believers like you, making it painfully easy for even lay observers like me to spot. Because you cannot help yourself: you have to wave it all about.
Oh, and before you lecture me on Fleming, go read the popsci book I linked you. Because your version of history is wrong. Fleming was first to notice that a particular Penicillium mould had a pronounced antibacterial effect in a Petri dish. He published his observation in 1929, and investigated it fitfully himself. However, never made any substantial progress and largely lost interest after 1932, thereafter moving into exploring vaccines for disease control.
It was Florey and Chaim who came across Fleming’s original paper ten years later, in 1940, and they are the ones who ran with it as part of the war effort (wound infections then being a rampant killer of troops). They worked out how to isolate and mass-produce it, performed the first trials, and approached the US pharma companies to scale that production up. (Indeed, when Fleming first popped into the Dunn School for a visit, it was a bit of a surprise: Chaim had thought he was dead! [p188])
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p.s Don’t even try that Appeal to Antiquity crap. Because all through history people have smeared everything—from clay through herbs to crap—onto their wounds, in hopes of making them heal. So suggesting that Egyptians discovered mould-derived antibiotics first is risible crap, which you’d recognize as that if you knew anything at all about how things work. Because almost all claims are; and it is only by being wrong a great many times, and from learning through that to recognise how, when, and why we are wrong, that we can gradually work to become less wrong over time. Starting from the Null Hypothesis. That’s science.
Yes. Personal experience. My actinic keratosis are disappearing as I treat them with DMSO/Tea Tree oil. That is something my dermatologist was unable to accomplish with Carac cream, Diclofenac and/or Imiquomode. As to the general statement about the effect of many essential oils, like Tea Tree Oil and others, just hop onto Pubmed.gov and do a search. You will find scores of scientific studies showing that they discriminately kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells, for the most part, unharmed unless you heavily overdose them. The difference between a 10% and 11% solution, obviously, is not a dramatic over dose. As a part of your results, you will also find a series of studies using 10% tea tree oil to eliminate actinic keratosis as well as basal cell carcinoma, as well as a study on mice that shows elimination of implanted human melanoma cells. If you keep an open mind, all you really need to do is take a few minutes of your time to do a search, and then spend a few hours reading. Sorry to keep this short, but I’ve gotta’ go back to work myself. Best regards…
my gran smoked all her life 2-3 packets per day and did not get lung cancer.
so, smoking does not cause cancer?
do you see why experience is not the same as evidence?
@Edzard: Perhaps the worst bit is that there is nothing inherently implausible in what ABG said above, in the way that a claim about, say, homeopathy or reiki would be. Tree oil contains a great variety of interesting complex chemicals, chemicals evolved by trees to do various kinds of work. Therefore it is possible for one or more of these chemicals to have physiological effects on animal cells. Indeed, as we have found through scientific research, plants often evolve chemicals which do exactly this; specifically, sickening or killing animals which would eat them as a deterrent against being eaten to death.
Every now and again we (by which I mean pharmacognosists) discover one of these chemicals to be really good at killing things others than ourselves. A classic example is Paclitaxel, derived from the Pacific yew, which we’ve found jolly handy for killing bits of ourselves that turn cancerous. (And I mentioned Penicillin earlier, derived from Penicillum moulds and is—or at rather was—fantastic at killing bacteria, until the bacteria evolved defenses against it.)
The practical problem is: for every successful Paclitaxel we discover, there are Dog knows how many Resveratrols; interesting complex chemicals which sadly turn out, after rigorous testing, to be sod all use… at least for medicinal purpose. But they are clearly very good at something else, because when I search for its name on teh Googelz, I get hit with a dozen ads touting the crap out the stuff.
And since what I am is a skeptic of human nature, I am ready to bet that what Resveratrol is very good at is parting large numbers of willing believers from their own cold hard allopathic cash. Especially when I see the outrageous prices they are charging for little bottles and bags of the stuff.
…
Therefore, as tea tree oil’s proponent, it was ABG’s own responsibility to rise above that giant midden of crap, to provide us an exceptional argument as to why we should take it seriously—why it deserves that attention when so many others don’t.
Not only did ABG fail to stick their landing, they didn’t even try to make the jump. /plonk
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My sympathies, Prof Ernst. I cannot even imagine how beyond frustrating it must have been, devoting your professional career and life to studying this stuff and doing what you could to make it work better.
Alas, while you can try to lead an Altie away from the water, there’s not much more you can do as long as they want to drink the stuff.
It is a fact, incidentally, that most of history’s major scientific discoveries started as an offhand observation of cause and effect. But, in any case, the studies are double blinded and support my personal experience. Just open your mind, do the research, and be amazed. Best regards.
has it occurred to you that you might be wrong?
@Edzard: What is irritating here is less that ABG refuses to ask “Might I be wrong?”, but more that they fail to ask “How can I be certain I am not?”
Because an honest individual, upon asking herself this question, must ultimately, unavoidably, arrive at her answer: “I can’t.”
To illustrate why, let’s work through a thought experiment.
…
If I throw a ball in the air, I predict that the ball will return to the ground. But can I guarantee this? Is it possible that on my next throw, or a million throws from now, or a trillion trillion trillion throws from now, that the ball might not return to the ground but continue eternally upwards instead? Could I conceivably have missed some heretofore unanticipated universal condition that would generate a different behavior to that which I previously observed?
The full and honest answer to this question must be: “Yes.”
Why? Because I do not—cannot—know everything there is to know. And I can say that with 100% certainty, because, for starters, I do not know the future. Time to us is linear; therefore my future is closed to me until it become my now. And there’s always another future after that one, so…. The best I can do there is to make predictions, and perhaps a few of these [un]informed guesses will turn out right while others do not.
My knowledge is finite while my ignorance is infinite (or as near as). A bit of a gut punch to realize, but one that my ego has adapted to live with.
And all of that is elementary logic. (No science or math required.)
If it has a “good side”, it is that philosophers will never want for work.
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So what can we be certain of, once we accept it is impossible for us to be certain we are right?
Well, it is possible to be certain we are wrong. For instance, our current working hypothesis that “what goes up, must come down” (which is so familiar to us we take it for granted) says that our ball, when we toss it upwards, will return to the ground every time.
Therefore, all we need to disprove this hypothesis is to observe that our ball continues forever upwards just once.
And perhaps on our next toss it will do just that; or on the next toss after; or on our trillion trillion trillionth toss from now. We can’t be certain of it until after we’ve performed that toss. And once we have; if it confirms our current expectation yet again as our ball lands at our feet, then we still can’t be certain of the toss after that one, or any of our [in]finite tosses to follow.
So we can prove ourselves wrong, but we can’t prove ourselves right. And if all we could ever know is everything that we know is Wrong, then we would already know a great deal—but knowing where all the dead-ends are can only be of so much use if we want to get somewhere useful.
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So what else could we usefully know, if we really put our minds to it?
Well, look once more at our ball tossing experiment. Humanity has performed this particular test an untold number of times informally and, more recently, quite a few times formally as well. To date, all of our observations have confirmed our early hypothesis (itself born from our first hypothesis formed back when we were chucking sticks at tasty gazelles on the savannah).
Therefore, what we can say is that from the results of ALL of our test to date that, when we chuck our ball upward we expect it come back down. We can’t be certain of that, no; but we can be extremely, incredibly, confident. And we can express this confidence that we are Not Wrong in terms of probability; which in this case is a very, very high of probability, trending towards 1.0, as we already have an enormous body of observed and experimental evidence accumulated, ALL of which has to date confirmed our prediction.
(Which is why we keep on repeating: Show us your Evidence. Because we are trying to be helpful. But we can’t make you do it: you have to want to do it yourself.)
And when science reaches such high levels of confidence, it renames our explanation from hypothesis to theory. Which says that while it can never be 100% certain the explanation is valid (within limitations) it is now very, very confident that it is… at least until and unless the ball flies off forever upward instead.
(And I will note here: we have recently figured out—at least in principle—how to chuck our ball upward so that it keeps on going forever. Though we’ve never yet managed this in practice as it requires imparting our ball with a stupendous amount of initial momentum, enough to overcome whatever it is that apparently pulls it down. So we have had to revise our original hypothesis somewhat, to insert the new narrower limits beyond which we know now its predictions won’t hold.)
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So to quote Our Richie again:
This is the key insight that we “skeptics” finally arrive at—and not for lack of being frequently stupendously all sorts of Wrong first. So we can absolutely understand and empathize with Alties and their difficulties in grasping it.
What we don’t empathise with is that, having taken our own time to explain all of this very patiently to the best of our capabilities and caution them gently that, based on all of our prior experience that ALL of us are Wrong About Stuff far far more often than we ever manage to be right, so maybe a little bit of humility and homework checking would be a wise move before the pronounce their success, the Altie reaction to this is almost universally to scream and throw shit at us for even hinting that they could ever be wrong.
But as I say to them all: You do you. Because in doing so—by being so abusive and shouty and shamefully hostile—you tell both us and every independent observer far more about the voracious black hole at your heart than all our careful caveat-ed analyses ever could.
It is not our job to disprove your claims. It is yours.
And it is your repeated refusals to do this which disprove you.
@ABG
“But, in any case, the studies are double blinded and support my personal experience. ”
Your experience is worth jack sh*t to everyone else. Either you are too lazy to cite the study that you are taking about or it doesn’t exist. If you make a claim, you are expected to substantiate with evidence, see the big red banner up on this page.
It always occurs to me that I might be wrong. There are no infallible people. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well accepted as it is, may eventually turn out to be wrong. But, using logic, reason, common sense and the evidence of my eyes, ears and mind, in this case, I feel rather certain that I am right on this particular limited subject.
Excellent!
because you ARE wrong.
@ABG: “But, using logic, reason, common sense and the evidence of my eyes, ears and mind, in this case, I feel rather certain that I am right on this particular limited subject.”
I have to say, Richard Feynman’s getting a real workout this week. So stop us if you’ve heard this one before:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
It is extraordinarily presumptuous, if not outright arrogant, to assume that your logic, reason, common sense, and personal perception is somehow above and immune to oversight and error.
So let me put it another way: nobody here gives a fig what you believe, only what you can reasonably prove.
To quote Richard again:
“It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”
Or, to quote me: Evidence or GTFO
…
So here’s a suggestion:
Instead of you constantly telling us how certain you are that you’re Right, how about you iterate all the ways in which you might conceivably be wrong?
We will then be honored to ride shotgun for you, while you check your own homework to be certain you have not (by accident) committed any of those slips.
I think that if that sort of due dilligence was good enough for an honest working salt-of-the-earth scientist like Feynman, it should be good enough for you. Or am I in error myself? If so, do let us know.