The Apple That Kept The Doctor Away

The death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has drawn renewed attention to alternative medicine, most of it non-flattering. Jobs had a rare form of pancreatic cancer, insulinoma, which has a better than 75% cure rate when conventional remedies are utilized. Jobs delayed standard treatment – namely surgery – for 9 months while he instead explored dietary therapy. Whether or not his foray into alternative medicine led to his death is pure speculation, but his story does show that you can be brilliant, creative and wealthy yet still make questionable decisions about your own health.

Much of my day-to-day work as a radiologist involves assessing the response of cancer to various medical and surgical treatments, using tests such as CT, PET scanning and ultrasound to actually measure tumor sizes and changes in such over time. Most cancers respond favorably to conventional therapies, but – sadly – some don’t respond well to anything. I have on only very few occasions encountered patients who have opted for alternative regimens over traditional ones, Mr. Jobs’ story thankfully the exception in my experience rather than rule.

A few years back I performed an ultrasound on a woman who had been treating her breast cancer for 4 months with dietary therapy – perhaps similar to what Mr. Jobs tried – by an alternative practitioner based locally in the northwest suburbs. She was by all accounts intelligent, informed and perfectly reasonable, but she was adamant against having breast surgery. Her alternative medicine practitioner had told her that the dietary regimens were working and that her cancer was shrinking. But she was misinformed. I measured the size of her tumor and had a comparison study from the time her cancer was initially biopsied, and it had doubled in size. Based upon this information, she opted for breast conservation surgery – lumpectomy, the standard traditional treatment – and will hopefully not suffer any adverse consequences because of this delay, as her disease was still localized at the time she decided to abandon alternative medicine. But it frightens me that otherwise logical people can be taken advantage of like this, the lure of something labeled as “natural” and “noninvasive” – yet completely unproven – somehow worth such a significant risk.

I have in particular always found it infuriating that some proponents of alternative medicine sincerely believe that there’s a conspiracy against them by those of us who work in the conventional world. I have found the exact opposite to be true. I have seen a complete unwillingness by alternative medical practitioners to subject their treatments – most of which are expensive (these are nearly always cash-only services not covered by insurance) and some of which are frankly dangerous (please look up “coffee enema” if you doubt this) – to any objective scientific testing. I would be proud to be part of any research that could prove that an easy-to-tolerate dietary therapy shrinks cancer, but no one has ever asked me to do so. And as a radiologist who measures tumor sizes daily, I am perhaps the perfect person to be involved with such a study.

A Google search of “Buffalo Grove” and “alternative medicine” will return approximately 600,000 items. While the vast majority are not relevant to treating cancer this way by a local practitioner, the few that certainly are show up near the top of the list. I sincerely invite any of these people to work with me in evaluating their treatments. If I am wrong and these therapies can be shown to work, then alternative medicine gains credibility and these practitioners will rightfully be able to reap any and all benefits. But if unbiased testing continues to be refused, then these individuals are simply selling snake oil. And I wish they’d stop.