rePost::The Gonzalez protocol: Worse than useless for pancreatic cancer : Respectful Insolence

This should have been a snarky post, suffice to say, if stupid people continue to be swayed by advertising into buying useless tablets with no approved therapeutic claims, giving testimonials. Damn these people are earning barrel loads of money and they can’t afford to fund a study showing their supplements work, fuck them. Preying on the weak minded or probably people who have nowhere else to go to, extracting the money of i suspect people from the middle and lower classes. Do these people have no shame. This ended in an angry note, Why don’t the Philippine Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical companies (probably because they couldn’t care less or they have their own supplements) fund studies that would expose these snake’s oil salesmen for the charlatan whacks they really are.

It is the very deadliness of pancreatic cancer and the lack of effective life-saving or life-prolonging treatments for it that make pancreatic cancer a ripe condition for quackery. Rising above most other quackeries to attract a lot of attention about a decade ago is a quackery known as the Gonzalez protocol. It is described on Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez‘s website as involving dietary changes, supplements, the replenishment of pancreatic proteolytic enzymes, and “detoxification,” including coffee enemas. It is not an easy therapy to undergo. For example, Dr. Gonzalez states:
Overall, cancer patients will consume 130-175 capsules a day, including nutrients as well as enzymes. Non-cancer patients might consume in the range of 80-100 capsules a day, the exact number depending on their health status and medical problems.
I know of no science-based cancer protocol that requires a patient to consume 150 pills a day. There are also the dietary alterations that can be quite hard to follow, as well as the frequent coffee enemas. All in all, the Gonzalez protocol is an arduous regimen for a debilitated pancreatic cancer patient to follow. Still, for some reason, it gained some popularity in the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) community, so much so that, based on poorly designed case series of eleven patients, Dr. Gonzalez managed to get a clinical trial funded by the NIH to study his method versus standard chemotherapy, a sordid story that Dr. Atwood has chronicled in detail in a long series of blog posts. That trial ended in 2005.
via The Gonzalez protocol: Worse than useless for pancreatic cancer : Respectful Insolence.