Actually, both of the original links in this thread were to articles posted on ABC News websites. It's not surprising that after four years the links no longer go to the original articles (thanks for noticing, eibren), so here's a working link to one of the articles. Still very timely. "Many hospitals offer aromatherapy, massage, meditation, yoga and acupuncture because patients want them and there is little risk of physical harm. They call this complementary or integrative medicine because it is in addition to - not in place of conventional treatments. At the other end of the spectrum are quacks selling fringe therapies and supplements through testimonials, not proof. Laetrile, "detoxifying" coffee enemas, shark cartilage - the miracle cures change but the bogus claims remain the same. "What I am noticing in the last year or two is a resurgence of these things. It's coming back," said Barrie Cassileth, integrative medicine chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a longtime adviser to the American Cancer Society. The Internet fuels this trend by letting people buy direct and bypass doctors who could help them see through scams and misleading claims of scientific proof. Sadly, some Web sites are run by quacks - a "doctor" title doesn't mean the remedy is safe or effective. "A lot of these doctors prey on people's insecurities and need for hope," said Dr. Roy Herbst, lung cancer chief at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. "After they've been there some months they'll realize things are not working. But with cancer, you get one chance. By the time they get back to a reasonable hospital, they're dead. Nothing can be done for them," she said. Ways that supplements and fringe therapies can harm: Financially. Pills that seem cheap actually cost a lot if they are worthless or are bought in place of real medicine, fresh fruits and vegetables, or other things known to boost health. Medically. Trying an alternative remedy can delay the time until a patient receives an effective treatment, allowing the cancer to spread. A potentially curable cancer may become untreatable - as Leslee Flasch found out when she belatedly sought the surgery that had been recommended. Having such an advanced cancer without standard medical care must have caused excruciating pain, said one of her physicians, Dr. Lodovico Balducci at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Physically. Supplements, even those claimed to be natural, have biological effects and can interact dangerously with a wide array of medicines. Psychologically. Futile treatment raises false hope and deprives people of the chance to prepare for the end of life and die in dignity and comfort." Here is a link that might be useful: Alt med cancer treatments - a risky business This post was edited by eric_oh on Sun, Oct 6, 13 at 14:41

The Story of Essiac Tea below is for the benefit of anyone interested. On a fateful day in 1922 Canadian nurse Rene Caisse happened to notice some scar tissue on the breast of an elderly woman. The woman said that doctors had diagnosed her with breast cancer years before. However, the woman didn't want to risk surgery nor did she have the money for it. As luck would have it, she had met an old Indian medicine man who told her that he could cure her cancer with an herbal tea. The woman took the medicine man's advice, and consequently she was still alive nearly thirty years later to pass on this herbal remedy to Nurse Caisse. About a year later, Rene Caisse was walking beside a retired doctor who pointed to a common weed and stated: "Nurse Caisse, if people would use this weed there would be little cancer in the world." Rene later stated: "He told me the name of the plant. It was one of the herbs my patient named as an ingredient of the Indian medicine man's tea!" The "weed" was sheep sorrel. In 1924 she decided to test the tea on her aunt who had cancer of the stomach and was given about six months to live. Her aunt lived for another 21 years, cancer free. Rene Caisse (pronounced "Reen Case") later gave the tea to her 72-year old mother who was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the liver, with only days to live. Her mother recovered and lived without cancer for another 18 years. In the ensuing years Nurse Caisse refined and perfected the original "medicine man's" formula. She tested various herbal combinations on laboratory mice and on human cancer patients. She eventually reduced the tea to four herbs: burdock root, sheep sorrel, slippery elm and turkey rhubarb. She called the formula Essiac, which is her surname spelled backwards. Rene Caisse devoted over fifty years of her life to treating thousands of cancer patients with Essiac. So effective were her free treatments that in 1938 her supporters gathered 55,000 signatures for a petition to present to the Ontario legislature to "authorise Rene Caisse to practice medicine in the Province of Ontario in the treatment of cancer and conditions therein". Unfortunately, due to the machinations of the Canadian Medical Association, the bill failed to pass by just three votes. WHAT DID DOCTORS SAY ABOUT RENE CAISSE'S TEA? Rene Caisse operated her cancer clinic under the supervision and observation of a number of doctors. Based on what those doctors saw with their own eyes, eight of them signed a petition to the Department of National Health and Welfare at Ottawa, asking that Nurse Caisse be given facilities to do independent research on her discovery. Their petition, dated at Toronto on October 27, 1926, read as follows: To Whom It May Concern: "We the undersigned believe that the 'Treatment for Cancer' given by Nurse R.M. Caisse can do no harm and that it relieves pain, will reduce the enlargement and will prolong life in hopeless cases. To the best of our knowledge, she has not been given a case to treat until everything in medical and surgical science has been tried without effect and even then she was able to show remarkable beneficial results on those cases at that late stage. "We would be interested to see her given an opportunity to prove her work in a large way. To the best of our knowledge she has treated all cases free of any charge and has been carrying on this work over the period of the past two years." Initially, Rene was not aware of the control that the medical/pharmaceutical establishment had over governments. After the petition was delivered to the National Health and Welfare Department, she was continually threatened with arrest until she finally withdrew from public view. Unlike Nurse Caisse, the medical establishment was more interested in making money than in helping people. Essiac was cheap. It could cut into the lucrative profits from radiation, chemotherapy and surgery--treatments that often did more harm than good. Essiac is non-toxic. Rene said, "Chemotherapy should be a criminal offense." The story of Rene Caisse's struggle to make Essiac an official cancer treatment was told by Dr. Gary Glum in his book CALLING OF AN ANGEL: ESSIAC, NATURE'S CURE FOR CANCER. In a telephone conversation Dr. Glum stated that people who take Essiac on a regular, preventive basis do not get cancer. Dr. Glum interviewed JFK's personal physician, Dr. Charles Brusch, who stated: "I know Essiac has curing potential. It can lessen the condition of the individual, control it, and it can cure it." Dr. Ralph Moss was appointed to the Cancer Advisory Panel that evaluates alternative cancer therapies for the government. On his web site and in his book CANCER THERAPY, Dr. Moss points out that each of the herbs in Essiac has been scientifically shown to contain anticancer substances. In his "Cancer Chronicles" [www.ralphmoss.com/essiac], Dr. Moss notes Essiac's rising popularity by comparing Essiac's low cost to a $150,000 bone marrow transplant. ESSIAC--MORE THAN JUST A CANCER TREATMENT Dr.Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin became interested in Essiac and even offered Nurse Caisse research facilities to test it. According to Rene, Dr. Banting stated that "Essiac must actuate the pancreatic gland into normal functioning". Even today diabetics are using Essiac to improve their condition and many have gone off insulin entirely.

This message has kind of gotten hijacked from the original post to an argument over the risks/benefits of genetic engineering. Certainly genetically engineered crops are being developed to produce a marketable result (GM seeds) and side effects may not be of the utmost concern. However, an underlying theme of developing these crops is to reduce the potential side effects of other pesticides by reducing their use and substituting pesticides that are safer, non-toxic or less toxic to non-target species, and have a reduced potential to cause damage to non-target species or areas. There is the potential for Bt crops to kill Monarch caterpillers, however it is still probably less toxic than the alternatives. Bt crops do not produce a bug free field. Many species of insects are immune to Bt. Caterpillars are generally not immune to it. Insects that are not eating the corn are not a target of the Bt corn, and Monarchs do not eat the corn. The risk lies in the movement of corn pollen carrying the Bt to the Monarch's food source. Still, the bloom period for corn will run a couple weeks in the summer. The rest of the growing season, it is not shedding any Bt material. Thus, there is risk to non-target Monarch larvae for a couple weeks. Adults would not be harmed, just larvae during this period. Without Bt corn, the control of insect pests in the crop would generally require sprays or soil treatments that would kill a much broader spectrum of insects, including all adult Monarchs that might be in the field. Thus while the use of Bt crops might not be totally safe for non-target species, it is still probably much safer than the alternatives, and it is more effective on the target pests. Seems like a winning solution here--and with time it can still be improved. But if the early steps aren't profitable for the developers, they will never move on to develop even safer products down the road. With herbicide resistant crops, the plants are producing and carrying no pesticides. What the genes do is allow farmers to spray the crop with broad spectrum, low toxicity herbicides and the plant has the ability to deactivate the herbicide quickly so it suffers no damage. There are valid concerns with these technologies, however we need to explore them as they offer the potential to reduce the use of toxic pesticides and non-target damage dramatically compared to conventional technologies. When it comes to the potential for the bunny cottonwoods to spread by seed or cross into other poplars growing wild, Monsanto had techniques to render their genetically modified crop seeds sterile so they could not transfer into other plants, however that was killed with the help of those claiming that potential outcrossing was a terrible risk. Sometimes I think the anti-GM people are less interested in controlling the risks of GM technology than they are in finding issues to generate memberships and donations to feather their nests and perpetuate the discord.

I do remember coming across an article in the medical literature about 5 years ago reporting a higher rate of bladder cancer in Scottish Terriers that lived in yards that had been treated with pesticides - and I think it was herbicides, specifically. The article stated that, while the S. Terriers are more prone to bladder cancer to begin with, they may be considered the proverbial "miner's canary" and therefore a warning to us all. I'm with you and Cisco and, following an integrated pest management approach, reach for the least toxic control measures, and only when they are truly necessary. Thanks for bringing this to the forum!