Kate should ask doctors about bogus treatments
REGARDING Kate O’Connell’s article about bogus cancer cures (Mail, Tuesday), I expect that she and many readers will have watched the recent Prime Time investigation into desperate women with breast cancer heading off to dubious clinics in Turkey at great expense, seeking a cure for their cancer. As a doctor I felt most sorry for them.
However Ms O’Connell fails to mention the obvious question – just why are so many cancer sufferers doing this sort of thing?
Surely it is because of the failure of conventional treatments to cure them. They will have been told that nothing more can be done. We all will know of friends and relatives who have died from cancer. Clearly standard treatments are often failing, but why if they are all evidence based and well researched?
Furthermore, there is a communication failure, if oncologists are unable to demonstrate to patients that alternative therapies do not work, as Kate O’Connell claims. In fact not all alternative internet sites are there to make money by exploiting vulnerable cancer sufferers. Some are for information and usually quote evidence to back up what they say. Unfortunately it is not enough to satisfy the excessively restrictive qualifications by which research is judged to be adequate, so it is said to be ‘unproven’. However ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’.
Though getting such evidence is cheap enough when obtained from rats and mice with cancer, it is almost impossible to get such research on cancer treatments to be financed, so that it can done on people with progressing cancer and so it gets ignored by the designers of the medical guidelines.
The TD has contacted various representative bodies, but this is not the same as asking the medical profession or nutritionists and I have never been asked for my opinion on the Bill.
She needs to study the evidence herself, rather than accepting the opinions of others.
So let her ask all doctors, if she wants us to support her Bill which I trust will be worded in an effective way and aimed at truly exploitive sites. ALISTAIR McFARLANE, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal.
Save our planet first
SOON we are going to have less fuzzy pictures of a big rock four billion miles from Earth. Although I am a science enthusiast I wonder if we should first at least also look inwards. The photos of explanet Pluto are fantastic and probably quite meaningful to a few people although to most they probably could be mistaken for moon photos.
It was suggested that we have explored more of outer space than our oceans which seems strange but may actually be true. We should first see what we have, especially as we are making a pretty good effort at destroying it. The purpose of science is many fold including just learning more about how big rocks a long way away rotate but its first purpose should be to make the human condition better. We still have so many things to achieve here, starting with the challenging – feeding the masses – through to the difficult – curing many diseases – and the seemingly impossible: stopping climate change.
The rock has been around for at least four billion years so we could wait a few more centuries and get a great Instagram shot later.
Let’s sort out our own world and then go and check out the neighbours later. DENNIS FITZGERALD,
Melbourne.
Spiritual delusion
I RECENTLY read your exclusive interview of Josepha Madigan. I suppose we should never be surprised at double speak from politicians, however, in Ms Madigan’s case I think I can be forgiven.
Josepha seems to be afflicted with one of the worst cases of spiritual delusion ever! To suggest that as a devout Catholic she can easily reconcile the intentional killing of an preborn child is outrageous. The following is an extract from a Sunday Mass homily given in Navan, the day after the abortion referendum result was announced. ‘I also have a duty to speak to those of you who voted yes. I have to suggest to you that there is now a disconnect between your Catholic faith and what you think is right. Your Catholic faith, in this critical moment, has not informed how you make a judgment between right and wrong. True faith, true Christian faith is not about what I or any other priest says. True faith is the search for what God is saying, and submit to that. You need to be honest with yourself and humbly acknowledge the disconnect between your faith and your value system. Hear the invitation that is extended to you to turn to God, to seek his mercy and to embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ.’
If Ms. Madigan would like the full text of the homily, that can be arranged.
JOE SMITH, Navan, Co. Meath
Fine Gael waffle
JUST as Michael Noonan told us back then that ‘austerity is over’, now we have Leo Varadkar, tell us that ‘we turned the corner in 2018’ on the housing crisis.
Are they living in the same world as us citizens? We can think or believe whatever the hell we want is now the attitude coming from our government.
ROBERT SULLIVAN, Co. Cork.