Doing Your Own Cancer Research

Without wanting to make a fetish of peer review, it still stands that any serious research on cancer treatments will have been published in a scientific journal. Something published on a web-site or forum and without supporting evidence has to be treated with a huge amount of scepticism. What it says may be true, but you need to know the evidence – and that doesn't mean anonymous web users reporting second hand stories of what works (or doesn't work).

Pubmed is the best place to start when looking for published research. You'll find everything here, from studies on curcumin, resveratrol, glutamine, methyl jasmonate to the latest in chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery and so on. If you've not got the scientific training you can still learn a lot from reading the abstract and discussion sections of a paper. For help in interpreting the results that are listed a good place to go is the Anticancer.org.uk site, particularly the 'How To Read A Cancer Paper' article.

Cancer cures and the internet

The original Grouppe Kurosowa blog was set up by the late Steve Martin as a vehicle for exploring his theories on cancer treatment. The blog was his way of thinking out loud and musing on various aspects of therapy. His main point was to come up with a set of protocols that could cure cancer using non-toxic and easily available drugs and supplements. His views changed over time and the various protocols he developed changed too. For example curcumin was in, then it was out. The last sets of protocols were mainly based around the combination of glutamine, sodium selenite and methyl jasmonate. All of these were used in combination to generate large amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS), so that this would overwhelm the anti-oxidant defences of tumour cells. His protocols specifically forbade the use of anti-oxidants. Various versions of these protocols can still be found floating around the dark, dim recesses of the web.

Steve Martin passed away a while back and his family kept the blog site up for a while and then took it down. Like a lot of people I has book-marked the site and came back to find that the blog was vacant again. Rather than let it go to some unscrupulous person who’d exploit the existing traffic for financial gain I have taken the name as a gesture of goodwill.

I think that although Steve Martin had some interesting theories, his protocols were largely untested and potentially dangerous. He did not just present theories, with all of the caveats that that entails, he proposed concrete protocols for people to follow to the letter. He promised that this would cure cancer. He wasn’t a doctor, and even if he was to propose general protocols without even knowing an individual’s medical history and current status is dangerous. Therefore this site will not be posting those protocols again. Instead, patients are urged to do plenty of research for themselves (and we’ll point to some interesting sites to do this), but not to take on trust the ‘cures’ that people like to post on the internet. The sad truth is that there are no guaranteed cures – and that goes as much for conventional treatments as it does for the ‘alternatives’ that litter the web.

Steve Martin had interesting theories, but he could not cure cancer.

Please read stuff carefully.

Please practice scepticism.

Please do not be taken in by false promises of cures.

Not Grouppe Kurosawa

Nope - at least not the old Grouppe Kurosawa. Watch this space though...