I'm going to break the mould and go for a "disagree, agree, disagree" tactic. I'm interested to know how effective it is at convincing people (I'm guessing not very, but let's see.)

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So you're applying a barrier to entry that filters out only the people who are willing to sit through hours of videos about certain topics? Sounds like you're trying to manually generate an echo chamber. If the best argument you've got against my words is that I'm not in a certain set of people, then that suggests you actually don't have much of an argument against my words.

You seem angry. In my experience, people only usually get angry about words (that aren't personal attacks) when they're causing some sort of internal conflict in the reader. It's not my place to say whether this is due to cognitive dissonance or some event in your past or something else; I don't know you well enough.

I deleted Scientism from the Open Source article on Wikipedia because it's not about Open Source.

Your own statement proves yourself wrong and exposes the twisted logic they get you in.

I simply do not understand what you're trying to say here. I'm not saying that it doesn't work. I'm merely saying that I'd bet my life savings that it doesn't work, based on my previous life experiences.

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Now we've disagreed, time to agree.

Meanwhile a lot of home remedies work way better than [allopathic cures].

Many do, yes. Very traditional remedies are only still around because they work, and work well.

The same cannot be said, however, for newly-invented scams passed off as traditional, natural or "naturopathic" cures. And I've no doubt that many of these are promoted by big companies. I've no doubt that some big commercial allopathic cures, especially those around mental health issues, are passed off as working to cure things that they don't, solve problems they never have, and have a much higher success rate than they actually do.

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But those things aren't cancer.

Cancer is a name for a vast variety of similarly-behaving catastrophic revolts of the body. A cell or group of cells somehow gets the idea to go off and do its own thing, and our body's usual defence system just lets it do just that. We've tried loads and loads and loads of different things to solve the problem, from synthetic chemicals to mashed-up herbs to sharp objects to laser beams to standing on your head to poison to radiation to pure oxygen to diets. And we've got something that kind of sort of works.

Thousands died to teach us what we know now. Thousands more will die to teach us still more. We are unable to save millions. And yet we have given millions of people just another month, year, decade – and some we have cured.

The usual approach goes something like this:

• Surgery – cut out as much cancer as possible. This one's falling out of favour somewhat, as there's evidence that some types of cancer get more aggressive when damaged, and if even a single cell remains…

• Chemotherapy – poison the cancer. This has been improving, as we've found different chemicals that target rapidly-dividing cells more and more effectively, and so can avoid killing the rest of the patient.

  Traditionally, this tends to make the patient's hair fall out and reduce the effectiveness of their immune system. However, we're getting closer and closer to a "magic bullet" for cancer. In fact, for some cancers, we're already using chemicals that target the cancer itself, which leaves the patient less vulnerable to other diseases, etc..

• Radiotherapy – damage the tumour so much that it can't divide any more. This is dangerous, as it has the potential to cause cancer in other cells, and it only works for solid tumours. However, it's effective when it works, and we're developing more techniques (like robots and tattoo-guided laser guns) for increasing the dose to the tumour while decreasing the dose to the rest of the body.

There are also other treatments. A months-old technique injects immunostimulator into the tumour itself, basically making it a sort of beacon and allowing the immune system to properly attack and kill it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a treatment involving basically killing the whole immune system and then making a bone marrow transplant has proven somewhat effective for treating leukaemia (and, as an added bonus, HIV too).

If an alternative medicine cure has promise, like IPT, then it'll be pursued by researchers, refined (if possible), marked up at a higher price (in the US; not as much where we've got Universal Healthcare) and become mainstream – it ceases to be alternative medicine. Yes, there's not enough funding for this, so it's slow, and people tend to play it safe and not test things that aren't guaranteed to work…

… but there's nothing stopping you from combining cancer treatments. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are often combined to produce much better results. Likewise, if you think there's a promising approach that hasn't been picked up by doctors yet for whatever reason, go ahead and try that too.

But forbidding a child known-effective cancer treatment is wildly unethical.

This is the reason Steve Jobs died, and he was an adult who was able to make his own choices. But having a parent decide that they'd rather be Right™ and stick it to the institutions than have the child survive? Reprehensible. Understandable, but a terrible, terrible thing.

The parents shouldn't have had to pay for it, but the system in America is known to be broken. I'd argue that this was a symptom. But the state's "kidnapping" to provide the child with potentially life-saving treatment? It is, in my mind, the moral thing to do.