Comment by tptacek
2 days ago
I don't believe he had the easily curable kind, or that there's evidence that he completely ditched conventional medicine --- he publicly appealed to Trump for Pluvicto, which treats mCRPC. In several unusual but not ultra-rare cases, CRPC among them, prostate cancer is a nightmare diagnosis. Worse, the kinds of prostate cancer most easily caught by screening tend not to be the aggressive kind, meaning aggressive cases tend to get caught in advanced stages.
Respectfully, I don't think comments like yours are a good idea. I don't think RFKJ had much of anything to do with what happened to Adams.
RFK Jr isn't part of this, nobody mentioned him, and nobody claimed he completely ditched conventional medicine either. I'm not saying this to take on a confrontational tone, but this is a sensitive issue and it's worth keeping these things in mind.
The ivermectin hysteria has been going on since 2020. There are still large political bubbles where people believe ivermectin is a cure-all, and he was in that bubble when he was diagnosed.
The evidence is in his public statements. He is on video on the matter, and he has publicly stated elsewhere he that he tried ivermectin and fenbendazole at first. (They didn't work.) Here is him describing how he rejected ADT at first, and how taking it worked a lot: https://x.com/jayplemons/status/1939769665527718024
(I can't view the above video myself, since I have X blocked on my network, and the transcript is too long to post here. In short, he notes that he rejected ADT, but then started it when he realized it would ease his symptoms even if not cure him. He found his symptoms did indeed ease.)
The problem isn't that he completely ditched conventional medicine, it's that he didn't start conventional medicine immediately. And his appeal for Pluvicto only came in November.
Cancer is more survivable the earlier treatment starts. He delayed it for no reason at all. If he didn't start treatment at all, he probably have died earlier. If he didn't reject treatment at all, he probably would still be alive today, possibly even cancer-free.
I have the same opinion about ivermectin as you do. People with intractable cancers, for wholly sympathetic reasons, turn to alternative medication. I don't think any of that helped him. But it's not what killed him. He's was a human being, his published beliefs notwithstanding, and his illness was not a parable.
I am not unfamiliar with that dynamic myself. But the crucial point is that he turned to alt-medicine as a first resort, not as a last resort. This is decisionmaking that leads to deaths which were avoidable.
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