There's no such thing as "alternative" treatment.

Alternative treatment implies that such treatment options are valid choices, when there is no scientific proof for these treatments, meaning going through well designed, usually double-blinded clinical trials, multiple stages, to prove efficacy, dosage, risk and side effects, safety, and can be reproduced. Anecdotes, like my aunt's neighbour's son's classmate ate this and they say good, is pointless and nothing but stories.

Effective treatments have gone through rounds and rounds of studies, billions of RnD funds, and years of research done by thousands and thousands of really smart people.

Prime example is Steve Jobs. Had pancreatic cancer, surgery to remove it would have sufficed but nope. Delayed for 9 months and you all know the rest of the story. The riches man on the planet spent 9 months on alternative medicine. Must have spent a shit tonne of money on injections to salves to supplements.

That obviously didn't work

Sarcasm cap firmly on:

For some, they might argue that Jobs didn’t use google because he was waiting for Apple to come up with its own search engine to trawl the internet for the holy grail of mystical alternative treatments.

I’ll give you a couple of pertinent reasons why I would advocate for allopathic medicine (that is the proper nomenclature to apply, it is not “Western” medicine) and not alternative methods as far as disease (not only cancer) treatment is concerned.

Firstly, as a doctor, governed by the rules and statutes that both protect as well as prosecute practitioners, I don’t have the luxury to quote statistically improbable, anecdotal cases that may be a mathematical outlier to give false hope to patients. We have to deal with empirical evidence and the evidence must be backed up by statistical outcomes.

A tik-tokker can claim that his words in his videos are for entertainment purposes when his “advice” causes the death of a follower. A doctor has no such defense.

Secondly, unlike proponents of alternative methods, allopathic medicine does not reject an alternative suggestion but instead subjects it to rigorous scientific scrutiny and research. If the statistics and the trials demonstrate efficacy and safety above and beyond that which can be attributed to chance (ie statistically significant outcome), then, the alternative method is incorporated into allopathic medicine and ceases to be labelled “alternative”. A prime example would be the use of artemisinin for malaria treatment.

It’s not us versus “them”, but that’s not often the case with supporters of alternative approaches. They will reject allopathic treatment and hype up the side effects without acknowledging the benefits, and they are quick to quote anecdotal cases of unexpected or unexplained “healing” without understanding why, or even ensuring the full facts are listed (eg the case quoted re colon cancer and carotene hyperdoses - surgery was conveniently left out of the whole story).

I hope this gives you a snippet into the view commonly held by doctors when it comes to alternative strategies.