Placing Too Much Value on “Studies” is Irresponsible:

An excerpt from a comment field under a video discussing a woman who is choosing to take her life on November 1st, having been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer…and the video uploader who was suggesting she at least try a raw food diet before deciding to take her own life:

You really shouldn’t present things like this as if it was any form of serious or genuine information. If you can’t show research or studies that demonstrate that these diets do anything at all to help terminally ill cancer patients, you’re potentially interfering with the final months of someone’s life, with unknown consequences. You need study, intense fact checking and rigorous experimentation. Without that, you’ve got conjecture and hypothesis.
Reply:

The “you need research and studies” mindset is a form of programming.  I am not trying to attack you, I am simply stating that it has become so ingrained into culture as a standard that must be adhered to, that the most vital challenge to it is completely ignored: that of the “studies” never including the actual patient.  I’ve learned to benefit from research/studies as much as I can, while fully understanding each time, that *I* was not IN the study.  And if you look into what is being discovered about how differently individuals can react to different therapies, you’ll find that the individual and their personal experience can be vastly different than that of what a study determines.  Of equal importance, as someone who is well-versed in research and law, you would be surprised how often “studies” are completely misinterpreted.  Forget the individual differences in biology, diet, lifestyle, etc…there are countless omissions, and occasionally outright manipulations, of data, along with biased interpretations.  It often requires mental acrobatics just to attempt to decipher what was *really* determined by any study.  We need to stop what has become a form of brainwashing regarding the “need for study” and start placing the majority of our attention on personal intuition, insight, knowledge that we can apply to ourselves.  Learn from research, yes…but do NOT place it into some elevated, undeserved realm of the highest authority.  Because it may not even apply to *you* at all.