"Black Salve as an Alternative Cancer Cure"
Despite warnings from the American Academy of Dermatology
and being listed as a "fake cancer cure" by the FDA,
so-called black salve is still promoted on the internet through anecdotal
and unsubstantiated claims as a natural alternative remedy for skin cancer.
It typically contains a caustic chemical called zinc chloride,
and bloodroot, a native herb that can be like poison ivy on steroids.
It's ironic that people seek it out as a "natural therapy"
when it may mostly just be a stew
of caustic chemicals that together form a corrosive paste
that indiscriminately damages healthy and diseased tissue alike.
But that's not what the claims on the internet say.
Black salve is touted as a selective treatment,
only killing off cancer cells and abnormal tissue,
when in fact in some cases the exact opposite is true.
Some cancer cells resist the damaging effects better than normal cells.
Normal skin cells can be more vulnerable
to the toxic effects than cancer cells.
When tissue samples are taken from black salve treatment lesions,
the damage to normal tissue is readily apparent.
It can burn right through and leave you with like an extra nostril,
or even worse one less nostril.
This isn't just buyer beware, but viewer beware.
Some of these are graphic images,
like this, where he like burned half his nose off.
Now, on the nose you can just be left with cosmetic defects
but put it on the face and it can eat all the way down through to an artery.
And the irony of all this is that when asked why users decided
to order it off the internet, they said it was because
they were fearful of pain and scarring from conventional therapy.
But then you end up with these disfiguring deformities,
whereas after conventional treatment,
where skin cancers are just surgically removed,
about 9 out of 10 reported satisfactory cosmetic results.
About three quarters of black salve users surveyed were unaware
of the potential adverse side effects of black salve treatment.
Yeah, but does it work?
Because of its escharotic, or tissue sloughing character,
corrosive black salve products may destroy both cancerous and healthy skin
to a degree that it eradicates a local cancer.
So, who cares if it leaves an esthetically unpleasing result?
Well, the problem is that without a biopsy, there can be no guarantee
that the cancer has been completely eliminated.
If residual cancer cells persist,
the risk of recurrence or metastasis remains.
And that's probably the biggest concern.
See, people think that if a mole or whatever goes away,
that means the cancer's gone, but that may not be the case.
Malignancy may persist under a black salve scar tissue
and extend under the skin.
Here's a good example to illustrate.
A case study of a woman diagnosed with superficial spreading melanoma,
who decided to go against her dermatologist's advice
and instead treat the lesion with black salve.
By the time she was seen again a few years later,
it had spread to her lymph nodes, lungs, and liver.
Had she been treated early and had it removed,
her prognosis would have been good:
nearly a 90% 10-year disease-free survival.
But once she came back after it had spread,
her survival prognosis may have dropped to about 2.5%
From 90 to 2.5.
And so that's the second irony.
Conventional allopathic medicine has had an extraordinary proven track record
of successful treatment for skin cancer.
It's one of the few cancers we're really good at curing
because we can catch it so early because you can see it emerge,
and so easily cut it out.
So like for basal cell carcinoma, the most common type of skin cancer,
conventional surgery has up to a 99% cure rate;
squamous cell carcinoma about 95%;
and the most common type of melanoma up to 90%.
With escharotic therapies like black salve,
there is no scientifically documented proof of efficacy, period,
since there's never been any clinical trials.
And so all we're left with are glorified anecdotes
ranging from patient satisfaction, to unacceptable scarring,
to invasive recurrent tumors, to ulcer complications, to death.
So why do people use it?
Well, why do cancer patients seek out alternative therapies in general?
Yes, some of it is misinformation; they're just duped by snake oil salesmen.
But a lot of it may be negative experiences
with the current medical system.
Many of those who refused conventional therapies
described their oncologists as intimidating, cold, uncaring,
unnecessarily harsh, thinking they were God,
who sometimes didn't even know their names.
Some reported their physicians became adversarial
when questioned about treatment recommendations.
Almost all the conventional therapy refusers described
the way they were treated as impersonal,
and few believed their doctors were working in their best interests.
So, they left conventional medicine in search of more caring practitioners.
Looking back, many said that
had they had a better first experience with their physicians,
it might have made a difference in their treatment path they ultimately chose.
They said that they would have been more likely to accept
conventional treatment earlier had they felt
they had caring physicians who treated them with respect.