I do not believe in a "big pharma" conspiracy, nor do I think that doctors are in their profession (especially oncology!) for the money. I do not think the government is hiding a cure, especially since most governments in the world actually pay for their citizens' cancer treatments.
While I do believe that diet, exercise, hydration and good sleep patterns are important to a healthy body, I do not believe that the absence, presence, too much of/too little of these things caused the metastatic breast cancer that is invading my body.
There are a lot of "suggestions" out on the market that present themselves as medical knowledge. They are touted as "alternative treatments" because, gasp, the medical industry doesn't want you to know anything about them because it would cut into their bottom line.
There's no doubt ... medicine IS a big business ... but it's not the evil entity the alternative pushers try to make it to be. Quite frankly, I know too many people in the medical industry to believe the lies. I'm talking about my personal friends ... not the medical team treating me, although, they are amazing people who work incredibly hard on my behalf. But in my personal friendship circle, I know health administrators, nurses, doctors and researchers. I live in Stanford's back yard and I see the blood, sweat and tears that go into developing a medical product. My own husband works in medical device development so I know the number of hours, the amount of testing and the huge regulatory requirements that go into getting a product to market.
The alternative market is full of "pretend knowledge."
"Pretend knowledge is very dangerous because it can create the powerful illusion of genuine knowledge. Confirmation bias is a persistent and subtle bias in the way we perceive, filter, and evaluate information that systematically supports what we already believe or wish to be true. It largely occurs without our conscious awareness. We also tend to be unaware of the vast amounts of data we are sifting, and so when we find bits of data that seem to support our beliefs we find it unlikely that there is an alternate explanation.
"In medicine there are other factors that also conspire to create the powerful illusion that even entirely fake beliefs are legitimate. Chief among these factors are placebo effects – effects that make it seem as if a treatment is having a benefit even when it is doing nothing. Placebo effects are largely illusory, such as regression to the mean (symptoms getting better as a matter of course)."
The above two paragraphs are from a very interesting article on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I have a whole different post about TCM but I'll save that for another time.
Whole article here: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-tcm-challenge/#more-34093