William Li

Angiogenesis

Angiogenesis is what happens when the body grows new blood vessels — it's really a thing, look it up in your freshman physiology text. The woo comes in when Li argues that "angiogenesis therapy" promotes the growth of new blood vessels in order to "to replenish the blood supply to chronic wounds to speed healing, and [prevent] unnecessary amputations."[1]

In reality, angiogenesis can make you worse if you have metastatic (malignant) cancer. When a tumor metastasizes in a new area of the body, it starts out tiny, but sends out signals telling the surrounding tissue to grow new blood vessels so that it can feed. Without angiogenesis, the new tumor can't grow bigger than a pin head. In fact, one cancer management therapy that's under serious study is the use of angiogenesis inhibitors such as thalidomide to prevent new blood vessels from forming.[2]

gollark: Oh, so it's meant to be "probability of surviving X years"? How is it actually computed?
gollark: How does that work?
gollark: Who deems these things viable?
gollark: If I IIRC, DALL-E Mini is actually light enough that you could feasibly run it on many consumer GPUs.
gollark: Ha, I was right. FEAR my rough knowledge of modern artistic AI things.

References
  1. "Understanding Angiogenesis."
  2. The National Cancer Institute, fact sheet on angiogenesis inhibitors
This alternative medicine-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.