@DeNovo "Adjusting pH within a very narrow tolerance" is very different from "mess around with".

In this frame of reference — i.e. responding layman crazy-party-of-the-internet non-medicinal(*) non-advice — then no, you cannot "mess about" with the body's pH and not expect to feel very ill or even die from it. ( * ) There is no such thing as "alternative medicine". Either something is effective and safe, and then it is "medicine", everything else is "non-medicine".

I think this answer is misleading on the Warburg effect, and on OW's position on the origin of cancer. To quote from Sidney Weinhouse's famous 1956 rebuttal in Science Some years ago Otto Warburg enunciated a theory of cancer which, briefly summarized proposed that cancer originates when a nonneoplastic cell adopts an anaerobic metabolism as a mean of survival after injury to its respiratory system. According to W., the tumor is initiated by a damaged respiration, which persists as a characteristic feature of the neoplastic condition

@tomd I do not see that this quote in any way contradicts that which I said, albeit in simpler form.

[Wargurg quote part 1 of 2] And to quote from the English translation of Warburg's On the Origin of Cancer Cells: Cancer cells originate from normal body cells in two phases. The first phase is the irreversible injuring of respiration. [...] The irreversible injuring of respiration is followed, as a second phase of cancer formation, by a long struggle for existence by the injured cells to maintain their structure, to which a part of the cells perish from lack of energy, while another part succeed in replacing the irrretrievably lost respiration energy by fermentation energy.

[Wargurg quote part 2 of 2] Because of the morphological inferiority of fermentation energy, the highly differentiated body cells are converted by this into undifferentiated cells that grow widely -the cancer cells.

@tomd This is still not contradicting that which I said in the post. The Warburg Effect — that "most cancer cells predominantly produce their energy through a high rate of glycolysis followed by lactic acid fermentation even in the presence of abundant oxygen" — is undisputed. But Warburg also claimed that this is the cause of cancer and not just an effect of cancer. This last bit has not been validated.

@tomd "Well, I think it is misleading at least in the following sense. The is no diminution of oxygen consumption in cancer cells." The answer does not go into that at all. These comments are completely missing the mark, because they try to "correct" something that is not even mentioned in the post!

@MichaelK Even effective medicines aren't necessarily perfectly safe. NSAIDs can cause ulcers, people can have allergies, etc. The important thing is balancing the risk with the benefit.

@JAB I did not say perfectly safe, I only said "safe and effective".

@JAB And yes, it is a mater of benefit vs. risk-induced cost.

@MichaelK re: "messing with pH", when an evidence based principle of medicine is adopted and distorted by quackery, that doesn't make the principle wrong. Acid base disorders and their treatment are evidence based, mainstream western medicine. It bothers me to see "you can't mess with pH" as a response to the quack claim "all disease comes from excess acid in the body". You are making an incorrect argument. There are correct ones available.

@tomd Quoted directly from Wikipedia, which in turn quotes from here.