Clinical trials
oracknows | January 9, 2013About a year and a half ago, I applied a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a a clueless article about the the "triumph" of New Age medicine. The article channeled the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. Basically, its whole idea appeared to be that, even if most of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" is quackery (which it most certainly is), it doesn't matter because allegedly it's making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to them in a way that most doctors do not. In brief, the article was…
oracknows | December 9, 2012For all the worship of "translational" research that is currently in vogue, it needs to be remembered that a robust pipeline of basic science progress upon which to base translational research and clinical trials is absolutely essential if progress in medicine is to continue. Without it, progress in SBM will slow and even grind to a halt. That's why, in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is so critical. The NIH funds large amounts of biomedical research each year, which means that what the NIH will and will not fund can't help but have a profound effect shaping the pipeline of…
oracknows | December 2, 2012Sometimes when a study comes out that I'm very interested in blogging about, I don't get around to it right away. In the blogging biz, this sort of delay is often considered a bad thing, because blogging tends to be very immediate, about being the firstest with the mostest, and the moment to strike and be heard about major studies is brief. Of course, there's also real life as well. That this particular study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) didn't help. So, here it is, a week and a half later, and I'm finally getting around to it. There is, however, an advantage to this…
oracknows | November 30, 2012If there's one thing that's difficult about writing about Stanislaw Burzynski, his highly dubious (nay, bogus) antineoplaston cancer therapy, his "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy for dummies," and his shameless rebranding of an orphan drug as a miracle cure for cancer, it's trying to balance a righteous anger at what he does to desperate cancer patients with a knowledge of the effect that my words will have on some of those same desperate cancer patients. Most regular readers of this blog know who Stanislaw Burzynski is, but, even if I've just written about him a few days ago (this…
oracknows | November 20, 2012I've made no secret of my opinion of a certain "alternative" cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, of the infamous Burzynski Clinic. When last we left Burzynski, his propagandist lapdog bootlicker documentary film maker Eric Merola was most unhappy with bloggers like me for having the temerity to tell it like it is when it comes to his film subject's activities. Merola, you might recall, was responsible for Burzynski the Movie – Cancer Is a Serious Business, which I characterized as pure propaganda so incompetently made that it would make Leni Riefenstahl blush. After a couple of…
oracknows | November 19, 2012As I looked over the ol' blog last night, I was shocked to realize that I haven't blogged about the antivaccine movement and its offenses against science in nearly three weeks. That's right! The last time I did a vaccine post was when I examined a particularly egregiously bad paper from a couple of scientists who have drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid and as a result are trying to blame the HPV vaccine Gardasil for the death of an 18-year-old woman in Australia and a 14-year-old girl in Quebec. It's amazing but true. Rarely do I go that long without antivaccine pseudoscience attracting…
oracknows | November 13, 2012Regular readers probably know that I'm into more than just science, skepticism, and promoting science-based medicine (SBM). (If they're regular readers of my other, not-so-super-secret other project, they might also realize that they've seen this post before elsewhere. I had to stay out late for a work-related event and decided to tart it up and recycle. So sue me.) I'm also into science fiction (hence the very name of this blog, not to mention the pseudonym I use), computers, and baseball, not to mention politics (at least more than average). That's why our recent election, coming as it did…
oracknows | November 10, 2012As our great Lord Draconis Zeneca promises, besides the fantasies of filthy lucre in the minds of our opponents, there are other rewards to being one of his shills and minions besides getting to blog to my heart's content about the pseudoscience and quackery that is "alternative" medicine. One of them is that sometimes I find out that my victim target subject notices me.
So it was, when I became aware on Facebook that Eric Merola noticed me. Merola, as you might recall, is the producer of that paean to Stanislaw Burzynski, entitled, unimaginatively and awkwardly enough, Burzynski the Movie -…
oracknows | November 7, 2012I've been writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again, just yesterday having mentioned a warning letter that the Burzynski Clinic received from the FDA last month. Given Dr. Burzynski's history of promoting a highly dubious cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons and administering them to patients under the guise of clinical trials for which he charges patients huge sums of money and of also selling an equally dubious form of "personalized gene targeted cancer therapy" that I've referred to as "personalized cancer therapy for dummies," I took a very dim view of his having received yet…
oracknows | November 6, 2012I sometimes think that Stanislaw Burzynski is a lot like the Bloody Mary of folklore, or perhaps Candyman of the famous horror movie—or perhaps like a number of other legends and horror stories—in that all it seems to take for him to show up in the blogosphere again is for me to recite his hame enough times. Yes, I know that it's a bit of confirmation bias on my part and whether or not some new Burzynski news happens to come to the fore again has little or nothing to do with my invocation of his name, but it is a rather amusing thought. Be that as it may, it was just late last week that I…
oracknows | November 4, 2012Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on "heavy metal toxicity." Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to be excreted by the kidneys is standard therapy for certain types of acute heavy metal poisoning, such as iron overload due to transfusion, aluminum overload due to hemodialysis, copper toxicity due to Wilson's disease, acute heavy metal toxicity, and a handful…
oracknows | November 2, 2012I hate to end the week on a down note, but sometimes it's necessary. It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski. I'm sure you recall Burzynski. He's a hero in the alternative medicine world, having been cast as a martyr to The Man (i.e., the FDA and Big Pharma) because of his selling of a dubious cancer cure that he calls antineoplastons. Although he's been selling his questionable cancer treatments for thirty years now, he's recently been in the news a lot lately thanks to a credulous paean to his activities in the form of a movie that was released in 2010 called,…
oracknows | October 31, 2012I'd like to publicly thank Dr. John Killen, Jr. I was looking for something to write about yesterday evening, and, just when I was beginning to despair that I might have to do another post on the lunacy that is antivaccine nonsense (even I get tired of taking on antivaccine idiocy, as regular readers know), he generously provided me with a perfect non-vaccine-related topic. Truly, to a skeptical blogger and supporter of science-based medicine like myself, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) blog is the gift that keeps on giving. I've written a lot of…
oracknows | October 17, 2012As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It's an area that you wouldn't necessarily expect, although anyone who's read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I'm referring to the military, and, as I've documented time and time again, increasingly our men and women in uniform are being subjected to abject quackery. What they need and deserve is the very best science-based medicine that we as a nation have to offer. Instead, what more and more of…
oracknows | September 28, 2012From time to time, I tussle with various animal rights activists online. Over the summer, unfortunately the radical animal rights types, those who think that, at the very least, vandalism is perfectly acceptable in the name of their cause, some of whom think that action up to and including murder of scientists could potentially be morally justified, came to my campus. They also threatened and harassed an excellent scientist whom I know personally and with whom I've served on a committee. That's a bit too close.
Then there are animal rights apologists whom, although they make a point of…
oracknows | September 26, 2012There's an oft-quoted saying that's become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that's been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn't. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine. Of course, being the kind of guy that I am, I have to make it a bit more complicated than that while driving home in essence the same message. In my hands, the way this argument goes is that the whole concept of "alternative"…
oracknows | September 16, 2012As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I've probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and various antivaccine websites. I think of it as my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the antiscience and pseudoscience wing of medicine, but I must admit that I don't really read them all, but they do allow me to know what the quacks are selling and what new…
oracknows | September 14, 2012The Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the most massive scientific undertakings in recent years and, from a basic science and technology development standpoint, one of the most productive. The data gained formed the basis of the genomic revolution. And "revolution" is the right word. A mere 12 years after the human genome sequence was first published in papers in Nature and Science, we now have petabytes of sequence data pouring out of universities, research institutes, and genomics institutes. Sequencing a genome, which took several years to do for the HGP and cost billions of dollars,…
oracknows | September 11, 2012I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me glad that I didn't blog about this back on Monday, when the study that is the focus of this disturbance was published. Had I written about it then, all I would have had as fodder was the study itself. However, waiting a couple of days has allowed me to see the reaction of the…
oracknows | September 5, 2012Long, long ago, seemingly in a galaxy far, far away, I first encountered quackery on the Internet. Because I am a cancer surgeon, naturally I gravitated towards cancer quackery at first. Believe it or not, it was quite some time after that before I started to take an interest in what has become a major focus of this blog, the antivaccine movement and the misinformation it spreads. Both are equally damaging in their own way. True, these were back in the deep, dark days when I used to cruise various Usenet newsgroups, ranging from alt.revisionism (Holocaust denial), sci.skeptic (of course!),…