Clinical trials
oracknows | January 8, 2014Well, that didn't take long. I knew it had been too quiet on the Burzynski front. In retrospect, that was almost certainly because of the holidays, but the holidays are over, and real life is here again.
Yes, the year 2014 is only a little more than a week old, and here comes Stanislaw Burzynski again, hurt but not defeated in the wake of all the negative publicity he received late last year, thanks to Liz Szabo's USA TODAY expose. Actually, in a way it might have been a good thing that I was delayed in addressing this a day by my little bit of weakness Tuesday night that led mere exhaustion…
oracknows | December 31, 2013As I write this, 2013 is drawing to a close, with only a little more than 12 hours to go before the crowds now gathering at Times Square and elsewhere ring in 2014. For some of you, 2014 has already arrived or will arrive many hours before it does for me. I'm not normally one to do much navel gazing, but 2013 has been a mixed year. As far as this blog goes, for instance, readership is up, with over 3.5 million page views for the year, although that's still a little below the blog's height before the whole "Pepsigate" thing. (It's really hard to believe that was almost three and a half years…
oracknows | December 19, 2013I remember during medical school that more than one of my faculty used to have a regularly repeated crack that the only thing that taking vitamin supplements could do for you was to produce expensive pee. My first year in medical school was nearly thirty years ago now; so it's been a long time. During the nearly three decades since I first entered medical school, I have yet to see any evidence to persuade me otherwise. If you eat a well-rounded diet, you don't need vitamin supplementation. Of course, none of that stops the supplement manufacturers from trying to convince us that taking…
oracknows | December 11, 2013The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle.
Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…
oracknows | December 9, 2013Three weeks ago, USA TODAY published an expose of the Burzynski Clinic by Liz Szabo that was devastating in its scope and detail. Early on, Stanislaw Burzynski and his minions tried to do some damage control, with hilarious results given how inept and unconvincing his excuses were for all the violations of ethics and patient care and abuse of clinical trials detailed by Szabo. Later, Burzynski presented some abstracts at the Society of Neuro-Oncology meeting in San Francisco. Let's just say that the case report and his reports of a phase 2 clinical trial were...similarly unimpressive. Overall…
oracknows | December 4, 2013I'm not really happy to have to write this post, but a blogger's got to do what a blogger's got to do. The reason is that Katie Couric has done something requires—nay, demands—a heapin' helpin' of Orac's characteristic Respectful Insolence. Why should I give the proverbial rodent's posterior about who gets the Insolence today? The reason is that, when it comes to medicine, Katie Couric has done a fair amount of good. After the tragic death of her husband at a young age from colon cancer, she became an activist and spokesperson for colorectal cancer awareness, even famously undergoing her very…
oracknows | November 27, 2013A man on TV is selling me a miracle cure that will keep me young forever. It’s called Androgel…for treating something called Low T, a pharmaceutical company–recognized condition affecting millions of men with low testosterone, previously known as getting older.
—The Colbert Report, December 2012
And now for something completely different...sort of.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I'm busy. Fortunately, I have material to use that has never been posted on this blog before. For those of you who don't also read my not-so-super-secret other blog, it's new to you. For those who do, think of it as an…
oracknows | November 22, 2013I know I have readers who are neuroscientists. However, do I have readers who are currently attending the 4th Quadrennial Meeting of the Society of Neuro-Oncology in San Francisco going on this weekend? Why do I ask? Given the Regular readers might suspect that it has to do something with a man who has become a regular topic of this blog over the last two years. Yes, I'm referring to Stanislaw Burzynski, the oncologist who has never done a residency in internal medicine or a fellowship in oncology who was the subject of an excellent news report by Liz Szabo in USA TODAY one week ago today,…
oracknows | November 18, 2013I was very pleased last Friday, very pleased indeed. Given the normal subject matter of this blog, in which we face a seemingly unrelenting infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into even the most hallowed halls of academic medicine, against which we seem to be fighting a mostly losing battle, having an opportunity to see such an excellent deconstruction of bad science and bad medicine in a large mainstream news outlet like USA TODAY is rare and gratifying. As you might recall, USA TODAY reporter Liz Szabo capped off a months-long investigation of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his…
oracknows | November 15, 2013I've made no secret of how much I despise Stanislaw Burzynski, the self-proclaimed cancer doctor and medical researcher who has been treating patients with an unproven, unapproved chemotherapeutic agent since 1977, seemingly slithering around, under, over, and past all attempts to investigate him and shut him down. Along the way, Burzynski has become a hero to the cancer quackery industry, touted as the man who can cure incurable cancers that science-based medicine can't, even though his treatment, antineoplastons, allegedly peptides isolated from blood and urine that normally keep cancer in…
oracknows | November 10, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who inexplicably has been permitted to continue to administer an unproven cancer treatment to children with deadly brain cancers for nearly 37 years now. Beginning in 1977, when he left Baylor College of Medicine and opened up the Burzynski Clinic, Burzynski has administered a cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons to patients. After nearly four decades and several dozen phase II clinical trials started, he never published a completed phase II trial. The only evidence he's published consists mainly…
oracknows | November 10, 2013Never let it be said that Orac can't match Mark Crislip in shameless promotion. The world might indeed need more Mark Crislip™, but I like to think that it needs a bit more of his friends, too. So, in that spirit, here are the videos, recently released by the James Randi Educational Foundation, of Bob Blaskiewicz, myself, and some key SBM players that you've come to know and love. The first video is a talk by my best "friend" in the world at The Amazing Meeting in July about Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD. It's entitled Why We Fight (Part I): Stanislaw Burzynski Versus Science-Based Medicine.…
oracknows | October 30, 2013If there's one medical treatment that proponents of "alternative medicine" love to hate, it's chemotherapy. Rants against "poisoning" are a regular staple on "alternative health" websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the "cancer industrial complex" in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit massively from administering them. Indeed, I've lost track of the number of such rants I've deconstructed over the last nine years.…
oracknows | October 15, 2013As I mentioned yesterday, one of the things I do on this blog that I consider to be a public service is to analyze cancer cure testimonials that are used to sell alternative medicine. Indeed, I did just that yesterday for a testimonial by someone Chris Wark, who will probably feature again one more time this week; that is, unless I have another Dug the Dog moment. In the meantime, this being Breast Cancer Awareness Month and all, a related article came to my attention. Although it doesn't have anything to do with alternative medicine, it does, like the story of Chris Wark, have everything to…
oracknows | October 9, 2013Here we go with another one.
Three weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that the week of October 7 to 14 was declared by our very own United States Senate to be Naturopathic Medicine Week, which I declared unilaterally through my power as managing editor of Science-Based Medicine (for what that's worth) to be Quackery Week. One wonders where the Senate found the time to consider and vote for S.Res.221, which reads:
S.Res.221 – A resolution designating the week of October 7 through October 13, 2013, as “Naturopathic Medicine Week” to recognize the value of naturopathic medicine in providing safe…
oracknows | October 1, 2013In medicine, particularly oncology, it's often the little things that matter. Sometimes, however, the "little things" aren't actually little; they just seem that way. I was reminded of this by a story that was circulating a couple of weeks ago in the national media, often under titles like “Obese cancer patients often shorted on chemo doses”, ”Are obese people with cancer getting chemotherapy doses too small for them?”, and “Obese Cancer Patients Not Getting Full Doses of Chemotherapy Drugs”. It's also interesting to me because it stands in marked contrast to something I've written about a…
oracknows | September 30, 2013Tomorrow, as mandated by the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (PPACA, often called just the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, or "Obamacare"), the government-maintained health insurance exchanges will open for business (that is, assuming the likely government shutdown doesn't stop them temporarily). This post will be basically a followup to a post I did almost a year ago that used a statement by Mitt Romney during the height of the Presidential campaign as a jumping off point to look at the relationship between health insurance status and mortality. Unfortunately, it is not entirely…
oracknows | August 26, 2013I've written a lot about Stanislaw Burzynski and what I consider to be his unethical use and abuse of institutional review boards and clinical trials. Before that, I used to regularly write about Mark and David Geier and their unethical use and abuse of IRBs and clinical trials. In both cases, I lamented how they could use their own IRBs stacked with their own cronies to rubberstamp scientifically and ethically dubious studies. Mark and David Geier got away with it for years. Stanislaw Burzynski got away with it for decades and, apparently, is still getting away with it to some extent. (His…
oracknows | August 23, 2013About a week and a half ago, I wrote about a local oncologist who was arrested by the FBI for massive Medicare fraud in which physician involved diagnosed cancers that weren't there, gave chemotherapy to patients who either didn't have cancer or were in remission and thus didn't need it, and had developed a self-referral system to his own imaging facility. The story of this oncologist, Dr. Farid Fata, founder of a very large multi-location oncology practice (Michigan Hematology Oncology), made international news, which is exactly not the sort of coverage Detroit needs right now, given all the…
oracknows | August 20, 2013Recently, I got an e-mail from someone who had just discovered my blog that made me think a bit, which is usually a good thing. At least, in this case it was. Basically, this reader asked me a question I hadn't been asked in a very long time and hadn't thought about in a very long time, specifically: If I had to pick just one and only one, what is the single most characteristic difference between alternative medicine quackery and science-based medicine? True, there are several key differences, and I'm sure many of you could tick off a list of five to ten characteristic differences without…