Cancer
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Cancer
A response to the father of a Burzynski patient
Posted by Orac on November 30, 2012 If 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…
Quackademic medicine involving reflexology
Posted by Orac on November 27, 2012 Reflexology is quackery. It’s based on magical thinking that views every major organ in the body as somehow mappable to specific points on the soles of the feet or the palms of the hands and posits that somehow massaging these areas can have therapeutic effects on the organs in question. Claims regularly made for reflexology…
Stanislaw Burzynski gets off on a technicality
Posted by Orac on November 26, 2012 NOTE: Special thanks to Jann Bellamy for advising me regarding the legal aspects of this post. There are times when I fear that I’m writing about the same topic too many times in too brief a period of time. Most commonly, I notice this concern when writing about the lunacy of the anti-vaccine movement. In…
Yet another patient wasting money on Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplastons while Burzynski apparently slithers away from justice yet again
Posted by Orac on November 21, 2012 I’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…
Eric Merola apparently doesn’t like what Orac writes about Stanislaw Burzynski
Posted by Orac on November 10, 2012 As 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…
Stanislaw Burzynski and “clarity” from the FDA
Posted by Orac on November 8, 2012 I’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…
Stanislaw Burzynski: Slapped down by the FDA once again
Posted by Orac on November 7, 2012 I 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…
Stanislaw Burzynski fails to save another patient
Posted by Orac on November 2, 2012 I 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…
A slightly different alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial
Posted by Orac on October 12, 2012 And now for something completely different… Well, not really. It’s a little different, but regular readers will soon recognize it as a variation on the same old theme. One topic I’ve been writing about since the very beginning of this blog is the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, or, more specifically, the breast cancer cure…
One more example of the price of refusing science-based cancer therapy
Posted by Orac on October 10, 2012 Another year, another Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While most people who have either been touched by breast cancer or who have a professional interest in it, the significance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is that it is a time, well, to increase awareness and to promote breast cancer research. There is another side to Breast…
Are mouse “avatars” useful for predicting human response to chemotherapy and targeted agents in cancer?
Posted by Orac on September 28, 2012 From 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…
Overselling preclinical results
Posted by Orac on September 17, 2012 As 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,…
The real way to prevent cancer
Posted by Orac on September 6, 2012 Long, 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…
A different kind of breast cancer testimonial
Posted by Orac on September 3, 2012 For my international readers, it’s a holiday here in the U.S. That means I plan on taking it easy, which means I’ve decided on doing, in essence, a “rerun.” I chose this particular rerun based on my post from last Thursday. I thought that rerunning this particular post is a good reminder of what the…
The price of refusing science-based medical and surgical therapy in breast cancer
Posted by Orac on August 30, 2012 As a cancer surgeon specializing in breast cancer, I have a particular contempt for cancer quacks. In particular, that contempt smolders and occasionally bursts in to flames right here on this very blog and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere, when I see instances of such quackery applied to women with breast cancer. They are, after…
Quackademic medicine versus cancer quackery: The central dogma of alternative medicine is questioned by an advocate of “integrative medicine”
Posted by Orac on August 22, 2012 Since I seem to be on a roll the last few days discussing cancer quackery, I thought I’d just go with it at least one more day. Frequently, when I get on these rolls laying down the Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, over antivaccine quackery I start whining about how I need to change topics,…
Yet another dubious breast cancer cure testimonial
Posted by Orac on August 21, 2012 [NOTE: Please be sure to read the addendum!] I hate cancer quackery. I know, I know, regular readers probably figured that out by now, and even new readers rarely take more than a couple of weeks to figure it out. That’s because cancer quackery is a frequent topic on this blog. One of the most…
Stanislaw Burzynski versus regulations protecting human research subjects
Posted by Orac on August 16, 2012 It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. Well, not really, although it has been a while since I’ve discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become…
Alternative medicine as religion
Posted by Orac on August 15, 2012 Over the years, I’ve often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It’s not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can’t be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have…
Naturopathic cancer treatments versus reality
Posted by Orac on August 14, 2012 Well, I’m back. It’s always a bit weird to try to get back into the swing of things after even just a week off and even when during that week I didn’t actually stop blogging but merely slowed down a lot and succeeded (mostly) in restricting what little blogging I did to brief posts. (Yes,…
“Overselling” mammography?
Posted by Orac on August 13, 2012 One issue that keeps coming up time and time again for me is the issue of screening for cancer. Because I’m primarily a breast cancer surgeon in my clinical life, that means mammography, although many of the same issues come up time and time again in discussions of using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate…
Patient-led “clinical trials” versus clinical research (2012 edition)
Posted by Orac on August 2, 2012 Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical…
New cancer drugs: Fitter, happier, more productive? Or not?
Posted by Orac on July 27, 2012 It’s known as “targeted” therapy, and it’s the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it’s the path towards “personalized medicine” that improves survival with much lower toxicity, in which, instead of using the hammer that is chemotherapy, precisely targets specific molecular abnormalities that drive cancer growth.…
First it was sheep, and now it’s sharks: A progression of pseudoscience in medicine
Posted by Orac on July 25, 2012 At least half the time, it seems that when I take on a relatively new topic with every intention of just doing one post about it I somehow end up doing more than one post. I don’t know why that is. It just seems to happen. Sometimes, I find something related to but sufficiently different…
An inflated view of one’s importance
Posted by Orac on July 10, 2012 Something came up that made me think it would be a good idea to mention a couple of features of the new WordPress template, just in case anyone missed them when I mentioned them before. I apologize to any who might find this repetitive, but there do appear to be some newbies here; so I…