Cancer
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Cancer
True “individualization” of cancer therapy
Posted by Orac on July 9, 2012 One major point I’ve tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called “individualization” or “personalization” of treatments claimed by practitioners of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is not “individualization” at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the “individualization”…
Simplistic criticisms of cancer therapy by Dr. Margaret Cuomo
Posted by Orac on June 25, 2012 I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is “not long at all.” I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual…
Entelev, CanCell, and Cantron: Not curing cancer since the 1930s
Posted by Orac on June 19, 2012 A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. However, as I’ve mentioned before, when it comes to blogging, I’m a bit like Dug the Talking Dog from the movie Up in…
Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) and autism at Autism One: Kerri Rivera’s apologists strike back (Part 2)
Posted by Orac on June 18, 2012 
Here we go again. Remember how last week I said I wouldn’t write about the Miracle Mineral Solution (abbreviated MMS) again for a while? I lied. Well, actually, I didn’t. At the time I wrote that, I really did mean to give it a rest for a while, and for a while at least I…
R.I.P., Billie Bainbridge
Posted by Orac on June 5, 2012 A very sad bit of news has come to my attention, courtesy of a reader. Billie Bainbridge has died of her brainstem cancer. Regular readers might remember this unfortunate young girl, who was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma of the brainstem last year. The tumor was inoperable, and, unfortunately, Billie’s parents turned, as…
Two more tragic tales of Burzynski patients
Posted by Orac on May 10, 2012 One of my newer blogging interests is the “alternative” cancer doctor named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had heard of him years ago, mainly in the context of his desperate patients tapping into the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for his “antineoplaston” therapy, I hadn’t really written much about him until very recently. About…
Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic
Posted by Orac on May 8, 2012 It’s no secret that over the years I’ve been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we’ve…
Preclinical research has a problem, but that doesn’t mean religion is better
Posted by Orac on April 30, 2012 Remember Vox Day? Sure, I bet you do, at least if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog more than a year or two. If you’re a really long-timer, you probably remember him even better. Let’s just put it this way. Vox is a guy who has a much higher opinion of his intellectual…
Stanislaw Burzynski: Kind-hearted strangers and a failure of medical journalism
Posted by Orac on April 25, 2012 About two and a half weeks ago, I was disappointed to learn that Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski had somehow managed to delay justice again. At the time, I didn’t know what had happened other than that his hearing before the Texas Medical Board, which had been scheduled to begin on April 11 and to which I…
No, Virginia, cancer care in Europe doesn’t suck, contrary to what a recent paper implies
Posted by Orac on April 24, 2012 The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been the…
Epigenetics does not mean that thinking makes it so
Posted by Orac on April 13, 2012 You know, I really, really hate the way quacks abuse molecular biology. I know, I know. I’ve said it before, but certain quacks have a way of willfully misunderstanding the latest advances in genomics, molecular biology, and biology in general. Of course, this isn’t limited to just medicine, unfortunately. After all, we have Deepak Chopra…
Yet more evidence that “natural” doesn’t necessarily mean “safer”
Posted by Orac on April 11, 2012 Repeat after me one more time: Just because something is natural does not necessarily mean it’s effective or, more importantly, safe. If there’s one thing common among virtually all purveyors of “alternative” medicine, it’s that they fetishize anything they consider “natural.” To them, “natural” is always better. At the very least it’s better than those…
Medicine and evolution, part 13: The fly in the ointment of personalized cancer therapy
Posted by Orac on April 9, 2012 About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple, albeit clichéd question: If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer? As I pointed out at the time, it’s a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer…
Will Stanislaw Burzynski slither away from justice again?
Posted by Orac on April 7, 2012 April 11 is a mere five days away. What’s the significance of April 11? Easy. April 11 is the date when the hearing before the Texas Medical Board to determine whether Stanislaw Burzynski will lose his license to practice medicine in Texas. Dr. Burzynski, as you recall, is the Texas doctor who has somehow managed…
At the AACR
Posted by Orac on April 2, 2012 Blogging might be a little sketchy for the next couple of days, because I’m at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting (AACR) in Chicago, all to to imbibe the latest and greatest in cancer research. I’m sure I’ll manage to get a post or two in while I’m here, but I doubt there will…
Another case of chemotherapy refusal for pediatric cancer
Posted by Orac on March 26, 2012 As sometimes happens, last week I let myself get tied up writing multiple posts about a single topic, namely the promotion of an antivaccine movie by a school board president in California, apparently as part of an attempt to influence California legislators who are considering a law that will make philosophical exemptions for school vaccine…
Fighting the “acid” of negative (e)motions?
Posted by Orac on March 15, 2012 If there’s one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it’s Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don’t you? He’s the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I’ve written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused…
Another Burzynski patient dies
Posted by Orac on March 7, 2012 If there’s one thing that practitioners of dubious cancer therapies rely upon, it’s testimonials. If there’s one such practitioner who really, really relies on testimonials, it’s Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, founder of the Burzynski Clinic. Dr. Burzynski is known for what he refers to as “antineoplaston” therapy (which he massively oversells and is currently rebranding as…
Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski strikes again
Posted by Orac on March 2, 2012 I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it’s compelling in exactly the wrong way. It’s infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It’s also yet another example of how it’s so…
A patient you won’t hear about from Stanislaw Burzynski or his apologists
Posted by Orac on February 16, 2012 It’s been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls “antineoplastons” without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there…
Dr. Francis Collins and “integrative oncology”
Posted by Orac on January 23, 2012 I was disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say “doubly” disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at…
More trouble for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski
Posted by Orac on January 20, 2012 It’s a new year, but some topics remain the same. One of these is the case of the highly dubious cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have discovered anticancer compounds in the blood known as antineoplastons, conducts “clinical trials” for which he charges patients and whose results he are largely unpublished, and of…
Naturopaths vs. “stayin’ alive”
Posted by Orac on January 12, 2012 For all the good things about my life there are, there is one bad thing, and that was that I was born so that I reached high school age right at the height of the disco era. At least, that’s the way I viewed it at the time because at the time, like many teenaged…
On leaping to conclusions about a neurosurgeon and Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski
Posted by Orac on December 27, 2011 Another Christmas is over, and we’re settling in to that strange week between Christmas and New Years when, or so it would seem, most of the world isn’t working except for retail. I’m half taking the week off from work in that I don’t plan on going into the office if I can possibly avoid…
One more lesson on what “antivaccine” means
Posted by Orac on December 20, 2011 Yesterday, I discussed the meaning of the word “antivaccine,” using the example of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an MD-turned-homeopath, as an example of why I refer to people like Humphries as “antivaccine.” She really laid down the crazy, too, repeatedly calling vaccines the injection of “disease matter” and “unnatural,” while piling conspiracy theory on top of…