cancer
Respectful Insolence
Tag archives for cancer
The kudzu that is “integrative oncology” continues to insinuate quackademic medicine into oncology
Posted by Orac on May 10, 2013 I hate to end the week on a bit of a downer, but sometimes I just have to. At least, it’s depressing to anyone who is a proponent of science-based cancer care as the strategy most likely to decrease the death rate from cancer and improve quality of life for cancer patients. Unfortunately, in enough…
Deconstructing another Stanislaw Burzynski cancer “success story”
Posted by Orac on May 9, 2013 A key pillar of the Stanislaw Burzynski antineoplaston marketing machine, a component of the marketing strategy without which his clinic would not be able to attract nearly as many desperate cancer patients to Houston for either his antineoplaston therapy (now under a temporary shutdown by the FDA that, if science were to reign, will become…
Eric Merola and Stanislaw Burzynski’s secret weapon against The Skeptics™: Fabio Lanzoni (I kid you not)
Posted by Orac on April 30, 2013 So now we know. Back when it was announced that the second Burzynski movie by Eric Merola would be screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 27, Merola announced that there would be a “special celebrity guest.” Those of us who have been following Burzynski for a while scratched our heads, not knowing…
“All truth comes from public debate”: A corollary to crank magnetism
Posted by Orac on April 26, 2013 A long, long time ago in a ScienceBlogs far, far away (well, it seems that way anyway, given the halcyon times back then before Pepsigate), Mark Hoofnagle coined the term “crank magnetism.” It was a fantastic term used to describe how susceptibility to one form of quackery, pseudoscience, or just plain crankery tended to be…
Claiming to be able to cure cancer with magic water
Posted by Orac on April 25, 2013 I’ve written about naturopathy many times before. The reasons that it interests me are several. First, it amazes me how anyone “discipline” (if you want to call it that) can encompass so many forms of quackery, some of which are mutually contradictory. (For instance, how can homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine both be true?) Also,…
Is there gold in that thar genomic medicine?
Posted by Orac on April 23, 2013 I’ve written a lot about a doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have much better outcomes in treating deadly brainstem tumors than conventional oncology does. Although the way he claims to do it is through the use of substances he calls “antineoplastons,” which he claimed to have isolate from the urine of patients. Over…
The fundamental intellectual dishonesty of Eric Merola and his promotion of Stanislaw Burzynski
Posted by Orac on April 15, 2013 About a month ago, Eric Merola screened his second movie about “brave maverick doctor” Stanislaw Burzynski, Burzynski: Cancer Is A Serious Business, Part 2 (henceforth referred to as “Burzynski II”), a screening that Brian Thompson and an unnamed colleague from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) attended, took notes, and even managed to ask a…
Apparently, according to Eric Merola, Orac is a white supremacist who eats puppies
Posted by Orac on April 1, 2013 It’s been less than a week since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski. In fact, as hard as it is to believe, I’ve been trying not to. Obviously, I’m failing, but what can I say? Things keep happening. In particular, there’s Eric Merola. You remember Eric Merola? He’s the producer of a propaganda film extolling the…
R.I.P., Seán Ó’Laighin
Posted by Orac on March 20, 2013 This will be an uncharacteristically short (for Orac) post. A couple of months ago, I wrote about the sad story of a young man from Ireland named Seán Ó’Laighin diagnosed with an inoperable brainstem glioma at age 19. Even more sadly, this young man heard about the Burzynski Clinic in Houston and believed the claims…
Disease, “dis-ease,” what’s the difference?
Posted by Orac on March 19, 2013 I’ve had a rule of thumb for a while that helps me identify quacks with a high degree of accuracy. It’s not very sensitive, as a lot of quacks don’t exhibit this trait, but it’s very specific. A lot of quacks don’t use the term; so not hearing says nothing about a practitioner. If you…
The long, strange case of Abraham Cherrix continues
Posted by Orac on February 19, 2013 Discussing Stanislaw Burzynski’s abuse of science while contemplating how even his success stories really aren’t yesterday reminded me of a topic that I discussed rather extensively not long after I moved my blog over to ScienceBlogs and have covered sporadically since then. I’m referring to the case of Abraham Cherrix. Cherrix, for those who haven’t…
How “they” view “us”
Posted by Orac on February 12, 2013 Those of us who dedicate considerable time and effort to combatting quackery generally do it because we think we’re doing good. Certainly, I wouldn’t spend so much time nearly every evening blogging the way I do if I didn’t think so. It’s true that I also enjoy it, but if I were doing this just…
No more antineoplastons? Will the FDA finally slap down Stanislaw Burzynski for good?
Posted by Orac on February 8, 2013 Earlier this week, there was a very bad, very credulous story was broadcast. Now, I realize that this is not an uncommon occurrence. Indeed, I’m sure that this sort of thing happens pretty much every day somewhere in the country and even on national media, but on this particular occasion the story was about a…
An excellent explanation of how dubious Stanislaw Burzynski’s activities are
Posted by Orac on January 28, 2013 The weekend was busy, and I was working on grants, which meant that I could only come up with one post of Orac-style length and depth. Sadly, it wasn’t for this blog. Fortunately, C0nc0rdance came to the rescue with a must-watch video about our old friend Stanislaw Burzynski. He’s the guy who claims to treat…
Another way to join the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients’ campaign, plus: It is noticed that Stanislaw Burzynski has thrown information about his “clinical trials” down the ol’ memory hole
Posted by Orac on January 22, 2013 While I’m using my blog as an announcement platform today, I would be remiss not to mention that tomorrow is Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s birthday, and the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients are still raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in order to try to get Dr. Burzynski to do something good for…
Let’s make Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski do something good for cancer patients for a change
Posted by Orac on January 7, 2013 Today’s post will be relatively brief (for an Orac post, that is). The reason is that it’s some very sad news that depresses me greatly. It’s also because I don’t want to distract too much from the announcement I’d like to highlight. About a month and a half ago, around the same time that Stanislaw…
Unexpected praise of the virtues of bacon by Joe Mercola
Posted by Orac on January 4, 2013 It is an indisputable axiom that everything tastes better with bacon. Well, almost everything. As much as I love bacon, whenever I watch one of those cooking competition shows on the Food Network, like Iron Chef America, in which the secret ingredient is bacon, I can’t figure out how putting bacon in ice cream works.…
More sad news about a Burzynski patient
Posted by Orac on December 12, 2012 As much as I try, even when I’m on vacation in an undisclosed warm location near a beach (actually, our hotel room has a balcony overlooking the ocean), occasionally news finds its way to me. Part of it is because I still get the odd e-mail or two, and I do check my e-mail every…
Stanislaw Burzynski: On the arrogance of ignorance about cancer and targeted therapies
Posted by Orac on December 5, 2012 Here we go again. Because he’s been in the news lately, I’ve been writing a lot about the “brave maverick doctor” known as Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have spectacular results treating normally incurable cancers using something he calls antineoplastons. Unfortunately, the reason Burzynski has featured prominently in the skeptical blogosphere over the last two…
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…
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: 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…