Medicine
oracknows | February 7, 2014If there's one thing that I write that I don't feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it's that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist as a separate entity. There is nothing that NCCAM does that couldn't be done just as well in other parts of the NIH, with the exception of research into modalities with such low prior plausibility and such fantastical proposed mechanisms of working that…
oracknows | February 5, 2014Contrary to what you might think, the longer I do this blogging thing, it doesn't necessarily get easier. The reason, of course, is that after more than nine years of near daily posts there are days when it's really hard to come up with something that really gets me fired up to do the hard work it takes to write. I'd be lying if I said there weren't days when the thought going through my head goes something like, "Another bit of idiocy by antivaccinationists? How many times have I seen this before." But sometimes, as much as I sometimes think I've seen it all with respect to quackery, there…
oracknows | January 30, 2014Believe it or not, I'm about to say the one and only good thing I will say about Stanislaw Burzynski in this post. After all, I was always taught to find the good in my opponents, no matter how vile I find them. Burzynski, for instance, has been peddling a cure for brain cancer (and other cancers) that he claims to have discovered in the blood and urine in the 1970s. Despite there being no convincing evidence of antitumor activity due to these peptides, which he dubbed antineoplastons, he has managed to win battle after battle with the FDA and the Texas Medical Board and to continue to prey…
oracknows | January 28, 2014When last I wrote about the sad saga of Sarah Hershberger, the 12-year-old Amish girl from northeastern Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, decided to stop her chemotherapy resulting in legal action by Akron children's Hospital to have a medical guardian appointed to make sure that Sarah continues effective science-based therapy of her tumor, I intentionally chose a rather inflammatory title in which I proclaimed that she was coming home to die. I didn't do that lightly. Rather, I did it because I was thoroughly depressed because David Michael, the woo-…
oracknows | January 22, 2014I realize that I just wrote about infamous cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski yesterday. (Note how I refuse to call him an "oncologist," mainly because he isn't one, having never completed an oncology fellowship—or even an internal medicine residency, the usual prerequisite to do an oncology fellowship.) However, there's a bit more that I wanted to touch on before moving on to other topics. What brought this on was a Google Alert that appeared in my in box yesterday relevant to yesterday's post. You might recall that yesterday I mentioned a campaign by the Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-…
oracknows | January 17, 2014Everyone hates health insurance companies. At least, so it seems. Personally, I've had my issues with such companies myself, particularly when having to deal with them when they refuse to cover certain medical tests for my patients. Fortunately for me, surgical oncology is a specialty that doesn't have a lot of tests or treatments that are frequently not covered, particularly for breast cancer surgery, which means that I don't have to deal with insurance companies that much. It's a wonderful thing for a doctor.
Still, for all the complaining about insurance companies, if there's one good…
oracknows | January 16, 2014Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…
oracknows | January 15, 2014Here we go again. In the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) beyond that of placebo, the campaign to a "rebrand" CAM as "working" through the "power of placebo" continues apace, in the wake of the successful campaign to "rebrand" various needle-based medical modalities as "acupuncture." Personally, I've argued that in reality this new focus on placebo effects as the "mechanism" through which CAM "works" is in reality more a manifestation of the common fantasy that wishing makes it so. Meanwhile I've argued that this…
oracknows | January 10, 2014I realize that everyone, is looking forward to my deconstruction of Mike Adams' quacktacular attempt at being a real scientist (well, some of you, anyway). I must confess, though. I was a bit disappointed. And, being like Dug the Dog (a comparison I so frequently make), my attention was easily distracted. I'm sure I'll get back to Mikey eventually, but he really did show such a lack of imagination in his "big announcement" that I'm actually having a hard time motivating myself to apply any "Insolence" to it. It just doesn't seem worthy of the effort it would take, at least not right now.
In…
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…
lborkowski | January 6, 2014Now that it’s 2014, millions more people in the US have health insurance coverage (either Medicaid or private insurance), thanks to the Affordable Care Act. In the weeks ahead, many of the newly insured will be visiting healthcare providers to address ongoing health concerns. The Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar and Karen Tumulty highlighted one person with a pent-up demand for healthcare, Sharon Kelly of Louisville, Kentucky:
Kelly said that having Medicaid coverage on Jan. 1 “is a huge relief,” adding, “I’m a redhead and I used to live in California. I have things on my skin that are…
lborkowski | December 30, 2013While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on March 12, 2013.
By Liz Borkowski
On March 12, 2003, the World Health Organization issued a global health alert for an atypical pneumonia that was soon dubbed SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. The coronavirus had a high fatality rate; it emerged in China's Guangdong province and within a month affected 8,000 patients, killing 774 of them in 26 countries. Toronto was one of the cities hit hard by the disease, and ace health reporter Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press has…
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…
lborkowski | December 10, 2013A coalition of public-health organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, has released a report criticizing most U.S. states for under-investing in smoking prevention and cessation. Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 15 Years Later calculates that states over the past 15 years, states have collected a total of $391 billion from tobacco settlements and tobacco taxes, but spent only 2.3% of that amount on tobacco prevention programs.
The report compares states’ tobacco-prevention expenditures to the levels…
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 8, 2013I am afraid. I am afraid that the Amish girl with cancer whose parents' battle to treat her with "natural" therapy instead of effective science-based chemotherapy has made international news, is doomed. It might take longer than doctors have estimated, but it seems inevitable now. I will explain.
It's hard to believe that it's been two months since I first became aware of the case of Sarah Hershberger, the now 11-year-old Amish girl from Medina County, Ohio near Akron with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents stopped her chemotherapy after only two rounds. It was around that time that, after…
oracknows | December 1, 2013It figures.
Whenever there's a holiday or a break where I'm not paying as much attention to the blog as usual, something always seems to happen regarding a story I'm interested and have been blogging about. Remember Sarah Hershberger? She's 11 year old Amish girl who developed lymphoblastic lymphoma, underwent one round of chemotherapy, suffered highly unpleasant side effects from the second round of chemotherapy, and then refused to undergo further chemotherapy. Her parents, distressed at her suffering, decided not to make her continue her therapy. They also see that her cancer has shrunk (…
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 25, 2013Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I've developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that somehow, placing little needles into the body along various lines known as meridians, somehow "redirects" the flow of vital life "energy" to healing effect. Never mind that this energy, called "qi," has never been detected, measured, or characterized, nor have have "…
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,…