Medicine
oracknows | March 20, 2013This 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 of its founder, Stanislaw Burzynski, that being treated with antineoplastons would provide him with a much greater chance of survival than anything conventional medicine had to offer. As has been the case for so many patients of Stanislaw Burzynski, Seán and his family started…
lborkowski | March 12, 2013On 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 written several pieces on ten-year anniversary of the outbreak.
In "A decade ago, SARS raced round the world; Where is it now? Will it return?"…
oracknows | March 12, 2013With very limited exceptions, chelation therapy is, as I said before in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. The sole exception is for real, documented cases of acute heavy metal poisoning that are known to respond to chelation, such as iron overload due to transfusion, aluminum overload due to hemodialysis, copper toxicity due to Wilson's disease, acute heavy metal toxicity, and a handful of other indications. Basically, chelation therapy involves infusing chemicals that can bind to metal ions and make them easier for the kidneys to excrete. The problem is, there is no good basic…
oracknows | March 8, 2013So I finally made it to the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Symposium. Thanks to the snowstorm that apparently wasn't (at least, I don't see any snow around), my arrival was delayed by a day, as all flights to the Washington, DC area were canceled on Wednesday. But I did finally get here, and, although I missed most of the first day, I did at least get to see a talk given by a friend of mine late in the day and I had a chance to hang out for a while with an old friend.
I also got the chance after I got back to my hotel room to be highly amused by a "response" to criticism from the author…
lborkowski | March 6, 2013In the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman writes about anger management problems in healthcare:
At a critical point in a complex abdominal operation, a surgeon was handed a device that didn’t work because it had been loaded incorrectly by a surgical technician. Furious that she couldn’t use it, the surgeon slammed it down, accidentally breaking the technician’s finger. “I felt pushed beyond my limits,” recalled the surgeon, who was suspended for two weeks and told to attend an anger management course for doctors.
The 2011 incident illuminates a long-festering problem that many hospitals have…
oracknows | March 3, 2013Over the weekend, as I was contemplating what to write about for today, I received a rather odd and unexpected e-mail. Indeed, it was with great surprise that I read this e-mail on Saturday morning, sent to the Burzynski Movie mailing list:
Dear Burzynski Movie Subscribers:
Major International Distribution Deal For
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Part II:
We are pleased to announce that Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Part II has landed a major international distribution deal with one of America's top distribution companies.
We can't give out any specific details until…
tsmith | March 1, 2013Fifth of five student guest posts by Jonathan Yuska
The saying, “The more you know, the more you can control,” is no more meaningful than when used in the context of HIV detection and prevention. Public health advocates endlessly stress the need for knowing one’s status; and one would assume that any way in which the most amount of people can be tested would be beneficial for the population1. The Food and Drug Administration shared this same idea when they overwhelmingly approved the first ever over-the-counter (OTC) HIV testing kit in 20052; which in theory, sounds like a promising way to…
oracknows | February 28, 2013Yesterday, I expressed my dismay at learning that what used to be a bastion of science-based medicine, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, is now peddling the quackery known as acupuncture to children, or, as I put it, "integrating" nonsense with science. Sadly, as I've written about all too often because I keep seeing it again and again, it's an all too common trend. Hospitals are increasingly embracing pseudoscience and quackery, laboring under the misguided belief that by doing so they are somehow "cutting edge"; that the patients really, really want it; and as a marketing tool. Although I…
oracknows | February 27, 2013Thanks to a winter storm that dumped a heapin' helpin' of heavy wet snow on us last night, we lost power before this post even got going. However, I did have a bit of time this morning to finish it up as a quickie (by my standards) before my laptop battery indicator started expressing its displeasure. Since it's a topic that doesn't really necessitate a long post anyway, it's a perfect fit for today, and I'll just put off what I was going to write about today until tomorrow. Or the day after if nothing else comes up between now and then that interests me more. You see, the power company is…
tsmith | February 27, 2013Third of five student guest posts by Dana Lowry
In 1911, Peyton Rous first discovered viruses can cause cancer. A chicken with a lump in her breast had been brought to Rous by a farmer. Rous prepared an extract that eliminated bacteria and tumor cells and injected this extract into other chickens—tumors grew. Rous suggested “a minute parasitic organism” was causing the tumor growth, which is now known to be a virus. However, Rous’ discovery remained very controversial, and it wasn’t until 1966 that he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Since Rous’s discovery, researchers have…
denialism | February 25, 2013Steven Brill's extensive piece in Time has generated a good discussion once again on why Americans pay so much more for health care than other countries, and while I agree with most of his critiques, he seems to have gotten overly hung-up on the hospital chargemaster.
Readers of this blog know I've also discussed reform in health care, the diverse sources of excess cost including price gouging on pharmaceuticals, defensive medicine, expensive end-of-life care, the high cost of primary care in the ER etc, and both Brill and I appear to have relied on the same sources of data in the McKinsey…
oracknows | February 24, 2013That the myth that vaccines cause autism is indeed nothing more than a myth, a phantom, a delusion unsupported by science is no longer in doubt. In fact, it's been many years now since it was last taken seriously by real scientists and physicians, as opposed to crank scientists and physicians, who are still selling the myth. Thanks to them, and a dedicated cadre of antivaccine activists, the myth is like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger at the end of one of their slasher flicks. The slasher or monster appears to be dead, but we know that he isn't because we know that he'll…
oracknows | February 20, 2013Here's a little thought experiment for proponents of "alternative medicine." Imagine, if you will, a small pharmaceutical company. Founded in the 1970s, it has starts out with only one product, a drug that its founder thought to be a very promising anticancer agent. So enamored of this particular drug was the founder of the company that he left a job with an academic medical center, founded his own clinic, and then his own research institute and company to manufacture the new drug. After first having painstakingly isolated the substances that make up his drug, he later started to synthesize…
oracknows | February 18, 2013Discussing 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 been regular readers long enough to have encounter him before, was a 15 year old boy who was unfortunate enough to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately for him, rather than undergoing curative therapy, he decided that he wanted "natural"…
oracknows | February 14, 2013Over the last couple of days, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. So it seemed appropriate, as a grant deadline fast approaches and constrains my time, to revisit a topic that comes up here from time to time. Basically, every so often, my day job intrudes on my blogging hobby, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to…
milhayser | February 8, 2013It's not often that medical science seems nuttier than its alternative. On Respectful Insolence, Orac dismisses the enema as a cure for all ills, writing that the "liver, colon, and kidneys" are specialized to remove toxins, and you won't "become chronically ill if you don’t shoot water up your butt periodically to wash the poop out." On the other other hand, "bowel lavage" played an important role in a new study of patients infected by Clostridium difficile, which can cause chronic diarrhea and even death. But critically, after flushing the patient's poop out, researchers put someone else…
oracknows | February 8, 2013Earlier 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 man who has become a frequent topic of this blog, namely Stanislaw Burzynski. Burzynski, as you recall, is the Polish physician who runs a cancer clinic in Houston that attracts desperate patients with advanced cancer from all over the world to spend huge sums of money for his treatment…
oracknows | February 3, 2013If I've pointed it out once, I've pointed it out a thousand times. Naturopathy is a cornucopia of almost every quackery you can think of. Be it homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, applied kinesiology, anthroposophical medicine, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Bowen Technique, and pretty much any other form of unscientific or prescientific medicine that you can imagine, it's hard to think of a single form of pseudoscientific medicine and quackery that naturopathy doesn't embrace or at least tolerate. Indeed, as I've retorted before to apologists for naturopathy who…
oracknows | January 29, 2013On Monday of this week, Michael Specter published an article in The New Yorker entitled THE OPERATOR: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good? In the article, Specter expended considerable verbiage that, as I explained yesterday, was beautiful in how it let Oz reveal through his own words that (1) he is no longer a scientist and (2) how he views science-based medicine as apparently religion and just another way of knowing. Indeed, so off the wall were Oz's utterances in this article that Jeff Bercovici boiled it down, summarizing it as Dr. Oz's Five Wackiest Medical…
oracknows | January 28, 2013In the beginning, medicine was religion. Indeed, if you look at the history of medicine, you'll see that the very first physicians were virtually always religious figures in addition to their roles as healers. Indeed, in ancient Egypt, for example, the professions of priest and healer were one, and most medicine involved incantations, invocations of magic, and, of course, prayers to the gods, who were believed to be both the cause and the cure of human disease. Amulets were particularly popular, and consisted of three types: homeopoetic, phylactic and theophoric. Homeopoetic amulets, for…