Medicine
oracknows | January 25, 2013Three years ago, the influenza season was a really big deal. The reason, of course, is that the 2009-2010 flu season was dominated by fears of the H1N1 strain, so much so that it was a rare flu season that there were two recommended vaccines, one for the originally expected strains of flu and one for the H1N1 strain. Fortunately for all of us, the H1N1 fear mostly fizzled, but public health officials were in a bad place. Under-react, and if the pandemic turned out to be as bad as the worst case scenarios predicted before the pandemic, and they'd be crucified for not having done everything…
oracknows | January 22, 2013While 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 cancer patients for a change. The beauty of it is that, even if Burzynski declines, as is likely, there'll still be a nice big donation to a real cancer center that does real good for children with cancer, which is in marked contrast to Burzynski. Harriet Hall has joined in the…
oracknows | January 20, 2013As I contemplated how I wanted to start the blogging week, I thought that I should probably again plug Bob Blaskiewicz's campaign to provide Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who for the last 35 years has been treating patients diagnosed with advanced stage and terminal cancers with something he calls antineoplastons (ANPs), with a most excellent "gift" for his 70th birthday. This he does despite the astounding lack of compelling evidence that ANPs are actually effective against cancer, none of which stops him from charging patients exorbitant amounts of money, sometimes upwards of…
carlyo | January 18, 2013--Widely considered the founder of modern-day Pediatric Cardiology
--Discovered the cause of “Blue Baby Syndrome” in infants, and helped ban the use of the drug Thalidomide for pregnant women in the U.S.
--Battled dyslexia as a child, and deafness in the later years of her career
For years, physicians were baffled by “Blue Baby Syndrome” – a mysterious condition in which infants, either at birth or soon after, died after their skin became blue-tinted in color. The prevailing medical thought was that the condition was caused by cardiac arrest. However, a young physician and researcher named…
lborkowski | January 17, 2013Over the past few years, the incidence of Clostridium difficile infections has risen in the US, and 14,000 people have died from the persistent diarrhea this bacteria causes. Some patients who haven’t been cured by antibiotics have turned to “fecal transplants” – the introduction of a healthy person’s feces into a patient’s digestive system – with, according to case reports and news stories, great success. Now, the New England Journal of Medicine has published results of a randomized clinical trial of the treatment. Of 16 C. diff sufferers given fecal transplants, 15 were cured
Most of us…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
sa smith | January 16, 2013I will give them this-- This is a new anti-vax argument for me:
Like most medical facilities, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital appears to require that all of its employees receive an annual flu shot. It fired Sakile Chenzira, a customer service representative, for refusing to comply. Chenzira sued, claiming that because the flu vaccine contains eggs the requirement violated her religion—veganism—which prohibits the ingestion of any animals or animal by-products.
The influenza vaccine is produced in eggs. If youre vegan, this might present an ethical problem, for you. But most people are vegans…
oracknows | January 15, 2013Now that Trine Tsouderos no longer works for the Chicago Tribune, there aren't that many reliable generalist medical/science reporters around any more. For example, here in the U.S. there's Marilyn Marchionne at the AP, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, and then there's Sharon Begley, who used to be at Newsweek but is now at Reuters I'm having trouble thinking of others with national prominence, other than Nancy Snyderman, who has recently profoundly disappointed me with a fawning report on "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that made it seem to be the greatest thing since sliced…
oracknows | January 13, 2013Eric Merola doesn't much like me.
Actually, no one who is an apologist for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, a.k.a. "Stan the Man," who over 30 years ago unleashed antineoplastons on unsuspecting cancer patients, much likes me. It's not surprising. As you might recall, antineoplastons are chemicals that Burzynski found in the urine of cancer patients and that (or so he claims). Claiming that antineoplastons were endogenous inhibitors of tumor growth made by the body and of which cancer patients are deficient, thus allowing cancer to grow, he embarked on a campaign to treat cancer patients with them.…
gregladen | January 11, 2013It is Influenza Season in the Northern Hemisphere. So, this is a good time to talk about the flu. Three years ago we had an unusual flu season, with a nasty variant about that seemed to be threatening a pandemic, and that's the year Huxley was born (in November) so we faced the problem of getting an off season flu shot and not being a member of a Fortune 500 company. We also faced the problem of varying levels of understanding of the flu, and varying odd beliefs about it, among people to whom newborn Huxley might be exposed. This year, my S-I-L is expecting to produce an offspring some…
oracknows | January 11, 2013
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer -
Joe Jackson
I don't write about nutrition as much as other topics because I'm not as knowledgeable about it as I am about, say, cancer, vaccines, and what constitutes good medical evidence. (I am, however, trying to become more knowledgeable.) Even so, I was thinking. After my post a week ago in which über-quack Joe Mercola unexpectedly gave a glowing introduction to a paean of praise for bacon and my post yesterday in which a credulous fellow by the…
pharyngula | January 6, 2013We're coming up on Burzynski's 70th birthday — it's a bit ironic that the man responsible for so many shattered hopes has had such a long life himself — and there is a plan to remind him of the grief he has caused.
Burzynski, if you've forgotten, is the guy who claims to have a cancer treatment called antineoplastons, a small set of compounds isolated from urine that he injects at high dosages into cancer patients. These drugs have not had their efficacy demonstrated, but Burzynski keeps cycling through clinical trials, taking the preliminary steps to demonstrating scientific utility, but…
oracknows | January 2, 2013If there's one claim that practitioners of "holistic" medicine frequently make, it's that "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" or whatever the term du jour for the combining of quackery with science-based medicine is these days is allegedly so much better than "conventional" or "allopathic" medicine (or whatever disparaging term "holistic practitioners" prefer) at preventing disease and keeping people healthy. The claim is a load of fetid nonsense, of course, but it sounds convincing on the surface. After all, CAM practitioners have been disturbingly…
oracknows | January 1, 2013That Dr. Mehmet Oz uses his show to promote quackery of the vilest sort is no longer in any doubt. I was reminded yet again of this last week when I caught a rerun of one of his shows from earlier this season, when he gazed in wonder at the tired old cold reading schtick used by all "psychic mediums" from time immemorial, long before the current crop of celebrity psychic mediums, such as John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and the "Long Island Medium" Theresa Caputo, discovered how much fame and fortune they could accrue by scamming the current generation of the credulous. Speaking of Theresa Caputo…
oracknows | December 9, 2012For all the worship of "translational" research that is currently in vogue, it needs to be remembered that a robust pipeline of basic science progress upon which to base translational research and clinical trials is absolutely essential if progress in medicine is to continue. Without it, progress in SBM will slow and even grind to a halt. That's why, in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is so critical. The NIH funds large amounts of biomedical research each year, which means that what the NIH will and will not fund can't help but have a profound effect shaping the pipeline of…
oracknows | December 4, 2012Here 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 weeks is because, unfortunately, the Texas Medical Board (TMB) dropped its case against him. Basically, Burzynski got off on a technicality.
For purposes of this post, I don't want to dwell on this case, because I've already pretty…
lborkowski | November 30, 2012This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose problem. Read the previous stories in the series here and here. (We'll be publishing a bonus addition to the series next week — a discussion with Dr. Daniel Carr, director of the Pain Research, Education and Policy Program at Tufts University.)
by Kim Krisberg
A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the…
oracknows | November 30, 2012If 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 with a knowledge of the effect that my words will have on some of those same desperate cancer patients. Most regular readers of this blog know who Stanislaw Burzynski is, but, even if I've just written about him a few days ago (this…
oracknows | November 25, 2012NOTE: 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 fact, it's fairly rare that I feel it for any other topic. There is, however, one topic other than antivaccinationist assaults against science and reason that will sometimes obligate me to go on a roll such that I might write multiple posts in a short period of time. I'm referring, of course…
oracknows | November 23, 2012Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I'm frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In the case of NCCAM, the primary driving force to create it, promote it from an office (originally the Office of Unconventional Medicine and then later renamed the Office of Alternative Medicine) to a full center, and protect it from all…