antineoplastons
oracknows | September 8, 2013It occurs to me that it's been a while since I've written anything about Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Truth be told, I had been hoping not to write about him for a while, and I had been actually succeeding. The last time I took notice of him was about a month ago, when his propagandist Eric Merola whined about how Dr. Hidaeki Tsuda, the Japanese anesthesiologist who was featured in the second movie that Merola made about Burzynski, had seen his latest manuscript rapidly rejected by The Lancet Oncology. In Tsuda's segment in the movie he claimed to have done a clinical trial showing that the…
oracknows | August 11, 2013Eric Merola alternates between offending me and making me laugh at his antics. Since it's been a couple weeks since I've written anything about the Houston doctor who claims to be able to do so much better against many forms of cancer than conventional medicine, I have to express a bit of gratitude to Mr. Merola for giving me today's topic for blogging. Mr. Merola, as you recall, produced two incredibly bad and deceptive movies lionizing that very same Houston cancer doctor as a brave maverick genius who's been kept down by The Man (i.e., the Texas Medical Board, the FDA, the National Cancer…
oracknows | July 17, 2013Believe it or not, I'm going to do Eric Merola (who doesn't particularly like me, to the point of thinking, apparently, that I'm a white supremacist who doesn't like evidence but does like to eat puppies) a favor. Having been away at TAM, somehow I missed this. Well, actually, I didn't miss it, but somehow I forgot to post it. Then when I got home I still forgot to post it. Now there are only three days left (four, counting today) for me to do it; so I'd better get to it. My having forgotten to do this is particularly amazing given the subject of my main stage talk at TAM.
Eric Merola, as you…
oracknows | June 5, 2013I realize that I've been focusing on Stanislaw Burzynski the last couple of days, but it's just been one of those weeks. Between the release of Eric Merola's latest paean to the Brave Maverick Doctor and BBC Panorama's report on Burzynski and his activities, it's been an eventful week. My review of the second Burzynski movie and the Panorama report explain a lot, but there are some loose ends left over. So I might as well take care of that today before resuming regular blogging topics. (Yes, I know Stanislaw Burzynski is a regular blogging topic, but too much of a bad thing can get tiresome,…
oracknows | June 3, 2013After yesterday's epic deconstruction of the latest propaganda-fest from everybody's favorite Leni Riefenstahl without the talent, Eric Merola, on his most admired subject, "brave maverick doctor" Stanislaw Burzynski, I needed something science-based to cleanse the rancid taste of intelligence-insulting nonsense from my mind. Through a quirk of fate that couldn't have worked out better if I had planned it myself, a long-expected investigation of the Burzynski Clinic by the BBC, presented on its venerable news program Panorama. It was entitled, appropriately enough, Cancer: Hope for Sale? Ever…
oracknows | May 30, 2013Cancer is a bitch. Depending upon what organ is involved and what kind of cancer it is, it can be incredibly hard to cure. All too often, it is incurable, particularly when it involves the brain, pancreas, esophagus, or other organs. People wonder why, after over 40 years of a "war on cancer," we don't have better treatments and more cures. As I've explained before, it's because cancer is incredibly complex, and cancer cells have incredibly messed-up genomes. Even worse, cancer uses evolution against any efforts to treat it, producing such marked heterogeneity among tumor cells that not only…
oracknows | May 8, 2013A 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 permanent) or his "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy," which Burzynski represents as a discovery of his that large NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers like M.D. Anderson or Memorial Sloan-Kettering are only now starting to copy, is the…
oracknows | May 8, 2013I've been very, very critical of a self-proclaimed cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, who is not an oncologist but somehow has managed over the last 36 years to treat patients with unapproved cancer drugs, list dozens of phase 2 clinical trials in ClinicalTrials.gov but never publish a completed one (at least to this date), and have his patients pay up up to several hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of being treated on one of his clinical trials. Meanwhile, the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute flout the regulations protecting human subjects in research. Even…
oracknows | April 29, 2013So 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 who it could likely be. We considered and rejected multiple possibilities: Suzanne Somers, Ralph Moss, and many others. Well, now we know who would be giving the celebrity endorsement for the Burzynski Clinic, and, no, it's not Josh Duhamel.
It's Fabio Lanzoni:
Yes, that Fabio. The…
oracknows | April 19, 2013If there is one aspect of cranks that is almost universal (besides the aforementioned tendency to want to prove themselves through things like "live televised debates"), it's a tendency to want to shut down the criticism of its opposition. True, such a tendency is a human trait as well and used far too often by, say, corporations, but it's one that seems to be cranked up to 11 and beyond, as they say, in cranks.
We've seen it time and time again. Most often, it takes the form of some sort of legal bullying, such as when the British Chiropractic Association bit off more than it could chew by…
oracknows | April 14, 2013About 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 question. At the time, I took advantage of Brian's awesome commentary about his experience on the JREF Swift Blog, his copious notes, and my read on Eric Merola's trailers for the movie, what he said in the first movie, and his own promotional…
oracknows | March 31, 2013It'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 virtues of Stanislaw Burzynski who decided that one movie was not enough. He needed to make another, in which skeptics are painted as the enemy, a shadowy cabal. Well, apparently he saw a certain video I posted last Friday, and he was displeased. Whether it was because the speaker…
oracknows | March 26, 2013Here we go again.
Every time I think I can get away from this topic for a while, I get sucked back in. Indeed, it seems that hardly a week can go by when I don't find myself pulled inexorably back to this horrible, horrible clinic and what I consider to be the abuses of science and clinical trials that go on there on a daily basis. Whether it be the patients who are offered false hope at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of a chemotherapeutic drug known as antineoplastons that, contrary to what it is claimed, is not "non-toxic," "natural," or even particularly…
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…
oracknows | March 13, 2013Film producer Eric Merola seems to think that there is a conspiracy of skeptics (whom he calls The Skeptics) hell bent on harassing his hero, Brave Maverick Doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. According to his latest film Burzynski: Cancer Is A Serious Business, Part 2 (henceforth referred to as Burzynski II, to distinguish it from Merola's first Burzynski movie, to which I will refer as Burzynski I), there is a shadowy cabal of Skeptics out there just waiting to swoop down on any Burzynski supporter who has the temerity to Tweet support for him, any cancer patient being treated by Burzynski who…
oracknows | March 10, 2013One of the strategies that Stanislaw Burzynski will undoubtedly use to "prove" in Eric Merola's new Stanislaw Burzynski movie that antineoplastons work in cancer will be to highlight "success stories." Last year, Burzynski apologists frequently pointed to a girl with an inoperable brain tumor named Amelia Saunders as a success story when the U.K. press widely featured her going to school in September but, very sadly, her family saw her tumor begin to progress again in December, ultimately resulting in her death about a month and a half ago. In the process, Burzynski did what he all too often…
oracknows | March 5, 2013That didn't take long.
Earlier today I wrote about how Colorado Public TV (channel 12) has betrayed its public trust by airing movies promoting quackery and/or pseudoscience. The most recent example is its upcoming airing of the first Burzynski movie, a propaganda piece so blatantly one-sided and full of cherry picked information and conspiracy mongering that it's painful for anyone with two neurons to rub together to watch.
Well, Colorado PBS, Channel 12 has responded (click to embiggen):
Indeed. Colorado PBS must have incredible contempt for its viewers to think that such a transparent…
oracknows | February 11, 2013Those 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 for enjoyment I'm sure I could manage to find other topics that I could write about. In actuality, way back in deepest darkest beginnings of this blog, I did write about a lot of other things. My skeptical topics were more general in nature, encompassing not just medicine but evolution versus "…
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 | January 28, 2013The 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 cancer more successfully than conventional medicine—and not by a little—using chemicals he calles "antineoplastons," which he originally isolated from urine but now synthesizes in a laboratory. More recently, he's been claiming to deliver "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that…