Bioethics
oracknows | June 19, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines and autism after a long hiatus, thanks to the Atuism Omnibus, don't know how I missed this article by Sharyl Attkisson, entitled Autism: Why the Debate Rages. I can't recall the last time I saw so many logical fallacies and doggerel packed into an article on an ostensibly "mainstream news" site. In fact, I don't think I've seen such antivax idiocy on a mainstream news site ever, but it's possible that I blocked it out of my mind. I don't have time to do a thorough fisking, but I will hit the main points. Here are the "reasons" that Attkisson lists as…
oracknows | June 14, 2007Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…
oracknows | June 14, 2007At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages oncologists to use chemotherapy even in patients for whom it may not benefit or may only provide marginal benefit. It's rare for something in the news to mesh so closely with the topic at hand; so I couldn't resist looking up the article, which appeared Tuesday morning, and was…
j7uy5 | June 7, 2007Amy Goodman has a good article on Truthdig. The
reason I like the article is that it provides follow-up to an issue
that was in the headlines, briefly a couple of years ago. It
has largely been ignored by the media since then.
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070605_a_hypocritical_oath_psychologists_and_torture/">Hypocritical
Oath: Psychologists and Torture
By Amy Goodman
Jun 5, 2007
First, do no harm. This tenet of medicine applies equally to
psychologists, yet they are increasingly implicated in abusive
interrogations, dare we say torture, at U.S. military detention…
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007It never seems to end, does it?
I'm talking about the hype and questionable practices revolving around dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the Warburg effect, in essence normalizing the metabolism of tumor cells and thereby inhibiting their growth. (See here and here for more details.) A report by Evangelos Michelakis at the University of Alberta in Cancer Cell in January reported strong antitumor activity against a wide variety of tumors in rat tumor models resulted in a phenomenon ballooning out of control in a way that he could never have imagined…
sporte | May 28, 2007Is the case for open access truly "open and shut"?
Will open access impede science by limiting genetic studies with families?
tags: genetics, genetic privacy, bioethics, open access
Microsoft's brave new world
The April ALPSP conference began with songs for the open access choir. Microsoft's Lee Dirks painted visions of a utopian future where everything will be open, labs shall be judged by the worthiness of their databases, and even scientists will learn to share.
According to Dirks, "Open access to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm."
Since I've had a few data…
oracknows | May 24, 2007A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it's a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild Abraham Cherrix and Katie Wernecke, both of whom had relapsed when last I discussed them. The case is one with which I had not been familiar, namely that of Noah Maxin, of Canton, OH:
CANTON No one in the courtroom nearly five years ago wanted this day to come. Not Noah Maxin's parents. Not…
oracknows | May 21, 2007I hadn't planned on revisiting this topic again quite so soon, but sometimes a piece of information comes up that's so disturbing that I can't ignore it and can't justify delaying blogging about it by very long. So it is yet again with the strange and disturbing saga of dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecular chemotherapeutic drug with a novel and scientifically interesting mechanism of action that could lead to a whole new class of chemotherapeutic agents and that has shown considerable promise in rat tumor models but has not yet been tested in humans. Not to belabor the story, which has…
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
j7uy5 | May 15, 2007Often,
on this blog, I've ranted about the risks that our government, and our
corporate citizens, e.g. pharmaceutical companies, expose us to on a
daily basis.
Perhaps it would be good to put some of those risks in perspective.
That is, to compare the risks of various medications to
others risks that we take on a routine basis. In the May/June
issue of the journal, Health Affairs, there is an article on the
subject. The full thing is behind a pay wall, but we'll get
to the heart of the matter anyway.
href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/636">What's
More…
oracknows | May 14, 2007Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it.
I say this in light of a commenter, who decided to show up in one of my old posts to claim "positive results" from dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule experimental cancer drug that has shown promising activity in rat models of cancer but has not yet been subjected to testing in human trials, and invite me to check out new testimonials. Because DCA is a small molecule that is inexpensive to produce and can't itself be patented (although a patent for its use in treating cancer, a weaker form of patent, is possible), pharmaceutical…
terrasig | May 12, 2007Via my colleague, PharmCanuck, comes news of an in-depth radio program on dichloroacetate (DCA) that aired this past Tuesday on CBC's, "The Current." As a reminder to readers who aren't already bored senseless of my discussion of this chemical, DCA is a small molecule freely-available in the public domain that was shown to slow the growth of human lung tumors implanted in rats by researchers at the University of Alberta. I've posted on this issue a number of times and have been well outposted by my surgical oncology blogging colleague, Orac at Respectful Insolence.
(Real Audio segment: 21:…
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
j7uy5 | April 30, 2007Just
in case you are a physician looking for a reason to avoid drug reps,
you should read this article on PLOS Medicine. It is an
enlightening, if sickening, inside view of pharmaceutical sales
practices.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040150">Following
the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence DoctorsAdriane
Fugh-Berman*, Shahram AhariApril
24, 2007
...Unlike
the door-to-door vendors of cosmetics and vacuum cleaners, drug reps do
not sell their product directly to…
oracknows | April 24, 2007Given all the verbiage (see the link list below) about dichloroacetate (DCA) that I've spewed into the blogosphere decrying the hijacking of a promising cancer therapy by conspiracy-mongers (it's the cancer cure "big pharma" is keeping from you because they can't make money on it) and opportunistic entrepreneurs like Jim Tassanno preying on the desperation of terminally ill cancer patients, I had thought that I would be taking a break on the topic for a while. But wouldn't you know it? My blogging colleague Abel at Terra Sigillata unearthed another fascinating article on the effects of this…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Those arguing the "conventional" view that sound science and epidemiological studies have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism are often tarred with the "pharma shill" brush. Meanwhile, researchers who have ever taken drug company money (particularly if it's from a drug company that makes vaccines) are castigated for having a serious conflict of interest, even to the point where conflicts of interest are invented or exaggerated beyond any reasonable recognition to tar the investigator with the dreaded "pharma shill" label.
Don't get me wrong. Possible conflicts of interest should…
oracknows | April 11, 2007It's been a couple of weeks since we last checked in with The DCA Site, that dubious advertising site for BuyDCA.com, where a chemist named Jim Tassano sells to desperate cancer patients non-pharmaceutical grade and non-FDA-approved dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent with an interesting and unusual mechanism of action that has shown promise in rat models of cancer but as yet has not undergone clinical trials in humans to determine if it is effective in cancer. Based on a lot of hype by the credulous and proudly ignorant, a lot of distrust of big pharma (some justified…
terrasig | April 2, 2007A bad day for pharma on the newswires:
Pfizer subsidiaries agree to pay $34.7 million in fines
Two subsidiaries of Pfizer Inc. have agreed to pay fines totaling $34.7 million for offering a kickback to recommend company drugs and for illegally promoting the human growth hormone product Genotropin for non-approved uses, federal prosecutors announced Monday. Prosecutors allege that Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc. offered to overpay a subsidiary of a pharmacy benefit manager by $12.3 million in the hope the company would, in turn, recommend Pharmacia's drug products to its clients.
Pharmacy…
oracknows | March 28, 2007It's been a week since I last wrote about dichloroacetate (DCA), the chemotherapeutic agent that targets tumor cells by an interesting new mechanism based on the Warburg effect, as I've described in the past. After a very interesting article in Cancer Cell in January by investigators at the University of Alberta, the blogosphere erupted with wild speculation that this was a "cure" for cancer, based only on animal studies that were fairly impressive. Because DCA is a small molecule that is supposedly "unpatentable," pharmaceutical companies have been rather cool in their interest, and it is…