cancer
oracknows | May 1, 2017"Integrative medicine" is a term for a form of medicine in which pseudoscience and quackery are "integrated" with real medicine. Unfortunately, as Mark Crislip puts it, when you mix cow pie with apple pie, it doesn't make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Unfortunately these days, there's a lot of cow pie being mixed with apple pie. Worse, it's gotten to the point where integrative medicine is subspecializing. For instance, there is now a specialty known as "integrative oncology," which particularly burns me. Indeed, supportive care oncology has been very susceptible to the…
oracknows | April 27, 2017I was going to write about this yesterday, but seeing a family of a child with terminal cancer seduced by the siren call of Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplaston quackery distracted me and I had to blog about it. It's actually an appropriate lead-in to this story, which was based on an announcement by the FDA that it was sending warning letters to 14 companies for selling products that they claimed were treatments for cancer:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters addressed to 14 U.S.-based companies illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently…
The failure of the Texas Medical Board: Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski is back in business
oracknows | April 26, 2017When last I wrote about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski nearly two months ago, he had, as I characterized it, just mostly slithered away from justice once again. The Texas Medical Board had not removed his license and had only fined him relatively lightly given his offenses. True, he had conditions placed on his continued practice (more on that later), but it hasn't slowed him down, as you will soon see. Another family is raising funds, this time from the UK, to travel to Houston for his nostrums. Basically, by failing to revoke Stanislaw Burzynski's medical license, the Texas…
oracknows | April 23, 2017Anyone who has been reading this blog for the last three years or so knows that I'm not a fan of "right-to-try" laws. Basically such laws, which have sprung up like kudzu since 2014 and now exist in 33 states, purport to allow terminally ill patients the "right to try" experimental therapeutics. Thus far, they have been sold to the public as giving terminally ill patients "one last shot" and touting how such laws could save lives. As a result, as I've grimly quipped on multiple occasions, to politicians opposing right-to-try laws is akin to opposing motherhood, apple pie, and the American…
oracknows | April 21, 2017Yesterday, I discussed a topic that has vexed me ever since long before I started this blog, namely the topic of how physicians are seduced by pseudoscience and ultimately embrace it whole-heartedly. The kinds of pseudoscience I've seen physicians embracing are many, including climate science denialism and creationism, but the ones that most interest me are ones that physicians should know better than to embrace. I'm referring, of course, to pseudoscience related to the medical profession, such as various forms of medical quackery (which, alas, have found all too cozy a home in medicine to…
cmonforton | April 19, 2017A new commentary by CUNY School of Public Health professor Franklin Mirer is timed perfectly for this weekend's Marches for Science.
Mirer writes about the ongoing interference by Members of Congress on the science behind the designation of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. His commentary, "What’s Science Got to Do with It?" appears in the current issue of April issue of the Synergist, a membership publication of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
Mirer's example concerns a rule published by EPA in December 2016 on testing formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products (e.g.,…
oracknows | April 16, 2017From the moment that Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected President, I couldn't help but be concerned about what President Trump would mean for medical science and science in general. I was not alone in my concerns. Of course, now, five months later, we know that such concerns were quite valid. If funding is a primary indicator, then, if anything, my concerns expressed last November were understated. For example, in his first budget, Trump proposed cutting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 19%, and, then, not content with that, proposed cutting $1.2 billion from this fiscal…
oracknows | April 10, 2017If you were to rely on much of what you see in the mainstream media and on social media, you probably have the impression that we are not doing very well against cancer. Indeed, a common trope I see in a lot of articles is that we are somehow "losing" the war on cancer. Just for yuks, I Googled the term "losing the war on cancer," and it didn't take long to find a lot of articles, both in the mainstream press and, more predictably, on alternative medicine-friendly websites making just that argument. Indeed, in 2011, which was the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of "war on…
oracknows | April 7, 2017One of the most common topics of this blog is the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial. Basically, these testimonials consist of a cancer patient telling a story of how alternative medicine saved him or her from cancer. They tend to consist of two varieties. The first variety is the patient who underwent a partial course of conventional therapy. In the case of breast cancer, most commonly the woman has undergone surgery but no chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, or radiation therapy, deciding to undertake quack treatments after surgery. Inevitably, the person doing the testimonial credits…
oracknows | April 2, 2017It's been a while since I've written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I've written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick…
cmonforton | March 30, 2017The U.S. Senate passed a resolution last night urging Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy to warn the public about the risk of asbestos exposure. The deadly mineral continues to be imported to the U.S.
S. Res. 98 designates the first week of April as “National Asbestos Awareness Week.” The Senators note that the U.S. continues to use tons of asbestos every year despite its well-known danger. The resolution acknowledges:
Thousands of workers in the U.S. face significant asbestos exposure
Thousands of people in the U.S. die from asbestos-related diseases every year
The U.S. Geological Survey…
oracknows | March 23, 2017It was only just yesterday that I recounted the story of a naturopathic quack in Bowling Green, KY who told a cancer patient that "chemo is for losers," promising her that he eliminate her tumor within three months. She listened to him, and as a result she died, as she and her husband were suing the quack. Not long after, her distraught widower walked into the quack's office on a Friday evening earlier this month and, if the police charges are accurate, shot him dead. Basically, because this quack convinced the woman to forego chemotherapy, whatever chance of survival she had was eliminated.…
oracknows | March 6, 2017I've been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over...sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final ruling of the Texas Medical Board regarding Dr. Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who has been a frequent topic of this blog because of his practices of charging desperate cancer patient tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for his "antineoplastons" (ANPs) and, later, what he…
oracknows | February 17, 2017I like to refer to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All, so much so that I almost always call it that within the first two paragraphs of any post I write about some tasty bit of homeopathy pseudoscience. It's also a wonderful tool for teaching critical thinking because it's easy to explain and people grasp intuitively why homeopathy is pseudoscience when it's explained properly to them. Basically, it's because of homeopathy's two laws. The first is the Law Similars, which states that, relieve a symptom, you must use something that causes the symptom. It's nonsense. There's no…
oracknows | February 5, 2017"You need to detox."
How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, "Toujours les toxines," because in many branches of alternative medicine the overarching idea behind the interventions used is that vague, unnamed "toxins" are somehow poisoning you and that the only way to fix what's wrong with you is to "detoxify." These "detox" interventions can take many forms, ranging from the relatively (but not completely) benign, such as "juice cleanses," to…
oracknows | January 29, 2017About a week ago, I happened upon a number of stories about a study and project that demonstrates a key difference between science and pseudoscience. They had titles like, "Rigorous replication effort succeeds for just two of five cancer papers" (Science), "Cancer reproducibility project releases first results: An open-science effort to replicate dozens of cancer-biology studies is off to a confusing start" (Nature), and "What Does It Mean When Cancer Findings Can't Be Reproduced?" (NPR). Basically, these stories all reference a review of the initial results of the Reproducibility Project in…
oracknows | January 26, 2017Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with one major kind of blog post that I've done periodically ever since the very beginning of this blog, and that's the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, particularly breast cancer cure testimonials, but also testimonials for a wide variety of cancers allegedly "cured" by a wide variety of quacks. It started with Suzanne Somers and Lorraine Day, whose stories I deconstructed and showed not to be indicative of a cancer cure due to the quackery they were pursuing and continues to this day. Another, related category of post are early…
cmonforton | January 12, 2017Chronic beryllium disease is a horrible illness, as is lung cancer. Both diseases are the rationale for a new health standard issued by OSHA on January 9.
The rule is designed to protect the health of an estimated 60,000 workers in the U.S. who are exposed to the light-weight, super-strong metal: beryllium. This includes about 10,000 workers involved in electric-power generation; 9,000 workers in dental laboratories and dental offices; 8,400 in specialty construction trades; 5,600 in motor vehicle parts manufacturing; and 3,000 in the maritime industry who are welders and abrasive blasters.…
oracknows | January 5, 2017If there's one thing that proponents of "integrative medicine" (or, as it's been called in the past, "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) take great pains to emphasize whenever defending their integration of prescientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medicine, it's that they do not recommend using "alternative medicine" instead of real medicine but in addition to real medicine. Indeed, even the "gods" of integrative medicine, such as Barrie Cassileth at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, not only emphasize that but actually often take umbrage when it is suggested that…
kkrisberg | January 4, 2017At the Toronto Star, Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the “lethal legacy” of a General Electric plant in the Canadian city of Peterborough, Ontario, where hundreds of compensation claims have been filed for illnesses that workers say were caused by occupational chemical exposures. In fact, one occupational health expert described the plant as a “cancer generator.”
Mojtehedzadeh reports that a study commissioned by General Electric and that the Star obtained found that male workers at the plant were up to 57 percent more likely to die of lung cancer than the general population, while female…