cancer
oracknows | February 9, 2014There are certain things that can happen that are the equivalent of the Bat Signal to me; that is, if you can swallow the idea of me being in any way like Bruce Wayne. Call them the Cancer Signal, if you will. When I see the Cancer Signal, I know that I have to head down to the Cancer Cave—wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. Scratch that. In any caes, there are certain studies or stories that basically demand my attention and say, "Blog me, Orac! Blog me right now!!!" Either that, or they're studies that capture my readers' attention, leading them to e-mail me or Tweet at me plaintive…
oracknows | February 7, 2014If there's one thing that I write that I don't feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it's that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist as a separate entity. There is nothing that NCCAM does that couldn't be done just as well in other parts of the NIH, with the exception of research into modalities with such low prior plausibility and such fantastical proposed mechanisms of working that…
oracknows | February 6, 2014Now we come to a post in which Orac unloads a bit about one of his pet peeves. It is a post that will likely piss a few people off on "his" side. If it does, so be it. He does this now because yesterday something happened that irritated the crap out of me because it put on display one of the less appealing characteristics of the skeptical movement, a tendency to obsessively focus on what it views as important at the expense of losing touch with the big picture. It is a story about knee jerk responses to which we all (myself included) fall prey.
Yesterday it was widely reported in the media,…
kkrisberg | January 31, 2014In a first-of-its-kind study, a researcher has estimated that the health-related economic savings of removing bisphenol A from our food supply is a whopping $1.74 billion annually. And that’s a conservative estimate.
“This study is a case in point of the economic burden borne by society due to the failure to regulate environmental chemicals in a proactive way,” study author Leonardo Trasande told me.
With evidence mounting that bisphenol A (BPA) exposure is a serious health risk, Trasande, an associate professor in pediatrics, environmental medicine and health policy at New York University,…
oracknows | January 30, 2014Since I've been complaining about credulity in the media reporting on cancer this week, in particular the way local reporters Carol Robidoux and April Guilmet published articles that were nothing more than regurgitations of propaganda from Stanislaw Burzynski, I figured I might as well go all in and finish the week out with more of the same. Hopefully, it'll clear the deck to move on to different topics next week. Besides, seeing this really irritated me.
I don't live in Australia (obviously), but it seems that I'm frequently aware of things going on in Australia relevant to skeptical…
oracknows | January 30, 2014Believe it or not, I'm about to say the one and only good thing I will say about Stanislaw Burzynski in this post. After all, I was always taught to find the good in my opponents, no matter how vile I find them. Burzynski, for instance, has been peddling a cure for brain cancer (and other cancers) that he claims to have discovered in the blood and urine in the 1970s. Despite there being no convincing evidence of antitumor activity due to these peptides, which he dubbed antineoplastons, he has managed to win battle after battle with the FDA and the Texas Medical Board and to continue to prey…
dr. dolittle | January 29, 2014Scientists have identified the origin of a genome for a specific type of transmissible cancer that has spread between dogs beginning 11,000 years ago!
oracknows | January 28, 2014When last I wrote about the sad saga of Sarah Hershberger, the 12-year-old Amish girl from northeastern Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, decided to stop her chemotherapy resulting in legal action by Akron children's Hospital to have a medical guardian appointed to make sure that Sarah continues effective science-based therapy of her tumor, I intentionally chose a rather inflammatory title in which I proclaimed that she was coming home to die. I didn't do that lightly. Rather, I did it because I was thoroughly depressed because David Michael, the woo-…
dr. dolittle | January 27, 2014New research published in Science Reports by Strauch et al., shows that fruit flies can tell the difference between cancerous and healthy cells. The researchers recorded calcium patterns indicative of neuronal activity that was stimulated in response to various odors emitted by healthy and cancerous cells. Because cells with cancer differ metabolically from healthy cells, they emit different volatile compounds that can be detected by olfactory receptor neurons on the antennae of fruit flies. When exposed to breast cancer cells or healthy cells, the flies exhibited different patterns in…
oracknows | January 27, 2014Being a cancer surgeon and researcher, naturally I tend to write about cancer a lot more than other areas of medicine and science. It's what I know best. Also, cancer is a very common area for unscientific practices to insinuate themselves, something that's been true for a very long time. The ideas don't change very rapidly, either. Drop a cancer quack from 2014 into 1979, and he would probably be right at home. Of course, part of the reason is because the "elder statesmen" of cancer quackery today were just getting their starts in 1979. Still, the same ideas keep recurring even as far back…
oracknows | January 22, 2014I realize that I just wrote about infamous cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski yesterday. (Note how I refuse to call him an "oncologist," mainly because he isn't one, having never completed an oncology fellowship—or even an internal medicine residency, the usual prerequisite to do an oncology fellowship.) However, there's a bit more that I wanted to touch on before moving on to other topics. What brought this on was a Google Alert that appeared in my in box yesterday relevant to yesterday's post. You might recall that yesterday I mentioned a campaign by the Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-…
oracknows | January 20, 2014The year 2013 finished with serious setbacks for Stanislaw Burzynski and his unproven cancer treatment that he dubbed "antineoplastons" (ANPs) way back in the early 1970s. As you might recall, in November, two things happened. First, the FDA released its initial reports on its inspection of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute (BRI) carried out from January to March 2013. They were damning in the extreme, pointing out the shoddy operating methods of the institutional review board (IRB) used by the BRI to approve and oversee Burzynski's "clinical trials" (and I use the term…
cmonforton | January 20, 2014It was one of those weeks when two seemingly unrelated topics crossed my desk. Only later did it strike me that they were connected. Both involved toxic substances and what we know about their adverse health effects. One concerned the contaminated water supply in West Virginia. The other involved a commentary by attorney Steve Wodka about a newish revision to OSHA’s chemical right-to-know regulation.
The drinking water emergency in West Virginia---thousands of gallons of MCHM (methylcyclohexanemethanol) which flowed into the water supply--- has focused attention on the inadequacy of the key…
oracknows | January 16, 2014Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…
kkrisberg | January 14, 2014It’s probably my earliest public health memory — the image of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and his grandfatherly beard on the television warning my elementary school self about the dangers of smoking. He was the first doctor I knew by name.
But while Koop may be the surgeon general that people of my generation most likely associate with the public health movement to reduce smoking, he wasn’t the first to speak out against tobacco. Koop was carrying on a legacy that began decades before with the nation’s ninth surgeon general, Luther Terry, who on Jan. 11, 1964, released the first surgeon…
oracknows | January 8, 2014Well, that didn't take long. I knew it had been too quiet on the Burzynski front. In retrospect, that was almost certainly because of the holidays, but the holidays are over, and real life is here again.
Yes, the year 2014 is only a little more than a week old, and here comes Stanislaw Burzynski again, hurt but not defeated in the wake of all the negative publicity he received late last year, thanks to Liz Szabo's USA TODAY expose. Actually, in a way it might have been a good thing that I was delayed in addressing this a day by my little bit of weakness Tuesday night that led mere exhaustion…
oracknows | January 5, 2014Believe it or not, even your ever-lovin' box of colored blinking lights can malfunction, and it happened to me over the weekend. Actually, sometime around New Years, I caught some sort of crud, and have been battling it since. There's nothing like hacking up a lung and not being able to sleep well for days to put one in a perfect mood to be particularly Insolent. And so it would have been, until my part of the country managed to be buried in snow all day and night Sunday, necessitating multiple rounds of going out to use the snow blower in spite of my condition and having to get up super…
oracknows | January 3, 2014One of the more bizarre bits of cancer quackery that I've come across is that of an Italian doctor (who, like many cancer quacks, appears not to be a board-certified oncologist) named Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is really a fungus and has even written a book about it, entitled, appropriately enough for this particular quackery, Cancer Is A Fungus. The first time I encountered Simoncini, about five years ago, I was floored by his arguments, not because of how bizarre they were (although that was part of it) because of their sheer stupidity. Seriously, Simoncini's reasoning—if "…
lborkowski | December 31, 2013While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on June 26, 2013.
By Elizabeth Grossman
In 1989, Massachusetts enacted a remarkable and landmark law known as the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Supported by both environmentalists and industry, and passed unanimously by the state legislature, TURA established toxics use reduction as Massachusetts’ preferred strategy for pollution prevention, and for reducing public, occupational and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals. The law requires in-state businesses to report on…
oracknows | December 31, 2013As I write this, 2013 is drawing to a close, with only a little more than 12 hours to go before the crowds now gathering at Times Square and elsewhere ring in 2014. For some of you, 2014 has already arrived or will arrive many hours before it does for me. I'm not normally one to do much navel gazing, but 2013 has been a mixed year. As far as this blog goes, for instance, readership is up, with over 3.5 million page views for the year, although that's still a little below the blog's height before the whole "Pepsigate" thing. (It's really hard to believe that was almost three and a half years…