cancer
oracknows | December 30, 2013NOTE: Because I've been (kind of) relaxing over this holiday period, this is not an entirely new post. It is, however, a significantly expanded and reworked version of a post from nearly four years ago. So if you haven't been reading four years, it's new to you, and if you have you might or might not remember it.(Who remembers a blog post four years later? I'm not that good—usually.)
Those who know me and/or follow me on various social media know that I'm a big Doctor Who fan. I have been since the 1980s. So the last two big events of the year, the 50th anniversary special in November and the…
oracknows | December 22, 2013It was a couple of weeks ago that I last provided an update on the case of Sarah Hershberger, the 11-year-old Amish girl from Medina County, Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents decided to stop her chemotherapy because of how sick it was making her. As I explained early on and on multiple occasions afterward, Sarah had about an 85% chance of long term survival with the chemotherapy regimen she was undergoing but a close to zero percent chance of surviving without it. In other words, her parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, are committing gross medical neglect of their child. I…
oracknows | December 20, 2013One of the frequent topics on this blog is, unsurprisingly, cancer quackery. Be it the Gerson therapy and its propensity for encouraging patients to take hundreds of supplements and to shoot copious amounts of coffee where it really doesn't belong (where the sun don't shine), the Gonzalez protocol, homeopathy, naturopathy, or various other nonsensical and dangerous cancer therapies with no scientific basis, I take them on because, as a cancer surgeon, I can't stand seeing cancer patients abused this way. If they're curable, I hate seeing them seduced into throwing away their chance for cure,…
cmonforton | December 19, 2013Two economists, funded by right-wing, university-housed think tanks, recently submitted their views on OSHA's proposed rule to protect silica-exposed workers. Michael L. Marlow with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and Susan Dudley of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, describe OSHA's proposal as flawed, sloppy, weak and unsubstantiated. Funny, those are some of the terms I used to describe their analyses.
Marlow offers a litany of cockamamie reasons that OSHA should scrap its proposed rule. He says, for example, that OSHA needs to consider a wider set of…
oracknows | December 19, 2013I remember during medical school that more than one of my faculty used to have a regularly repeated crack that the only thing that taking vitamin supplements could do for you was to produce expensive pee. My first year in medical school was nearly thirty years ago now; so it's been a long time. During the nearly three decades since I first entered medical school, I have yet to see any evidence to persuade me otherwise. If you eat a well-rounded diet, you don't need vitamin supplementation. Of course, none of that stops the supplement manufacturers from trying to convince us that taking…
lborkowski | December 17, 2013On December 5, fast-food workers mounted one-day strikes in dozens of cities (between 100 and 130 cities, depending which tally you consult) to demand higher wages and the right to unionize without reprisal. The strikes follow walkouts that started in New York City in November 2012, and a series of multi-city actions this past spring and summer. The Nation's Allison Kilkenny shares the story of Mary Coleman, a worker who has participated in several of these actions:
Mary Coleman, known to her co-workers as Ms. Mary, works at a Popeye’s in Milwaukee for $7.25 an hour. Coleman, 59, lives with…
oracknows | December 16, 2013These days, Dr. Oz seems to stand for everything I oppose in medicine: Fear mongering, quackery, making claims that he can't back up with science, and, of course, filthy lucre. On second thought, I'm not against filthy lucre per se. In fact, I wouldn't mind having some of it myself. However, I also want to keep my integrity, and if getting a piece of that filthy lucre involves compromising myself, my scientific credibility, and my overall credibility as much as Dr. Mehmet Oz has done over the last several years, I'll have to settle for my comfortable upper middle class existence. It's not so…
oracknows | December 11, 2013The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle.
Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…
oracknows | December 10, 2013Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
oracknows | December 9, 2013Three weeks ago, USA TODAY published an expose of the Burzynski Clinic by Liz Szabo that was devastating in its scope and detail. Early on, Stanislaw Burzynski and his minions tried to do some damage control, with hilarious results given how inept and unconvincing his excuses were for all the violations of ethics and patient care and abuse of clinical trials detailed by Szabo. Later, Burzynski presented some abstracts at the Society of Neuro-Oncology meeting in San Francisco. Let's just say that the case report and his reports of a phase 2 clinical trial were...similarly unimpressive. Overall…
oracknows | December 8, 2013I am afraid. I am afraid that the Amish girl with cancer whose parents' battle to treat her with "natural" therapy instead of effective science-based chemotherapy has made international news, is doomed. It might take longer than doctors have estimated, but it seems inevitable now. I will explain.
It's hard to believe that it's been two months since I first became aware of the case of Sarah Hershberger, the now 11-year-old Amish girl from Medina County, Ohio near Akron with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents stopped her chemotherapy after only two rounds. It was around that time that, after…
oracknows | December 3, 2013I don't normally ask you, my readers for much, if anything, other than to read and for the subset of you who like to be active in the comments to have at it and, if so inclined, to cover my back by swatting down the trolls, quacks, and antivaccinationists who occasionally show up to infest the comments, so that I don't have to. However, given the story of Stanislaw Burzysnki, which I've been covering with frequent blog posts for over two years now, how could I not listen to the appeal of my friend and co-conspirator (note to Burzysnki fans: that "co-conspirator" bit was sarcasm) to take…
oracknows | December 1, 2013It figures.
Whenever there's a holiday or a break where I'm not paying as much attention to the blog as usual, something always seems to happen regarding a story I'm interested and have been blogging about. Remember Sarah Hershberger? She's 11 year old Amish girl who developed lymphoblastic lymphoma, underwent one round of chemotherapy, suffered highly unpleasant side effects from the second round of chemotherapy, and then refused to undergo further chemotherapy. Her parents, distressed at her suffering, decided not to make her continue her therapy. They also see that her cancer has shrunk (…
oracknows | November 29, 2013Well, Thanksgiving's over, and the orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday is in full swing. Personally, I have to work, at least part of the day, and I don't go anywhere near the stores on Black Friday anyway. I haven't for years. So we might as well briefly discuss a bit of science today. It won't be long (by Orac standards), but there was a tidbit of news that hit the blogosphere on Thanksgiving Day that caught my interest. Apparently the execrable study by Gilles Séralini on the effect of using feed made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on rats is heading for retraction. You…
dr. dolittle | November 22, 2013Researchers are studying tumors in the mammary glands of dogs to help understand breast cancer in humans with the goal of developing new treatments.
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oracknows | November 22, 2013I know I have readers who are neuroscientists. However, do I have readers who are currently attending the 4th Quadrennial Meeting of the Society of Neuro-Oncology in San Francisco going on this weekend? Why do I ask? Given the Regular readers might suspect that it has to do something with a man who has become a regular topic of this blog over the last two years. Yes, I'm referring to Stanislaw Burzynski, the oncologist who has never done a residency in internal medicine or a fellowship in oncology who was the subject of an excellent news report by Liz Szabo in USA TODAY one week ago today,…
egrossman | November 21, 2013At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry, stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis, an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…
oracknows | November 18, 2013I was very pleased last Friday, very pleased indeed. Given the normal subject matter of this blog, in which we face a seemingly unrelenting infiltration of pseudoscience and quackery into even the most hallowed halls of academic medicine, against which we seem to be fighting a mostly losing battle, having an opportunity to see such an excellent deconstruction of bad science and bad medicine in a large mainstream news outlet like USA TODAY is rare and gratifying. As you might recall, USA TODAY reporter Liz Szabo capped off a months-long investigation of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his…
oracknows | November 15, 2013I've made no secret of how much I despise Stanislaw Burzynski, the self-proclaimed cancer doctor and medical researcher who has been treating patients with an unproven, unapproved chemotherapeutic agent since 1977, seemingly slithering around, under, over, and past all attempts to investigate him and shut him down. Along the way, Burzynski has become a hero to the cancer quackery industry, touted as the man who can cure incurable cancers that science-based medicine can't, even though his treatment, antineoplastons, allegedly peptides isolated from blood and urine that normally keep cancer in…
oracknows | November 10, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who inexplicably has been permitted to continue to administer an unproven cancer treatment to children with deadly brain cancers for nearly 37 years now. Beginning in 1977, when he left Baylor College of Medicine and opened up the Burzynski Clinic, Burzynski has administered a cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons to patients. After nearly four decades and several dozen phase II clinical trials started, he never published a completed phase II trial. The only evidence he's published consists mainly…