cancer
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 19, 2013I've had a rule of thumb for a while that helps me identify quacks with a high degree of accuracy. It's not very sensitive, as a lot of quacks don't exhibit this trait, but it's very specific. A lot of quacks don't use the term; so not hearing says nothing about a practitioner. If you hear someone using this term, however, it's at least 99% likely that he is a quack. At least.
I'm referring to the word "dis-ease."
You see it everywhere. Instead of using the word "disease," quacks will often use the word "dis-ease" instead. Basically, the idea (apparently) is to choose not to empower health…
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 7, 2013I'm not a big fan of Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). That I don't much like CTCA should come as no surprise, given that this particular hospital chain distinguishes itself from other hospital chains by advertising its full body embrace of quackery, in particular "naturopathic oncology." At the same time as it's advertising its "integrative cancer care." It all sounds great on the surface, but anyone who understands exactly what "integrative medicine" is and how it basically represents the evolution of quackery will also understand that when you "integrate" quackery and…
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 | March 3, 2013Over the weekend, as I was contemplating what to write about for today, I received a rather odd and unexpected e-mail. Indeed, it was with great surprise that I read this e-mail on Saturday morning, sent to the Burzynski Movie mailing list:
Dear Burzynski Movie Subscribers:
Major International Distribution Deal For
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Part II:
We are pleased to announce that Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Part II has landed a major international distribution deal with one of America's top distribution companies.
We can't give out any specific details until…
sa smith | March 1, 2013Another day, another disease treatment strategy based off a genetically modified virus!
Prostate Specific Antigen Retargeted Recombinant Newcastle Disease Virus for Prostate Cancer Virotherapy.
This one is so clever, you guys. It is so freaking clever!
Some of you might know that sometimes, when prostate cancer is present, there is an elevated level of 'Prostate Specific Antigen'. Physicians used to test for elevated PSA levels as a test for prostate cancer, but because it lead to over-diagnosis/unnecessary treatments, its not anymore.
But lets say you *know* prostate cancer is there, and it…
jhalper | February 24, 2013Another advance in cancer research is featured on our website this week. Among other things, this one highlights the dangers of assuming causation from correlation. Prof. Dov Zipori and his team were looking at adult stem cells in the bone marrow. These hold a lot of potential for treating many kinds of disease but, like many kinds of stem cells, there is a risk of these cells differentiating into cancer instead of the intended normal tissue replacement. The idea was to find a marker that could tell which cells were more likely to turn cancerous, thus making the use of these stem cells safer…
oracknows | February 20, 2013Here's a little thought experiment for proponents of "alternative medicine." Imagine, if you will, a small pharmaceutical company. Founded in the 1970s, it has starts out with only one product, a drug that its founder thought to be a very promising anticancer agent. So enamored of this particular drug was the founder of the company that he left a job with an academic medical center, founded his own clinic, and then his own research institute and company to manufacture the new drug. After first having painstakingly isolated the substances that make up his drug, he later started to synthesize…
oracknows | February 18, 2013Discussing Stanislaw Burzynski's abuse of science while contemplating how even his success stories really aren't yesterday reminded me of a topic that I discussed rather extensively not long after I moved my blog over to ScienceBlogs and have covered sporadically since then. I'm referring to the case of Abraham Cherrix. Cherrix, for those who haven't been regular readers long enough to have encounter him before, was a 15 year old boy who was unfortunate enough to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately for him, rather than undergoing curative therapy, he decided that he wanted "natural"…
sa smith | February 18, 2013This is ridiculous. After all of the papers I have read, written about, the new stuff we can do with GMO viruses...I can still be amazed. This is insane:
Randomized dose-finding clinical trial of oncolytic immunotherapeutic vaccinia JX-594 in liver cancer
The patients in this study had liver cancer. Specifically, malignant hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In general, someone diagnosed with HCC can expect to live 3-6 months.
These patients had already failed conventional therapies, so they were looking at 2-4 months.
So they tried the best kind of alternative therapy-- Not witch doctors or…
oracknows | February 17, 2013About a week and a half ago, I noted that the FDA had apparently paid every skeptic's favorite cancer doctor who is not an oncologist, Stanislaw Burzynski, a visit, while taking notice of a particularly credulous piece of puff journalism that portrayed Dr. Burzynski as a "brave maverick doctor" fighting The Man, who (of course) is trying to keep him down because he has The Natural Cure For Cancer "They" Don't Want You Sheeple To Know About.
Burzynski, as you recall, is the Houston doctor who claims to have much better results curing incurable cancers than conventional evidence-based…
cmonforton | February 14, 2013Imagine an organization that is given 90 days to complete a task, but after two years still hasn't finished the job. When you ask them 'what's taking so long?' or 'when we'll you be done?' they respond with 'no comment.'
That's the frustrating situation encountered by the U.S. public health and worker safety community when it comes to the Obama Administration and a proposed rule to protect workers from respirable crystalline silica. The proposed regulation would potentially affect workers involved in stonecutting, sandblasting, tuckpointing, brickmaking, foundries, and road, tunnel and…
sa smith | February 13, 2013Here is a nice open access review article on ERVs and their association with cancer:
Human endogenous retroviruses and cancer prevention: evidence and prospects
While thats wonderfully interesting, what I want to focus on is a bit at the end. More information I have never heard before--
An amino acid sequence similar to HERV-K-MEL, recognized to cause a significant protective effect against melanoma, is shared by the antigenic determinants expressed by some vaccines such as BCG, vaccinia virus and the yellow fever virus.
...
A recent epidemiological study provided provisional evidence of how…
sa smith | February 12, 2013I was actually unaware of this-- But melanoma is Yet Another Disease that has been associated with wayward ERV transcription and translation. Scientists have found inappropriate ERV RNA, protein, and anti-ERV antibodies in melanoma patients.
This is the first paper to break down 'melanoma' into subtypes (like 'cancer' is not monolithic, all 'melanomas' are not the same), and to compare those subtypes to normal tissue and benign naevus (non-cancerous birthmarks and moles).
Human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K) rec mRNA is expressed in primary melanoma but not in benign naevi or normal skin.…
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 "…
dr. dolittle | February 11, 2013 Image from: Collectors Weekly
Ever wonder how to tell if "scientific" information that you find on the internet is believable or just plain bogus? I came across a website called Sense About Science that explains how research is published and how to determine if it is credible. They also give advice and answer questions about claimed scientific evidence.
Here is a synopsis of the scientific peer review process: After a study is conducted and data has been gathered and analyzed, scientists summarize their findings in a paper that they submit for publication to a journal. The editor of the…
oracknows | February 10, 2013Epigenetics. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I realize I overuse that little joke, but I can't help but think that virtually every time I see advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's known more commonly now, "integrative medicine" discussing epigenetics. All you have to do to view mass quantities of misinterpretation of the science of epigenetics is to type the word into the "search" box of a website like Mercola.com or NaturalNews.com, and you'll be treated to large numbers of articles touting the latest…
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…