cancer
oracknows | December 12, 2012As much as I try, even when I'm on vacation in an undisclosed warm location near a beach (actually, our hotel room has a balcony overlooking the ocean), occasionally news finds its way to me. Part of it is because I still get the odd e-mail or two, and I do check my e-mail every so often on vacation in case something is exploding. In any case, an update to a story I wrote about last month has found its way to my in box, and, even on vacation, I can't resist a brief update.
Right before Thanksgiving, when it was announced that Stanislaw Burzynski got off on a technicality, I discussed as part…
oracknows | December 11, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Given that the blog seems to have been infiltrated with Burzynski trolls again and Eric Merola threatens to make a sequel to the execrable movie he made about Burzynski a couple of years ago, now seems a perfect time to rerun a post of Orac's from about a year ago. In fact, now might be a perfect time to rerun the whole trio, as Orac has been thinking he needs to do a major update and reanalysis, and where better to start than with the…
sa smith | December 11, 2012A lot of folks have been forwarding me this story from the New York Times--
In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia
It is a FANTASTIC story about a little girl who had been sick from leukemia for two years, wasnt responding to conventional therapies, and her parents chose to try alternative medicine. Not magic lotions and potions from soulless snake-oil salesmen-- A GMO virus, made in part with HIV-1.
What, exactly, her physicians used, I do not know-- This is a MSM piece, not a peer-reviewed paper, but Im guessing they used something like what I wrote about last year:
Oh,…
oracknows | December 10, 2012As I mentioned yesterday, Orac is currently away at an undisclosed location that is someplace warm. He is there, taking a rare pre-solstice break, preparing for the Mayan apocalypse that is to come on the 21st of this month. (Actually, he's recharging his Tarial cell, the better to be prepared for the utter nonsense that is to come in 2013, given that there is, at the very minimum, going to be another Stanislaw Burzynski hagiography released early in the year.) In the meantime, as I mentioned yesterday, most, if not all, of the posts this week will appear...familiar. At least, they might be…
oracknows | December 9, 2012For all the worship of "translational" research that is currently in vogue, it needs to be remembered that a robust pipeline of basic science progress upon which to base translational research and clinical trials is absolutely essential if progress in medicine is to continue. Without it, progress in SBM will slow and even grind to a halt. That's why, in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is so critical. The NIH funds large amounts of biomedical research each year, which means that what the NIH will and will not fund can't help but have a profound effect shaping the pipeline of…
oracknows | December 4, 2012Here we go again.
Because he's been in the news lately, I've been writing a lot about the "brave maverick doctor" known as Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have spectacular results treating normally incurable cancers using something he calls antineoplastons. Unfortunately, the reason Burzynski has featured prominently in the skeptical blogosphere over the last two weeks is because, unfortunately, the Texas Medical Board (TMB) dropped its case against him. Basically, Burzynski got off on a technicality.
For purposes of this post, I don't want to dwell on this case, because I've already pretty…
oracknows | December 2, 2012Sometimes when a study comes out that I'm very interested in blogging about, I don't get around to it right away. In the blogging biz, this sort of delay is often considered a bad thing, because blogging tends to be very immediate, about being the firstest with the mostest, and the moment to strike and be heard about major studies is brief. Of course, there's also real life as well. That this particular study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) didn't help. So, here it is, a week and a half later, and I'm finally getting around to it. There is, however, an advantage to this…
milhayser | November 30, 2012On Pharyngula, PZ Myers deconstructs the hypothesis of two physicists who show an undue enthusiasm for biology. They claim cancer is caused by cells regressing from their modern, multicellular functionality to a "proto-metazoan" lifestyle of largely uncoordinated growth. Myers says their is no plausible avenue for such atavism, writing "you can’t take one of your cells, switch off a few genes, and set it free in the ocean to swim off and follow its primitive lifestyle." Considering the factors that really contribute to cancer, Myers concludes "scientists shouldn’t be looking for optimism,…
oracknows | November 30, 2012If there's one thing that's difficult about writing about Stanislaw Burzynski, his highly dubious (nay, bogus) antineoplaston cancer therapy, his "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy for dummies," and his shameless rebranding of an orphan drug as a miracle cure for cancer, it's trying to balance a righteous anger at what he does to desperate cancer patients with a knowledge of the effect that my words will have on some of those same desperate cancer patients. Most regular readers of this blog know who Stanislaw Burzynski is, but, even if I've just written about him a few days ago (this…
oracknows | November 26, 2012Reflexology is quackery. It's based on magical thinking that views every major organ in the body as somehow mappable to specific points on the soles of the feet or the palms of the hands and posits that somehow massaging these areas can have therapeutic effects on the organs in question. Claims regularly made for reflexology include that it can "detoxify" the body, increase circulation, assist in weight loss, and improve the health of organs. Other conditions for which quacks claim reflexology is efficacious include earaches, anemia, bedwetting, bronchitis, convulsions in an infant,…
sa smith | November 26, 2012Scientists all around the world are creating legions of genetically modified viruses to treat/cure human afflictions, from nicotine addiction to hemophilia (A and B).
One disease a lot of folks are focused on in brain cancer. Certainly not a monolithic entity-- but scientists are working on viruses against them all. One of the viruses on the front lines against cancer is herpes.
Good old fashioned cold sore viruses love to blow up brain cancers.
But while HSV-1 has worked well in cell lines and some animal models, human trials have not worked out as well (sigh, sigh).
WHY???
Maybe this is…
oracknows | November 25, 2012NOTE: Special thanks to Jann Bellamy for advising me regarding the legal aspects of this post.
There are times when I fear that I'm writing about the same topic too many times in too brief a period of time. Most commonly, I notice this concern when writing about the lunacy of the anti-vaccine movement. In fact, it's fairly rare that I feel it for any other topic. There is, however, one topic other than antivaccinationist assaults against science and reason that will sometimes obligate me to go on a roll such that I might write multiple posts in a short period of time. I'm referring, of course…
oracknows | November 20, 2012I've made no secret of my opinion of a certain "alternative" cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, of the infamous Burzynski Clinic. When last we left Burzynski, his propagandist lapdog bootlicker documentary film maker Eric Merola was most unhappy with bloggers like me for having the temerity to tell it like it is when it comes to his film subject's activities. Merola, you might recall, was responsible for Burzynski the Movie – Cancer Is a Serious Business, which I characterized as pure propaganda so incompetently made that it would make Leni Riefenstahl blush. After a couple of…
cmonforton | November 20, 2012
Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place. In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said:
"Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger."
In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added:
"Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers. When rulemaking takes years and even…
oracknows | November 10, 2012As our great Lord Draconis Zeneca promises, besides the fantasies of filthy lucre in the minds of our opponents, there are other rewards to being one of his shills and minions besides getting to blog to my heart's content about the pseudoscience and quackery that is "alternative" medicine. One of them is that sometimes I find out that my victim target subject notices me.
So it was, when I became aware on Facebook that Eric Merola noticed me. Merola, as you might recall, is the producer of that paean to Stanislaw Burzynski, entitled, unimaginatively and awkwardly enough, Burzynski the Movie -…
oracknows | November 7, 2012I've been writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again, just yesterday having mentioned a warning letter that the Burzynski Clinic received from the FDA last month. Given Dr. Burzynski's history of promoting a highly dubious cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons and administering them to patients under the guise of clinical trials for which he charges patients huge sums of money and of also selling an equally dubious form of "personalized gene targeted cancer therapy" that I've referred to as "personalized cancer therapy for dummies," I took a very dim view of his having received yet…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
oracknows | November 6, 2012I sometimes think that Stanislaw Burzynski is a lot like the Bloody Mary of folklore, or perhaps Candyman of the famous horror movie—or perhaps like a number of other legends and horror stories—in that all it seems to take for him to show up in the blogosphere again is for me to recite his hame enough times. Yes, I know that it's a bit of confirmation bias on my part and whether or not some new Burzynski news happens to come to the fore again has little or nothing to do with my invocation of his name, but it is a rather amusing thought. Be that as it may, it was just late last week that I…
cmonforton | November 5, 2012At last week's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting its Governing Council adopted about a dozen new policies to guide the Association's advocacy activities. Over APHA's 140 year history, these resolutions have covered a variety of public health topics, from the 1950 policy supporting fluoridation of public water supplies, the 1960 policy supporting compulsory pasteurization of milk, the 1969 policy calling for American forces to be withdrawn from Vietnam, to the 1982 policy condemning the apartheid policy of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, and the 2009…
cmonforton | November 2, 2012I was eight years old on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" was the slogan for us kids. When we'd see a newscast with factory stacks spewing thick gray smoke we'd say "yuck." We'd hold our noses when tailpipes of junker cars belched exhaust. In our minds, air pollution was a bad thing because of what we could see and smell. We sure didn't think about it as something that was cutting short people's lives.
One of the first prospective U.S. studies to demonstrate an association between air pollutants and premature mortality was published in the New England…