cancer
oracknows | August 20, 2012[NOTE: Please be sure to read the addendum!]
I hate cancer quackery.
I know, I know, regular readers probably figured that out by now, and even new readers rarely take more than a couple of weeks to figure it out. That's because cancer quackery is a frequent topic on this blog. One of the most powerful tools of persuasion that cancer quacks employ in promoting their quackery is something I call the cancer cure testimonial. Basically, a cancer cure testimonial is a story of a patient using alternative medicine and "curing" himself of cancer. Such testimonials come from both practitioners and…
oracknows | August 15, 2012It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Well, not really, although it has been a while since I've discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become famous because her family had managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds with the help of some U.K. celebrities. Burzynski, as regular readers will recall, became a frequent topic on this blog last fall after one of his lackeys decided to issue vacuous legal threats…
oracknows | August 14, 2012Over the years, I've often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It's not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can't be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have to believe in the therapy, dedicate yourself completely to it, in order for it to work. Of course, as I've also mentioned before, it is that insistence on belief and total commitment shared by religion and alternative medicine…
oracknows | August 13, 2012Well, I'm back.
It's always a bit weird to try to get back into the swing of things after even just a week off and even when during that week I didn't actually stop blogging but merely slowed down a lot and succeeded (mostly) in restricting what little blogging I did to brief posts. (Yes, I know there was one exception.) Even so, I did ignore a fair number of things that normally would have been either the subject of one of my scintillating detailed scientific analyses or the target of a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Usually when I get back from a vacation I like to ease…
oracknows | August 12, 2012One issue that keeps coming up time and time again for me is the issue of screening for cancer. Because I'm primarily a breast cancer surgeon in my clinical life, that means mammography, although many of the same issues come up time and time again in discussions of using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer. Over time, my position regarding how to screen and when to screen has vacillated—er, um, evolved, yeah, that's it—in response to new evidence, although the core, including my conclusion that women should definitely be screened beginning at age 50 and that it's…
cmonforton | August 7, 2012I feel dense for not knowing this important public health fact: women with extremely dense breast tissue are at least four times more likely to develop breast cancer.
Over the years, I've had my routine screening mammograms with stellar results. No evidence of cancer in my two mammary glands. I've heard radiology technicians comment about my dense breasts, but I thought it was an interesting attribute like droopy breast, or perky breasts or double D breasts.
In December 2011, just before my 50th birthday, I was overdue for my routine screening mammogram. I felt a little guilty for putting…
oracknows | August 3, 2012Let's travel back in time fifteen years.
It's a time that, for me, at times seems as though it were just yesterday while at other times it seems like truly ancient history. Back then, certainly, I wasn't the blogging powerhouse that I am today. I didn't even know what blogging was because it was so much in its infancy that few people knew what it was. In fact, it was only around 14 years ago that I first discovered Usenet, that vast, sprawling, brawling assortment of discussion groups where I cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, discovering, as I did, alt.revisionism (often abbrievated a.r.…
oracknows | August 1, 2012Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and spasticity, with ultimate progression to respiratory muscles leading to difficulty breathing and speaking (dysarthria) and to the muscles controlling swallowing. The rate of clinical course is variable, often…
oracknows | July 27, 2012It's known as "targeted" therapy, and it's the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it's the path towards "personalized medicine" that improves survival with much lower toxicity, in which, instead of using the hammer that is chemotherapy, precisely targets specific molecular abnormalities that drive cancer growth. With the advent of the revolution in genomics that has transformed cancer research over the last decade, including the petabytes of sequence and gene expression data that pour out of universities and research institutes, the promise…
oracknows | July 24, 2012At least half the time, it seems that when I take on a relatively new topic with every intention of just doing one post about it I somehow end up doing more than one post. I don't know why that is. It just seems to happen. Sometimes, I find something related to but sufficiently different that interests me, sometimes seemingly quite at random. Sometimes someone responds to my post in such a way that I feel obliged to answer. Sometimes, readers make me aware of variations on a theme, so to speak, either in the comments or by e-mailing me links. That's what happened this time.
Yesterday I posted…
sa smith | July 17, 2012Look, scientists are nuts. Virologists, on the other hand, are certifiably insane. As Hedwig would say, virologists make the strangest things seem suddenly routine. Yesterdays absurd future technology (GENE THERAPY!) is now something as miraculous as curing genetic diseases, and as mundane as an anti-smoking therapy.
Todays insane idea?
Using mouse and rat parvoviruses to treat human cancers.
This is not some lone mad scientists mad idea-- Though this info was news to me, this approach is being explored world-wide, and is already in clinical trials for glioblastoma multiform. Yeah, read…
sa smith | July 16, 2012The 'debate' over the HPV vaccine has thus far has been a tug-of-war with radical religion/conservative politicians/nutbar anti-vaxers on one side, and the lives of women on the other side.
The HPV vaccine has been A Female Issue.
Turns out the people opposing the HPV vaccine were damning male children, as well.
Though I wrote about how HPV can cause head/neck/throat cancers in both genders before, there is more and more evidence coming to light that everyone, male and female, will benefit from the HPV vaccine series:
Local Inflammation and Human Papillomavirus Status of Head and Neck Cancers…
oracknows | July 9, 2012Something came up that made me think it would be a good idea to mention a couple of features of the new WordPress template, just in case anyone missed them when I mentioned them before. I apologize to any who might find this repetitive, but there do appear to be some newbies here; so I think it's worth a quick repeat.
A commenter who borders on trollish wrote:
One thing I forgot. I wanted to congratulate you and the team for closing ‘Evolution and Medicine’ just when you did, leaving the impression that I am EXTREMELY dangerous. Well, I’m not in the least little bit dangerous, but it’s…
oracknows | July 8, 2012One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…
sa smith | July 3, 2012If you are reading this blog, you already know all about how a huge portion of your genome is parasitic junk DNA (~40-45%), a fraction of which is retroviral junk (ERVs, ~9%). If youre new here... SURPRISE!
Sure, we have a gene here, a promoter there (maybe) that was domesticated for human genome use, but its junk, and that is a good thing. I mean, if our genome was 9% retrovirus and every one of them was active, we would all be dead from the insertional mutagenesis alone.
So your genome and cells have evolved lots of ways to make sure your junk DNA stays junk... but I guess ERVs are like…
oracknows | June 24, 2012I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is "not long at all." I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual suspect; i.e., Mike Adams, whom I've taken to task on many occasions for gloating over celebrity deaths and illnesses, such as those of Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, and Elizabeth Edwards, as "evidence" that conventional medicine either doesn't work or kills.
The celebrity to whom I am…
oracknows | June 19, 2012A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. However, as I've mentioned before, when it comes to blogging, I'm a bit like Dug the Talking Dog from the movie Up in that I'm easily distracted. Unlike Dug, what distracts me aren't squirrels, but rather bright, shiney pieces of pseudoscience, quackery, paranormal, or otherwise weird nonsense. Sometimes after I'm distracted I come back to the topic I had originally wanted to blog about. Sometimes I don't. Or, sometimes (like…
oracknows | June 17, 2012Here we go again.
Remember how last week I said I wouldn't write about the Miracle Mineral Solution (abbreviated MMS) again for a while? I lied.
Well, actually, I didn't. At the time I wrote that, I really did mean to give it a rest for a while, and for a while at least I was a good boy. I even managed to ignore Todd Drezner's excellent post on—of all places!—what is normally a wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, entitled The Curious Case of Autism and MMS. Then came this post by an MMS apologist that we've met before, a man named Adam Mr. Abraham who goes by the handle…
jhalper | June 13, 2012Blurring, chopping and blocking. Three online items this week all deal with some pretty dynamic phenomena.
The blurring is in our perceptions. It turns out that if you even think you have lost money in an experiment, your ability to distinguish between musical notes will be hampered. What’s the connection? Dr. Rony Paz has been showing that this tendency to lump sounds together is tied to fear. In our evolutionary past, humans may have survived because anything that sounded remotely like a predator aroused an immediate “fight or flight” response. But if mild stress can provoke a similar…
cmonforton | June 12, 2012A panel of scientific experts convened by the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded today that diesel engine exhaust is carcinogenic to humans. Previously, the IARC classification for diesel exhaust was "probably carcinogenic to humans," but with the publication of additional epidemiological and toxicological studies over the last 20 years, the expert panel determined there was sufficient evidence to change the compound's cancer designation. The IARC panel wrote:
"The scientific evidence was reviewed thoroughly by the Working Group…