cancer
oracknows | June 22, 2009It's no secret that, when it comes to computers, my preferred axe has been the Apple Macintosh. Indeed, back in the 1983-1984 school year I was in college living in a house with five other guys, and one of my roommates was a a total Apple geek. He had, as one might expect, an Apple IIe, and I immediately decided that, when it came to computers, I definitely liked the Apple product better than the IBM PC that my other roommate had. Of course, at the time I was nowhere well off enough to be able to afford either, but these two roommates were both computer science majors. They had to have a…
oracknows | June 14, 2009Last month, a frequent topic of this blog was the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy from Minnesota with Hodgkin's lymphoma who made the national news for his refusal (and his mother's support of that refusal) to undergo a second round of chemotherapy. Instead, he wanted to pursue "natural" therapy, including what sounded like alkalinization quackery. What was especially disturbing about this case was that he had a highly treatable form of cancer with close to a 90% expectation of long term survival with conventional treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. As with the cases of…
oracknows | June 12, 2009I was very happy with NEWSWEEK recently, specifically because of its lengthy expose of Oprah Winfrey and her promotion of pseudoscience, mysticism, and quackery on her talk show. However, I haven't always been that thrilled with NEWSWEEK's coverage of medicine and science. For example, NEWSWEEK's science columnist Sharon Begley has gotten on my nerves on more than one occasion, most recently when she castigated doctors for not enthusiastically embracing comparative effectiveness research, making the unjustified slur against physicians that they "hate science." Indeed, she even managed to…
oracknows | June 9, 2009Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority of them, and how supplements are virtually unregulated. If the article had mentioned the extreme scientific and biological implausibility of nearly all of the non-herbal CAM therapies that are routinely promoted, it would have…
oracknows | June 2, 2009Three years ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a fascinating and promising approach to understanding tumor biology. This method involved understanding that tumors are in general made up of a heterogeneous collection of cells. Using this knowledge, it is possible to apply evolutionary principles to cancer, treating a tumor as, in essence, an ecosystem. Indeed, that is exactly what Maley et al did three years ago. They applied evolutionary principles to the precancerous lesion in the distal esophagus known as Barrett's esophagus by examining various measures of population diversity in…
oracknows | May 30, 2009One reason I (and most people involved in cancer research) don't like the frequently used term "cure for cancer." The reason is simple. Embedded within this term is the assumption that cancer is just one disease, when it is most definitely not. Rather, it is many diseases affecting many organs, each with its own mechanism of pathogenesis and each often requiring different treatments. For example, for "liquid" tumors arising from hematopoietic organs, the treatment usually consists primarily of chemotherapy, sometimes with radiation therapy in the case of lymphomas, while "solid" tumors often…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Here's one of the stranger "alternative cancer cure" cases I've seen in a while. Basically, a man seems to think that a daily helping of his daughter's breast milk will cure his metastatic colon cancer:
When Tim Browne sits down to a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, he slurps up one unusual, and controversial, extra ingredient: his own daughter's breast milk.
He doesn't do it for the taste -- Browne initally said his daughter Georgia's breast millk tasted "not unpleasant, but slightly pungent" -- but for his health.
Nearly two years ago, the retired teacher and musician from Wiltshire,…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Today is a very good day indeed.
I say that because Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who ran away with his mother to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy ordered by a judge, who had found that his parents were engaging in medical neglect in not getting him effective treatment, and returned on Monday, will begin his course of chemotherapy today. I'm very happy to hear that Daniel and his parents have decided to stop fighting:
After Daniel and his mother returned to Minnesota this week, both his parents told a judge they will let Daniel undergo chemotherapy because…
oracknows | May 25, 2009I've been writing a lot about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who underwent one course of chemotherapy and then decided he wanted to pursue "alternative therapy" based on fear of chemotherapy and the faux Native American religion that his mother had taken up with. Ultimately, after a judge ordered Daniel's parents to make sure that Daniel received the chemotherapy and radiation therapy he needed, Daniel and his mother Colleen went on the lam last week and were last thought to be heading for Mexico and almost certain death.
That is, until sanity prevailed…
oracknows | May 25, 2009It's a lovely, sunny day here, so I'll be brief. I've written several posts about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old who refused chemotherapy and is now on the run from the law with his mother to avoid having to comply with a judge's order that he receive effective, science-based treatment. One strange aspect of this story is that he may be receiving aid from Billy Best, a man who, as a teen, also had Hodgkin's disease and, at age 16, also ran away to avoid chemotherapy.
Here's the story headline:
Man Who Survived Without Chemo: 'I'd Still Fight': Man Who Ran to Avoid Chemo in 1994,…
oracknows | May 20, 2009Over the last couple of weeks, I've been blogging regularly about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with stage 2B Hodgkin's lymphoma who, after one course of chemotherapy in January, refused to undergo any more, citing a faux religion run by a woo-meister naturopath and Native American wannabe called "Chief" Cloudpiler. In reality, it probably wasn't so much belief in this fake religion, which is really no more than an excuse to use laws guaranteeing Native Americans freedom to practice their religions as justification for using peyote and various quackery for disease, but rather…
terrasig | May 20, 2009About four years ago, I started reading blogs. One of those, Respectful Insolence, was written by a surgical oncologist who writes under the name, Orac. This was before he was asked to be at ScienceBlogs and about a year before Terra Sig was. He has since become my friend and colleague.
Orac is one of the most consistently excellent medical bloggers in the sci/med blogosphere. But today's post resonated exceptionally with me. In discussing the ongoing case of Daniel Hauser, a young man with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose parents are fighting to withhold his chemotherapy, Orac writes a concise,…
oracknows | May 20, 2009I know I've been writing a lot about the Daniel Hauser case, and forgive me if I may be beating a dead horse, but cases like these reprsent supreme "teachable" moments that don't come along that often. The antivaccine movement, for instance, will be with us always (or at least, I fear, as long as I still walk this earth and beyond), but cases like that of Daniel Hauser don't come along that often. As tragic as they are, they always bring up so many issues that I have a hard time leaving them alone.
This time around, I wanted to touch on an issue that has come up frequently in the discussions…
oracknows | May 19, 2009Maybe I was wrong.
I praised the decision of Judge Rodenberg last Friday, in which he placed chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser in the custody of his parents and ordered them to take him to an oncologist and have him undergo repeat staging studies in order to determine the extent of his Hodgkin's lymphoma. I did mention my one reservation was that leaving Daniel in the custody of his mother did run the risk of their fleeing to avoid the court order. Unfortunately, shades of Katie Wernecke, that's exactly what they appear to have done:
Daniel Hauser and his parents, Colleen and Anthony…
oracknows | May 19, 2009As you may have noticed if you've been paying attention to the comments over the last few days, you may have noticed that we've had a bit of an infiltration of believers in "alternative cancer cures" (or, as I will abbreviate them, ACCs). The main focus of the infiltration appears to be in this post about Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy who refused chemotherapy for his Hodgkin's lymphoma and whose case was recently decided, with the judge ordering his parents to obtain repeat staging studies and then to get him to a science-based practitioner in order to get appropriate therapy. Oddly…
mikethemadbiologist | May 18, 2009Probably not. But genes linked to a high risk of breast cancer? You betcha.
ScienceBlogling Rebecca Skloot has a very good piece about the lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Myriad, the company that owns the patent for the 'breast cancer genes' BRCA1 and BRCA2 (she provides some more background here).
To me, the really galling thing is that Myriad didn't discover these genes, publicly funded research did. The goal of that research is not to enrich patent holders, but to improve human health for society as a whole. The patent drives up diagnosis costs by preventing anyone else from…
oracknows | May 18, 2009You knew it was just a matter of time. At least I did. Let me back up a minute and tell you what I mean.
Over the last week, I've done three posts about a chemotherapy refusenik (as some oncologists I've worked with tend to refer to them as) named Daniel Hauser. Hauser is a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, after having undergone one course of chemotherapy for his disease, decided that he didn't want anymore. He and his mother justified his refusal using the teachings of a faux Native American cultish religious group but in reality are probably only using religion as a convenient…
bioephemera | May 16, 2009Students and laypeople alike often view biotech patents with baffled disbelief. How is it possible to patent bacteria? Mice? Cell types and DNA sequences? How can someone else "own" gene sequences that all of us have carried inside our bodies since birth?
Honestly, as a biologist, the concept of patenting a gene doesn't really throw me for a loop. Think about it: although we all have genes, we can't read them unless we use a variety of lab techniques, many of them patented. In turn, reading the sequence isn't any use unless we know why we care - that this gene is relevant and can be used to…
oracknows | May 16, 2009Over the last week, I've written about the case of a 13-year-old chemotherapy refusenik named Daniel Hauser, who lives in Minnesota. After having been diagnosed with a highly curable form of cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, back in February and having undergone one cycle of chemotherapy that apparently made him very sick, he refused further chemotherapy and his mother actually went to court to justify this decision. As part of their justification, they tried to use freedom of religion based on Daniel's supposedly being a "medicine man" in a cult of faux Native American wannabes called Nemenhah,…
terrasig | May 15, 2009Well, it's mid-May at 36° North, the honeysuckles are blooming, my allergies are miserable, the air is damp, and that can only mean one thing: the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting is nearly upon us.
Held this year beginning on 29 May, the annual ASCO meeting coincides with all sorts of announcements of miracle cancer drugs and the sound of cash changing hands. Although being held in Orlando, Florida, this is far from a Mickey Mouse operation; in fact, the buzz of bullion here rivals that of the Walt Disney empire. With the abstracts released last night at 6 pm EDT,…