cancer
oracknows | May 12, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, with the support of his parents, has refused conventional therapy for his cancer, which would normally consist of chemotherapy and radiation. Given his stage and type of tumor, he could normally expect at least an 85% chance of surviving and perhaps even greater than 90%, wherea without therapy he is certain to die of his disease, barring a rare spontaneous remission. The reason given by his Daniel and his mother Colleen is that they belong to a highly dubious-sounding American Indian religion called…
oracknows | May 10, 2009Regular readers here know that I really hate to see stories like the one I'm about to discuss, specifically that of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, a boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who is refusing chemotherapy based on religion and his preference for "alternative" therapy, whose parents are also supporting his decision.
Since I'm a bit behind on this story, its having percolated through the blogosphere for the last three or four days, let me start with a bit of context. If there is one theme that I've emphasized time and time again here, it's science- and evidence-based medicine. That means…
oracknows | May 8, 2009After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn't head about at some point before.
I was wrong.
Perusing the Skepchick blog the other day I saw a wonderful story related by Masala Skeptic about how a group of skeptics in Mississippi attended a talk by a cancer quack named Robert Dowling, who apparently claims that…
terrasig | May 7, 2009The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has long had programs to make available to researchers any variety of compounds, natural and synthetic. These offerings are administered by the Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) of the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD).
So, I was very happy to see this e-mail last evening:
Dear Colleague,
I am pleased to announce that the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis can now bring a new, important resource to drug discovery efforts. Oncology drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration are being offered…
terrasig | May 6, 2009The other day I wrote about a really nice post someone wrote about a cardiologist with whom I have had a relationship since postdoc years.
I also have several physician friends and colleagues IRL and on these interblogs who must constantly be questioned about their motives, their pharma connections, etc.
Let me state from this place and time: t
There are far more physicians who uphold our idealistic Rockwellian view of them than not.
Two years ago, I shared a cab with a doc on his way to a basic and clinical cancer research meeting focused on an organ we both study. Good guy. I might have…
dgmacarthur | May 3, 2009I'll be spending the next few days at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, NY - one of the most awaited events on the genomics calendar. I plan to blog here about the major themes emerging from the meeting; you can also follow me on Twitter if you want shorter, punchier updates, and I've set up a FriendFeed group for more complex topics.
The meeting kicked off last night with a session on cancer genomics that gave a sense of the serious amounts of data currently being generated on the genetic origins of tumour development. Most of the work in this area has a fairly…
oracknows | April 24, 2009I'm tired of blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense again. Don't get me wrong, I had an enormous amount of fun writing my commentary on Fire Marshal Bill's attempt to explain vaccine/autism pseudoscience. It was a hoot, if I do say so myself, but it depresses me that writing such posts is so necessary so often. Fortunately, it's Friday, and you know what that means (well, at least some of the time, anyway). That's right, it's time for some woo.
This time around, it's not just any woo. In fact, it's woo that relates to my area of expertise. As you may recall, I do a lot of breast cancer surgery…
oracknows | April 21, 2009I'm really starting to hate the Huffington Post.
It used to be that I just disliked it intensely. The reasons are, of course, obvious. Ever since its very beginning nearly four years ago, HuffPo has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Over the years, it's served up pseudoscience and antivaccine nuttery from such "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement as David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, among others, in an unholy tradition that continues to this very day. HuffPo didn't limit itself to just antivaccine lunacy, either. It wasn't long before the Dark Lord of…
terrasig | April 21, 2009Never pass up an opportunity to get face-to-face time with grants officials from any research funding agency. This from the Department of Defense for those of you in Denver tomorrow:
To all individuals attending the 100th Annual Meeting of the AACR in Denver, Colorado:
The Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) will be presenting a series of short talks on CDMRP and its cancer research funding programs on Wednesday, April 22, from 8:30-10:30 a.m., in Room 607 of the Colorado Convention Center.
Scheduled to speak from the CDMRP are the Director, a…
oracknows | April 19, 2009I forgot to mention yesterday (although I did on Twitter) that I'm currently in Denver, where I will be attending the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), as I do almost every year at this time. I hope to see, as Isis would put it, some hot, hot science over the next three and a half days. In between sessions, I'll be putting the finishing touches on my Challenge Grant, seeing old friends, and possibly even blogging. The frequency depends upon (1) how many old friends I see and (2) how good or crappy the wifi is at the Colorado Convention Center.
In the…
oracknows | April 17, 2009I've complained about it time and time again because it's annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I'm talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), sometimes called "integrative medicine" (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make the scientific medicine go down. In general, because the press likes stories that buck the establishment, it tends to favor studies that seem to show that CAM modalities work. Even worse, it tends to misinterpret negative studies in the most…
oracknows | April 8, 2009I really need to rein myself in sometimes.
Yesterday, all pleased as punch with myself for my mad Google skillz and for thinking I figured out just what "alternative" therapy it was that Farrah Fawcett had undergone that had resulted in what sounded for all the world like a rectus sheath hematoma, I wrote about how I thought that Fawcett had been undergoing galvanotherapy in Bad Weissee in southern Germany. Either my mad Google skillz failed me, or I was just too lazy to scroll through a sufficient number of screens to find additional information that would have brought the most likely answer…
oracknows | April 7, 2009Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating...
Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to get to the elevators that will take me to my lab. In each patient area is a large-screen television to help patients pass the time during the inevitable wait to be seen by their doctors. As I happened to be wandering through that area on the way to my lab and office, I noticed on one of…
scientificactivist | April 2, 2009Through the results of widespread experimentation of the... well... let's say "non-scientific" variety, it's pretty well known that marijuana has the side effect of making the user very hungry. This is one of the many physiological effects of the active ingredient THC (Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol). More relevantly, however, THC and other cannabinoids are actively being investigated for various useful clinical purposes, including the treatment of cancer through the inhibition of tumor growth.
A new study by Salazar et al. in The Journal of Clinical Investigation demonstrates that THC causes…
oracknows | March 26, 2009(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
Three days ago, I decided to take a look at the scientific literature regarding whether any "alternative" therapies do any good for breast cancer. Not surprisingly, I found no evidence that any such therapy did, with the possible exception of melatonin, which there is no reason to label "alternative," given that it was discovered through science and is being tested using science. At the same time, I've been keeping an eye on the usual suspects pushing various forms of woo for breast cancer,…
oracknows | March 23, 2009Has it really been that long?
More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who's to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had rejected conventional therapy for an eminently treatable breast cancer and then returned two or three years later with a large, nasty tumor that was much more difficult to treat and possibly metastatic to the bone, which, if ture, would have made it no longer even possibly curable. My discussion centered on…
oracknows | March 19, 2009Given that I'm the proverbial lapsed Catholic cum agnostic, religion just doesn't play that large a role in my life and hasn't since around six years ago. I don't know if I'll ever discuss or explain on this blog what the last straw resulting in that transformation was (it's too personal), but a couple of years ago I did go through a period where I became hostile to religion, perhaps spurred on by PZ and the whole anti-religion gestalt of the ScienceBlogs Collective here. That lasted maybe a year or two, during which time I did what every new disillusioned ex-religious person seems to do (…
terrasig | March 18, 2009I just had a chance to check in on a triad of posts by Prof Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science (1, 2, 3) on the ethical issues of the conduct of studies, particularly clinical trials, supported by the US NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
For background, NCCAM was originally established for political, not scientific reasons, as the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine in October 1991. It received a token budget of $2 million at the time. They still only get $120-ish million; modest by NIH standards as compared, say, with the 2007 NCI…
oracknows | March 17, 2009Until recently, most of my research was laboratory-based. It included cell culture, biochemical assays, molecular biology, and experiments using mouse tumor models. However, one of the reasons that I got both an MD and a PhD was so that I could ultimately test ideas for new treatments on patients and, if I'm good enough and lucky enough, ultimately improve the care for cancer patients. If there's one thing, though, that I've learned in my nearly nine years in academic surgery, it's that far fewer patients end up enrolled on clinical trials than are eligible to participate in them. Every…
terrasig | March 11, 2009Back in February 2007, we had a lively discussion on a post about pharmacist objection to filling prescriptions for drugs they felt went again their personal moral stance: from morning-after pills to garden-variety oral contraceptives. I held that since pharmacists are licensed by the state to provide a service to the citizenry (and they make about as much money as a full professor at a US research university), they should be required to fill prescriptions. Some commenters argued that ethical practice of one's profession dictate that one apply moral standards. I disagree. As an agent of…