cancer
oracknows | September 12, 2007I'm away from regular blogging for a couple of weeks, and what do I find when I finally get back into the swing of things?
Dangerous cancer quackery published on Mike Adams' Newstarget site, that's what.
I know, I know. I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not. It's all par for the course for Newstarget, where evidence-based medicine is viewed as nothing but a conspiracy of big pharma, evil scientific doctors, and the FDA to poison patients against their will. Truly, Mike Adams has decided to go head-to-head with Whale.to and Dr. Mercola for the title of most ridiculous website ostensibly about…
terrasig | September 10, 2007Today's New York Times notes this weekend's launch of Elsevier's OncologySTAT website:
But now Reed Elsevier, which publishes more than 400 medical and scientific journals, is trying an experiment that stands this model on its head. Over the weekend it introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and that plans to sell advertisements against the content.
The new site asks oncologists to register their personal information. In exchange, it gives them immediate access to the latest cancer-related…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2007In response to this post about annual influenza (also crossposted here), I received several emails and comments that missed the whole point. I am not denigrating the importance of 'other' diseases. AIDS and cancer are worth curing and preventing. My point about influenza is that preventing most of the deaths can be thought of as 'low-hanging fruit.'
Unlike AIDS or various cancers (there is no single 'cancer'), we don't need a medical or technological breakthrough that might or might not happen. We also don't need behavioral modification, such as STD awareness or smoking cessation…
terrasig | September 4, 2007A press release came in from the US NIH before the weekend noting that NCI's Dr Jeffrey Green has identified potential anticancer activities from a grape skin extract that is not dependent on the presence of the well-known compound, resveratrol. The report is to appear in the 1 September issue of Cancer Research, but the article is not yet online.
Green's group investigated a skin extract from muscadine grapes (Vitis rotundifolia) that was apparently nearly devoid of resveratrol but contained high levels of compunds called anthocyanins (they called it MSKE for "muscadine skin extract"). The…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2007tags: cancer, smokers, pets
Maybe this will surprise you but, having worked in cancer research for a few years, it isn't surprising to me to learn that secondhand smoke can cause cancer in your pets as well as in people. I mean, this just makes sense, ya know?
However, according to a study study done by the Tufts College of Veterinary Medicine, some of the nuances of this cancer risk might be unexpected. For example, of all pets, cats living with smokers are three times more likely to develop oral cancers (also known as squamous cell carcinoma) because they lick carcinogens from their fur…
terrasig | August 30, 2007Karl Schwartz is a tireless lymphoma patient advocate who is co-founder and president of Patients Against Lymphoma. Karl also oversees their excellent website, Lymphomation.org.
A missive from Karl came in today detailing how the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to cut reimbursements for two radioimmunotherapy drugs to less than their cost. Their collective response to the Deputy Administrator of CMS can be viewed in PDF or HTML.
The two immunotherapy drugs in question are Bexxar (I-131 tositumomab) and Zevalin (Y-90 ibritumomab). They are among the most…
terrasig | August 29, 2007Nick Anthis at The Scientific Activist had a great post yesterday on the fallacies in an article from the UK Guardian detailing a peer-reviewed publication on replacing animal research with in vitro and computational models. As much as all scientists would wish this were true, there are simply no replacements for animal research in many areas, as noted by PZ Myers.
One of my favorite sources for promoting the factual necessity for animal research (and exposing extremist groups for attacks on scientists) is the Washington, DC-based, Foundation for Biomedical Research. The poster above is…
oracknows | August 20, 2007After a lot of the not-so-Respectful Insolence⢠of the last couple of weeks, I've been meaning to get back to living up to the name of the overall mega-blog, namely ScienceBlogs. Meeting up with my fellow SB'ers over the weekend in New York Fortunately, last week a topic just so happened to pop up related to my area of expertise, when a study in The Lancet was published evaluating the use of MRI in breast cancer. It happened to get a bit of press when it came out last month, some of it a bit breathless, as though this were a revolutionary observation. (To some extent it was unexpected, but…
oracknows | August 16, 2007[Note: Part I is here.]
I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be going on in this article), I do not have a subscription to the WSJ; however, a little Googling found the whole text here. I've written about this conflict before, and it's a recurring theme in the multiple posts that I've done regarding dichloroacetate (DCA), the small…
oracknows | August 13, 2007I debated for a while about whether or not I wanted to comment on this one. The reason, of course, is that, to some extent, I've commented on a similar article before. Also, given the utter contempt that the blogger who posted this series holds me in and his delusion that I am somehow "obsessed" with him, I worried that commenting about this series, which he posted with some fanfare, might feed that delusion some more. In the end, though, because the series was by someone other than this particular blogger and because, as before, it was presented as a stinging indictment of our system of…
oracknows | August 9, 2007I'm a bit cranky right now.
Long time readers are familiar with the logorrhea that usually characterizes this blog. Fans love it; detractors hate it, Some may have noticed a bit of paucity of blogging, at least relatively speaking. There's a good reason for this. Not only was I out of town last weekend, but I got to come back to be on call (i.e. on service) for the group while at the same time trying to finish a grant application that my institution had "honored" with a nomination to fill out--only two weeks before it was due. Yes, now is not a great time to be around Orac; his crankiness is…
terrasig | August 9, 2007A federal appeals court has denied the right of patients to the use of cancer drugs prior to their complete assessment of safety and efficacy. The case was filed against the US FDA in 2003 by the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, who argued that patients have a constitutional right to any drug in clinical trials.
The 8-to-2 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in a closely watched and emotional case that pitted desperate patients willing to try unproven, even risky, therapies against those arguing that drugs should be proved safe…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
terrasig | August 6, 2007Back in June, we reported on several botanical/non-botanical supplement studies presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting. One was a Mayo Clinic study of a proprietary Wisconsin-grown ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) extract showing positive effects of the preparation in relieving cancer-related fatigue. The study authors were very careful to note this study was conducted specifically with Wisconsin-sourced product.
From my own post:
Note that the extract can't be compared to anything on the market since it was made for the study from a single source of Wisconsin…
oracknows | July 31, 2007Since this seems to be the day for applying Respectful Insolence⢠to people who say stupid things about me...
Everyone knows that Dean Esmay and I don't exactly see eye to eye on a lot of things. Indeed, it could be safely said that Dean has nothing but contempt for me. It doesn't bother me. After all, I have to respect someone before his negative opinion of me can possibly bother me in the least. Between his HIV/AIDS denialism, his ignorant rants about cancer research, and his know-nothing conspiratorial "critiques" of the peer review system, Dean is clearly someone who has a far higher…
oracknows | July 31, 2007A couple of weeks ago, inspired by a somewhat drunken encounter two weeks prior, against my better judgment, I waded into the evidence supporting the contention that secondhand smoke is harmful to health, increasing the risk of heart disease and lung cancer in workers chronically exposed to it. In response to a list of quotes going around the Internet claiming that relative risks less than 2 are so unreliable that they may be ignored (conveniently enough, most relative risks reported for exposure to SHS are in the 1.2 to 1.3 range), I pointed out what a load of dishonest quotemining the list…
oracknows | July 30, 2007Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…
terrasig | July 26, 2007When readers are looking for clinical trials information, particularly for cancer therapies, I often refer to the NIH-operated clinicaltrials.gov:
ClinicalTrials.gov provides regularly updated information about federally and privately supported clinical research in human volunteers. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers for more details. The information provided on ClinicalTrials.gov should be used in conjunction with advice from health care professionals.
The other day, I accidentally typed in clinicaltrials.org.…
oracknows | July 23, 2007After the invasion of the smoking cranks last week into the comments of the three posts I somehow ended up doing on the topic of secondhand smoke (SHS), the health dangers it poses, and some of the deceptive quote mining used in the service of trying to discredit studies demonstrating a moderate but real risk from SHS , I was ready to move on to other topics. I'll give these guys credit for one thing; they're almost as persistent as the antivaccinationists. Despite my flooding this blog with fluff unrelated to smoking and the hazards it causes (or even, for that matter, medicine or surgery),…
oracknows | July 20, 2007It sure took the FDA long enough, nearly five months, but it finally acted. It finally shut Jim Tassano down, as this notice on TheDCASite.com states:
Two agents from the FDA visited us on Tuesday,July 17, 2007 and ordered that we stop making and selling DCA. Unfortunately, the site www.buydca.com will be shut down immediately.
It is against US government law to sell substances with the suggestion that they are cancer treatments unless they are approved by the FDA.
DCA can still be obtained from pharmacies with a prescription and from chemical companies.
To keep you informed and abreast of…