cancer
oracknows | July 19, 2007Little did I know when I posted my first article on the evidence supporting health hazards due to secondhand smoke that it would end up dominating the comments of this blog for three full days and lead me to a site that's so full of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and just plain B.S. that it is worthy of the title of the Whale.to of the tobacco nuts. Even less did I expect that the crankfest would spread to fellow SBer Mark's denialism blog as well. The sheer vitriol that some of these "smoking rights" advocates direct at any suggestion that SHS might be harmful, quite frankly, took me…
oracknows | July 18, 2007The other day, in the course of posting about some deceptive quote-mining by someone who doesn't accept the science indicating that secondhand smoke is a health danger, I referenced the uber-crank of crank websites, Forces.org, a website so cranky that it denies not just health dangers from secondhand smoke, but rather that even smoking causes cancer in smokers!
Naturally, such a site was irresistable to Mark over at the denialism blog and he has some fun with it.
Sit back and enjoy.
Oh, and as has happened on my posts about the data supporting health dangers from secondhand smoke and about…
oracknows | July 18, 2007I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the house organ of the Discovery Institute's propaganda arm, Evolution News & Views, as I did yesterday. I'm not as young as I used to be, have a family history of cardiovascular disease, and am not in the greatest of shape. Reading idiocy such as what regularly appears there surely cannot be good for my blood pressure or my general health, nor can it be good for my mind. Still, for you I nonetheless delve deeply into the muck of logical fallacies, half-truths, distortions, and misinformation that spews forth from the…
oracknows | July 16, 2007"What do you think about second hand smoke?" he asked me. I sensed ulterior motives behind the question, but I wasn't sure. I suspected that he was just looking for an argument.
"It's bad," I joked.
"Some have told me that the studies don't show any health problems from second hand smoke," he replied.
"I'm sure 'some' have," I retorted somewhat sarcastically.
"No, really, is there any evidence," he replied. "I'm open-minded about this topic."
Somehow I doubted this, but I figured, what the heck, and did a little reviewing. It makes for some interesting reading.
The question of whether second…
terrasig | July 15, 2007Nearly two months ago, we spoke here of the surprising use of arsenic trioxide (Trisenox) in treating various cancers. Trisenox, approved in the US in 2000 for treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), is also being investigated for other hematologic malignancies.
Now, the 23 Jul issue of Business Week reports on a company making second-generation arsenicals that are believed to have less toxicity since the arsenic is linked to organic functional groups:
But the arsenic that Ziopharm uses in its Darinaparsin (ZIO-101) is organic, which reduces most toxic side effects, [Ziopharm CEO Dr…
oracknows | July 12, 2007Mike Adams is an idiot.
There, I said it.
Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
oracknows | July 2, 2007I thought I knew all the good websites to get information about cancer research and research funding opportunities. Perusing Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship, I found I was wrong.
Check out the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Research Portfolio.
It lets cancer researchers search quickly for funding opportunities, what cancer-related projects are already funded, and peruse a number of other resources. It even has a link to the International Cancer Research Portfolio, where you can search for funded projects and research opportunities covered by the American Cancer Society, the…
oracknows | June 22, 2007The Cheerful Oncologist, noting my recent post about the relapse of Abraham Cherrix's lymphoma in the lung, has done an analysis from--of course!--an oncologist's viewpoint. Given that I don't treat lymphoma, other than doing the occasional lymph node biopsy to diagnose it, his viewpoint is well worth reading.
He quite correctly points out that Abraham's reasoning, where he observes that his tumor has "only" recurred in one place and concludes that what he's doing is working is the fallacy of moderation. He points out that for Hodgkin's lymphoma (and, I personally would add, for all cancer…
oracknows | June 21, 2007I've written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court ultimately (sort of) compromised, letting Abraham go to Mississippi to be treated by a radiation oncologist with taste for alternative medicine named Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who would give him low dose radiation and an unconventional variety of…
oracknows | June 14, 2007Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…
oracknows | June 14, 2007At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages oncologists to use chemotherapy even in patients for whom it may not benefit or may only provide marginal benefit. It's rare for something in the news to mesh so closely with the topic at hand; so I couldn't resist looking up the article, which appeared Tuesday morning, and was…
terrasig | June 11, 2007As I noted in a previous post on arsenic trioxide, you just never know what source will give rise to the next promising drug. Last week's New England Journal of Medicine marked a key study on an old drug, mitotane (Lysodren, Bristol-Myers Squibb), that is a structural derivative of the pesticide, DDT.
Adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare cancer with only 16-38% of patients surviving for five years. Following surgical resection, 75-85% of patients experience a relapse. Therefore, a group of Italian and German researchers sought to identify drugs that could be used as adjunct therapy in this…
oracknows | June 11, 2007Dedicated advocate of evidence-based medicine that I am, I am sometimes labeled by those who do not understand skepticism as a "shill" for big pharma. Of course, such accusations are simply the logical fallacy known as poisoning the well, in which the credulous engage in preemptive ad hominem attacks designed to associate me with the hated big pharma, but it's a common enough tactic that sometimes I can't help but joke that I wish pharma did actually pay me for my little hobby here. After all, why do for free (or for a pittance from my Seed overlords) what, if you believe the alties, I could…
oracknows | June 8, 2007As we continue our countdown to having reached one full year of woo (namely, the one year anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo), it's occurred to me that there's one form of woo that I've dealt with before, but haven't revisited. It's a bit of woo that's so monumentally silly that it's hard to believe that anyone can take it seriously, although I will admit up front that it is not quite as silly as homeopathy. It's close though. I'm talking, of course, about pH woo, the concept that pretty much every disease (or at least a whole heck of a lot of them) is caused by alterations in your blood…
oracknows | June 7, 2007As I mentioned a few days ago, I was at the ASCO Meeting over the weekend, arriving home Tuesday evening. ASCO has to be, as far as I can tell, the largest cancer meeting in the world. How big? 30,000 or so attendees big. Hundreds of sessions and talks big. Filling most of McCormick Center in Chicago big. Filling most hotel rooms in the city of Chicago big. Or, as these photos show, this big:
And, to reflect the hugeness of the meeting, the exhibit hall is enormous:
As is the hugeness of many of the drug company displays...
Although I couldn't really take pictures of it (too dark…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It's day three of the ASCO Meeting here in Chicago.
So far, I have to say, it's been a bit underwhelming. Unlike some years past, there don't appear to have been any real blockbuster results to report; rather, lots of incremental studies were presented. There's really only one study presented that I might blog, mainly because it relates to posts that I did before about early detection of cancer and using MRI to screen for breast cancer, but that will probably have to wait until tomorrow or after I get back. In this impression, I don't appear to be alone, as Dr. Len Lichtenfield, the CEO of…
terrasig | June 3, 2007Yesterday morning's press release from the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting included discussion of three abstracts on complementary therapies being tested in cancer and cancer-related indications. The highlights on the major news services are that 1) a shark cartilage extract failed to provide survival benefit in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, 2) an American ginseng extract reduced cancer-related fatigue, and 3) flaxseed slows prostate cancer growth.
Just a few comments, mostly on the positive results, that didn't make it into mainstream media reports:
The…
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007It never seems to end, does it?
I'm talking about the hype and questionable practices revolving around dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the Warburg effect, in essence normalizing the metabolism of tumor cells and thereby inhibiting their growth. (See here and here for more details.) A report by Evangelos Michelakis at the University of Alberta in Cancer Cell in January reported strong antitumor activity against a wide variety of tumors in rat tumor models resulted in a phenomenon ballooning out of control in a way that he could never have imagined…