chemotherapy
oracknows | October 3, 2017It's October again, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As someone who takes care of breast cancer patients, I have a love-hate relationship with October. On the good side, I like seeing positive messages about what's going on in breast cancer research, advocacy, and clinical treatment. On the other hand, the quacks come out. I also see a lot of bad breast cancer studies. You might think that I'd like that too because it provides blog fodder. I could actually do without that, but in this case I happened to come across a "study" that illustrates why I detest how those promoting unproven…
oracknows | August 20, 2017Alternative medicine, by definition, consists of medicine that either has not been shown to work or has been shown not to work. To paraphrase an old adage yet again, medicine that has been shown to work with an acceptable risk-benefit ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply "medicine."
Unlike the case for many conditions commonly treated with alternative medicine, whether or not a treatment works against cancer is determined by its impact on the hardest of "hard" endpoints: Survival. A patient either survives his cancer or he does not. Even the "softer" endpoints used to assess the…
oracknows | August 6, 2017One of the gratifying things about having been blogging so long—nearly 13 years now!—is that you start to see stories that you wrote about a long time ago resurface, allowing you to see the resolution. For instance, I've not infrequently written about people who, mistakenly believing the blandishments of alternative medicine practitioners that they could forego all that nasty chemotherapy and radiation and survive their cancer to live a happy, normal life, made the disastrous decision to eschew conventional medical therapy and pursue alternative medicine. My interest in this topic comes from…
oracknows | July 23, 2017Over the last two or three weeks, you might have noticed a disturbance in the alternative medicine force. Unlike disturbances in the Force in Star Wars movies (which usually result from horrors like the obliteration of millions of lives on Alderaan), this was a joyous, celebratory disturbance in the mystical nonexistent energy fields in which promoters of alternative medicine cancer cures and haters of chemotherapy and "conventional" cancer treatment (the two almost always go together) thought that a major study in a reputable journal had put yet another "final nail in the coffin of…
oracknows | April 10, 2017If you were to rely on much of what you see in the mainstream media and on social media, you probably have the impression that we are not doing very well against cancer. Indeed, a common trope I see in a lot of articles is that we are somehow "losing" the war on cancer. Just for yuks, I Googled the term "losing the war on cancer," and it didn't take long to find a lot of articles, both in the mainstream press and, more predictably, on alternative medicine-friendly websites making just that argument. Indeed, in 2011, which was the 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of "war on…
oracknows | August 3, 2016It is an article of faith among believers in alternative cancer cures that conventional oncology consists mainly of a bunch of money-hungry surgeons and oncologists who want nothing more than to cut, poison, and burn patients with cancer and charge them enormous sums of money to do so for as long as they can until the poisonous chemotherapy finally kills them. It is an evil and malicious caricature, of course. People don’t endure four years of medical school, three to five years of residency, and three years of fellowship in order to be able to cut, poison, and burn without regard for whether…
oracknows | June 28, 2016Forgive me, dear readers.
Ever since Mike Adams, the crank who runs and “alternative health” empire and a website with as much traffic as the NIH website, started targeting me two months ago with a series of libelous posts, I haven’t mentioned him much, for the simple reason that I don’t want to drive any traffic his way. Also, after his having posted 25(!) articles targeting me over the last two months, the most recent just this weekend, I realized that addressing him directly is too much like wrestling a pig in mud. You get dirty, and the pig likes it. However, yesterday, Adams outdid…
oracknows | April 27, 2016I hate these stories, because they so seldom end well. Unfortunately, this one is more messy than even the usual messiness of the typical story of this type. The type of story I’m referring to, of course, is one that I’ve told from time to time ever since near the first year of this blog’s existence, that of the child or teen with cancer who, for whatever reason, refuses curative chemotherapy in favor of some sort of quackery. The litany of names depresses me to contemplate: Katie Wernecke, Abraham Cherrix, Sarah Hershberger, Daniel Hauser, Makayla Sault...the list goes on. In the vast…
oracknows | April 18, 2016It sucks to be diagnosed with cancer at any age, but it especially sucks to be young and diagnosed with cancer. The prompt application of science-based cancer treatment is important for anyone with cancer, but it’s especially important for young people with cancer, because they have the most life-years to lose if they dawdle or pursue quackery. That’s why I get particularly perturbed about young people with cancer whose parents choose (or who themselves choose) quackery over science-based medicine, and it’s why I become the most perturbed of all when I learn of stories of children being…
oracknows | March 31, 2016Over the last week or so, I've noticed (or had brought to my attention) a series of articles discussing a phenomenon related to alternative medicine that I don't believe that I've addressed before, at least not directly anyway. I had filed some of these in my folder of topics for blogging, but somehow never got around to them because I let so much time and blog verbiage be dominated by a discussion of how Andrew Wakefield infiltrated the Tribeca Film Festival, only to see Robert De Niro reverse his decision a few days later and yank his film from the festival, after a brief attempt to defend…
oracknows | March 8, 2016Medical research is a scientific enterprise, but, like most areas of science, nonscientific considerations have a great deal of influence over what sorts of research are funded. This is true regardless of who is funding the research. When it's the government, obviously it's impossible to avoid some degree of politics. (Indeed, politics is largely responsible for why the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, or NCCIH, even exists and has been studying quackademic medicine for over 20 years.) The same, however, is true when it comes to foundation funding. Some foundations…
oracknows | January 18, 2016I've been a big fan of David Bowie ever since high school. True, I didn't appreciate his less mainstream stuff as intensely as I do now until I had been in college a couple of years, but it's not an inaccurate to characterize the effect of David Bowie's art on my life as significant. Basically, I own pretty much everything he ever committed to CD or vinyl and have seen him in concert every time he's toured, starting with his Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983 and ending with his appearance at Madison Square Garden during his Reality Tour in December 2003. I saw him with Trent Reznor in 1995, and…
oracknows | January 17, 2016One of the recurring topics I write about is, of course, cancer quackery. It goes right back to the very beginning of this blog, to my very earliest posts more than 11 years ago. Over the years I've covered more cases than I can remember of patients relying on quackery instead of real medicine. In particular, tales of children with highly curable cancers being treated with quackery bother me most of all. Many have been the examples throughout the years: Abraham Cherrix, Katie Wernecke, Chad Jessop, Daniel Hauser, Sarah Hershberger, and teens like Cassandra Callender, who wanted to use…
oracknows | October 14, 2015One of the more depressing topics that I regularly write about includes of analyses of news stories of children with cancer whose parents decided to stop science-based treatment (usually the chemotherapy) and use quackery instead. There are, of course, variations on this theme, but these stories take form that generally resembles this outline: A child is diagnosed with a highly treatable cancer with an excellent cure rate. Standard science-based treatment is begun, but the child suffers severe side effects from the chemotherapy. After an incomplete course of chemotherapy, the parents, alarmed…
oracknows | October 8, 2015Yesterday, I wrote about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Youyou Tu, who, after screening 2,000 herbal treatments from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for anti-malaria activity, finally discovered Artemisinin. She isolated it from the plant in which it is found, using modern chemistry to isolate it, purify it, and later chemically modify it to make it more active against malaria. Tu deserved the Nobel Prize for her years of screening. As I pointed out, contrary to how the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Tu is being spun, it is not a validation of TCM, but rather of…
oracknows | September 17, 2015It just occurred to me that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is fast approaching, not the least of which because I did a Komen event last night as one of the breast cancer experts. I sometimes wonder if I suffer from a bit of the imposter syndrome, because sixteen years on I still sometimes can't believe that I'm considered some sort of "expert" in breast cancer, much less anything else. It's not that different than when, as a freshly minted faculty member, I was sent out to our cancer center's affiliates to attend their tumor boards as the "expert" from the mother ship.
In any case, in my…
oracknows | August 27, 2015After a busy day yesterday and falling asleep early on the couch, I only have time for a quick take today. So file this under "only in America":
A 23-year-old Metro Detroit man robbed a South Lyon credit union earlier this month for his daughter, he told investigators according to South Lyon Police Lt. Chris Sovik.
Brian Randolph, who is currently jailed on a $500,000 bond and facing up to life in prison for robbery of a banking institution, told detectives he recently lost insurance coverage necessary to pay for cancer treatment his daughter required, Sovic said.
Randolph said his daughter…
oracknows | August 17, 2015A recurring topic on this blog involves my discussion of stories about children with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy, thus endangering the children's lives. These stories usually take this general form: The child is diagnosed with a deadly, but treatable cancer that has a high probability of cure with proper chemotherapy. The child receives the first round of chemotherapy. The parents can't deal with the side effects. If they are woo-prone, they make the decision to use "natural healing" or some form of alternative medicine. Sometimes it's in response to the child's request.…
oracknows | July 28, 2015I hate stories like this, but what I hate even more is the way stories like this are all too commonly reported. Readers have been sending me links to stories about a woman named Alex Wynn that have been published over the last few days, in particular this story about her in the Daily Mail (better known as the Daily Fail when it comes to medical stories). As is the Fail's wont, the headline blares Newlywed shuns chemotherapy for CARROTS as she vows to beat cancer with alternative therapies while trying for a baby - even though doctors warn there's 'no evidence' they work, with a picture of an…
oracknows | June 24, 2015My opinion about medical marijuana has been fairly consistent. First, the claims made by its advocates for it far exceed the evidence for its benefit, which is why I've referred to it as the "new herbalism." Of course, it's not really very new, but it is herbalism in that medical marijuana advocates make grandiose claims for using their favorite "drug" in its plant form rather than doing the standard thing that modern medicine does with natural products and try to isolate the active compounds, in this case a class of molecules known as cannabinoids. Second, although medical marijuana might…