epithelioid sarcoma
oracknows | April 5, 2015Recent articles in The Daily Mail and The Australian reminded me that it's been over a month since the unfortunate demise of Jess Ainscough, a young Australian woman who was diagnosed with an epithelioid sarcoma of her left upper extremity in 2008. Before I get to the articles, a brief recap is in order.
This is a very rare tumor that is generally slow growing but relentless, with most untreated patients dying within 10 years, although with radical surgery and complete removal of all tumor deposits it is possible to produce ten year survivals on the order of 49-72%, closer to 72% for young…
oracknows | March 6, 2015"I don't want knowledge. I want certainty!"
--David Bowie, from Law (Earthlings on Fire)
I know I've already said this once, but I have to say it again, but it's been a rather stressful week on the old blog, but I hadn't planned on writing about this particular topic again (although I will say that this will likely be the last time I do write about it for a while, perhaps forever, unless we learn something new). A little more than one week ago, a young Australian woman named Jess Ainscough, better known as "The Wellness Warrior," died a potentially preventable death due to a rare form of…
oracknows | February 27, 2015Two months ago, I took note of a somewhat cryptic blog post by a young woman named Jess Ainscough. In Australia and much of the world, Ainscough was known as the Wellness Warrior. She was a young woman who developed an epithelioid sarcoma in 2008 and ended up choosing "natural healing" to treat her cancer. Among the "natural healing" modalities touted by the Wellness Warrior included that quackery of quackeries, the Gerson protocol, complete with coffee enemas and everything. She even did videos explaining how to administer coffee enemas and posted them on YouTube, although that video is now…
oracknows | December 16, 2014
Not being Australian and, for some reason, never having encountered her promotion of "natural health" online before, I first encountered Jessica Ainscough, also known as "The Wellness Warrior" over a year ago when I learned that her mother Sharyn Ainscough had died of breast cancer. Her mother, it turns out, had rejected conventional treatment for her breast cancer and chosen instead the quackery known as Gerson therapy. It's a treatment regimen based on long-discredited view of how cancer forms and that requires the consumption of boatloads of supplements and the administration multiple…
oracknows | January 30, 2014Since I've been complaining about credulity in the media reporting on cancer this week, in particular the way local reporters Carol Robidoux and April Guilmet published articles that were nothing more than regurgitations of propaganda from Stanislaw Burzynski, I figured I might as well go all in and finish the week out with more of the same. Hopefully, it'll clear the deck to move on to different topics next week. Besides, seeing this really irritated me.
I don't live in Australia (obviously), but it seems that I'm frequently aware of things going on in Australia relevant to skeptical…
oracknows | October 16, 2013This being Breast Cancer Awareness Month and all, stories about breast cancer are frequently sent my way. This one is depressing and sad, mainly because it's the story of death from breast cancer. From what I can gather, it is the story of a death from quackery, a death that didn't have to occur. Even worse than that, it appears to be a death facilitated by the daughter of the deceased, a woman named Jessica Ainscough, who bills herself as the "Wellness Warrior." It's a horrifying story, the story of a woman who followed her daughter's lead and put her faith in the quackery known as the…