Farrah Fawcett
oracknows | November 9, 2016Yesterday, I wrote about alternative medicine clinics in Germany that offer a combination of alternative cancer cures plus experimental therapeutics administered improperly outside the auspices of a clinical trial. In particular, I discussed two cases. The first was British actress Leah Bracknell, who is raising money to go to one of these alternative cancer clinics to treat her stage IV lung cancer. the second was a British woman named Pauline Gahan, who was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and has thus far spent £300,000 for a combination of vitamin infusions, “detox,” and Keytruda…
oracknows | August 21, 2016I've frequently written about various dubious and outright quack clinics in different parts of the word with—shall we say?—somewhat less rigorous laws and regulations than the US. Most commonly, given the proximity to the US, the clinics that have drawn my attention are located in Mexico, most commonly right across the border from San Diego in Tijuana for easy access by American patients. Sometimes, in the case of dubious stem cell clinics, they are located in countries like China, Argentina, or Kazakhstan. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of quack clinics right here in the US (…
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 | 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…