Hoxsey therapy

One 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…
Discussing Stanislaw Burzynski's abuse of science while contemplating how even his success stories really aren't yesterday reminded me of a topic that I discussed rather extensively not long after I moved my blog over to ScienceBlogs and have covered sporadically since then. I'm referring to the case of Abraham Cherrix. Cherrix, for those who haven't been regular readers long enough to have encounter him before, was a 15 year old boy who was unfortunate enough to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately for him, rather than undergoing curative therapy, he decided that he wanted "natural"…