Many are the cancer quacks—and just plain quacks—whom I have discussed over the years. Some of them, like Robert O. Young, have been truly horrendous, so bad that I’m left shaking my head and wondering how anyone can fall for their obvious misinformation and outright lies. For instance, Robert O Young claims that all cancer—not to mention all disease—is basically due to “excess acid.” You’d think that people would immediately become suspicious when a quack proclaims there to be only One True Cause of All Disease and offers the One True Treatment for All Disease, but, sadly, they don’t, even…
Six Nations
One 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…
Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…
I'm depressed and angry as I write this.
The reason for this is simple. I hate it when cancer quacks claim the lives of patients with cancer, particularly patients who were eminently treatable for cure. It's happened again, and it makes me sad. Florida cancer quack Brian Clement has claimed the life of Makayla Sault, an 11 year old Ojibwe girl with leukemia:
The entire community of New Credit is in mourning today, following the news of the passing of 11 year old Makayla Sault.
The child suffered a stroke on Sunday morning and was unable to recover. Friends and family from across the…