sodium phenylbutyrate

This will be an uncharacteristically short (for Orac) post. A couple of months ago, I wrote about the sad story of a young man from Ireland named Seán Ó'Laighin diagnosed with an inoperable brainstem glioma at age 19. Even more sadly, this young man heard about the Burzynski Clinic in Houston and believed the claims of its founder, Stanislaw Burzynski, that being treated with antineoplastons would provide him with a much greater chance of survival than anything conventional medicine had to offer. As has been the case for so many patients of Stanislaw Burzynski, Seán and his family started…
Last week, I applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to a movie about a physician and "researcher" named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, founder of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute in Houston. I refer you to my original smackdown for details, but in brief Dr. Burzynski claimed in the 1970s to have made a major breakthrough in cancer therapy through his discovery of anticancer substances in the urine that he dubbed "antineoplastons," which turned out to be mainly modified amino acids and peptides. Since the late 1970s, when he founded his clinic, Dr. Burzynski has been…