Texas Medical Board
The failure of the Texas Medical Board: Houston cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski is back in business
oracknows | April 26, 2017When last I wrote about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski nearly two months ago, he had, as I characterized it, just mostly slithered away from justice once again. The Texas Medical Board had not removed his license and had only fined him relatively lightly given his offenses. True, he had conditions placed on his continued practice (more on that later), but it hasn't slowed him down, as you will soon see. Another family is raising funds, this time from the UK, to travel to Houston for his nostrums. Basically, by failing to revoke Stanislaw Burzynski's medical license, the Texas…
oracknows | March 6, 2017I've been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over...sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final ruling of the Texas Medical Board regarding Dr. Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who has been a frequent topic of this blog because of his practices of charging desperate cancer patient tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for his "antineoplastons" (ANPs) and, later, what he…
oracknows | October 19, 2016It’s been a while since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Polish ex-pat physician who is not an oncologist but treats cancer patients in his Houston clinic with a mixture of a compound he calls “antineoplastons” (ANPs) and “gene-targeted” therapy. The former are really a mixture of various chemicals he isolated from the blood and urine back in the 1970s, including chemicals like phenylacetic acid (PA) and phenylacetyl glutamine (PAG), that he thought to be endogenous cancer suppressors but has never been able to demonstrate that they are, despite having had four decades to do so.…
oracknows | January 15, 2016I feel as though I'm experiencing an acid flashback to 2011, and I've never in my entire life once tried acid—or any mind-altering substance other than booze.
What am I talking about? Let's take a trip down memory lane, if you will, back to those halcyon days of—oh—five years ago. That was the time when I first took an interest in the Polish oncologist wannabe named Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had mentioned him before because he featured prominently in Suzanne Somers' 2009 paean to quackery Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First…
oracknows | November 17, 2015The other day, I suddenly realized that it's been a long time since I've written about the Polish expat doctor in Houston who treats patients with advanced brain cancer with a concoction that he dubbed antineoplastons (ANPs). I'm referring, of course, to Stanislaw Burzynski who, despite the fact that he has no training in medical oncology, has treated thousands of cancer patients with ANPs beginning back in the late 1970s. Somehow, despite the fact that he's never even come close to showing that ANPs are effective and safe against the cancers for which he uses it, the FDA has, with a brief…
oracknows | September 25, 2015Yesterday, I wrote about how pediatric neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson is an excellent example demonstrating how the vast majority of physicians and surgeons, even highly accomplished ones admired as being at the top of their professions, are not scientists and how many of them are disturbingly prone to buying into pseudoscience. In Dr. Carson's case, that tendency to believe in pseudoscience derives from his fundamentalist religion that led him to reject evolution and accept arguments against evolution every bit as ignorant as the ones Kent Hovind or Ken Ham serves up…
oracknows | October 29, 2014
R.I.P., McKenzie Lowe. Unfortunately, Stanislaw Burzynski was no more able to save you than anyone else, his claims of great success treating pediatric brain tumors notwithstanding:
HUDSON — Thirteen-year-old Hudson resident McKenzie Lowe died Friday evening after a 2-year-battle against an aggressive and inoperable brain stem tumor.
McKenzie died at 10:27 p.m. in her own bed at her home in Hudson.
McKenzie was diagnosed on Nov. 28, 2012 with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG, a brain tumor located on the brain stem. Patients with DIPG typically survive for less than a year.…
oracknows | July 14, 2014
There’s a point I feel that I have have to make briefly as I begin this post. Basically, this might look familiar, but given that I was at TAM Wednesday through Sunday, I didn’t have time to produce two separate posts, and this is important enough to be distributed as widely as possible. In any event, as I started writing this, I was on a miserably crowded, hot, stinky flight winging my way home from TAM (nothing like being stuck in coach on the tarmac in the middle of the desert before taking off—the sweat never quite goes away even after the plane cools down). This puts me in the perfect…
oracknows | February 15, 2014Regular readers know my frustration with the Texas Medical Board. Why is it, I've often wondered, that Stanislaw Burzynski can keep peddling his unproven cancer treatment with seeming impunity for nearly four decades, with every attempt of the TMB over the last four decades seemingly being utterly ineffective? It's not as though Burzynski is alone. There are many other doctors who should, in the opinion of many, have their licenses revoked but keep practicing in Texas. Even when there's a doctor who is clearly an immediate threat to patients, it's hard to get the TMB to do anything. Ditto…
oracknows | September 19, 2013One of the greatest mysteries I've encountered since I started following the case of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he's managed to keep practicing for 36 years after he first began treating patients with his concoction of peptides purportedly isolated from blood and urine that he dubbed "antineoplastons" (ANPs) because of their alleged ability to inhibit the growth of cancer. This is not an issue that is by any means unique to Burzynski; I've discussed other cases like this, such as Rolando Arafiles, who used his business relationship with the local sheriff to fend off the Texas Medical Board (…
oracknows | November 25, 2012NOTE: Special thanks to Jann Bellamy for advising me regarding the legal aspects of this post.
There are times when I fear that I'm writing about the same topic too many times in too brief a period of time. Most commonly, I notice this concern when writing about the lunacy of the anti-vaccine movement. In fact, it's fairly rare that I feel it for any other topic. There is, however, one topic other than antivaccinationist assaults against science and reason that will sometimes obligate me to go on a roll such that I might write multiple posts in a short period of time. I'm referring, of course…
oracknows | February 11, 2010Well, that didn't take long, at least not once the trial ended.
It's good to see the jury act with such alacrity to find Anne Mitchell not guilty and send a strong message to the hapless Dr. Rolando Arafiles and his errand boy Sheriff Robert L. Roberts, who spent more effort tracking down a nurse doing her duty than I bet he spends tracking down thieves and murderers, as well as the equally clueless County Attorney Scott Tidwell. It's good to see that justice was finally done in the end, but it's absolutely horrifying that it took so many months for it to happen. This is a prosecution that…
oracknows | February 7, 2010About five months ago, I blogged about a true miscarriage of justice, the sort of thing that should never, ever happen. In brief, it was the story of two nurses who, disturbed at how a local doctor was peddling his dubious "herbal" concoctions in the emergency room of the local hospital when he came in to see patients, reported him to the authorities. Moreover, they had gone up the chain of command, first complaining to hospital authorities. After nothing happened for months, they decided to report the physician, Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr., to the Texas Medical Board because they honestly…
oracknows | September 18, 2009I just found out via one of the mailing lists I'm on of a very disturbing case in Kermit, Texas. Two nurses who were dismayed and disturbed by a physician peddling all manner of herbal supplements reported him to the authorities. Now, they are facing jail:
In a stunning display of good ol' boy idiocy and abuse of prosecutorial discretion, two West Texas nurses have been fired from their jobs and indicted with a third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of $10,000. Why? Because they exercised a basic tenet of the nurse's Code of…