'Alternative Medicine' Clinic Attempts To Silence Critics 515
Asmodae writes "Stanislaw Burzynski runs a clinic specializing in an alternative cancer treatment called 'antineoplaston therapy,' and charges thousands of dollars for the privilege. Unfortunately, there's no scientific support for such treatment, and skeptics all over the web are raising red flags and trying to warn potential patients away. This includes high-school blogger Rhys Morgan, who has received legal threats from Burzynski's clinic for his efforts. Phil Plait summarizes the situation thus: 'In general, it’s a little unusual, to say the least, for a team doing medical research to sue someone for criticizing them. That’s because real science thrives on criticism, since it’s only through critiques that the potential errors of a particular method can be assessed — that’s why research is supposed to be published in peer-reviewed journals as well. Suing is the antithesis of that idea. ... I’ll note that the clinic has threatened to sue multiple people, including Peter Bowditch and Andy Lewis, two other bloggers who have criticized antineoplaston therapy.'"
Southpark (Score:5, Funny)
Not just threatening to sue (Score:5, Interesting)
Burzynski wasn't just threatening to sue. They sent one blogger a photo of his house saying we know where you live. And they threatened the other blogger's family.
Re:Not just threatening to sue (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like the behavior of a genuine medical professional to me! Sign me up!
Re:Not just threatening to sue (Score:5, Insightful)
Burzynski wasn't just threatening to sue. They sent one blogger a photo of his house saying we know where you live. And they threatened the other blogger's family.
That sounds like these bloggers have grounds to sue the pants off the clinic and possibly file criminal charges.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Southpark (Score:4, Insightful)
You are confusing the actual meaning of homeopathy with the commonly used meaning.
True homeopathy is bunk. You dilute something with water to make it more effective and the more times you dilute it, the more powerful the effect? It's nonsensical.
In this context, homeopathic is a substitute for "naturally occurring substances used to treat symptoms". The product in your link includes 13.3mg of a zinc compound that has been shown to reduce the duration of the common cold. See here. [nih.gov] The same study showed that people who regularly took Zinc Gluconate Glycine had fewer colds per year. It's not a scam, it's real data confirmed by the NIH.
13.3mg in each lozenge is more than you'd get in an Olympic sized swimming pool of a true homeopathic remedy.
There is a world of difference between the two. One is rot, gibberish and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery. The other is a scientifically proven remedy that happens to use pharmacologically active substances that happen to not be covered by billion dollar patents. That branch of medicine is just as valid as any other.
LK
Storm... (Score:5, Informative)
I give you, Tim Michin's "Storm"
[...]And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”[...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U [youtube.com]
Re:Storm... (Score:5, Informative)
If you followed the link you'd have seen that argument covered later in the song... A certain extract of the willow tree is mentioned.
Re: (Score:3)
What company is going to advertise drinking 8 cups of water a day to prevent cancer?
If $simple_thing cured cancer, there would no longer be cancer. Imagine countries like North Korea with zero tolerance for non-working citizens, at least in theory. If 8 cups of water could prevent you from having to leave your government-mandated job, lighten the load on health care (which is a pure cost center there), and otherwise keep you being productive rather than a drain on society, you'd be drinking a gallon of it daily at gunpoint.
Re:Storm... (Score:4, Informative)
Nope.
Very few plants have pharmaceutically-active components in sufficiently high concentration to be used for drugs. Or when they do contain them, they are usually contaminated by something else.
For example, aspirin is contained in willow bark and you can actually use willow bark tea instead of aspirin. However, willow bark also contains substances that actively damage kidneys so you can't drink willow tea often.
Re:Storm... (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense. I can create invisibility potions from simple plants all day long in Skyrim.
Re:Storm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you dose the tea?
Re:Storm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, toxicity of aspirin in tablet form is NOT greater. It's actually far smaller.
It's _easier_ to overdose on tablet aspirin since it's sold in a such convenient tablet form. However, if you do use aspirin sanely you basically have no chance to get poisoned even if you do use it regularly (modulo personal adverse drug reactions).
However, if you do drink willow bark tea regularly in therapeutic concentration quantities you WILL get kidney failure eventually (which generally is not a problem because stomach problems will get to you first).
Re:Storm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a person who (like many who others read /.) has lost someone close through cancer, I find the suggestion that drinking '8 cups of water' a day will prevent it highly offensive.
In addition, the notion that '8 cups of water a day' is of therapeutic benefit to any extent is also completely bunk.
Re: (Score:3)
The NIH spends ~$30 Billion a year on biology research, with the findings published in peer-reviewed journals.
Take off the tin-foil hat mr. coward.
Plus, medical science recognizes that cranberry juice helps prevent UTIs, and St. John's Wart acts as a weak SSRI. These provide a kind of ready counter-example that modern medicine is against supporting non-drug treatments. (Seriously, contract a UTI and go to the doctor for treatment. They'll give you a pill to deaden the pain (and turn your urine orange), antibiotics to clear it up, and a recommendation to drink cranberry juice on a semi-regular basis to avoid further UTIs.)
If some "wonder food" (woo-nde
Re: (Score:3)
That "vitamin" should have been "vitamin D".
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/ [vitamindcouncil.org]
Vitamin D may help prevent autism too, if pregnant and nursing women (and young children) take the right amount.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/ [vitamindcouncil.org]
Re:Storm... (Score:4, Informative)
Good question. You would think that greatly reduced costs would produce increased profits in the short term, yes.
But there is a conflict, because insurance company profits are essentially a percentage of premiums, which will be raised every year to track rising costs (justified to clients and regulators).
With a single payer government-funded system, there is little incentive to keep costs high (but not none, because probably some aspect of bureaucratic salaries is tied to perceived importance and budget, but nothing like insurance CEO pay).
Still, I think insurance companies would go for the short term profits if they could, and I expect as more understand this, they will integrate it into wellness programs. For example:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx [drfuhrman.com]
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
One other aspect of this is that "health care" has been defined as paying for treatments and drugs when you are sick. That is not health care. That is sick care. Thus, insurance will pay for a $100K heart operation, but not $50K over ten years for organic vegetables to keep you healthy. So, the insurance system is very broken *inherently* in that sense.
Again, a government program can get around this by integrating things like agricultural subsidies in theory. Unfortunately, US subsidies for agriculture have been captures by unhealthy food makers:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html [seriouseats.com]
What a mess.
Oblig. xkcd (Score:5, Informative)
Not usually a fan, but the caption is worthwhile: "...Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong."
Actually Wally gives a much better lesson (Score:3)
The Wisdom of Wally [dilbert.com] clearly illustrates the difference between trust and stupidity.
Re:Oblig. xkcd (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The FDA and the AMA have ulterior motives as well. If everyone lived to be 125 years old, then what would we have?
The only way that makes any sense is if the people at the FDA and AMA, and the politicians who control them, were not-completely-human beings who themselves had extremely long life spans (or completely non-human beings who wouldn't benefit from human medicine).
Even if our politicians are a bunch of sociopaths, do you really think they'd prefer to die of cancer at 50-70 so they can make more mone
Re:Oblig. xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
The FDA and the AMA have ulterior motives
Does the FDA and AMA equivalent in every single country in the world have both the greed-driven screw-the-patient mentality and the political power necessary to oppress legitimate cures? Every single one of them, without exception? If there were a million doctors in the world (and there are a lot more than that), and each was 99.99% likely to cooperate in suppressing the cure for a serious illness, then there would only be a 3e-44 chance of that secret being kept. Your ideas are stupid and I recommend that you keep them hidden before exposing yourself as a greater ignorant.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What argument could you possibly make that lying is right?
"Does this dress make me look fat?"
Re: (Score:3)
Chiroplastin is far superior.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Chiroplastin is far superior.. (Score:5, Interesting)
No. It's for real. "Doctors studying the placebo effect have noticed that large pills work better than small pills, and that coloured pills work better than white ones." http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml [bbc.co.uk]
Sorry, don't have the original citations.
Re:Chiroplastin is far superior.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Chiroplastin is far superior.. (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, I took it, and I was hard for ... oh, wait, you mean the other blue pill. ;-)
Big Wikipedia Bang - Identifying pseudoscience (Score:5, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience#Identifying_pseudoscience [wikipedia.org]:
"A field, practice, or body of knowledge might reasonably be called pseudoscientific when it is presented as consistent with the norms of scientific research; but it demonstrably fails to meet these norms. [...] Examples of pseudoscience concepts, proposed as scientific when they are not scientific, are creation science, intelligent design, orgone energy, N-rays, ch'i, L. Ron Hubbard's engram theory, enneagram, iridology, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, New Age psychotherapies (e.g., rebirthing therapy), reflexology, applied kinesiology, astrology, biorhythms, facilitated communication, plant perception, extrasensory perception (ESP), Velikovsky's ideas, von Däniken's ideas, Sitchen's ideas, anthropometry, post-normal science, craniometry, graphology, metoposcopy, personology, physiognomy, acupuncture, alchemy, cellular memory, Lysenkoism, naturopathy, reiki, Rolfing, therapeutic touch, ayurvedic medicine, and homeopathy. Robert T. Carroll stated in part: "Pseudoscientists claim to base their theories on empirical evidence, and they may even use some scientific methods, though often their understanding of a controlled experiment is inadequate. Many pseudoscientists relish being able to point out the consistency of their ideas with known facts or with predicted consequences, but they do not recognize that such consistency is not proof of anything. It is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition that a good scientific theory be consistent with the facts."
There must be some Federal Bureau Against Quacks, or something.
Re: (Score:3)
Complain to the FDA (Score:3, Informative)
There must be some Federal Bureau Against Quacks, or something.
There is. [youtube.com]
See Lengthy Jail Sentence for Vendor of Laetrile -- A Quack Medication to Treat Cancer Patients [fda.gov]. They finally nailed Jason Vale, the guy behind Laetrile, the apricot-pit "cancer cure". He did over 5 years in a Federal pen as prisoner #09073-067.
Why don't we (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Steve Jobs how it worked out for him?
Facts are now optional (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Alternative Medicine nuts are usually liberal nuts, not conservative nuts. It's an albatross around the neck of sane liberals trying to make choices based on science rather than delusion.
The difference, I think, is that the liberals at least try to marginalize their nuts, while conservatives make them the front-runners.
This Guy is a Scammer (Score:5, Informative)
http://skepticalhumanities.com/2011/11/26/stanislaw-burzynskis-public-record/ [skepticalhumanities.com]
Oh crap, now I'm gonna get sued! I shoulda posted AC
Pisses me off (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a cancer survivor. I'm also sympathetic, to a degree, to alternative medicines. But never for cancer! I have known a number of people who tried to treat their cancers through diet, herbs, acupuncture, and so on. Every one of them is dead. Every. Single. One. For cancer, you need the big guns, the heavy chemicals, the knives, the radiation. They leave lots and lots of collateral damage, but at least they have have a chance of keeping you alive for awhile longer.
So when I see people like Burzynski preying on frightened cancer patients and their families with their snake oil, it makes me see red.
Re:Pisses me off (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me just say this. For years men were put through agony to 'cure' prostrate cancer until common sense was able to overcome the drug dealer industrial complex and men were told the truth, that prostate cancer was slow growing enough that in men the benefit of treating the cancer was primarily to enrich the drug and insurance companies, while causing unneceasry pain and risk to the male involved.
For years women were told to undergo painful mammograms every year after 40. Now it is every year or two, and for women at low risk the consensus seems to be after 50. Again, there is profit to many people to maximize the diagnosis and testing. False negatives are 20%, which means the cancer is not found, as well as false positives which require painful procedures and over diagnosis. Scientific studies indicate that little loss of effectiveness will occur if mamaograms are started at 50 for low risk groups, yet the loss of money to the insurance companies and drug cartels are so great the science it overwhelmed by the march to profits.
Then we have Avastin, a drug that actually can kill the patient without provided any proven benefit for those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Are the doctors following the science? There is evidence to suggest that it will still be prescribed even though the patient might have an heart attack, but at least if that happens before the patient dies of breast cancer it will not effect the five year survival rate. In fact, Roche is so determined to keep the profits of this killer drug rolling that it is said that they are part of a lobby to get congress to limit the FDA ability to protect US patients from killer drugs such as these. For $100,000 a year paid by scared patients who are looking for any hope, even a drug that will kill them, it is a good bussines model.
I am all for fast track and therapies that can help cancer patients. I can tolerate treatments such as mammograms and quack therapies that are costl but do not real harm and may make the patient happy. What I can't deal with are therapies that are known to kill the patient but are still allowed on the market.
Re: (Score:3)
No, there isn't. If your support is a movie he made then you have no support.
Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm the cornerstone of rationality for a good portion of my friends, so I found it no surprise when one emailed me requesting I watch a documentary called "Burzynski" (http://www.burzynskimovie.com/) and decide if the guy was a quack or really on to something.
I watched the documentary before researching anything about him and was genuinely intrigued. They present science and statistics in the movie and show how the gov't took some really (in retrospect) bonehead actions to prevent him from providing his therapy.
Then I looked up actual history and figured out that the guy is a quack. No one can replicate his results and he gets angry when they don't. He claims that all the independent trials are purposely done incorrect to his specifications.
But here's my problem: Fully aside from this guy being a genuine quack, why not just test his therapy fully and completely? Follow his specs and advice to the proverbial "T". Prove him wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and put an end to it.
Re:Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Because testing requires manpower and money, both of which, sadly, are in short supply in medical research (or any research, for that matter). Wasting money on the claims of a quack means that some legitimate avenue of research either gets deprived or cut off.
If you want to pay to have his claims tested, you go right ahead.
Re:Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the ethical problems with subjecting people to this stuff.
Re:Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
But here's my problem: Fully aside from this guy being a genuine quack, why not just test his therapy fully and completely? Follow his specs and advice to the proverbial "T". Prove him wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and put an end to it.
I can see at least four reasons.
First, it's painfully unethical. Since these novel therapies are unlikely to work, encouraging patients to try them in lieu of real, evidence-based medicine is going to kill a lot of people. You cannot get institutional approval to do a trial unless you can demonstrate that your trial therapy is likely to perform as well or better than the existing gold-standard approach. Randomized trials these days don't divide patients into experimental therapy versus placebo; they're divided into experimental therapy versus current therapy.
Second, there isn't enough of anything to do trials of all the ridiculous therapies; we have enough trouble organizing trials of real, evidence-based therapies that are likely to work. The dollar cost would be exorbitant, but that's actually not the steepest cost or most irreplaceable resource. There are only so many clinicians available - doctors and nurses and radiation therapists and pharmacists - with training relevant to oncology, and they can only do so many hours of work in a day. Wasting their time on futile clinical trials means treating fewer patients with real therapies. Similarly, there are limited numbers of skilled laboratory workers, statisticians, and other scientists. Last, but by no means least, there's a limited number of patients with cancer. Recruiting large numbers of patients into useless trials means a shortage of patients for worthwhile trials.
Third, the quacks won't be satisfied anyway. One of the important parameters used in modern clinical trials is the establishment of 'futility' criteria. Essentially, they're intermediate checkpoints in the trial where it might be halted early if the therapy's results aren't looking promising. This is done in an effort to reduce wasting time and money on ineffective interventions; for serious illnesses the futility criteria help to limit the number of dead bodies. If one cuts off a futile trial of a quack therapy early in order to save lives, the quack is going to say that The Man shut down his trial.
Finally, if our response to quackery is to throw funding at it, we encourage more quackery. The persuasive charlatan will always be able to recruit more followers. If this iteration of the therapy is demonstrated useless in a full-blown clinical trial, after this round's money runs out he can just come up with a new variant on the theme, and demand fresh funding for another few years. Lather, rinse, repeat--we create an entire pathological, publicly-funded quack welfare program.
Re: (Score:3)
But here's my problem: Fully aside from this guy being a genuine quack, why not just test his therapy fully and completely? Follow his specs and advice to the proverbial "T". Prove him wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and put an end to it.
Probably because like all charlitans he'll always claim that you haven't followed his specs - that you've misunderstood or misapplied them. Do you think such people are above lying and manipulating? So you've got nothing to gain. It's expensive and a headache and at the end he'll always claim he's right, you're wrong, and you can't follow simple directions so how can you be trusted? Meanwhile he keeps shifting his goalposts to make you look bad.
Burzynski is a fraud. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/burzynski1.html [quackwatch.com]
Pretty open and shut.
Burzynski is a fraud.
I say that as a real researcher (and research director.) The amount of work this man has done is PATHETIC. Even his supposed year-long lab experiment to get his "D.Msc (which didn't exist at the time,) has the shittiest documentation ever.
Well, if being a fraudulent quack is illegal then (Score:5, Insightful)
... why aren't the guys who bundled crap mortgages into financial instruments in jail? Or any executives on Wall Street who lied to their clients?
Christmas with a homeopath (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Christmas with a homeopath (Score:4, Interesting)
You should mix the drinks. If she wants Egg Nog (or some other drink), give her a drop of the drink in a glass of water and ask her if it is too strong. (You could always pour half of the glass into another half glass of water and shake it up to strengthen it.)
Of course, you'll want to drink the "weak" version of the drinks... you know, the ones not strengthened by being diluted in water.
I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
But... (Score:3)
"That’s because real science thrives on criticism"
But only real educated criticise. Not criticise coming form people who know nothing about medicine or your proposed treatment.
I admit I have not read the original article, but unless I am missing my guess this is just some stupid high schooler who is criticising doctors.
Ignoring that in general the medical community does not agree with this guy I imagine that any medical center would sue when confronted with ignorant bloggers copying and recopying each other and, irregardless to the effectiveness of the procedure, probably changing know facts in the process.
Criticise is part of science, criticism from your peers, not random people/high schoolers.
That is like saying that these evolutionary biologists are not being very scientific when they do not respond/sue fundamentalist Christians who badger and criticize them.
not just for the third world (Score:3, Interesting)
You know... (Score:4, Funny)
Medicine.
I'm here all week. Tip your veal, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really the issue here. The issue fundamentally isn't whether or not these lying quacks cure anybody or not, but rather whether real scientists are free to judge them by the scientific method. These lying quacks are trying to use the legal system to silence legitimate scientific inquiry into their scam.
That you're allowed to collect money from gullible morons if you can convince them of your quackery is not questioned, that you can try to hold the scientific community at bay through litigious behavior is.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Funny)
These lying quacks are trying to use the legal system to silence legitimate scientific inquiry into their scam.
Apparently the Scientology PR strategy has been licensed out for use in the medical field!
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the worst this treatment could do? Kill you?
No, the worst would be that this quackery robs you of all the money you could have spent on legitimate medical treatment. Hell, you could have spent the cash on pints of ice cream and raised your quality of life for your last couple of years. Bilking people out of their savings because they're terrified that they're going to die is pretty fucking low.
Re: (Score:3)
Bilking people out of their savings because they're terrified that they're going to die is pretty fucking low.
Their money is forfeit any way you look at it. The insurance company will almost certainly clean them out if this guy doesn't.
Re: (Score:3)
Such as?
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
The only instance I can find is when he filed a countersuit regarding a FOIA request trying to get private emails. It wasn't trying to silence dissent, that's just how you dispute a request.
Any others?
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
Other than the countersuit already addressed by the GP, the only thing your stupid LMGTFY link produces is a cease & desist against the makers of a silly satirical music video that used his likeness without his permission. I'm sorry, but a satirical music video is not science, and attempting to suppress it is in no way an attempt to suppress legitimate scientific dissent.
If you want to counter the science, counter it with more science, not with silly videos or FOIA requests for private emails.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
The critic that you refer to made specific libelous claims. He isn't being sued because he's skeptical, he's being sued because he slandered a scientist by making claims of ill conduct. If the claimant had had any evidence of the scientist's ill conduct, he would have provided it, and thus (except in Britain) have walked away satisfied that he had taken down a climatologist. Instead, the claimant turned out to be a serial liar who had made false claims against other scientists.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/21/bc-andrew-weaver-national-post-lawsuit.html [www.cbc.ca]
You mean (Score:3)
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
WTF are you talking about? For most cancers, five year survival rates have been steadily climbing for decades. The fact is that this guy is displaying all the traits of quackery; refusal to publish or even to co-operate with researchers, taking money directly from patients and now attempting to silence critics. If he had something real, he'd go through the accepted channels and right now would likely be getting ready to cash his first massive check from some Big Pharma company.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why would big pharma want cancer cured? Oh, yeah, I remember now - so they can stop selling all of those expensive cancer drugs."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0yXn9XA-5c [youtube.com]
Ribbit.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention the incredible jingoism required to believe that every country in the world but your own is too stupid to come up with a cure on their own, if such a thing were possible. If you're an American, for example, and you believe that "Big Pharma" is colluding to block a cure for something, then what you're really saying is that no other country has the ability to make that same discovery without our help and that we're single-handedly able to hold the world hostage. How arrogant can you get?
Dead men don't buy Viagra (Score:4, Insightful)
And then, once they're cured of the fatal disease, you can still sell them all of your other drugs!
Re:Dead men don't buy Viagra (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cure for cancer" as a general concept really annoys me, because cancer isn't a disease/disorder singular, but rather a large number of different diseases/disorders with certain common traits that lump them together, but for which therapies can be wildly different.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm interested in hearing more about the work they're doing with decapitation survival, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yeah, in some states, decapitation and rigor mortis are the only conditions under which a paramedic can call a death on scene. Otherwise, they have to try and save the person, which increases the DOA rates, but prevents autopsy reports that indicate that the time of death occurred during the initial police investigation.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to reply here and explain to you in a detailed and rational manner why your post was the dumbest thing I've read in weeks. Then I got to the bottom and read your signature and realized you were not the kind of person who would read and understand a rational argument, since as we all know, the free market will just magically solve all problems (except cancer, evidently that gets cured by some combination of stupidity and urine).
So instead, in the spirit of the free market, I've decided to offer my own cancer treatment. It's mostly just ice cream, pencil shavings and cyanide, but I've yet to receive a single complaint from anyone who's taken it, and not one of my patients has died of cancer.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of this article is that it's fine to try something "different", provided you follow a couple baseline rules: first, you go the peer-review route. You do a double-blind clinical trial, you perform the analysis and see that your method works significantly better than placebo and has improvements over the current state-of-the-art, and then you market it publicly. If (and this is a big "if") Burzynski is going this route, he's doing this step entirely backwards, which is ethically suspect at best. Second, you let the data speak for itself, not the lawyers. You sue people who slander you, not your work. If your work is being called into question, you debate it scientifically, just like in the peer-review process.
It's the fact that Burzynski is failing hard on these two points that's getting him into trouble, not the supposed shortcomings of the modern medical industry.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at the Burzynski clinic. I did see the results. For brain tumors, non-hodgkin's lymphoma, and liver cancer (when combined with other treatments, something legally barred in the US), antineoplastons were quite effective if the patient got treated early enough, which usually meant before chemo or radiation. All other patients were basically being ripped off. Anyone going in under a SE or CE (exceptions) is a goner and was just being soaked for money. Oh, and most patients won't get antineoplastons. They get a different medicine (called PB).
I'm posting as an AC because Burzynski is sue happy. He has very good lawyers. He's been sued multiple times for discrimination and won every time. He is guilty though IMHO based on first hand experience. If you're Polish, you're golden. Everyone else is disposable. He has been sued by the federal government and won, although there was more than a little perjury at those trials.
One of the main reasons his clinic is so expensive is because it's poorly run. It seems like the managers there take management lessons from Dilbert's PHB.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
The rate of cancer survival in the medical industry is pretty bad ~ shouldn't the entire industry be criticized more?
When I was a kid not so long ago, Hodgkin's lymphoma was a death sentence. I remember hearing my parents speak in hushed tones about friends and acquaintances who'd been diagnosed and were trying to get their affairs in order.
Today, Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] that "In one recent European trial, the 5-year survival rate for those patients with a favorable prognosis was 98%, while that for patients with worse outlooks was at least 85%."
I'd call that progress.
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Look pal, you won't make any money selling urine as a cancer therapy if you keep demonstrating that mainstream medicine has in fact made strides. You need to handwave away those kinds of numbers, talk a lot about Big Pharma conspiracies and get a pamphlet with a lot of anecdotal and unverifiable claims like "Before P. Wilson of Honolulu drank my frosty piss, he was at death's door with just days to live, but since his therapy, has fully recovered and is president of a small central African nation."
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The fact is that the medical community as a whole has not cured cancer.
The fact is this guy's methods don't work either. Him deciding to sue critics rather than scientifically address them is further evidence of his quackery.
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Feel free to explain how electromagnetic therapy is supposed to do anything about that.
As for the "drug companies don't want a cure" argument -- if any company, drug or otherwise, could get their hands on a cure, they'd be over the moon with joy, thinking about the license to print money that they'd found. If a drug company really thought Burzynski was onto something, they'd try to buy him out, no
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:4, Informative)
Chemical reactions are electrical interactions after all.
Hmm. Not in any meaningful sense, no.
I say this as someone who works in a research group on chemoinformatics, involving comparison and analysis of (bio)chemical reactions. For example, here is a drawing (made by graphics software written by me of an atom-atom mapping from my colleague):
cinnamate beta-D-glucosyltransferase [ebi.ac.uk]
Cinnamate (in cyan) is being attached to the sugar (purple). This is carried out by an enzyme, with a precise arrangement of amino acids in an active site. How on earth would 'electrical interactions' (in general) affect this reaction - or any other?
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maybe he shots them up with opium? that would make them happy yes, but wouldn't cure their cancer.
the clinic doesn't seem to be doing research either. just selling a treatment.
no, wait, he's not selling treatment. technically he's selling participation in a clinical trial.... though there seems to have been so many patients already that if it was effective, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't release the data.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
The dead don't complain much. This isn't being flippant. I personally knew a woman that took the 'alternative' road to 'cure' her breast cancer. It took four years to kill her.
They promised their blood 'filter' machine therapy would reverse the growth. They convinced her surgery was an unnecessary aberration of 'western' medicine, at a time when the 'western' surgeons offered at good prognosis for success. They fed here special diets, pills and all sorts of other stuff. The point of no return was eventually crossed and surgery was no longer an option.
There are a lot of quacks haunting Big Cancer because there is a lot of money sloshing around. All of the above was funded by employer provided insurance.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The dead don't complain much. This isn't being flippant. I personally knew a woman that took the 'alternative' road to 'cure' her breast cancer. It took four years to kill her.
[cough]SteveJobs[cough]
What? Too soon? Not for Steve Jobs.
Re:Are his customers happy? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem I've noticed with a lot of Libertarian arguments on topics like this is that they omit the biggest part of choice, which is information. Without informed choice, no good decisions can be made. If product A and product B are both supposed to cure missing limbs, but product A is a miracle pill that makes you regrow arms and legs and what-not and product B is a 2X4 with a nail in it, which would you choose? How would you know which to choose without information? How would you know that Product B is far inferior if the company were able to silence their critics like the "doctor" in this article?
Obviously, my example is hyperbole, but it was done to make a point. Without informed choice, there really is no valid choice.
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According to Dante, the lowest, deepest, circles of Hell that are reserved for the most terrible sins like treason are covered in ice and battered by cold cruel winds. Quack doctors and the like are forced to slog through a canal filled with shit, and every time they talk, shit comes out of their mouths.
Re:Either way.. (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's the problem with these evil bastards, they prey upon the most vulnerable, people and their families desperately trying to keep the flame burning. I remember years ago my grandmother's best friend was diagnosed with some inoperable terminal cancer, and her church got together and raised several thousand dollars to send her to some "clinic" in Greece which happily took her money, did some meaningless mumbo jumbo and sent her home still dying of cancer. These were poor people, and most members of the church were on the lower end of the middle class. It was very commendable that they pooled their resources together, but I still think the "doctor" who ran the "clinic" should have been taken out and shot. He stole a lot of money from a lot of people who could not really afford it, but who were bamboozled or guilted into donating to a dying woman's fantasy of a cure.
Re:Either way.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, as I said elsewhere, five year survival rates for many cancers have been steadily climbing. Many cancers are very fucking bad and metastasize to all sorts of tissues, making treatment very fucking difficult. That means that the treatments will often be very fucking bad, and will do all sorts of damage to tissues. The alternative is often between living a few years longer with the help of these drugs and all their very fucking bad side-effects, or dying relatively quickly, and often far more awfully fucking bad than they would have if they had taken the treatments.
My wife survived thyroid cancer and is alive six years later because she had a total thyroidectomy, which is an awful fucking procedure that saw her in the hospital for six days just healing from basically having her neck cut open and large amounts of tissue yanked out just in case the tumor had spread to neighboring lymph glands. She faced radioactive iodine to kill off any potentially cancerous thyroid cells lurking elsewhere. It took her three or four months before she could even drive or go shopping again, because her neck was literally stapled together. She has to take synthetic thyroid hormone until the day she dies, and there's still no guarantee, even though she's made it over five years, that she might not get stricken again.
Cancer is fucking awful pal. So don't give this anti-pharmaceutical schizoid conspiracy theory bullshit.
Re:watch his documentary on youtube before comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you watch a documentary to evaluate any claim, medical or otherwise? Let's see the peer-reviewed articles in recognized journals detailing out how the experiments were carried out and demonstrating the veracity of the claims.
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Scientology has operatives in many, many places of power that helps them get away with that shit.
Re:Freedom of Choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but society does have the right to shut down those who do harm by deceit. Your right to free speech does not extend to selling snake oil that does measurable harm.
As far as kemo and radiation, while hardly perfect, there are measurable and repeatable results confirming that these techniques improve the chances of survival. In this fraudster's case, random trials have shown that there is no such evidence.
Re:Double Standards i guess (Score:5, Funny)
don't themselves go through the pier review process
Agreed. Anyone refusing pier review should have their credibility heavily docked.
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Too bad the deniers harbor resentment when they can't get a lock on the publicity, and their ideas are killed at berth. I guess that those who don't want to believe are o-quay with it, though...
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citation needed
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Easy, because most alternative medicine is bumpkus. Especially cancer remedies (I'm sure a certain Steven P. Jobs can attest to that).
If this system really works, then anyone who's not a
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What do you call an alternative medicine that works?
Medicine.
And U.S. is not the only country in the world, you know. FDA can be rotten to the core, but if something is effective, it would be routinely practiced elsewhere - if only in China or Cuba.