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'Alternative Medicine' Clinic Attempts To Silence Critics
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.'"
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ask Steve Jobs how it worked out for him?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
No sig? Sigh...
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.
You talk about cancer as if it were the flu, some common viral infection that most people get every now and then and is a minor annoying blip in one's everyday routine. It's a radically different disease by virtue of the fact that it's your own cells gone rogue. I'm not saying it's beyond the realm of science-based medicine, I'm saying it's not a trivial problem to solve, yet the fact that modern medicine hasn't solved it somehow anoints alternative medicine--which has never empirically shown any effectiveness beyond what you'd see from placebo--as the savior?
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.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I agree, but I'd draw the line at calling customers "gullible morons". I'd call them "desperate" more than anything. What's the worst this treatment could do? Kill you? You're dead already. These fraudsters should be exposed as the fraudsters they are, but I can't really blame their customers, because many are willing to try and pay just about anything if there's even a slim, outside chance it could give them even just a bit more time.
Please define cancer. You seem to be implying it is a single disease which can be cured if we find the "right" treatment. It is actually a term used to describe a very large set of diseases which usually have little in common apart from them all involving unregulated cell growth. And yes I am a researcher involved with anticancer drugs.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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.
Well, that's probably because the number of people that take aspirin dwarfs the number of people that drink willow tea...
"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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.