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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.'"
Maybe we should ask Miss Information about this one.
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
http://xkcd.com/971/
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."
Can dead people be happy?
in its unproven effectiveness. Plus it's a big red pill, red pills always work better than other colors.
Dig them up and ask.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience#Identifying_pseudoscience :
"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.
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
It started with Creation Science and then evolved into Climate Science Denialism and then evolved into Paul Ryan "Economics" so why should medicine be proven to work. I'm allowed to choose facts and if I don't like the ones that are available I can get the Heritage Foundation or one of the debate team to make some up for me. Same goes here.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://skepticalhumanities.com/2011/11/26/stanislaw-burzynskis-public-record/
Oh crap, now I'm gonna get sued! I shoulda posted AC
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...
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.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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!
How many times do you hear of a single person even having the means to sue a company?
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/burzynski1.html
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"The rate of cancer survival in the medical industry is pretty bad ~ shouldn't the entire industry be criticized more?" Isn't that like saying 'the rate of head gunshot wound survival is pretty bad, shouldn't the entire medical industry be criticized more?', or about Alzheimer's, or decapitation, etc. They're working on it. It is just that some things are easier to solve than others.
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.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/21/bc-andrew-weaver-national-post-lawsuit.html
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... 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?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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.
Check your premises.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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.
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?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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!
"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
Ribbit.
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.
We're having Christmas with an old friend of the wife's, who works as a homeopath. I'm not letting her (the homeopath) mix the drinks.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
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.
Breakfast served all day!
Seriously, why is this even a problem? Why doesn't the FDA just shut him down? He's claiming to be able to cure cancer and is instead bilking people who are dying. Wasn't the whole point of the FDA to eliminate problems like this? Where has the system broken down here exactly?
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.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
don't themselves go through the pier review process
Agreed. Anyone refusing pier review should have their credibility heavily docked.
My webcomic
A company that made an actual cure to cancer could print their own money off of the patent. Not to mention having humongous clout and popularity due to that revolutionary breakthrough.
And then, once they're cured of the fatal disease, you can still sell them all of your other drugs!
When I lived in South Africa, there was an advanced, modern hospital, the kinds you'd find in the USA not far away from where i lived. But usually people didn't go there until they'd tried the witch doctors and undergo their range of treatments, and by then it would be too late. You know, lemon juice couldn't stop HIV from becoming AIDS, and the hospital couldn't do anything by that time. I thought that was an 'African thing' ...but it's happening in my own backyard (Texas). People really are the same wherever you go, imagine that.
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 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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You know what they call alternative medicine that works?
Medicine.
I'm here all week. Tip your veal, etc.
"Long time listener, first time caller."
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
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?