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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."
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
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...
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
Sorry, don't have the original citations.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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!
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?
"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.