Category: Cancer
Bill Maher endorses cancer quackery
Over the last five years or so, I’ve often asked, “Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?” I’ve come to the conclusion that he is, and a couple of weeks ago laid out the evidence why right here on this very blog. (Lately Maher has been issuing Tweets that call people who get flu shots “idiots.”) Indeed, I even included in the post...
Tom Harkin, NCCAM, health care reform, and a cancer treatment that is worse than useless
PRELUDE: SOME BAD NEWS FOR ADVOCATES OF SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE It was a bad week for science-based medicine. It was a good week (sort of) for science-based medcine. First the bad. There has been a development that anyone who supports science in medicine and opposes quackery will likely find disturbing. Do you remember Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)? We’ve written about him extensively over...
“Gonzalez Regimen” for Cancer of the Pancreas: Even Worse than We Thought (Part I: Results)
Review One of the more bizarre and unpleasant “CAM” claims, but one taken very seriously at the NIH, at Columbia University, and on Capitol Hill, is the cancer “detoxification” regimen advocated by Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez: Patients receive pancreatic enzymes orally every 4 hours and at meals daily on days 1-16, followed by 5 days of rest. Patients receive magnesium citrate and Papaya...
The price of cancer quackery
I don’t have much to add to this one, as it’s a tragic tale. Shadowfax, a blogging ER doc, relates to us what happens when cancer patients rely on quackery like the Gerson protocol instead of scientific medicine: This was a young woman, barely out of her teens, who presented with a tumor in her distal femur, by the knee. This was...
If you’re sick, even the ridiculous can seem sublime
Let’s say you have cancer. And let’s say you’re really, really sick of having cancer. And let’s say that you’re also pretty tired of scans, chemo, radiation, hair loss, nausea. And let’s say you’re not really sick and tired of living, but actually pretty happy to be alive. Finally, let’s say someone says that they can get rid of your cancer, without...
Are one in three breast cancers really overdiagnosed and overtreated?
Screening for disease is a real pain. I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the...
Cancer research: Going for the bunt versus swinging for the fences
A couple of weeks ago, our resident skeptical medical student Tim Kreider wrote an excellent article about an op-ed in NEWSWEEK by science correspondent Sharon Begley, in which he pointed out many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Basically, her thesis rested on little more than a...
Applying evolutionary principles to cancer treatment
EDITOR’S NOTE: Unfortunately, this weekend, I was forced to get my slides together for the upcoming SBM Conference, plus editing a manuscript for resubmission, plus working on a manuscript that I should have submitted six months ago, plus reading over some grants, plus…well, you get the idea. What this means is that, alas, I didn’t have any time to prepare one of...
The case of chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser
I’ve written before about clinical trials as one place where “the rubber hits the road,” so to speak regarding the interface between science-based medicine and actual medical practice. Another critical place where an equal amount of rubber hits an equal amount of road is how the medical system and the law deal with the medical care of minors. In the vast majority...
The Huffington Post‘s War on Medical Science: A Brief History
I realize that our fearless leader Steve Novella has already written about this topic twice. He has, as usual, done a bang-up job of describing how Arianna Huffington’s political news blog has become a haven for quackery, even going so far as to entitle his followup post The Huffington Post’s War on Science. And he’s absolutely right. The Huffington Post has waged...