Category: Politics and Regulation
“Right to try” laws and Dallas Buyers’ Club: Great movie, terrible for patients and terrible policy
"Right-to-try" is a new kind of bill that claims to give terminally ill patients the "right to try" experimental therapeutics that have passed phase 1 testing. It's a smokescreen, no more real than the movie that seemingly inspired it.
The illusions of “right to try” laws
[Ed. Note: For additional commentary on why “right-to-try” laws are such a bad idea, see “Right to try” laws and Dallas Buyers’ Club: Great movie, terrible for patients and terrible policy and The false hope of “right-to-try” metastasizes to Michigan.] There is nothing like a touching anecdote to spur a politician into action. And those who want to try investigational drugs outside...
Measles gets a helping hand
In a recent post I shared a bit of my personal, near-death experience with measles during the US epidemic of 1989-1991. As I describe in that post, I contracted a very serious measles infection at the end of medical school, and was highly infectious when I interviewed for a residency position at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Like others my age who received an...
Eric Merola and Ralph Moss try to exhume the rotting corpse of Laetrile in a new movie
Note: Some of you have probably seen a different version of this post fairly recently. I have a grant deadline this week and just didn’t have time to come up with fresh material up to the standards of SBM. This left me with two choices: Post a “rerun” of an old post, or recycle something. I decided to recycle something for reasons...
A cure for chiropractic
Almost 10 years ago, a thoughtful article, entitled “Chiropractic as spine care: a model for the profession”, appeared in the journal Chiropractic & Osteopathy. The authors were a group of both academic and practicing chiropractors, as well as representatives from a health insurer specializing in coverage of CAM provider services. Another article, under different authorship, appeared the same year deploring some aspects...
Twenty days in primary care practice, or “naturopathic residency”
The metastasis of alternative medicine throughout the health care system comes, in no small part, at the hands of the federal and state governments, mostly the latter and most particularly the state legislatures. Under their jurisdiction rests the decision of who can, and cannot, become a licensed health care practitioner, and what they can, and cannot, do. This is the gateway through...
Washington State’s Unconscionable, Unconstitutional Child Protection Law
I recently wrote about the conflict between child protection and the religious freedom of believers in faith healing. That issue has reared its ugly head again in the state of Washington. Washington law currently denies the children of Christian Scientists equal protection under the law governing child abuse and neglect, and it grants a special exemption from criminal prosecution for abuse and...
pH Miracle Living “Dr.” Robert O. Young is finally arrested, but will it stop him?
Being a cancer surgeon and researcher, naturally I tend to write about cancer a lot more than other areas of medicine and science. It’s what I know best. Also, cancer is a very common area for unscientific practices to insinuate themselves, something that’s been true for a very long time. The ideas don’t change very rapidly, either. Drop a cancer quack from...
Stanislaw Burzynski: Using 1990s techniques to battle the FDA today
In the 1990s, cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his lawyer Richard Jaffe perfected a PR strategy in which patients who believed that Burzynski had saved their lives would protest and, often aided by friendly legislators, beg the FDA (or whatever regulatory body was trying to stop Burzynski's abuses at the time) not to let them die. It was very effective political...
2013 Legislative Review: placenta take out
It’s official in Oregon now. You can take your placenta, along with your new baby, home from the hospital. This was already a practice among the CAM set but apparently new mothers were running afoul of laws designed to protect us from bio-hazards. New legislation exempts “the removal from a health care facility . . . of a placenta by a postpartum...