Tag: cancer
Stanislaw Burzynski: Bad medicine, a bad movie, and bad P.R.
And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the...
Birth Control
From a message posted on Facebook: Is the pill safe? The International Agency for Research on Cancer in a 2007 study made by 21 scientists reported that the pill causes cancer, giving it the highest level of carcinogenicity, the same as cigarettes and asbestos. It also causes stroke, and significantly increases the risk of heart attacks. Several scientific journals have stated that...
Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…
A favorite claim made by cancer quacks (and quacks of all varieties, actually) is that chemotherapy doesn't work. One variant of this claim is what I call the "2% gambit." Basically, this gambit claims that chemotherapy is only 2% effective. Not surprisingly, the evidence backing up the "2% gambit" is a highly flawed study, as is the evidence used by quacks to...
Dummy Medicines, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 1: a Curious Editorial Choice for the New England Journal of Medicine
Background This post concerns the recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titled “Active Albuterol or Placebo, Sham Acupuncture, or No Intervention in Asthma.” It was ably reviewed by Dr. Gorski on Monday, so I will merely summarize its findings: of the three interventions used—inhaled albuterol (a bronchodilator), a placebo inhaler designed to mimic albuterol, or ‘sham acupuncture’—only albuterol...
Hash Oil for Gliomas? What Would You Do?
A friend asked me to look at the evidence for hash oil as a treatment for glioma. His teenage daughter was recently diagnosed with brain cancer: a grade 3 anaplastic ependymoma. It recurred very rapidly after surgery and radiotherapy and the latest tissue diagnosis shows an aggressive grade IV glioma. Her prognosis is not good. No further attempts at curative therapy are...
The benefits and risks of folic acid supplementation
Could a vitamin with proven benefits in one group cause harm to another? That’s the growing concern with folic acid, the vitamin that dramatically reduces the risk of neural tube birth defects such a spina bifida. Studies designed to explore the possible benefits of folic acid for heart disease, stroke and cancer are giving out some worrying signs: At best, folic acid...
Ann Coulter says: Radiation is good for you!
In her eagerness to convince everyone that radiation leakage from the Fukushima reactor damaged by the recent tsunami poses no threat, Ann Coulter turns the concept of hormesis on its head and tries to argue that a little extra ionizing radiation is good for you. Ann Coulter being Ann Coulter, she has no clue what she is talking about, but can spin...
Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?
Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer? If we can harness the atom, why can’t we cure cancer? How many times have you heard these questions, or variants thereof? How many times have you asked this question yourself? Sometimes, I even ask this question myself. Saturday was the two...
Overdiagnosis
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch has written a new book Over-diagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, with co-authors Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. It identifies a serious problem, debunks medical misconceptions and contains words of wisdom. We are healthier, but we are increasingly being told we are sick. We are labeled with diagnoses that may not mean anything to our health....