cancer
oracknows | July 24, 2015The conspiracy deepens.
What conspiracy? You ask. Haven't you heard? Big pharma is out killing alternative medicine doctors! Or at least that's what you'll be told if you venture towards the deep dark underbelly of quack websites. Up until now, the most prominent "victim" was autism quack, Jeff Bradstreet, who, according to police, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest in the woods of North Carolina but who, according to antivaccine advocates and "autism biomed" quacks, must have been assassinated by a big pharma black ops team. Or something. After all, as we know, the FDA had…
oracknows | July 20, 2015And now for something completely different...but depressingly the same in some ways.
Longtime readers—and I do mean longtime—might remember from several years ago a certain case adjudicated before the Vaccine Court. I'm referring, of course, to the Autism Omnibus. In Autism Omnibus, some 4,800 claimants were bringing action seeking compensation for "vaccine injury" characterized by autism. Basically, it was a large number of parents who thought vaccines had caused their children's autism seeking compensation from the Vaccine Court, and they implicated the MMR and thimerosal-containing…
oracknows | July 19, 2015Mammography is a topic that, as a breast surgeon, I can't get away from. It's a useful tool that those of us who treat breast cancer patients have used for over 30 years to detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women and thus (or so we hope) decrease their risk of dying of breast cancer through early intervention. We have always known, however, that mammography is an imperfect tool. Oddly enough, its imperfections come from two different directions. On the one hand, in women with dense breasts its sensitivity can be maddeningly low, leading it to miss breast cancers camouflaged by the…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2015This week, the Center for Public Integrity launched a new investigative series into the failure of regulators to protect workers for toxic exposures. The series begins with the story of a bricklayer who developed acute silicosis after exposure to silica, a deadly substance that threatens more than 2 million workers and that OSHA has been struggling to regulate for 40 years. The bricklayer, Chris Johnson, is just 40 years old and can expect to survive less than five years. Reporters Jim Morris, Jamie Smith Hopkins and Maryam Jameel write:
An 18-month investigation by the Center for Public…
oracknows | June 24, 2015My opinion about medical marijuana has been fairly consistent. First, the claims made by its advocates for it far exceed the evidence for its benefit, which is why I've referred to it as the "new herbalism." Of course, it's not really very new, but it is herbalism in that medical marijuana advocates make grandiose claims for using their favorite "drug" in its plant form rather than doing the standard thing that modern medicine does with natural products and try to isolate the active compounds, in this case a class of molecules known as cannabinoids. Second, although medical marijuana might…
oracknows | June 14, 2015Over the years, I've written a lot about the intersection between the law and science in medicine. Sometimes, I support a particular bill, such as SB 277. Sometimes I oppose a bill, such as right-to-try or laws licensing naturopaths. The case I will discuss here is unusual in that it is a case of the law getting ahead of what the science says in a manner that will likely do little, if any, good for patients, cause a lot of confusion until the science is worked out better, and end up costing patients money for little or no benefit. I am referring to laws mandating the reporting of high-breast-…
oracknows | June 8, 2015Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
- attributed to Hippocrates
Who said anything about medicine? Let's eat!
- attributed to one of Hippocrates forgotten (and skeptical) students
Who hasn't seen or heard Hippocrates' famous quote about letting food be your medicine and your medicine your food? If you have Facebook friends who are the least bit into "natural" medicine or living, you've almost certainly come across it in your feed, and if you're a skeptic who pays the least bit of attention to what's going on in the quackosphere you will almost certainly have seen it plastered…
oracknows | June 1, 2015I've been following Mike Adams a long time, going back to 2007 and even before. It's difficult to find anyone who can pack more pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and outright hateful bile into an article when he has a mind to do so. I've documented this tendency many times, so many times that, each time I write about one of his rants, I tell myself it'll be the last time. But it never is, because Adams is so vile and I cannot abide the way he spits on the grave of people who died of cancer, people like Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, Elizabeth Edwards, and Farrah Fawcett. Every time, his MO is…
oracknows | May 31, 2015I have some sad news for my readers today. It's even sadder given that it's only been two and a half weeks since I last had to mourn the passing of one of our own, a champion of science-based medicine, a regular commenter of five years, lilady. Unfortunately, this time around, it is my sad duty to inform you that Dr. Wallace Sampson has passed away at the age of 85. I knew about it late last week, but I wanted to wait until official obituaries were published, such as this one in the Mercury News.
I first encountered Wally (as his friends called him) through his writings deconstructing various…
sa smith | May 27, 2015WHOOOOOOOO!!!!
April 7, 2010:
Using HSV-1 to cure metastatic melanoma
May 26, 2015:
Talimogene Laherparepvec Improves Durable Response Rate in Patients With Advanced Melanoma
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
They just published the results of Phase III clinical trials of a herpes simplex-1 genetically modified to kill cancers, specifically, advanced melanoma.
The GMO virus has a name now: T-VEC.
And instead of looking at 50 patients who all got the virus, this study was a group of 436 patients , randomly assigned 2:1 to a treatment (T-VEC) group, or GM-CSF only group (the immunostimulatory molecule…
oracknows | May 27, 2015When it comes to the use of what is sometimes called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, increasingly, "integrative medicine," there is a certain narrative. It's a narrative promoted by CAM proponents that does its best to convince the public that there is nothing unusual, untoward, or odd about CAM use, even though much of CAM consists of treatments that are based on prescientific concepts of human physiology and pathology, such as traditional Chinese medicine or homeopathy. In other words, it's a narrative designed to "normalize" CAM usage (and therefore CAM practice), making…
kkrisberg | May 13, 2015In a perfect example of how the Affordable Care Act is broadening access to relatively low-cost and potentially life-saving interventions, a new study finds that the health reform law likely led more than 1 million young women to seek out the human papillomavirus vaccine and protect themselves against cervical cancer.
In a study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers studied the impact of two ACA provisions: one requiring insurance providers to extend dependent coverage through age 26 and another that required insurers to offer a range of preventive services, such as…
gregladen | May 13, 2015Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones recently posted an item called "Scores of Scientists Raise Alarm About the Long-Term Health Effects of Cellphones." I like Josh's work, but there are some problems with this article I want to point out, some of which parallel problems in the more general discussion of cell phone safety.
Before looking at the Mother Jones piece, here's the bottom line: There is no known mechanism by which cell phone use can lead to cancer (usually, brain cancer is of concern). There have been many studies on this and related issues. They vary in quality and in what they look…
kkrisberg | April 27, 2015Today, Maine’s legislature held a hearing on the Toxic Chemicals in the Workplace Act, a proposal to require employers to identify harmful chemicals in the workplace and replace them with safer alternatives. It’s the perfect example of state action on behalf of worker safety and exactly the kind of measure that might no longer be possible under two congressional proposals aimed at overhauling the federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
As Congress considers a number of legislative proposals to reform the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) — a law that hasn’t been updated since its passage…
oracknows | April 27, 2015Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…
cmonforton | April 17, 2015The AFL-CIO outlined in an April 13 letter the “serious flaws and deficiencies” in a bill introduced by Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Tom Udall (D-NM) to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The country’s largest labor federation noted its deep involvement in the passage of TSCA in 1976, but its disappointment that the 40 year old law has “failed to provide meaningful and effective regulation” of toxic substances. (Even efforts to ban asbestos failed under the law.)
The labor federation has an important voice and perspective when it comes to chemical hazards. Workers are the…
oracknows | April 5, 2015Recent articles in The Daily Mail and The Australian reminded me that it's been over a month since the unfortunate demise of Jess Ainscough, a young Australian woman who was diagnosed with an epithelioid sarcoma of her left upper extremity in 2008. Before I get to the articles, a brief recap is in order.
This is a very rare tumor that is generally slow growing but relentless, with most untreated patients dying within 10 years, although with radical surgery and complete removal of all tumor deposits it is possible to produce ten year survivals on the order of 49-72%, closer to 72% for young…
oracknows | April 3, 2015Why, oh why, did I look at GreenMedInfo again?
You remember GreenMedInfo? It's yet another wretched hive of scum and quackery, but with a twist. Its proprietor, Sayer Ji, thinks he's an expert at interpreting the biomedical literature. Unfortunately, as he demonstrates time and time again with depressing regularity, he is nothing of the sort. In reality, what Ji is an expert at is cherry picking medical studies and torturing them until they confess agreement with whatever quack idea he's currently espousing. In the wake of the news coverage of Angelina Jolie's decision to have her ovaries…
oracknows | April 1, 2015It's no secret that I don't have a high opinion of naturopathy. Just enter the word "naturopathy" into the search box of this blog, and you'll quickly see what I mean. Indeed, when last I mentioned the topic a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the revelations of Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who realized what a load of pseudoscientific quackery she had bought into, unfortunately, after having finished naturopathy school with a quarter million dollars of debt and having practiced for a while. Her account confirmed my impression of naturopathy as a veritable cornucopia of quackery…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I sat on my couch last night, laptop sitting in front of me, I awaited the Ken Burns adaptation of Siddartha Mukherjee's excellent book The Emperor of All Maladies into a three part television documentary to air on PBS. I'm not sure whether I'll blog the show or not, but if I do I'll probably wait until all three episodes have aired. In the meantime, this seems as good a time as any to go back to a story that I saw a week ago but somehow, thanks to grants, traveling to Houston, and other distractions that I wanted to blog about more, never got around to. Since The Emperor of All Maladies,…