melanoma
oracknows | October 1, 2017Last week, I wrote about Rigvir, a highly dubious cancer therapy developed in Latvia. Rigvir is an oncolytic virus, and its proponents claim that it targets only cancer cells for destruction, leaving normal tissue alone. Its history and how it came to be approved in Latvia in 2004 and added to the Latvian Health Ministry's list of reimbursable medications in 2011 remain rather mysterious, but how it is being marketed does not. For example, Rigvir has become a new favorite treatment at a number of quack clinics, such as the Hope4Cancer Institute in Mexico, where Rigvir is offered along with…
oracknows | September 24, 2017This blog is based in the United States, and I'm an American. Unfortunately, this produces a difficult-to-avoid baked-in bias towards medicine as it is practiced in the US and, to a lesser extent, as it is practiced in the English-speaking world, because English is my language and I can read accounts coming out of English-speaking countries. The same bias exists with respect to pseudo-medicine, with our concentration having been primarily on either quackery that is practiced in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia (and sometimes New Zealand). It's not because I'm not interested in medicine and…
jhalper | October 27, 2015 Metastatic melanoma tumors. Left exhibits low or absent expression of RASA2 and reduced survival, typical of about 35% of patients. The sample on the right exhibits high RASA2 expression and increased survival
Rates of melanoma are increasing, even as the rates of other common cancers are decreasing. According to the Melanoma Research Alliance, it is the most common cancer diagnosis in young adults 25-29 years old in the United States, the second most common cancer in young people 15-29, and its incidence has tripled in the last 30 years.
What are we doing about it? The Weizmann Institute’…
oracknows | May 28, 2013Not too long ago, a reader asked me about black salve, and then not too long later I saw a commenter mention black salve. It occurs to me that, in all the years I've been doing this blog and my other blog, I don't think I've ever actually written about black salve, except in passing. So I searched the blog, and my memory appears to be correct about this. I really haven't written much about black salve. It's been mentioned several times, but I haven't really dedicated a post to it, even though that wretchedest of wretched hives of scum and quackery, NaturalNews.com, has promoted black salve in…
oracknows | September 20, 2010A critical aspect of both evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is the randomized clinical trial. Ideally, particularly for conditions with a large subjective component in symptomatology, the trial should be randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. As Kimball Atwood pointed out just last week (me too), in EBM, scientific prior probability tends to be discounted while in SBM it is not, particularly for therapies that are wildly improbable strictly on the basis of basic science, but for both the randomized clinical trial remains, in essence, where the "rubber…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, premature hair graying, autosomal dominant trait, genetics, horses, hair color, syntaxin-17, melanocortin-1 receptor, cis-acting regulatory mutation, melanoma, evolution
This horse is in the process of losing its pigment.
It will end up being all white by the time it is eight years old.
Image: Horse Wallpaper [larger view].
Even though I have always been a fan of black horses, my heart did leap at the sight of the noble Shadowfax racing towards Gandalf in response to his call in the Lord of the Rings. White horses have symbolized purity throughout most ages…