personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy
oracknows | March 6, 2017I've been blogging fairly regularly about Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski since 2011, and now the story is over...sort of. Unfortunately, as you will see, the ending is far from ideal. It is, however, somewhat better than I had feared it might be. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final ruling of the Texas Medical Board regarding Dr. Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who has been a frequent topic of this blog because of his practices of charging desperate cancer patient tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars for his "antineoplastons" (ANPs) and, later, what he…
oracknows | September 8, 2013It occurs to me that it's been a while since I've written anything about Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Truth be told, I had been hoping not to write about him for a while, and I had been actually succeeding. The last time I took notice of him was about a month ago, when his propagandist Eric Merola whined about how Dr. Hidaeki Tsuda, the Japanese anesthesiologist who was featured in the second movie that Merola made about Burzynski, had seen his latest manuscript rapidly rejected by The Lancet Oncology. In Tsuda's segment in the movie he claimed to have done a clinical trial showing that the…
oracknows | June 5, 2013I realize that I've been focusing on Stanislaw Burzynski the last couple of days, but it's just been one of those weeks. Between the release of Eric Merola's latest paean to the Brave Maverick Doctor and BBC Panorama's report on Burzynski and his activities, it's been an eventful week. My review of the second Burzynski movie and the Panorama report explain a lot, but there are some loose ends left over. So I might as well take care of that today before resuming regular blogging topics. (Yes, I know Stanislaw Burzynski is a regular blogging topic, but too much of a bad thing can get tiresome,…
oracknows | June 3, 2013After yesterday's epic deconstruction of the latest propaganda-fest from everybody's favorite Leni Riefenstahl without the talent, Eric Merola, on his most admired subject, "brave maverick doctor" Stanislaw Burzynski, I needed something science-based to cleanse the rancid taste of intelligence-insulting nonsense from my mind. Through a quirk of fate that couldn't have worked out better if I had planned it myself, a long-expected investigation of the Burzynski Clinic by the BBC, presented on its venerable news program Panorama. It was entitled, appropriately enough, Cancer: Hope for Sale? Ever…
oracknows | June 2, 2013Well, I've finally seen it, and it was even worse than I had feared. One might even say that watching it was like repeatedly smacking my head into a brick wall. It felt so good when it finally stopped.
I'm referring, of course, to Eric Merola's latest cinematic "effort. Ever since it was revealed that ric Merola's planned to make a sequel to his 2010 propaganda "documentary" about Stanislaw Burzynski, Burzynski The Movie: Cancer Is Serious Business, whose rank stupidity provided me with copious blogging material, I've finally actually seen the finished product, such as it is. Of course,…
oracknows | May 8, 2013A key pillar of the Stanislaw Burzynski antineoplaston marketing machine, a component of the marketing strategy without which his clinic would not be able to attract nearly as many desperate cancer patients to Houston for either his antineoplaston therapy (now under a temporary shutdown by the FDA that, if science were to reign, will become permanent) or his "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy," which Burzynski represents as a discovery of his that large NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers like M.D. Anderson or Memorial Sloan-Kettering are only now starting to copy, is the…
oracknows | April 19, 2013If there is one aspect of cranks that is almost universal (besides the aforementioned tendency to want to prove themselves through things like "live televised debates"), it's a tendency to want to shut down the criticism of its opposition. True, such a tendency is a human trait as well and used far too often by, say, corporations, but it's one that seems to be cranked up to 11 and beyond, as they say, in cranks.
We've seen it time and time again. Most often, it takes the form of some sort of legal bullying, such as when the British Chiropractic Association bit off more than it could chew by…
oracknows | January 6, 2013Today's post will be relatively brief (for an Orac post, that is). The reason is that it's some very sad news that depresses me greatly. It's also because I don't want to distract too much from the announcement I'd like to highlight. About a month and a half ago, around the same time that Stanislaw Burzynski managed to get off on a technicality, with the Texas Medical Board agreeing to dismiss its case against Burzynski because it apparently couldn't go after him for treatment decisions made by doctors he hired, I met an unfortunate girl named Amelia Saunders. Amelia had been diagnosed with a…
oracknows | December 12, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Given that the blog seems to have been infiltrated with Burzynski trolls again and Eric Merola threatens to make a sequel to the execrable movie he made about Burzynski a couple of years ago, now seems a perfect time to rerun a post of Orac's from about a year ago. In fact, now might be a perfect time to rerun these posts. Indeed, maybe I'll even rerun the whole trio, as Orac has been thinking he needs to do a major update and…
oracknows | December 4, 2012Here we go again.
Because he's been in the news lately, I've been writing a lot about the "brave maverick doctor" known as Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have spectacular results treating normally incurable cancers using something he calls antineoplastons. Unfortunately, the reason Burzynski has featured prominently in the skeptical blogosphere over the last two weeks is because, unfortunately, the Texas Medical Board (TMB) dropped its case against him. Basically, Burzynski got off on a technicality.
For purposes of this post, I don't want to dwell on this case, because I've already pretty…
oracknows | November 20, 2012I've made no secret of my opinion of a certain "alternative" cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, of the infamous Burzynski Clinic. When last we left Burzynski, his propagandist lapdog bootlicker documentary film maker Eric Merola was most unhappy with bloggers like me for having the temerity to tell it like it is when it comes to his film subject's activities. Merola, you might recall, was responsible for Burzynski the Movie – Cancer Is a Serious Business, which I characterized as pure propaganda so incompetently made that it would make Leni Riefenstahl blush. After a couple of…
oracknows | November 2, 2012I hate to end the week on a down note, but sometimes it's necessary. It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski. I'm sure you recall Burzynski. He's a hero in the alternative medicine world, having been cast as a martyr to The Man (i.e., the FDA and Big Pharma) because of his selling of a dubious cancer cure that he calls antineoplastons. Although he's been selling his questionable cancer treatments for thirty years now, he's recently been in the news a lot lately thanks to a credulous paean to his activities in the form of a movie that was released in 2010 called,…
oracknows | August 15, 2012It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Well, not really, although it has been a while since I've discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become famous because her family had managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds with the help of some U.K. celebrities. Burzynski, as regular readers will recall, became a frequent topic on this blog last fall after one of his lackeys decided to issue vacuous legal threats…
oracknows | June 5, 2012A very sad bit of news has come to my attention, courtesy of a reader. Billie Bainbridge has died of her brainstem cancer.
Regular readers might remember this unfortunate young girl, who was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma of the brainstem last year. The tumor was inoperable, and, unfortunately, Billie's parents turned, as all too frequently happens, to a dubious doctor by the name of Stanislaw Burzynski. Dr. Burzynski, as you will recall, is a doctor in Houston who claims to have discovered and purified anti-cancer compounds from urine (which he dubbed "antineoplastons")…
oracknows | December 5, 2011Last week, I applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to a movie about a physician and "researcher" named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, founder of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute in Houston. I refer you to my original smackdown for details, but in brief Dr. Burzynski claimed in the 1970s to have made a major breakthrough in cancer therapy through his discovery of anticancer substances in the urine that he dubbed "antineoplastons," which turned out to be mainly modified amino acids and peptides. Since the late 1970s, when he founded his clinic, Dr. Burzynski has been…