Interesting article about the many doctors who had their cancer cures stopped!

angec said:

Yes Alice it is true.
Yes Alice it is true. Everyone is out to make a buck. I am not defending this doctor Per'se I just feel that no one individual will be able to come out with their medicines because the "big companies" want it all! The FDA and the big companies are working together. No one can deny it. A lot of alternative treatments have to be done outside of the US as well, and there are plenty getting good results.

Nano, I did read that dr. B charged a lot of money and also he had turned others away. I am not defending that or saying he was right to do that. The point I was making is that he was able to help many patients and there is documentation for it as well as those who have testified in court who were helped by his treatments, it cannot be denied. I saw several pieces on the news in the past and the movie that was out on him. There are other possibilities out there for cancer and the avenues should be explored. That is my point.

Texas_wedge said:

Why it matters
After lengthy vacillation (based on the premonition that if I get started here I may not be able to stop) I've elected to pitch in on this debate.

So I'll get warmed up by indulging my pedantry before getting down to business. Thus, first: I get irritated by ellipsis in using metaphors that lose the meaning - the proof isn't in the pudding 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating', the full force of which is that you can't judge a pudding simply by the way it looks, rather you have to get stuck into it and find out how it tastes, which is very material to the debate here.

Next, I'm a little anxious about Ange's formulation "They would not have thrown his case out if they could stop him for good!" This seems to me to betoken a little haziness about the way the Anglo-American legal system works. It's an adversarial system (as opposed to the inquisitorial jursiprudence of the Civilan systems of continental Europe, based on Romen Law). The roles of prosecution and judgment must remain entirely distinct. The judgment is not in the gift of either side - otherwise it would be a "kangaroo court". The judge threw out the case here, much to the annoyance of the prosecution and to the profound disgust of David Gorski (see the link Nano gave). However, one of Ange's points bothers me too and I'll pick that up in a moment.

Another quick tut! tut! first over Nano's reference to "a phenomena" - phenomenon, please, N. (Ironically one can speak of 'a plural' but an indefinite article can't govern a plural - for some reason that reminds me of the quip “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?”).

I have a lot of sympathy for Ange's question as to why (especially after 30 years or so of attempts to do so) his opponents haven't been able to stop Burzynski. Perhaps he is a total, self-serving charlatan but if the case against him is as unequivocal as Nano and 'Orac'(David Gosrski) maintain, how has he, for so long, evaded demolition in the courts. It's not as though his opposition don't have all the financial resources necessary to do so, countless times over. How can he have 'escaped on a technicality' time after time?

Please note that this isn't an apologia for Burzynski about whom I don't have enough solid information to form a judgment. I simply echo Ange's implicit question.

I agree with Nano about how easy it is to craft propaganda that looks plausible (though your "Fox News" seems to find that impossible - I think, N, that you meant to say 'entertainment masked as news', rather than vice versa?).

If I catch her drift, Ange thinks we can too easily throw the baby out with the bathwater in our attempt to impose rigour and accountability on innovative endeavours. I'm guessing that we can all agree that there are snake-oil purveyors we need to thwart in their bids to fleece the innocents in our society. At the same time, I trust we can all agree that, as Nano so aptly puts it "the FDA and big Pharma do work together in ways that are not always in our (the patient's) best interest". When they act counter to society's needs they are every bit as self-serving as the snake-oil salesmen, but on a vastly more damaging scale and I believe that that was a central point of Ange's.

That said, I don't want to dissent from Nano's "On the other hand, within the last decade they have managed to provide us with targeted molecular drugs and other miraculous substances that are currently prolonging our lives - if not saving them." Nor will I demur when it comes to his " Of these two "evils" I know which one to choose. The one that works." However, I think it's all too easy to get into black and white thinking at this point.

A major pitfall is getting drawn unwittingly into false dichotomies. Now, as an Englishman, I may be too prone to 'the art of compromise' and being too inclined to see that there are valid points on both sides of an argument, but I do see a danger in espousing a viewpoint so strongly that we blind ourselves to its limits. Nano has cited Orac's appraisal in support of the case against Burzynski and I think that's useful.

'Orac' has a right to be heard on the topic. He's a surgical oncologist, specialising in breast cancer and a research scientist involved in work of considerable potential value to us, involved as we are with RCC. He has a couple of blogs and I've read quite a bit of his writing with interest, in the past. He is also a man of such overwhelming modesty that when choosing the name of a supercomputer for his "nom de blog" (as he calls it) he eschewed adopting Douglas Adams's "Deep Thought" (Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) in favour of "Orac" from Blake's 7, a computer of virtually infinite capacity but also notorious for verbosity and irascibility - a bad-tempered "What is it now?" when being disturbed by an enquiry from one of the crew (Avon, I think).

[It's amusing to me that he likes the British cult series (Blake's 7) which was a favourite of mine but which must have been screened before he was born, or not much after (?). It was only around for about 3 years, having been great fun for some of us, despite its risible production values - lacking any of the sort of gloss that so often makes Hollywood's output speciously attractive and Bollywood's merely ridiculous. I still can't forget the attractions of the delectable "Servalan", played by the alluring English actress Jacqueline Pearce, who is almost my age. Ironically, she succumbed to the disease Orac is expert on - breast cancer - seven years ago and had a recurrence this year, starting chemo for it on Friday 13th (April), this year. She left Africa and her beloved animals there to come back to London (she grew up near London) for treatment at a state-of-the-art new Macmillan cancer centre here and seems to be doing well.]

But, I digress! Orac is so committed to his viewpoint that I suspect he can lose perspective. He writes entertainingly but sometimes so fast, I presume, that he sometimes loses his grammar a little and occasionally says the opposite of what he means. I'd like to take issue with things he says but must acknowledge that I basically agree with his fundamental approach. He espouses SBM (Science based medicine) as a progression from EBM (Evidence based medicine) and considers that there is a shortfall in EBM in failing to pay due regard to Bayesian probability.

Alice mentioned her thoughts regarding similarities between the medical world and politicians. In an engaging recent blog ("Moneyball, politics, and science-based medicine", three weeks ago in his "Respectful Insolence" blog) Orac talks about the fruitful statistical approach to baseball performance ("Sabermetrics") that has paid off similarly in the realms of psephology and should be given its head in medicine!

Gorski is still a comparatively young man and will doubtless go places from being a junior author on a number of academic papers to being a force in his own right. I have the impression that he is one who responds over-sensitively to the charge of being potentially too much in thrall to the Establishment. He has tried to shoot the fox of critics of his stance by coining the memorable phrase of "the pharma shill gambit". I'm not in a position to evaluate how beholden he may be to drug companies for assisting in his research but he volubly objects to implications that he derives financial gain from involvement in investigations that may favour the interests of Big Pharma.

Whether my feeling that he may be too much the enthusiast [nearly said "zealot", Nano ;-)]
for the "scientific" approach to be truly scientific, is something I'll ponder over whatever time I have left to ponder anything. I think no-one should be excessively a 'respecter of persons' but I'm put off by his take on his namesake, the late David Servan-Schreiber - he will do well to match his justified eminence. I'd like to know his assessments of Jerry White and Dr. Keith Block - again men whose achievements he may never match. Time will tell. I'm puzzled by his seemingly equivocal relationship with Ben Goldacre whose hard-science scepticism he shares but whose new book "Bad Pharma" may not commend itself so much. Anyway, I'll try to read more of an interesting writer who is a deeper thinker than many in the medical profession.

This brings me full circle to the point that exercised Ange. She will doubtless be cheered by the thesis of Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma, viz:

"Medicine is broken. While patients trust that their drugs are safeand regulated, and doctors attempt to prescribe the most effective cures, the global pharmaceutical industry is a $600 billion business rife with corruption and greed.

Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But companies run biased trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the results. Unflattering data is [sic!] simply buried. Government regulators withhold vitally important information. Seemingly independent doctor and patient groups are funded by the industry, in a world so cracked that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry. The result of all this is inevitable: patients are harmed, unnecessarily, in huge numbers."