Remember yesterday how I said I would be following the “rule of three” in blogging about the Burzynski Clinic, its questionable practices in charging patients huge sums of money for dubious therapies, the even more dubious science behind his “antineoplaston therapy,” and his shill Marc Stephens threatening bloggers with legal action in hilariously crude ways? In other words, in the tradition of comics and documentaries everywhere, I’d stop at three posts about Burzynski, at least for the moment. I lied. Well, no, actually I didn’t lie. When I wrote yesterday’s post, I fully planned on taking a break from Burzynski …
Month: November 2011
Burzynski The Movie: Is Stanislaw Burzynski a pioneering cancer researcher or a quack?
I’ve been thinking about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. You remember the Holy Hand Grenade, don’t you? It was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a cleric goes on and on about how “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.” Yesterday, I counted two and am now proceeding to three. I figured that, after spending two posts on how Burzynski’s minions and shills (in particular a man named Marc Stephens) have …
Marc Stephens issues more threats on behalf of the Burzynski Clinic
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I was simultaneously alarmed and amused at how someone named Marc Stephens, who claims (although presents no evidence for his claim) that he represents the rogue physician and “researcher” Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, had taken to threatening skeptical bloggers who criticize Dr. Burzynski’s highly dubious cancer therapy, a therapy Burzynski dubbed “antineoplastons.” In particular, Mr. Stephens threatened a blogger by the name of Andy Lewis, whose nom de blog is Le Canard Noir and whose blog and website, The Quackometer, I’ve followed for years now. As a reward for my having written about the incident, it …
A P.R. flack from the Burzynski Clinic threatens a skeptical blogger
A common thread that runs through the activities of various antiscience cranks, quacks, charlatans, and denialists is an extreme aversion to criticism. In fact, in many cases their aversion to criticism is so extreme that a common reaction of cranks to even legitimate criticism is to try to shut that criticism down any way possible. Sometimes, this intimidation takes the form of harassment or attempts to get a critic fired from his job, as has happened with René Najera and yours truly. this takes the form of lawsuits or abuse of the legal process, as has been experienced by Dr. …
No more Acupuncturists Without Borders?
One of the more depressing things I’ve seen coming from various practitioners of quackery is a tendency for them to mimic Médecins Sans Frontières (in English, Doctors Without Borders). You know Doctors Without Borders, don’t you? It’s a fantastic organization that brings volunteer physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals into disaster areas and war zones in order to bring health care to people who desperately need it regardless of politics or ideology. Unfortunately, because MSF is such an admirable group, quacks with good intentions but no effective remedies have mimicked its methods, dropping practitioners of various forms of woo …
Compare and contrast
I’ve spent nearly seven years and an enormous amount of verbiage writing about the difference between pseudoscience and science, between cranks and skeptics, between denialists and scientists. Along the way, I’ve identified a number of factors common to cranks and denialists. For example, two of the most prominent characteristics are a tendency to cherry pick studies and evidence and–shall we say?–a major “inconsistency” in how they deal with data. If a study appears to support their viewpoint, it doesn’t matter how small it is, how preliminary it is, how poorly designed it is, or how weak its conclusions are. It …
Picking up one’s marbles and going home
One of the greatest gifts anyone can give is to donate his body to science after death. Such anatomic gifts contribute to the training of medical students, residents, and other medical professionals as well as being used for research that can contribute to the advancement of medical science. One of the things that makes an anatomic gift such a profound gift is that the donor usually has little control over what their body or body parts will be used for. There is, thus, more than a little trust in medical science involved in these gifts. When the deceased is a …
“Ayurgenomics”: The return of woo-omics
Every so often, I come across something in the world of woo that leaves my jaw dangling from its joint in utter astonishment that anyone could think such a thing was a good idea. Sometimes these things are investigations into various paranormal phenomena. Sometimes, it’s the latest anti-science denialist screed from a creationist. Other times, it’s a contortion of science so egregious that I can’t believe anyone would actually do it–or that anyone would actually mistake that woo for good science. This time around, it’s genomics that’s being abused. This is a topic that, although I don’t write about it …
Anti-vaccine propaganda lands in New York City this weekend
I’ve heard it said (actually, I’ve said it myself) that if you don’t have the science and evidence to back up your point of view, in order to persuade someone, make a movie. At least, this seems to be the philosophy of a number of cranks who have produced movies promoting pseudoscience over the last five years or so. The first one of these movies that really caught my attention was an anti-evolution, pro-“intelligent design” creationism documentary narrated by Ben Stein and released in 2008, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie was pure creationist propaganda, complete with Ben Stein visiting …
The return of the Medical Hypotheses anti-vaccine howler
When it rains it pours, as they say. Yes, sometimes there’s so much going on that I can’t possibly blog about it all, particularly now that I’ve cut back a bit. This week seems to be turning into one of those weeks. Yesterday, I couldn’t resist having a bit of fun with the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher when she released a seriously hypocritical and silly press release whining about how mistreated she thinks her organization, the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had the audacity to–gasp!–write …