Two more tragic tales of Burzynski patients

His usual pattern is to make claims that the tumor’s increase in size means that the therapy was working because the tumor is “swelling” while the person undergoing treatment suffers significant side effects.

<facepalm>

Growth is what defines a malignant tumor as being malignant. Making this claim puts Dr. Burzynski firmly in woo territory, erasing any possibility that he might have been merely misguided (as if his practice of charging patients hundreds of thousands of dollars each weren’t evidence enough of that point).

I can’t help but wonder how much the anti-SBM forces’ derision of the ‘cancer industry’ and pharma though their many diatribes, ‘documentaries’ and “investigative reports” influences people to even *consider* creatures like Dr B as providers.
Take a bow, Mike Adams, Gary Null, Dr Mercola, Suzanne Somers, Tim Bolen!

My husband’s beautiful niece was told there was nothing more that could be done to stop her cancer, just as she came into a small inheritance. Instead of spending the money on painful, futile treatments, her husband chartered a plane and took her, her siblings, and their spouses on one, last, live-it-up-til-you-die blowout vacation at their favorite Mexican resort.

Perhaps it was a frivolous use of the money, but it left her family with cherished memories of that last, happy time together. For the comfort it gave her family, I think it was money well spent.

Here we have two of Burzynski’s patients (Kristie Gibbs and Nadyne Missler) whose pleas for funds for treatment at the Burzynski Clinic, are on the Setting Them Free. org website:

http://settingthemfree.org/patient-profiles/kristie-coe/

http://settingthemfree.org/patient-profiles/nadyne-missler/

And, here are their obituaries:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/news-journal/obituary.aspx?n=kristie-suzanne-gibbs-coe&pid=157085308

http://obits.dignitymemorial.com/dignity-memorial/obituary.aspx?n=Nadyne-Missler&lc=4938&pid=155407215&mid=4950232&locale=en-US

Rory, could you link to your editorial. I searched the HC site but only the original story came up.

lilady,

Is there any evidence that either of these two women actually went to Houston, or were they just trying to raise the money? Neither obituary mentions Burzynski, so either they didn’t get there or they weren’t too happy with him. Neither woman’s name shows up on the BPG list either.

I noticed that Nadyne Missler also followed Robert O. Young’s “alkalyze your blood” pH nonsense. (Why can’t people understand that you cannot change the pH of your blood? But that’s another story…)

Maybe the waiver patients sign limits any action against the clinic. Apparently it’s read out loud to incoming patients as well as presented in document form to avoid any “future misunderstandings”, as in “they never told me…”

I don’t know how the law works in the US, apart from having read John Grisham novels, but you’d think a lawyer could put together a class action suit from all the disgruntled patients and/or their surviving family members.

If an ambulance chaser lawyer can find dozens of masseurs willing to testify against John Travolta, you’d think a legitimate attorney could assemble quite a nice group of people looking for damages from Stan. I imagine they’d have to be from the US, in order to file suit in the US. I’m sure some of Stan’s UK and Australian patients would like in on that lawsuit too.

Technically, you can change your blood PH; however you’ll probably die.

@ Marc Stephens: I located a few Facebook pages about fundraising levels for Kristie Coe to undergo treatment at Buzynski’s clinic…and now fundraisers set up for her children’s welfare, after her death. I’m unable to find any websites about her “progress” while undergoing Burzynski’s treatment plan.

There is even less information about Nadyne Missler. I knew you would “pick-up” on the quack diet she followed:

“At that time, I was surprised and realized that the chemo was a temporary fix. I began researching other alternatives. A friend worked at Dr. Robert Young’s Ranch — he had me read and follow The pH Miracle plan by Dr. Young. I began seriously eating to keep my blood and body alkaline. I became a vegetarian (not vegan).”

I wouldn’t expect that either dead patient would be *featured* on Burzynski’s patient testimonial website.

@ cervantes: Perhaps the reason why patients and their families are not suing Burzynski, is because many of them are still enamored with him. One patient from Florida did sue him to recover the money he stole, when he used her credit card to pay for *traditional* chemotherapeutic drugs at jacked-up prices, ordered through his free-standing pharmacy:

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/01/more_trouble_for_dr_stanislaw_burzynski.php

I applaud your continued attention to Burzynski’s dubious (to say the least) medical practice.

Nit: This sentence “Elsewhere, on various patient discussion forums, Burzynski shills make it sound as though Burzynski is the only one who can save him.” should end with “the only one who can save them.”

@ Eric Lund: Reading from Burzynski’s patients *testimonials* and fundraising sites, I see that these patients (in all instances?), have been told by their oncologists that their cancers are in advanced stages and/or incurable.

Who can blame patients, given these ominous prognoses…or their families…for seeking a *cure* from Burzynski? I suspect that Burzynski has perused potential patients medical records…and refuses to see patients who may have a good chance for remission…not a cure…with some additional *traditional* treatment.

@lilady

Interesting, but not quite what I’m looking for. That is just an advertisement for a trial. What I’m seeking is the actual consent form that subjects and Dr. Burzynski must both sign before they can be enrolled in the study.

I don’t think anyone is blaming the patients for seeking a cure, butcondemning Burzynski for offering them false hope at extraordinary prices.

I don’t think Brzynski would refuse to enroll patients with good prognoses for remission following standard care. if anything I think he’d find such patients most appealing, since if they do go into remission after receiving some mix of standard chemo and antineoplastins he can claim it was the antineoplastins that saved them.

I’m wondering about the future of his clinical trials. PhasE — trials address basically safety. At some point he is going to havew to address efficacy in a valid fashion. That means he is going to have to compare conventional treatment against conventional + neoplastins, righty? Or will he put up just neoplastins? Because he certainly can’t run neoplastins vs placebo.

So to what extent is he qualified to administor modern stayte-of-the-art chemo/radiation? Does he have the oncology qualifications to pull off a legitimate trial?

Could that be the reason he is stalling the onset of his phase 3 trials?

And another “success story” for the clinic, back from 1997:
http://articles.courant.com/1997-01-12/news/9701120070_1_brain-tumor-stanislaw-burzynski-mainstream-medicine

@lilady and Todd W

with regards to the consent form, I’ll admit to being curious as well.

I’ll admit to little/no legal knowledge, but if the clinic had not lived up to their part of the bargain, wouldn’t that render any contract null and void? Or is that why it’s a ‘trial’? So that he’s not accountable.

There has to be a way to shut him down. Is there some sort of ‘consumer watchdog’ that he could be reported to for false advertising?

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
This much we know:
Stan B can’t cure you.

Why does Dr. Oz showcase him then.

Dr Oz showcases all sorts of quacks and charltans. Being “showcased” by Dr. Oz is a good indication of quackery rather than a sign of credibility. Oz use to have people do Reiki over the patient during heart surgery. Like his mentor Oprah Winfrey Oz doesn’t care whether or not something is true, all he cares about is will it get him good ratings. In his business (commercial television) attracting an audience of the credulous and gullible is desirable for sponsors, since such an audience is more easily manipulated into buying overpriced crap.

@ meg: Patients and their families…for the most part…believe that Burzynski and his clinic did fulfill their “end of the bargain”.

He only takes patients who have failed to achieve a sustainable remission…they are in advance stages of cancer. (Re-read the links to patient consent forms that I provided at # 22 and #24)

Patients willingly sign a contract that does not promise any cures or any remissions. There are two qualifiers to begin treatment at the Burzynski Clinic:

-You are terminally ill

-You come up with hard cash for the *treatments*

@12:
“Why can’t people understand that you cannot change the pH of your blood?”

But OF COURSE you can! If you want PH to go up, fill a syringe with bleach and inject it into your veins. If you want it to go down, fill the syringe with hydrochloric acid.

Just follow these simple instructions, and it’s a CERTAINTY you won’t die of cancer!

David N. Brown
Mesa, Arizona

@Kelly M Bray

And woe is you if you don’t have the hard cash.

Woe is you either way seemingly.

His care is “supposedly” better only according to him, and even he won’t produce evidence to support that. If Burzynski’s care really is as good as he claims, he is lacking in even the basics of empathy. A good person who had a cure for cancer, or for a specific cancer, would publish the data and encourage other doctors to use his techniques to save lives.

@skeptic –

Hi everyone, Just asking aren’t there people that have actually benefited to his treatment?

Is there any solid evidence that anyone has benefited specifically from his treatments? I don’t see any. If you have some, I’d like to see. In advance, let me tell you that I would prefer to see published peer-reviewed results of a double blind clinical trial. Don’t tell me “the medical establishment is covering it up” because Burzynski claims to be running a clinical trial. He’s charging people a great deal of money to enroll in a clinical trial, so he must think it is worthwhile to run a clinical trial, right?

Lacking that, I would like to see some very well documented high quality anecdotal case studies. That would mean seeing independent radiology, pathology, and clinical data documenting that case report patients had in fact been correctly diagnosed with poor prognosis cancer unlikely to be successfully treated by conventional means, documentation of exactly how the patients were then treated by Burzynski, and subsequent documentation of both unexpectedly long survival and remission, reduction, or unexpected stabilizing of tumor burden, documented with independent radiology and pathology reports. This would not be difficult to produce, if, in fact, patients were benefiting from the treatments.

His care isn’t a hundred percent, but supposedly better than conventional.

What do you mean by “supposedly”? What evidence do you have to back up that statement?

Why does Dr. Oz showcase him then.

Because, in my subjective opinion, Dr. Oz often “showcases” worthless things.

Sorry if a am a newbie.

Newbie or not, given that you are a skeptic, I am surprised that you didn’t think of some of this yourself.

@Mark #30, wow, now that I’m seeing that the Hartford Courant had already done a story on Burzynski being a load of crap, I’m even more angry that they gave him a pass in their recent story. I can understand the reporter not wanting to dig into a lot of Google-based biomedical research for what was essentially a feel-good local story, but you’d think that the reporter would at least take two seconds to check the paper’s own indices, given the plausibility of a brave maverick doctor in Texas magically curing cancer.

Rory:

Quelle coincidence! When I posted the link to the ’97 story I didn’t even make the connection it was from the same paper you were posting about. I just thought it was germane since it showcased Stan’s incompetence in reading MRIs and how it cost a patient.

I re-read the cheerleader story: I find it interesting that Stan’s son Greg, the newly-minted doctor (he only got licensed last year) is already “overseeing” such serious, critical patient cases.

Also, I assume if the reporter checked his own paper’s archives and was aware of the previous story, he didn’t want to “harsh” the good vibes and deflect attention away from the cheerleader.

Stan is probably positioning his son so that if (when!) he loses his license Dr. Greg can seamlessly step in and continue to run the clinic. That way they won’t have to set up shop next to the Clark zapper clinic in Tijuana.

Speaking of newspaper archives, this is MUST reading for any Burzynski-watcher. It’s the famous interview where he calls the reporter a “shit” with a “little brain” for daring to question him. It really illustrates how deranged he is.

http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-01-01/news/cancer-doctor-stanislaw-burzynski-sees-himself-as-a-crusading-researcher-not-a-quack/

In case you don’t feel like reading it all, here is the salient part. This paper certainly didn’t give Stan a free pass. Listen your little brain to this:

“I have the right to do whatever research I want, okay?” he says, followed closely by, “I spent 42 years practicing medicine, doing research, and you are little man for asking such question, okay? Maybe in three years I get Nobel Prize, and you’ll look like a shit, okay, asking me such stupid questions, okay?”
The Press explains that the reasoning behind the questions is this: Is Burzynski convinced that he’s done everything possible to get antineoplastons federally approved, and thus covered by insurance, thus giving a chance to those dying children whose parents can’t afford the steep payments? But when pressed as to why — even after the prolonged litigation with the FDA — he still hasn’t been able to prove his treatment’s efficacy, he is equally offended.

“You know why?” he says. “Because I came to this country with $15 in my pocket, okay? Because I didn’t speak English when I came to this country. I learned it by myself. And in order for me to do what I am doing now, I needed to establish a pharmaceutical company. I needed to establish the research institute, okay, from the scratch, okay? And I need to do all of this from my own money, which I am, okay? How many years it would take for you to do it if you come to the country [from] like, say, Afghanistan?”

The Press also asks why, if one of the biggest barriers to sharing a promising cancer treatment with the rest of the world is his language skills, he hasn’t enlisted the help of English-speaking scientists.

Burzynski laughs that one off. “Listen your little brain to this thing: I came to this country with $15, okay? How can you enlist somebody, paying him $5 [out of] $15, okay?”

Which leads to one of the most troubling aspects of the Burzynski saga: Why have no credible oncologists stood up for him? Why don’t oncologists regularly refer their patients to his clinic? Why aren’t the greatest minds in medicine calling for the swift approval of antineoplastons?

If they are out there, the Press needs to hear from them. Burzynski obliges as best he can, throwing out the name of perhaps his biggest ally in medicine (using that term loosely). That is Julian Whitaker, an alternative medicine practitioner who claims to be “board-certified in antiaging medicine.” That could be true — it’s just a question of which board he’s talking about. One thing is for sure: It’s not the American Board of Medical Specialties, which is what most doctors are talking about when they say “board-­certified.” The ABMS does not recognize “anti­-aging” as a medical specialty. When asked for the names of supporting doctors who don’t have Web sites featuring “Rollback Savings!” on their lines of nutritional supplements, Burzynski eventually comes up with Bruce Cohen, a brain tumor specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. Cohen did not return calls.

Denice,

So it’s all quackery, from what I read. They made up their own “board certification”.

When I read a bit about Whitaker some red flags popped up, and sure enough, he’s a $cientology doctor. One of my other “hobbies” is $cientology-critic, so it’s cool when the world of woo and L. Ron’s cult intersect.

One reason why people don’t sue is that they’re ashamed to have been taken advantage of in such an ugly way.

Also, they’re dead.

Marg, we also didn’t talk about how green curry works well with tilapia. In both cases, it was an area completely irrelevant to the article at hand.

Gray Falcon, I beg to differ. Oncologists railing at Dr. Burzynsky is merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black given the failing grade that chemotherapy has been given in the paper “The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies”, written by three oncologists and published in the Australian journal Clinical Oncology.

Here is a summary: http://www.icnr.com/articles/ischemotherapyeffective.html

And an excerpt from the summary:

“Their meticulous study was based on an analysis of the results of all the randomized, controlled clinical trials (RCTs) performed in Australia and the US that reported a statistically significant increase in 5-year survival due to the use of chemotherapy in adult malignancies. Survival data were drawn from the Australian cancer registries and the US National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) registry spanning the period January 1990 until January 2004.

Wherever data were uncertain, the authors deliberately erred on the side of over-estimating the benefit of chemotherapy. Even so, the study concluded that overall, chemotherapy contributes just over 2 percent to improved survival in cancer patients.

Yet despite the mounting evidence of chemotherapy’s lack of effectiveness in prolonging survival, oncologists continue to present chemotherapy as a rational and promising approach to cancer treatment.”

The difference between the orthodox medical establishment’s cancer treatment “quackery” and Dr. Burzynsky’s is that the former is accepted while the latter is reviled.

Please note that my aim here is not to defend Dr. Burzynsky but to point out the hypocrisy of those who attack him.

In other words, no dissenting voices allowed? I take it this is a cheering mob for orthodoxy, waving torches and pitchforks at anyone who disagrees with them.

You lot dig up less than a dozen cases of failure to show Dr. Burzynsky’s guilt, yet thousands upon thousands die horrible deaths using the conventional methods. Some of them go directly from chemotherapy to emergency and from there to the morgue. Families are impoverished purchasing cancer drugs that cost in excess of $1,000 per pill. Increased survival for lung cancer is measured in a handful of months and is applauded as success.

And yet you all stand on your soapboxes and deride Dr. Burzynsky.

Bravo.

Marg, this isn’t about dissent, this is about posting off-topic.

Some of them go directly from chemotherapy to emergency and from there to the morgue

Citation needed.

Marg, you might try this article: So chemotherapy does work, after all, plus this book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

@Johnny,

Thank you for the link–I’ll spend some time later listening. I hang out at The Village Voice’s anti-$cientology blog run by Tony Ortega, and will let those folks know about The Enturbulators. Tony might even do a piece on them.

If you’re a CofS follower, you should check out the spoken word of L. Ron’s great grandson Jamie Kennedy or Jamie DeWolf (he changed his name recently). He rips his great grandfather to shreds, especially in radio interviews near the cult’s homebase of Clearwater/St.Pete/Tampa Bay.

Praise Xenu.

(Sorry-didn’t mean to post off topic, especially after Marg got blasted for doing just that. I was only answering Johnny. Back to Stan!)

Marg –

Please note that my aim here is not to defend Dr. Burzynsky but to point out the hypocrisy of those who attack him.

First of all, even if some other chemotherapy also did not work, this would not change the fact that Burzynski charges desperately ill patients a great deal of money for therapy that has never been conclusively shown to work, and that, as I am personally forced to conclude based on the evidence available, is almost certain not to provide any significant benefit to the patients he treats. (If you have persuasive scientific evidence that Burzynski’s treatments work, I am willing to evaluate it; not only do I see none, but that would still raise the major ethical issue of his failure to make the treatments widely available in other settings, if they do work.)

The only possible logical interpretation of your comment is that you believe that Burzynski should be allowed to do so without even being criticized, merely because others may also do so.

To use an absurd extension of this logic to illustrate the error, this is the logical equivalent of saying that Charles Manson cannot be criticized because someone else may also be a mass murderer.

Secondly, you are wrong about conventional chemotherapy, and about the claims made for it.

Conventional chemotherapy is improving with the addition of adjuncts based on targeting of known molecular genetic lesions, where that is possible, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib, but its limitations are still extremely well known and acknowledged by all competent physicians.

Conventional chemotherapy can cure certain types of malignancy, but it has long term negative effects – cure is typically defined in terms of five or ten more measured years of life, rather than inevitable rapid and painful death from the malignancy.

In other cases, chemotherapy provides even less, but is still shown to give results that are better than merely not giving anything.

Conventional chemotherapy is, overall, merely the best medical science has. Most agents are potentially toxic and have severe side effects. Nobody would use it if anything better were available. If you think you have something better, instead of insulting everyone or making logically fallacious arguments, provide a legitimately convincing case for your approach.

Two more tragic tales of celebrity cancer patients:

“Conventional doctors can fail and still be considered heroes…

There’s a very eminent oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who treated Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney’s wife, who had metastatic breast cancer. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. There’s no evidence in the history of the world that bone marrow transplant helps metastatic breast cancer. None whatsoever, and it’s a deadly procedure – 10 to 30 percent of women who get it would die from the procedure. He gave it to her, and she died. Then he treated …, who used to be editor of … She had metastatic ovarian cancer. He gave her chemo; it didn’t work. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. It didn’t work; she died!

What did the New York Times do? They have a second-page major article about this hero oncologist who’s been working day and night against such odds to keep these wonderful gifts to the world alive. But they’re dead. He didn’t succeed. He gave them therapies that could not, in a thousand years, be of cancer significance.

DM: Are there any ethics or panels that need to approve those procedures before they’re implemented?

DG: There are ethics panels for the likes of you and me. When you’re a celebrity oncology star, you make the rules as you go along… These oncologists can pretty much do whatever they want, and they’re lauded for doing it. They’re considered heroes. They’re considered heroes for using this desperate, expensive, terribly toxic therapy. In fact the more toxic, the more heroic the doctor is perceived. The press loves them… If you stand outside of the back door of Sloan-Kettering, you see the bodies coming out every day. Conventional oncologists lose patients every day, and no one says they’re murdering anybody… Patrick Swayze’s doctors have been lauded as heroes; no one came out and said that the Stanford oncology team are sleazy quacks making money and taking advantage of their victims… [But] if you’re an alternative practitioner and succeed, you’re still considered a sleazy quack. So it’s a very interesting dynamic that has absolutely nothing to do with scientific validity, objectivity, or evaluation of data – it has nothing to do with that at all. It’s almost a religious fervor… Conventional academic medicine is the last religion left in America.”

(http://bit.ly/nlwulK)

“Taking a passive role with today’s conventional therapy is terribly dangerous… Jackie Kennedy, after a “courageous fight,” succumbed to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – or did she? Her early demise, attributed to the cancer, was a shock to cancer specialists worldwide, and brought into question the real cause of her death. She had been given an unproved protocol of very high-dose chemotherapy. The drugs alone could easily have caused her death – and this would not be unusual. There are numerous cases of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths from chemotherapy.”

“Betsy Lehman, an award winning health columnist for the Boston Globe died on December 3, 1994. She died of chemotherapy.

The 39-year-old mother of two had breast cancer and sought what she considered was the best treatment at one of the finest medical facilities in the world -;the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Instead of a cure, Lehman got a lethal dose of chemotherapy which was overlooked by at least a dozen physicians, nurses and pharmacists for over four days.

The cause of death wasn’t discovered until February 13, after clerks went through her treatment records. Nearly at the end of her 3 months of treatment, the record indicated that Lehman died of heart failure after she was given four times the maximum safe dosage of a highly toxic drug during her chemotherapy treatment.

“She was dealing with horrendous symptoms. The whole lining of her gut from one end to the other was shedding. She was vomiting sheets of tissue. They said it was the worst they had ever seen. But the doctors said this was all normal,” according to Lehman’s husband, Robert Distal, a scientist at Dana-Farber.

Critics have suggested this death may not be an isolated incident. Dr O Michael Colvin, director of the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center asked, “If this can happen at a place like Dana-Farber…what is happening in other places?”

Two more tragic tales of celebrity cancer patients:

Marg, if you think that the deaths of celebrities are more tragic and more important than the deaths of anyone else — or if you think that readers will be more influenced by celebrity patients — then feel free to DIAF.

the hundreds of thousands of dollars patients shell out for those prior to dying.

A few seconds spent reading the original post would show that this is not true for at least one of the cases mentioned (Billie Bainbridge), on account of not being American. Nor is there any evidence that the other cases he mentions were paying “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for conventional treatment. This is perhaps one reason why the expenses of conventional oncology were not mentioned.

And yet you all stand on your soapboxes and deride Dr. Burzynsky

We do, however, take the trouble to spell his name correctly.

@marg

Yawn, what a weak insult.

Please, do try to come up with a better type insult, but judging by your posting stupidity, it’s going to be a while.

Speaking of celebrity cancer deaths, the scumbags at Natural News are blaming the death of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch on “conventional cancer treatment.” Of course the chemo and radiation killed him, not the cancer.

He was a devout Buddhist and a strict vegan. He had diet and spiritualism on his side, for those who consider those two things important. Not a typical rock star decadent lifestyle.

Dr Gonzalez- Some Thoughts about Scientific Bias

http://www.dr-gonzalez.com/bias.htm

@Kelly -you just exhibited your extreme bias. I saw my friend die after 5 years of painful chemo- the chemo ate away his digestive tract. The survival rate for older people (over 60) is pretty grim with standard chemo. He was also on morphine toward the end. I wouldn’t want to go through what he went through.

@ken,
Proven effective in some cases vs proven not effective. Dr “coffee enema” Gonzales is clearly in the latter.

With all human medicine, because of the near infinite genomic variety, there are limits and areas where modalities are more or less effective based on age, stage of disease, complications and a host of other effectors. The advantage with science-based techniques is that the vast majority of patients opt for them so that science learns, changes and provides small steps in more effective therapies as a result. This is also the public relations negative that Gonzalez, Burzynski and others prey on.

Quacks like Gonzales & Burzynski provide none of that progress. They have the magic pill. “I have found the holy grail of ‘name your disease here‘. Spend (lots of) money & take the cure!” Of course they must blame the (dead) victim when their crap fails and tout the very few successes (and those rarely, definitively, due to the magic treatment) as marketing for more victims.

@ marg @ ken: Just in case you didn’t read the link I provided to “marg” at # 72 above…the New York State Office of Professional Medical Conduct brought charges against Dr. Gonzalez. Here are the two decisions related to Dr. Gonzalez’s *coffee enemas* treatment protocol:

http://w3.health.state.ny.us/opmc/factions.nsf/58220a7f9eeaafab85256b180058c032/f566901672739a1a85256a4a0047d2e6?OpenDocument

He offered his *alternative treatment* to the five patients whose records were reviewed by the OPMC and he was found to be incompetent and negligent. His patients suffered while under his care and died in agonizing pain.

His ghoulish self-serving statements about dead celebrities are a testament to the lengths this quack will go to, in order to promote his coffee enemas *treatment*.

Ken and Marg,

I was once as you are now. Credulous. Angry. Conspiracy minded. Incensed at “Big Medicine.” But in retrospect, most of all, I was just scared. From my own experience I know that fear can make you believe absolute nonsense. Fear can make you ignore facts in favor of what you wish were true. Fear can cripple your reasoning facilities. But fear can also be vanquished through acceptance of reality.

I watched my oldest sister battle cancer twice. The first time was 18 years ago when chemo and radiation gave her an extra 17 years of life. There was no surgery, her lung tumor was too close to her heart. Stanford University did the experimental chemo/radiation treatment with follow-up at Alta Bates in Berkeley. She was given a 12% at living 5 years. She lived another 18 active, healthy years.

She lived long enough to see her sons married. Long enough to leave her husband and strike out on her own. Long enough to see all her grandchildren born and do grandma day care with them during the week. She was a kick-ass patient who never complained about her predicament. When the cancer came back in ’06 it was terminal. She knew that it probably would come back at some point as a possible side effect of the aggressive treatment she had. She knew the odds and risks. Her courageous acceptance completely buried my fear and magical-thinking once and for all. It changed my life.

Doctors are not miracle workers. Cancer is a thousand discrete diseases with myriad triggers. Science-based oncologists may not be perfect, but they don’t claim they are, and they’re heroes in my book. “Brave Maverick Doctors™” like Burzynski and Gonzalez are either totally self-deluded or Charlatans. I’m not sure which is worse.

On a final anecdotal, note, my mother got an extra 41 years and counting from her oncologist . . . whom she has outlived.

@marge – you mean the Dr. Gonzales links? The man is pure quack…..

@Chris You could try one 🙂

Marg, I prefer not to put that much stress on my liver and actually enjoy my coffee properly: from a cup, sipped through my lips.

You obviously prefer sadistically torturing cancer patients.

No more sadistic than putting toxic substances that are classified as biohazards into their veins so they can lose their hair and retch and have their stomach lining slough off. Compared to that a coffee enema is a picnic in the park.

Marg: What vaccines are injected into veins?

(I’ll give you a hint — none).

What toxic substances are present in vaccines at harmful levels?

(I’ll give you another hint — none).

EPIC fail.

I think in this case, Marg is referring to conventional chemo. Still a failure on her part, she still hasn’t provided any evidence that coffee enemas work, while strong evidence does exist for chemo.

Compared to that a coffee enema is a picnic in the park.

In terms of known side effects, perhaps. In terms of therapeutic benefit, however, coffee enemas are worthless while chemotherapy saves lives, extends survival time, etc.

Marg — at a guess, they forgot which thread they were reading; there are some active vaccine-related threads at the moment.

There is indeed a lot more than coffee enemas to Dr Gonzalez’s protocol. I haven’t seen any more evidence for the rest of it either, but remain curious what coffee enemas are supposed to accomplish.

If you want an example of someone barking up the wrong tree, though, you could hardly do better than Dr Gonzalez. The clinical trial in 2009 had to be terminated early because his patients were dying faster than those taking conventional chemo:
Twelve months after enrollment, 56% of chemotherapy-group patients were alive; 16% of the enzyme-group patients were alive. The longest survivors were one chemotherapy-group patient who died at 39.5 months and one chemotherapy-group patient who was censored at 37.5 months (ie, the closing date of the data analysis) and, at the time of manuscript submission, was still alive at 40 months.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2860407/?tool=pmcentrez

This trial did include the coffee enemas; according to the study, this was intended for “detoxification”, although the paper doesn’t elaborate on the mechanisms of any of this.

The enzyme treatment included orally ingested proteolytic enzymes, nutritional supplements, detoxification, and an organic diet (unaltered from the pilot study).3 Patients received three pancreatic enzyme and two magnesium citrate capsules with each meal. The patients also took specified numbers of capsules with magnesium citrate and Papaya Plus every 4 hours on an empty stomach. The dose for patients with stage II disease was 69 enzyme capsules, and the dose for patients with stages III or IV was 81 capsules per day. After day 16, patients had a 5-day rest period and then resumed treatment on day 22. Treatment could be adjusted by the physician and could be increased for cancer progression. A diet that required at least 70% of the food to be raw or minimally cooked was required. All food was organic. Prescribed detoxification procedures included coffee enemas twice each day; skin brushing and cleansing; salt and soda baths; and a liver flush, clean sweep, and purging.

I’ve read the critiques of the Australian paper which essentially said that they left out blood cancers, which are more responsive to chemo, unless of course you count acute myelogenous leukemia, which isn’t. Including blood cancers would have raised the 5-year adjuvant effectiveness of chemo to 5 or 6 per cent. Wow. That’s a huge difference.

Chemo agents are considered effective if they shrink tumours by a certain percentage for a certain limited period of time.

O RLY?

Including blood cancers would have raised the 5-year adjuvant effectiveness of chemo to 5 or 6 per cent. Wow. That’s a huge difference.

You clearly have no clue what “adjuvant” means when applied to chemotherapy treatments. (Hint: Leukemias and lymphomas are not treated with chemotherapy on an adjuvant basis; for these cancers, chemotherapy is potentially curative.)

BTW, adjuvant chemotherapy for at least one cancer is considerably more effective than 5-6%:

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2011/12/so_chemotherapy_does_work_after_all.php

@Gray Falcon

What on earth do you mean? Is chemotherapy the option that’s supposed to cost $10 and work slowly? The Australian paper certainly demonstrated that it doesn’t.

@Orac 111

I know what “adjuvant” means. I specified “adjuvant” because I believed that’s what the study was about. But in fact it also included “curative” cytotoxic chemotherapy and lymphomas.

Herewith the authors’ aims:

“The debate on the funding and availability of cytotoxic drugs raises questions about the contribution of curative or adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to survival in adult cancer patients.”

The 2.1% effectiveness was an average figure for cancers overall, excluding leukemias. The cancers with the highest 5-year survival rate were testicular cancer and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. What sunk the numbers was the large number of cancers for which the 5-year survival rate was 0.

All right Marg, you say cancer specialists are barking up the wrong tree. This implies you have some idea what the right tree is, care to elaborate?

I do, but I don’t care to elaborate because all you will do is dump venom all over it. And no, it has nothing to do with either Dr. Gonzalez or Dr. Burzynski. Give it time. In about ten years I will be able to tell you whether I was right.

I suspect you’ll invite far more “venom” with this weaselly line of shit.

I do, but I don’t care to elaborate because all you will do is dump venom all over it.

If by ‘dump venom’ you mean ‘ask for peer-reviewed evidence of its efficacy,’ then yes, we certainly will. If you don’t care to share your miracle cure and its supporting evidence with us then, well, there’s the door. We have no reason at all to listen to what you have to say.

Marg,

Are you by any chance a DO doing cancer research in Lebanon, NH? You usually use the name Margit?

If that’s not you, perhaps you can tell us if you are a doctor or researcher and why you are qualified to come up with “ideas” on how to cure cancer.

Yeah Marg, because plumbers should be qualified to work on nuclear reactors, or we should draw stars to see what passenger gets to fly the plane……

Of course only doctors or researchers are qualified to come up with “ideas” on how to cure cancer.

That is because only doctors and researchers have the scientific training and knowhow to develop and test hypotheses regarding cancer treatment. You wouldn’t want someone with no training in aviation to build you an airplane, would you?

I think Marg, or Margit, ran away when she realized we might know who she is. Can you imagine being this woman’s colleagues in her hospital in Lebanon, New Hampshire and knowing what she really thinks of the medical profession, scientists and researchers.

Maybe she thinks a DO is better than an MD.

That is, IF it’s the same Margit.

Well, at least the Health Ranger isn’t much down with CLA.

@mark – somehow the plumber analogy just made sense.

@ ken @ 134

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/gonzalez-regimen-for-cancer-of-the-pancreas-even-worse-than-we-thought-part-i-results/

So if by some long shot a high school student suddenly came up with a cure for cancer in the course of a science project, all those of you who think only scientists and doctors have the right to do so would reject it?

I agree with @Vicki that it would have to be vetted and tested by scientists, but wouldn’t it be foolish to reject it out of hand because it came from the wrong quarter?

Those of you heaping scorn on Margit the DO please cease and desist because I am not her.

I do believe that when a solution for cancer is found, it will be relatively simple, and scientists will palm their foreheads saying “duh! why didn’t we think of that sooner?” Who would have believed in the 19th century that something in bread mold would cure TB? Prior to the development of penicillin TB was as frightening as cancer is today. Even “bubonic plague” can be cured with erithromycin and how many people died of it in the middle ages and beyond? Yes, scientists came up with penicillin, but by accident. And scientists also came up with Vioxx and Thalidomide, which proves that neither scientists nor the scientific method are infallible.

So if a plumber comes up with a cure for cancer, I will be there applauding him (or her). And if a scientist does, kudos to him (or her) too!

Marg–

Penicillin is not, of course, a panacea. And 1.2 million people died of tuberculosis in 2010.

Cancer is unlikely to turn out to be simple, because it isn’t a single thing. Even if someone finds a simple cure for one kind of cancer–which would be a very good thing, don’t get me wrong–they won’t be able to close down all the cancer research centers.

@Chris

Sad, isn’t it, that penicillin won’t cure TB any more.

Five hundred years from now, if we are still around, we will think the biochemical model of disease as outdated as, say, the flat earth society.

New discoveries have a way of assigning old “truths” to the dustbin.

Yes, it is called antibiotic resistance due to a process known as evolution. Something that is well understood.

Marg, why do you think there is only one kind of cancer?

I think Marg, or Margit, ran away when she realized we might know who she is.

Oh, there are Margits all over the place. It doesn’t much matter.

Five hundred years from now, if we are still around, we will think the biochemical model of disease as outdated as, say, the flat earth society.

It seems unlikely based on what we now know, but I’m game – what will replace it and what is the evidence for that?

Yes, it is called antibiotic resistance due to a process known as evolution. Something that is well understood.

Marg, why do you think there is only one kind of cancer?

No.Not at all. Antibiotic resistance is due to Ignorant Oracian type doctors who think they can control nature with their arrogant know-it-all intelligence.

“Who would have believed in the 19th century that something in bread mold would cure TB? Prior to the development of penicillin TB was as frightening as cancer is today.”

Except…that penicillin was never used to treat TB. Try looking up streptomycin…developed in 1946. Presently, for non-drug-resistant TB, standard beginning treatment is Rifampin, Isoniazid, Pyrazinamide and Ethambutol until cultures/sensitivities prove that the TB strain is sensitive to both Rifampin and Isoniazid. Treatment of TB is much more complicated if you have MDR TB or X-MDR TB:

http://www.slideshare.net/doctorrao/xmdr-tuberculosis

“Even “bubonic plague” can be cured with erithromycin and how many people died of it in the middle ages and beyond?”

No. Try looking up antibiotic treatments for plague…such as streptomycin, Gentamycin, Doxycycline and Ciprofloxacin.

Chris:

It is unnatural for us to fight against it, but we will anyway.

On the contrary, fighting against the things we know can hurt us is completely natural. “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” Just as it’s completely natural for us to want to maximize our food production by any means possible. “Natural” really encompasses pretty much everything, IMHO.

Another famous patient: Robi Draco Rosa, famous ex-Menudo that wrote/produced many of Ricky Martin’s biggest hits.
He recently returned home to Los Angeles to continue normal treatment for a non-Hodgkin lymphoma in his lower abdomen, near his liver, diagnosed on April, 2011. It was initially reported that his cancer was not too bad, and that he wanted “natural” treatment and prayer to get cured. He has been very quiet about everything, but he is not being treated by Burzynski anymore. This a big admission, considering how much Draco is into woo….

And here’s a story about a friend of Robi Draco’s, Eva Ekvall, a former Miss Venezuela, who died recently of breast cancer while she was still at Burzynski’s shop of horrors (sorry it’s from Fox News):

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/health/2012/02/20/husband-venezuelas-beautiful-face-cancer-awareness-struggles-with-her-legacy/

Ekvall died at the Burzynski Research Institute in Houston, a facility that treats clients with advanced stages of cancer. While the facility is controversial because it uses unconventional methods to treat cancer – Ekvall refused to undergo more rounds of chemotherapy – it successfully treated a cancer survivor friend of hers, ex-Menudo member Robi Draco Rosa.

Bermúdez said his wife’s cause of death was complications from pneumonia.

(I posted this on an older Burzynski thread but realized this is a better place for it)

Sadly, Lola Quinlan, the woman suing Burzynski for treating her like an ATM, has died. A poster on Quackometer found the memorial notice:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/palmbeachpost/obituary.aspx?n=lola-ann-quinlan&pid=157687281

I hope somehow the lawsuit will continue, but with no husband or children I really doubt it. I think I could hear a big sigh of relief from a building on Katy Freeway in Houston yesterday…

Here is a Wednesday May 30, 2012 E-mail I sent to Azad Rastegar who is Dr. Burzynski’s main public relations representative.

I haven’t received a reply from him and will probably die from other natural causes besides my cancer if I didn’t have it. The main theme is; Is it cancer or not? …

==========================================

Hello Mr. Rastegar (Azad) – I spoke to you at length a few weeks ago – re: Cancer that’s not …

in our conversation which I finally have got around to getting the exact reference (web page URL)

Here it is:

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2011/11/25/hope-or-false-hope/

When we had our discussion at least in my mind’s eye, my recollection my relating this to you seemed like a “new one on you”. As the public relations director for the Burzynski Clinic:

http://www.cancercontrolsociety.com/bio2009/rastegar.html

one that has been under tremendous pressure, controversy and expose attack I found that kind of odd that you didn’t hear about such claims/contentions. Your “cancer cures” that were the centerpiece examples of your movie:

http://burzynskimovie.com/

are addressed in the “hope-or-false-hope” blog above. I don’t see any counter-claims by you, Dr. Burzynski that the instances were indeed cancer. I hope you’ll agree this is a critical basic aspect. It either is cancer or it’s not.

I saw the movie and indeed many you had many patient supporters in your congressional hearings and you cite all kinds of cancer cure/treatment results:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12718563?dopt=Abstract

but you don’t publish the results, scans, etc. with the personal info blotted out like you do in the movie. I realize there are a lot of privacy issues etc. but the abstract coming from your clinic is logically the same as asking the fox how many chickens are in the hen house and are they all all right? Without some kind of independent verification such as a web cam in my figurative analogy it’s all here-say thus my focus on the “non-cancer” examples of your movie which you sell and advertise.

My first question to you was what was the majority of the case against Dr. Burzynski dismissed by the Texas Medical Board that you cite in your web page”

http://www.burzynskimovie.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=126

I never got any explicit answer from you. I kind of understand why as if you go to the Texas State Office of Administrative Hearings web page”

http:/www.soah.state.tx.us

select the Electronic Case Files link in the upper right hand corner, the select “Use Guest Account” and search: 503-11-1669 and open you the resulting folder you’ll see a chronology of legal documents in .PDF format pertaining to the Texas Medical Board’s (TMB) complaint against Dr. Burzynski with none of them showing any charges being dismissed.

I called the TMB and the more than one person I talked to concurred; there are no charges dismissed.

In fact the recent document No. 57 titled: ORDER NO. 14 – REGARDING STAFF’S OBJECTION TO ORDER NO. 12 it seems Dr. Burzynski got a hold of some investigative material from the Texas Medical Board and now they’re very upset about it.

As I told you in conversation I’m no great fan of the FDA. Where I find the contradictions from your side troubling that can be remedied by some kind of proof the examples in your movie are indeed cancer, I look on the FDA with simple disgust and disdain that they can’t even tell me if your IRB complied with it’s warning letter to it.

If it didn’t then how the hell did it let Dr. Burzynski have Phase III antineoplaston trial clearance?

If Antineoplastons are indeed the “real deal” and the FDA didn’t create an environment for its development whether by yourself or some other entity then my disgust and disdain for them transforms to all out hatred.

But that is between me and the FDA:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58684622/FDA_Burzynski_Warning_Letter_FOIA_Request.tif

The bottom line is there’s enough room in all of this for the FDA to permit a scam to continue because it would sure look bad if Dr. Burzynski was a quack and they twiddled their thumbs for years and years not putting a stop to it. But if Antineoplastons are neutral in of themselves; no harm – no foul then I can see the “symbiotic relationship” going on indefinitely.

I think if the preceding might be the case where Dr. Burzynski “messed up” is prescribing all those other unapproved drugs:

(from the complaint)

Respondent prescribed a combination of five immunotherapy
agents-—phenylbutyrate, erlotinib, dasatinib, vorinostat, and sorafenib—which are not approved by
the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for the treatment of breast cancer, and which do not
meet the FDA’s regulations for the use of off-label drugs in breast cancer therapy.

Where this is all my business is no only can we not have doctors prescribing all kinds of things willy-nilly just because they’re MD’s as a cancer sufferer I believe I have a right that cancer research dollars go to the most promising vaccines and treatments even if the most legit are not as promising as those claimed by those that aren’t. I trust you know exactly what I’m trying to convey.

In closing, I contend I really do have an open mind and three simple things might indeed sway me to consider Antoneoplastons are key an Dr. Brzynski the keyholder to my cancer: the examples in the movie – prove to me beyond a shadow of doubt they were cancer, show me where the TMB dropped the majority of charges against you and show me (formally) where the Burzynski IRB complied with the tenets and stipulations of the FDA warning letter:

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/ucm192711.htm

Thank you and regards,

Joel S.

Joel Shapiro
Rochester, New York 14618
Phone numbers in order of preference:
(585) 255-0997 (Cell – Call anytime – best to reach me)
(585) 473-7013 (Home – 9:30 to 22:00 EDT/EST)
(585) 250-8053 (Home – 9:30 to 22:00 EDT/EST)

[email protected]
-or-
[email protected]

So if by some long shot a high school student suddenly came up with a cure for cancer in the course of a science project, all those of you who think only scientists and doctors have the right to do so would reject it?

In science, what is important isn’t who came up with an idea, but the evidence behind it. A garbage man, physicist or homeless person could have an idea, but what matters is whether, when compared to current treatments, it did better or worse in a fair and public test. That’s why the “brave maverick doctor” gambit is stupid – real doctors and scientists don’t care who comes up with an idea, they care whether it passes empirical tests.

Five hundred years from now, if we are still around, we will think the biochemical model of disease as outdated as, say, the flat earth society.
New discoveries have a way of assigning old “truths” to the dustbin.

Unlikely, the comparison is inapt. You can basically draw a line in history starting around the 1700s. Pretty much everything before that time was based on faith and authority (generally Jesus and the Greeks). Starting around the 1700s, give or take a century, knowledge began to be measured by empirical proof – how well the theory adhered to reality, rather than how well observations adhered to theory. Once empirical testing becomes part of the basis for describing reality, it’s a virtuous circle that accelerates technological and scientific progress.

Whatever exists in 500 years will be more specific from what we know today, but unlikely in most cases to be wildly different – because for the past 300+ we have been basing knowledge on better and more specific tests. Einstein didn’t replace Newton’s work, he refined it.

Learn your history and epistemology.

@sheepmilker,

Heartbreaking message, but thanks for posting it.

I mentioned your post (giving you credit!) on the Quackometer site in the UK. Billie’s story was one of the first to use the mainstream press to call attention to Stan and his “treatments”, and motivated other desperate parents in the UK to waste their money and precious time messing around in Houston.

What’s going on with his postponed hearings with the TMB? When will this monster finally be shut down? (And cue Stan’s outraged sockpuppets in: three, two, one…)

If I’m reading the Texas State Office of Administrative Hearings docket correctly…
http://www.soah.state.tx.us/Docket/general.asp
…it appears a hearing on the Texas Medical Board complaint against Burzynski is now scheduled for next Wednesday, June 27, at 10 am.