Category: Cancer

Categories
Bad science Cancer Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Clínica 0-19 and IDOI: Not making DIPG history in Monterrey (part 1 of 4)

Clínica 0-19: Where hope doesn't live

Drs. Alberto Siller and Alberto Garcia run Clínica 0-19 in Monterrey, Mexico, which has become a magnet for patients with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a deadly brain cancer. Unfortunately, their treatment is an unproven combination of 11 chemotherapy drugs injected into an artery feeding the brainstem, plus an unknown and unproven “immunotherapy.” Of course it all costs $300,000 or more for a complete course of treatment, and the good doctors are “too busy to do clinical trials” or even publish their survival and recurrence statistics, despite having used this protocol for 20 years. I say: If it quacks like a duck…

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Quackery

ASCO: Endorsing the Society for Integrative Oncology’s “integration” of quackery into oncology

Quack attack: ASCO and Society for Integrative Oncology

In 2014, the Society for Integrative Oncology first published clinical guidelines for the care of breast cancer patients. Not surprisingly, SIO advocated “integrating” dubious therapies with oncology. Last week, the most influential oncology society, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), endorsed a 2017 update to the SIO guidelines, thus endorsing the “integration” of quackery with oncology and paving the way for insurance coverage. The advance of quackademic medicine in oncology continues apace.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Cancer Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

A dumpster fire of a study about HPV vaccination and female fertility, courtesy of Gayle Delong

Gayle Delong's dumpster fire

Gayle Delong is an economist who thinks she’s an epidemiologist. Consistent with that delusion, her latest study of HPV vaccination is all amateurs hour, in which she misses a major potential confounder on her way to “proving” that HPV vaccination could be associated with decreased fertility in young women.

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Take that, Mike Adams! The TAILORx study vs. the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

Mammogram

Alternative medicine mavens like to promote a stereotype of cancer doctors as practically slavering to poison patients with chemotherapy. The TAILORx trial and its results would beg to differ.

Categories
Cancer Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Helen Lawson and black salve: Cutting, burning, and poisoning “naturally”

Cansema black salve
Cansema black salve

Cancer quacks frequently characterize conventional treatments for cancer as “cutting, poisoning, and burning.” Yet, in Australia a woman with ovarian cancer chose black salve, in essence, “cutting, poisoning, and burning” (but mostly burning and without the cutting) to treat her disease. She died a horrible death. How can black salve still be a thing.