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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

Drug safety versus a “Constitutional right” to access to experimental drugs, part 2

[Note: Part I is here.] I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be […]

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Bioethics Cancer Medicine

Dichloroacetate and cancer: Health scammers never die; they just keep popping up like Whac-A-Mole

It’s been a long time, been a long time, Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. – Led Zeppelin Not nearly long enough. – Orac Some rats never die, it would appear. You may recall last year, when I spend a considerable amount of verbiage writing about a promising cancer drug called dichloroacetate […]

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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Patient-led “clinical trials” versus clinical research

In 2007, I wrote a series of posts about what I found to be a fascinating yet at the same time disturbing phenomenon, specifically self-experimentation by cancer patients using an as yet unapproved drug called dichloroacetate. If you’ll recall, DCA is a small molecule drug that was used to treat congenital lactic acidosis in children […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Autism quackery invades my hometown, part II

Not again. I have no way of knowing if the media in my hometown happen to be more credulous when it comes to pseudoscience than average, but, given the number of stories referred to me emanating from Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, you’ll forgive me if I’m very depressed right now. For instance, we have […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine

Dichloroacetate to enter clinical trials in cancer patients

I’ve written a lot about dichloroacetate, a.k.a. DCA (my last post here, along with links to my previous posts), the small molecule drug that burst onto the scene after Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta published a paper in Cancer Cell in January describing strong anti-tumor activity in preclinical models (in this case, a […]