Dec 03 2012
Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013”.
19 Responses to “Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013”
What really saddens me is the intolerable personal toll you mention which is placed upon these families. After all, who wouldn’t do “anything” to save their child? Who wouldn’t sacrifice their entire life savings or sell their house to give their dying child a chance of a cure?
The hope given to them is entirely false, and the continued refusal of StanB&Co to provide evidence their treatments either work, or don’t work is absolutely criminal IMO. I am so sad no-one can call him to account for the harm he has done.
Apart from the personal toll on the families concerned, there is an entire population of people who have whole-heartedly thrown their efforts into helping with fundraising, and contributers who have been hoodwinked into giving time and money to these lost causes, often when they can ill afford it.
I know this from personal experience, when my own elderly mother became one of the “kind hearted strangers” you talk about. She lives in a sheltered flat for the aged, and was emotionally moved to almost empty her current account in order to give money to fundraisers so a local child could be sent to a private German clinic for “holistic” cancer treatment (which on closer inspection consists of a highly expensive brew of homeopathy, reiki and the like). Her rationalization? She has lived her life, and if she can help in anyway to give a deserving child the chance to have a long and healthy life then that is a price she is prepared to pay, even if it means she struggles financially for a time or her own life is shortened. I still haven’t had the heart to tell her what she is really paying for, and I feel I haven’t the right to extinguish anyone’s hope, nor my mothers warm glow of inner altruism which I hope keeps her going through the winter when she may now not be able to afford her heating bills.
But this just shows how devious these people are. I am not religious, but I just hope that somehow there is a special hell reserved for such parasites.
The lack of scientific foundation is clear but the ethics of the situation interest me. Ignoring for the moment that some of the money for some patients’ treatment comes from third parties and that some patients are too young to consent:
If a patient has exhausted the treatment options medical science can offer and if that patient is deteriorating and if that patient has the financial resources to pursue experimental treatments and a host of other conditionals, what is the ethical objection to that patient pursuing even the nuttiest therapy?
As I understand it (and I am not a physician much less an oncologist), the first real cancer ‘cures’ resulted from the use of, as I recall, four or so different chemo agents and radiation as well. Antineoplastons aside, that seems to be what Burzynski is doing so there is, at the heart of his nonsense, at least a nugget of plausibility.
And let me save the flamers a burst blood vessel – I am not in any way condoning the manipulation of vulnerable patient populations by Burzynski or anyone else – those ethical problems are neither unclear nor interesting. I simply wonder whether legal and ethical standards that are appropriate for a stage II breast cancer patient are still appropriate for a stage IV anaplastic thyroid patient and whether conflating the two may slow research that could benefit the many at the cost of a few who are willing to take one last at-bat in any event.
My objection is not to patients pursuing experimental or even nutty treatments. It is to providers misrepresenting the state of the evidence, promising miraculous cures, and failing to give patients the information they need to give truly informed consent.
Someone wanna draw a line for when off-label targeted drugs for second-line therapy is “for dummies” vs. not? Not just by extreme example either.
Tell me what rules you want, cause so far I’ve not seen docs fighting it in general. I fear they want to jump on board in fact – it sounds so cool ya know.
Yes, even if you were prepared to keep an open mind about the scant, seemingly good results in occasional cases, there is no question that the material produced by the B clinic induces grossly inflated expectations in vulnerable people.
They should be given enough information to be able to know what usually happens to patients with the same type and stage of cancer when treated by his methods. As a purportedly serious researcher, B should be able to provide that in relation to the hundreds of patients treated yearly.
The addition of chemotherapy ( I agree the “personalized” aspect is as dodgy as everything else about his operation), is cunning, because it will produce a few short-term responses to add to his testimonials. Possibly even a cure or two, as Windriven suggests. Odd things can happen in oncology, as every quack knows.
One question that bears asking is – just who is funding this movie? Indeed, who funded the first film? Are we to believe that Eric Merola funded the movies himself out of the goodness of his own heart or is there a money trail that traceable? What if that money trail led back to Burzynski?
What is clear is that Burzynski’s catalogue of publications are not worth the paper they’re written on. Preliminary results of multiple unfinished trials. The only finished trial has never had its findings published. Charging his patients thousands of dollars for the dubious pleasure of being one of his trial guinea-pigs is unethical and immoral. As for his blunderbuss (not in any real sense of the phrase) “gene-targeted” therapies it beggars belief that the TMB failed abjectly to nail him. They really have to go after the poor unfortunate doctors that Burzynski himself has thrown to the lions as the only logical action to put a stop to the clinic’s working. I would presume that working for Burzynski is effectively career suicide – do we know what has happened to doctors formerly employed at his clinic?
Actually, I do know of one such doctor, but I can’t really discuss it right now.
My objection is not to patients pursuing experimental or even nutty treatments. It is to providers misrepresenting the state of the evidence, promising miraculous cures, and failing to give patients the information they need to give truly informed consent.
Harriet you’ve just unintentionally implicated your colleagues, even though they’re not promising miracles the conventional patient is expecting one.
http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20121024/incurable-cancer-patients-think-cure
@Pman,
“Harriet you’ve just unintentionally implicated your colleagues.”
Other more careful readers of this blog may have noticed that I have already intentionally implicated my colleagues in a previous post about the exact same article Pman cites. See http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/true-informed-consent-is-elusive/
Doctors are to blame if they promise more than the evidence warrants, and patients are to blame if they hear things the doctor didn’t say.
windriven’s “may slow research that could benefit the many” would be more true if doing new experiments on people were actually doing real research. I’m OK with trying fairly risky things, if it is part of a real trial, approved by a real IRB. Patient with money can do what they want. Doctor with patient, not so much.
[...] Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013 (sciencebasedmedicine.org) Share ERIC.fm:TwitterFacebookPinterestGoogle +1MoreTumblrStumbleUponLinkedInRedditDiggPrintEmailLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. Posted in Uncategorized [...]
Indeed. It should be 5,883,124.
[...] the next installment of the bullshit Burzynski propaganda movie is released later in 2013, Slippery Stan is going to recruit patients, conduct trials, write up and get his work published in a credible [...]
[...] now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing “Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But [...]
[...] now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing “Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But [...]
[...] now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing “Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But [...]
[...] The Movie: Cancer Is Serious Business, in case anyone’s interested), was planning on releasing another propaganda “documentary” about Stanislaw Burzynski later this year. Merola decided to call it Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Chapter 2 | A [...]
[...] Basically, Merola’s a hack. Unfortunately, I also found out that Merola is planning on releasing another propaganda “documentary” about Stanislaw Burzynski later this year. Merola decided to call it Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Chapter 2 | A [...]
[...] far superior to current conventional science- and evidence-based cancer treatments, is releasing releasing a sequel to his wildly successful documentary (in the “alternative cancer” underground, that is) [...]